Northern Light
Author: Stephen Leacock
Date: 1894-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Fiction; Canadian Wit and Humor; Satire; Parody
Description: Stephen Leacock was a Canadian educator, political scientist, writer, and humorist. Between 1911 and 1925 he was so well-known as the world’s greatest humorist that it was said more people had heard of Stephen Leacock than had heard of Canada. * * * * Perhaps his most famous books were “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town” and “Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich”, two of his many books of humor. He also wrote non-fiction, including books on political science, economics, history, literary criticism, and biographies of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. * * * * This omnibus, comprised of 25 book
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Text is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

Literary Lapses
Nonsense Novels
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Behind the Beyond
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy
Further Foolishness
Frenzied Fiction
The Hohenzollerns in America
Winsome Winnie and Others
My Discovery of England
College Days
Over the Footlights
The Garden of Folly
Winnowed Wisdom
Short Circuits
The Iron Man and the Tin Woman
The Dry Pickwick
Afternoons in Utopia
Hellements of Hickonomics
Model Memoirs
Too Much College
My Remarkable Uncle
Happy Stories
Serendipity

—

Bibliography
Index of Story Titles
About This eBook

[Each book title-page has its own Table of Contents. “Buttons” at the end of each story link back to the individual Table of Contents, and to the alphabetical Index of Story Titles. Book titles link back to this page.]

Literary Lapses

A Book of Sketches

(1910)

~

My Financial Career
Lord Oxhead’s Secret
Boarding-House Geometry
The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones
A Christmas Letter
How to Make a Million Dollars
How to Live to Be 200
How to Avoid Getting Married
How to Be a Doctor
The New Food
A New Pathology
The Poet Answered
The Force of Statistics
Men Who Have Shaved Me
Getting the Thread of It
Telling His Faults
Winter Pastimes
Number Fifty-Six
Aristocratic Education
The Conjurer’s Revenge
Hints to Travellers
A Manual of Education
Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas
The Life of John Smith
On Collecting Things
Society Chit-Chat
Insurance Up to Date
Borrowing a Match
A Lesson in Fiction
Helping the Armenians
A Study in Still Life: The Country Hotel
An Experiment with Policeman Hogan
The Passing of the Poet
Self-Made Men
A Model Dialogue
Back to the Bush
Reflections on Riding
Saloonio

Half-Hours with the Poets

Mr. Wordsworth and the Little Cottage Girl.

How Tennyson Killed the May Queen

Old Mr. Longfellow on Board the Hesperus.

A, B, and C

My Financial Career

When I go into a bank I get rattled. The clerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money rattles me; everything rattles me.

The moment I cross the threshold of a bank and attempt to transact business there, I become an irresponsible idiot.

I knew this beforehand, but my salary had been raised to fifty dollars a month and I felt that the bank was the only place for it.

So I shambled in and looked timidly round at the clerks. I had an idea that a person about to open an account must needs consult the manager.

I went up to a wicket marked “Accountant.” The accountant was a tall, cool devil. The very sight of him rattled me. My voice was sepulchral.

“Can I see the manager?” I said, and added solemnly, “alone.” I don’t know why I said “alone.”

“Certainly,” said the accountant, and fetched him.

The manager was a grave, calm man. I held my fifty-six dollars clutched in a crumpled ball in my pocket.

“Are you the manager?” I said. God knows I didn’t doubt it.

“Yes,” he said.

“Can I see you,” I asked, “alone?” I didn’t want to say “alone” again, but without it the thing seemed self-evident.

The manager looked at me in some alarm. He felt that I had an awful secret to reveal.

“Come in here,” he said, and led the way to a private room. He turned the key in the lock.

“We are safe from interruption here,” he said; “sit down.”

We both sat down and looked at each other. I found no voice to speak.

“You are one of Pinkerton’s men, I presume,” he said.

He had gathered from my mysterious manner that I was a detective. I knew what he was thinking, and it made me worse.

“No, not from Pinkerton’s,” I said, seeming to imply that I came from a rival agency.

“To tell the truth,” I went on, as if I had been prompted to lie about it, “I am not a detective at all. I have come to open an account. I intend to keep all my money in this bank.”

The manager looked relieved but still serious; he concluded now that I was a son of Baron Rothschild or a young Gould.

“A large account, I suppose,” he said.

“Fairly large,” I whispered. “I propose to deposit fifty-six dollars now and fifty dollars a month regularly.”

The manager got up and opened the door. He called to the accountant.

“Mr. Montgomery,” he said unkindly loud, “this gentleman is opening an account, he will deposit fifty-six dollars. Good morning.”

I rose.

A big iron door stood open at the side of the room.

“Good morning,” I said, and stepped into the safe.

“Come out,” said the manager coldly, and showed me the other way.

I went up to the accountant’s wicket and poked the ball of money at him with a quick convulsive movement as if I were doing a conjuring trick.

My face was ghastly pale.

“Here,” I said, “deposit it.” The tone of the words seemed to mean, “Let us do this painful thing while the fit is on us.”

He took the money and gave it to another clerk.

He made me write the sum on a slip and sign my name in a book. I no longer knew what I was doing. The bank swam before my eyes.

“Is it deposited?” I asked in a hollow, vibrating voice.

“It is,” said the accountant.

“Then I want to draw a cheque.”

My idea was to draw out six dollars of it for present use. Someone gave me a chequebook through a wicket and someone else began telling me how to write it out. The people in the bank had the impression that I was an invalid millionaire. I wrote something on the cheque and thrust it in at the clerk. He looked at it.

“What! are you drawing it all out again?” he asked in surprise. Then I realized that I had written fifty-six instead of six. I was too far gone to reason now. I had a feeling that it was impossible to explain the thing. All the clerks had stopped writing to look at me.

Reckless with misery, I made a plunge.

“Yes, the whole thing.”

“You withdraw your money from the bank?”

“Every cent of it.”

“Are you not going to deposit any more?” said the clerk, astonished.

“Never.”

An idiot hope struck me that they might think something had insulted me while I was writing the cheque and that I had changed my mind. I made a wretched attempt to look like a man with a fearfully quick temper.

The clerk prepared to pay the money.

“How will you have it?” he said.

“What?”

“How will you have it?”

“Oh” – I caught his meaning and answered without even trying to think – “in fifties.”

He gave me a fifty-dollar bill.

“And the six?” he asked dryly.

“In sixes,” I said.

He gave it me and I rushed out.

As the big door swung behind me I caught the echo of a roar of laughter that went up to the ceiling of the bank. Since then I bank no more. I keep my money in cash in my trousers pocket and my savings in silver dollars in a sock.

TOC   INDEX

Lord Oxhead’s Secret

A Romance in One Chapter

It was finished. Ruin had come. Lord Oxhead sat gazing fixedly at the library fire. Without, the wind soughed (or sogged) around the turrets of Oxhead Towers, the seat of the Oxhead family. But the old earl heeded not the sogging of the wind around his seat. He was too absorbed.

Before him lay a pile of blue papers with printed headings. From time to time he turned them over in his hands and replaced them on the table with a groan. To the earl they meant ruin – absolute, irretrievable ruin, and with it the loss of his stately home that had been the pride of the Oxheads for generations. More than that – the world would now know the awful secret of his life.

The earl bowed his head in the bitterness of his sorrow, for he came of a proud stock. About him hung the portraits of his ancestors. Here on the right an Oxhead who had broken his lance at Crecy, or immediately before it. There McWhinnie Oxhead who had ridden madly from the stricken field of Flodden to bring to the affrighted burghers of Edinburgh all the tidings that he had been able to gather in passing the battlefield. Next him hung the dark half Spanish face of Sir Amyas Oxhead of Elizabethan days whose pinnace was the first to dash to Plymouth with the news that the English fleet, as nearly as could be judged from a reasonable distance, seemed about to grapple with the Spanish Armada. Below this, the two Cavalier brothers, Giles and Everard Oxhead, who had sat in the oak with Charles II. Then to the right again the portrait of Sir Ponsonby Oxhead who had fought with Wellington in Spain, and been dismissed for it.

Immediately before the earl as he sat was the family escutcheon emblazoned above the mantelpiece. A child might read the simplicity of its proud significance – an ox rampant quartered in a field of gules with a pike dexter and a dog intermittent in a plain parallelogram right centre, with the motto, “Hic, haec, hoc, hujus, hujus, hujus.”

—

“Father!” – The girl’s voice rang clear through the half light of the wainscoted library. Gwendoline Oxhead had thrown herself about the earl’s neck. The girl was radiant with happiness. Gwendoline was a beautiful girl of thirty-three, typically English in the freshness of her girlish innocence. She wore one of those charming walking suits of brown holland so fashionable among the aristocracy of England, while a rough leather belt encircled her waist in a single sweep. She bore herself with that sweet simplicity which was her greatest charm. She was probably more simple than any girl of her age for miles around. Gwendoline was the pride of her father’s heart, for he saw reflected in her the qualities of his race.

“Father,” she said, a blush mantling her fair face, “I am so happy, oh so happy; Edwin has asked me to be his wife, and we have plighted our troth – at least if you consent. For I will never marry without my father’s warrant,” she added, raising her head proudly; “I am too much of an Oxhead for that.”

Then as she gazed into the old earl’s stricken face, the girl’s mood changed at once. “Father,” she cried, “father, are you ill? What is it? Shall I ring?” As she spoke Gwendoline reached for the heavy bell-rope that hung beside the wall, but the earl, fearful that her frenzied efforts might actually make it ring, checked her hand. “I am, indeed, deeply troubled,” said Lord Oxhead, “but of that anon. Tell me first what is this news you bring. I hope, Gwendoline, that your choice has been worthy of an Oxhead, and that he to whom you have plighted your troth will be worthy to bear our motto with his own.” And, raising his eyes to the escutcheon before him, the earl murmured half unconsciously, “Hic, haec, hoc, hujus, hujus, hujus,” breathing perhaps a prayer as many of his ancestors had done before him that he might never forget it.

“Father,” continued Gwendoline, half timidly, “Edwin is an American.”

“You surprise me indeed,” answered Lord Oxhead; “and yet,” he continued, turning to his daughter with the courtly grace that marked the nobleman of the old school, “why should we not respect and admire the Americans? Surely there have been great names among them. Indeed, our ancestor Sir Amyas Oxhead was, I think, married to Pocahontas – at least if not actually married” – the earl hesitated a moment.

“At least they loved one another,” said Gwendoline simply. “Precisely,” said the earl, with relief, “they loved one another, yes, exactly.” Then as if musing to himself, “Yes, there have been great Americans. Bolivar was an American. The two Washingtons – George and Booker – are both Americans. There have been others too, though for the moment I do not recall their names. But tell me, Gwendoline, this Edwin of yours – where is his family seat?”

“It is at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, father.”

“Ah! say you so?” rejoined the earl, with rising interest. “Oshkosh is, indeed, a grand old name. The Oshkosh are a Russian family. An Ivan Oshkosh came to England with Peter the Great and married my ancestress. Their descendant in the second degree once removed, Mixtup Oshkosh, fought at the burning of Moscow and later at the sack of Salamanca and the treaty of Adrianople. And Wisconsin too,” the old nobleman went on, his features kindling with animation, for he had a passion for heraldry, genealogy, chronology, and commercial geography; “the Wisconsins, or better, I think, the Guisconsins, are of old blood. A Guisconsin followed Henry I to Jerusalem and rescued my ancestor Hardup Oxhead from the Saracens. Another Guisconsin . . .”

“Nay, father,” said Gwendoline, gently interrupting, “Wisconsin is not Edwin’s own name: that is, I believe, the name of his estate. My lover’s name is Edwin Einstein.”

“Einstein,” repeated the earl dubiously – “an Indian name perhaps; yet the Indians are many of them of excellent family. An ancestor of mine . . .”

“Father,” said Gwendoline, again interrupting, “here is a portrait of Edwin. Judge for yourself if he be noble.” With this she placed in her father’s hand an American tin-type, tinted in pink and brown. The picture represented a typical specimen of American manhood of that Anglo-Semitic type so often seen in persons of mixed English and Jewish extraction. The figure was well over five feet two inches in height and broad in proportion. The graceful sloping shoulders harmonized with the slender and well-poised waist, and with a hand pliant and yet prehensile. The pallor of the features was relieved by a drooping black moustache.

Such was Edwin Einstein to whom Gwendoline’s heart, if not her hand, was already affianced. Their love had been so simple and yet so strange. It seemed to Gwendoline that it was but a thing of yesterday, and yet in reality they had met three weeks ago. Love had drawn them irresistibly together. To Edwin the fair English girl with her old name and wide estates possessed a charm that he scarcely dared confess to himself. He determined to woo her. To Gwendoline there was that in Edwin’s bearing, the rich jewels that he wore, the vast fortune that rumour ascribed to him, that appealed to something romantic and chivalrous in her nature. She loved to hear him speak of stocks and bonds, corners and margins, and his father’s colossal business. It all seemed so noble and so far above the sordid lives of the people about her. Edwin, too, loved to hear the girl talk of her father’s estates, of the diamond-hilted sword that the saladin had given, or had lent, to her ancestor hundreds of years ago. Her description of her father, the old earl, touched something romantic in Edwin’s generous heart. He was never tired of asking how old he was, was he robust, did a shock, a sudden shock, affect him much? and so on. Then had come the evening that Gwendoline loved to live over and over again in her mind when Edwin had asked her in his straightforward, manly way, whether – subject to certain written stipulations to be considered later – she would be his wife: and she, putting her hand confidingly in his hand, answered simply, that – subject to the consent of her father and pending always the necessary legal formalities and inquiries – she would.

It had all seemed like a dream: and now Edwin Einstein had come in person to ask her hand from the earl, her father. Indeed, he was at this moment in the outer hall testing the gold leaf in the picture-frames with his pen-knife while waiting for his affianced to break the fateful news to Lord Oxhead.

Gwendoline summoned her courage for a great effort. “Papa,” she said, “there is one other thing that it is fair to tell you. Edwin’s father is in business.”

The earl started from his seat in blank amazement. “In business!” he repeated, “the father of the suitor of the daughter of an Oxhead in business! My daughter the step-daughter of the grandfather of my grandson! Are you mad, girl? It is too much, too much!”

“But, father,” pleaded the beautiful girl in anguish, “hear me. It is Edwin’s father – Sarcophagus Einstein, senior – not Edwin himself. Edwin does nothing. He has never earned a penny. He is quite unable to support himself. You have only to see him to believe it. Indeed, dear father, he is just like us. He is here now, in this house, waiting to see you. If it were not for his great wealth . . .”

“Girl,” said the earl sternly, “I care not for the man’s riches. How much has he?”

“Fifteen million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” answered Gwendoline. Lord Oxhead leaned his head against the mantelpiece. His mind was in a whirl. He was trying to calculate the yearly interest on fifteen and a quarter million dollars at four and a half per cent reduced to pounds, shillings, and pence. It was bootless. His brain, trained by long years of high living and plain thinking, had become too subtle, too refined an instrument for arithmetic. . . .

—

At this moment the door opened and Edwin Einstein stood before the earl. Gwendoline never forgot what happened. Through her life the picture of it haunted her – her lover upright at the door, his fine frank gaze fixed inquiringly on the diamond pin in her father’s necktie, and he, her father, raising from the mantelpiece a face of agonized amazement.

“You! You!” he gasped. For a moment he stood to his full height, swaying and groping in the air, then fell prostrate his full length upon the floor. The lovers rushed to his aid. Edwin tore open his neckcloth and plucked aside his diamond pin to give him air. But it was too late. Earl Oxhead had breathed his last. Life had fled. The earl was extinct. That is to say, he was dead.

The reason of his death was never known. Had the sight of Edwin killed him? It might have. The old family doctor, hurriedly summoned, declared his utter ignorance. This, too, was likely. Edwin himself could explain nothing. But it was observed that after the earl’s death and his marriage with Gwendoline he was a changed man; he dressed better, talked much better English.

The wedding itself was quiet, almost sad. At Gwendoline’s request there was no wedding breakfast, no bridesmaids, and no reception, while Edwin, respecting his bride’s bereavement, insisted that there should be no best man, no flowers, no presents, and no honeymoon.

Thus Lord Oxhead’s secret died with him. It was probably too complicated to be interesting anyway.

TOC     INDEX

Boarding-House Geometry

Definitions and Axioms

All boarding-houses are the same boarding-house.

Boarders in the same boarding-house and on the same flat are equal to one another.

A single room is that which has no parts and no magnitude.

The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram – that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything.

A wrangle is the disinclination of two boarders to each other that meet together but are not in the same line.

All the other rooms being taken, a single room is said to be a double room.

Postulates and Propositions

A pie may be produced any number of times.

The landlady can be reduced to her lowest terms by a series of propositions.

A bee line may be made from any boarding-house to any other boarding-house.

The clothes of a boarding-house bed, though produced ever so far both ways, will not meet.

Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than two square meals.

If from the opposite ends of a boarding-house a line be drawn passing through all the rooms in turn, then the stovepipe which warms the boarders will lie within that line.

On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two charges for the same thing.

If there be two boarders on the same flat, and the amount of side of the one be equal to the amount of side of the other, each to each, and the wrangle between one boarder and the landlady be equal to the wrangle between the landlady and the other, then shall the weekly bills of the two boarders be equal also, each to each.

For if not, let one bill be the greater.

Then the other bill is less than it might have been – which is absurd.

TOC     INDEX

The Awful Fate
of Melpomenus Jones

Some people – not you nor I, because we are so awfully self-possessed – but some people, find great difficulty in saying good-bye when making a call or spending the evening. As the moment draws near when the visitor feels that he is fairly entitled to go away he rises and says abruptly, “Well, I think I . . .” Then the people say, “Oh, must you go now? Surely it’s early yet!” and a pitiful struggle ensues.

I think the saddest case of this kind of thing that I ever knew was that of my poor friend Melpomenus Jones, a curate – such a dear young man, and only twenty-three! He simply couldn’t get away from people. He was too modest to tell a lie, and too religious to wish to appear rude. Now it happened that he went to call on some friends of his on the very first afternoon of his summer vacation. The next six weeks were entirely his own – absolutely nothing to do. He chatted awhile, drank two cups of tea, then braced himself for the effort and said suddenly:

“Well, I think I . . .”

But the lady of the house said, “Oh, no! Mr. Jones, can’t you really stay a little longer?”

Jones was always truthful. “Oh, yes,” he said, “of course, I – er – can stay.”

“Then please don’t go.”

He stayed. He drank eleven cups of tea. Night was falling. He rose again.

“Well now,” he said shyly, “I think I really . . .”

“You must go?” said the lady politely. “I thought perhaps you could have stayed to dinner . . .”

“Oh well, so I could, you know,” Jones said, “if . . .”

“Then please stay, I’m sure my husband will be delighted.”

“All right,” he said feebly, “I’ll stay,” and he sank back into his chair, just full of tea, and miserable.

Papa came home. They had dinner. All through the meal Jones sat planning to leave at eight-thirty. All the family wondered whether Mr. Jones was stupid and sulky, or only stupid.

After dinner mamma undertook to “draw him out,” and showed him photographs. She showed him all the family museum, several gross of them – photos of papa’s uncle and his wife, and mamma’s brother and his little boy, an awfully interesting photo of papa’s uncle’s friend in his Bengal uniform, an awfully well-taken photo of papa’s grandfather’s partner’s dog, and an awfully wicked one of papa as the devil for a fancy-dress ball. At eight-thirty Jones had examined seventy-one photographs. There were about sixty-nine more that he hadn’t. Jones rose.

“I must say good night now,” he pleaded.

“Say good night!” they said, “why it’s only half-past eight! Have you anything to do?”

“Nothing,” he admitted, and muttered something about staying six weeks, and then laughed miserably.

Just then it turned out that the favourite child of the family, such a dear little romp, had hidden Mr. Jones’s hat; so papa said that he must stay, and invited him to a pipe and a chat. Papa had the pipe and gave Jones the chat, and still he stayed. Every moment he meant to take the plunge, but couldn’t. Then papa began to get very tired of Jones, and fidgeted and finally said, with jocular irony, that Jones had better stay all night, they could give him a shake-down. Jones mistook his meaning and thanked him with tears in his eyes, and papa put Jones to bed in the spare room and cursed him heartily.

After breakfast next day, papa went off to his work in the City, and left Jones playing with the baby, broken-hearted. His nerve was utterly gone. He was meaning to leave all day, but the thing had got on his mind and he simply couldn’t. When papa came home in the evening he was surprised and chagrined to find Jones still there. He thought to jockey him out with a jest, and said he thought he’d have to charge him for his board, he! he! The unhappy young man stared wildly for a moment, then wrung papa’s hand, paid him a month’s board in advance, and broke down and sobbed like a child.

In the days that followed he was moody and unapproachable. He lived, of course, entirely in the drawing-room, and the lack of air and exercise began to tell sadly on his health. He passed his time in drinking tea and looking at the photographs. He would stand for hours gazing at the photographs of papa’s uncle’s friend in his Bengal uniform – talking to it, sometimes swearing bitterly at it. His mind was visibly failing.

At length the crash came. They carried him upstairs in a raging delirium of fever. The illness that followed was terrible. He recognized no one, not even papa’s uncle’s friend in his Bengal uniform. At times he would start up from his bed and shriek, “Well, I think I . . .” and then fall back upon the pillow with a horrible laugh. Then, again, he would leap up and cry, “Another cup of tea and more photographs! More photographs! Har! Har!”

At length, after a month of agony, on the last day of his vacation, he passed away. They say that when the last moment came, he sat up in bed with a beautiful smile of confidence playing upon his face, and said, “Well – the angels are calling me; I’m afraid I really must go now. Good afternoon.”

And the rushing of his spirit from its prison-house was as rapid as a hunted cat passing over a garden fence.

TOC     INDEX

A Christmas Letter

(In answer to a young lady who has sent an invitation to be present at a children’s party)

Madamoiselle,

Allow me very gratefully but firmly to refuse your kind invitation. You doubtless mean well; but your ideas are unhappily mistaken.

Let us understand one another once and for all. I cannot at my mature age participate in the sports of children with such abandon as I could wish. I entertain, and have always entertained, the sincerest regard for such games as Hunt-the-Slipper and Blind-Man’s Buff. But I have now reached a time of life, when, to have my eyes blindfolded and to have a powerful boy of ten hit me in the back with a hobby-horse and ask me to guess who hit me, provokes me to a fit of retaliation which could only culminate in reckless criminality. Nor can I cover my shoulders with a drawing-room rug and crawl round on my hands and knees under the pretence that I am a bear without a sense of personal insufficiency, which is painful to me.

Neither can I look on with a complacent eye at the sad spectacle of your young clerical friend, the Reverend Mr. Uttermost Farthing, abandoning himself to such gambols and appearing in the role of life and soul of the evening. Such a degradation of his holy calling grieves me, and I cannot but suspect him of ulterior motives.

You inform me that your maiden aunt intends to help you to entertain the party. I have not, as you know, the honour of your aunt’s acquaintance, yet I think I may with reason surmise that she will organize games – guessing games – in which she will ask me to name a river in Asia beginning with a Z; on my failure to do so she will put a hot plate down my neck as a forfeit, and the children will clap their hands. These games, my dear young friend, involve the use of a more adaptable intellect than mine, and I cannot consent to be a party to them.

May I say in conclusion that I do not consider a five-cent pen-wiper from the top branch of a Xmas tree any adequate compensation for the kind of evening you propose.

I have the honour

To subscribe myself,

Your obedient servant.

TOC     INDEX

How to Make
a Million Dollars

I mix a good deal with the Millionaires. I like them. I like their faces. I like the way they live. I like the things they eat. The more we mix together the better I like the things we mix.

Especially I like the way they dress, their grey check trousers, their white check waist-coats, their heavy gold chains, and the signet-rings that they sign their cheques with. My! they look nice. Get six or seven of them sitting together in the club and it’s a treat to see them. And if they get the least dust on them, men come and brush it off. Yes, and are glad to. I’d like to take some of the dust off them myself.

Even more than what they eat I like their intellectual grasp. It is wonderful. Just watch them read. They simply read all the time. Go into the club at any hour and you’ll see three or four of them at it. And the things they can read! You’d think that a man who’d been driving hard in the office from eleven o’clock until three, with only an hour and a half for lunch, would be too fagged. Not a bit. These men can sit down after office hours and read the Sketch and the Police Gazette and the Pink Un, and understand the jokes just as well as I can.

What I love to do is to walk up and down among them and catch the little scraps of conversation. The other day I heard one lean forward and say, “Well, I offered him a million and a half and said I wouldn’t give a cent more, he could either take it or leave it—” I just longed to break in and say, “What! what! a million and a half! Oh! say that again! Offer it to me, to either take it or leave it. Do try me once: I know I can: or here, make it a plain million and let’s call it done.”

Not that these men are careless over money. No, sir. Don’t think it. Of course they don’t take much account of big money, a hundred thousand dollars at a shot or anything of that sort. But little money. You’ve no idea till you know them how anxious they get about a cent, or half a cent, or less.

Why, two of them came into the club the other night just frantic with delight: they said wheat had risen and they’d cleaned up four cents each in less than half an hour. They bought a dinner for sixteen on the strength of it. I don’t understand it. I’ve often made twice as much as that writing for the papers and never felt like boasting about it.

One night I heard one man say, “Well, let’s call up New York and offer them a quarter of a cent.” Great heavens! Imagine paying the cost of calling up New York, nearly five million people, late at night and offering them a quarter of a cent! And yet – did New York get mad? No, they took it. Of course it’s high finance. I don’t pretend to understand it. I tried after that to call up Chicago and offer it a cent and a half, and to call up Hamilton, Ontario, and offer it half a dollar, and the operator only thought I was crazy.

All this shows, of course, that I’ve been studying how the millionaires do it. I have. For years. I thought it might be helpful to young men just beginning to work and anxious to stop.

You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won’t; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don’t know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn’t be? These are awful thoughts.

At any rate, I’ve been gathering hints on how it is they do it.

One thing I’m sure about. If a young man wants to make a million dollars he’s got to be mighty careful about his diet and his living. This may seem hard. But success is only achieved with pains.

There is no use in a young man who hopes to make a million dollars thinking he’s entitled to get up at 7.30, eat force and poached eggs, drink cold water at lunch, and go to bed at 10 p.m. You can’t do it. I’ve seen too many millionaires for that. If you want to be a millionaire you mustn’t get up till ten in the morning. They never do. They daren’t. It would be as much as their business is worth if they were seen on the street at half-past nine.

And the old idea of abstemiousness is all wrong. To be a millionaire you need champagne, lots of it and all the time. That and Scotch whisky and soda: you have to sit up nearly all night and drink buckets of it. This is what clears the brain for business next day. I’ve seen some of these men with their brains so clear in the morning, that their faces look positively boiled.

To live like this requires, of course, resolution. But you can buy that by the pint.

Therefore, my dear young man, if you want to get moved on from your present status in business, change your life. When your landlady brings your bacon and eggs for breakfast, throw them out of window to the dog and tell her to bring you some chilled asparagus and a pint of Moselle. Then telephone to your employer that you’ll be down about eleven o’clock. You will get moved on. Yes, very quickly.

Just how the millionaires make the money is a difficult question. But one way is this. Strike the town with five cents in your pocket. They nearly all do this; they’ve told me again and again (men with millions and millions) that the first time they struck town they had only five cents. That seems to have given them their start. Of course, it’s not easy to do. I’ve tried it several times. I nearly did it once. I borrowed five cents, carried it away out of town, and then turned and came back at the town with an awful rush. If I hadn’t struck a beer saloon in the suburbs and spent the five cents I might have been rich today.

Another good plan is to start something. Something on a huge scale: something nobody ever thought of. For instance, one man I know told me that once he was down in Mexico without a cent (he’d lost his five in striking Central America) and he noticed that they had no power plants. So he started some and made a mint of money. Another man that I know was once stranded in New York, absolutely without a nickel. Well, it occurred to him that what was needed were buildings ten stories higher than any that had been put up. So he built two and sold them right away. Ever so many millionaires begin in some such simple way as that.

There is, of course, a much easier way than any of these. I almost hate to tell this, because I want to do it myself.

I learned of it just by chance one night at the club. There is one old man there, extremely rich, with one of the best faces of the lot, just like a hyena. I never used to know how he had got so rich. So one evening I asked one of the millionaires how old Bloggs had made all his money.

“How he made it?” he answered with a sneer. “Why he made it by taking it out of widows and orphans.”

Widows and orphans! I thought, what an excellent idea. But who would have suspected that they had it?

“And how,” I asked pretty cautiously, “did he go at it to get it out of them?”

“Why,” the man answered, “he just ground them under his heels, that was how.”

Now isn’t that simple? I’ve thought of that conversation often since and I mean to try it. If I can get hold of them, I’ll grind them quick enough. But how to get them. Most of the widows I know look pretty solid for that sort of thing, and as for orphans, it must take an awful lot of them. Meantime I am waiting, and if I ever get a large bunch of orphans all together, I’ll stamp on them and see.

I find, too, on inquiry, that you can also grind it out of clergymen. They say they grind nicely. But perhaps orphans are easier.

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How to Live to Be 200

Twenty years ago I knew a man called Jiggins, who had the Health Habit.

He used to take a cold plunge every morning. He said it opened his pores. After it he took a hot sponge. He said it closed the pores. He got so that he could open and shut his pores at will.

Jiggins used to stand and breathe at an open window for half an hour before dressing. He said it expanded his lungs. He might, of course, have had it done in a shoe-store with a boot stretcher, but after all it cost him nothing this way, and what is half an hour?

After he had got his undershirt on, Jiggins used to hitch himself up like a dog in harness and do Sandow exercises. He did them forwards, backwards, and hind-side up.

He could have got a job as a dog anywhere. He spent all his time at this kind of thing. In his spare time at the office, he used to lie on his stomach on the floor and see if he could lift himself up with his knuckles. If he could, then he tried some other way until he found one that he couldn’t do. Then he would spend the rest of his lunch hour on his stomach, perfectly happy.

In the evenings in his room he used to lift iron bars, cannon-balls, heave dumb-bells, and haul himself up to the ceiling with his teeth. You could hear the thumps half a mile. He liked it.

He spent half the night slinging himself around his room. He said it made his brain clear. When he got his brain perfectly clear, he went to bed and slept. As soon as he woke, he began clearing it again.

Jiggins is dead. He was, of course, a pioneer, but the fact that he dumb-belled himself to death at an early age does not prevent a whole generation of young men from following in his path.

They are ridden by the Health Mania.

They make themselves a nuisance.

They get up at impossible hours. They go out in silly little suits and run Marathon heats before breakfast. They chase around barefoot to get the dew on their feet. They hunt for ozone. They bother about pepsin. They won’t eat meat because it has too much nitrogen. They won’t eat fruit because it hasn’t any. They prefer albumen and starch and nitrogen to huckleberry pie and doughnuts. They won’t drink water out of a tap. They won’t eat sardines out of a can. They won’t use oysters out of a pail. They won’t drink milk out of a glass. They are afraid of alcohol in any shape. Yes, sir, afraid. “Cowards.”

And after all their fuss they presently incur some simple old-fashioned illness and die like anybody else.

Now people of this sort have no chance to attain any great age. They are on the wrong track.

Listen. Do you want to live to be really old, to enjoy a grand, green, exuberant, boastful old age and to make yourself a nuisance to your whole neighbourhood with your reminiscences?

Then cut out all this nonsense. Cut it out. Get up in the morning at a sensible hour. The time to get up is when you have to, not before. If your office opens at eleven, get up at ten-thirty. Take your chance on ozone. There isn’t any such thing anyway. Or, if there is, you can buy a Thermos bottle full for five cents, and put it on a shelf in your cupboard. If your work begins at seven in the morning, get up at ten minutes to, but don’t be liar enough to say that you like it. It isn’t exhilarating, and you know it.

Also, drop all that cold-bath business. You never did it when you were a boy. Don’t be a fool now. If you must take a bath (you don’t really need to), take it warm. The pleasure of getting out of a cold bed and creeping into a hot bath beats a cold plunge to death. In any case, stop gassing about your tub and your “shower,” as if you were the only man who ever washed.

So much for that point.

Next, take the question of germs and bacilli. Don’t be scared of them. That’s all. That’s the whole thing, and if you once get on to that you never need to worry again.

If you see a bacilli, walk right up to it, and look it in the eye. If one flies into your room, strike at it with your hat or with a towel. Hit it as hard as you can between the neck and the thorax. It will soon get sick of that.

But as a matter of fact, a bacilli is perfectly quiet and harmless if you are not afraid of it. Speak to it. Call out to it to “lie down.” It will understand. I had a bacilli once, called Fido, that would come and lie at my feet while I was working. I never knew a more affectionate companion, and when it was run over by an automobile, I buried it in the garden with genuine sorrow.

(I admit this is an exaggeration. I don’t really remember its name; it may have been Robert.)

Understand that it is only a fad of modern medicine to say that cholera and typhoid and diphtheria are caused by bacilli and germs; nonsense. Cholera is caused by a frightful pain in the stomach, and diphtheria is caused by trying to cure a sore throat.

Now take the question of food.

Eat what you want. Eat lots of it. Yes, eat too much of it. Eat till you can just stagger across the room with it and prop it up against a sofa cushion. Eat everything that you like until you can’t eat any more. The only test is, can you pay for it? If you can’t pay for it, don’t eat it. And listen – don’t worry as to whether your food contains starch, or albumen, or gluten, or nitrogen. If you are a damn fool enough to want these things, go and buy them and eat all you want of them. Go to a laundry and get a bag of starch, and eat your fill of it. Eat it, and take a good long drink of glue after it, and a spoonful of Portland cement. That will gluten you, good and solid.

If you like nitrogen, go and get a druggist to give you a canful of it at the soda counter, and let you sip it with a straw. Only don’t think that you can mix all these things up with your food. There isn’t any nitrogen or phosphorus or albumen in ordinary things to eat. In any decent household all that sort of stuff is washed out in the kitchen sink before the food is put on the table.

And just one word about fresh air and exercise. Don’t bother with either of them. Get your room full of good air, then shut up the windows and keep it. It will keep for years. Anyway, don’t keep using your lungs all the time. Let them rest. As for exercise, if you have to take it, take it and put up with it. But as long as you have the price of a hack and can hire other people to play baseball for you and run races and do gymnastics when you sit in the shade and smoke and watch them – great heavens, what more do you want?

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How to Avoid
Getting Married

Some years ago, when I was the Editor of a Correspondence Column, I used to receive heart-broken letters from young men asking for advice and sympathy. They found themselves the object of marked attentions from girls which they scarcely knew how to deal with. They did not wish to give pain or to seem indifferent to a love which they felt was as ardent as it was disinterested, and yet they felt that they could not bestow their hands where their hearts had not spoken. They wrote to me fully and frankly, and as one soul might write to another for relief. I accepted their confidences as under the pledge of a secrecy, never divulging their disclosures beyond the circulation of my newspapers, or giving any hint of their identity other than printing their names and addresses and their letters in full. But I may perhaps without dishonour reproduce one of these letters, and my answer to it, inasmuch as the date is now months ago, and the softening hand of Time has woven its roses – how shall I put it? – the mellow haze of reminiscences has – what I mean is that the young man has gone back to work and is all right again.

Here then is a letter from a young man whose name I must not reveal, but whom I will designate as D. F., and whose address I must not divulge, but will simply indicate as Q. Street, West.

Dear Mr. Leacock,

For some time past I have been the recipient of very marked attentions from a young lady. She has been calling at the house almost every evening, and has taken me out in her motor, and invited me to concerts and the theatre. On these latter occasions I have insisted on her taking my father with me, and have tried as far as possible to prevent her saying anything to me which would be unfit for father to hear. But my position has become a very difficult one. I do not think it right to accept her presents when I cannot feel that my heart is hers. Yesterday she sent to my house a beautiful bouquet of American Beauty roses addressed to me, and a magnificent bunch of Timothy Hay for father. I do not know what to say. Would it be right for father to keep all this valuable hay? I have confided fully in father, and we have discussed the question of presents. He thinks that there are some that we can keep with propriety, and others that a sense of delicacy forbids us to retain. He himself is going to sort out the presents into the two classes. He thinks that as far as he can see, the Hay is in class B. Meantime I write to you, as I understand that Miss Laura Jean Libby and Miss Beatrix Fairfax are on their vacation, and in any case a friend of mine who follows their writings closely tells me that they are always full.

I enclose a dollar, because I do not think it right to ask you to give all your valuable time and your best thought without giving you back what it is worth.

On receipt of this I wrote back at once a private and confidential letter which I printed in the following edition of the paper.

My dear, dear Boy,

Your letter has touched me. As soon as I opened it and saw the green and blue tint of the dollar bill which you had so daintily and prettily folded within the pages of your sweet letter, I knew that the note was from someone that I could learn to love, if our correspondence were to continue as it had begun. I took the dollar from your letter and kissed and fondled it a dozen times. Dear unknown boy! I shall always keep that dollar! No matter how much I may need it, or how many necessaries, yes, absolute necessities, of life I may be wanting, I shall always keep that dollar. Do you understand, dear? I shall keep it. I shall not spend it. As far as the use of it goes, it will be just as if you had not sent it. Even if you were to send me another dollar, I should still keep the first one, so that no matter how many you sent, the recollection of one first friendship would not be contaminated with mercenary considerations. When I say dollar, darling, of course an express order, or a postal note, or even stamps would be all the same. But in that case do not address me in care of this office, as I should not like to think of your pretty little letters lying round where others might handle them.

“But now I must stop chatting about myself, for I know that you cannot be interested in a simple old fogey such as I am. Let me talk to you about your letter and about the difficult question it raises for all marriageable young men.

“In the first place, let me tell you how glad I am that you confide in your father. Whatever happens, go at once to your father, put your arms about his neck, and have a good cry together. And you are right, too, about presents. It needs a wiser head than my poor perplexed boy to deal with them. Take them to your father to be sorted, or, if you feel that you must not overtax his love, address them to me in your own pretty hand.

“And now let us talk, dear, as one heart to another. Remember always that if a girl is to have your heart she must be worthy of you. When you look at your own bright innocent face in the mirror, resolve that you will give your hand to no girl who is not just as innocent as you are and no brighter than yourself. So that you must first find out how innocent she is. Ask her quietly and frankly – remember, dear, that the days of false modesty are passing away – whether she has ever been in jail. If she has not (and if you have not), then you know that you are dealing with a dear confiding girl who will make you a life mate. Then you must know, too, that her mind is worthy of your own. So many men today are led astray by the merely superficial graces and attractions of girls who in reality possess no mental equipment at all. Many a man is bitterly disillusioned after marriage when he realizes that his wife cannot solve a quadratic equation, and that he is compelled to spend all his days with a woman who does not know that x squared plus 2xy plus y squared is the same thing, or, I think nearly the same thing, as x plus y squared.

Nor should the simple domestic virtues be neglected. If a girl desires to woo you, before allowing her to press her suit, ask her if she knows how to press yours. If she can, let her woo; if not, tell her to whoa. But I see I have written quite as much as I need for this column. Won’t you write again, just as before, dear boy?

Stephen Leacock.

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How to Be a Doctor

Certainly the progress of science is a wonderful thing. One can’t help feeling proud of it. I must admit that I do. Whenever I get talking to any one – that is, to any one who knows even less about it than I do – about the marvellous development of electricity, for instance, I feel as if I had been personally responsible for it. As for the linotype and the airplane and the vacuum house-cleaner, well, I am not sure that I didn’t invent them myself. I believe that all generous-hearted men feel just the same way about it.

However, that is not the point I am intending to discuss. What I want to speak about is the progress of medicine. There, if you like, is something wonderful. Any lover of humanity (or of either sex of it) who looks back on the achievements of medical science must feel his heart glow and his right ventricle expand with the pericardiac stimulus of a permissible pride.

Just think of it. A hundred years ago there were no bacilli, no ptomaine poisoning, no diphtheria, and no appendicitis. Rabies was but little known, and only imperfectly developed. All of these we owe to medical science. Even such things as psoriasis and parotitis and trypanosomiasis, which are now household names, were known only to the few, and were quite beyond the reach of the great mass of the people.

Or consider the advance of the science on its practical side. A hundred years ago it used to be supposed that fever could be cured by the letting of blood; now we know positively that it cannot. Even seventy years ago it was thought that fever was curable by the administration of sedative drugs; now we know that it isn’t. For the matter of that, as recently as thirty years ago, doctors thought that they could heal a fever by means of low diet and the application of ice; now they are absolutely certain that they cannot. This instance shows the steady progress made in the treatment of fever. But there has been the same cheering advance all along the line. Take rheumatism. A few generations ago people with rheumatism used to have to carry round potatoes in their pockets as a means of cure. Now the doctors allow them to carry absolutely anything they like. They may go round with their pockets full of water-melons if they wish to. It makes no difference. Or take the treatment of epilepsy. It used to be supposed that the first thing to do in sudden attacks of this kind was to unfasten the patient’s collar and let him breathe; at present, on the contrary, many doctors consider it better to button up the patient’s collar and let him choke.

In only one respect has there been a decided lack of progress in the domain of medicine, that is in the time it takes to become a qualified practitioner. In the good old days a man was turned out thoroughly equipped after putting in two winter sessions at a college and spending his summers in running logs for a sawmill. Some of the students were turned out even sooner. Nowadays it takes anywhere from five to eight years to become a doctor. Of course, one is willing to grant that our young men are growing stupider and lazier every year. This fact will be corroborated at once by any man over fifty years of age. But even when this is said it seems odd that a man should study eight years now to learn what he used to acquire in eight months.

However, let that go. The point I want to develop is that the modern doctor’s business is an extremely simple one, which could be acquired in about two weeks. This is the way it is done.

The patient enters the consulting-room. “Doctor,” he says, “I have a bad pain.” “Where is it?” “Here.” “Stand up,” says the doctor, “and put your arms up above your head.” Then the doctor goes behind the patient and strikes him a powerful blow in the back. “Do you feel that?” he says. “I do,” says the patient. Then the doctor turns suddenly and lets him have a left hook under the heart. “Can you feel that?” he says viciously, as the patient falls over on the sofa in a heap. “Get up,” says the doctor, and counts ten. The patient rises. The doctor looks him over very carefully without speaking, and then suddenly fetches him a blow in the stomach that doubles him up speechless. The doctor walks over to the window and reads the morning paper for a while. Presently he turns and begins to mutter more to himself than the patient. “Hum!” he says, “there’s a slight anaesthesia of the tympanum.” “Is that so?” says the patient, in an agony of fear. “What can I do about it, doctor?” “Well,” says the doctor, “I want you to keep very quiet; you’ll have to go to bed and stay there and keep quiet.” In reality, of course, the doctor hasn’t the least idea what is wrong with the man; but he does know that if he will go to bed and keep quiet, awfully quiet, he’ll either get quietly well again or else die a quiet death. Meantime, if the doctor calls every morning and thumps and beats him, he can keep the patient submissive and perhaps force him to confess what is wrong with him.

“What about diet, doctor?” says the patient, completely cowed.

The answer to this question varies very much. It depends on how the doctor is feeling and whether it is long since he had a meal himself. If it is late in the morning and the doctor is ravenously hungry, he says: “Oh, eat plenty, don’t be afraid of it; eat meat, vegetables, starch, glue, cement, anything you like.” But if the doctor has just had lunch and if his breathing is short-circuited with huckleberry-pie, he says very firmly: “No, I don’t want you to eat anything at all: absolutely not a bite; it won’t hurt you, a little self-denial in the matter of eating is the best thing in the world.”

“And what about drinking?” Again the doctor’s answer varies. He may say: “Oh, yes, you might drink a glass of lager now and then, or, if you prefer it, a gin and soda or a whiskey and Apollinaris, and I think before going to bed I’d take a hot Scotch with a couple of lumps of white sugar and bit of lemon-peel in it and a good grating of nutmeg on the top.” The doctor says this with real feeling, and his eye glistens with the pure love of his profession. But if, on the other hand, the doctor has spent the night before at a little gathering of medical friends, he is very apt to forbid the patient to touch alcohol in any shape, and to dismiss the subject with great severity.

Of course, this treatment in and of itself would appear too transparent, and would fail to inspire the patient with a proper confidence. But nowadays this element is supplied by the work of the analytical laboratory. Whatever is wrong with the patient, the doctor insists on snipping off parts and pieces and extracts of him and sending them mysteriously away to be analyzed. He cuts off a lock of the patient’s hair, marks it, “Mr. Smith’s Hair, October, 1910.” Then he clips off the lower part of the ear, and wraps it in paper, and labels it, “Part of Mr. Smith’s Ear, October, 1910.” Then he looks the patient up and down, with the scissors in his hand, and if he sees any likely part of him he clips it off and wraps it up. Now this, oddly enough, is the very thing that fills the patient up with that sense of personal importance which is worth paying for. “Yes,” says the bandaged patient, later in the day to a group of friends much impressed, “the doctor thinks there may be a slight anaesthesia of the prognosis, but he’s sent my ear to New York and my appendix to Baltimore and a lock of my hair to the editors of all the medical journals, and meantime I am to keep very quiet and not exert myself beyond drinking a hot Scotch with lemon and nutmeg every half-hour.” With that he sinks back faintly on his cushions, luxuriously happy.

And yet, isn’t it funny?

You and I and the rest of us – even if we know all this – as soon as we have a pain within us, rush for a doctor as fast as a hack can take us. Yes, personally, I even prefer an ambulance with a bell on it. It’s more soothing.

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The New Food

I see from the current columns of the daily press that “Professor Plumb, of the University of Chicago, has just invented a highly concentrated form of food. All the essential nutritive elements are put together in the form of pellets, each of which contains from one to two hundred times as much nourishment as an ounce of an ordinary article of diet. These pellets, diluted with water, will form all that is necessary to support life. The professor looks forward confidently to revolutionizing the present food system.”

Now this kind of thing may be all very well in its way, but it is going to have its drawbacks as well. In the bright future anticipated by Professor Plumb, we can easily imagine such incidents as the following:

The smiling family were gathered round the hospitable board. The table was plenteously laid with a soup-plate in front of each beaming child, a bucket of hot water before the radiant mother, and at the head of the board the Christmas dinner of the happy home, warmly covered by a thimble and resting on a poker chip. The expectant whispers of the little ones were hushed as the father, rising from his chair, lifted the thimble and disclosed a small pill of concentrated nourishment on the chip before him. Christmas turkey, cranberry sauce, plum pudding, mince pie – it was all there, all jammed into that little pill and only waiting to expand. Then the father with deep reverence, and a devout eye alternating between the pill and heaven, lifted his voice in a benediction.

At this moment there was an agonized cry from the mother.

“Oh, Henry, quick! Baby has snatched the pill!” It was too true. Dear little Gustavus Adolphus, the golden-haired baby boy, had grabbed the whole Christmas dinner off the poker chip and bolted it. Three hundred and fifty pounds of concentrated nourishment passed down the oesophagus of the unthinking child.

“Clap him on the back!” cried the distracted mother. “Give him water!”

The idea was fatal. The water striking the pill caused it to expand. There was a dull rumbling sound and then, with an awful bang, Gustavus Adolphus exploded into fragments!

And when they gathered the little corpse together, the baby lips were parted in a lingering smile that could only be worn by a child who had eaten thirteen Christmas dinners.

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A New Pathology

It has long been vaguely understood that the condition of a man’s clothes has a certain effect upon the health of both body and mind. The well-known proverb, “Clothes make the man” has its origin in a general recognition of the powerful influence of the habiliments in their reaction upon the wearer. The same truth may be observed in the facts of everyday life. On the one hand we remark the bold carriage and mental vigour of a man attired in a new suit of clothes; on the other hand we note the melancholy features of him who is conscious of a posterior patch, or the haunted face of one suffering from internal loss of buttons. But while common observation thus gives us a certain familiarity with a few leading facts regarding the ailments and influence of clothes, no attempt has as yet been made to reduce our knowledge to a systematic form. At the same time the writer feels that a valuable addition might be made to the science of medicine in this direction. The numerous diseases which are caused by this fatal influence should receive a scientific analysis, and their treatment be included among the principles of the healing art. The diseases of the clothes may roughly be divided into medical cases and surgical cases, while these again fall into classes according to the particular garment through which the sufferer is attacked.

MEDICAL CASES

Probably no article of apparel is so liable to a diseased condition as the trousers. It may be well, therefore, to treat first those maladies to which they are subject.

1. Contractio Pantalunae, or Shortening of the Legs of the Trousers, an extremely painful malady most frequently found in the growing youth. The first symptom is the appearance of a yawning space (lacuna) above the boots, accompanied by an acute sense of humiliation and a morbid anticipation of mockery. The application of treacle to the boots, although commonly recommended, may rightly be condemned as too drastic a remedy. The use of boots reaching to the knee, to be removed only at night, will afford immediate relief. In connection with Contractio is often found—

2. Inflatio Genu, or Bagging of the Knees of the Trousers, a disease whose symptoms are similar to those above. The patient shows an aversion to the standing posture, and, in acute cases, if the patient be compelled to stand, the head is bent and the eye fixed with painful rigidity upon the projecting blade formed at the knee of the trousers.

In both of the above diseases anything that can be done to free the mind of the patient from a morbid sense of his infirmity will do much to improve the general tone of the system.

3. Oases, or Patches, are liable to break out anywhere on the trousers, and range in degree of gravity from those of a trifling nature to those of a fatal character. The most distressing cases are those where the patch assumes a different colour from that of the trousers (dissimilitas coloris). In this instance the mind of the patient is found to be in a sadly aberrated condition. A speedy improvement may, however, be effected by cheerful society, books, flowers, and, above all, by a complete change.

4. The overcoat is attacked by no serious disorders, except—
Phosphorescentia, or Glistening, a malady which indeed may often be observed to affect the whole system. It is caused by decay of tissue from old age and is generally aggravated by repeated brushing. A peculiar feature of the complaint is the lack of veracity on the part of the patient in reference to the cause of his uneasiness. Another invariable symptom is his aversion to outdoor exercise; under various pretexts, which it is the duty of his medical adviser firmly to combat, he will avoid even a gentle walk in the streets.

5. Of the waistcoat science recognizes but one disease—
Porriggia, an affliction caused by repeated spilling of porridge. It is generally harmless, chiefly owing to the mental indifference of the patient. It can be successfully treated by repeated fomentations of benzine.

6. Mortificatio Tilis, or Greenness of the Hat, is a disease often found in connection with Phosphorescentia (mentioned above), and characterized by the same aversion to outdoor life.

7. Sterilitas, or Loss of Fur, is another disease of the hat, especially prevalent in winter. It is not accurately known whether this is caused by a falling out of the fur or by a cessation of growth. In all diseases of the hat the mind of the patient is greatly depressed and his countenance stamped with the deepest gloom. He is particularly sensitive in regard to questions as to the previous history of the hat.

Want of space precludes the mention of minor diseases, such as—

8. Odditus Soccorum, or oddness of the socks, a thing in itself trifling, but of an alarming nature if met in combination with Contractio Pantalunae. Cases are found where the patient, possibly on the public platform or at a social gathering, is seized with a consciousness of the malady so suddenly as to render medical assistance futile.

SURGICAL CASES

It is impossible to mention more than a few of the most typical cases of diseases of this sort.

1. Explosio, or Loss of Buttons, is the commonest malady demanding surgical treatment. It consists of a succession of minor fractures, possibly internal, which at first excite no alarm. A vague sense of uneasiness is presently felt, which often leads the patient to seek relief in the string habit – a habit which, if unduly indulged in, may assume the proportions of a ruling passion. The use of sealing-wax, while admirable as a temporary remedy for Explosio, should never be allowed to gain a permanent hold upon the system. There is no doubt that a persistent indulgence in the string habit, or the constant use of sealing-wax, will result in—

2. Fractura Suspendorum, or Snapping of the Braces, which amounts to a general collapse of the system. The patient is usually seized with a severe attack of explosio, followed by a sudden sinking feeling and sense of loss. A sound constitution may rally from the shock, but a system undermined by the string habit invariably succumbs.

3. Sectura Pantalunae, or Ripping of the Trousers, is generally caused by sitting upon warm beeswax or leaning against a hook. In the case of the very young it is not unfrequently accompanied by a distressing suppuration of the shirt. This, however, is not remarked in adults. The malady is rather mental than bodily, the mind of the patient being racked by a keen sense of indignity and a feeling of unworthiness. The only treatment is immediate isolation, with a careful stitching of the affected part.

In conclusion, it may be stated that at the first symptom of disease the patient should not hesitate to put himself in the hands of a professional tailor. In so brief a compass as the present article the discussion has of necessity been rather suggestive than exhaustive. Much yet remains to be done, and the subject opens wide to the inquiring eye. The writer will, however, feel amply satisfied if this brief outline may help to direct the attention of medical men to what is yet an unexplored field.

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The Poet Answered

Dear sir:

In answer to your repeated questions and requests which have appeared for some years past in the columns of the rural press, I beg to submit the following solutions of your chief difficulties:

Topic I.—You frequently ask, where are the friends of your childhood, and urge that they shall be brought back to you. As far as I am able to learn, those of your friends who are not in jail are still right there in your native village. You point out that they were wont to share your gambols. If so, you are certainly entitled to have theirs now.

Topic II.—You have taken occasion to say:

“Give me not silk, nor rich attire,

Nor gold, nor jewels rare.”

But, my dear fellow, this is preposterous. Why, these are the very things I had bought for you. If you won’t take any of these, I shall have to give you factory cotton and cordwood.

Topic III.—You also ask, “How fares my love across the sea?” Intermediate, I presume. She would hardly travel steerage.

Topic IV.—“Why was I born? Why should I breathe?” Here I quite agree with you. I don’t think you ought to breathe.

Topic V.—You demand that I shall show you the man whose soul is dead and then mark him. I am awfully sorry; the man was around here all day yesterday, and if I had only known I could easily have marked him so that we could pick him out again.

Topic VI.—I notice that you frequently say, “Oh, for the sky of your native land.” Oh, for it, by all means, if you wish. But remember that you already owe for a great deal.

Topic VII.—On more than one occasion you wish to be informed, “What boots it, that you idly dream?” Nothing boots it at present – a fact, sir, which ought to afford you the highest gratification.

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The Force of Statistics

They were sitting on a seat of the car, immediately in front of me. I was consequently able to hear all that they were saying. They were evidently strangers who had dropped into a conversation. They both had the air of men who considered themselves profoundly interesting as minds. It was plain that each laboured under the impression that he was a ripe thinker.

One had just been reading a book which lay in his lap.

“I’ve been reading some very interesting statistics,” he was saying to the other thinker.

“Ah, statistics” said the other; “wonderful things, sir, statistics; very fond of them myself.”

“I find, for instance,” the first man went on, “that a drop of water is filled with little . . . with little . . . I forget just what you call them . . . little – er – things, every cubic inch containing – er – containing . . . let me see . . .”

“Say a million,” said the other thinker, encouragingly.

“Yes, a million, or possibly a billion . . . but at any rate, ever so many of them.”

“Is it possible?” said the other. “But really, you know there are wonderful things in the world. Now, coal . . . take coal. . . .”

“Very, good,” said his friend, “let us take coal,” settling back in his seat with the air of an intellect about to feed itself.

“Do you know that every ton of coal burnt in an engine will drag a train of cars as long as . . . I forget the exact length, but say a train of cars of such and such a length, and weighing, say so much . . . from . . . from . . . hum! for the moment the exact distance escapes me . . . drag it from . . .”

“From here to the moon,” suggested the other.

“Ah, very likely; yes, from here to the moon. Wonderful, isn’t it?”

“But the most stupendous calculation of all, sir, is in regard to the distance from the earth to the sun. Positively, sir, a cannon-ball – er – fired at the sun . . .”

“Fired at the sun,” nodded the other, approvingly, as if he had often seen it done.

“And travelling at the rate of . . . of . . .”

“Of three cents a mile,” hinted the listener.

“No, no, you misunderstand me – but travelling at a fearful rate, simply fearful, sir, would take a hundred million – no, a hundred billion – in short would take a scandalously long time in getting there—”

At this point I could stand no more. I interrupted – “Provided it were fired from Philadelphia,” I said, and passed into the smoking-car.

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Men Who Have Shaved Me

A barber is by nature and inclination a sport. He can tell you at what exact hour the ball game of the day is to begin, can foretell its issue without losing a stroke of the razor, and can explain the points of inferiority of all the players, as compared with better men that he has personally seen elsewhere, with the nicety of a professional. He can do all this, and then stuff the customer’s mouth with a soap-brush, and leave him while he goes to the other end of the shop to make a side bet with one of the other barbers on the outcome of the Autumn Handicap. In the barber-shops they knew the result of the Jeffries-Johnson prize-fight long before it happened. It is on information of this kind that they make their living. The performance of shaving is only incidental to it. Their real vocation in life is imparting information. To the barber the outside world is made up of customers, who are to be thrown into chairs, strapped, manacled, gagged with soap, and then given such necessary information on the athletic events of the moment as will carry them through the business hours of the day without open disgrace.

As soon as the barber has properly filled up the customer with information of this sort, he rapidly removes his whiskers as a sign that the man is now fit to talk to, and lets him out of the chair.

The public has grown to understand the situation. Every reasonable business man is willing to sit and wait half an hour for a shave which he could give himself in three minutes, because he knows that if he goes downtown without understanding exactly why Chicago lost two games straight he will appear an ignoramus.

At times, of course, the barber prefers to test his customer with a question or two. He gets him pinned in the chair, with his head well back, covers the customer’s face with soap, and then planting his knee on his chest and holding his hand firmly across the customer’s mouth, to prevent all utterance and to force him to swallow the soap, he asks: “Well, what did you think of the Detroit-St. Louis game yesterday?” This is not really meant for a question at all. It is only equivalent to saying: “Now, you poor fool, I’ll bet you don’t know anything about the great events of your country at all.” There is a gurgle in the customer’s throat as if he were trying to answer, and his eyes are seen to move sideways, but the barber merely thrusts the soap-brush into each eye, and if any motion still persists, he breathes gin and peppermint over the face, till all sign of life is extinct. Then he talks the game over in detail with the barber at the next chair, each leaning across an inanimate thing extended under steaming towels that was once a man.

To know all these things barbers have to be highly educated. It is true that some of the greatest barbers that have ever lived have begun as uneducated, illiterate men, and by sheer energy and indomitable industry have forced their way to the front. But these are exceptions. To succeed nowadays it is practically necessary to be a college graduate. As the courses at Harvard and Yale have been found too superficial, there are now established regular Barbers’ Colleges, where a bright young man can learn as much in three weeks as he would be likely to know after three years at Harvard. The courses at these colleges cover such things as: (1) Physiology, including Hair and its Destruction, The Origin and Growth of Whiskers, Soap in its Relation to Eyesight; (2) Chemistry, including lectures on Florida Water; and How to Make it out of Sardine Oil; (3) Practical Anatomy, including The Scalp and How to Lift it, The Ears and How to Remove Them, and, as the Major Course for advanced students, The Veins of the Face and how to open and close them at will by the use of alum.

The education of the customer is, as I have said, the chief part of the barber’s vocation. But it must be remembered that the incidental function of removing his whiskers in order to mark him as a well-informed man is also of importance, and demands long practice and great natural aptitude. In the barbers’ shops of modern cities shaving has been brought to a high degree of perfection. A good barber is not content to remove the whiskers of his client directly and immediately. He prefers to cook him first. He does this by immersing the head in hot water and covering the victim’s face with steaming towels until he has him boiled to a nice pink. From time to time the barber removes the towels and looks at the face to see if it is yet boiled pink enough for his satisfaction. If it is not, he replaces the towels again and jams them down firmly with his hand until the cooking is finished. The final result, however, amply justifies this trouble, and the well-boiled customer only needs the addition of a few vegetables on the side to present an extremely appetizing appearance.

During the process of the shave, it is customary for the barber to apply the particular kind of mental torture known as the third degree. This is done by terrorizing the patient as to the very evident and proximate loss of all his hair and whiskers, which the barber is enabled by his experience to foretell. “Your hair,” he says, very sadly and sympathetically, “is all falling out. Better let me give you a shampoo?” “No.” “Let me singe your hair to close up the follicles?” “No.” “Let me plug up the ends of your hair with sealing-wax, it’s the only thing that will save it for you?” “No.” “Let me rub an egg on your scalp?” “No.” “Let me squirt a lemon on your eyebrows?” “No.”

The barber sees that he is dealing with a man of determination, and he warms to his task. He bends low and whispers into the prostrate ear: “You’ve got a good many grey hairs coming in; better let me give you an application of Hairocene, only cost you half a dollar?” “No.” “Your face,” he whispers again, with a soft, caressing voice, “is all covered with wrinkles; better let me rub some of this Rejuvenator into the face.”

This process is continued until one of two things happens. Either the customer is obdurate, and staggers to his feet at last and gropes his way out of the shop with the knowledge that he is a wrinkled, prematurely senile man, whose wicked life is stamped upon his face, and whose unstopped hair-ends and failing follicles menace him with the certainty of complete baldness within twenty-four hours – or else, as in nearly all instances, he succumbs. In the latter case, immediately on his saying “yes” there is a shout of exultation from the barber, a roar of steaming water, and within a moment two barbers have grabbed him by the feet and thrown him under the tap, and, in spite of his struggles, are giving him the Hydro-magnetic treatment. When he emerges from their hands, he steps out of the shop looking as if he had been varnished.

But even the application of the Hydro-magnetic and the Rejuvenator do not by any means exhaust the resources of the up-to-date barber. He prefers to perform on the customer a whole variety of subsidiary services not directly connected with shaving, but carried on during the process of the shave.

In a good, up-to-date shop, while one man is shaving the customer, others black his boots; brush his clothes, darn his socks, point his nails, enamel his teeth, polish his eyes, and alter the shape of any of his joints which they think unsightly. During this operation they often stand seven or eight deep round a customer, fighting for a chance to get at him.

All of these remarks apply to barber-shops in the city, and not to country places. In the country there is only one barber and one customer at a time. The thing assumes the aspect of a straight-out, rough-and-tumble, catch-as-catch-can fight, with a few spectators sitting round the shop to see fair play. In the city they can shave a man without removing any of his clothes. But in the country, where the customer insists on getting the full value for his money, they remove the collar and necktie, the coat and the waistcoat, and, for a really good shave and hair-cut, the customer is stripped to the waist. The barber can then take a rush at him from the other side of the room, and drive the clippers up the full length of the spine, so as to come at the heavier hair on the back of the head with the impact of a lawn-mower driven into long grass.

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Getting the Thread of It

Have you ever had a man try to explain to you what happened in a book as far as he has read? It is a most instructive thing. Sinclair, the man who shares my rooms with me, made such an attempt the other night. I had come in cold and tired from a walk and found him full of excitement, with a bulky magazine in one hand and a paper-cutter gripped in the other.

“Say, here’s a grand story,” he burst out as soon as I came in; “it’s great! most fascinating thing I ever read. Wait till I read you some of it. I’ll just tell you what has happened up to where I am – you’ll easily catch the thread of it – and then we’ll finish it together.”

I wasn’t feeling in a very responsive mood, but I saw no way to stop him, so I merely said, “All right, throw me your thread, I’ll catch it.”

“Well,” Sinclair began with great animation, “this count gets this letter . . .”

“Hold on,” I interrupted, “what count gets what letter?”

“Oh, the count it’s about, you know. He gets this letter from this Porphirio . . .”

“From which Porphirio?”

“Why, Porphirio sent the letter, don’t you see, he sent it,” Sinclair exclaimed a little impatiently – “sent it through Demonio and told him to watch for him with him, and kill him when he got him.”

“Oh, see here!” I broke in, “who is to meet who, and who is to get stabbed?”

“They’re going to stab Demonio.”

“And who brought the letter?”

“Demonio.”

“Well, now, Demonio must be a clam! What did he bring it for?”

“Oh, but he don’t know what’s in it, that’s just the slick part of it,” and Sinclair began to snigger to himself at the thought of it. “You see, this Carlo Carlotti the Condottiere . . .”

“Stop right there,” I said. “What’s a Condottiere?”

“It’s a sort of brigand. He, you understand, was in league with this Fra Fraliccolo . . .”

A suspicion flashed across my mind. “Look here,” I said firmly, “if the scene of this story is laid in the Highlands, I refuse to listen to it. Call it off.”

“No, no,” Sinclair answered quickly, “that’s all right. It’s laid in Italy . . . time of Pius the something. He comes in – say, but he’s great! so darned crafty. It’s him, you know, that persuades this Franciscan . . .”

“Pause,” I said, “what Franciscan?”

“Fra Fraliccolo, of course,” Sinclair said snappishly. “You see, Pio tries to . . .”

“Whoa!” I said, “who is Pio?”

“Oh, hang it all, Pio is Italian, it’s short for Pius. He tries to get Fra Fraliccolo and Carlo Carlotti the Condottiere to steal the document from . . . let me see; what was he called? . . .Oh, yes . . . from the Dog of Venice, so that . . . or . . . no, hang it, you put me out, that’s all wrong. It’s the other way round. Pio wasn’t clever at all; he’s a regular darned fool. It’s the Dog that’s crafty. By Jove, he’s fine,” Sinclair went on; warming up to enthusiasm again, “he just does anything he wants. He makes this Demonio (Demonio is one of those hirelings, you know, he’s the tool of the Dog) . . . makes him steal the document off Porphirio, and . . .”

“But how does he get him to do that?” I asked.

“Oh, the Dog has Demonio pretty well under his thumb, so he makes Demonio scheme round till he gets old Pio – er – gets him under his thumb, and then, of course, Pio thinks that Porphirio – I mean he thinks that he has Porphirio – er – has him under his thumb.”

“Half a minute, Sinclair,” I said, “who did you say was under the Dog’s thumb?”

“Demonio.”

“Thanks. I was mixed in the thumbs. Go on.”

“Well, just when things are like this . . .”

“Like what?”

“Like I said.”

“All right.”

“Who should turn up and thwart the whole scheme, but this Signorina Tarara in her domino . . .”

“Hully Gee!” I said, “you make my head ache. What the deuce does she come in her domino for?”

“Why, to thwart it.”

“To thwart what?”

“Thwart the whole darned thing,” Sinclair exclaimed emphatically.

“But can’t she thwart it without her domino?”

“I should think not! You see, if it hadn’t been for the domino, the Dog would have spotted her quick as a wink. Only when he sees her in the domino with this rose in her hair, he thinks she must be Lucia dell’ Esterolla.”

“Say, he fools himself, doesn’t he? Who’s this last girl?”

“Lucia? Oh, she’s great!” Sinclair said. “She’s one of those Southern natures, you know, full of – er – full of . . .”

“Full of fun,” I suggested.

“Oh, hang it all, don’t make fun of it! Well, anyhow, she’s sister, you understand, to the Contessa Carantarata, and that’s why Fra Fraliccolo, or . . . hold on, that’s not it, no, no, she’s not sister to anybody. She’s cousin, that’s it; or, anyway, she thinks she is cousin to Fra Fraliccolo himself, and that’s why Pio tries to stab Fra Fraliccolo.”

“Oh, yes,” I assented, “naturally he would.”

“Ah,” Sinclair said hopefully, getting his paper-cutter ready to cut the next pages, “you begin to get the thread now, don’t you?”

“Oh, fine!” I said. “The people in it are the Dog and Pio, and Carlo Carlotti the Condottiere, and those others that we spoke of.”

“That’s right,” Sinclair said. “Of course, there are more still that I can tell you about if . . .”

“Oh, never mind,” I said, “I’ll work along with those, they’re a pretty representative crowd. Then Porphirio is under Pio’s thumb, and Pio is under Demonio’s thumb, and the Dog is crafty, and Lucia is full of something all the time. Oh, I’ve got a mighty clear idea of it,” I concluded bitterly.

“Oh, you’ve got it,” Sinclair said, “I knew you’d like it. Now we’ll go on. I’ll just finish to the bottom of my page and then I’ll go on aloud.”

He ran his eyes rapidly over the lines till he came to the bottom of the page, then he cut the leaves and turned over. I saw his eye rest on the half-dozen lines that confronted him on the next page with an expression of utter consternation.

“Well, I will be cursed!” he said at length.

“What’s the matter?” I said gently, with a great joy at my heart.

“This infernal thing’s a serial,” he gasped, as he pointed at the words, To be continued, “and that’s all there is in this number.”

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Telling His Faults

“Oh, do, Mr. Sapling,” said the beautiful girl at the summer hotel, “do let me read the palm of your hand! I can tell you all your faults.”

Mr. Sapling gave an inarticulate gurgle and a roseate flush swept over his countenance as he surrendered his palm to the grasp of the fair enchantress.

“Oh, you’re just full of faults, just full of them, Mr. Sapling!” she cried.

Mr. Sapling looked it.

“To begin with,” said the beautiful girl, slowly and reflectingly, “you are dreadfully cynical: you hardly believe in anything at all, and you’ve utterly no faith in us poor women.”

The feeble smile that had hitherto kindled the features of Mr. Sapling into a ray of chastened imbecility, was distorted in an effort at cynicism.

“Then your next fault is that you are too determined; much too determined. When once you have set your will on any object, you crush every obstacle under your feet.”

Mr. Sapling looked meekly down at his tennis shoes, but began to feel calmer, more lifted up. Perhaps he had been all these things without knowing it.

“Then you are cold and sarcastic.”

Mr. Sapling attempted to look cold and sarcastic. He succeeded in a rude leer.

“And you’re horribly world-weary, you care for nothing. You have drained philosophy to the dregs, and scoff at everything.”

Mr. Sapling’s inner feeling was that from now on he would simply scoff and scoff and scoff.

“Your only redeeming quality is that you are generous. You have tried to kill even this, but cannot. Yes,” concluded the beautiful girl, “those are your faults, generous still, but cold, cynical, and relentless. Good night, Mr. Sapling.”

And resisting all entreaties the beautiful girl passed from the verandah of the hotel and vanished.

And when later in the evening the brother of the beautiful girl borrowed Mr. Sapling’s tennis racket, and his bicycle for a fortnight, and the father of the beautiful girl got Sapling to endorse his note for a couple of hundreds, and her uncle Zephas borrowed his bedroom candle and used his razor to cut up a plug of tobacco, Mr. Sapling felt proud to be acquainted with the family.

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Winter Pastimes

It is in the depth of winter, when the intense cold renders it desirable to stay at home, that the really Pleasant Family is wont to serve invitations upon a few friends to spend a Quiet Evening.

It is at these gatherings that that gay thing, the indoor winter game, becomes rampant. It is there that the old euchre deck and the staring domino become fair and beautiful things; that the rattle of the Loto counter rejoices the heart, that the old riddle feels the sap stirring in its limbs again, and the amusing spilikin completes the mental ruin of the jaded guest. Then does the Jolly Maiden Aunt propound the query: What is the difference between an elephant and a silk hat? Or declare that her first is a vowel, her second a preposition, and her third an archipelago. It is to crown such a quiet evening, and to give the finishing stroke to those of the visitors who have not escaped early, with a fierce purpose of getting at the saloons before they have time to close, that the indoor game or family reservoir of fun is dragged from its long sleep. It is spread out upon the table. Its paper of directions is unfolded. Its cards, its counters, its pointers and its markers are distributed around the table, and the visitor forces a look of reckless pleasure upon his face. Then the “few simple directions” are read aloud by the Jolly Aunt, instructing each player to challenge the player holding the golden letter corresponding to the digit next in order, to name a dead author beginning with X, failing which the player must declare himself in fault, and pay the forfeit of handing over to the Jolly Aunt his gold watch and all his money, or having a hot plate put down his neck.

With a view to bringing some relief to the guests at entertainments of this kind, I have endeavoured to construct one or two little winter pastimes of a novel character. They are quite inexpensive, and as they need no background of higher arithmetic or ancient history, they are within reach of the humblest intellect. Here is one of them. It is called

Indoor Football,
or Football without a Ball.

In this game any number of players, from fifteen to thirty, seat themselves in a heap on any one player, usually the player next to the dealer. They then challenge him to get up, while one player stands with a stop-watch in his hand and counts forty seconds. Should the first player fail to rise before forty seconds are counted, the player with the watch declares him suffocated. This is called a “Down” and counts one. The player who was the Down is then leant against the wall; his wind is supposed to be squeezed out. The player called the referee then blows a whistle and the players select another player and score a down off him. While the player is supposed to be down, all the rest must remain seated as before, and not rise from him until the referee by counting forty and blowing his whistle announces that in his opinion the other player is stifled. He is then leant against the wall beside the first player. When the whistle again blows the player nearest the referee strikes him behind the right ear. This is a “Touch,” and counts two.

It is impossible, of course, to give all the rules in detail. I might add, however, that while it counts two to strike the referee, to kick him counts three. To break his arm or leg counts four, and to kill him outright is called grand slam and counts one game.

—

Here is another little thing that I have worked out, which is superior to parlour games in that it combines their intense excitement with sound out-of-door exercise.

It is easily comprehended, and can be played by any number of players, old and young. It requires no other apparatus than a trolley car of the ordinary type, a mile or two of track, and a few thousand volts of electricity. It is called:

The Suburban Trolley Car
A Holiday Game for Old and Young.

The chief part in the game is taken by two players who station themselves one at each end of the car, and who adopt some distinctive costumes to indicate that they are “it.” The other players occupy the body of the car, or take up their position at intervals along the track.

The object of each player should be to enter the car as stealthily as possible in such a way as to escape the notice of the players in distinctive dress. Should he fail to do this he must pay the philopena or forfeit. Of these there are two: philopena No. 1, the payment of five cents, and philopena No. 2, being thrown off the car by the neck. Each player may elect which philopena he will pay. Any player who escapes paying the philopena scores one.

The players who are in the car may elect to adopt a standing attitude, or to seat themselves, but no player may seat himself in the lap of another without the second player’s consent. The object of those who elect to remain standing is to place their feet upon the toes of those who sit; when they do this they score. The object of those who elect to sit is to elude the feet of the standing players. Much merriment is thus occasioned.

The player in distinctive costume at the front of the car controls a crank, by means of which he is enabled to bring the car to a sudden stop, or to cause it to plunge violently forward. His aim in so doing is to cause all the standing players to fall over backward. Every time he does this he scores. For this purpose he is generally in collusion with the other player in distinctive costume, whose business it is to let him know by a series of bells and signals when the players are not looking, and can be easily thrown down. A sharp fall of this sort gives rise to no end of banter and good-natured drollery, directed against the two players who are “it.”

Should a player who is thus thrown backward save himself from falling by sitting down in the lap of a female player, he scores one. Any player who scores in this manner is entitled to remain seated while he may count six, after which he must remove himself or pay philopena No. 2.

Should the player who controls the crank perceive a player upon the street desirous of joining in the game by entering the car, his object should be: primo, to run over him and kill him; secundo, to kill him by any other means in his power; tertio, to let him into the car, but to exact the usual philopena.

Should a player, in thus attempting to get on the car from without, become entangled in the machinery, the player controlling the crank shouts “huff!” and the car is supposed to pass over him. All within the car score one.

A fine spice of the ludicrous may be added to the game by each player pretending that he has a destination or stopping-place, where he would wish to alight. It now becomes the aim of the two players who are “it” to carry him past his point. A player who is thus carried beyond his imaginary stopping-place must feign a violent passion, and imitate angry gesticulations. He may, in addition, feign a great age or a painful infirmity, which will be found to occasion the most convulsive fun for the other players in the game.

These are the main outlines of this most amusing pastime. Many other agreeable features may, of course, be readily introduced by persons of humour and imagination.

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Number Fifty-Six

What I narrate was told me one winter’s evening by my friend Ah-Yen in the little room behind his laundry. Ah-Yen is a quiet little celestial with a grave and thoughtful face, and that melancholy contemplative disposition so often noticed in his countrymen. Between myself and Ah-Yen there exists a friendship of some years’ standing, and we spend many a long evening in the dimly lighted room behind his shop, smoking a dreamy pipe together and plunged in silent meditation. I am chiefly attracted to my friend by the highly imaginative cast of his mind, which is, I believe, a trait of the Eastern character and which enables him to forget to a great extent the sordid cares of his calling in an inner life of his own creation. Of the keen, analytical side of his mind, I was in entire ignorance until the evening of which I write.

The room where we sat was small and dingy, with but little furniture except our chairs and the little table at which we filled and arranged our pipes, and was lighted only by a tallow candle. There were a few pictures on the walls, for the most part rude prints cut from the columns of the daily press and pasted up to hide the bareness of the room. Only one picture was in any way noticeable, a portrait admirably executed in pen and ink. The face was that of a young man, a very beautiful face, but one of infinite sadness. I had long been aware, although I know not how, that Ah-Yen had met with a great sorrow, and had in some way connected the fact with this portrait. I had always refrained, however, from asking him about it, and it was not until the evening in question that I knew its history.

We had been smoking in silence for some time when Ah-Yen spoke. My friend is a man of culture and wide reading, and his English is consequently perfect in its construction; his speech is, of course, marked by the lingering liquid accent of his country which I will not attempt to reproduce.

“I see,” he said, “that you have been examining the portrait of my unhappy friend, Fifty-Six. I have never yet told you of my bereavement, but as tonight is the anniversary of his death, I would fain speak of him for a while.”

Ah-Yen paused; I lighted my pipe afresh, and nodded to him to show that I was listening.

“I do not know,” he went on, “at what precise time Fifty-Six came into my life. I could indeed find it out by examining my books, but I have never troubled to do so. Naturally I took no more interest in him at first than in any other of my customers – less, perhaps, since he never in the course of our connection brought his clothes to me himself but always sent them by a boy. When I presently perceived that he was becoming one of my regular customers, I allotted to him his number, Fifty-Six, and began to speculate as to who and what he was. Before long I had reached several conclusions in regard to my unknown client. The quality of his linen showed me that, if not rich, he was at any rate fairly well off. I could see that he was a young man of regular Christian life, who went out into society to a certain extent; this I could tell from his sending the same number of articles to the laundry, from his washing always coming on Saturday night, and from the fact that he wore a dress shirt about once a week. In disposition he was a modest, unassuming fellow, for his collars were only two inches high.”

I stared at Ah-Yen in some amazement, the recent publications of a favourite novelist had rendered me familiar with this process of analytical reasoning, but I was prepared for no such revelations from my Eastern friend.

“When I first knew him,” Ah-Yen went on, “Fifty-Six was a student at the university. This, of course, I did not know for some time. I inferred it, however, in the course of time, from his absence from town during the four summer months, and from the fact that during the time of the university examinations the cuffs of his shirts came to me covered with dates, formulas, and propositions in geometry. I followed him with no little interest through his university career. During the four years which it lasted, I washed for him every week; my regular connection with him and the insight which my observation gave me into the lovable character of the man, deepened my first esteem into a profound affection and I became most anxious for his success. I helped him at each succeeding examination, as far as lay in my power, by starching his shirts half-way to the elbow, so as to leave him as much room as possible for annotations. My anxiety during the strain of his final examination I will not attempt to describe. That Fifty-Six was undergoing the great crisis of his academic career, I could infer from the state of his handkerchiefs which, in apparent unconsciousness, he used as pen-wipers during the final test. His conduct throughout the examination bore witness to the moral development which had taken place in his character during his career as an undergraduate; for the notes upon his cuffs which had been so copious at his earlier examinations were limited now to a few hints, and these upon topics so intricate as to defy an ordinary memory. It was with a thrill of joy that I at last received in his laundry bundle one Saturday early in June, a ruffled dress shirt, the bosom of which was thickly spattered with the spillings of the wine-cup, and realized that Fifty-Six had banqueted as a Bachelor of Arts.

“In the following winter the habit of wiping his pen upon his handkerchief, which I had remarked during his final examination, became chronic with him, and I knew that he had entered upon the study of law. He worked hard during that year, and dress shirts almost disappeared from his weekly bundle. It was in the following winter, the second year of his legal studies, that the tragedy of his life began. I became aware that a change had come over his laundry; from one, or at most two a week, his dress shirts rose to four, and silk handkerchiefs began to replace his linen ones. It dawned upon me that Fifty-Six was abandoning the rigorous tenor of his student life and was going into society. I presently perceived something more; Fifty-Six was in love. It was soon impossible to doubt it. He was wearing seven shirts a week; linen handkerchiefs disappeared from his laundry; his collars rose from two inches to two and a quarter, and finally to two and a half. I have in my possession one of his laundry lists of that period; a glance at it will show the scrupulous care which he bestowed upon his person. Well do I remember the dawning hopes of those days, alternating with the gloomiest despair. Each Saturday I opened his bundle with a trembling eagerness to catch the first signs of a return of his love. I helped my friend in every way that I could. His shirts and collars were masterpieces of my art, though my hand often shook with agitation as I applied the starch. She was a brave noble girl, that I knew; her influence was elevating the whole nature of Fifty-Six; until now he had had in his possession a certain number of detached cuffs and false shirt-fronts. These he discarded now – at first the false shirt-fronts, scorning the very idea of fraud, and after a time, in his enthusiasm, abandoning even the cuffs. I cannot look back upon those bright happy days of courtship without a sigh.

“The happiness of Fifty-Six seemed to enter into and fill my whole life. I lived but from Saturday to Saturday. The appearance of false shirt-fronts would cast me to the lowest depths of despair; their absence raised me to a pinnacle of hope. It was not till winter softened into spring that Fifty-Six nerved himself to learn his fate. One Saturday he sent me a new white waistcoat, a garment which had hitherto been shunned by his modest nature, to prepare for his use. I bestowed upon it all the resources of my art; I read his purpose in it. On the Saturday following it was returned to me and, with tears of joy, I marked where a warm little hand had rested fondly on the right shoulder, and knew that Fifty-Six was the accepted lover of his sweetheart.”

Ah-Yen paused and sat for some time silent; his pipe had sputtered out and lay cold in the hollow of his hand; his eye was fixed upon the wall where the light and shadows shifted in the dull flickering of the candle. At last he spoke again:

“I will not dwell upon the happy days that ensued – days of gaudy summer neckties and white waistcoats, of spotless shirts and lofty collars worn but a single day by the fastidious lover. Our happiness seemed complete and I asked no more from fate. Alas! it was not destined to continue! When the bright days of summer were fading into autumn, I was grieved to notice an occasional quarrel – only four shirts instead of seven, or the reappearance of the abandoned cuffs and shirt-fronts. Reconciliations followed, with tears of penitence upon the shoulder of the white waistcoat, and the seven shirts came back. But the quarrels grew more frequent and there came at times stormy scenes of passionate emotion that left a track of broken buttons down the waistcoat. The shirts went slowly down to three, then fell to two, and the collars of my unhappy friend subsided to an inch and three-quarters. In vain I lavished my utmost care upon Fifty-Six. It seemed to my tortured mind that the gloss upon his shirts and collars would have melted a heart of stone. Alas! my every effort at reconciliation seemed to fail. An awful month passed; the false fronts and detached cuffs were all back again; the unhappy lover seemed to glory in their perfidy. At last, one gloomy evening, I found on opening his bundle that he had bought a stock of celluloids, and my heart told me that she had abandoned him for ever. Of what my poor friend suffered at this time, I can give you no idea; suffice it to say that he passed from celluloid to a blue flannel shirt and from blue to grey. The sight of a red cotton handkerchief in his wash at length warned me that his disappointed love had unhinged his mind, and I feared the worst. Then came an agonizing interval of three weeks during which he sent me nothing, and after that came the last parcel that I ever received from him an enormous bundle that seemed to contain all his effects. In this, to my horror, I discovered one shirt the breast of which was stained a deep crimson with his blood, and pierced by a ragged hole that showed where a bullet had singed through into his heart.

“A fortnight before, I remembered having heard the street boys crying the news of an appalling suicide, and I know now that it must have been he. After the first shock of my grief had passed, I sought to keep him in my memory by drawing the portrait which hangs beside you. I have some skill in the art, and I feel assured that I have caught the expression of his face. The picture is, of course, an ideal one, for, as you know, I never saw Fifty-Six.”

The bell on the door of the outer shop tinkled at the entrance of a customer. Ah-Yen rose with that air of quiet resignation that habitually marked his demeanour, and remained for some time in the shop. When he returned he seemed in no mood to continue speaking of his lost friend. I left him soon after and walked sorrowfully home to my lodgings. On my way I mused much upon my little Eastern friend and the sympathetic grasp of his imagination. But a burden lay heavy on my heart – something I would fain have told him but which I could not bear to mention. I could not find it in my heart to shatter the airy castle of his fancy. For my life has been secluded and lonely and I have known no love like that of my ideal friend. Yet I have a haunting recollection of a certain huge bundle of washing that I sent to him about a year ago. I had been absent from town for three weeks and my laundry was much larger than usual in consequence. And if I mistake not there was in the bundle a tattered shirt that had been grievously stained by the breaking of a bottle of red ink in my portmanteau, and burnt in one place where an ash fell from my cigar as I made up the bundle. Of all this I cannot feel absolutely certain, yet I know at least that until a year ago, when I transferred my custom to a more modern establishment, my laundry number with Ah-Yen was Fifty-Six.

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Aristocratic Education

House of Lords, Jan. 25, 1920.—The House of Lords commenced today in Committee the consideration of Clause No. 52,000 of the Education Bill, dealing with the teaching of Geometry in the schools.

The Leader of the Government in presenting the clause urged upon their Lordships the need of conciliation. The Bill, he said, had now been before their Lordships for sixteen years. The Government had made every concession. They had accepted all the amendments of their Lordships on the opposite side in regard to the original provisions of the Bill. They had consented also to insert in the Bill a detailed programme of studies of which the present clause, enunciating the fifth proposition of Euclid, was a part. He would therefore ask their Lordships to accept the clause drafted as follows:

“The angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, and if the equal sides of the triangle are produced, the exterior angles will also be equal.”

He would hasten to add that the Government had no intention of producing the sides. Contingencies might arise to render such a course necessary, but in that case their Lordships would receive an early intimation of the fact.

The Archbishop of Canterbury spoke against the clause. He considered it, in its present form, too secular. He should wish to amend the clause so as to make it read:

“The angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are, in every Christian community, equal, and if the sides be produced by a member of a Christian congregation, the exterior angles will be equal.”

He was aware, he continued, that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are extremely equal, but he must remind the Government that the Church had been aware of this for several years past. He was willing also to admit that the opposite sides and ends of a parallelogram are equal, but he thought that such admission should be coupled with a distinct recognition of the existence of a Supreme Being.

The Leader of the Government accepted His Grace’s amendment with pleasure. He considered it the brightest amendment His Grace had made that week. The Government, he said, was aware of the intimate relation in which His Grace stood to the bottom end of a parallelogram and was prepared to respect it.

Lord Halifax rose to offer a further amendment. He thought the present case was one in which the “four-fifths” clause ought to apply: he should wish it stated that the angles are equal for two days every week, except in the case of schools where four-fifths of the parents are conscientiously opposed to the use of the isosceles triangle.

The Leader of the Government thought the amendment a singularly pleasing one. He accepted it and would like it understood that the words isosceles triangle were not meant in any offensive sense.

Lord Rosebery spoke at some length. He considered the clause unfair to Scotland, where the high state of morality rendered education unnecessary. Unless an amendment in this sense was accepted, it might be necessary to reconsider the Act of Union of 1707.

The Leader of the Government said that Lord Rosebery’s amendment was the best he had heard yet. The Government accepted it at once. They were willing to make every concession. They would, if need be, reconsider the Norman Conquest.

The Duke of Devonshire took exception to the part of the clause relating to the production of the sides. He did not think the country was prepared for it. It was unfair to the producer. He would like the clause altered to read, “if the sides be produced in the home market.”

The Leader of the Government accepted with pleasure His Grace’s amendment. He considered it quite sensible. He would now, as it was near the hour of rising, present the clause in its revised form. He hoped, however, that their Lordships would find time to think out some further amendments for the evening sitting.

The clause was then read.

His Grace of Canterbury then moved that the House, in all humility, adjourn for dinner.

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The Conjurer’s Revenge

“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” said the conjurer, “having shown you that the cloth is absolutely empty, I will proceed to take from it a bowl of goldfish. Presto!”

All around the hall people were saying, “Oh, how wonderful! How does he do it?”

But the Quick Man on the front seat said in a big whisper to the people near him, “He-had-it-up-his-sleeve.”

Then the people nodded brightly at the Quick Man and said, “Oh, of course”; and everybody whispered round the hall, “He-had-it-up-his-sleeve.”

“My next trick,” said the conjurer, “is the famous Hindostanee rings. You will notice that the rings are apparently separate; at a blow they all join (clang, clang, clang) – Presto!”

There was a general buzz of stupefaction till the Quick Man was heard to whisper, “He-must-have-had-another-lot-up-his-sleeve.”

Again everybody nodded and whispered, “The-rings-were-up-his-sleeve.”

The brow of the conjurer was clouded with a gathering frown.

“I will now,” he continued, “show you a most amusing trick by which I am enabled to take any number of eggs from a hat. Will some gentleman kindly lend me his hat? Ah, thank you – Presto!”

He extracted seventeen eggs, and for thirty-five seconds the audience began to think that he was wonderful. Then the Quick Man whispered along the front bench, “He-has-a-hen-up-his-sleeve,” and all the people whispered it on. “He-has-a-lot-of-hens-up-his-sleeve.”

The egg trick was ruined.

It went on like that all through. It transpired from the whispers of the Quick Man that the conjurer must have concealed up his sleeve, in addition to the rings, hens, and fish, several packs of cards, a loaf of bread, a doll’s cradle, a live guinea-pig, a fifty-cent piece, and a rocking-chair.

The reputation of the conjurer was rapidly sinking below zero. At the close of the evening he rallied for a final effort.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I will present to you, in conclusion, the famous Japanese trick recently invented by the natives of Tipperary. Will you, sir,” he continued turning toward the Quick Man, “will you kindly hand me your gold watch?”

It was passed to him.

“Have I your permission to put it into this mortar and pound it to pieces?” he asked savagely.

The Quick Man nodded and smiled.

The conjurer threw the watch into the mortar and grasped a sledge hammer from the table. There was a sound of violent smashing. “He’s-slipped-it-up-his-sleeve,” whispered the Quick Man.

“Now, sir,” continued the conjurer, “will you allow me to take your handkerchief and punch holes in it? Thank you. You see, ladies and gentlemen, there is no deception; the holes are visible to the eye.”

The face of the Quick Man beamed. This time the real mystery of the thing fascinated him.

“And now, sir, will you kindly pass me your silk hat and allow me to dance on it? Thank you.”

The conjurer made a few rapid passes with his feet and exhibited the hat crushed beyond recognition.

“And will you now, sir, take off your celluloid collar and permit me to burn it in the candle? Thank you, sir. And will you allow me to smash your spectacles for you with my hammer? Thank you.”

By this time the features of the Quick Man were assuming a puzzled expression. “This thing beats me,” he whispered, “I don’t see through it a bit.”

There was a great hush upon the audience. Then the conjurer drew himself up to his full height and, with a withering look at the Quick Man, he concluded:

“Ladies and gentlemen, you will observe that I have, with this gentleman’s permission, broken his watch, burnt his collar, smashed his spectacles, and danced on his hat. If he will give me the further permission to paint green stripes on his overcoat, or to tie his suspenders in a knot, I shall be delighted to entertain you. If not, the performance is at an end.”

And amid a glorious burst of music from the orchestra the curtain fell, and the audience dispersed, convinced that there are some tricks, at any rate, that are not done up the conjurer’s sleeve.

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Hints to Travellers

The following hints and observations have occurred to me during a recent trip across the continent: they are written in no spirit of complaint against existing railroad methods, but merely in the hope that they may prove useful to those who travel, like myself, in a spirit of meek, observant ignorance.

1. Sleeping in a Pullman car presents some difficulties to the novice. Care should be taken to allay all sense of danger. The frequent whistling of the engine during the night is apt to be a source of alarm. Find out, therefore, before travelling, the meaning of the various whistles. One means “station,” two, “railroad crossing,” and so on. Five whistles, short and rapid, mean sudden danger. When you hear whistles in the night, sit up smartly in your bunk and count them. Should they reach five, draw on your trousers over your pyjamas and leave the train instantly. As a further precaution against accident, sleep with the feet towards the engine if you prefer to have the feet crushed, or with the head towards the engine, if you think it best to have the head crushed. In making this decision try to be as unselfish as possible. If indifferent, sleep crosswise with the head hanging over into the aisle.

2. I have devoted some thought to the proper method of changing trains. The system which I have observed to be the most popular with travellers of my own class, is something as follows: Suppose that you have been told on leaving New York that you are to change at Kansas City. The evening before approaching Kansas City, stop the conductor in the aisle of the car (you can do this best by putting out your foot and tripping him), and say politely, “Do I change at Kansas City?” He says “Yes.” Very good. Don’t believe him. On going into the dining-car for supper, take a negro aside and put it to him as a personal matter between a white man and a black, whether he thinks you ought to change at Kansas City. Don’t be satisfied with this. In the course of the evening pass through the entire train from time to time, and say to people casually, “Oh, can you tell me if I change at Kansas City?” Ask the conductor about it a few more times in the evening: a repetition of the question will ensure pleasant relations with him. Before falling asleep watch for his passage and ask him through the curtains of your berth, “Oh, by the way, did you say I changed at Kansas City?” If he refuses to stop, hook him by the neck with your walking-stick, and draw him gently to your bedside. In the morning when the train stops and a man calls, “Kansas City! All change!” approach the conductor again and say, “Is this Kansas City?” Don’t be discouraged at his answer. Pick yourself up and go to the other end of the car and say to the brakesman, “Do you know, sir, if this is Kansas City?” Don’t be too easily convinced. Remember that both brakesman and conductor may be in collusion to deceive you. Look around, therefore, for the name of the station on the signboard. Having found it, alight and ask the first man you see if this is Kansas City. He will answer, “Why, where in blank are your blank eyes? Can’t you see it there, plain as blank?” When you hear language of this sort, ask no more. You are now in Kansas and this is Kansas City.

3. I have observed that it is now the practice of the conductors to stick bits of paper in the hats of the passengers. They do this, I believe, to mark which ones they like best. The device is pretty, and adds much to the scenic appearance of the car. But I notice with pain that the system is fraught with much trouble for the conductors. The task of crushing two or three passengers together, in order to reach over them and stick a ticket into the chinks of a silk skull cap is embarrassing for a conductor of refined feelings. It would be simpler if the conductor should carry a small hammer and a packet of shingle nails and nail the paid-up passenger to the back of the seat. Or better still, let the conductor carry a small pot of paint and a brush, and mark the passengers in such a way that he cannot easily mistake them. In the case of bald-headed passengers, the hats might be politely removed and red crosses painted on the craniums. This will indicate that they are bald. Through passengers might be distinguished by a complete coat of paint. In the hands of a man of taste, much might be effected by a little grouping of painted passengers and the leisure time of the conductor agreeably occupied.

4. I have observed in travelling in the West that the irregularity of railroad accidents is a fruitful cause of complaint. The frequent disappointment of the holders of accident policy tickets on western roads is leading to widespread protest. Certainly the conditions of travel in the West are altering rapidly and accidents can no longer be relied upon. This is deeply to be regretted, in so much as, apart from accidents, the tickets may be said to be practically valueless.

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A Manual of Education

The few selections below are offered as a specimen page of a little book which I have in course of preparation.

Every man has somewhere in the back of his head the wreck of a thing which he calls his education. My book is intended to embody in concise form these remnants of early instruction.

Educations are divided into splendid educations, thorough classical educations, and average educations. All very old men have splendid educations; all men who apparently know nothing else have thorough classical educations; nobody has an average education.

An education, when it is all written out on foolscap, covers nearly ten sheets. It takes about six years of severe college training to acquire it. Even then a man often finds that he somehow hasn’t got his education just where he can put his thumb on it. When my little book of eight or ten pages has appeared, everybody may carry his education in his hip pocket.

Those who have not had the advantage of an early training will be enabled, by a few hours of conscientious application, to put themselves on an equal footing with the most scholarly.

The selections are chosen entirely at random.

I.—Remains of Astronomy

Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets. These may be put on a frame of little sticks and turned round. This causes the tides. Those at the ends of the sticks are enormously far away. From time to time a diligent searching of the sticks reveals new planets. The orbit of a planet is the distance the stick goes round in going round. Astronomy is intensely interesting; it should be done at night, in a high tower in Spitzbergen. This is to avoid the astronomy being interrupted. A really good astronomer can tell when a comet is coming too near him by the warning buzz of the revolving sticks.

II.—Remains of History

Aztecs: A fabulous race, half man, half horse, half mound-builder. They flourished at about the same time as the early Calithumpians. They have left some awfully stupendous monuments of themselves somewhere.

Life of Caesar: A famous Roman general, the last who ever landed in Britain without being stopped at the custom house. On returning to his Sabine farm (to fetch something), he was stabbed by Brutus, and died with the words “Veni, vidi, tekel, upharsim” in his throat. The jury returned a verdict of strangulation.

Life of Voltaire: A Frenchman; very bitter.

Life of Schopenhauer: A German; very deep; but it was not really noticeable when he sat down.

Life of Dante: An Italian; the first to introduce the banana and the class of street organ known as “Dante’s Inferno.”

Peter the Great, Alfred the Great, Frederick the Great, John the Great, Jim the Great, Tom the Great, Jo the Great, etc., etc.
It is impossible for a busy man to keep these apart. They sought a living as kings and apostles and pugilists and so on.

III.—Remains of Botany.

Botany is the art of plants. Plants are divided into trees, flowers, and vegetables. The true botanist knows a tree as soon as he sees it. He learns to distinguish it from a vegetable by merely putting his ear to it.

IV.—Remains of Natural Science.

Natural Science treats of motion and force. Many of its teachings remain as part of an educated man’s permanent equipment in life. Such are:

(a) The harder you shove a bicycle the faster it will go. This is because of natural science.

(b) If you fall from a high tower, you fall quicker and quicker and quicker; a judicious selection of a tower will ensure any rate of speed.

(c) If you put your thumb in between two cogs it will go on and on, until the wheels are arrested, by your suspenders. This is machinery.

(d) Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one kind comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.

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Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas

This Santa Claus business is played out. It’s a sneaking, underhand method, and the sooner it’s exposed the better.

For a parent to get up under cover of the darkness of night and palm off a ten-cent necktie on a boy who had been expecting a ten-dollar watch, and then say that an angel sent it to him, is low, undeniably low.

I had a good opportunity of observing how the thing worked this Christmas, in the case of young Hoodoo McFiggin, the son and heir of the McFiggins, at whose house I board.

Hoodoo McFiggin is a good boy – a religious boy. He had been given to understand that Santa Claus would bring nothing to his father and mother because grown-up people don’t get presents from the angels. So he saved up all his pocket-money and bought a box of cigars for his father and a seventy-five-cent diamond brooch for his mother. His own fortunes he left in the hands of the angels. But he prayed. He prayed every night for weeks that Santa Claus would bring him a pair of skates and a puppy-dog and an air-gun and a bicycle and a Noah’s ark and a sleigh and a drum – altogether about a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of stuff.

I went into Hoodoo’s room quite early Christmas morning. I had an idea that the scene would be interesting. I woke him up and he sat up in bed, his eyes glistening with radiant expectation, and began hauling things out of his stocking.

The first parcel was bulky; it was done up quite loosely and had an odd look generally.

“Ha! ha!” Hoodoo cried gleefully, as he began undoing it. “I’ll bet it’s the puppy-dog, all wrapped up in paper!”

And was it the puppy-dog? No, by no means. It was a pair of nice, strong, number-four boots, laces and all, labelled, “Hoodoo, from Santa Claus,” and underneath Santa Claus had written, “95 net.”

The boy’s jaw fell with delight. “It’s boots,” he said, and plunged in his hand again.

He began hauling away at another parcel with renewed hope on his face.

This time the thing seemed like a little round box. Hoodoo tore the paper off it with a feverish hand. He shook it; something rattled inside.

“It’s a watch and chain! It’s a watch and chain!” he shouted. Then he pulled the lid off.

And was it a watch and chain? No. It was a box of nice, brand-new celluloid collars, a dozen of them all alike and all his own size.

The boy was so pleased that you could see his face crack up with pleasure.

He waited a few minutes until his intense joy subsided. Then he tried again.

This time the packet was long and hard. It resisted the touch and had a sort of funnel shape.

“It’s a toy pistol!” said the boy, trembling with excitement. “Gee! I hope there are lots of caps with it! I’ll fire some off now and wake up father.”

No, my poor child, you will not wake your father with that. It is a useful thing, but it needs not caps and it fires no bullets, and you cannot wake a sleeping man with a tooth-brush. Yes, it was a tooth-brush – a regular beauty, pure bone all through, and ticketed with a little paper, “Hoodoo, from Santa Claus.”

Again the expression of intense joy passed over the boy’s face, and the tears of gratitude started from his eyes. He wiped them away with his tooth-brush and passed on.

The next packet was much larger and evidently contained something soft and bulky. It had been too long to go into the stocking and was tied outside.

“I wonder what this is,” Hoodoo mused, half afraid to open it. Then his heart gave a great leap, and he forgot all his other presents in the anticipation of this one. “It’s the drum!” he gasped. “It’s the drum, all wrapped up!”

Drum nothing! It was pants – a pair of the nicest little short pants – yellowish-brown short pants – with dear little stripes of colour running across both ways, and here again Santa Claus had written, “Hoodoo, from Santa Claus, one fort net.”

But there was something wrapped up in it. Oh, yes! There was a pair of braces wrapped up in it, braces with a little steel sliding thing so that you could slide your pants up to your neck, if you wanted to.

The boy gave a dry sob of satisfaction. Then he took out his last present. “It’s a book,” he said, as he unwrapped it. “I wonder if it is fairy stories or adventures. Oh, I hope it’s adventures! I’ll read it all morning.”

No, Hoodoo, it was not precisely adventures. It was a small family Bible. Hoodoo had now seen all his presents, and he arose and dressed. But he still had the fun of playing with his toys. That is always the chief delight of Christmas morning.

First he played with his tooth-brush. He got a whole lot of water and brushed all his teeth with it. This was huge.

Then he played with his collars. He had no end of fun with them, taking them all out one by one and swearing at them, and then putting them back and swearing at the whole lot together.

The next toy was his pants. He had immense fun there, putting them on and taking them off again, and then trying to guess which side was which by merely looking at them.

After that he took his book and read some adventures called “Genesis” till breakfast-time.

Then he went downstairs and kissed his father and mother. His father was smoking a cigar, and his mother had her new brooch on. Hoodoo’s face was thoughtful, and a light seemed to have broken in upon his mind. Indeed, I think it altogether likely that next Christmas he will hang on to his own money and take chances on what the angels bring.

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The Life of John Smith

The lives of great men occupy a large section of our literature. The great man is certainly a wonderful thing. He walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on his goloshes as he passes. It is impossible to get up a revolution or a new religion, or a national awakening of any sort, without his turning up, putting himself at the head of it and collaring all the gate-receipts for himself. Even after his death he leaves a long trail of second-rate relations spattered over the front seats of fifty years of history.

Now the lives of great men are doubtless infinitely interesting. But at times I must confess to a sense of reaction and an idea that the ordinary common man is entitled to have his biography written too. It is to illustrate this view that I write the life of John Smith, a man neither good nor great, but just the usual, everyday homo like you and me and the rest of us.

From his earliest childhood John Smith was marked out from his comrades by nothing. The marvellous precocity of the boy did not astonish his preceptors. Books were not a passion for him from his youth, neither did any old man put his hand on Smith’s head and say, mark his words, this boy would some day become a man. Nor yet was it his father’s wont to gaze on him with a feeling amounting almost to awe. By no means! All his father did was to wonder whether Smith was a darn fool because he couldn’t help it, or because he thought it smart. In other words, he was just like you and me and the rest of us.

In those athletic sports which were the ornament of the youth of his day, Smith did not, as great men do, excel his fellows. He couldn’t ride worth a darn. He couldn’t skate worth a darn. He couldn’t swim worth a darn. He couldn’t shoot worth a darn. He couldn’t do anything worth a darn. He was just like us.

Nor did the bold cast of the boy’s mind offset his physical defects, as it invariably does in the biographies. On the contrary. He was afraid of his father. He was afraid of his school-teacher. He was afraid of dogs. He was afraid of guns. He was afraid of lightning. He was afraid of hell. He was afraid of girls.

In the boy’s choice of a profession there was not seen that keen longing for a life-work that we find in the celebrities. He didn’t want to be a lawyer, because you have to know law. He didn’t want to be a doctor, because you have to know medicine. He didn’t want to be a business-man, because you have to know business; and he didn’t want to be a school-teacher, because he had seen too many of them. As far as he had any choice, it lay between being Robinson Crusoe and being the Prince of Wales. His father refused him both and put him into a dry goods establishment.

Such was the childhood of Smith. At its close there was nothing in his outward appearance to mark the man of genius. The casual observer could have seen no genius concealed behind the wide face, the massive mouth, the long slanting forehead, and the tall ear that swept up to the close-cropped head. Certainly he couldn’t. There wasn’t any concealed there.

It was shortly after his start in business life that Smith was stricken with the first of those distressing attacks, to which he afterwards became subject. It seized him late one night as he was returning home from a delightful evening of song and praise with a few old school chums. Its symptoms were a peculiar heaving of the sidewalk, a dancing of the street lights, and a crafty shifting to and fro of the houses, requiring a very nice discrimination in selecting his own. There was a strong desire not to drink water throughout the entire attack, which showed that the thing was evidently a form of hydrophobia. From this time on, these painful attacks became chronic with Smith. They were liable to come on at any time, but especially on Saturday nights, on the first of the month, and on Thanksgiving Day. He always had a very severe attack of hydrophobia on Christmas Eve, and after elections it was fearful.

There was one incident in Smith’s career which he did, perhaps, share with regret. He had scarcely reached manhood when he met the most beautiful girl in the world. She was different from all other women. She had a deeper nature than other people. Smith realized it at once. She could feel and understand things that ordinary people couldn’t. She could understand him. She had a great sense of humour and an exquisite appreciation of a joke. He told her the six that he knew one night and she thought them great. Her mere presence made Smith feel as if he had swallowed a sunset: the first time that his finger brushed against hers, he felt a thrill all through him. He presently found that if he took a firm hold of her hand with his, he could get a fine thrill, and if he sat beside her on a sofa, with his head against her ear and his arm about once and a half round her, he could get what you might call a first-class, A-1 thrill. Smith became filled with the idea that he would like to have her always near him. He suggested an arrangement to her, by which she should come and live in the same house with him and take personal charge of his clothes and his meals. She was to receive in return her board and washing, about seventy-five cents a week in ready money, and Smith was to be her slave.

After Smith had been this woman’s slave for some time, baby fingers stole across his life, then another set of them, and then more and more till the house was full of them. The woman’s mother began to steal across his life too, and every time she came Smith had hydrophobia frightfully. Strangely enough there was no little prattler that was taken from his life and became a saddened, hallowed memory to him. Oh, no! The little Smiths were not that kind of prattler. The whole nine grew up into tall, lank boys with massive mouths and great sweeping ears like their father’s, and no talent for anything.

The life of Smith never seemed to bring him to any of those great turning-points that occurred in the lives of the great. True, the passing years brought some change of fortune. He was moved up in his dry-goods establishment from the ribbon counter to the collar counter, from the collar counter to the gents’ panting counter, and from the gents’ panting to the gents’ fancy shirting. Then, as he grew aged and inefficient, they moved him down again from the gents’ fancy shirting to the gents’ panting, and so on to the ribbon counter. And when he grew quite old they dismissed him and got a boy with a four-inch mouth and sandy-coloured hair, who did all Smith could do for half the money. That was John Smith’s mercantile career: it won’t stand comparison with Mr. Gladstone’s, but it’s not unlike your own.

Smith lived for five years after this. His sons kept him. They didn’t want to, but they had to. In his old age the brightness of his mind and his fund of anecdote were not the delight of all who dropped in to see him. He told seven stories and he knew six jokes. The stories were long things all about himself, and the jokes were about a commercial traveller and a Methodist minister. But nobody dropped in to see him, anyway, so it didn’t matter.

At sixty-five Smith was taken ill, and, receiving proper treatment, he died. There was a tombstone put up over him, with a hand pointing north-north-east.

But I doubt if he ever got there. He was too like us.

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On Collecting Things

Like most other men I have from time to time been stricken with a desire to make collections of things.

It began with postage stamps. I had a letter from a friend of mine who had gone out to South Africa. The letter had a three-cornered stamp on it, and I thought as soon as I looked at it, “That’s the thing! Stamp collecting! I’ll devote my life to it.”

I bought an album with accommodation for the stamps of all nations, and began collecting right off. For three days the collection made wonderful progress. It contained:

One Cape of Good Hope stamp.

One one-cent stamp, United States of America.

One two-cent stamp, United States of America.

One five-cent stamp, United States of America.

One ten-cent stamp, United States of America.

After that the collection came to a dead stop. For a while I used to talk about it rather airily and say I had one or two rather valuable South African stamps. But I presently grew tired even of lying about it.

Collecting coins is a thing that I attempt at intervals. Every time I am given an old half-penny or a Mexican quarter, I get an idea that if a fellow made a point of holding on to rarities of that sort, he’d soon have quite a valuable collection. The first time that I tried it I was full of enthusiasm, and before long my collection numbered quite a few articles of vertu. The items were as follows:

No. 1. Ancient Roman coin. Time of Caligula. This one of course was the gem of the whole lot; it was given me by a friend, and that was what started me collecting.

No. 2. Small copper coin. Value one cent. United States of America. Apparently modern.

No. 3. Small nickel coin. Circular. United States of America. Value five cents.

No. 4. Small silver coin. Value ten cents. United States of America.

No. 5. Silver coin. Circular. Value twenty-five cents. United States of America. Very beautiful.

No. 6. Large silver coin. Circular. Inscription, “One Dollar.” United States of America. Very valuable.

No. 7. Ancient British copper coin. Probably time of Caractacus. Very dim. Inscription, “Victoria Dei gratia regina.” Very valuable.

No. 8. Silver coin. Evidently French. Inscription, “Funf Mark. Kaiser Wilhelm.”

No. 9. Circular silver coin. Very much defaced. Part of inscription, “E Pluribus Unum.” Probably a Russian rouble, but quite as likely to be a Japanese yen or a Shanghai rooster.

That’s as far as that collection got. It lasted through most of the winter and I was getting quite proud of it, but I took the coins downtown one evening to show to a friend and we spent No. 3, No. 4, No. 5, No. 6, and No. 7 in buying a little dinner for two. After dinner I bought a yen’s worth of cigars and traded the relic of Caligula for as many hot Scotches as they cared to advance on it. After that I felt reckless and put No. 2 and No. 8 into a Children’s Hospital poor box.

I tried fossils next. I got two in ten years. Then I quit.

A friend of mine once showed me a very fine collection of ancient and curious weapons, and for a time I was full of that idea. I gathered several interesting specimens, such as:

No. 1. Old flint-lock musket, used by my grandfather. (He used it on the farm for years as a crowbar.)

No. 2. Old raw-hide strap, used by my father.

No. 3. Ancient Indian arrowhead, found by myself the very day after I began collecting. It resembles a three-cornered stone.

No. 4. Ancient Indian bow, found by myself behind a sawmill on the second day of collecting. It resembles a straight stick of elm or oak. It is interesting to think that this very weapon may have figured in some fierce scene of savage warfare.

No. 5. Cannibal poniard or straight-handled dagger of the South Sea Islands. It will give the reader almost a thrill of horror to learn that this atrocious weapon, which I bought myself on the third day of collecting, was actually exposed in a second-hand store as a family carving-knife. In gazing at it one cannot refrain from conjuring up the awful scenes it must have witnessed.

I kept this collection for quite a long while until, in a moment of infatuation, I presented it to a young lady as a betrothal present. The gift proved too ostentatious and our relations subsequently ceased to be cordial.

On the whole I am inclined to recommend the beginner to confine himself to collecting coins. At present I am myself making a collection of American bills (time of Taft preferred), a pursuit I find most absorbing.

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Society Chit-Chat

As it should be Written

I notice that it is customary for the daily papers to publish a column or so of society gossip. They generally head it “Chit-Chat,” or “On Dit,” or “Le Boudoir,” or something of the sort, and they keep it pretty full of French terms to give it the proper sort of swing. These columns may be very interesting in their way, but it always seems to me that they don’t get hold of quite the right things to tell us about. They are very fond, for instance, of giving an account of the delightful dance at Mrs. De Smythe’s – at which Mrs. De Smythe looked charming in a gown of old tulle with a stomacher of passementerie – or of the dinner-party at Mr. Alonzo Robinson’s residence, or the smart pink tea given by Miss Carlotta Jones. No, that’s all right, but it’s not the kind of thing we want to get at; those are not the events which happen in our neighbours’ houses that we really want to hear about. It is the quiet little family scenes, the little traits of home-life that – well, for example, take the case of that delightful party at the De Smythes. I am certain that all those who were present would much prefer a little paragraph like the following, which would give them some idea of the home-life of the De Smythes on the morning after the party.

Déjeuner de Luxe at the De Smythe Residence

On Wednesday morning last at 7.15 a.m. a charming little breakfast was served at the home of Mr. De Smythe. The déjeuner was given in honour of Mr. De Smythe and his two sons, Master Adolphus and Master Blinks De Smythe, who were about to leave for their daily travail at their wholesale Bureau de Flour et de Feed. All the gentlemen were very quietly dressed in their habits de work. Miss Melinda De Smythe poured out tea, the domestique having refusé to get up so early after the partie of the night before. The menu was very handsome, consisting of eggs and bacon, demi-froid, and ice-cream. The conversation was sustained and lively. Mr. De Smythe sustained it and made it lively for his daughter and his garçons. In the course of the talk Mr. De Smythe stated that the next time he allowed the young people to turn his maison topsy-turvy he would see them in enfer. He wished to know if they were aware that some ass of the evening before had broken a pane of coloured glass in the hall that would cost him four dollars. Did they think he was made of argent. If so, they never made a bigger mistake in their vie. The meal closed with general expressions of good-feeling. A little bird has whispered to us that there will be no more parties at the De Smythes’ pour long-temps.

Here is another little paragraph that would be of general interest in society.

Diner De Fameel at the Boarding-House de McFiggin

Yesterday evening at half after six a pleasant little diner was given by Madame McFiggin of Rock Street, to her boarders. The salle à manger was very prettily decorated with texts, and the furniture upholstered with cheveux de horse, Louis Quinze. The boarders were all very quietly dressed: Mrs. McFiggin was daintily attired in some old clinging stuff with a corsage de Whalebone underneath. The ample board groaned under the bill of fare. The boarders groaned also. Their groaning was very noticeable. The piece de résistance was a hunko de boeuf boilé, flanked with some old clinging stuff. The entrees were paté de pumpkin, followed by fromage McFiggin, served under glass. Towards the end of the first course, speeches became the order of the day. Mrs. McFiggin was the first speaker. In commencing, she expressed her surprise that so few of the gentlemen seemed to care for the hunko de boeuf; her own mind, she said, had hesitated between hunko de boeuf boilé and a pair of roast chickens (sensation). She had finally decided in favour of the hunko de boeuf (no sensation). She referred at some length to the late Mr. McFiggin, who had always shown a marked preference for hunko de boeuf. Several other speakers followed. All spoke forcibly and to the point. The last to speak was the Reverend Mr. Whiner. The reverend gentleman, in rising, said that he confided himself and his fellow-boarders to the special interference of providence. For what they had eaten, he said, he hoped that Providence would make them truly thankful. At the close of the Repas several of the boarders expressed their intention of going down the street to a restourong to get quelque chose à manger.

Here is another example. How interesting it would be to get a detailed account of that little affair at the Robinsons’, of which the neighbours only heard indirectly! Thus:

Delightful Evening at the Residence of Mr. Alonzo Robinson

Yesterday the family of Mr. Alonzo Robinson spent a very lively evening at their home on ——th Avenue. The occasion was the seventeenth birthday of Master Alonzo Robinson, junior. It was the original intention of Master Alonzo Robinson to celebrate the day at home and invite a few of les garçons. Mr. Robinson, senior, however, having declared that he would be damné first, Master Alonzo spent the evening in visiting the salons of the town, which he painted rouge. Mr. Robinson, senior, spent the evening at home in quiet expectation of his son’s return. He was very becomingly dressed in a pantalon quatre vingt treize, and had his whippe de chien laid across his knee. Madame Robinson and the Mademoiselles Robinson wore black. The guest of the evening arrived at a late hour. He wore his habits de spri, and had about six pouces of eau de vie in him. He was evidently full up to his cou. For some time after his arrival a very lively time was spent. Mr. Robinson having at length broken the whippe de chien, the family parted for the night with expressions of cordial goodwill.

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Insurance Up to Date

A man called on me the other day with the idea of insuring my life. Now, I detest life-insurance agents; they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so. I have been insured a great many times, for about a month at a time, but have had no luck with it at all.

So I made up my mind that I would outwit this man at his own game. I let him talk straight ahead and encouraged him all I could, until he finally left me with a sheet of questions which I was to answer as an applicant. Now this was what I was waiting for; I had decided that, if that company wanted information about me, they should have it, and have the very best quality I could supply. So I spread the sheet of questions before me, and drew up a set of answers for them, which, I hoped, would settle for ever all doubts as to my eligibility for insurance.

Question.—What is your age?

Answer.—I can’t think.

Q.—What is your chest measurement?

A.—Nineteen inches.

Q.—What is your chest expansion?

A.—Half an inch.

Q.—What is your height?

A.—Six feet five, if erect, but less when I walk on all fours.

Q.—Is your grandfather dead?

A.—Practically.

Q.—Cause of death, if dead?

A.—Dipsomania, if dead.

Q.—Is your father dead?

A.—To the world.

Q.—Cause of death?

A.—Hydrophobia.

Q.—Place of father’s residence?

A.—Kentucky.

Q.—What illness have you had?

A.—As a child, consumption, leprosy, and water on the knee. As a man, whooping-cough, stomach-ache, and water on the brain.

Q.—Have you any brothers?

A.—Thirteen; all nearly dead.

Q.—Are you aware of any habits or tendencies which might be expected to shorten your life?

A.—I am aware. I drink, I smoke, I take morphine and vaseline. I swallow grape seeds and I hate exercise.

I thought when I had come to the end of that list that I had made a dead sure thing of it, and I posted the paper with a cheque for three months’ payment, feeling pretty confident of having the cheque sent back to me. I was a good deal surprised a few days later to receive the following letter from the company:

“Dear Sir – We beg to acknowledge your letter of application and cheque for fifteen dollars. After a careful comparison of your case with the average modern standard, we are pleased to accept you as a first-class risk.”

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Borrowing a Match

You might think that borrowing a match upon the street is a simple thing. But any man who has ever tried it will assure you that it is not, and will be prepared to swear to the truth of my experience of the other evening.

I was standing on the corner of the street with a cigar that I wanted to light. I had no match. I waited till a decent, ordinary-looking man came along. Then I said:

“Excuse me, sir, but could you oblige me with the loan of a match?”

“A match?” he said, “why certainly.” Then he unbuttoned his overcoat and put his hand in the pocket of his waistcoat. “I know I have one,” he went on, “and I’d almost swear it’s in the bottom pocket – or, hold on, though, I guess it may be in the top – just wait till I put these parcels down on the sidewalk.”

“Oh, don’t trouble,” I said, “it’s really of no consequence.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble, I’ll have it in a minute; I know there must be one in here somewhere” – he was digging his fingers into his pockets as he spoke – “but you see this isn’t the waistcoat I generally . . .”

I saw that the man was getting excited about it. “Well, never mind,” I protested; “if that isn’t the waistcoat that you generally – why, it doesn’t matter.”

“Hold on, now, hold on!” the man said, “I’ve got one of the cursed things in here somewhere. I guess it must be in with my watch. No, it’s not there either. Wait till I try my coat. If that confounded tailor only knew enough to make a pocket so that a man could get at it!”

He was getting pretty well worked up now. He had thrown down his walking-stick and was plunging at his pockets with his teeth set. “It’s that cursed young boy of mine,” he hissed; “this comes of his fooling in my pockets. By Gad! perhaps I won’t warm him up when I get home. Say, I’ll bet that it’s in my hip-pocket. You just hold up the tail of my overcoat a second till I . . .”

“No, no,” I protested again, “please don’t take all this trouble, it really doesn’t matter. I’m sure you needn’t take off your overcoat, and oh, pray don’t throw away your letters and things in the snow like that, and tear out your pockets by the roots! Please, please don’t trample over your overcoat and put your feet through the parcels. I do hate to hear you swearing at your little boy, with that peculiar whine in your voice. Don’t – please don’t tear your clothes so savagely.”

Suddenly the man gave a grunt of exultation, and drew his hand up from inside the lining of his coat.

“I’ve got it,” he cried. “Here you are!” Then he brought it out under the light.

It was a toothpick.

Yielding to the impulse of the moment I pushed him under the wheels of a trolley-car, and ran.

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A Lesson in Fiction

Suppose that in the opening pages of the modern melodramatic novel you find some such situation as the following, in which is depicted the terrific combat between Gaspard de Vaux, the boy lieutenant, and Hairy Hank, the chief of the Italian banditti:

“The inequality of the contest was apparent. With a mingled yell of rage and contempt, his sword brandished above his head and his dirk between his teeth, the enormous bandit rushed upon his intrepid opponent. De Vaux seemed scarce more than a stripling, but he stood his ground and faced his hitherto invincible assailant. ‘mong Dieu,’ cried De Smythe, ‘he is lost!’”

Question.—On which of the parties to the above contest do you honestly feel inclined to put your money?

Answer.—On De Vaux. He’ll win. Hairy Hank will force him down to one knee and with a brutal cry of “Har! har!” will be about to dirk him, when De Vaux will make a sudden lunge (one he had learnt at home out of a book of lunges) and—

Very good. You have answered correctly. Now, suppose you find, a little later in the book, that the killing of Hairy Hank has compelled De Vaux to flee from his native land to the East. Are you not fearful for his safety in the desert?

Answer.—Frankly, I am not. De Vaux is all right. His name is on the title page, and you can’t kill him.

Question.—Listen to this, then: “The sun of Ethiopia beat fiercely upon the desert as De Vaux, mounted upon his faithful elephant, pursued his lonely way. Seated in his lofty hoo-doo, his eye scoured the waste. Suddenly a solitary horseman appeared on the horizon, then another, and another, and then six. In a few moments a whole crowd of solitary horsemen swooped down upon him. There was a fierce shout of ‘Allah!’ a rattle of firearms. De Vaux sank from his hoo-doo on to the sands, while the affrighted elephant dashed off in all directions. The bullet had struck him in the heart.”

There now, what do you think of that? Isn’t De Vaux killed now?

Answer.—I am sorry. De Vaux is not dead. True, the ball had hit him, oh yes, it had hit him, but it had glanced off against a family Bible, which he carried in his waistcoat in case of illness, struck some hymns that he had in his hip-pocket, and, glancing off again, had flattened itself against De Vaux’s diary of his life in the desert, which was in his knapsack.

Question.—But even if this doesn’t kill him, you must admit that he is near death when he is bitten in the jungle by the deadly dongola?

Answer.—That’s all right. A kindly Arab will take De Vaux to the Sheik’s tent.

Question.—What will De Vaux remind the Sheik of?

Answer.—Too easy. Of his long-lost son, who disappeared years ago.

Question.—Was this son Hairy Hank?

Answer.—Of course he was. Anyone could see that, but the Sheik never suspects it, and heals De Vaux. He heals him with an herb, a thing called a simple, an amazingly simple, known only to the Sheik. Since using this herb, the Sheik has used no other.

Question.—The Sheik will recognize an overcoat that De Vaux is wearing, and complications will arise in the matter of Hairy Hank deceased. Will this result in the death of the boy lieutenant?

Answer.—No. By this time De Vaux has realized that the reader knows he won’t die and resolves to quit the desert. The thought of his mother keeps recurring to him, and of his father, too, the grey, stooping old man – does he stoop still or has he stopped stooping? At times, too, there comes the thought of another, a fairer than his father; she whose – but enough, De Vaux returns to the old homestead in Piccadilly.

Question.—When De Vaux returns to England, what will happen?

Answer.—This will happen: “He who left England ten years before a raw boy, has returned a sunburnt soldierly man. But who is this that advances smilingly to meet him? Can the mere girl, the bright child that shared his hours of play, can she have grown into this peerless, graceful girl, at whose feet half the noble suitors of England are kneeling? ‘Can this be her?’ he asks himself in amazement.”

Question.—Is it her?

Answer.—Oh, it’s her all right. It is her, and it is him, and it is them. That girl hasn’t waited fifty pages for nothing.

Question.—You evidently guess that a love affair will ensue between the boy lieutenant and the peerless girl with the broad feet. Do you imagine, however, that its course will run smoothly and leave nothing to record?

Answer.—Not at all. I feel certain that the scene of the novel having edged itself around to London, the writer will not feel satisfied unless he introduces the following famous scene:

“Stunned by the cruel revelation which he had received, unconscious of whither his steps were taking him, Gaspard de Vaux wandered on in the darkness from street to street until he found himself upon London Bridge. He leaned over the parapet and looked down upon the whirling stream below. There was something in the still, swift rush of it that seemed to beckon, to allure him. After all, why not? What was life now that he should prize it? For a moment De Vaux paused irresolute.”

Question.—Will he throw himself in?

Answer.—Well, say, you don’t know Gaspard. He will pause irresolute up to the limit, then, with a fierce struggle, will recall his courage and hasten from the Bridge.

Question.—This struggle not to throw oneself in must be dreadfully difficult?

Answer.—Oh! dreadfully! Most of us are so frail we should jump in at once. But Gaspard has the knack of it. Besides he still has some of the Sheik’s herb; he chews it.

Question.—What has happened to De Vaux anyway? Is it anything he has eaten?

Answer.—No, it is nothing that he has eaten. It’s about her. The blow has come. She has no use for sunburn, doesn’t care for tan; she is going to marry a duke and the boy lieutenant is no longer in it. The real trouble is that the modern novelist has got beyond the happy-marriage mode of ending. He wants tragedy and a blighted life to wind up with.

Question.—How will the book conclude?

Answer.—Oh, De Vaux will go back to the desert, fall upon the Sheik’s neck, and swear to be a second Hairy Hank to him. There will be a final panorama of the desert, the Sheik and his newly found son at the door of the tent, the sun setting behind a pyramid, and De Vaux’s faithful elephant crouched at his feet and gazing up at him with dumb affection.

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Helping the Armenians

The financial affairs of the parish church up at Doogalville have been getting rather into a tangle in the last six months. The people of the church were specially anxious to do something toward the general public subscription of the town on behalf of the unhappy Armenians, and to that purpose they determined to devote the collections taken up at a series of special evening services. To give the right sort of swing to the services and to stimulate generous giving, they put a new pipe organ into the church. In order to make a preliminary payment on the organ, it was decided to raise a mortgage on the parsonage.

To pay the interest on the mortgage, the choir of the church got up a sacred concert in the town hall.

To pay for the town hall, the Willing Workers’ Guild held a social in the Sunday school. To pay the expenses of the social, the rector delivered a public lecture on “Italy and Her Past,” illustrated by a magic lantern. To pay for the magic lantern, the curate and the ladies of the church got up some amateur theatricals.

Finally, to pay for the costumes for the theatricals, the rector felt it his duty to dispense with the curate.

So that is where the church stands just at present. What they chiefly want to do, is to raise enough money to buy a suitable gold watch as a testimonial to the curate. After that they hope to be able to do something for the Armenians. Meantime, of course, the Armenians, the ones right there in the town, are getting very troublesome. To begin with, there is the Armenian who rented the costumes for the theatricals: he has to be squared. Then there is the Armenian organ dealer, and the Armenian who owned the magic lantern. They want relief badly.

The most urgent case is that of the Armenian who holds the mortgage on the parsonage; indeed it is generally felt in the congregation, when the rector makes his impassioned appeals at the special services on behalf of the suffering cause, that it is to this man that he has special reference.

In the meanwhile the general public subscription is not getting along very fast; but the proprietor of the big saloon further down the street and the man with the short cigar that runs the Doogalville Midway Plaisance have been most liberal in their contributions.

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A Study in Still Life:

The Country Hotel

The country hotel stands on the sunny side of Main Street. It has three entrances.

There is one in front which leads into the Bar. There is one at the side called the Ladies’ Entrance which leads into the Bar from the side. There is also the Main Entrance which leads into the bar through the Rotunda.

The Rotunda is the space between the door of the bar-room and the cigar-case.

In it is a desk and a book. In the book are written down the names of the guests, together with marks indicating the direction of the wind and the height of the barometer. It is here that the newly arrived guest waits until he has time to open the door leading to the Bar.

The bar-room forms the largest part of the hotel. It constitutes the hotel proper. To it are attached a series of bedrooms on the floor above, many of which contain beds.

The walls of the bar-room are perforated in all directions with trap-doors. Through one of these drinks are passed into the back sitting-room. Through others drinks are passed into the passages. Drinks are also passed through the floor and through the ceiling. Drinks once passed never return. The Proprietor stands in the doorway of the bar. He weighs two hundred pounds. His face is immovable as putty. He is drunk. He has been drunk for twelve years. It makes no difference to him. Behind the bar stands the bartender. He wears wicker sleeves, his hair is curled in a hook, and his name is Charlie.

Attached to the bar is a pneumatic beer pump, by means of which the bartender can flood the bar with beer. Afterwards he wipes up the beer with a rag. By this means he polishes the bar. Some of the beer that is pumped up spills into glasses and has to be sold.

Behind the bartender is a mechanism called a cash-register, which, on being struck a powerful blow, rings a bell, sticks up a card marked NO SALE, and opens a till from which the bartender distributes money.

There is printed a tariff of drinks and prices on the wall.

It reads thus:

Beer | 5 cents
Whiskey | 5 cents
Whiskey and Soda | 5 cents
Beer and Soda | 5 cents
Whiskey and Beer and Soda | 5 cents
Whiskey and Eggs | 5 cents
Beer and Eggs | 5 cents
Champagne | 5 cents
Cigars | 5 cents
Cigars, extra fine | 5 cents

All calculations are made on this basis and are worked out to three places of decimals. Every seventh drink is on the house and is not followed by a distribution of money.

The bar-room closes at midnight, provided there are enough people in it. If there is not a quorum the proprietor waits for a better chance. A careful closing of the bar will often catch as many as twenty-five people. The bar is not opened again till seven o’clock in the morning; after that the people may go home. There are also, nowadays, Local Option Hotels. These contain only one entrance, leading directly into the bar.

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An Experiment
with Policeman Hogan

Mr. Scalper sits writing in the reporters’ room of The Daily Eclipse. The paper has gone to press and he is alone; a wayward talented gentleman, this Mr. Scalper, and employed by The Eclipse as a delineator of character from handwriting. Any subscriber who forwards a specimen of his handwriting is treated to a prompt analysis of his character from Mr. Scalper’s facile pen. The literary genius has a little pile of correspondence beside him, and is engaged in the practice of his art. Outside the night is dark and rainy. The clock on the City Hall marks the hour of two. In front of the newspaper office Policeman Hogan walks drearily up and down his beat. The damp misery of Hogan is intense. A belated gentleman in clerical attire, returning home from a bed of sickness, gives him a side-look of timid pity and shivers past. Hogan follows the retreating figure with his eye; then draws forth a note-book and sits down on the steps of The Eclipse building to write in the light of the gas lamp. Gentlemen of nocturnal habits have often wondered what it is that Policeman Hogan and his brethren write in their little books. Here are the words that are fashioned by the big fist of the policeman:

“Two o’clock. All is well. There is a light in Mr. Scalper’s room above. The night is very wet and I am unhappy and cannot sleep – my fourth night of insomnia. Suspicious-looking individual just passed. Alas, how melancholy is my life! Will the dawn never break! Oh, moist, moist stone.”

Mr. Scalper up above is writing too, writing with the careless fluency of a man who draws his pay by the column. He is delineating with skill and rapidity. The reporters’ room is gloomy and desolate. Mr. Scalper is a man of sensitive temperament and the dreariness of his surroundings depresses him. He opens the letter of a correspondent, examines the handwriting narrowly, casts his eye around the room for inspiration, and proceeds to delineate:

“G. H. You have an unhappy, despondent nature; your circumstances oppress you, and your life is filled with an infinite sadness. You feel that you are without hope—”

Mr. Scalper pauses, takes another look around the room, and finally lets his eye rest for some time upon a tall black bottle that stands on the shelf of an open cupboard. Then he goes on:

“—and you have lost all belief in Christianity and a future world and human virtue. You are very weak against temptation, but there is an ugly vein of determination in your character, when you make up your mind that you are going to have a thing—”

Here Mr. Scalper stops abruptly, pushes back his chair, and dashes across the room to the cupboard. He takes the black bottle from the shelf, applies it to his lips, and remains for some time motionless. He then returns to finish the delineation of G. H. with the hurried words:

“On the whole I recommend you to persevere; you are doing very well.” Mr. Scalper’s next proceeding is peculiar. He takes from the cupboard a roll of twine, about fifty feet in length, and attaches one end of it to the neck of the bottle. Going then to one of the windows, he opens it, leans out, and whistles softly. The alert ear of Policeman Hogan on the pavement below catches the sound, and he returns it. The bottle is lowered to the end of the string, the guardian of the peace applies it to his gullet, and for some time the policeman and the man of letters remain attached by a cord of sympathy. Gentlemen who lead the variegated life of Mr. Scalper find it well to propitiate the arm of the law, and attachments of this sort are not uncommon. Mr. Scalper hauls up the bottle, closes the window, and returns to his task; the policeman resumes his walk with a glow of internal satisfaction. A glance at the City Hall clock causes him to enter another note in his book.

“Half-past two. All is better. The weather is milder with a feeling of young summer in the air. Two lights in Mr. Scalper’s room. Nothing has occurred which need be brought to the notice of the roundsman.”

Things are going better upstairs too. The delineator opens a second envelope, surveys the writing of the correspondent with a critical yet charitable eye, and writes with more complacency.

“William H. Your writing shows a disposition which, though naturally melancholy, is capable of a temporary cheerfulness. You have known misfortune but have made up your mind to look on the bright side of things. If you will allow me to say so, you indulge in liquor but are quite moderate in your use of it. Be assured that no harm ever comes of this moderate use. It enlivens the intellect, brightens the faculties, and stimulates the dormant fancy into a pleasurable activity. It is only when carried to excess—”

At this point the feelings of Mr. Scalper, who had been writing very rapidly, evidently become too much for him. He starts up from his chair, rushes two or three times around the room, and finally returns to finish the delineation thus: “it is only when carried to excess that this moderation becomes pernicious.”

Mr. Scalper succumbs to the train of thought suggested and gives an illustration of how moderation to excess may be avoided, after which he lowers the bottle to Policeman Hogan with a cheery exchange of greetings.

The half-hours pass on. The delineator is writing busily and feels that he is writing well. The characters of his correspondents lie bare to his keen eye and flow from his facile pen. From time to time he pauses and appeals to the source of his inspiration; his humanity prompts him to extend the inspiration to Policeman Hogan. The minion of the law walks his beat with a feeling of more than tranquillity. A solitary Chinaman, returning home late from his midnight laundry, scuttles past. The literary instinct has risen strong in Hogan from his connection with the man of genius above him, and the passage of the lone Chinee gives him occasion to write in his book:

“Four-thirty. Everything is simply great. There are four lights in Mr. Scalper’s room. Mild, balmy weather with prospects of an earthquake, which may be held in check by walking with extreme caution. Two Chinamen have just passed – mandarins, I presume. Their walk was unsteady, but their faces so benign as to disarm suspicion.”

Up in the office Mr. Scalper has reached the letter of a correspondent which appears to give him particular pleasure, for he delineates the character with a beaming smile of satisfaction. To the unpractised eye the writing resembles the prim, angular hand of an elderly spinster. Mr. Scalper, however, seems to think otherwise, for he writes:

“Aunt Dorothea. You have a merry, rollicking nature. At times you are seized with a wild, tumultuous hilarity to which you give ample vent in shouting and song. You are much addicted to profanity, and you rightly feel that this is part of your nature and you must not check it. The world is a very bright place to you, Aunt Dorothea. Write to me again soon. Our minds seem cast in the same mould.”

Mr. Scalper seems to think that he has not done full justice to the subject he is treating, for he proceeds to write a long private letter to Aunt Dorothea in addition to the printed delineation. As he finishes the City Hall clock points to five, and Policeman Hogan makes the last entry in his chronicle. Hogan has seated himself upon the steps of The Eclipse building for greater comfort and writes with a slow, leisurely fist:

“The other hand of the clock points north and the second longest points south-east by south. I infer that it is five o’clock. The electric lights in Mr. Scalper’s room defy the eye. The roundsman has passed and examined my notes of the night’s occurrences. They are entirely satisfactory, and he is pleased with their literary form. The earthquake which I apprehended was reduced to a few minor oscillations which cannot reach me where I sit—”

The lowering of the bottle interrupts Policeman Hogan. The long letter to Aunt Dorothea has cooled the ardour of Mr. Scalper. The generous blush has passed from his mind and he has been trying in vain to restore it. To afford Hogan a similar opportunity, he decides not to haul the bottle up immediately, but to leave it in his custody while he delineates a character. The writing of this correspondent would seem to the inexperienced eye to be that of a timid little maiden in her teens. Mr. Scalper is not to be deceived by appearances. He shakes his head mournfully at the letter and writes:

“Little Emily. You have known great happiness, but it has passed. Despondency has driven you to seek forgetfulness in drink. Your writing shows the worst phase of the liquor habit. I apprehend that you will shortly have delirium tremens. Poor little Emily! Do not try to break off; it is too late.”

Mr. Scalper is visibly affected by his correspondent’s unhappy condition. His eye becomes moist, and he decides to haul up the bottle while there is still time to save Policeman Hogan from acquiring a taste for liquor. He is surprised and alarmed to find the attempt to haul it up ineffectual. The minion of the law has fallen into a leaden slumber, and the bottle remains tight in his grasp. The baffled delineator lets fall the string and returns to finish his task. Only a few lines are now required to fill the column, but Mr. Scalper finds on examining the correspondence that he has exhausted the subjects. This, however, is quite a common occurrence and occasions no dilemma in the mind of the talented gentleman. It is his custom in such cases to fill up the space with an imaginary character or two, the analysis of which is a task most congenial to his mind. He bows his head in thought for a few moments, and then writes as follows:

“Policeman H. Your hand shows great firmness; when once set upon a thing you are not easily moved. But you have a mean, grasping disposition and a tendency to want more than your share. You have formed an attachment which you hope will be continued throughout life, but your selfishness threatens to sever the bond.”

Having written which, Mr. Scalper arranges his manuscript for the printer next day, dons his hat and coat, and wends his way home in the morning twilight, feeling that his pay is earned.

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The Passing of the Poet

Studies in what may be termed collective psychology are essentially in keeping with the spirit of the present century. The examination of the mental tendencies, the intellectual habits which we display not as individuals, but as members of a race, community, or crowd, is offering a fruitful field of speculation as yet but little exploited. One may, therefore, not without profit, pass in review the relation of the poetic instinct to the intellectual development of the present era.

Not the least noticeable feature in the psychological evolution of our time is the rapid disappearance of poetry. The art of writing poetry, or perhaps more fairly, the habit of writing poetry, is passing from us. The poet is destined to become extinct.

To a reader of trained intellect the initial difficulty at once suggests itself as to what is meant by poetry. But it is needless to quibble at a definition of the term. It may be designated, simply and fairly, as the art of expressing a simple truth in a concealed form of words, any number of which, at intervals greater or less, may or may not rhyme.

The poet, it must be said, is as old as civilization. The Greeks had him with them, stamping out his iambics with the sole of his foot. The Romans, too, knew him – endlessly juggling his syllables together, long and short, short and long, to make hexameters. This can now be done by electricity, but the Romans did not know it.

But it is not my present purpose to speak of the poets of an earlier and ruder time. For the subject before us it is enough to set our age in comparison with the era that preceded it. We have but to contrast ourselves with our early Victorian grandfathers to realize the profound revolution that has taken place in public feeling. It is only with an effort that the practical common sense of the twentieth century can realize the excessive sentimentality of the earlier generation.

In those days poetry stood in high and universal esteem. Parents read poetry to their children. Children recited poetry to their parents. And he was a dullard, indeed, who did not at least profess, in his hours of idleness, to pour spontaneous rhythm from his flowing quill.

Should one gather statistics of the enormous production of poetry some sixty or seventy years ago, they would scarcely appear credible. Journals and magazines teemed with it. Editors openly countenanced it. Even the daily press affected it. Love sighed in home-made stanzas. Patriotism rhapsodized on the hustings, or cited rolling hexameters to an enraptured legislature. Even melancholy death courted his everlasting sleep in elegant elegiacs.

In that era, indeed, I know not how, polite society was haunted by the obstinate fiction that it was the duty of a man of parts to express himself from time to time in verse. Any special occasion of expansion or exuberance, of depression, torsion, or introspection, was sufficient to call it forth. So we have poems of dejection, of reflection, of deglutition, of indigestion.

Any particular psychological disturbance was enough to provoke an excess of poetry. The character and manner of the verse might vary with the predisposing cause. A gentleman who had dined too freely might disexpand himself in a short fit of lyric doggerel in which “bowl” and “soul” were freely rhymed. The morning’s indigestion inspired a long-drawn elegiac, with “bier” and “tear,” “mortal” and “portal” linked in sonorous sadness. The man of politics, from time to time, grateful to an appreciative country, sang back to it, “Ho, Albion, rising from the brine!” in verse whose intention at least was meritorious.

And yet it was but a fiction, a purely fictitious obligation, self-imposed by a sentimental society. In plain truth, poetry came no more easily or naturally to the early Victorian than to you or me. The lover twanged his obdurate harp in vain for hours for the rhymes that would not come, and the man of politics hammered at his heavy hexameter long indeed before his Albion was finally “hoed” into shape; while the beer-besotted convivialist cudgelled his poor wits cold sober in rhyming the light little bottle-ditty that should have sprung like Aphrodite from the froth of the champagne.

I have before me a pathetic witness of this fact. It is the note-book once used for the random jottings of a gentleman of the period. In it I read: “Fair Lydia, if my earthly harp.” This is crossed out, and below it appears, “Fair Lydia, COULD my earthly harp.” This again is erased, and under it appears, “Fair Lydia, SHOULD my earthly harp.” This again is struck out with a despairing stroke, and amended to read: “Fair Lydia, DID my earthly harp.” So that finally, when the lines appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1845) in their ultimate shape – “Fair Edith, when with fluent pen,” etc., etc. – one can realize from what a desperate congelation the fluent pen had been so perseveringly rescued.

There can be little doubt of the deleterious effect occasioned both to public and private morals by this deliberate exaltation of mental susceptibility on the part of the early Victorian. In many cases we can detect the evidences of incipient paresis. The undue access of emotion frequently assumed a pathological character. The sight of a daisy, of a withered leaf or an upturned sod, seemed to disturb the poet’s mental equipoise. Spring unnerved him. The lambs distressed him. The flowers made him cry. The daffodils made him laugh. Day dazzled him. Night frightened him.

This exalted mood, combined with the man’s culpable ignorance of the plainest principles of physical science, made him see something out of the ordinary in the flight of a waterfowl or the song of a skylark. He complained that he could hear it, but not see it – a phenomenon too familiar to the scientific observer to occasion any comment.

In such a state of mind the most inconsequential inferences were drawn. One said that the brightness of the dawn – a fact easily explained by the diurnal motion of the globe – showed him that his soul was immortal. He asserted further that he had, at an earlier period of his life, trailed bright clouds behind him. This was absurd.

With the disturbance thus set up in the nervous system were coupled, in many instances, mental aberrations, particularly in regard to pecuniary matters. “Give me not silk, nor rich attire,” pleaded one poet of the period to the British public, “nor gold nor jewels rare.” Here was an evident hallucination that the writer was to become the recipient of an enormous secret subscription. Indeed, the earnest desire NOT to be given gold was a recurrent characteristic of the poetic temperament. The repugnance to accept even a handful of gold was generally accompanied by a desire for a draught of pure water or a night’s rest.

It is pleasing to turn from this excessive sentimentality of thought and speech to the practical and concise diction of our time. We have learned to express ourselves with equal force, but greater simplicity. To illustrate this I have gathered from the poets of the earlier generation and from the prose writers of today parallel passages that may be fairly set in contrast. Here, for example, is a passage from the poet Grey, still familiar to scholars:

“Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Can honour’s voice invoke the silent dust

Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?”

Precisely similar in thought, though different in form, is the more modern presentation found in Huxley’s Physiology:

“Whether after the moment of death the ventricles of the heart can be again set in movement by the artificial stimulus of oxygen, is a question to which we must impose a decided negative.”

How much simpler, and yet how far superior to Grey’s elaborate phraseology! Huxley has here seized the central point of the poet’s thought, and expressed it with the dignity and precision of exact science.

I cannot refrain, even at the risk of needless iteration, from quoting a further example. It is taken from the poet Burns. The original dialect being written in inverted hiccoughs, is rather difficult to reproduce. It describes the scene attendant upon the return of a cottage labourer to his home on Saturday night:

“The cheerfu’ supper done, wi’ serious face

They round the ingle form in a circle wide;

The sire turns o’er, wi’ patriarchal grace,

The big ha’ Bible, ance his father’s pride:

His bonnet rev’rently is laid aside,

His lyart haffets wearing thin an’ bare:

Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,

He wales a portion wi’ judeecious care.”

Now I find almost the same scene described in more apt phraseology in the police news of the Dumfries Chronicle (October 3, 1909), thus: “It appears that the prisoner had returned to his domicile at the usual hour, and, after partaking of a hearty meal, had seated himself on his oaken settle, for the ostensible purpose of reading the Bible. It was while so occupied that his arrest was effected.” With the trifling exception that Burns omits all mention of the arrest, for which, however, the whole tenor of the poem gives ample warrant, the two accounts are almost identical.

In all that I have thus said I do not wish to be misunderstood. Believing, as I firmly do, that the poet is destined to become extinct, I am not one of those who would accelerate his extinction. The time has not yet come for remedial legislation, or the application of the criminal law. Even in obstinate cases where pronounced delusions in reference to plants, animals, and natural phenomena are seen to exist, it is better that we should do nothing that might occasion a mistaken remorse. The inevitable natural evolution which is thus shaping the mould of human thought may safely be left to its own course.

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Self-Made Men

They were both what we commonly call successful business men – men with well-fed faces, heavy signet rings on fingers like sausages, and broad, comfortable waistcoats, a yard and a half round the equator. They were seated opposite each other at a table of a first-class restaurant, and had fallen into conversation while waiting to give their order to the waiter. Their talk had drifted back to their early days and how each had made his start in life when he first struck New York.

“I tell you what, Jones,” one of them was saying, “I shall never forget my first few years in this town. By George, it was pretty uphill work! Do you know, sir, when I first struck this place, I hadn’t more than fifteen cents to my name, hadn’t a rag except what I stood up in, and all the place I had to sleep in – you won’t believe it, but it’s a gospel fact just the same – was an empty tar barrel. No, sir,” he went on, leaning back and closing up his eyes into an expression of infinite experience, “no, sir, a fellow accustomed to luxury like you has simply no idea what sleeping out in a tar barrel and all that kind of thing is like.”

“My dear Robinson,” the other man rejoined briskly, “if you imagine I’ve had no experience of hardship of that sort, you never made a bigger mistake in your life. Why, when I first walked into this town I hadn’t a cent, sir, not a cent, and as for lodging, all the place I had for months and months was an old piano box up a lane, behind a factory. Talk about hardship, I guess I had it pretty rough! You take a fellow that’s used to a good warm tar barrel and put him into a piano box for a night or two, and you’ll see mighty soon—”

“My dear fellow,” Robinson broke in with some irritation, “you merely show that you don’t know what a tar barrel’s like. Why, on winter nights, when you’d be shut in there in your piano box just as snug as you please, I used to lie awake shivering, with the draught fairly running in at the bunghole at the back.”

“Draught!” sneered the other man, with a provoking laugh, “draught! Don’t talk to me about draughts. This box I speak of had a whole darned plank off it, right on the north side too. I used to sit there studying in the evenings, and the snow would blow in a foot deep. And yet, sir,” he continued more quietly, “though I know you’ll not believe it, I don’t mind admitting that some of the happiest days of my life were spent in that same old box. Ah, those were good old times! Bright, innocent days, I can tell you. I’d wake up there in the mornings and fairly shout with high spirits. Of course, you may not be able to stand that kind of life—”

“Not stand it!” cried Robinson fiercely; “me not stand it! By gad! I’m made for it. I just wish I had a taste of the old life again for a while. And as for innocence! Well, I’ll bet you you weren’t one-tenth as innocent as I was; no, nor one-fifth, nor one-third! What a grand old life it was! You’ll swear this is a darned lie and refuse to believe it – but I can remember evenings when I’d have two or three fellows in, and we’d sit round and play pedro by a candle half the night.”

“Two or three!” laughed Jones; “why, my dear fellow, I’ve known half a dozen of us to sit down to supper in my piano box, and have a game of pedro afterwards; yes, and charades and forfeits, and every other darned thing. Mighty good suppers they were too! By Jove, Robinson, you fellows round this town who have ruined your digestions with high living, have no notion of the zest with which a man can sit down to a few potato peelings, or a bit of broken pie crust, or—”

“Talk about hard food,” interrupted the other, “I guess I know all about that. Many’s the time I’ve breakfasted off a little cold porridge that somebody was going to throw away from a back-door, or that I’ve gone round to a livery stable and begged a little bran mash that they intended for the pigs. I’ll venture to say I’ve eaten more hog’s food—”

“Hog’s food!” shouted Robinson, striking his fist savagely on the table, “I tell you hog’s food suits me better than—”

He stopped speaking with a sudden grunt of surprise as the waiter appeared with the question:

“What may I bring you for dinner, gentlemen?”

“Dinner!” said Jones, after a moment of silence, “dinner! Oh, anything, nothing – I never care what I eat – give me a little cold porridge, if you’ve got it, or a chunk of salt pork – anything you like, it’s all the same to me.”

The waiter turned with an impassive face to Robinson.

“You can bring me some of that cold porridge too,” he said, with a defiant look at Jones; “yesterday’s, if you have it, and a few potato peelings and a glass of skim milk.”

There was a pause. Jones sat back in his chair and looked hard across at Robinson. For some moments the two men gazed into each other’s eyes with a stern, defiant intensity. Then Robinson turned slowly round in his seat and beckoned to the waiter, who was moving off with the muttered order on his lips.

“Here, waiter,” he said with a savage scowl, “I guess I’ll change that order a little. Instead of that cold porridge I’ll take – um, yes – a little hot partridge. And you might as well bring me an oyster or two on the half shell, and a mouthful of soup (mock-turtle, consomme, anything), and perhaps you might fetch along a dab of fish, and a little peck of Stilton, and a grape, or a walnut.”

The waiter turned to Jones.

“I guess I’ll take the same,” he said simply, and added; “and you might bring a quart of champagne at the same time.”

And nowadays, when Jones and Robinson meet, the memory of the tar barrel and the piano box is buried as far out of sight as a home for the blind under a landslide.

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A Model Dialogue

In which is shown how the drawing-room juggler may be permanently cured of his card trick.

The drawing-room juggler, having slyly got hold of the pack of cards at the end of the game of whist, says:

“Ever see any card tricks? Here’s rather a good one; pick a card.”

“Thank you, I don’t want a card.”

“No, but just pick one, any one you like, and I’ll tell which one you pick.”

“You’ll tell who?”

“No, no; I mean, I’ll know which it is, don’t you see? Go on now, pick a card.”

“Any one I like?”

“Yes.”

“Any colour at all?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Any suit?”

“Oh, yes; do go on.”

“Well, let me see, I’ll – pick – the – ace of spades.”

“Great Caesar! I mean you are to pull a card out of the pack.”

“Oh, to pull it out of the pack! Now I understand. Hand me the pack. All right – I’ve got it.”

“Have you picked one?”

“Yes, it’s the three of hearts. Did you know it?”

“Hang it! Don’t tell me like that. You spoil the thing. Here, try again. Pick a card.”

“All right, I’ve got it.”

“Put it back in the pack. Thanks. (Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle – flip) – There, is that it?” (triumphantly).

“I don’t know. I lost sight of it.”

“Lost sight of it! Confound it, you have to look at it and see what it is.”

“Oh, you want me to look at the front of it!”

“Why, of course! Now then, pick a card.”

“All right. I’ve picked it. Go ahead.” (Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle – flip.)

“Say, confound you, did you put that card back in the pack?”

“Why, no. I kept it.”

“Holy Moses! Listen. Pick – a – card – just one – look at it – see what it is – then put it back – do you understand?”

“Oh, perfectly. Only I don’t see how you are ever going to do it. You must be awfully clever.”

(Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle – flip.)

“There you are; that’s your card, now, isn’t it?” (This is the supreme moment.)

“NO. THAT IS NOT MY CARD.” (This is a flat lie, but Heaven will pardon you for it.)

“Not that card!!!! Say – just hold on a second. Here, now, watch what you’re at this time. I can do this cursed thing, mind you, every time. I’ve done it on father, on mother, and on every one that’s ever come round our place. Pick a card. (Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle – flip, bang.) There, that’s your card.”

“NO. I AM SORRY. THAT IS NOT MY CARD. But won’t you try it again? Please do. Perhaps you are a little excited – I’m afraid I was rather stupid. Won’t you go and sit quietly by yourself on the back verandah for half an hour and then try? You have to go home? Oh, I’m so sorry. It must be such an awfully clever little trick. Good night!”

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Back to the Bush

I have a friend called Billy, who has the Bush Mania. By trade he is a doctor, but I do not think that he needs to sleep out of doors. In ordinary things his mind appears sound. Over the tops of his gold-rimmed spectacles, as he bends forward to speak to you, there gleams nothing but amiability and kindliness. Like all the rest of us he is, or was until he forgot it all, an extremely well-educated man,

I am aware of no criminal strain in his blood. Yet Billy is in reality hopelessly unbalanced. He has the Mania of the Open Woods.

Worse than that, he is haunted with the desire to drag his friends with him into the depths of the Bush.

Whenever we meet he starts to talk about it.

Not long ago I met him in the club.

“I wish,” he said, “you’d let me take you clear away up the Gatineau.”

“Yes, I wish I would, I don’t think,” I murmured to myself, but I humoured him and said:

“How do we go, Billy, in a motor-car or by train?”

“No, we paddle.”

“And is it up-stream all the way?”

“Oh, yes,” Billy said enthusiastically.

“And how many days do we paddle all day to get up?”

“Six.”

“Couldn’t we do it in less?”

“Yes,” Billy answered, feeling that I was entering into the spirit of the thing, “if we start each morning just before daylight and paddle hard till moonlight, we could do it in five days and a half.”

“Glorious! and are there portages?”

“Lots of them.”

“And at each of these do I carry two hundred pounds of stuff up a hill on my back?”

“Yes.”

“And will there be a guide, a genuine, dirty-looking Indian guide?”

“Yes.”

“And can I sleep next to him?”

“Oh, yes, if you want to.”

“And when we get to the top, what is there?”

“Well, we go over the height of land.”

“Oh, we do, do we? And is the height of land all rock and about three hundred yards up-hill? And do I carry a barrel of flour up it? And does it roll down and crush me on the other side? Look here, Billy, this trip is a great thing, but it is too luxurious for me. If you will have me paddled up the river in a large iron canoe with an awning, carried over the portages in a sedan chair, taken across the height of land in a palanquin or a howdah, and lowered down the other side in a derrick, I’ll go. Short of that, the thing would be too fattening.”

Billy was discouraged and left me. But he has since returned repeatedly to the attack.

He offers to take me to the head-waters of the Batiscan. I am content at the foot.

He wants us to go to the sources of the Attahwapiscat. I don’t.

He says I ought to see the grand chutes of the Kewakasis. Why should I?

I have made Billy a counter-proposition that we strike through the Adirondacks (in the train) to New York, from there portage to Atlantic City, then to Washington, carrying our own grub (in the dining-car), camp there a few days (at the Willard), and then back, I to return by train and Billy on foot with the outfit.

The thing is still unsettled.

Billy, of course, is only one of thousands that have got this mania. And the autumn is the time when it rages at its worst.

Every day there move northward trains, packed full of lawyers, bankers, and brokers, headed for the bush. They are dressed up to look like pirates. They wear slouch hats, flannel shirts, and leather breeches with belts. They could afford much better clothes than these, but they won’t use them. I don’t know where they get these clothes. I think the railroad lends them out. They have guns between their knees and big knives at their hips. They smoke the worst tobacco they can find, and they carry ten gallons of alcohol per man in the baggage car.

In the intervals of telling lies to one another they read the railroad pamphlets about hunting. This kind of literature is deliberately and fiendishly contrived to infuriate their mania. I know all about these pamphlets because I write them. I once, for instance, wrote up, from imagination, a little place called Dog Lake at the end of a branch line. The place had failed as a settlement, and the railroad had decided to turn it into a hunting resort. I did the turning. I think I did it rather well, rechristening the lake and stocking the place with suitable varieties of game. The pamphlet ran like this:

“The limpid waters of Lake Owatawetness (the name, according to the old Indian legends of the place, signifies. The Mirror of the Almighty) abound with every known variety of fish. Near to its surface, so close that the angler may reach out his hand and stroke them, schools of pike, pickerel, mackerel, doggerel, and chickerel jostle one another in the water. They rise instantaneously to the bait and swim gratefully ashore holding it in their mouths. In the middle depth of the waters of the lake, the sardine, the lobster, the kippered herring, the anchovy and other tinned varieties of fish disport themselves with evident gratification, while even lower in the pellucid depths the dog-fish, the hog-fish, the log-fish, and the sword-fish whirl about in never-ending circles.

“Nor is Lake Owatawetness merely an Angler’s Paradise. Vast forests of primeval pine slope to the very shores of the lake, to which descend great droves of bears – brown, green, and bear-coloured – while as the shades of evening fall, the air is loud with the lowing of moose, cariboo, antelope, cantelope, musk-oxes, muskrats, and other graminivorous mammalia of the forest. These enormous quad-rumana generally move off about 10.30 p.m., from which hour until 11.45 p.m. the whole shore is reserved for bison and buffalo.

“After midnight hunters who so desire it can be chased through the woods, for any distance and at any speed they select, by jaguars, panthers, cougars, tigers, and jackals whose ferocity is reputed to be such that they will tear the breeches off a man with their teeth in their eagerness to sink their fangs in his palpitating flesh. Hunters, attention! Do not miss such attractions as these!”

I have seen men – quiet, reputable, well-shaved men – reading that pamphlet of mine in the rotundas of hotels, with their eyes blazing with excitement. I think it is the jaguar attraction that hits them the hardest, because I notice them rub themselves sympathetically with their hands while they read.

Of course, you can imagine the effect of this sort of literature on the brains of men fresh from their offices, and dressed out as pirates.

They just go crazy and stay crazy.

Just watch them when they get into the bush.

Notice that well-to-do stockbroker crawling about on his stomach in the underbrush, with his spectacles shining like gig-lamps. What is he doing? He is after a cariboo that isn’t there. He is “stalking” it. With his stomach. Of course, away down in his heart he knows that the cariboo isn’t there and never was; but that man read my pamphlet and went crazy. He can’t help it: he’s got to stalk something. Mark him as he crawls along; see him crawl through a thimbleberry bush (very quietly so that the cariboo won’t hear the noise of the prickles going into him), then through a bee’s nest, gently and slowly, so that the cariboo will not take fright when the bees are stinging him. Sheer woodcraft! Yes, mark him. Mark him any way you like. Go up behind him and paint a blue cross on the seat of his pants as he crawls. He’ll never notice. He thinks he’s a hunting dog. Yet this is the man who laughs at his little son of ten for crawling round under the dining-room table with a mat over his shoulders, and pretending to be a bear.

Now see these other men in camp.

Someone has told them – I think I first started the idea in my pamphlet – that the thing is to sleep on a pile of hemlock branches. I think I told them to listen to the wind sowing (you know the word I mean), sowing and crooning in the giant pines. So there they are upside-down, doubled up on a couch of green spikes that would have killed St. Sebastian. They stare up at the sky with blood-shot, restless eyes, waiting for the crooning to begin. And there isn’t a sow in sight.

Here is another man, ragged and with a six days’ growth of beard, frying a piece of bacon on a stick over a little fire. Now what does he think he is? The chef of the Waldorf Astoria? Yes, he does, and what’s more he thinks that that miserable bit of bacon, cut with a tobacco knife from a chunk of meat that lay six days in the rain, is fit to eat. What’s more, he’ll eat it. So will the rest. They’re all crazy together.

There’s another man, the Lord help him, who thinks he has the “knack” of being a carpenter. He is hammering up shelves to a tree. Till the shelves fall down he thinks he is a wizard. Yet this is the same man who swore at his wife for asking him to put up a shelf in the back kitchen. “How the blazes,” he asked, “could he nail the damn thing up? Did she think he was a plumber?”

After all, never mind.

Provided they are happy up there, let them stay.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t come back and lie about it. They get back to the city dead fagged for want of sleep, sogged with alcohol, bitten brown by the bush-flies, trampled on by the moose and chased through the brush by bears and skunks – and they have the nerve to say that they like it.

Sometimes I think they do.

Men are only animals anyway. They like to get out into the woods and growl round at night and feel something bite them.

Only why haven’t they the imagination to be able to do the same thing with less fuss? Why not take their coats and collars off in the office and crawl round on the floor and growl at one another. It would be just as good.

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Reflections on Riding

The writing of this paper has been inspired by a debate recently held at the literary society of my native town on the question, “Resolved: that the bicycle is a nobler animal than the horse.” In order to speak for the negative with proper authority, I have spent some weeks in completely addicting myself to the use of the horse. I find that the difference between the horse and the bicycle is greater than I had supposed.

The horse is entirely covered with hair; the bicycle is not entirely covered with hair, except the ’89 model they are using in Idaho.

In riding a horse the performer finds that the pedals in which he puts his feet will not allow of a good circular stroke. He will observe, however, that there is a saddle in which – especially while the horse is trotting – he is expected to seat himself from time to time. But it is simpler to ride standing up, with the feet in the pedals.

There are no handles to a horse, but the 1910 model has a string to each side of its face for turning its head when there is anything you want it to see.

Coasting on a good horse is superb, but should be under control. I have known a horse to suddenly begin to coast with me about two miles from home, coast down the main street of my native town at a terrific rate, and finally coast through a platoon of the Salvation Army into its livery stable.

I cannot honestly deny that it takes a good deal of physical courage to ride a horse. This, however, I have. I get it at about forty cents a flask, and take it as required.

I find that in riding a horse up the long street of a country town, it is not well to proceed at a trot. It excites unkindly comment. It is better to let the horse walk the whole distance. This may be made to seem natural by turning half round in the saddle with the hand on the horse’s back, and gazing intently about two miles up the road. It then appears that you are the first in of about fourteen men.

Since learning to ride, I have taken to noticing the things that people do on horseback in books. Some of these I can manage, but most of them are entirely beyond me. Here, for instance, is a form of equestrian performance that every reader will recognize and for which I have only a despairing admiration:

“With a hasty gesture of farewell, the rider set spurs to his horse and disappeared in a cloud of dust.”

With a little practice in the matter of adjustment, I think I could set spurs to any size of horse, but I could never disappear in a cloud of dust – at least, not with any guarantee of remaining disappeared when the dust cleared away.

Here, however, is one that I certainly can do:

“The bridle-rein dropped from Lord Everard’s listless hand, and, with his head bowed upon his bosom, he suffered his horse to move at a foot’s pace up the sombre avenue. Deep in thought, he heeded not the movement of the steed which bore him.”

That is, he looked as if he didn’t; but in my case Lord Everard has his eye on the steed pretty closely, just the same.

This next I am doubtful about:

“To horse! to horse!” cried the knight, and leaped into the saddle.

I think I could manage it if it read:

“To horse!” cried the knight, and, snatching a step-ladder from the hands of his trusty attendant, he rushed into the saddle.

As a concluding remark, I may mention that my experience of riding has thrown a very interesting sidelight upon a rather puzzling point in history. It is recorded of the famous Henry the Second that he was “almost constantly in the saddle, and of so restless a disposition that he never sat down, even at meals.” I had hitherto been unable to understand Henry’s idea about his meals, but I think I can appreciate it now.

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Saloonio

A Study in
Shakespearean Criticism

They say that young men fresh from college are pretty positive about what they know. But from my own experience of life, I should say that if you take a comfortable, elderly man who hasn’t been near a college for about twenty years, who has been pretty liberally fed and dined ever since, who measures about fifty inches around the circumference, and has a complexion like a cranberry by candlelight, you will find that there is a degree of absolute certainty about what he thinks he knows that will put any young man to shame. I am specially convinced of this from the case of my friend Colonel Hogshead, a portly, choleric gentleman who made a fortune in the cattle-trade out in Wyoming, and who, in his later days, has acquired a chronic idea that the plays of Shakespeare are the one subject upon which he is most qualified to speak personally.

He came across me the other evening as I was sitting by the fire in the club sitting-room looking over the leaves of The Merchant of Venice, and began to hold forth to me about the book.

“Merchant of Venice, eh? There’s a play for you, sir! There’s genius! Wonderful, sir, wonderful! You take the characters in that play and where will you find anything like them? You take Antonio, take Sherlock, take Saloonio—”

“Saloonio, Colonel?” I interposed mildly, “aren’t you making a mistake? There’s a Bassanio and a Salanio in the play, but I don’t think there’s any Saloonio, is there?”

For a moment Colonel Hogshead’s eye became misty with doubt, but he was not the man to admit himself in error:

“Tut, tut! young man,” he said with a frown, “don’t skim through your books in that way. No Saloonio? Why, of course there’s a Saloonio!”

“But I tell you, Colonel,” I rejoined, “I’ve just been reading the play and studying it, and I know there’s no such character—”

“Nonsense, sir, nonsense!” said the Colonel, “why he comes in all through; don’t tell me, young man, I’ve read that play myself. Yes, and seen it played, too, out in Wyoming, before you were born, by fellers, sir, that could act. No Saloonio, indeed! why, who is it that is Antonio’s friend all through and won’t leave him when Bassoonio turns against him? Who rescues Clarissa from Sherlock, and steals the casket of flesh from the Prince of Aragon? Who shouts at the Prince of Morocco, ‘Out, out, you damned candlestick’? Who loads up the jury in the trial scene and fixes the doge? No Saloonio! By gad! in my opinion, he’s the most important character in the play—”

“Colonel Hogshead,” I said very firmly, “there isn’t any Saloonio and you know it.”

But the old man had got fairly started on whatever dim recollection had given birth to Saloonio; the character seemed to grow more and more luminous in the Colonel’s mind, and he continued with increasing animation:

“I’ll just tell you what Saloonio is: he’s a type. Shakespeare means him to embody the type of the perfect Italian gentleman. He’s an idea, that’s what he is, he’s a symbol, he’s a unit—”

Meanwhile I had been searching among the leaves of the play. “Look here,” I said, “here’s the list of the Dramatis Personae. There’s no Saloonio there.”

But this didn’t dismay the Colonel one atom. “Why, of course there isn’t,” he said. “You don’t suppose you’d find Saloonio there! That’s the whole art of it! That’s Shakespeare! That’s the whole gist of it! He’s kept clean out of the Personae – gives him scope, gives him a free hand, makes him more of a type than ever. Oh, it’s a subtle thing, sir, the dramatic art!” continued the Colonel, subsiding into quiet reflection; “it takes a feller quite a time to get right into Shakespeare’s mind and see what he’s at all the time.”

I began to see that there was no use in arguing any further with the old man. I left him with the idea that the lapse of a little time would soften his views on Saloonio. But I had not reckoned on the way in which old men hang on to a thing. Colonel Hogshead quite took up Saloonio. From that time on Saloonio became the theme of his constant conversation. He was never tired of discussing the character of Saloonio, the wonderful art of the dramatist in creating him, Saloonio’s relation to modern life, Saloonio’s attitude toward women, the ethical significance of Saloonio, Saloonio as compared with Hamlet, Hamlet as compared with Saloonio – and so on, endlessly. And the more he looked into Saloonio, the more he saw in him.

Saloonio seemed inexhaustible. There were new sides to him – new phases at every turn. The Colonel even read over the play, and finding no mention of Saloonio’s name in it, he swore that the books were not the same books they had had out in Wyoming; that the whole part had been cut clean out to suit the book to the infernal public schools, Saloonio’s language being – at any rate, as the Colonel quoted it – undoubtedly a trifle free. Then the Colonel took to annotating his book at the side with such remarks as, “Enter Saloonio,” or “A tucket sounds; enter Saloonio, on the arm of the Prince of Morocco.” When there was no reasonable excuse for bringing Saloonio on the stage the Colonel swore that he was concealed behind the arras, or feasting within with the doge.

But he got satisfaction at last. He had found that there was nobody in our part of the country who knew how to put a play of Shakespeare on the stage, and took a trip to New York to see Sir Henry Irving and Miss Terry do the play. The Colonel sat and listened all through with his face just beaming with satisfaction, and when the curtain fell at the close of Irving’s grand presentation of the play, he stood up in his seat, and cheered and yelled to his friends: “That’s it! That’s him! Didn’t you see that man that came on the stage all the time and sort of put the whole play through, though you couldn’t understand a word he said? Well, that’s him! That’s Saloonio!”

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Half-Hours with the Poets

–1–
Mr. Wordsworth
and the Little Cottage Girl

I met a little cottage girl,

She was eight years old she said,

Her hair was thick with many a curl

That clustered round her head.

This is what really happened.

Over the dreary downs of his native Cumberland the aged laureate was wandering with bowed head and countenance of sorrow.

Times were bad with the old man.

In the south pocket of his trousers, as he set his face to the north, jingled but a few odd coins and a cheque for St. Leon water. Apparently his cup of bitterness was full.

In the distance a child moved – a child in form, yet the deep lines upon her face bespoke a countenance prematurely old.

The poet espied, pursued and overtook the infant. He observed that apparently she drew her breath lightly and felt her life in every limb, and that presumably her acquaintance with death was of the most superficial character.

“I must sit awhile and ponder on that child,” murmured the poet. So he knocked her down with his walking-stick and seating himself upon her, he pondered.

Long he sat thus in thought. “His heart is heavy,” sighed the child.

At length he drew forth a note-book and pencil and prepared to write upon his knee. “Now then, my dear young friend,” he said, addressing the elfin creature, “I want those lines upon your face. Are you seven?”

“Yes, we are seven,” said the girl sadly, and added, “I know what you want. You are going to question me about my afflicted family. You are Mr. Wordsworth, and you are collecting mortuary statistics for the Cottagers’ Edition of the Penny Encyclopaedia.”

“You are eight years old?” asked the bard.

“I suppose so,” answered she. “I have been eight years old for years and years.”

“And you know nothing of death, of course?” said the poet cheerfully.

“How can I?” answered the child.

“Now then,” resumed the venerable William, “let us get to business. Name your brothers and sisters.”

“Let me see,” began the child wearily; “there was Rube and Ike, two I can’t think of, and John and Jane.”

“You must not count John and Jane,” interrupted the bard reprovingly; “they’re dead, you know, so that doesn’t make seven.”

“I wasn’t counting them, but perhaps I added up wrongly,” said the child; “and will you please move your overshoe off my neck?”

“Pardon,” said the old man. “A nervous trick, I have been absorbed; indeed, the exigency of the metre almost demands my doubling up my feet. To continue, however; which died first?”

“The first to go was little Jane,” said the child.

“She lay moaning in bed, I presume?”

“In bed she moaning lay.”

“What killed her?”

“Insomnia,” answered the girl. “The gaiety of our cottage life, previous to the departure of our elder brothers for Conway, and the constant field-sports in which she indulged with John, proved too much for a frame never too robust.”

“You express yourself well,” said the poet. “Now, in regard to your unfortunate brother, what was the effect upon him in the following winter of the ground being white with snow and your being able to run and slide?”

“My brother John was forced to go,” answered she. “We have been at a loss to understand the cause of his death. We fear that the dazzling glare of the newly fallen snow, acting upon a restless brain, may have led him to a fatal attempt to emulate my own feats upon the ice. And, oh, sir,” the child went on, “speak gently of poor Jane. You may rub it into John all you like; we always let him slide.”

“Very well,” said the bard, “and allow me, in conclusion, one rather delicate question: Do you ever take your little porringer?”

“Oh, yes,” answered the child frankly—

“‘Quite often after sunset,

When all is light and fair,

I take my little porringer’—

I can’t quite remember what I do after that, but I know that I like it.”

“That is immaterial,” said Wordsworth. “I can say that you take your little porringer neat, or with bitters, or in water after every meal. As long as I can state that you take a little porringer regularly, but never to excess, the public is satisfied. And now,” rising from his seat, “I will not detain you any longer. Here is sixpence – or stay,” he added hastily, “here is a cheque for St. Leon water. Your information has been most valuable, and I shall work it, for all I am Wordsworth.” With these words the aged poet bowed deferentially to the child and sauntered off in the direction of the Duke of Cumberland’s Arms, with his eyes on the ground, as if looking for the meanest flower that blows itself.

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–2–
How Tennyson
Killed the May Queen

“If you’re waking call me early,
call me early, mother dear.”

PART I

As soon as the child’s malady had declared itself the afflicted parents of the May Queen telegraphed to Tennyson, “Our child gone crazy on subject of early rising, could you come and write some poetry about her?”

Alfred, always prompt to fill orders in writing from the country, came down on the evening train. The old cottager greeted the poet warmly, and began at once to speak of the state of his unfortunate daughter.

“She was took queer in May,” he said, “along of a sort of bee that the young folks had; she ain’t been just right since; happen you might do summat.”

With these words he opened the door of an inner room.

The girl lay in feverish slumber. Beside her bed was an alarm-clock set for half-past three. Connected with the clock was an ingenious arrangement of a falling brick with a string attached to the child’s toe.

At the entrance of the visitor she started up in bed. “Whoop,” she yelled, “I am to be Queen of the May, mother, ye-e!”

Then perceiving Tennyson in the doorway, “If that’s a caller,” she said, “tell him to call me early.”

The shock caused the brick to fall. In the subsequent confusion Alfred modestly withdrew to the sitting-room.

“At this rate,” he chuckled, “I shall not have long to wait. A few weeks of that strain will finish her.”

PART II

Six months had passed.

It was now mid-winter.

And still the girl lived. Her vitality appeared inexhaustible.

She got up earlier and earlier. She now rose yesterday afternoon.

At intervals she seemed almost sane, and spoke in a most pathetic manner of her grave and the probability of the sun shining on it early in the morning, and her mother walking on it later in the day. At other times her malady would seize her, and she would snatch the brick off the string and throw it fiercely at Tennyson. Once, in an uncontrollable fit of madness, she gave her sister Effie a half-share in her garden tools and an interest in a box of mignonette.

The poet stayed doggedly on. In the chill of the morning twilight he broke the ice in his water-basin and cursed the girl. But he felt that he had broken the ice and he stayed.

On the whole, life at the cottage, though rugged, was not cheerless. In the long winter evenings they would gather around a smoking fire of peat, while Tennyson read aloud the Idylls of the King to the rude old cottager. Not to show his rudeness, the old man kept awake by sitting on a tin-tack. This also kept his mind on the right tack. The two found that they had much in common, especially the old cottager. They called each other “Alfred” and “Hezekiah” now.

PART III

Time moved on and spring came.

Still the girl baffled the poet.

“I thought to pass away before,” she would say with a mocking grin, “but yet alive I am, Alfred, alive I am.”

Tennyson was fast losing hope.

Worn out with early rising, they engaged a retired Pullman-car porter to take up his quarters, and being a negro his presence added a touch of colour to their life.

The poet also engaged a neighbouring divine at fifty cents an evening to read to the child the best hundred books, with explanations. The May Queen tolerated him, and used to like to play with his silver hair, but protested that he was prosy.

At the end of his resources the poet resolved upon desperate measures.

He chose an evening when the cottager and his wife were out at a dinner-party.

At nightfall Tennyson and his accomplices entered the girl’s room.

She defended herself savagely with her brick, but was overpowered.

The negro seated himself upon her chest, while the clergyman hastily read a few verses about the comfort of early rising at the last day.

As he concluded, the poet drove his pen into her eye.

“Last call!” cried the negro porter triumphantly.

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–3–
Old Mr. Longfellow
on Board the Hesperus

It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea,

And the skipper had taken his little daughter to bear him company.

There were but three people in the cabin party of the Hesperus: old Mr. Longfellow, the skipper, and the skipper’s daughter.

The skipper was much attached to the child, owing to the singular whiteness of her skin and the exceptionally limpid blue of her eyes; she had hitherto remained on shore to fill lucrative engagements as albino lady in a circus.

This time, however, her father had taken her with him for company. The girl was an endless source of amusement to the skipper and the crew. She constantly got up games of puss-in-the-corner, forfeits, and Dumb Crambo with her father and Mr. Longfellow, and made Scripture puzzles and geographical acrostics for the men.

Old Mr. Longfellow was taking the voyage to restore his shattered nerves. From the first the captain disliked Henry. He was utterly unused to the sea and was nervous and fidgety in the extreme. He complained that at sea his genius had not a sufficient degree of latitude. Which was unparalleled presumption.

On the evening of the storm there had been a little jar between Longfellow and the captain at dinner. The captain had emptied it several times, and was consequently in a reckless, quarrelsome humour.

“I confess I feel somewhat apprehensive,” said old Henry nervously, “of the state of the weather. I have had some conversation about it with an old gentleman on deck who professed to have sailed the Spanish main. He says you ought to put into yonder port.”

“I have,” hiccoughed the skipper, eyeing the bottle, and added with a brutal laugh that “he could weather the roughest gale that ever wind did blow.” A whole Gaelic society, he said, wouldn’t fizz on him.

Draining a final glass of grog, he rose from his chair, said grace, and staggered on deck.

All the time the wind blew colder and louder.

The billows frothed like yeast. It was a yeast wind.

The evening wore on.

Old Henry shuffled about the cabin in nervous misery.

The skipper’s daughter sat quietly at the table selecting verses from a Biblical clock to amuse the ship’s bosun, who was suffering from toothache.

At about ten Longfellow went to his bunk, requesting the girl to remain up in his cabin.

For half an hour all was quiet, save the roaring of the winter wind.

Then the girl heard the old gentleman start up in bed.

“What’s that bell, what’s that bell?” he gasped.

A minute later he emerged from his cabin wearing a cork jacket and trousers over his pyjamas.

“Sissy,” he said, “go up and ask your pop who rang that bell.”

The obedient child returned.

“Please, Mr. Longfellow,” she said, “pa says there weren’t no bell.”

The old man sank into a chair and remained with his head buried in his hands.

“Say,” he exclaimed presently, “someone’s firing guns and there’s a glimmering light somewhere. You’d better go upstairs again.”

Again the child returned.

“The crew are guessing at an acrostic, and occasionally they get a glimmering of it.”

Meantime the fury of the storm increased.

The skipper had the hatches battered down.

Presently Longfellow put his head out of a porthole and called out, “Look here, you may not care, but the cruel rocks are goring the sides of this boat like the horns of an angry bull.”

The brutal skipper heaved the log at him. A knot in it struck a plank and it glanced off.

Too frightened to remain below, the poet raised one of the hatches by picking out the cotton batting and made his way on deck. He crawled to the wheel-house.

The skipper stood lashed to the helm all stiff and stark. He bowed stiffly to the poet. The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow on his fixed and glassy eyes. The man was hopelessly intoxicated.

All the crew had disappeared. When the missile thrown by the captain had glanced off into the sea, they glanced after it and were lost.

At this moment the final crash came.

Something hit something. There was an awful click followed by a peculiar grating sound, and in less time than it takes to write it (unfortunately), the whole wreck was over.

As the vessel sank, Longfellow’s senses left him. When he reopened his eyes he was in his own bed at home, and the editor of his local paper was bending over him.

“You have made a first-rate poem of it, Mr. Longfellow,” he was saying, unbending somewhat as he spoke, “and I am very happy to give you our cheque for a dollar and a quarter for it.”

“Your kindness checks my utterance,” murmured Henry feebly, very feebly.

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A, B, and C

The Human Element
in Mathematics

The student of arithmetic who has mastered the first four rules of his art, and successfully striven with money sums and fractions, finds himself confronted by an unbroken expanse of questions known as problems. These are short stories of adventure and industry with the end omitted, and though betraying a strong family resemblance, are not without a certain element of romance.

The characters in the plot of a problem are three people called A, B, and C. The form of the question is generally of this sort:

“A, B, and C do a certain piece of work. A can do as much work in one hour as B in two, or C in four. Find how long they work at it.”

Or thus:

“A, B, and C are employed to dig a ditch. A can dig as much in one hour as B can dig in two, and B can dig twice as fast as C. Find how long, etc. etc.”

Or after this wise:

“A lays a wager that he can walk faster than B or C. A can walk half as fast again as B, and C is only an indifferent walker. Find how far, and so forth.”

The occupations of A, B, and C are many and varied. In the older arithmetics they contented themselves with doing “a certain piece of work.” This statement of the case however, was found too sly and mysterious, or possibly lacking in romantic charm. It became the fashion to define the job more clearly and to set them at walking matches, ditch-digging, regattas, and piling cord wood. At times, they became commercial and entered into partnership, having with their old mystery a “certain” capital. Above all they revel in motion. When they tire of walking-matches – A rides on horseback, or borrows a bicycle and competes with his weaker-minded associates on foot. Now they race on locomotives; now they row; or again they become historical and engage stage-coaches; or at times they are aquatic and swim. If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump water into cisterns, two of which leak through holes in the bottom and one of which is water-tight. A, of course, has the good one; he also takes the bicycle, and the best locomotive, and the right of swimming with the current. Whatever they do they put money on it, being all three sports. A always wins.

In the early chapters of the arithmetic, their identity is concealed under the names John, William, and Henry, and they wrangle over the division of marbles. In algebra they are often called X, Y, Z. But these are only their Christian names, and they are really the same people.

Now to one who has followed the history of these men through countless pages of problems, watched them in their leisure hours dallying with cord wood, and seen their panting sides heave in the full frenzy of filling a cistern with a leak in it, they become something more than mere symbols. They appear as creatures of flesh and blood, living men with their own passions, ambitions, and aspirations like the rest of us. Let us view them in turn.

A is a full-blooded blustering fellow, of energetic temperament, hot-headed and strong-willed. It is he who proposes everything, challenges B to work, makes the bets, and bends the others to his will. He is a man of great physical strength and phenomenal endurance. He has been known to walk forty-eight hours at a stretch, and to pump ninety-six. His life is arduous and full of peril. A mistake in the working of a sum may keep him digging a fortnight without sleep. A repeating decimal in the answer might kill him.

B is a quiet, easy-going fellow, afraid of A and bullied by him, but very gentle and brotherly to little C, the weakling. He is quite in A’s power, having lost all his money in bets.

Poor C is an undersized, frail man, with a plaintive face. Constant walking, digging, and pumping has broken his health and ruined his nervous system. His joyless life has driven him to drink and smoke more than is good for him, and his hand often shakes as he digs ditches. He has not the strength to work as the others can, in fact, as Hamlin Smith has said, “A can do more work in one hour than C in four.”

The first time that ever I saw these men was one evening after a regatta. They had all been rowing in it, and it had transpired that A could row as much in one hour as B in two, or C in four. B and C had come in dead fagged and C was coughing badly. “Never mind, old fellow,” I heard B say, “I’ll fix you up on the sofa and get you some hot tea.” Just then A came blustering in and shouted, “I say, you fellows, Hamlin Smith has shown me three cisterns in his garden and he says we can pump them until tomorrow night. I bet I can beat you both. Come on. You can pump in your rowing things, you know. Your cistern leaks a little, I think, C.” I heard B growl that it was a dirty shame and that C was used up now, but they went, and presently I could tell from the sound of the water that A was pumping four times as fast as C.

For years after that I used to see them constantly about town and always busy. I never heard of any of them eating or sleeping. Then owing to a long absence from home, I lost sight of them. On my return I was surprised to no longer find A, B, and C at their accustomed tasks; on inquiry I heard that work in this line was now done by N, M, and O, and that some people were employing for algebraica jobs four foreigners called Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta.

Now it chanced one day that I stumbled upon old D, in the little garden in front of his cottage, hoeing in the sun. D is an aged labouring man who used occasionally to be called in to help A, B, and C. “Did I know ’em, sir?” he answered, “why, I knowed ’em ever since they was little fellows in brackets. Master A, he were a fine lad, sir, though I always said, give me Master B for kind-heartedness-like. Many’s the job as we’ve been on together, sir, though I never did no racing nor aught of that, but just the plain labour, as you might say. I’m getting a bit too old and stiff for it nowadays, sir – just scratch about in the garden here and grow a bit of a logarithm, or raise a common denominator or two. But Mr. Euclid he use me still for them propositions, he do.”

From the garrulous old man I learned the melancholy end of my former acquaintances. Soon after I left town, he told me, C had been taken ill. It seems that A and B had been rowing on the river for a wager, and C had been running on the bank and then sat in a draught. Of course the bank had refused the draught and C was taken ill. A and B came home and found C lying helpless in bed. A shook him roughly and said, “Get up, C, we’re going to pile wood.” C looked so worn and pitiful that B said, “Look here, A, I won’t stand this, he isn’t fit to pile wood tonight.” C smiled feebly and said, “Perhaps I might pile a little if I sat up in bed.” Then B, thoroughly alarmed, said, “See here, A, I’m going to fetch a doctor; he’s dying.” A flared up and answered, “You’ve no money to fetch a doctor.” “I’ll reduce him to his lowest terms,” B said firmly, “that’ll fetch him.” C’s life might even then have been saved but they made a mistake about the medicine. It stood at the head of the bed on a bracket, and the nurse accidentally removed it from the bracket without changing the sign. After the fatal blunder C seems to have sunk rapidly. On the evening of the next day, as the shadows deepened in the little room, it was clear to all that the end was near. I think that even A was affected at the last as he stood with bowed head, aimlessly offering to bet with the doctor on C’s laboured breathing. “A,” whispered C, “I think I’m going fast.” “How fast do you think you’ll go, old man?” murmured A. “I don’t know,” said C, “but I’m going at any rate.” – The end came soon after that. C rallied for a moment and asked for a certain piece of work that he had left downstairs. A put it in his arms and he expired. As his soul sped heavenward A watched its flight with melancholy admiration. B burst into a passionate flood of tears and sobbed, “Put away his little cistern and the rowing clothes he used to wear, I feel as if I could hardly ever dig again.” – The funeral was plain and unostentatious. It differed in nothing from the ordinary, except that out of deference to sporting men and mathematicians, A engaged two hearses. Both vehicles started at the same time, B driving the one which bore the sable parallelopiped containing the last remains of his ill-fated friend. A on the box of the empty hearse generously consented to a handicap of a hundred yards, but arrived first at the cemetery by driving four times as fast as B. (Find the distance to the cemetery.) As the sarcophagus was lowered, the grave was surrounded by the broken figures of the first book of Euclid. —It was noticed that after the death of C, A became a changed man. He lost interest in racing with B, and dug but languidly. He finally gave up his work and settled down to live on the interest of his bets. —B never recovered from the shock of C’s death; his grief preyed upon his intellect and it became deranged. He grew moody and spoke only in monosyllables. His disease became rapidly aggravated, and he presently spoke only in words whose spelling was regular and which presented no difficulty to the beginner. Realizing his precarious condition he voluntarily submitted to be incarcerated in an asylum, where he abjured mathematics and devoted himself to writing the History of the Swiss Family Robinson in words of one syllable.

TOC     INDEX

Nonsense Novels

(1911)

~

Preface
Maddened by Mystery
“Q.” A Psychic Pstory of the Psupernatural
Guido the Gimlet of Ghent
Gertrude the Governess
A Hero in Homespun
Sorrows of a Super Soul
Hannah of the Highlands
Soaked in Seaweed
Caroline’s Christmas
The Man in Asbestos

Preface

The author of this book offers it to the public without apology. The reviewers of his previous work of this character have presumed, on inductive grounds, that he must be a young man from the most westerly part of the Western States, to whom many things might be pardoned as due to the exuberant animal spirits of youth. They were good enough to express the thought that when the author grew up and became educated there might be hope for his intellect. This expectation is of no avail. All that education could do in this case has been tried and has failed. As a Professor of Political Economy in a great university, the author admits that he ought to know better. But he will feel amply repaid for his humiliation if there are any to whom this little book may bring some passing amusement in hours of idleness, or some brief respite when the sadness of the heart or the sufferings of the body forbid the perusal of worthier things.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

McGill University

Montreal

Maddened by Mystery

—or—
The Defective Detective.

The Great Detective sat in his office.

He wore a long green gown and half a dozen secret badges pinned to the outside of it.

Three or four pairs of false whiskers hung on a whisker-stand beside him.

Goggles, blue spectacles and motor glasses lay within easy reach.

He could completely disguise himself at a second’s notice.

Half a bucket of cocaine and a dipper stood on a chair at his elbow.

His face was absolutely impenetrable.

A pile of cryptograms lay on the desk. The Great Detective hastily tore them open one after the other, solved them, and threw them down the cryptogram-chute at his side.

There was a rap at the door.

The Great Detective hurriedly wrapped himself in a pink domino, adjusted a pair of false black whiskers and cried,

“Come in.”

His secretary entered. “Ha,” said the detective, “it is you!”

He laid aside his disguise.

“Sir,” said the young man in intense excitement, “a mystery has been committed!”

“Ha!” said the Great Detective, his eye kindling, “is it such as to completely baffle the police of the entire continent?”

“They are so completely baffled with it,” said the secretary, “that they are lying collapsed in heaps; many of them have committed suicide.”

“So,” said the detective, “and is the mystery one that is absolutely unparalleled in the whole recorded annals of the London police?”

“It is.”

“And I suppose,” said the detective, “that it involves names which you would scarcely dare to breathe, at least without first using some kind of atomizer or throat-gargle.”

“Exactly.”

“And it is connected, I presume, with the highest diplomatic consequences, so that if we fail to solve it England will be at war with the whole world in sixteen minutes?”

His secretary, still quivering with excitement, again answered yes.

“And finally,” said the Great Detective, “I presume that it was committed in broad daylight, in some such place as the entrance of the Bank of England, or in the cloak-room of the House of Commons, and under the very eyes of the police?”

“Those,” said the secretary, “are the very conditions of the mystery.”

“Good,” said the Great Detective, “now wrap yourself in this disguise, put on these brown whiskers and tell me what it is.”

The secretary wrapped himself in a blue domino with lace insertions, then, bending over, he whispered in the ear of the Great Detective:

“The Prince of Wurttemberg has been kidnapped.”

The Great Detective bounded from his chair as if he had been kicked from below.

A prince stolen! Evidently a Bourbon! The scion of one of the oldest families in Europe kidnapped. Here was a mystery indeed worthy of his analytical brain.

His mind began to move like lightning.

“Stop!” he said, “how do you know this?”

The secretary handed him a telegram. It was from the Prefect of Police of Paris. It read: “The Prince of Wurttemberg stolen. Probably forwarded to London. Must have him here for the opening day of Exhibition. £1,000 reward.”

So! The Prince had been kidnapped out of Paris at the very time when his appearance at the International Exposition would have been a political event of the first magnitude.

With the Great Detective to think was to act, and to act was to think. Frequently he could do both together.

“Wire to Paris for a description of the Prince.”

The secretary bowed and left.

At the same moment there was a slight scratching at the door.

A visitor entered. He crawled stealthily on his hands and knees. A hearthrug thrown over his head and shoulders disguised his identity.

He crawled to the middle of the room.

Then he rose.

Great Heaven!

It was the Prime Minister of England.

“You!” said the detective.

“Me,” said the Prime Minister.

“You have come in regard to the kidnapping of the Prince of Wurttemberg?”

The Prime Minister started.

“How do you know?” he said.

The Great Detective smiled his inscrutable smile.

“Yes,” said the Prime Minister. “I will use no concealment. I am interested, deeply interested. Find the Prince of Wurttemberg, get him safe back to Paris and I will add £500 the reward already offered. But listen,” he said impressively as he left the room, “see to it that no attempt is made to alter the marking of the prince, or to clip his tail.”

So! To clip the Prince’s tail! The brain of the Great Detective reeled. So! a gang of miscreants had conspired to – but no! the thing was not possible.

There was another rap at the door.

A second visitor was seen. He wormed his way in, lying almost prone upon his stomach, and wriggling across the floor. He was enveloped in a long purple cloak. He stood up and peeped over the top of it.

Great Heaven!

It was the Archbishop of Canterbury!

“Your Grace!” exclaimed the detective in amazement – “pray do not stand, I beg you. Sit down, lie down, anything rather than stand.”

The Archbishop took off his mitre and laid it wearily on the whisker-stand.

“You are here in regard to the Prince of Wurttemberg.”

The Archbishop started and crossed himself. Was the man a magician?

“Yes,” he said, “much depends on getting him back. But I have only come to say this: my sister is desirous of seeing you. She is coming here. She has been extremely indiscreet and her fortune hangs upon the Prince. Get him back to Paris or I fear she will be ruined.”

The Archbishop regained his mitre, uncrossed himself, wrapped his cloak about him, and crawled stealthily out on his hands and knees, purring like a cat.

The face of the Great Detective showed the most profound sympathy. It ran up and down in furrows. “So,” he muttered, “the sister of the Archbishop, the Countess of Dashleigh!” Accustomed as he was to the life of the aristocracy, even the Great Detective felt that there was here intrigue of more than customary complexity.

There was a loud rapping at the door.

There entered the Countess of Dashleigh. She was all in furs.

She was the most beautiful woman in England. She strode imperiously into the room. She seized a chair imperiously and seated herself on it, imperial side up.

She took off her tiara of diamonds and put it on the tiara-holder beside her and uncoiled her boa of pearls and put it on the pearlstand.

“You have come,” said the Great Detective, “about the Prince of Wurttemberg.”

“Wretched little pup!” said the Countess of Dashleigh in disgust.

So! A further complication! Far from being in love with the Prince, the Countess denounced the young Bourbon as a pup!

“You are interested in him, I believe.”

“Interested!” said the Countess. “I should rather say so. Why, I bred him!”

“You which?” gasped the Great Detective, his usually impassive features suffused with a carmine blush.

“I bred him,” said the Countess, “and I’ve got £10,000 upon his chances, so no wonder I want him back in Paris. Only listen,” she said, “if they’ve got hold of the Prince and cut his tail or spoiled the markings of his stomach it would be far better to have him quietly put out of the way here.”

The Great Detective reeled and leaned up against the side of the room. So! The cold-blooded admission of the beautiful woman for the moment took away his breath! Herself the mother of the young Bourbon, misallied with one of the greatest families of Europe, staking her fortune on a Royalist plot, and yet with so instinctive a knowledge of European politics as to know that any removal of the hereditary birth-marks of the Prince would forfeit for him the sympathy of the French populace.

The Countess resumed her tiara.

She left.

The secretary re-entered.

“I have three telegrams from Paris,” he said, “they are completely baffling.”

He handed over the first telegram.

It read:

“The Prince of Wurttemberg has a long, wet snout, broad ears, very long body, and short hind legs.”

The Great Detective looked puzzled.

He read the second telegram.

“The Prince of Wurttemberg is easily recognized by his deep bark.”

And then the third.

“The Prince of Wurttemberg can be recognized by the patch of white hair across the centre of his back.”

The two men looked at one another. The mystery was maddening, impenetrable.

The Great Detective spoke.

“Give me my domino,” he said. “These clues must be followed up,” then pausing, while his quick brain analysed and summed up the evidence before him – “a young man,” he muttered, “evidently young since described as a ‘pup,’ with a long, wet snout (ha! addicted obviously to drinking), a streak of white hair across his back (a first sign of the results of his abandoned life) – yes, yes,” he continued, “with this clue I shall find him easily.”

The Great Detective rose.

He wrapped himself in a long black cloak with white whiskers and blue spectacles attached.

Completely disguised, he issued forth.

He began the search.

For four days he visited every corner of London.

He entered every saloon in the city. In each of them he drank a glass of rum. In some of them he assumed the disguise of a sailor. In others he entered as a soldier. Into others he penetrated as a clergyman. His disguise was perfect. Nobody paid any attention to him as long as he had the price of a drink.

The search proved fruitless.

Two young men were arrested under suspicion of being the Prince, only to be released.

The identification was incomplete in each case.

One had a long wet snout but no hair on his back.

The other had hair on his back but couldn’t bark.

Neither of them was the young Bourbon.

The Great Detective continued his search.

He stopped at nothing.

Secretly, after nightfall, he visited the home of the Prime Minister. He examined it from top to bottom. He measured all the doors and windows. He took up the flooring. He inspected the plumbing. He examined the furniture. He found nothing.

With equal secrecy he penetrated into the palace of the Archbishop. He examined it from top to bottom. Disguised as a choir-boy he took part in the offices of the church. He found nothing.

Still undismayed, the Great Detective made his way into the home of the Countess of Dashleigh. Disguised as a housemaid, he entered the service of the Countess.

Then at last the clue came which gave him a solution of the mystery.

On the wall of the Countess’ boudoir was a large framed engraving.

It was a portrait.

Under it was a printed legend:

THE PRINCE OF WURTTEMBERG

The portrait was that of a Dachshund.

The long body, the broad ears, the unclipped tail, the short hind legs – all was there.

In the fraction of a second the lightning mind of the Great Detective had penetrated the whole mystery.

THE PRINCE WAS A DOG!!!!

Hastily throwing a domino over his housemaid’s dress, he rushed to the street. He summoned a passing hansom, and in a few moments was at his house.

“I have it,” he gasped to his secretary, “the mystery is solved. I have pieced it together. By sheer analysis I have reasoned it out. Listen – hind legs, hair on back, wet snout, pup – eh, what? does that suggest nothing to you?”

“Nothing,” said the secretary; “it seems perfectly hopeless.”

The Great Detective, now recovered from his excitement, smiled faintly.

“It means simply this, my dear fellow. The Prince of Wurttemberg is a dog, a prize Dachshund. The Countess of Dashleigh bred him, and he is worth some £25,000 in addition to the prize of £10,000 offered at the Paris dog show. Can you wonder that——”

At that moment the Great Detective was interrupted by the scream of a woman.

“Great Heaven!”

The Countess of Dashleigh dashed into the room.

Her face was wild.

Her tiara was in disorder.

Her pearls were dripping all over the place.

She wrung her hands and moaned.

“They have cut his tail,” she gasped, “and taken all the hair off his back. What can I do? I am undone!!”

“Madame,” said the Great Detective, calm as bronze, “do yourself up. I can save you yet.”

“You!”

“Me!”

“How?”

“Listen. This is how. The Prince was to have been shown at Paris.”

The Countess nodded.

“Your fortune was staked on him?”

The Countess nodded again.

“The dog was stolen, carried to London, his tail cut and his marks disfigured.”

Amazed at the quiet penetration of the Great Detective, the Countess kept on nodding and nodding.

“And you are ruined?”

“I am,” she gasped, and sank down on the floor in a heap of pearls.

“Madame,” said the Great Detective, “all is not lost.”

He straightened himself up to his full height. A look of inflinchable unflexibility flickered over his features.

The honour of England, the fortune of the most beautiful woman in England was at stake.

“I will do it,” he murmured.

“Rise, dear lady,” he continued. “Fear nothing. I WILL IMPERSONATE THE DOG!!!”

That night the Great Detective might have been seen on the deck of the Calais packet boat with his secretary. He was on his hands and knees in a long black cloak, and his secretary had him on a short chain.

He barked at the waves exultingly and licked the secretary’s hand.

“What a beautiful dog,” said the passengers.

The disguise was absolutely complete.

The Great Detective had been coated over with mucilage to which dog hairs had been applied. The markings on his back were perfect. His tail, adjusted with an automatic coupler, moved up and down responsive to every thought. His deep eyes were full of intelligence.

Next day he was exhibited in the Dachshund class at the International show.

He won all hearts.

“Quel beau chien!” cried the French people.

“Ach! was ein Dog!” cried the Spanish.

The Great Detective took the first prize!

The fortune of the Countess was saved.

Unfortunately as the Great Detective had neglected to pay the dog tax, he was caught and destroyed by the dog-catchers. But that is, of course, quite outside of the present narrative, and is only mentioned as an odd fact in conclusion.

TOC     INDEX

“Q.” A Psychic Pstory
of the Psupernatural

I cannot expect that any of my readers will believe the story which I am about to narrate. Looking back upon it, I scarcely believe it myself. Yet my narrative is so extraordinary and throws such light upon the nature of our communications with beings of another world, that I feel I am not entitled to withhold it from the public.

I had gone over to visit Annerly at his rooms. It was Saturday, October 31. I remember the date so precisely because it was my pay day, and I had received six sovereigns and ten shillings. I remember the sum so exactly because I had put the money into my pocket, and I remember into which pocket I had put it because I had no money in any other pocket. My mind is perfectly clear on all these points.

Annerly and I sat smoking for some time.

Then quite suddenly—

“Do you believe in the supernatural?” he asked.

I started as if I had been struck.

At the moment when Annerly spoke of the supernatural I had been thinking of something entirely different. The fact that he should speak of it at the very instant when I was thinking of something else, struck me as at least a very singular coincidence.

For a moment I could only stare.

“What I mean is,” said Annerly, “do you believe in phantasms of the dead?”

“Phantasms?” I repeated.

“Yes, phantasms, or if you prefer the word, phanograms, or say if you will phanogrammatical manifestations, or more simply psycho-phantasmal phenomena?”

I looked at Annerly with a keener sense of interest than I had ever felt in him before. I felt that he was about to deal with events and experiences of which in the two or three months that I had known him he had never seen fit to speak.

I wondered now that it had never occurred to me that a man whose hair at fifty-five was already streaked with grey, must have passed through some terrible ordeal.

Presently Annerley spoke again.

“Last night I saw Q,” he said.

“Good heavens!” I ejaculated. I did not in the least know who Q was, but it struck me with a thrill of indescribable terror that Annerly had seen Q. In my own quiet and measured existence such a thing had never happened.

“Yes,” said Annerly, “I saw Q as plainly as if he were standing here. But perhaps I had better tell you something of my past relationship with Q, and you will understand exactly what the present situation is.”

Annerly seated himself in a chair on the other side of the fire from me, lighted a pipe and continued.

“When first I knew Q he lived not very far from a small town in the south of England, which I will call X, and was betrothed to a beautiful and accomplished girl whom I will name M.”

Annerly had hardly begun to speak before I found myself listening with riveted attention. I realized that it was no ordinary experience that he was about to narrate. I more than suspected that Q and M were not the real names of his unfortunate acquaintances, but were in reality two letters of the alphabet selected almost at random to disguise the names of his friends. I was still pondering over the ingenuity of the thing when Annerly went on:

“When Q and I first became friends, he had a favourite dog, which, if necessary, I might name Z, and which followed him in and out of X on his daily walk.”

“In and out of X,” I repeated in astonishment.

“Yes,” said Annerly, “in and out.”

My senses were now fully alert. That Z should have followed Q out of X, I could readily understand, but that he should first have followed him in seemed to pass the bounds of comprehension.

“Well,” said Annerly, “Q and Miss M were to be married. Everything was arranged. The wedding was to take place on the last day of the year. Exactly six months and four days before the appointed day (I remember the date because the coincidence struck me as peculiar at the time) Q came to me late in the evening in great distress. He had just had, he said, a premonition of his own death. That evening, while sitting with Miss M on the verandah of her house, he had distinctly seen a projection of the dog R pass along the road.”

“Stop a moment,” I said. “Did you not say that the dog’s name was Z?”

Annerly frowned slightly.

“Quite so,” he replied. “Z, or more correctly Z R, since Q was in the habit, perhaps from motives of affection, of calling him R as well as Z. Well, then, the projection, or phanogram, of the dog passed in front of them so plainly that Miss M swore that she could have believed that it was the dog himself. Opposite the house the phantasm stopped for a moment and wagged its tail. Then it passed on, and quite suddenly disappeared around the corner of a stone wall, as if hidden by the bricks. What made the thing still more mysterious was that Miss M’s mother, who is partially blind, had only partially seen the dog.”

Annerly paused a moment. Then he went on:

“This singular occurrence was interpreted by Q, no doubt correctly, to indicate his own approaching death. I did what I could to remove this feeling, but it was impossible to do so, and he presently wrung my hand and left me, firmly convinced that he would not live till morning.”

“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, “and he died that night?”

“No, he did not,” said Annerly quietly, “that is the inexplicable part of it.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“He rose that morning as usual, dressed himself with his customary care, omitting none of his clothes, and walked down to his office at the usual hour. He told me afterwards that he remembered the circumstances so clearly from the fact that he had gone to the office by the usual route instead of taking any other direction.”

“Stop a moment,” I said. “Did anything unusual happen to mark that particular day?”

“I anticipated that you would ask that question,” said Annerly, “but as far as I can gather, absolutely nothing happened. Q returned from his work, and ate his dinner apparently much as usual, and presently went to bed complaining of a slight feeling of drowsiness, but nothing more. His stepmother, with whom he lived, said afterwards that she could hear the sound of his breathing quite distinctly during the night.”

“And did he die that night?” I asked, breathless with excitement.

“No,” said Annerly, “he did not. He rose next morning feeling about as before except that the sense of drowsiness had apparently passed, and that the sound of his breathing was no longer audible.”

Annerly again fell into silence. Anxious as I was to hear the rest of his astounding narrative, I did not like to press him with questions. The fact that our relations had hitherto been only of a formal character, and that this was the first occasion on which he had invited me to visit him at his rooms, prevented me from assuming too great an intimacy.

“Well,” he continued, “Q went to his office each day after that with absolute regularity. As far as I can gather there was nothing either in his surroundings or his conduct to indicate that any peculiar fate was impending over him. He saw Miss M regularly, and the time fixed for their marriage drew nearer each day.”

“Each day?” I repeated in astonishment.

“Yes,” said Annerly, “every day. For some time before his marriage I saw but little of him. But two weeks before that event was due to happen, I passed Q one day in the street. He seemed for a moment about to stop, then he raised his hat, smiled and passed on.”

“One moment,” I said, “if you will allow me a question that seems of importance – did he pass on and then smile and raise his hat, or did he smile into his hat, raise it, and then pass on afterwards?”

“Your question is quite justified,” said Annerly, “though I think I can answer with perfect accuracy that he first smiled, then stopped smiling and raised his hat, and then stopped raising his hat and passed on.”

“However,” he continued, “the essential fact is this: on the day appointed for the wedding, Q and Miss M were duly married.”

“Impossible!” I gasped; “duly married, both of them?”

“Yes,” said Annerly, “both at the same time. After the wedding Mr. and Mrs. Q —”

“Mr. and Mrs. Q,” I repeated in perplexity.

“Yes,” he answered, “Mr. and Mrs. Q – for after the wedding Miss M took the name of Q – left England and went out to Australia, where they were to reside.”

“Stop one moment,” I said, “and let me be quite clear – in going out to settle in Australia it was their intention to reside there?”

“Yes,” said Annerly, “that at any rate was generally understood. I myself saw them off on the steamer, and shook hands with Q, standing at the same time quite close to him.”

“Well,” I said, “and since the two Q’s, as I suppose one might almost call them, went to Australia, have you heard anything from them?”

“That,” replied Annerly, “is a matter that has shown the same singularity as the rest of my experience. It is now four years since Q and his wife went to Australia. At first I heard from him quite regularly, and received two letters each month. Presently I only received one letter every two months, and later two letters every six months, and then only one letter every twelve months. Then until last night I heard nothing whatever of Q for a year and a half.”

I was now on the tiptoe of expectancy.

“Last night,” said Annerly very quietly, “Q appeared in this room, or rather, a phantasm or psychic manifestation of him. He seemed in great distress, made gestures which I could not understand, and kept turning his trouser pockets inside out. I was too spell-bound to question him, and tried in vain to divine his meaning. Presently the phantasm seized a pencil from the table, and wrote the words, ‘Two sovereigns, tomorrow night, urgent.’”

Annerly was again silent. I sat in deep thought. “How do you interpret the meaning which Q’s phanogram meant to convey?”

“I think,” he announced, “it means this. Q, who is evidently dead, meant to visualize that fact, meant, so to speak, to deatomize the idea that he was demonetized, and that he wanted two sovereigns tonight.”

“And how,” I asked, amazed at Annerly’s instinctive penetration into the mysteries of the psychic world, “how do you intend to get it to him?”

“I intend,” he announced, “to try a bold, a daring experiment, which, if it succeeds, will bring us into immediate connection with the world of spirits. My plan is to leave two sovereigns here upon the edge of the table during the night. If they are gone in the morning, I shall know that Q has contrived to de-astralize himself, and has taken the sovereigns. The only question is, do you happen to have two sovereigns? I myself, unfortunately, have nothing but small change about me.”

Here was a piece of rare good fortune, the coincidence of which seemed to add another link to the chain of circumstance. As it happened I had with me the six sovereigns which I had just drawn as my week’s pay.

“Luckily,” I said, “I am able to arrange that. I happen to have money with me.” And I took two sovereigns from my pocket.

Annerly was delighted at our good luck. Our preparations for the experiment were soon made.

We placed the table in the middle of the room in such a way that there could be no fear of contact or collision with any of the furniture. The chairs were carefully set against the wall, and so placed that no two of them occupied the same place as any other two, while the pictures and ornaments about the room were left entirely undisturbed. We were careful not to remove any of the wallpaper from the wall, nor to detach any of the window-panes from the window. When all was ready the two sovereigns were laid side by side upon the table, with their heads up in such a way that the lower sides or tails were supported by only the table itself. We then extinguished the light. I said “Good night” to Annerly, and groped my way out into the dark, feverish with excitement.

My readers may well imagine my state of eagerness to know the result of the experiment. I could scarcely sleep for anxiety to know the issue. I had, of course, every faith in the completeness of our preparations, but was not without misgivings that the experiment might fail, as my own mental temperament and disposition might not be of the precise kind needed for the success of these experiments.

On this score, however, I need have had no alarm. The event showed that my mind was a media, or if the word is better, a transparency, of the very first order for psychic work of this character.

In the morning Annerly came rushing over to my lodgings, his face beaming with excitement.

“Glorious, glorious,” he almost shouted, “we have succeeded! The sovereigns are gone. We are in direct monetary communication with Q.”

I need not dwell on the exquisite thrill of happiness which went through me. All that day and all the following day, the sense that I was in communication with Q was ever present with me.

My only hope was that an opportunity might offer for the renewal of our intercommunication with the spirit world.

The following night my wishes were gratified. Late in the evening Annerly called me up on the telephone.

“Come over at once to my lodgings,” he said. “Q’s phanogram is communicating with us.”

I hastened over, and arrived almost breathless. “Q has been here again,” said Annerly, “and appeared in the same distress as before. A projection of him stood in the room, and kept writing with its finger on the table. I could distinguish the word ‘sovereigns,’ but nothing more.”

“Do you not suppose,” I said, “that Q for some reason which we cannot fathom, wishes us to again leave two sovereigns for him?”

“By Jove!” said Annerly enthusiastically, “I believe you’ve hit it. At any rate, let us try; we can but fail.”

That night we placed again two of my sovereigns on the table, and arranged the furniture with the same scrupulous care as before.

Still somewhat doubtful of my own psychic fitness for the work in which I was engaged, I endeavoured to keep my mind so poised as to readily offer a mark for any astral disturbance that might be about. The result showed that it had offered just such a mark. Our experiment succeeded completely. The two coins had vanished in the morning.

For nearly two months we continued our experiments on these lines. At times Annerly himself, so he told me, would leave money, often considerable sums, within reach of the phantasm, which never failed to remove them during the night. But Annerly, being a man of strict honour, never carried on these experiments alone except when it proved impossible to communicate with me in time for me to come.

At other times he would call me up with the simple message, “Q is here,” or would send me a telegram, or a written note saying, “Q needs money; bring any that you have, but no more.”

On my own part, I was extremely anxious to bring our experiments prominently before the public, or to interest the Society for Psychic Research, and similar bodies, in the daring transit which we had effected between the world of sentience and the psycho-astric, or pseudo-ethereal existence. It seemed to me that we alone had succeeded in thus conveying money directly and without mediation, from one world to another. Others, indeed, had done so by the interposition of a medium, or by subscription to an occult magazine, but we had performed the feat with such simplicity that I was anxious to make our experience public, for the benefit of others like myself.

Annerly, however, was averse from this course, being fearful that it might break off our relations with Q.

It was some three months after our first inter-astral psycho-monetary experiment, that there came the culmination of my experiences – so mysterious as to leave me still lost in perplexity.

Annerly had come in to see me one afternoon. He looked nervous and depressed.

“I have just had a psychic communication from Q,” he said in answer to my inquiries, “which I can hardly fathom. As far as I can judge, Q has formed some plan for interesting other phantasms in the kind of work that we are doing. He proposes to form, on his side of the gulf, an association that is to work in harmony with us, for monetary dealings on a large scale, between the two worlds.”

My reader may well imagine that my eyes almost blazed with excitement at the magnitude of the prospect opened up.

“Q wishes us to gather together all the capital that we can, and to send it across to him, in order that he may be able to organize with him a corporate association of phanograms, or perhaps in this case, one would more correctly call them phantoids.”

I had no sooner grasped Annerly’s meaning than I became enthusiastic over it.

We decided to try the great experiment that night.

My own worldly capital was, unfortunately, no great amount. I had, however, some £500 in bank stock left to me at my father’s decease, which I could, of course, realize within a few hours. I was fearful, however, lest it might prove too small to enable Q to organize his fellow phantoids with it.

I carried the money in notes and sovereigns to Annerly’s room, where it was laid on the table. Annerly was fortunately able to contribute a larger sum, which, however, he was not to place beside mine until after I had withdrawn, in order that conjunction of our monetary personalities might not dematerialize the astral phenomenon.

We made our preparations this time with exceptional care, Annerly quietly confident, I, it must be confessed, extremely nervous and fearful of failure. We removed our boots, and walked about on our stockinged feet, and at Annerly’s suggestion, not only placed the furniture as before, but turned the coal-scuttle upside down, and laid a wet towel over the top of the wastepaper basket.

All complete, I wrung Annerly’s hand, and went out into the darkness.

I waited next morning in vain. Nine o’clock came, ten o’clock, and finally eleven, and still no word of him. Then feverish with anxiety, I sought his lodgings.

Judge of my utter consternation to find that Annerly had disappeared. He had vanished as if off the face of the earth. By what awful error in our preparations, by what neglect of some necessary psychic precautions, he had met his fate, I cannot tell. But the evidence was only too clear, that Annerly had been engulfed into the astral world, carrying with him the money for the transfer of which he had risked his mundane existence.

The proof of his disappearance was easy to find. As soon as I dared do so with discretion I ventured upon a few inquiries. The fact that he had been engulfed while still owing four months’ rent for his rooms, and that he had vanished without even having time to pay such bills as he had outstanding with local tradesmen, showed that he must have been devisualized at a moment’s notice.

The awful fear that I might be held accountable for his death, prevented me from making the affair public.

Till that moment I had not realized the risks that he had incurred in our reckless dealing with the world of spirits. Annerly fell a victim to the great cause of psychic science, and the record of our experiments remain in the face of prejudice as a witness to its truth.

TOC     INDEX

Guido the Gimlet of Ghent

A Romance of Chivalry.

It was in the flood-tide of chivalry. Knighthood was in the pod.

The sun was slowly setting in the east, rising and falling occasionally as it subsided, and illuminating with its dying beams the towers of the grim castle of Buggensberg.

Isolde the Slender stood upon an embattled turret of the castle. Her arms were outstretched to the empty air, and her face, upturned as if in colloquy with heaven, was distraught with yearning.

Anon she murmured, “Guido” – and bewhiles a deep sigh rent her breast.

Sylph-like and ethereal in her beauty, she scarcely seemed to breathe.

In fact she hardly did.

Willowy and slender in form, she was as graceful as a meridian of longitude. Her body seemed almost too frail for motion, while her features were of a mould so delicate as to preclude all thought of intellectual operation.

She was begirt with a flowing kirtle of deep blue, bebound with a belt bebuckled with a silvern clasp, while about her waist a stomacher of point lace ended in the ruffled farthingale at her throat. On her head she bore a sugarloaf hat shaped like an extinguisher and pointing backward at an angle of 45 degrees.

“Guido,” she murmured, “Guido.”

And erstwhile she would wring her hands as one distraught and mutter, “He cometh not.”

The sun sank and night fell, enwrapping in shadow the frowning castle of Buggensberg, and the ancient city of Ghent at its foot. And as the darkness gathered, the windows of the castle shone out with fiery red, for it was Yuletide, and it was wassail all in the Great Hall of the castle, and this night the Margrave of Buggensberg made him a feast, and celebrated the betrothal of Isolde, his daughter, with Tancred the Tenspot.

And to the feast he had bidden all his liege lords and vassals – Hubert the Husky, Edward the Earwig, Rollo the Rumbottle, and many others.

In the meantime the Lady Isolde stood upon the battlements and mourned for the absent Guido.

The love of Guido and Isolde was of that pure and almost divine type, found only in the middle ages.

They had never seen one another. Guido had never seen Isolde, Isolde had never seen Guido. They had never heard one another speak. They had never been together. They did not know one another.

Yet they loved.

Their love had sprung into being suddenly and romantically, with all the mystic charm which is love’s greatest happiness.

Years before, Guido had seen the name of Isolde the Slender painted on a fence.

He had turned pale, fallen into a swoon and started at once for Jerusalem.

On the very same day Isolde in passing through the streets of Ghent had seen the coat of arms of Guido hanging on a clothes line.

She had fallen back into the arms of her tire-women more dead than alive.

Since that day they had loved.

Isolde would wander forth from the castle at earliest morn, with the name of Guido on her lips. She told his name to the trees. She whispered it to the flowers. She breathed it to the birds. Quite a lot of them knew it. At times she would ride her palfrey along the sands of the sea and call “Guido” to the waves! At other times she would tell it to the grass or even to a stick of cordwood or a ton of coal.

Guido and Isolde, though they had never met, cherished each the features of the other. Beneath his coat of mail Guido carried a miniature of Isolde, carven on ivory. He had found it at the bottom of the castle crag, between the castle and the old town of Ghent at its foot.

How did he know that it was Isolde?

There was no need for him to ask.

His heart had spoken.

The eye of love cannot be deceived.

And Isolde? She, too, cherished beneath her stomacher a miniature of Guido the Gimlet. She had it of a travelling chapman in whose pack she had discovered it, and had paid its price in pearls. How had she known that he it was, that is, that it was he? Because of the Coat of Arms emblazoned beneath the miniature. The same heraldic design that had first shaken her to the heart. Sleeping or waking it was ever before her eyes: A lion, proper, quartered in a field of gules, and a dog, improper, three-quarters in a field of buckwheat.

And if the love of Isolde burned thus purely for Guido, the love of Guido burned for Isolde with a flame no less pure.

No sooner had love entered Guido’s heart than he had determined to do some great feat of emprise or adventure, some high achievement of deringdo which should make him worthy to woo her.

He placed himself under a vow that he would eat nothing, save only food, and drink nothing, save only liquor, till such season as he should have performed his feat.

For this cause he had at once set out for Jerusalem to kill a Saracen for her. He killed one, quite a large one. Still under his vow, he set out again at once to the very confines of Pannonia determined to kill a Turk for her. From Pannonia he passed into the Highlands of Britain, where he killed her a Caledonian.

Every year and every month Guido performed for Isolde some new achievement of emprise.

And in the meantime Isolde waited.

It was not that suitors were lacking. Isolde the Slender had suitors in plenty ready to do her lightest hest.

Feats of arms were done daily for her sake. To win her love suitors were willing to vow themselves to perdition. For Isolde’s sake, Otto the Otter had cast himself into the sea. Conrad the Cocoanut had hurled himself from the highest battlement of the castle head first into the mud. Hugo the Hopeless had hanged himself by the waistband to a hickory tree and had refused all efforts to dislodge him. For her sake Siegfried the Susceptible had swallowed sulphuric acid.

But Isolde the Slender was heedless of the court thus paid to her.

In vain her stepmother, Agatha the Angular, urged her to marry. In vain her father, the Margrave of Buggensberg, commanded her to choose the one or the other of the suitors.

Her heart remained unswervingly true to the Gimlet.

From time to time love tokens passed between the lovers. From Jerusalem Guido had sent to her a stick with a notch in it to signify his undying constancy. From Pannonia he sent a piece of board, and from Venetia about two feet of scantling. All these Isolde treasured. At night they lay beneath her pillow.

Then, after years of wandering, Guido had determined to crown his love with a final achievement for Isolde’s sake.

It was his design to return to Ghent, to scale by night the castle cliff and to prove his love for Isolde by killing her father for her, casting her stepmother from the battlements, burning the castle, and carrying her away.

This design he was now hastening to put into execution. Attended by fifty trusty followers under the lead of Carlo the Corkscrew and Beowulf the Bradawl, he had made his way to Ghent. Under cover of night they had reached the foot of the castle cliff; and now, on their hands and knees in single file, they were crawling round and round the spiral path that led up to the gate of the fortress. At six of the clock they had spiralled once. At seven of the clock they had reappeared at the second round, and as the feast in the hall reached its height, they reappeared on the fourth lap.

Guido the Gimlet was in the lead. His coat of mail was hidden beneath a parti-coloured cloak and he bore in his hand a horn.

By arrangement he was to penetrate into the castle by the postern gate in disguise, steal from the Margrave by artifice the key of the great door, and then by a blast of his horn summon his followers to the assault. Alas! there was need for haste, for at this very Yuletide, on this very night, the Margrave, wearied of Isolde’s resistance, had determined to bestow her hand upon Tancred the Tenspot.

It was wassail all in the great hall. The huge Margrave, seated at the head of the board, drained flagon after flagon of wine, and pledged deep the health of Tancred the Tenspot, who sat plumed and armoured beside him.

Great was the merriment of the Margrave, for beside him, crouched upon the floor, was a new jester, whom the seneschal had just admitted by the postern gate, and the novelty of whose jests made the huge sides of the Margrave shake and shake again.

“Odds Bodikins!” he roared, “but the tale is as rare as it is new! and so the wagoner said to the Pilgrim that sith he had asked him to put him off the wagon at that town, put him off he must, albeit it was but the small of the night – by St. Pancras! whence hath the fellow so novel a tale? – nay, tell it me but once more, haply I may remember it” – and the Baron fell back in a perfect paroxysm of merriment.

As he fell back, Guido – for the disguised jester was none other than he, that is, than him – sprang forward and seized from the girdle of the Margrave the key of the great door that dangled at his waist.

Then, casting aside the jester’s cloak and cap, he rose to his full height, standing in his coat of mail.

In one hand he brandished the double-headed mace of the Crusader, and in the other a horn.

The guests sprang to their feet, their hands upon their daggers.

“Guido the Gimlet!” they cried.

“Hold,” said Guido, “I have you in my power!!”

Then placing the horn to his lips and drawing a deep breath, he blew with his utmost force.

And then again he blew – blew like anything.

Not a sound came.

The horn wouldn’t blow!

“Seize him!” cried the Baron.

“Stop,” said Guido, “I claim the laws of chivalry. I am here to seek the Lady Isolde, betrothed by you to Tancred. Let me fight Tancred in single combat, man to man.”

A shout of approbation gave consent.

The combat that followed was terrific.

First Guido, raising his mace high in the air with both hands, brought it down with terrible force on Tancred’s mailed head. Then Guido stood still, and Tancred raising his mace in the air brought it down upon Guido’s head. Then Tancred stood still and turned his back, and Guido, swinging his mace sideways, gave him a terrific blow from behind, midway, right centre. Tancred returned the blow. Then Tancred knelt down on his hands and knees and Guido brought the mace down on his back. It was a sheer contest of skill and agility. For a time the issue was doubtful. Then Tancred’s armour began to bend, his blows weakened, he fell prone. Guido pressed his advantage and hammered him out as flat as a sardine can. Then placing his foot on Tancred’s chest, he lowered his vizor and looked around about him.

At this second there was a resounding shriek.

Isolde the Slender, alarmed by the sound of the blows, precipitated herself into the room.

For a moment the lovers looked into each other’s faces.

Then with their countenances distraught with agony they fell swooning in different directions.

There had been a mistake!

Guido was not Guido, and Isolde was not Isolde. They were wrong about the miniatures. Each of them was a picture of somebody else.

Torrents of remorse flooded over the lovers’ hearts.

Isolde thought of the unhappy Tancred, hammered out as flat as a picture-card and hopelessly spoilt; of Conrad the Cocoanut head first in the mud, and Siegfried the Susceptible coiled up with agonies of sulphuric acid.

Guido thought of the dead Saracens and the slaughtered Turks.

And all for nothing!

The guerdon of their love had proved vain. Each of them was not what the other had thought. So it is ever with the loves of this world, and herein is the mediaevel allegory of this tale.

The hearts of the two lovers broke together.

They expired.

Meantime Carlo the Corkscrew and Beowulf the Bradawl, and their forty followers, were hustling down the spirals as fast as they could crawl, hind end uppermost.

TOC     INDEX

Gertrude the Governess

—or—
Simple Seventeen.

Synopsis of Previous Chapters:

There are no Previous Chapters.

It was a wild and stormy night on the West Coast of Scotland. This, however, is immaterial to the present story, as the scene is not laid in the West of Scotland. For the matter of that the weather was just as bad on the East Coast of Ireland.

But the scene of this narrative is laid in the South of England and takes place in and around Knotacentinum Towers (pronounced as if written Nosham Taws), the seat of Lord Knotacent (pronounced as if written Nosh).

But it is not necessary to pronounce either of these names in reading them.

Nosham Taws was a typical English home. The main part of the house was an Elizabethan structure of warm red brick, while the elder portion, of which the Earl was inordinately proud, still showed the outlines of a Norman Keep, to which had been added a Lancastrian Jail and a Plantagenet Orphan Asylum. From the house in all directions stretched magnificent woodland and park with oaks and elms of immemorial antiquity, while nearer the house stood raspberry bushes and geranium plants which had been set out by the Crusaders.

About the grand old mansion the air was loud with the chirping of thrushes, the cawing of partridges and the clear sweet note of the rook, while deer, antelope and other quadrupeds strutted about the lawn so tame as to eat off the sun-dial. In fact, the place was a regular menagerie.

From the house downwards through the park stretched a beautiful broad avenue laid out by Henry VII.

Lord Nosh stood upon the hearthrug of the library. Trained diplomat and statesman as he was, his stern aristocratic face was upside down with fury.

“Boy,” he said, “you shall marry this girl or I disinherit you. You are no son of mine.”

Young Lord Ronald, erect before him, flung back a glance as defiant as his own.

“I defy you,” he said. “Henceforth you are no father of mine. I will get another. I will marry none but a woman I can love. This girl that we have never seen——”

“Fool,” said the Earl, “would you throw aside our estate and name of a thousand years? The girl, I am told, is beautiful; her aunt is willing; they are French; pah! they understand such things in France.”

“But your reason——”

“I give no reason,” said the Earl. “Listen, Ronald, I give one month. For that time you remain here. If at the end of it you refuse me, I cut you off with a shilling.”

Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.

As the door of the library closed upon Ronald the Earl sank into a chair. His face changed. It was no longer that of the haughty nobleman, but of the hunted criminal. “He must marry the girl,” he muttered. “Soon she will know all. Tutchemoff has escaped from Siberia. He knows and will tell. The whole of the mines pass to her, this property with it, and I – but enough.” He rose, walked to the sideboard, drained a dipper full of gin and bitters, and became again a high-bred English gentleman.

It was at this moment that a high dogcart, driven by a groom in the livery of Earl Nosh, might have been seen entering the avenue of Nosham Taws. Beside him sat a young girl, scarce more than a child, in fact not nearly so big as the groom.

The apple-pie hat which she wore, surmounted with black willow plumes, concealed from view a face so face-like in its appearance as to be positively facial.

It was – need we say it – Gertrude the Governess, who was this day to enter upon her duties at Nosham Taws.

At the same time that the dogcart entered the avenue at one end there might have been seen riding down it from the other a tall young man, whose long, aristocratic face proclaimed his birth and who was mounted upon a horse with a face even longer than his own.

And who is this tall young man who draws nearer to Gertrude with every revolution of the horse? Ah, who, indeed? Ah, who, who? I wonder if any of my readers could guess that this was none other than Lord Ronald.

The two were destined to meet. Nearer and nearer they came. And then still nearer. Then for one brief moment they met. As they passed Gertrude raised her head and directed towards the young nobleman two eyes so eye-like in their expression as to be absolutely circular, while Lord Ronald directed towards the occupant of the dogcart a gaze so gaze-like that nothing but a gazelle, or a gas-pipe, could have emulated its intensity.

Was this the dawn of love? Wait and see. Do not spoil the story.

—

Let us speak of Gertrude. Gertrude DeMongmorenci McFiggin had known neither father nor mother. They had both died years before she was born. Of her mother she knew nothing, save that she was French, was extremely beautiful, and that all her ancestors and even her business acquaintances had perished in the Revolution.

Yet Gertrude cherished the memory of her parents. On her breast the girl wore a locket in which was enshrined a miniature of her mother, while down her neck inside at the back hung a daguerreotype of her father. She carried a portrait of her grandmother up her sleeve and had pictures of her cousins tucked inside her boot, while beneath her – but enough, quite enough.

Of her father Gertrude knew even less. That he was a high-born English gentleman who had lived as a wanderer in many lands, this was all she knew. His only legacy to Gertrude had been a Russian grammar, a Roumanian phrase-book, a theodolite, and a work on mining engineering.

From her earliest infancy Gertrude had been brought up by her aunt. Her aunt had carefully instructed her in Christian principles. She had also taught her Mohammedanism to make sure.

When Gertrude was seventeen her aunt had died of hydrophobia.

The circumstances were mysterious. There had called upon her that day a strange bearded man in the costume of the Russians. After he had left, Gertrude had found her aunt in a syncope from which she passed into an apostrophe and never recovered.

To avoid scandal it was called hydrophobia. Gertrude was thus thrown upon the world. What to do? That was the problem that confronted her.

It was while musing one day upon her fate that Gertrude’s eye was struck with an advertisement.

“Wanted a governess; must possess a knowledge of French, Italian, Russian, and Roumanian, Music, and Mining Engineering. Salary £1, 4 shillings and 4 pence halfpenny per annum. Apply between half-past eleven and twenty-five minutes to twelve at No. 41 A Decimal Six, Belgravia Terrace. The Countess of Nosh.”

Gertrude was a girl of great natural quickness of apprehension, and she had not pondered over this announcement more than half an hour before she was struck with the extraordinary coincidence between the list of items desired and the things that she herself knew.

She duly presented herself at Belgravia Terrace before the Countess, who advanced to meet her with a charm which at once placed the girl at her ease.

“You are proficient in French,” she asked.

“Oh, oui,” said Gertrude modestly.

“And Italian,” continued the Countess.

“Oh, si,” said Gertrude.

“And German,” said the Countess in delight.

“Ah, ja,” said Gertrude.

“And Russian?”

“Yaw.”

“And Roumanian?”

“Jep.”

Amazed at the girl’s extraordinary proficiency in modern languages, the Countess looked at her narrowly. Where had she seen those lineaments before? She passed her hand over her brow in thought, and spit upon the floor, but no, the face baffled her.

“Enough,” she said, “I engage you on the spot; tomorrow you go down to Nosham Taws and begin teaching the children. I must add that in addition you will be expected to aid the Earl with his Russian correspondence. He has large mining interests at Tschminsk.”

Tschminsk! why did the simple word reverberate upon Gertrude’s ears? Why? Because it was the name written in her father’s hand on the title page of his book on mining. What mystery was here?

It was on the following day that Gertrude had driven up the avenue.

She descended from the dogcart, passed through a phalanx of liveried servants drawn up seven-deep, to each of whom she gave a sovereign as she passed and entered Nosham Taws.

“Welcome,” said the Countess, as she aided Gertrude to carry her trunk upstairs.

The girl presently descended and was ushered into the library, where she was presented to the Earl. As soon as the Earl’s eye fell upon the face of the new governess he started visibly. Where had he seen those lineaments? Where was it? At the races, or the theatre – on a bus – no. Some subtler thread of memory was stirring in his mind. He strode hastily to the sideboard, drained a dipper and a half of brandy, and became again the perfect English gentleman.

While Gertrude has gone to the nursery to make the acquaintance of the two tiny golden-haired children who are to be her charges, let us say something here of the Earl and his son.

Lord Nosh was the perfect type of the English nobleman and statesman. The years that he had spent in the diplomatic service at Constantinople, St. Petersburg, and Salt Lake City had given to him a peculiar finesse and noblesse, while his long residence at St. Helena, Pitcairn Island, and Hamilton, Ontario, had rendered him impervious to external impressions. As deputy-paymaster of the militia of the county he had seen something of the sterner side of military life, while his hereditary office of Groom of the Sunday Breeches had brought him into direct contact with Royalty itself.

His passion for outdoor sports endeared him to his tenants. A keen sportsman, he excelled in fox-hunting, dog-hunting, pig-killing, bat-catching and the pastimes of his class.

In this latter respect Lord Ronald took after his father. From the start the lad had shown the greatest promise. At Eton he had made a splendid showing at battledore and shuttlecock, and at Cambridge had been first in his class at needlework. Already his name was whispered in connection with the All England ping-pong championship, a triumph which would undoubtedly carry with it a seat in Parliament.

Thus was Gertrude the Governess installed at Nosham Taws.

The days and the weeks sped past.

The simple charm of the beautiful orphan girl attracted all hearts. Her two little pupils became her slaves. “Me loves oo,” little Rasehellfrida would say, leaning her golden head in Gertrude’s lap. Even the servants loved her. The head gardener would bring a bouquet of beautiful roses to her room before she was up, the second gardener a bunch of early cauliflowers, the third a spray of late asparagus, and even the tenth and eleventh a sprig of mangel-wurzel or an armful of hay. Her room was full of gardeners all the time, while at evening the aged butler, touched at the friendless girl’s loneliness, would tap softly at her door to bring her a rye whisky and seltzer or a box of Pittsburg Stogies. Even the dumb creatures seemed to admire her in their own dumb way. The dumb rooks settled on her shoulder and every dumb dog around the place followed her.

And Ronald! ah, Ronald! Yes, indeed! They had met. They had spoken.

“What a dull morning,” Gertrude had said. “Quel triste matin! Was fur ein allerverdamnter Tag!”

“Beastly,” Ronald had answered.

“Beastly!!” The word rang in Gertrude’s ears all day.

After that they were constantly together. They played tennis and ping-pong in the day, and in the evening, in accordance with the stiff routine of the place, they sat down with the Earl and Countess to twenty-five-cent poker, and later still they sat together on the verandah and watched the moon sweeping in great circles around the horizon.

It was not long before Gertrude realized that Lord Ronald felt towards her a warmer feeling than that of mere ping-pong. At times in her presence he would fall, especially after dinner, into a fit of profound subtraction.

Once at night, when Gertrude withdrew to her chamber and before seeking her pillow, prepared to retire as a preliminary to disrobing – in other words, before going to bed, she flung wide the casement (opened the window) and perceived (saw) the face of Lord Ronald. He was sitting on a thorn bush beneath her, and his upturned face wore an expression of agonized pallor.

Meantime the days passed. Life at the Taws moved in the ordinary routine of a great English household. At 7 a gong sounded for rising, at 8 a horn blew for breakfast, at 8.30 a whistle sounded for prayers, at 1 a flag was run up at half-mast for lunch, at 4 a gun was fired for afternoon tea, at 9 a first bell sounded for dressing, at 9.15 a second bell for going on dressing, while at 9.30 a rocket was sent up to indicate that dinner was ready. At midnight dinner was over, and at 1 a.m. the tolling of a bell summoned the domestics to evening prayers.

Meanwhile the month allotted by the Earl to Lord Ronald was passing away. It was already July 15, then within a day or two it was July 17, and, almost immediately afterwards, July 18.

At times the Earl, in passing Ronald in the hall, would say sternly, “Remember, boy, your consent, or I disinherit you.”

And what were the Earl’s thoughts of Gertrude? Here was the one drop of bitterness in the girl’s cup of happiness. For some reason that she could not divine the Earl showed signs of marked antipathy.

Once as she passed the door of the library he threw a bootjack at her. On another occasion at lunch alone with her he struck her savagely across the face with a sausage.

It was her duty to translate to the Earl his Russian correspondence. She sought in it in vain for the mystery. One day a Russian telegram was handed to the Earl. Gertrude translated it to him aloud.

“Tutchemoff went to the woman. She is dead.”

On hearing this the Earl became livid with fury, in fact this was the day that he struck her with the sausage.

Then one day while the Earl was absent on a bat hunt, Gertrude, who was turning over his correspondence, with that sweet feminine instinct of interest that rose superior to ill-treatment, suddenly found the key to the mystery.

Lord Nosh was not the rightful owner of the Taws. His distant cousin of the older line, the true heir, had died in a Russian prison to which the machinations of the Earl, while Ambassador at Tschminsk, had consigned him. The daughter of this cousin was the true owner of Nosham Taws.

The family story, save only that the documents before her withheld the name of the rightful heir, lay bare to Gertrude’s eye.

Strange is the heart of woman. Did Gertrude turn from the Earl with spurning? No. Her own sad fate had taught her sympathy.

Yet still the mystery remained! Why did the Earl start perceptibly each time that he looked into her face? Sometimes he started as much as four centimetres, so that one could distinctly see him do it. On such occasions he would hastily drain a dipper of rum and vichy water and become again the correct English gentleman.

The dénouement came swiftly. Gertrude never forgot it.

It was the night of the great ball at Nosham Taws. The whole neighbourhood was invited. How Gertrude’s heart had beat with anticipation, and with what trepidation she had overhauled her scant wardrobe in order to appear not unworthy in Lord Ronald’s eyes. Her resources were poor indeed, yet the inborn genius for dress that she inherited from her French mother stood her in good stead. She twined a single rose in her hair and contrived herself a dress out of a few old newspapers and the inside of an umbrella that would have graced a court. Round her waist she bound a single braid of bagstring, while a piece of old lace that had been her mother’s was suspended to her ear by a thread.

Gertrude was the cynosure of all eyes. Floating to the strains of the music she presented a picture of bright girlish innocence that no one could see undisenraptured.

The ball was at its height. It was away up!

Ronald stood with Gertrude in the shrubbery. They looked into one another’s eyes.

“Gertrude,” he said, “I love you.”

Simple words, and yet they thrilled every fibre in the girl’s costume.

“Ronald!” she said, and cast herself about his neck.

At this moment the Earl appeared standing beside them in the moonlight. His stern face was distorted with indignation.

“So!” he said, turning to Ronald, “it appears that you have chosen!”

“I have,” said Ronald with hauteur.

“You prefer to marry this penniless girl rather than the heiress I have selected for you.”

Gertrude looked from father to son in amazement.

“Yes,” said Ronald.

“Be it so,” said the Earl, draining a dipper of gin which he carried, and resuming his calm. “Then I disinherit you. Leave this place, and never return to it.”

“Come, Gertrude,” said Ronald tenderly, “let us flee together.”

Gertrude stood before them. The rose had fallen from her head. The lace had fallen from her ear and the bagstring had come undone from her waist. Her newspapers were crumpled beyond recognition. But dishevelled and illegible as she was, she was still mistress of herself.

“Never,” she said firmly. “Ronald, you shall never make this sacrifice for me.” Then to the Earl, in tones of ice, “There is a pride, sir, as great even as yours. The daughter of Metschnikoff McFiggin need crave a boon from no one.”

With that she hauled from her bosom the daguerreotype of her father and pressed it to her lips.

The Earl started as if shot. “That name!” he cried, “that face! that photograph! stop!”

There! There is no need to finish; my readers have long since divined it. Gertrude was the heiress.

The lovers fell into one another’s arms. The Earl’s proud face relaxed. “God bless you,” he said. The Countess and the guests came pouring out upon the lawn. The breaking day illuminated a scene of gay congratulations.

Gertrude and Ronald were wed. Their happiness was complete. Need we say more? Yes, only this. The Earl was killed in the hunting-field a few days after. The Countess was struck by lightning. The two children fell down a well. Thus the happiness of Gertrude and Ronald was complete.

TOC     INDEX

A Hero in Homespun

—or—
The Life Struggle
of Hezekiah Hayloft.

“Can you give me a job?”

The foreman of the bricklayers looked down from the scaffold to the speaker below. Something in the lad’s upturned face appealed to the man. He threw a brick at him.

It was Hezekiah Hayloft. He was all in homespun. He carried a carpet-bag in each hand. He had come to New York, the cruel city, looking for work.

Hezekiah moved on. Presently he stopped in front of a policeman.

“Sir,” he said, “can you tell me the way to——”

The policeman struck him savagely across the side of the head.

“I’ll learn you,” he said, “to ask damn fool questions——”

Again Hezekiah moved on. In a few moments he met a man whose tall black hat, black waistcoat and white tie proclaimed him a clergyman.

“Good sir,” said Hezekiah, “can you tell me——”

The clergyman pounced upon him with a growl of a hyena, and bit a piece out of his ear. Yes, he did, reader. Just imagine a clergyman biting a boy in open daylight! Yet that happens in New York every minute.

Such is the great cruel city, and imagine looking for work in it. You and I who spend our time in trying to avoid work can hardly realize what it must mean. Think how it must feel to be alone in New York, without a friend or a relation at hand, with no one to know or care what you do. It must be great!

For a few moments Hezekiah stood irresolute. He looked about him. He looked up at the top of the Metropolitan Tower. He saw no work there. He looked across at the sky-scrapers on Madison Square, but his eye detected no work in any of them. He stood on his head and looked up at the flat-iron building. Still no work in sight.

All that day and the next Hezekiah looked for work.

A Wall Street firm had advertised for a stenographer.

“Can you write shorthand?” they said.

“No,” said the boy in homespun, “but I can try.”

They threw him down the elevator.

Hezekiah was not discouraged. That day he applied for fourteen jobs.

The Waldorf Astoria was in need of a chef. Hezekiah applied for the place.

“Can you cook?” they said.

“No,” said Hezekiah, “but oh, sir, give me a trial, give me an egg and let me try – I will try so hard.” Great tears rolled down the boy’s face.

They rolled him out into the corridor.

Next he applied for a job as a telegrapher. His mere ignorance of telegraphy was made the ground of refusal.

At nightfall Hezekiah Hayloft grew hungry. He entered again the portico of the Waldorf Astoria. Within it stood a tall man in uniform.

“Boss,” said the boy hero, “will you trust me for the price of a square meal?”

They set the dog on him.

Such, reader, is the hardness and bitterness of the Great City.

For fourteen weeks Hezekiah Hayloft looked for work. Once or twice he obtained temporary employment only to lose it again.

For a few days he was made accountant in a trust company. He was discharged because he would not tell a lie. For about a week he held a position as cashier in a bank. They discharged the lad because he refused to forge a cheque. For three days he held a conductorship on a Broadway surface car. He was dismissed from this business for refusing to steal a nickle.

Such, reader, is the horrid degradation of business life in New York.

Meantime the days passed and still Hayloft found no work. His stock of money was exhausted. He had not had any money anyway. For food he ate grass in Central Park and drank the water from the Cruelty to Animals horsetrough.

Gradually a change came over the lad; his face grew hard and stern, the great city was setting its mark upon him.

One night Hezekiah stood upon the sidewalk. It was late, long after ten o’clock. Only a few chance pedestrians passed.

“By Heaven!” said Hezekiah, shaking his fist at the lights of the cruel city, “I have exhausted fair means, I will try foul. I will beg. No Hayloft has been a beggar yet,” he added with a bitter laugh, “but I will begin.”

A well-dressed man passed along.

Hezekiah seized him by the throat.

“What do you want?” cried the man in sudden terror. “Don’t ask me for work. I tell you I have no work to give.”

“I don’t want work,” said Hezekiah grimly. “I am a beggar.”

“Oh! is that all,” said the man, relieved. “Here, take this ten dollars and go and buy a drink with it.”

Money! money! and with it a new sense of power that rushed like an intoxicant to Hezekiah’s brain.

“Drink,” he muttered hoarsely, “yes, drink.”

The lights of a soda-water fountain struck his eye.

“Give me an egg phosphate,” he said as he dashed his money on the counter. He drank phosphate after phosphate till his brain reeled. Mad with the liquor, he staggered to and fro in the shop, weighed himself recklessly on the slot machine three or four times, tore out chewing gum and matches from the automatic nickel boxes, and finally staggered on to the street, reeling from the effects of thirteen phosphates and a sarsaparilla soda.

“Crime,” he hissed. “Crime, crime, that’s what I want.”

He noticed that the passers-by made way for him now with respect. On the corner of the street a policeman was standing.

Hezekiah picked up a cobblestone, threw it, and struck the man full on the ear.

The policeman smiled at him roguishly, and then gently wagged his finger in reproof. It was the same policeman who had struck him fourteen weeks before for asking the way.

Hezekiah moved on, still full of his new idea of crime. Down the street was a novelty shop, the window decked with New Year’s gifts.

“Sell me a revolver,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said the salesman. “Would you like something for evening wear, or a plain kind for home use. Here is a very good family revolver, or would you like a roof garden size?”

Hezekiah selected a revolver and went out.

“Now, then,” he muttered, “I will burglarize a house and get money.”

Walking across to Fifth Avenue he selected one of the finest residences and rang the bell.

A man in livery appeared in the brightly lighted hall.

“Where is your master?” Hezekiah asked, showing his revolver.

“He is upstairs, sir, counting his money,” the man answered, “but he dislikes being disturbed.”

“Show me to him,” said Hezekiah, “I wish to shoot him and take his money.”

“Very good, sir,” said the man deferentially. “You will find him on the first floor.”

Hezekiah turned and shot the footman twice through the livery and went upstairs.

In an upper room was a man sitting at a desk under a reading-lamp. In front of him was a pile of gold.

He was an old man, with a foolish, benevolent face.

“What are you doing?” said Hezekiah.

“I am counting my money,” said the man.

“What are you?” asked Hezekiah sternly.

“I am a philanthropist,” said the man. “I give my money to deserving objects. I establish medals for heroes. I give prizes for ship captains who jump into the sea, and for firemen who throw people from the windows of upper stories at the risk of their own; I send American missionaries to China, Chinese missionaries to India, and Indian missionaries to Chicago. I set aside money to keep college professors from starving to death when they deserve it.”

“Stop!” said Hezekiah, “you deserve to die. Stand up. Open your mouth and shut your eyes.”

The old man stood up.

There was a loud report. The philanthropist fell. He was shot through the waistcoat and his suspenders were cut to ribbons.

Hezekiah, his eyes glittering with the mania of crime, crammed his pockets with gold pieces.

There was a roar and hubbub in the street below.

“The police!” Hezekiah muttered. “I must set fire to the house and escape in the confusion.”

He struck a safety match and held it to the leg of the table.

It was a fireproof table and refused to burn. He held it to the door. The door was fireproof. He applied it to the bookcase. He ran the match along the books. They were all fireproof. Everything was fireproof.

Frenzied with rage, he tore off his celluloid collar and set fire to it. He waved it above his head. Great tongues of flame swept from the windows.

“Fire! Fire!” was the cry.

Hezekiah rushed to the door and threw the blazing collar down the elevator shaft. In a moment the iron elevator, with its steel ropes, burst into a mass of flame; then the brass fittings of the doors took fire, and in a moment the cement floor of the elevator was one roaring mass of flame. Great columns of smoke burst from the building.

“Fire! Fire!” shouted the crowd.

Reader, have you ever seen a fire in a great city? The sight is a wondrous one. One realizes that, vast and horrible as the city is, it nevertheless shows its human organization in its most perfect form.

Scarcely had the fire broken out before resolute efforts were made to stay its progress. Long lines of men passed buckets of water from hand to hand.

The water was dashed on the fronts of the neighbouring houses, thrown all over the street, splashed against the telegraph poles, and poured in torrents over the excited crowd. Every place in the neighbourhood of the fire was literally soaked. The men worked with a will. A derrick rapidly erected in the street reared itself to the height of sixteen or seventeen feet. A daring man mounted on the top of it, hauled bucket after bucket of water on the pulley. Balancing himself with the cool daring of the trained fireman, he threw the water in all directions over the crowd.

The fire raged for an hour. Hezekiah, standing at an empty window amid the flames, rapidly filled his revolver and emptied it into the crowd.

From one hundred revolvers in the street a fusillade was kept up in return.

This lasted for an hour. Several persons were almost hit by the rain of bullets, which would have proved fatal had they struck anyone.

Meantime, as the flames died down, a squad of policemen rushed into the doomed building.

Hezekiah threw aside his revolver and received them with folded arms.

“Hayloft,” said the chief of police, “I arrest you for murder, burglary, arson, and conspiracy. You put up a splendid fight, old man, and I am only sorry that it is our painful duty to arrest you.”

As Hayloft appeared below a great cheer went up from the crowd. True courage always appeals to the heart of the people.

Hayloft was put in a motor and whirled rapidly to the police station.

On the way the chief handed him a flask and a cigar.

They chatted over the events of the evening.

Hayloft realized that a new life had opened for him. He was no longer a despised outcast. He had entered the American criminal class.

At the police station the chief showed Hezekiah to his room.

“I hope you will like this room,” he said a little anxiously. “It is the best that I can give you tonight. Tomorrow I can give you a room with a bath, but at such short notice I am sure you will not mind putting up with this.”

He said good night and shut the door. In a moment he reappeared.

“About breakfast?” he said. “Would you rather have it in your room, or will you join us at our table d’hôte? The force are most anxious to meet you.”

Next morning, before Hezekiah was up, the chief brought to his room a new outfit of clothes – a silk hat, frock-coat, shepherd’s-plaid trousers and varnished boots with spats.

“You won’t mind accepting these things, Mr. Hayloft. Our force would like very much to enable you to make a suitable appearance in the court.”

Carefully dressed and shaved, Hezekiah descended. He was introduced to the leading officials of the force, and spent a pleasant hour of chat over a cigar, discussing the incidents of the night before.

In the course of the morning a number of persons called to meet and congratulate Hezekiah.

“I want to tell you, sir,” said the editor of a great American daily, “that your work of last night will be known and commented on all over the States. Your shooting of the footman was a splendid piece of nerve, sir, and will do much in defence of the unwritten law.”

“Mr. Hayloft,” said another caller, “I am sorry not to have met you sooner. Our friends here tell me that you have been in New York for some months. I regret, sir, that we did not know you. This is the name of my firm, Mr. Hayloft. We are leading lawyers here, and we want the honour of defending you. We may! Thank you, sir. And now, as we have still an hour or two before the court, I want to run you up to my house in my motor. My wife is very anxious to have a little luncheon for you.”

The court met that afternoon. There was a cheer as Hezekiah entered.

“Mr. Hayloft,” said the judge, “I am adjourning this court for a few days. From what I hear the nerve strain that you have undergone must have been most severe. Your friends tell me that you can hardly be in a state to take a proper interest in the case till you have had a thorough rest.”

As Hayloft left the court a cheer went up from the crowd, in which the judge joined.

The next few days were busy days for Hezekiah. Filled with receptions, civic committees, and the preparation of the brief, in which Hezekiah’s native intelligence excited the admiration of the lawyers.

Newspaper men sought for interviews. Business promoters called upon Hezekiah. His name was put down as a director of several leading companies, and it was rumoured that in the event of his acquittal he would undertake a merger of all the great burglar protection corporations of the United States.

The trial opened a week later, and lasted two months. Hezekiah was indicted on five charges – arson, for having burned the steel cage of the elevator; misdemeanour, for shooting the footman; the theft of the money, petty larceny; the killing of the philanthropist, infanticide; and the shooting at the police without hitting them, aggravated felony.

The proceedings were very complicated – expert evidence was taken from all over the United States. An analytical examination was made of the brain of the philanthropist. Nothing was found.

The entire jury were dismissed three times on the grounds of prejudice, twice on the ground of ignorance, and finally disbanded on the ground of insanity.

The proceedings dragged on.

Meantime Hezekiah’s business interests accumulated.

At length, at Hezekiah’s own suggestion, it was necessary to abandon the case.

“Gentlemen,” he said, in his final speech to the court, “I feel that I owe an apology for not being able to attend these proceedings any further. At any time, when I can snatch an hour or two from my business, you may always count on my attendance. In the meantime, rest assured that I shall follow your proceedings with the greatest interest.”

He left the room amid three cheers and the singing of “Auld Lang Syne.”

After that the case dragged hopelessly on from stage to stage.

The charge of arson was met by a nolle prosequi. The accusation of theft was stopped by a ne plus ultra. The killing of the footman was pronounced justifiable insanity.

The accusation of murder for the death of the philanthropist was withdrawn by common consent. Damages in error were awarded to Hayloft for the loss of his revolver and cartridges. The main body of the case was carried on a writ of certiorari to the Federal Courts and appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

It is there still.

Meantime, Hezekiah, as managing director of the Burglars’ Security Corporation, remains one of the rising generation of financiers in New York, with every prospect of election to the State Senate.

TOC     INDEX

Sorrows of a Super Soul

—or—
The Memoirs
of Marie Mushenough.

(Translated, by Machinery, out of the Original Russian.)

Do you ever look at your face in the glass?

I do.

Sometimes I stand for hours and peer at my face and wonder at it. At times I turn it upside down and gaze intently at it. I try to think what it means. It seems to look back at me with its great brown eyes as if it knew me and wanted to speak to me.

Why was I born?

I do not know.

I ask my face a thousand times a day and find no answer.

At times when people pass my room – my maid Nitnitzka, or Jakub, the serving-man – and see me talking to my face, they think I am foolish.

But I am not.

At times I cast myself on the sofa and bury my head in the cushions. Even then I cannot find out why I was born.

I am seventeen.

Shall I ever be seventy-seven? Ah!

Shall I ever be even sixty-seven, or sixty-seven even? Oh!

And if I am both of these, shall I ever be eighty-seven?

I cannot tell.

Often I start up in the night with wild eyes and wonder if I shall be eighty-seven.

.  .  .  .  .

Next Day.

I passed a flower in my walk today. It grew in the meadow beside the river bank.

It stood dreaming on a long stem.

I knew its name. It was a Tchupvskja. I love beautiful names.

I leaned over and spoke to it. I asked it if my heart would ever know love. It said it thought so.

On the way home I passed an onion.

It lay upon the road.

Someone had stepped upon its stem and crushed it. How it must have suffered. I placed it in my bosom. All night it lay beside my pillow.

.  .  .  .  .

Another Day.

My heart is yearning for love! How is it that I can love no one?

I have tried and I cannot. My father – Ivan Ivanovitch – he is so big and so kind, and yet I cannot love him; and my mother, Katoosha Katooshavitch, she is just as big, and yet I cannot love her. And my brother, Dimitri Dimitrivitch, I cannot love him.

And Alexis Alexovitch!

I cannot love him. And yet I am to marry him. They have set the day. It is a month from today. One month. Thirty days. Why cannot I love Alexis? He is tall and strong. He is a soldier. He is in the Guard of the Czar, Nicolas Romanoff, and yet I cannot love him.

.  .  .  .  .

Next Day but one.

How they cramp and confine me here – Ivan Ivanovitch my father, and my mother (I forget her name for the minute), and all the rest.

I cannot breathe.

They will not let me.

Every time I try to commit suicide they hinder me.

Last night I tried again.

I placed a phial of sulphuric acid on the table beside my bed.

In the morning it was still there.

It had not killed me.

They have forbidden me to drown myself.

Why!

I do not know why? In vain I ask the air and the trees why I should not drown myself? They do not see any reason why.

And yet I long to be free, free as the young birds, as the very youngest of them.

I watch the leaves blowing in the wind and I want to be a leaf.

Yet here they want to make me eat!

Yesterday I ate a banana! Ugh!

.  .  .  .  .

Next Day.

Today in my walk I found a cabbage.

It lay in a corner of the hedge. Cruel boys had chased it there with stones.

It was dead when I lifted it up.

Beside it was an egg.

It too was dead. Ah, how I wept—

.  .  .  .  .

This Morning.

How my heart beats. Today A MAN passed. He passed: actually passed.

From my window I saw him go by the garden gate and out into the meadow beside the river where my Tchupvskja flower is growing!

How beautiful he looked! Not tall like Alexis Alexovitch, ah, no! but so short and wide and round – shaped like the beautiful cabbage that died last week.

He wore a velvet jacket and he carried a camp stool and an easel on his back, and in his face was a curved pipe with a long stem, and his face was not red and rough like the face of Alexis, but mild and beautiful and with a smile that played on it like moonlight over putty.

Do I love him? I cannot tell. Not yet. Love is a gentle plant. You cannot force its growth.

As he passed I leaned from the window and threw a rosebud at him.

But he did not see it.

Then I threw a cake of soap and a toothbrush at him. But I missed him, and he passed on.

.  .  .  .  .

Another Day.

Love has come into my life. It fills it. I have seen HIM again. I have spoken with him. He sat beside the river on his camp stool. How beautiful he looked, sitting on it: how strong he seemed and how frail the little stool on which he sat.

Before him was the easel and he was painting. I spoke to him.

I know his name now.

His name – . How my heart beats as I write it – no, I cannot write it, I will whisper it – it is Otto Dinkelspiel.

Is it not a beautiful name? Ah!

He was painting on a canvas – beautiful colours, red and gold and white, in glorious opalescent streaks in all directions.

I looked at it in wonder.

Instinctively I spoke to him. “What are you painting?” I said. “Is it the Heavenly Child?”

“No,” he said, “it is a cow!”

Then I looked again and I could see that it was a cow.

I looked straight into his eyes.

“It shall be our secret,” I said; “no one else shall know.”

And I knew that I loved him.

.  .  .  .  .

A Week Later.

Each morning I go to see Otto beside the river in the meadow.

He sits and paints, and I sit with my hands clasped about my knees and talk to him. I tell him all that I think, all that I read, all that I know, all that I feel, all that I do not feel.

He listens to me with that far-away look that I have learned to love and that means that he is thinking deeply; at times he almost seems not to hear.

The intercourse of our minds is wonderful.

We stimulate one another’s thought.

Otto is my master. I am his disciple!

Yesterday I asked him if Hegel or Schlegel or Whegel gives the truest view of life.

He said he didn’t know! My Otto!

.  .  .  .  .

Today.

Otto touched me! He touched me!

How the recollection of it thrills me!

I stood beside him on the river bank, and as we talked the handle of my parasol touched the bottom button of his waistcoat.

It seemed to burn me like fire!

Tomorrow I am to bring Otto to see my father.

But tonight I can think of nothing else but that Otto has touched me.

.  .  .  .  .

Next Day.

Otto has touched father! He touched him for ten roubles. My father is furious. I cannot tell what it means.

I brought Otto to our home. He spoke with my father, Ivan Ivanovitch. They sat together in the evening. And now my father is angry. He says that Otto wanted to touch him.

Why should he be angry?

But Otto is forbidden the house, and I can see him only in the meadow.

.  .  .  .  .

Two Days Later.

Today Otto asked me for a keepsake.

I offered him one of my hatpins. But he said no. He has taken instead the diamond buckle from my belt.

I read his meaning.

He means that I am to him as a diamond is to lesser natures.

.  .  .  .  .

This Morning.

Yesterday Otto asked me for another keepsake. I took a gold rouble from my bag and said that he should break it in half and that each should keep one of the halves.

But Otto said no. I divined his thought. It would violate our love to break the coin.

He is to keep it for both of us, and it is to remain unbroken like our love.

Is it not a sweet thought?

Otto is so thoughtful. He thinks of everything.

Today he asked me if I had another gold rouble.

.  .  .  .  .

Next Day.

Today I brought Otto another gold rouble.

His eyes shone with love when he saw it.

He has given me for it a bronze kopek. Our love is to be as pure as gold and as strong as bronze.

Is it not beautiful?

.  .  .  .  .

Later.

I am so fearful that Alexis Alexovitch may return.

I fear that if he comes Otto might kill him. Otto is so calm, I dread to think of what would happen if he were aroused.

.  .  .  .  .

Next Day.

I have told Otto about Alexis. I have told him that Alexis is a soldier, that he is in the Guards of the Czar, and that I am betrothed to him. At first Otto would not listen to me. He feared that his anger might overmaster him. He began folding up his camp-stool.

Then I told him that Alexis would not come for some time yet, and he grew calmer.

I have begged him for my sake not to kill Alexis. He has given me his promise.

.  .  .  .  .

Another Day.

Ivan Ivanovitch, my father, has heard from Alexis. He will return in fourteen days. The day after his return I am to marry him.

And meantime I have still fourteen days to love Otto.

My love is perfect. It makes me want to die. Last night I tried again to commit suicide. Why should I live now that I have known a perfect love? I placed a box of cartridges beside my bed. I awoke unharmed. They did not kill me. But I know what it means. It means that Otto and I are to die together. I must tell Otto.

.  .  .  .  .

Later.

Today I told Otto that we must kill ourselves, that our love is so perfect that we have no right to live.

At first he looked so strange.

He suggested that I should kill myself first and that he should starve himself beside my grave.

But I could not accept the sacrifice.

I offered instead to help him to hang himself beside the river.

He is to think it over. If he does not hang himself, he is to shoot himself. I have lent him my father’s revolver. How grateful he looked when he took it.

.  .  .  .  .

Next Day.

Why does Otto seem to avoid me? Has he some secret sorrow that I cannot share? Today he moved his camp-stool to the other side of the meadow. He was in the long grass behind an elderberry bush. At first I did not see him. I thought that he had hanged himself. But he said no. He had forgotten to get a rope. He had tried, he said, to shoot himself. But he had missed himself.

.  .  .  .  .

Five Days Later.

Otto and I are not to die. We are to live; to live and love one another for ever! We are going away, out into the world together! How happy I am!

Otto and I are to flee together.

When Alexis comes we shall be gone; we shall be far away.

I have said to Otto that I will fly with him, and he has said yes.

I told him that we would go out into the world together; empty-handed we would fare forth together and defy the world. I said that he should be my knight-errant, my paladin!

Otto said he would be it.

He has consented. But he says we must not fare forth empty-handed. I do not know why he thinks this, but he is firm, and I yield to my lord. He is making all our preparations.

Each morning I bring to the meadow a little bundle of my things and give them to my knight-errant and he takes them to the inn where he is staying.

Last week I brought my jewel-case, and yesterday, at his request, I took my money from the bank and brought it to my paladin. It will be so safe with him.

Today he said that I shall need some little things to remember my father and mother by when we are gone. So I am to take my father’s gold watch while he is asleep. My hero! How thoughtful he is of my happiness.

.  .  .  .  .

Next Day.

All is ready. Tomorrow I am to meet Otto at the meadow with the watch and the rest of the things.

Tomorrow night we are to flee together. I am to go down to the little gate at the foot of the garden, and Otto will be there.

Today I have wandered about the house and garden and have said good-bye. I have said good-bye to my Tchupvskja flower, and to the birds and the bees.

Tomorrow it will be all over.

.  .  .  .  .

Next Evening.

How can I write what has happened! My soul is shattered to its depths.

All that I dreaded most has happened. How can I live!

Alexis has come back. He and Otto have fought.

Ah God! it has been terrible.

I stood with Otto in the meadow. I had brought him the watch, and I gave it to him, and all my love and my life with it.

Then, as we stood, I turned and saw Alexis Alexovitch striding towards us through the grass.

How tall and soldierly he looked! And the thought flashed through my mind that if Otto killed him he would be lying there a dead, inanimate thing.

“Go, Otto,” I cried, “go, if you stay you will kill him.”

Otto looked and saw Alexis coming. He turned one glance at me: his face was full of infinite meaning.

Then, for my sake, he ran. How noble he looked as he ran. Brave heart! he dared not stay and risk the outburst of his anger.

But Alexis overtook him.

Then beside the river-bank they fought. Ah! but it was terrible to see them fight. Is it not awful when men fight together?

I could only stand and wring my hands and look on in agony!

First, Alexis seized Otto by the waistband of his trousers and swung him round and round in the air. I could see Otto’s face as he went round: the same mute courage was written on it as when he turned to run. Alexis swung Otto round and round until his waistband broke, and he was thrown into the grass.

That was the first part of the fight.

Then Alexis stood beside Otto and kicked him from behind as he lay in the grass, and they fought like that for some time. That was the second part of the fight. Then came the third and last part. Alexis picked up the easel and smashed the picture over Otto’s head. It fastened itself like a collar about his neck. Then Alexis picked Otto up with the picture round his neck and threw him into the stream.

He floated!

My paladin!

He floated!

I could see his upturned face as he floated onwards down the stream, through the meadow! It was full of deep resignation.

Then Alexis Alexovitch came to me and gathered me up in his arms and carried me thus across the meadow – he is so tall and strong – and whispered that he loved me, and that tomorrow he would shield me from the world. He carried me thus to the house in his arms among the grass and flowers; and there was my father, Ivan Ivanovitch, and my mother, Katoosha Katooshavitch. And tomorrow I am to marry Alexis. He had brought back from the inn my jewels and my money, and he gave me again the diamond clasp that Otto had taken from my waist.

How can I bear it? Alexis is to take me to Petersburg, and he has bought a beautiful house in the Prospekt, and I am to live in it with him, and we are to be rich, and I am to be presented at the Court of Nicholas Romanoff and his wife. Ah! Is it not dreadful?

And I can only think of Otto floating down the stream with the easel about his neck. From the little river he will float into the Dnieper, and from the Dnieper into the Bug, and from the Bug he will float down the Volga, and from the Volga into the Caspian Sea. And from the Caspian Sea there is no outlet, and Otto will float round and round it for ever.

Is it not dreadful?

TOC     INDEX

Hannah of the Highlands

—or—
The Laird of
Loch Aucherlocherty.

“Sair maun ye greet, but hoot awa!

There’s muckle yet, love isna’ a’—

Nae more ye’ll see, howe’er ye whine

The bonnie breeks of Auld Lang Syne!”

The simple words rang out fresh and sweet upon the morning air.

It was Hannah of the Highlands. She was gathering lobsters in the burn that ran through the glen.

The scene about her was typically Highland. Wild hills rose on both sides of the burn to a height of seventy-five feet, covered with a dense Highland forest that stretched a hundred yards in either direction. At the foot of the burn a beautiful Scotch logch lay in the hollow of the hills. Beyond it again, through the gap of the hills, was the sea. Through the Glen, and close beside the burn where Hannah stood, wound the road that rose again to follow the cliffs along the shore.

The tourists in the Highlands will find no more beautiful spot than the Glen of Aucherlocherty.

Nor is there any spot which can more justly claim to be historic ground.

It was here in the glen that Bonnie Prince Charlie had lain and hidden after the defeat of Culloden. Almost in the same spot the great boulder still stands behind which the Bruce had lain hidden after Bannockburn; while behind a number of lesser stones the Covenanters had concealed themselves during the height of the Stuart persecution.

Through the Glen Montrose had passed on his fateful ride to Killiecrankie; while at the lower end of it the rock was still pointed out behind which William Wallace had paused to change his breeches while flying from the wrath of Rob Roy.

Grim memories such as these gave character to the spot.

Indeed, most of the great events of Scotch history had taken place in the Glen, while the little logch had been the scene of some of the most stirring naval combats in the history of the Grampian Hills.

But there was little in the scene which lay so peaceful on this April morning to recall the sanguinary history of the Glen. Its sides at present were covered with a thick growth of gorse, elderberry, egg-plants, and ghillie flower, while the woods about it were loud with the voice of the throstle, the linnet, the magpie, the jackdaw, and other song-birds of the Highlands.

It was a gloriously beautiful Scotch morning. The rain fell softly and quietly, bringing dampness and moisture, and almost a sense of wetness to the soft moss underfoot. Grey mists flew hither and thither, carrying with them an invigorating rawness that had almost a feeling of dampness.

It is the memory of such a morning that draws a tear from the eye of Scotchmen after years of exile. The Scotch heart, reader, can be moved to its depths by the sight of a raindrop or the sound of a wet rag.

And meantime Hannah, the beautiful Highland girl, was singing. The fresh young voice rose high above the rain. Even the birds seemed to pause to listen, and as they listened to the simple words of the Gaelic folk-song, fell off the bough with a thud on the grass.

The Highland girl made a beautiful picture as she stood.

Her bare feet were in the burn, the rippling water of which laved her ankles. The lobsters played about her feet, or clung affectionately to her toes, as if loath to leave the water and be gathered in the folds of her blue apron.

It was a scene to charm the heart of a Burne-Jones, or an Alma Tadema, or of anybody fond of lobsters.

The girl’s golden hair flowed widely behind her, gathered in a single braid with a piece of stovepipe wire.

“Will you sell me one of your lobsters?”

Hannah looked up. There, standing in the burn a few yards above her, was the vision of a young man.

The beautiful Highland girl gazed at him fascinated.

He seemed a higher order of being.

He carried a fishing-rod and basket in his hand. He was dressed in a salmon-fishing costume of an English gentleman. Salmon-fishing boots reached to his thighs, while above them he wore a fishing-jacket fastened loosely with a fishing-belt about his waist. He wore a small fishing-cap on his head.

There were no fish in his basket.

He drew near to the Highland girl.

Hannah knew as she looked at him that it must be Ian McWhinus, the new laird.

At sight she loved him.

“Ye’re sair welcome,” she said, as she handed to the young man the finest of her lobsters.

He put it in his basket.

Then he felt in the pocket of his jacket and brought out a sixpenny-piece.

“You must let me pay for it,” he said.

Hannah took the sixpence and held it a moment, flushing with true Highland pride.

“I’ll no be selling the fush for money,” she said.

Something in the girl’s speech went straight to the young man’s heart. He handed her half a crown. Whistling lightly, he strode off up the side of the burn. Hannah stood gazing after him spell-bound. She was aroused from her reverie by an angry voice calling her name.

“Hannah, Hannah,” cried the voice, “come away ben; are ye daft, lass, that ye stand there keeking at a McWhinus?”

Then Hannah realized what she had done.

She had spoken with a McWhinus, a thing that no McShamus had done for a hundred and fifty years. For nearly two centuries the McShamuses and the McWhinuses, albeit both dwellers in the Glen, had been torn asunder by one of those painful divisions by which the life of the Scotch people is broken into fragments.

It had arisen out of a point of spiritual belief.

It had been six generations agone at a Highland banquet, in the days when the unrestrained temper of the time gave way to wild orgies, during which theological discussions raged with unrestrained fury. Shamus McShamus, an embittered Calvinist, half crazed perhaps with liquor, had maintained that damnation could be achieved only by faith. Whimper McWhinus had held that damnation could be achieved also by good works. Inflamed with drink, McShamus had struck McWhinus across the temple with an oatcake and killed him. McShamus had been brought to trial. Although defended by some of the most skilled lawyers of Aucherlocherty, he had been acquitted. On the very night of his acquittal, Whangus McWhinus, the son of the murdered man, had lain in wait for Shamus McShamus, in the hollow of the Glen road where it rises to the cliff, and had shot him through the bagpipes. Since then the feud had raged with unquenched bitterness for a century and a half.

With each generation the difference between the two families became more acute. They differed on every possible point. They wore different tartans, sat under different ministers, drank different brands of whisky, and upheld different doctrines in regard to eternal punishment.

To add to the feud the McWhinuses had grown rich, while the McShamuses had become poor.

At least once in every generation a McWhinus or a McShamus had been shot, and always at the turn of the Glen road where it rose to the edge of the cliff. Finally, two generations gone, the McWhinuses had been raised to sudden wealth by the discovery of a coal mine on their land. To show their contempt for the McShamuses they had left the Glen to live in America. The McShamuses, to show their contempt for the McWhinuses, had remained in the Glen. The feud was kept alive in their memory.

And now the descendant of the McWhinuses had come back, and bought out the property of the Laird of Aucherlocherty beside the Glen. Ian McWhinus knew nothing of the feud. Reared in another atmosphere, the traditions of Scotland had no meaning for him. He had entirely degenerated. To him the tartan had become only a piece of coloured cloth. He wore a kilt as a masquerade costume for a Hallowe’en dance, and when it rained he put on a raincoat. He was no longer Scotch. More than that, he had married a beautiful American wife, a talcum-powder blonde with a dough face and the exquisite rotundity of the packing-house district of the Middle-West. Ian McWhinus was her slave. For her sake he had bought the lobster from Hannah. For her sake, too, he had scrutinized closely the beautiful Highland girl, for his wife was anxious to bring back a Scotch housemaid with her to Chicago.

And meantime Hannah, with the rapture of a new love in her heart, followed her father, Oyster McOyster McShamus, to the cottage. Oyster McOyster, even in advancing age, was a fine specimen of Scotch manhood. Ninety-seven years of age, he was approaching the time when many of his countrymen begin to show the ravages of time. But he bore himself straight as a lath, while his tall stature and his native Highland costume accentuated the fine outline of his form. This costume consisted of a black velvet beetle-shell jacket, which extended from the shoulder half-way down the back, and was continued in a short kilt of the tartan of the McShamuses, which extended from the waist half-way to the thigh. The costume reappeared again after an interval in the form of rolled golf stockings, which extended half-way up to the knee, while on his feet a pair of half shoes were buckled half-way up with a Highland clasp. On his head half-way between the ear and the upper superficies of the skull he wore half a Scotch cap, from which a tall rhinoceros feather extended half-way into the air.

A pair of bagpipes were beneath his arm, from which, as he walked, he blew those deep and plaintive sounds which have done much to imprint upon the characters of those who hear them a melancholy and resigned despair.

At the door of the cottage he turned and faced his daughter.

“What said Ian McWhinus to you i’ the burnside?” he said fiercely.

“’Twas nae muckle,” said Hannah, and she added, for the truth was ever more to her than her father’s wrath, “he gi’ed me saxpence for a fush.”

“Siller!” shrieked the Highlander. “Siller from a McWhinus!”

Hannah handed him the sixpence. Oyster McOyster dashed it fiercely on the ground, then picking it up he dashed it with full force against the wall of the cottage. Then, seizing it again, he dashed it angrily into the pocket of his kilt.

They entered the cottage.

Hannah had never seen her father’s face so dour as it looked that night.

Their home seemed changed.

Hannah and her mother and father sat down that night in silence to their simple meal of oatmeal porridge and Scotch whisky. In the evening the mother sat to her spinning. Busily she plied her work, for it was a task of love. Her eldest born, Jamie, was away at college at Edinburgh, preparing for the ministry. His graduation day was approaching, and Jamie’s mother was spinning him a pair of breeches against the day. The breeches were to be a surprise. Already they were shaping that way. Oyster McShamus sat reading the Old Testament in silence, while Hannah looked into the peat fire and thought of the beautiful young Laird. Only once the Highlander spoke.

“The McWhinus is back,” he said, and his glance turned towards the old flint-lock musket on the wall. That night Hannah dreamed of the feud, of the Glen and the burn, of love, of lobsters, and of the Laird of Loch Aucherlocherty. And when she rose in the morning there was a wistful look in her eyes, and there came no song from her throat.

The days passed.

Each day the beautiful Highland girl saw the young Laird, though her father knew it not.

In the mornings she would see him as he came fishing to the burn. At times he wore his fishing-suit, at other times he had on a knickerbocker suit of shepherd’s plaid with a domino pattern négligé shirt. For his sake the beautiful Highland girl made herself more beautiful still. Each morning she would twine a Scotch thistle in her hair, and pin a spray of burdock at her heart.

And at times he spoke to her. How Hannah treasured his words. Once, catching sight of her father in the distance, he had asked her who was the old sardine in the petticoats, and the girl had answered gladly that it was her father, for, as a fisherman’s daughter, she was proud to have her father mistaken for a sardine.

At another time he had asked her if she was handy about the work of the house. How Hannah’s heart had beat at the question. She made up her mind to spin him a pair of breeches like the ones now finishing for her brother Jamie.

And every evening as the sun set Hannah would watch in secret from the window of the cottage waiting for the young Laird to come past in his motor-car, down the Glen road to the sea. Always he would slacken the car at the sharp turn at the top of the cliff. For six generations no McWhinus had passed that spot after nightfall with his life. But Ian McWhinus knew nothing of the feud.

At times Oyster McOyster would see him pass, and standing at the roadside would call down Gaelic curses on his head.

Once, when her father was from home, Hannah had stood on the roadside, and Ian had stopped the machine and had taken her with him in the car for a ride. Hannah, her heart beating with delight, had listened to him as he explained how the car was worked. Had her father known that she had sat thus beside a McWhinus, he would have slain her where she sat.

The tragedy of Hannah’s love ran swiftly to its close.

Each day she met the young Laird at the burn.

Each day she gave him the finest of her lobsters. She wore a new thistle every day.

And every night, in secret as her mother slept, she span a new concentric section of his breeches.

And the young Laird, when he went home, said to the talcum blonde, that the Highland fisher-girl was not half such a damn fool as she seemed.

Then came the fateful afternoon.

He stood beside her at the burn.

“Hannah,” he said, as he bent towards her, “I want to take you to America.”

Hannah had fallen fainting in his arms.

Ian propped her against a tree, and went home.

An hour later, when Hannah entered her home, her father was standing behind the fireplace. He was staring fixedly into the fire, with the flint-lock musket in his hands. There was the old dour look of the feud upon his face, and there were muttered curses on his lips. His wife Ellen clung to his arm and vainly sought to quiet him.

“Curse him,” he muttered, “I’ll e’en kill him the night as he passes in his deil machine.”

Then Hannah knew that Oyster McShamus had seen her with Ian beside the burn. She turned and fled from the house. Straight up the road she ran towards the manor-house of Aucherlocherty to warn Ian. To save him from her father’s wrath, that was her one thought. Night gathered about the Highland girl as she ran. The rain clouds and the gathering storm hung low with fitful lightning overhead. She still ran on. About her was the rolling of the thunder and the angry roaring of the swollen burn. Then the storm broke upon the darkness with all the fury of the Highland gale. The sky was rent with the fierce play of the elements. Yet on Hannah ran. Again and again the lightning hit her, but she ran on still. She fell over the stones, tripped and stumbled in the ruts, butted into the hedges, cannoned off against the stone walls. But she never stopped. She went quicker and quicker. The storm was awful. Lightning, fire, flame, and thunder were all about her. Trees were falling, hurdles were flying, birds were being struck by lightning. Dogs, sheep, and even cattle were hurled through the air.

She reached the manor-house, and stood a moment at the door. The storm had lulled, the rain ceased, and for a brief moment there was quiet. The light was streaming from the windows of the house. Hannah paused. Suddenly her heart misgave her. Her quick ear had caught the sound of a woman’s voice within. She approached the window and looked in. Then, as if rooted to the spot, the Highland girl gazed and listened at the pane.

Ian lay upon a sofa. The négligé dressing-gown that he wore enhanced the pallid beauty of his face. Beside him sat the talcum-powder blonde. She was feeding him with chocolates. Hannah understood. Ian had trifled with her love. He had bought her lobsters to win her heart, only to cast it aside.

Hannah turned from the window. She plucked the thistle from her throat and flung it on the ground. Then, as she turned her eye, she caught sight of the motor standing in the shed.

“The deil machine!” she muttered, while the wild light of Highland frenzy gathered in her eye; then, as she rushed to it and tore the tarpaulin from off it, “Ye’ll no be wanting of a mark the night, Oyster McShamus,” she cried.

A moment later, the motor, with Hannah at the wheel, was thundering down the road to the Glen. The power was on to the full, and the demented girl clung tight to the steering-gear as the machine rocked and thundered down the descent. The storm was raging again, and the thunder mingled with the roar of the machine as it coursed madly towards the sea. The great eye of the motor blazed in front. The lurid light of it flashed a second on the trees and the burn as it passed, and flashed blinding on the eyes of Oyster as he stood erect on the cliff-side below, musket in hand, and faced the blazing apparition that charged upon him with the old Highland blood surging in his veins.

It was all over in a moment – a blinding flash of lightning, the report of a musket, a great peal of thunder, and the motor bearing the devoted girl hurled headlong over the cliff.

They found her there in the morning. She lay on her side motionless, half buried in the sand, upturned towards the blue Highland sky, serene now after the passing of the storm. Quiet and still she lay. The sea-birds seemed to pause in their flight to look down on her. The little group of Scotch people that had gathered stood and gazed at her with reverential awe. They made no attempt to put her together. It would have been useless. Her gasoline tubes were twisted and bent, her tank burst, her sprockets broken from their sides, and her steering-gear an utter wreck. The motor would never run again.

After a time they roused themselves from their grief and looked about for Hannah. They found her. She lay among the sand and seaweed, her fair hair soaked in gasoline. Then they looked about for Oyster McShamus. Him, too, they found, lying half buried in the grass and soaked in whisky. Then they looked about for Ellen. They found her lying across the door of the cottage half buried in Jamie’s breeches.

Then they gathered them up. Life was not extinct. They chafed their hands. They rubbed their feet. They put hot bricks upon their stomachs. They poured hot whisky down their throats. That brought them to.

Of course.

It always does.

They all lived.

But the feud was done for. That was the end of it. Hannah had put it to the bad.

TOC     INDEX

Soaked in Seaweed

—or—
Upset in the Ocean.

(An Old-fashioned Sea Story.)

It was in August in 1867 that I stepped on board the deck of the Saucy Sally, lying in dock at Gravesend, to fill the berth of second mate.

Let me first say a word about myself.

I was a tall, handsome young fellow, squarely and powerfully built, bronzed by the sun and the moon (and even copper-coloured in spots from the effect of the stars), and with a face in which honesty, intelligence, and exceptional brain power were combined with Christianity, simplicity, and modesty.

As I stepped on the deck I could not help a slight feeling of triumph, as I caught sight of my sailor-like features reflected in a tar-barrel that stood beside the mast, while a little later I could scarcely repress a sense of gratification as I noticed them reflected again in a bucket of bilge water.

“Welcome on board, Mr. Blowhard,” called out Captain Bilge, stepping out of the binnacle and shaking hands across the taffrail.

I saw before me a fine sailor-like man of from thirty to sixty, clean-shaven, except for an enormous pair of whiskers, a heavy beard, and a thick moustache, powerful in build, and carrying his beam well aft, in a pair of broad duck trousers across the back of which there would have been room to write a history of the British Navy.

Beside him were the first and third mates, both of them being quiet men of poor stature, who looked at Captain Bilge with what seemed to me an apprehensive expression in their eyes.

The vessel was on the eve of departure. Her deck presented that scene of bustle and alacrity dear to the sailor’s heart. Men were busy nailing up the masts, hanging the bowsprit over the side, varnishing the lee-scuppers and pouring hot tar down the companion-way.

Captain Bilge, with a megaphone to his lips, kept calling out to the men in his rough sailor fashion:

“Now, then, don’t over-exert yourselves, gentlemen. Remember, please, that we have plenty of time. Keep out of the sun as much as you can. Step carefully in the rigging there, Jones; I fear it’s just a little high for you. Tut, tut, Williams, don’t get yourself so dirty with that tar, you won’t look fit to be seen.”

I stood leaning over the gaff of the mainsail and thinking – yes, thinking, dear reader, of my mother. I hope that you will think none the less of me for that. Whenever things look dark, I lean up against something and think of mother. If they get positively black, I stand on one leg and think of father. After that I can face anything.

Did I think, too, of another, younger than mother and fairer than father? Yes, I did. “Bear up, darling,” I had whispered as she nestled her head beneath my oilskins and kicked out backward with one heel in the agony of her girlish grief, “in five years the voyage will be over, and after three more like it, I shall come back with money enough to buy a second-hand fishing-net and settle down on shore.”

Meantime the ship’s preparations were complete. The masts were all in position, the sails nailed up, and men with axes were busily chopping away the gangway.

“All ready?” called the Captain.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Then hoist the anchor in board and send a man down with the key to open the bar.”

Opening the bar! the last sad rite of departure. How often in my voyages have I seen it; the little group of men soon to be exiled from their home, standing about with saddened faces, waiting to see the man with the key open the bar – held there by some strange fascination.

—

Next morning with a fair wind astern we had buzzed around the corner of England and were running down the Channel.

I know no finer sight, for those who have never seen it, than the English Channel. It is the highway of the world. Ships of all nations are passing up and down, Dutch, Scotch, Venezuelan, and even American.

Chinese junks rush to and fro. Warships, motor yachts, icebergs, and lumber rafts are everywhere. If I add to this fact that so thick a fog hangs over it that it is entirely hidden from sight, my readers can form some idea of the majesty of the scene.

—

We had now been three days at sea. My first sea-sickness was wearing off, and I thought less of father.

On the third morning Captain Bilge descended to my cabin.

“Mr. Blowhard,” he said, “I must ask you to stand double watches.”

“What is the matter?” I inquired.

“The two other mates have fallen overboard,” he said uneasily, and avoiding my eye.

I contented myself with saying, “Very good, sir,” but I could not help thinking it a trifle odd that both the mates should have fallen overboard in the same night.

Surely there was some mystery in this.

Two mornings later the Captain appeared at the breakfast-table with the same shifting and uneasy look in his eye.

“Anything wrong, sir?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered, trying to appear at ease and twisting a fried egg to and fro between his fingers with such nervous force as almost to break it in two – “I regret to say that we have lost the bosun.”

“The bosun!” I cried.

“Yes,” said Captain Bilge more quietly, “he is overboard. I blame myself for it, partly. It was early this morning. I was holding him up in my arms to look at an iceberg, and, quite accidentally I assure you – I dropped him overboard.”

“Captain Bilge,” I asked, “have you taken any steps to recover him?”

“Not as yet,” he replied uneasily.

I looked at him fixedly, but said nothing.

Ten days passed.

The mystery thickened. On Thursday two men of the starboard watch were reported missing. On Friday the carpenter’s assistant disappeared. On the night of Saturday a circumstance occurred which, slight as it was, gave me some clue as to what was happening.

As I stood at the wheel about midnight, I saw the Captain approach in the darkness carrying the cabin-boy by the hind leg. The lad was a bright little fellow, whose merry disposition had already endeared him to me, and I watched with some interest to see what the Captain would do to him. Arrived at the stern of the vessel, Captain Bilge looked cautiously around a moment and then dropped the boy into the sea. For a brief instant the lad’s head appeared in the phosphorus of the waves. The Captain threw a boot at him, sighed deeply, and went below.

Here then was the key to the mystery! The Captain was throwing the crew overboard. Next morning we met at breakfast as usual.

“Poor little Williams has fallen overboard,” said the Captain, seizing a strip of ship’s bacon and tearing at it with his teeth as if he almost meant to eat it.

“Captain,” I said, greatly excited, stabbing at a ship’s loaf in my agitation with such ferocity as almost to drive my knife into it – “You threw that boy overboard!”

“I did,” said Captain Bilge, grown suddenly quiet, “I threw them all over and intend to throw the rest. Listen, Blowhard, you are young, ambitious, and trustworthy. I will confide in you.”

Perfectly calm now, he stepped to a locker, rummaged in it a moment, and drew out a faded piece of yellow parchment, which he spread on the table. It was a map or chart. In the centre of it was a circle. In the middle of the circle was a small dot and a letter T, while at one side of the map was a letter N, and against it on the other side a letter S.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Can you not guess?” queried Captain Bilge. “It is a desert island.”

“Ah!” I rejoined with a sudden flash of intuition, “and N is for North and S is for South.”

“Blowhard,” said the Captain, striking the table with such force as to cause a loaf of ship’s bread to bounce up and down three or four times, “you’ve struck it. That part of it had not yet occurred to me.”

“And the letter T?” I asked.

“The treasure, the buried treasure,” said the Captain, and turning the map over he read from the back of it – “The point T indicates the spot where the treasure is buried under the sand; it consists of half a million Spanish dollars, and is buried in a brown leather dress-suit case.”

“And where is the island?” I inquired, mad with excitement.

“That I do not know,” said the Captain. “I intend to sail up and down the parallels of latitude until I find it.”

“And meantime?”

“Meantime, the first thing to do is to reduce the number of the crew so as to have fewer hands to divide among. Come, come,” he added in a burst of frankness which made me love the man in spite of his shortcomings, “will you join me in this? We’ll throw them all over, keeping the cook to the last, dig up the treasure, and be rich for the rest of our lives.”

Reader, do you blame me if I said yes? I was young, ardent, ambitious, full of bright hopes and boyish enthusiasm.

“Captain Bilge,” I said, putting my hand in his, “I am yours.”

“Good,” he said, “now go forward to the forecastle and get an idea what the men are thinking.”

I went forward to the men’s quarters – a plain room in the front of the ship, with only a rough carpet on the floor, a few simple arm-chairs, writing-desks, spittoons of a plain pattern, and small brass beds with blue-and-green screens. It was Sunday morning, and the men were mostly sitting about in their dressing-gowns.

They rose as I entered and curtseyed.

“Sir,” said Tompkins, the bosun’s mate, “I think it my duty to tell you that there is a great deal of dissatisfaction among the men.”

Several of the men nodded.

“They don’t like the way the men keep going overboard,” he continued, his voice rising to a tone of uncontrolled passion. “It is positively absurd, sir, and if you will allow me to say so, the men are far from pleased.”

“Tompkins,” I said sternly, “you must understand that my position will not allow me to listen to mutinous language of this sort.”

I returned to the Captain. “I think the men mean mutiny,” I said.

“Good,” said Captain Bilge, rubbing his hands, “that will get rid of a lot of them, and of course,” he added musingly, looking out of the broad old-fashioned port-hole at the stern of the cabin, at the heaving waves of the South Atlantic, “I am expecting pirates at any time, and that will take out quite a few of them. However” – and here he pressed the bell for a cabin-boy – “kindly ask Mr. Tompkins to step this way.”

“Tompkins,” said the Captain as the bosun’s mate entered, “be good enough to stand on the locker and stick your head through the stern port-hole, and tell me what you think of the weather.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” replied the tar with a simplicity which caused us to exchange a quiet smile.

Tompkins stood on the locker and put his head and shoulders out of the port.

Taking a leg each we pushed him through. We heard him plump into the sea.

“Tompkins was easy,” said Captain Bilge. “Excuse me as I enter his death in the log.”

“Yes,” he continued presently, “it will be a great help if they mutiny. I suppose they will, sooner or later. It’s customary to do so. But I shall take no step to precipitate it until we have first fallen in with pirates. I am expecting them in these latitudes at any time. Meantime, Mr. Blowhard,” he said, rising, “if you can continue to drop overboard one or two more each week, I shall feel extremely grateful.”

Three days later we rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered upon the inky waters of the Indian Ocean. Our course lay now in zigzags and, the weather being favourable, we sailed up and down at a furious rate over a sea as calm as glass.

On the fourth day a pirate ship appeared. Reader, I do not know if you have ever seen a pirate ship. The sight was one to appal the stoutest heart. The entire ship was painted black, a black flag hung at the masthead, the sails were black, and on the deck people dressed all in black walked up and down arm-in-arm. The words “Pirate Ship” were painted in white letters on the bow. At the sight of it our crew were visibly cowed. It was a spectacle that would have cowed a dog.

The two ships were brought side by side. They were then lashed tightly together with bag string and binder twine, and a gang plank laid between them. In a moment the pirates swarmed upon our deck, rolling their eyes, gnashing their teeth and filing their nails.

Then the fight began. It lasted two hours – with fifteen minutes off for lunch. It was awful. The men grappled with one another, kicked one another from behind, slapped one another across the face, and in many cases completely lost their temper and tried to bite one another. I noticed one gigantic fellow brandishing a knotted towel, and striking right and left among our men, until Captain Bilge rushed at him and struck him flat across the mouth with a banana skin.

At the end of two hours, by mutual consent, the fight was declared a draw. The points standing at sixty-one and a half against sixty-two.

The ships were unlashed, and with three cheers from each crew, were headed on their way.

“Now, then,” said the Captain to me aside, “let us see how many of the crew are sufficiently exhausted to be thrown overboard.”

He went below. In a few minutes he reappeared, his face deadly pale. “Blowhard,” he said, “the ship is sinking. One of the pirates (sheer accident, of course, I blame no one) has kicked a hole in the side. Let us sound the well.”

We put our ear to the ship’s well. It sounded like water.

The men were put to the pumps and worked with the frenzied effort which only those who have been drowned in a sinking ship can understand.

At six p.m. the well marked one half an inch of water, at nightfall three-quarters of an inch, and at daybreak, after a night of unremitting toil, seven-eighths of an inch.

By noon of the next day the water had risen to fifteen-sixteenths of an inch, and on the next night the sounding showed thirty-one thirty-seconds of an inch of water in the hold. The situation was desperate. At this rate of increase few, if any, could tell where it would rise to in a few days.

That night the Captain called me to his cabin. He had a book of mathematical tables in front of him, and great sheets of vulgar fractions littered the floor on all sides.

“The ship is bound to sink,” he said, “in fact, Blowhard, she is sinking. I can prove it. It may be six months or it may take years, but if she goes on like this, sink she must. There is nothing for it but to abandon her.”

That night, in the dead of darkness, while the crew were busy at the pumps, the Captain and I built a raft.

Unobserved we cut down the masts, chopped them into suitable lengths, laid them crosswise in a pile and lashed them tightly together with bootlaces.

Hastily we threw on board a couple of boxes of food and bottles of drinking fluid, a sextant, a chronometer, a gas-meter, a bicycle pump and a few other scientific instruments. Then taking advantage of a roll in the motion of the ship, we launched the raft, lowered ourselves upon a line, and under cover of the heavy dark of a tropical night, we paddled away from the doomed vessel.

The break of day found us a tiny speck on the Indian Ocean. We looked about as big as this (.).

In the morning, after dressing, and shaving as best we could, we opened our box of food and drink.

Then came the awful horror of our situation.

One by one the Captain took from the box the square blue tins of canned beef which it contained. We counted fifty-two in all. Anxiously and with drawn faces we watched until the last can was lifted from the box. A single thought was in our minds. When the end came the Captain stood up on the raft with wild eyes staring at the sky.

“The can-opener!” he shrieked, “just Heaven, the can-opener.” He fell prostrate.

Meantime, with trembling hands, I opened the box of bottles. It contained lager beer bottles, each with a patent tin top. One by one I took them out. There were fifty-two in all. As I withdrew the last one and saw the empty box before me, I shroke out – “The thing! the thing! oh, merciful Heaven! The thing you open them with!”

I fell prostrate upon the Captain.

We awoke to find ourselves still a mere speck upon the ocean. We felt even smaller than before.

Over us was the burnished copper sky of the tropics. The heavy, leaden sea lapped the sides of the raft. All about us was a litter of corn beef cans and lager beer bottles. Our sufferings in the ensuing days were indescribable. We beat and thumped at the cans with our fists. Even at the risk of spoiling the tins for ever we hammered them fiercely against the raft. We stamped on them, bit at them and swore at them. We pulled and clawed at the bottles with our hands, and chipped and knocked them against the cans, regardless even of breaking the glass and ruining the bottles.

It was futile.

Then day after day we sat in moody silence, gnawed with hunger, with nothing to read, nothing to smoke, and practically nothing to talk about.

On the tenth day the Captain broke silence.

“Get ready the lots, Blowhard,” he said. “It’s got to come to that.”

“Yes,” I answered drearily, “we’re getting thinner every day.”

Then, with the awful prospect of cannibalism before us, we drew lots.

I prepared the lots and held them to the Captain. He drew the longer one.

“Which does that mean,” he asked, trembling between hope and despair. “Do I win?”

“No, Bilge,” I said sadly, “you lose.”

—

But I mustn’t dwell on the days that followed – the long quiet days of lazy dreaming on the raft, during which I slowly built up my strength, which had been shattered by privation. They were days, dear reader, of deep and quiet peace, and yet I cannot recall them without shedding a tear for the brave man who made them what they were.

It was on the fifth day after that I was awakened from a sound sleep by the bumping of the raft against the shore. I had eaten perhaps overheartily, and had not observed the vicinity of land.

Before me was an island, the circular shape of which, with its low, sandy shore, recalled at once its identity.

“The treasure island,” I cried, “at last I am rewarded for all my heroism.”

In a fever of haste I rushed to the centre of the island. What was the sight that confronted me? A great hollow scooped in the sand, an empty dress-suit case lying beside it, and on a ship’s plank driven deep into the sand, the legend, “Saucy Sally, October, 1867.” So! the miscreants had made good the vessel, headed it for the island of whose existence they must have learned from the chart we so carelessly left upon the cabin table, and had plundered poor Bilge and me of our well-earned treasure!

Sick with the sense of human ingratitude I sank upon the sand.

The island became my home.

There I eked out a miserable existence, feeding on sand and gravel and dressing myself in cactus plants. Years passed. Eating sand and mud slowly undermined my robust constitution. I fell ill. I died. I buried myself.

Would that others who write sea stories would do as much.

TOC     INDEX

Caroline’s Christmas

—or—
The Inexplicable Infant.

It was Xmas – Xmas with its mantle of white snow, scintillating from a thousand diamond points, Xmas with its good cheer, its peace on earth – Xmas with its feasting and merriment, Xmas with its – well, anyway, it was Xmas.

Or no, that’s a slight slip; it wasn’t exactly Xmas, it was Xmas Eve, Xmas Eve with its mantle of white snow lying beneath the calm moonlight – and, in fact, with practically the above list of accompanying circumstances with a few obvious emendations.

Yes, it was Xmas Eve.

And more than that!

Listen to where it was Xmas.

It was Xmas Eve on the Old Homestead. Reader, do you know, by sight, the Old Homestead? In the pauses of your work at your city desk, where you have grown rich and avaricious, does it never rise before your mind’s eye, the quiet old homestead that knew you as a boy before your greed of gold tore you away from it? The Old Homestead that stands beside the road just on the rise of the hill, with its dark spruce trees wrapped in snow, the snug barns and straw stacks behind it; while from its windows there streams a shaft of light from a coal-oil lamp, about as thick as a slate pencil that you can see four miles away, from the other side of the cedar swamp in the hollow. Don’t talk to me of your modern searchlights and your incandescent arcs, beside that gleam of light from the coal-oil lamp in the farmhouse window. It will shine clear to the heart across thirty years of distance. Do you not turn, I say, sometimes, reader, from the roar and hustle of the city with its ill-gotten wealth and its godless creed of mammon, to think of the quiet homestead under the brow of the hill? You don’t! Well, you skunk!

It was Xmas Eve.

The light shone from the windows of the homestead farm. The light of the log fire rose and flickered and mingled its red glare on the windows with the calm yellow of the lamplight.

John Enderby and his wife sat in the kitchen room of the farmstead. Do you know it, reader, the room called the kitchen? – with the open fire on its old brick hearth, and the cook stove in the corner. It is the room of the farm where people cook and eat and live. It is the living-room. The only other room beside the bedroom is the small room in front, chill-cold in winter, with an organ in it for playing “Rock of Ages” on, when company came. But this room is only used for music and funerals. The real room of the old farm is the kitchen. Does it not rise up before you, reader? It doesn’t? Well, you darn fool!

At any rate there sat old John Enderby beside the plain deal table, his head bowed upon his hands, his grizzled face with its unshorn stubble stricken down with the lines of devastating trouble. From time to time he rose and cast a fresh stick of tamarack into the fire with a savage thud that sent a shower of sparks up the chimney. Across the fireplace sat his wife Anna on a straight-backed chair, looking into the fire with the mute resignation of her sex.

What was wrong with them anyway? Ah, reader, can you ask? Do you know or remember so little of the life of the old homestead? When I have said that it is the Old Homestead and Xmas Eve, and that the farmer is in great trouble and throwing tamarack at the fire, surely you ought to guess!

The Old Homestead was mortgaged! Ten years ago, reckless with debt, crazed with remorse, mad with despair and persecuted with rheumatism, John Enderby had mortgaged his farmstead for twenty-four dollars and thirty cents.

Tonight the mortgage fell due, tonight at midnight, Xmas night. Such is the way in which mortgages of this kind are always drawn. Yes, sir, it was drawn with such diabolical skill that on this night of all nights the mortgage would be foreclosed. At midnight the men would come with hammer and nails and foreclose it, nail it up tight.

So the afflicted couple sat.

Anna, with the patient resignation of her sex, sat silent or at times endeavoured to read. She had taken down from the little wall-shelf Bunyan’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. She tried to read it. She could not. Then she had taken Dante’s Inferno. She could not read it. Then she had selected Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. But she could not read it either. Lastly, she had taken the Farmer’s Almanac for 1911. The books lay littered about her as she sat in patient despair.

John Enderby showed all the passion of an uncontrolled nature. At times he would reach out for the crock of buttermilk that stood beside him and drained a draught of the maddening liquid, till his brain glowed like the coals of the tamarack fire before him.

“John,” pleaded Anna, “leave alone the buttermilk. It only maddens you. No good ever came of that.”

“Aye, lass,” said the farmer, with a bitter laugh, as he buried his head again in the crock, “what care I if it maddens me.”

“Ah, John, you’d better be employed in reading the Good Book than in your wild courses. Here take it, father, and read it” – and she handed to him the well-worn black volume from the shelf. Enderby paused a moment and held the volume in his hand. He and his wife had known nothing of religious teaching in the public schools of their day, but the first-class non-sectarian education that the farmer had received had stood him in good stead.

“Take the book,” she said. “Read, John, in this hour of affliction; it brings comfort.”

The farmer took from her hand the well-worn copy of Euclid’s Elements, and laying aside his hat with reverence, he read aloud: “The angles at the base of an isoceles triangle are equal, and whosoever shall produce the sides, lo, the same also shall be equal each unto each.”

The farmer put the book aside.

“It’s no use, Anna. I can’t read the good words tonight.”

He rose, staggered to the crock of buttermilk, and before his wife could stay his hand, drained it to the last drop.

Then he sank heavily to his chair.

“Let them foreclose it, if they will,” he said; “I am past caring.”

The woman looked sadly into the fire.

Ah, if only her son Henry had been here. Henry, who had left them three years agone, and whose bright letters still brought from time to time the gleam of hope to the stricken farmhouse.

Henry was in Sing Sing. His letters brought news to his mother of his steady success; first in the baseball nine of the prison, a favourite with his wardens and the chaplain, the best bridge player of the corridor. Henry was pushing his way to the front with the old-time spirit of the Enderbys.

His mother had hoped that he might have been with her at Xmas, but Henry had written that it was practically impossible for him to leave Sing Sing. He could not see his way out. The authorities were arranging a dance and sleighing party for the Xmas celebration. He had some hope, he said, of slipping away unnoticed, but his doing so might excite attention.

Of the trouble at home Anna had told her son nothing.

No, Henry could not come. There was no help there. And William, the other son, ten years older than Henry. Alas, William had gone forth from the old homestead to fight his way in the great city! “Mother,” he had said, “when I make a million dollars I’ll come home. Till then good-bye,” and he had gone.

How Anna’s heart had beat for him. Would he make that million dollars? Would she ever live to see it? And as the years passed she and John had often sat in the evenings picturing William at home again, bringing with him a million dollars, or picturing the million dollars sent by express with love. But the years had passed. William came not. He did not come. The great city had swallowed him up as it has many another lad from the old homestead.

Anna started from her musing—

What was that at the door? The sound of a soft and timid rapping, and through the glass of the door-pane, a face, a woman’s face looking into the fire-lit room with pleading eyes. What was it she bore in her arms, the little bundle that she held tight to her breast to shield it from the falling snow? Can you guess, reader? Try three guesses and see. Right you are. That’s what it was.

The farmer’s wife went hastily to the door.

“Lord’s mercy!” she cried, “what are you doing out on such a night? Come in, child, to the fire!”

The woman entered, carrying the little bundle with her, and looking with wide eyes (they were at least an inch and a half across) at Enderby and his wife. Anna could see that there was no wedding-ring on her hand.

“Your name?” said the farmer’s wife.

“My name is Caroline,” the girl whispered. The rest was lost in the low tones of her voice. “I want shelter,” she paused, “I want you to take the child.”

Anna took the baby and laid it carefully on the top shelf of the cupboard, then she hastened to bring a glass of water and a dough-nut, and set it before the half-frozen girl.

“Eat,” she said, “and warm yourself.”

John rose from his seat.

“I’ll have no child of that sort here,” he said.

“John, John,” pleaded Anna, “remember what the Good Book says: ‘Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another!’”

John sank back in his chair.

And why had Caroline no wedding-ring? Ah, reader, can you not guess. Well, you can’t. It wasn’t what you think at all; so there. Caroline had no wedding-ring because she had thrown it away in bitterness, as she tramped the streets of the great city. “Why,” she cried, “should the wife of a man in the penitentiary wear a ring.”

Then she had gone forth with the child from what had been her home.

It was the old sad story.

She had taken the baby and laid it tenderly, gently on a seat in the park. Then she walked rapidly away. A few minutes after a man had chased after Caroline with the little bundle in his arms. “I beg your pardon,” he said, panting, “I think you left your baby in the park.” Caroline thanked him.

Next she took the baby to the Grand Central Waiting-room, kissed it tenderly, and laid it on a shelf behind the lunch-counter.

A few minutes later an official, beaming with satisfaction, had brought it back to her.

“Yours, I think, madame,” he said, as he handed it to her. Caroline thanked him.

Then she had left it at the desk of the Waldorf Astoria, and at the ticket-office of the subway.

It always came back.

Once or twice she took it to Brooklyn Bridge and threw it into the river, but perhaps something in the way it fell through the air touched the mother’s heart and smote her, and she had descended to the river and fished it out.

Then Caroline had taken the child to the country. At first she thought to leave it on the wayside and she had put it down in the snow, and standing a little distance off had thrown mullein stalks at it, but something in the way the little bundle lay covered in the snow appealed to the mother’s heart.

She picked it up and went on. “Somewhere,” she murmured, “I shall find a door of kindness open to it.” Soon after she had staggered into the homestead.

Anna, with true woman’s kindness, asked no questions. She put the baby carefully away in a trunk, saw Caroline safely to bed in the best room, and returned to her seat beside the fire.

The old clock struck twenty minutes past eight.

Again a knock sounded at the door.

There entered the familiar figure of the village lawyer. His astrachan coat of yellow dogskin, his celluloid collar, and boots which reached no higher than the ankle, contrasted with the rude surroundings of the little room.

“Enderby,” he said, “can you pay?”

“Lawyer Perkins,” said the farmer, “give me time and I will; so help me, give me five years more and I’ll clear this debt to the last cent.”

“John,” said the lawyer, touched in spite of his rough (dogskin) exterior, “I couldn’t, if I would. These things are not what they were. It’s a big New York corporation, Pinchem & Company, that makes these loans now, and they take their money on the day, or they sell you up. I can’t help it. So there’s your notice, John, and I am sorry! No, I’ll take no buttermilk, I must keep a clear head to work,” and with that he hurried out into the snow again.

John sat brooding in his chair.

The fire flickered down.

The old clock struck half-past eight, then it half struck a quarter to nine, then slowly it struck striking.

Presently Enderby rose, picked a lantern from its hook, “Mortgage or no mortgage,” he said, “I must see to the stock.”

He passed out of the house, and standing in the yard, looked over the snow to the cedar swamp beyond with the snow winding through it, far in the distance the lights of the village far away.

He thought of the forty years he had spent here on the homestead – the rude, pioneer days – the house he had built for himself, with its plain furniture, the old-fashioned spinning-wheel on which Anna had spun his trousers, the wooden telephone and the rude skidway on which he ate his meals.

He looked out over the swamp and sighed.

Down in the swamp, two miles away, could he but have seen it, there moved a sleigh, and in it a man dressed in a sealskin coat and silk hat, whose face beamed in the moonlight as he turned to and fro and stared at each object by the roadside as at an old familiar scene. Round his waist was a belt containing a million dollars in gold coin, and as he halted his horse in an opening of the road he unstrapped the belt and counted the coins.

Beside him there crouched in the bushes at the dark edge of the swamp road, with eyes that watched every glitter of the coins, and a hand that grasped a heavy cudgel of blackthorn, a man whose close-cropped hair and hard lined face belonged nowhere but within the walls of Sing Sing.

When the sleigh started again the man in the bushes followed doggedly in its track.

Meantime John Enderby had made the rounds of his outbuildings. He bedded the fat cattle that blinked in the flashing light of the lantern. He stood a moment among his hogs, and, farmer as he was, forgot his troubles a moment to speak to each, calling them by name. It smote him to think how at times he had been tempted to sell one of the hogs, or even to sell the cattle to clear the mortgage off the place. Thank God, however, he had put that temptation behind him.

As he reached the house a sleigh was standing on the roadway. Anna met him at the door. “John,” she said, “there was a stranger came while you were in the barn, and wanted a lodging for the night; a city man, I reckon, by his clothes. I hated to refuse him, and I put him in Willie’s room. We’ll never want it again, and he’s gone to sleep.”

“Ay, we can’t refuse.”

John Enderby took out the horse to the barn, and then returned to his vigil with Anna beside the fire.

The fumes of the buttermilk had died out of his brain. He was thinking, as he sat there, of midnight and what it would bring.

In the room above, the man in the sealskin coat had thrown himself down, clothes and all, upon the bed, tired with his drive.

“How it all comes back to me,” he muttered as he fell asleep, “the same old room, nothing changed – except them – how worn they look,” and a tear started to his eyes. He thought of his leaving his home fifteen years ago, of his struggle in the great city, of the great idea he had conceived of making money, and of the Farm Investment Company he had instituted – the simple system of applying the crushing power of capital to exact the uttermost penny from the farm loans. And now here he was back again, true to his word, with a million dollars in his belt. “Tomorrow,” he had murmured, “I will tell them. It will be Xmas.” Then William – yes, reader, it was William (see line 503 above) had fallen asleep.

The hours passed, and kept passing.

It was 11.30.

Then suddenly Anna started from her place.

“Henry!” she cried as the door opened and a man entered. He advanced gladly to meet her, and in a moment mother and son were folded in a close embrace. It was Henry, the man from Sing Sing. True to his word, he had slipped away unostentatiously at the height of the festivities.

“Alas, Henry,” said the mother after the warmth of the first greetings had passed, “you come at an unlucky hour.” They told him of the mortgage on the farm and the ruin of his home.

“Yes,” said Anna, “not even a bed to offer you,” and she spoke of the strangers who had arrived; of the stricken woman and the child, and the rich man in the sealskin coat who had asked for a night’s shelter.

Henry listened intently while they told him of the man, and a sudden light of intelligence flashed into his eye.

“By Heaven, father, I have it!” he cried. Then dropping his voice, he said, “Speak low, father. This man upstairs, he had a sealskin coat and silk hat?”

“Yes,” said the father.

“Father,” said Henry, “I saw a man sitting in a sleigh in the cedar swamp. He had money in his hand, and he counted it, and chuckled – five dollar gold pieces – in all, 1,125,465 dollars and a quarter.”

The father and son looked at one another.

“I see your idea,” said Enderby sternly.

“We’ll choke him,” said Henry.

“Or club him,” said the farmer, “and pay the mortgage.”

Anna looked from one to the other, joy and hope struggling with the sorrow in her face. “Henry, my Henry,” she said proudly, “I knew he would find a way.”

“Come on,” said Henry; “bring the lamp, mother, take the club, father,” and gaily, but with hushed voices, the three stole up the stairs.

The stranger lay sunk in sleep. The back of his head was turned to them as they came in.

“Now, mother,” said the farmer firmly, “hold the lamp a little nearer; just behind the ear, I think, Henry.”

“No,” said Henry, rolling back his sleeve and speaking with the quick authority that sat well upon him, “across the jaw, father, it’s quicker and neater.”

“Well, well,” said the farmer, smiling proudly, “have your own way, lad, you know best.”

Henry raised the club.

But as he did so – stay, what was that? Far away behind the cedar swamp the deep booming of the bell of the village church began to strike out midnight. One, two, three, its tones came clear across the crisp air. Almost at the same moment the clock below began with deep strokes to mark the midnight hour; from the farmyard chicken coop a rooster began to crow twelve times, while the loud lowing of the cattle and the soft cooing of the hogs seemed to usher in the morning of Christmas with its message of peace and goodwill.

The club fell from Henry’s hand and rattled on the floor.

The sleeper woke, and sat up.

“Father! Mother!” he cried.

“My son, my son,” sobbed the father, “we had guessed it was you. We had come to wake you.”

“Yes, it is I,” said William, smiling to his parents, “and I have brought the million dollars. Here it is,” and with that he unstrapped the belt from his waist and laid a million dollars on the table.

“Thank Heaven!” cried Anna, “our troubles are at an end. This money will help clear the mortgage – and the greed of Pinchem & Co. cannot harm us now.”

“The farm was mortgaged!” said William, aghast.

“Ay,” said the farmer, “mortgaged to men who have no conscience, whose greedy hand has nearly brought us to the grave. See how she has aged, my boy,” and he pointed to Anna.

“Father,” said William, in deep tones of contrition, “I am Pinchem & Co. Heaven help me! I see it now. I see at what expense of suffering my fortune was made. I will restore it all, these million dollars, to those I have wronged.”

“No,” said his mother softly. “You repent, dear son, with true Christian repentance. That is enough. You may keep the money. We will look upon it as a trust, a sacred trust, and every time we spend a dollar of it on ourselves we will think of it as a trust.”

“Yes,” said the farmer softly, “your mother is right, the money is a trust, and we will restock the farm with it, buy out the Jones’s property, and regard the whole thing as a trust.”

At this moment the door of the room opened. A woman’s form appeared. It was Caroline, robed in one of Anna’s directoire nightgowns.

“I heard your voices,” she said, and then, as she caught sight of Henry, she gave a great cry.

“My husband!”

“My wife,” said Henry, and folded her to his heart.

“You have left Sing Sing?” cried Caroline with joy.

“Yes, Caroline,” said Henry. “I shall never go back.”

Gaily the reunited family descended. Anna carried the lamp, Henry carried the club. William carried the million dollars.

The tamarack fire roared again upon the hearth. The buttermilk circulated from hand to hand. William and Henry told and retold the story of their adventures. The first streak of the Christmas morn fell through the door-pane.

“Ah, my sons,” said John Enderby, “henceforth let us stick to the narrow path. What is it that the Good Book says: ‘A straight line is that which lies evenly between its extreme points.’”

TOC     INDEX

The Man in Asbestos

An Allegory of the Future.

To begin with let me admit that I did it on purpose. Perhaps it was partly from jealousy.

It seemed unfair that other writers should be able at will to drop into a sleep of four or five hundred years, and to plunge head-first into a distant future and be a witness of its marvels.

I wanted to do that too.

I always had been, I still am, a passionate student of social problems. The world of today with its roaring machinery, the unceasing toil of its working classes, its strife, its poverty, its war, its cruelty, appals me as I look at it. I love to think of the time that must come some day when man will have conquered nature, and the toil-worn human race enter upon an era of peace.

I loved to think of it, and I longed to see it.

So I set about the thing deliberately.

What I wanted to do was to fall asleep after the customary fashion, for two or three hundred years at least, and wake and find myself in the marvel world of the future.

I made my preparations for the sleep.

I bought all the comic papers that I could find, even the illustrated ones. I carried them up to my room in my hotel: with them I brought up a pork pie and dozens and dozens of doughnuts. I ate the pie and the doughnuts, then sat back in the bed and read the comic papers one after the other. Finally, as I felt the awful lethargy stealing upon me, I reached out my hand for the London Weekly Times, and held up the editorial page before my eye.

It was, in a way, clear, straight suicide, but I did it.

I could feel my senses leaving me. In the room across the hall there was a man singing. His voice, that had been loud, came fainter and fainter through the transom. I fell into a sleep, the deep immeasurable sleep in which the very existence of the outer world was hushed. Dimly I could feel the days go past, then the years, and then the long passage of the centuries.

Then, not as it were gradually, but quite suddenly, I woke up, sat up, and looked about me.

Where was I?

Well might I ask myself.

I found myself lying, or rather sitting up, on a broad couch. I was in a great room, dim, gloomy, and dilapidated in its general appearance, and apparently, from its glass cases and the stuffed figures that they contained, some kind of museum.

Beside me sat a man. His face was hairless, but neither old nor young. He wore clothes that looked like the grey ashes of paper that had burned and kept its shape. He was looking at me quietly, but with no particular surprise or interest.

“Quick,” I said, eager to begin; “where am I? Who are you? What year is this; is it the year 3000, or what is it?”

He drew in his breath with a look of annoyance on his face.

“What a queer, excited way you have of speaking,” he said.

“Tell me,” I said again, “is this the year 3000?”

“I think I know what you mean,” he said; “but really I haven’t the faintest idea. I should think it must be at least that; within a hundred years or so; but nobody has kept track of them for so long, it’s hard to say.”

“Don’t you keep track of them any more?” I gasped.

“We used to,” said the man. “I myself can remember that a century or two ago there were still a number of people who used to try to keep track of the year, but it died out along with so many other faddish things of that kind. Why,” he continued, showing for the first time a sort of animation in his talk, “what was the use of it? You see, after we eliminated death——”

“Eliminated death!” I cried, sitting upright. “Good God!”

“What was that expression you used?” queried the man.

“Good God!” I repeated.

“Ah,” he said, “never heard it before. But I was saying that after we had eliminated Death, and Food, and Change, we had practically got rid of Events, and——”

“Stop!” I said, my brain reeling. “Tell me one thing at a time.”

“Humph!” he ejaculated. “I see, you must have been asleep a long time. Go on then and ask questions. Only, if you don’t mind, just as few as possible, and please don’t get interested or excited.”

Oddly enough the first question that sprang to my lips was—

“What are those clothes made of?”

“Asbestos,” answered the man. “They last hundreds of years. We have one suit each, and there are billions of them piled up, if anybody wants a new one.”

“Thank you,” I answered. “Now tell me where I am?”

“You are in a museum. The figures in the cases are specimens like yourself. But here,” he said, “if you want really to find out about what is evidently a new epoch to you, get off your platform and come out on Broadway and sit on a bench.”

I got down.

As we passed through the dim and dust-covered buildings I looked curiously at the figures in the cases.

“By Jove!” I said, looking at one figure in blue clothes with a belt and baton, “that’s a policeman!”

“Really,” said my new acquaintance, “is that what a policeman was? I’ve often wondered. What used they to be used for?”

“Used for?” I repeated in perplexity. “Why, they stood at the corner of the street.”

“Ah, yes, I see,” he said, “so as to shoot at the people. You must excuse my ignorance,” he continued, “as to some of your social customs in the past. When I took my education I was operated upon for social history, but the stuff they used was very inferior.”

I didn’t in the least understand what the man meant, but had no time to question him, for at that moment we came out upon the street, and I stood riveted in astonishment.

Broadway! Was it possible? The change was absolutely appalling! In place of the roaring thoroughfare that I had known, this silent, moss-grown desolation. Great buildings fallen into ruin through the sheer stress of centuries of wind and weather, the sides of them coated over with a growth of fungus and moss! The place was soundless. Not a vehicle moved. There were no wires overhead – no sound of life or movement except, here and there, there passed slowly to and fro human figures dressed in the same asbestos clothes as my acquaintance, with the same hairless faces, and the same look of infinite age upon them.

Good heavens! And was this the era of the Conquest that I had hoped to see! I had always taken for granted, I do not know why, that humanity was destined to move forward. This picture of what seemed desolation on the ruins of our civilization rendered me almost speechless.

There were little benches placed here and there on the street. We sat down.

“Improved, isn’t it,” said the man in asbestos, “since the days when you remember it?”

He seemed to speak quite proudly.

I gasped out a question.

“Where are the street cars and the motors?”

“Oh, done away with long ago,” he said; “how awful they must have been. The noise of them!” and his asbestos clothes rustled with a shudder.

“But how do you get about?”

“We don’t,” he answered. “Why should we? It’s just the same being here as being anywhere else.” He looked at me with an infinity of dreariness in his face.

A thousand questions surged into my mind at once. I asked one of the simplest.

“But how do you get back and forwards to your work?”

“Work!” he said. “There isn’t any work. It’s finished. The last of it was all done centuries ago.”

I looked at him a moment open-mouthed. Then I turned and looked again at the grey desolation of the street with the asbestos figures moving here and there.

I tried to pull my senses together. I realized that if I was to unravel this new and undreamed-of future, I must go at it systematically and step by step.

“I see,” I said after a pause, “that momentous things have happened since my time. I wish you would let me ask you about it all systematically, and would explain it to me bit by bit. First, what do you mean by saying that there is no work?”

“Why,” answered my strange acquaintance, “it died out of itself. Machinery killed it. If I remember rightly, you had a certain amount of machinery even in your time. You had done very well with steam, made a good beginning with electricity, though I think radial energy had hardly as yet been put to use.”

I nodded assent.

“But you found it did you no good. The better your machines, the harder you worked. The more things you had the more you wanted. The pace of life grew swifter and swifter. You cried out, but it would not stop. You were all caught in the cogs of your own machine. None of you could see the end.”

“That is quite true,” I said. “How do you know it all?”

“Oh,” answered the Man in Asbestos, “that part of my education was very well operated – I see you do not know what I mean. Never mind, I can tell you that later. Well, then, there came, probably almost two hundred years after your time, the Era of the Great Conquest of Nature, the final victory of Man and Machinery.”

“They did conquer it?” I asked quickly, with a thrill of the old hope in my veins again.

“Conquered it,” he said, “beat it out! Fought it to a standstill! Things came one by one, then faster and faster, in a hundred years it was all done. In fact, just as soon as mankind turned its energy to decreasing its needs instead of increasing its desires, the whole thing was easy. Chemical Food came first. Heavens! the simplicity of it. And in your time thousands of millions of people tilled and grubbed at the soil from morning till night. I’ve seen specimens of them – farmers, they called them. There’s one in the museum. After the invention of Chemical Food we piled up enough in the emporiums in a year to last for centuries. Agriculture went overboard. Eating and all that goes with it, domestic labour, housework – all ended. Nowadays one takes a concentrated pill every year or so, that’s all. The whole digestive apparatus, as you knew it, was a clumsy thing that had been bloated up like a set of bagpipes through the evolution of its use!”

I could not forbear to interrupt. “Have you and these people,” I said, “no stomachs – no apparatus?”

“Of course we have,” he answered, “but we use it to some purpose. Mine is largely filled with my education – but there! I am anticipating again. Better let me go on as I was. Chemical Food came first: that cut off almost one-third of the work, and then came Asbestos Clothes. That was wonderful! In one year humanity made enough suits to last for ever and ever. That, of course, could never have been if it hadn’t been connected with the revolt of women and the fall of Fashion.”

“Have the Fashions gone,” I asked, “that insane, extravagant idea of——” I was about to launch into one of my old-time harangues about the sheer vanity of decorative dress, when my eye rested on the moving figures in asbestos, and I stopped.

“All gone,” said the Man in Asbestos. “Then next to that we killed, or practically killed, the changes of climate. I don’t think that in your day you properly understood how much of your work was due to the shifts of what you called the weather. It meant the need of all kinds of special clothes and houses and shelters, a wilderness of work. How dreadful it must have been in your day – wind and storms, great wet masses – what did you call them? – clouds – flying through the air, the ocean full of salt, was it not? – tossed and torn by the wind, snow thrown all over everything, hail, rain – how awful!”

“Sometimes,” I said, “it was very beautiful. But how did you alter it?”

“Killed the weather!” answered the Man in Asbestos. “Simple as anything – turned its forces loose one against the other, altered the composition of the sea so that the top became all more or less gelatinous. I really can’t explain it, as it is an operation that I never took at school, but it made the sky grey, as you see it, and the sea gum-coloured, the weather all the same. It cut out fuel and houses and an infinity of work with them!”

He paused a moment. I began to realize something of the course of evolution that had happened.

“So,” I said, “the conquest of nature meant that presently there was no more work to do?”

“Exactly,” he said, “nothing left.”

“Food enough for all?”

“Too much,” he answered.

“Houses and clothes?”

“All you like,” said the Man in Asbestos, waving his hand. “There they are. Go out and take them. Of course, they’re falling down – slowly, very slowly. But they’ll last for centuries yet, nobody need bother.”

Then I realized, I think for the first time, just what work had meant in the old life, and how much of the texture of life itself had been bound up in the keen effort of it.

Presently my eyes looked upward: dangling at the top of a moss-grown building I saw what seemed to be the remains of telephone wires.

“What became of all that,” I said, “the telegraph and the telephone and all the system of communication?”

“Ah,” said the Man in Asbestos, “that was what a telephone meant, was it? I knew that it had been suppressed centuries ago. Just what was it for?”

“Why,” I said with enthusiasm, “by means of the telephone we could talk to anybody, call up anybody, and talk at any distance.”

“And anybody could call you up at any time and talk?” said the Man in Asbestos, with something like horror. “How awful! What a dreadful age yours was, to be sure. No, the telephone and all the rest of it, all the transportation and intercommunication was cut out and forbidden. There was no sense in it. You see,” he added, “what you don’t realize is that people after your day became gradually more and more reasonable. Take the railroad, what good was that? It brought into every town a lot of people from every other town. Who wanted them? Nobody. When work stopped and commerce ended, and food was needless, and the weather killed, it was foolish to move about. So it was all terminated. Anyway,” he said, with a quick look of apprehension and a change in his voice, “it was dangerous!”

“So!” I said. “Dangerous! You still have danger?”

“Why, yes,” he said, “there’s always the danger of getting broken.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Why,” said the Man in Asbestos, “I suppose it’s what you would call being dead. Of course, in one sense there’s been no death for centuries past; we cut that out. Disease and death were simply a matter of germs. We found them one by one. I think that even in your day you had found one or two of the easier, the bigger ones?”

I nodded.

“Yes, you had found diphtheria and typhoid, and, if I am right, there were some outstanding, like scarlet fever and smallpox, that you called ultra-microscopic, and which you were still hunting for, and others that you didn’t even suspect. Well, we hunted them down one by one and destroyed them. Strange that it never occurred to any of you that Old Age was only a germ! It turned out to be quite a simple one, but it was so distributed in its action that you never even thought of it.”

“And you mean to say,” I ejaculated in amazement, looking at the Man in Asbestos, “that nowadays you live for ever?”

“I wish,” he said, “that you hadn’t that peculiar, excitable way of talking; you speak as if everything mattered so tremendously. Yes,” he continued, “we live for ever, unless, of course, we get broken. That happens sometimes. I mean that we may fall over a high place or bump on something, and snap ourselves. You see, we’re just a little brittle still – some remnant, I suppose, of the Old Age germ – and we have to be careful. In fact,” he continued, “I don’t mind saying that accidents of this sort were the most distressing feature of our civilization till we took steps to cut out all accidents. We forbid all street cars, street traffic, airplanes, and so on. The risks of your time,” he said, with a shiver of his asbestos clothes, “must have been awful.”

“They were,” I answered, with a new kind of pride in my generation that I had never felt before, “but we thought it part of the duty of brave people to——”

“Yes, yes,” said the Man in Asbestos impatiently, “please don’t get excited. I know what you mean. It was quite irrational.”

We sat silent for a long time. I looked about me at the crumbling buildings, the monotone, unchanging sky, and the dreary, empty street. Here, then, was the fruit of the Conquest, here was the elimination of work, the end of hunger and of cold, the cessation of the hard struggle, the downfall of change and death – nay, the very millennium of happiness. And yet, somehow, there seemed something wrong with it all. I pondered, then I put two or three rapid questions, hardly waiting to reflect upon the answers.

“Is there any war now?”

“Done with centuries ago. They took to settling international disputes with a slot machine. After that all foreign dealings were given up. Why have them? Everybody thinks foreigners awful.”

“Are there any newspapers now?”

“Newspapers! What on earth would we want them for? If we should need them at any time there are thousands of old ones piled up. But what is in them, anyway; only things that happen, wars and accidents and work and death. When these went newspapers went too. Listen,” continued the Man in Asbestos, “you seem to have been something of a social reformer, and yet you don’t understand the new life at all. You don’t understand how completely all our burdens have disappeared. Look at it this way. How used your people to spend all the early part of their lives?”

“Why,” I said, “our first fifteen years or so were spent in getting education.”

“Exactly,” he answered; “now notice how we improved on all that. Education in our day is done by surgery. Strange that in your time nobody realized that education was simply a surgical operation. You hadn’t the sense to see that what you really did was to slowly remodel, curve and convolute the inside of the brain by a long and painful mental operation. Everything learned was reproduced in a physical difference to the brain. You knew that, but you didn’t see the full consequences. Then came the invention of surgical education – the simple system of opening the side of the skull and engrafting into it a piece of prepared brain. At first, of course, they had to use, I suppose, the brains of dead people, and that was ghastly” – here the Man in Asbestos shuddered like a leaf – “but very soon they found how to make moulds that did just as well. After that it was a mere nothing; an operation of a few minutes would suffice to let in poetry or foreign languages or history or anything else that one cared to have. Here, for instance,” he added, pushing back the hair at the side of his head and showing a scar beneath it, “is the mark where I had my spherical trigonometry let in. That was, I admit, rather painful, but other things, such as English poetry or history, can be inserted absolutely without the least suffering. When I think of your painful, barbarous methods of education through the ear, I shudder at it. Oddly enough, we have found lately that for a great many things there is no need to use the head. We lodge them – things like philosophy and metaphysics, and so on – in what used to be the digestive apparatus. They fill it admirably.”

He paused a moment. Then went on:

“Well, then, to continue, what used to occupy your time and effort after your education?”

“Why,” I said, “one had, of course, to work, and then, to tell the truth, a great part of one’s time and feeling was devoted toward the other sex, towards falling in love and finding some woman to share one’s life.”

“Ah,” said the Man in Asbestos, with real interest. “I’ve heard about your arrangements with the women, but never quite understood them. Tell me; you say you selected some woman?”

“Yes.”

“And she became what you called your wife?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And you worked for her?” asked the Man in Asbestos in astonishment.

“Yes.”

“And she did not work?”

“No,” I answered, “of course not.”

“And half of what you had was hers?”

“Yes.”

“And she had the right to live in your house and use your things?”

“Of course,” I answered.

“How dreadful!” said the Man in Asbestos. “I hadn’t realized the horrors of your age till now.”

He sat shivering slightly, with the same timid look in his face as before.

Then it suddenly struck me that of the figures on the street, all had looked alike.

“Tell me,” I said, “are there no women now? Are they gone too?”

“Oh, no,” answered the Man in Asbestos, “they’re here just the same. Some of those are women. Only, you see, everything has been changed now. It all came as part of their great revolt, their desire to be like the men. Had that begun in your time?”

“Only a little,” I answered; “they were beginning to ask for votes and equality.”

“That’s it,” said my acquaintance, “I couldn’t think of the word. Your women, I believe, were something awful, were they not? Covered with feathers and skins and dazzling colours made of dead things all over them? And they laughed, did they not, and had foolish teeth, and at any moment they could inveigle you into one of those contracts! Ugh!”

He shuddered.

“Asbestos,” I said (I knew no other name to call him), as I turned on him in wrath, “Asbestos, do you think that those jelly-bag Equalities out on the street there, with their ash-barrel suits, can be compared for one moment with our unredeemed, unreformed, heaven-created, hobble-skirted women of the twentieth century?”

Then, suddenly, another thought flashed into my mind—

“The children,” I said, “where are the children? Are there any?”

“Children,” he said, “no! I have never heard of there being any such things for at least a century. Horrible little hobgoblins they must have been! Great big faces, and cried constantly! And grew, did they not? Like funguses! I believe they were longer each year than they had been the last, and——”

I rose.

“Asbestos!” I said, “this, then, is your coming Civilization, your millennium. This dull, dead thing, with the work and the burden gone out of life, and with them all the joy and the sweetness of it. For the old struggle – mere stagnation, and in place of danger and death, the dull monotony of security and the horror of an unending decay! Give me back,” I cried, and I flung wide my arms to the dull air, “the old life of danger and stress, with its hard toil and its bitter chances, and its heartbreaks. I see its value! I know its worth! Give me no rest,” I cried aloud——

—

“Yes, but give a rest to the rest of the corridor!” cried an angered voice that broke in upon my exultation.

Suddenly my sleep had gone.

I was back again in the room of my hotel, with the hum of the wicked, busy old world all about me, and loud in my ears the voice of the indignant man across the corridor.

“Quit your blatting, you infernal blatherskite,” he was calling. “Come down to earth.”

I came.

TOC     INDEX

Sunshine Sketches
of a Little Town

(1912)

~

Preface
1 … The Hostelry of Mr. Smith
2 … The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe

3 … The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias

4 … The Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone
5 … The Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa
6 … The Beacon on the Hill

7 … The Extraordinary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin

8 … The Fore-Ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin

9 … The Mariposa Bank Mystery
10 … The Great Election in Missinaba County
11 … The Candidacy of Mr. Smith
L’Envoi: The Train to Mariposa

Preface

I know no way in which a writer may more fittingly introduce his work to the public than by giving a brief account of who and what he is. By this means some of the blame for what he has done is very properly shifted to the extenuating circumstances of his life.

I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, on December 30, 1869. I am not aware that there was any particular conjunction of the planets at the time, but should think it extremely likely. My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them. My father took up a farm near Lake Simcoe, in Ontario. This was during the hard times of Canadian farming, and my father was just able by great diligence to pay the hired men and, in years of plenty, to raise enough grain to have seed for the next year’s crop without buying any. By this process my brothers and I were inevitably driven off the land, and have become professors, business men, and engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farm labourers. Yet I saw enough of farming to speak exuberantly in political addresses of the joy of early rising and the deep sleep, both of body and intellect, that is induced by honest manual toil.

I was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, of which I was head boy in 1887. From there I went to the University of Toronto, where I graduated in 1891. At the University I spent my entire time in the acquisition of languages, living, dead, and half-dead, and knew nothing of the outside world. In this diligent pursuit of words I spent about sixteen hours of each day. Very soon after graduation I had forgotten the languages, and found myself intellectually bankrupt. In other words I was what is called a distinguished graduate, and, as such, I took to school teaching as the only trade I could find that needed neither experience nor intellect. I spent my time from 1891 to 1899 on the staff of Upper Canada College, an experience which has left me with a profound sympathy for the many gifted and brilliant men who are compelled to spend their lives in the most dreary, the most thankless, and the worst paid profession in the world. I have noted that of my pupils, those who seemed the laziest and the least enamoured of books are now rising to eminence at the bar, in business, and in public life; the really promising boys who took all the prizes are now able with difficulty to earn the wages of a clerk in a summer hotel or a deck hand on a canal boat.

In 1899 I gave up school teaching in disgust, borrowed enough money to live upon for a few months, and went to the University of Chicago to study economics and political science. I was soon appointed to a Fellowship in political economy, and by means of this and some temporary employment by McGill University, I survived until I took the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1903. The meaning of this degree is that the recipient of instruction is examined for the last time in his life, and is pronounced completely full. After this, no new ideas can be imparted to him.

From this time, and since my marriage, which had occurred at this period, I have belonged to the staff of McGill University, first as lecturer in Political Science, and later as head of the department of Economics and Political Science. As this position is one of the prizes of my profession, I am able to regard myself as singularly fortunate. The emolument is so high as to place me distinctly above the policemen, postmen, street-car conductors, and other salaried officials of the neighbourhood, while I am able to mix with the poorer of the business men of the city on terms of something like equality. In point of leisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than a business man knows in his whole life. I thus have what the business man can never enjoy, an ability to think, and, what is still better, to stop thinking altogether for months at a time.

I have written a number of things in connection with my college life – a book on Political Science, and many essays, magazine articles, and so on. I belong to the Political Science Association of America, to the Royal Colonial Institute, and to the Church of England. These things, surely, are a proof of respectability. I have had some small connection with politics and public life. A few years ago I went all round the British Empire delivering addresses on Imperial organization. When I state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Union of South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turco-Italian war, I think the reader can form some idea of their importance. In Canada I belong to the Conservative party, but as yet I have failed entirely in Canadian politics, never having received a contract to build a bridge, or make a wharf, nor to construct even the smallest section of the Transcontinental Railway. This, however, is a form of national ingratitude to which one becomes accustomed in this Dominion.

Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called “Literary Lapses” and the other “Nonsense Novels.” Each of these is published by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can be obtained, absurd though it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillings and sixpence. Any reader of this preface, for example, ridiculous though it appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books for seven shillings. Yet these works are of so humorous a character that for many years it was found impossible to print them. The compositors fell back from their task suffocated with laughter and gasping for air. Nothing but the invention of the linotype machine – or rather, of the kind of men who operate it – made it possible to print these books. Even now people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the books should never be put into the hands of persons not in robust health.

Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written “Alice in Wonderland” than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intention of trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place and real people. Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of the land of hope.

Similarly, the Reverend Mr. Drone is not one person, but about eight or ten. To make him I clapped the gaiters of one ecclesiastic round the legs of another, added the sermons of a third and the character of a fourth, and so let him start on his way in the book to pick up such individual attributes as he might find for himself. Mullins and Bagshaw and Judge Pepperleigh and the rest are, it is true, personal friends of mine. But I have known them in such a variety of forms, with such alternations of tall and short, dark and fair, that, individually, I should have much ado to know them. Mr. Pupkin is found whenever a Canadian bank opens a branch in a county town and needs a teller. As for Mr. Smith, with his two hundred and eighty pounds, his hoarse voice, his loud check suit, his diamonds, the roughness of his address and the goodness of his heart, – all of this is known by everybody to be a necessary and universal adjunct of the hotel business.

The inspiration of the book – a land of hope and sunshine where little towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside placid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest – is large enough. If it fails in its portrayal of the scenes and the country that it depicts the fault lies rather with an art that is deficient than in an affection that is wanting.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

McGill University

June 1912

I

The Hostelry of Mr. Smith

I don’t know whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no consequence, for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns just like it.

There it lies in the sunlight, sloping up from the little lake that spreads out at the foot of the hillside on which the town is built. There is a wharf beside the lake, and lying alongside of it a steamer that is tied to the wharf with two ropes of about the same size as they use on the Lusitania. The steamer goes nowhere in particular, for the lake is landlocked and there is no navigation for the Mariposa Belle except to “run trips” on the first of July and the Queen’s Birthday, and to take excursions of the Knights of Pythias and the Sons of Temperance to and from the Local Option Townships.

In point of geography the lake is called Lake Wissanotti and the river running out of it the Ossawippi, just as the main street of Mariposa is called Missinaba Street and the county Missinaba County. But these names do not really matter. Nobody uses them. People simply speak of the “lake” and the “river” and the “main street,” much in the same way as they always call the Continental Hotel, “Pete Robinson’s” and the Pharmaceutical Hall, “Eliot’s Drug Store.” But I suppose this is just the same in every one else’s town as in mine, so I need lay no stress on it.

The town, I say, has one broad street that runs up from the lake, commonly called the Main Street. There is no doubt about its width. When Mariposa was laid out there was none of that shortsightedness which is seen in the cramped dimensions of Wall Street and Piccadilly. Missinaba street is so wide that if you were to roll Jeff Thorpe’s barber shop over on its face it wouldn’t reach half way across. Up and down the Main Street are telegraph poles of cedar of colossal thickness, standing at a variety of angles and carrying rather more wires than are commonly seen at a transatlantic cable station.

On the Main Street itself are a number of buildings of extraordinary importance – Smith’s Hotel and the Continental and the Mariposa House, and the two banks (the Commercial and the Exchange), to say nothing of McCarthy’s Block (erected in 1878), and Glover’s Hardware Store with the Oddfellows’ Hall above it. Then on the “cross” street that intersects Missinaba Street at the main corner there is the Post Office and the Fire Hall and the Young Men’s Christian Association and the office of the Mariposa Newspacket – in fact, to the eye of discernment a perfect jostle of public institutions comparable only to Threadneedle Street or Lower Broadway. On all the side streets there are maple trees and broad sidewalks, trim gardens with upright calla lilies, houses with verandahs, which are here and there being replaced by residences with piazzas.

To the careless eye the scene on the Main Street of a summer afternoon is one of deep and unbroken peace. The empty street sleeps in the sunshine. There is a horse and buggy tied to the hitching post in front of Glover’s hardware store. There is, usually and commonly, the burly figure of Mr. Smith, proprietor of Smith’s Hotel, standing in his chequered waistcoat on the steps of his hostelry, and perhaps, further up the street, Lawyer Macartney going for his afternoon mail, or the Rev. Mr. Drone, the Rural Dean of the Church of England Church, going home to get his fishing rod after a mothers’ auxiliary meeting.

But this quiet is mere appearance. In reality, and to those who know it, the place is a perfect hive of activity. Why, at Netley’s butcher shop (established in 1882) there are no less than four men working on the sausage machines in the basement; at the Newspacket office there are as many more job-printing; there is a long distance telephone with four distracting girls on high stools wearing steel caps and talking incessantly; in the offices in McCarthy’s block are dentists and lawyers, with their coats off, ready to work at any moment; and from the big planing factory down beside the lake where the railroad siding is, you may hear all through the hours of the summer afternoon the long-drawn music of the running saw.

Busy – well, I should think so! Ask any of its inhabitants if Mariposa isn’t a busy, hustling, thriving town. Ask Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, who comes hustling over to his office from the Mariposa House every day at 10.30 and has scarcely time all morning to go out and take a drink with the manager of the Commercial; or ask – well, for the matter of that, ask any of them if they ever knew a more rushing go-a-head town than Mariposa.

Of course if you come to the place fresh from New York, you are deceived. Your standard of vision is all astray. You do think the place is quiet. You do imagine that Mr. Smith is asleep merely because he closes his eyes as he stands. But live in Mariposa for six months or a year and then you will begin to understand it better; the buildings get higher and higher; the Mariposa House grows more and more luxurious; McCarthy’s block towers to the sky; the ’buses roar and hum to the station; the trains shriek; the traffic multiplies; the people move faster and faster; a dense crowd swirls to and fro in the post-office and the five and ten cent store – and amusements! well, now! lacrosse, baseball, excursions, dances, the Firemen’s Ball every winter and the Catholic picnic every summer; and music – the town band in the park every Wednesday evening, and the Oddfellows’ brass band on the street every other Friday; the Mariposa Quartette, the Salvation Army – why, after a few months’ residence you begin to realize that the place is a mere mad round of gaiety.

In point of population, if one must come down to figures the Canadian census puts the numbers every time at something round five thousand. But it is very generally understood in Mariposa that the census is largely the outcome of malicious jealousy. It is usual that after the census the editor of the Mariposa Newspacket makes a careful re-estimate (based on the data of relative non-payment of subscriptions), and brings the population up to 6,000. After that the Mariposa Times-Herald makes an estimate that runs the figures up to 6,500. Then Mr. Gingham, the undertaker, who collects the vital statistics for the provincial government, makes an estimate from the number of what he calls the “demised” as compared with the less interesting persons who are still alive, and brings the population to 7,000. After that somebody else works it out that it’s 7,500; then the man behind the bar of the Mariposa House offers to bet the whole room that there are 9,000 people in Mariposa. That settles it, and the population is well on the way to 10,000, when down swoops the federal census taker on his next round and the town has to begin all over again.

Still, it is a thriving town and there is no doubt of it. Even the transcontinental railways, as any townsman will tell you, run through Mariposa. It is true that the trains mostly go through at night and don’t stop. But in the wakeful silence of the summer night you may hear the long whistle of the through train for the west as it tears through Mariposa, rattling over the switches and past the semaphores and ending in a long, sullen roar as it takes the trestle bridge over the Ossawippi. Or, better still, on a winter evening about eight o’clock you will see the long row of the Pullmans and diners of the night express going north to the mining country, the windows flashing with brilliant light, and within them a vista of cut glass and snow-white table linen, smiling negroes and millionaires with napkins at their chins whirling past in the driving snowstorm.

I can tell you the people of Mariposa are proud of the trains, even if they don’t stop! The joy of being on the main line lifts the Mariposa people above the level of their neighbours in such places as Tecumseh and Nichols Corners into the cosmopolitan atmosphere of through traffic and the larger life. Of course, they have their own train, too – the Mariposa Local, made up right there in the station yard, and running south to the city a hundred miles away. That, of course, is a real train, with a box stove on end in the passenger car, fed with cordwood upside down, and with seventeen flat cars of pine lumber set between the passenger car and the locomotive so as to give the train its full impact when shunting.

Outside of Mariposa there are farms that begin well but get thinner and meaner as you go on, and end sooner or later in bush and swamp and the rock of the north country. And beyond that again, as the background of it all, though it’s far away, you are somehow aware of the great pine woods of the lumber country reaching endlessly into the north.

Not that the little town is always gay or always bright in the sunshine. There never was such a place for changing its character with the season. Dark enough and dull it seems of a winter night, the wooden sidewalks creaking with the frost, and the lights burning dim behind the shop windows. In olden times the lights were coal oil lamps; now, of course, they are, or are supposed to be, electricity – brought from the power house on the lower Ossawippi nineteen miles away. But, somehow, though it starts off as electricity from the Ossawippi rapids, by the time it gets to Mariposa and filters into the little bulbs behind the frosty windows of the shops, it has turned into coal oil again, as yellow and bleared as ever.

After the winter, the snow melts and the ice goes out of the lake, the sun shines high and the shanty-men come down from the lumber woods and lie round drunk on the sidewalk outside of Smith’s Hotel – and that’s spring time. Mariposa is then a fierce, dangerous lumber town, calculated to terrorize the soul of a newcomer who does not understand that this also is only an appearance and that presently the rough-looking shanty-men will change their clothes and turn back again into farmers.

Then the sun shines warmer and the maple trees come out and Lawyer Macartney puts on his tennis trousers, and that’s summer time. The little town changes to a sort of summer resort. There are visitors up from the city. Every one of the seven cottages along the lake is full. The Mariposa Belle churns the waters of the Wissanotti into foam as she sails out from the wharf, in a cloud of flags, the band playing and the daughters and sisters of the Knights of Pythias dancing gaily on the deck.

That changes too. The days shorten. The visitors disappear. The golden rod beside the meadow droops and withers on its stem. The maples blaze in glory and die. The evening closes dark and chill, and in the gloom of the main corner of Mariposa the Salvation Army around a naphtha lamp lift up the confession of their sins – and that is autumn. Thus the year runs its round, moving and changing in Mariposa, much as it does in other places.

If, then, you feel that you know the town well enough to be admitted into the inner life and movement of it, walk down this June afternoon half way down the Main Street – or, if you like, half way up from the wharf – to where Mr. Smith is standing at the door of his hostelry. You will feel as you draw near that it is no ordinary man that you approach. It is not alone the huge bulk of Mr. Smith (two hundred and eighty pounds as tested on Netley’s scales). It is not merely his costume, though the chequered waistcoat of dark blue with a flowered pattern forms, with his shepherd’s plaid trousers, his grey spats and patent-leather boots, a colour scheme of no mean order. Nor is it merely Mr. Smith’s finely mottled face. The face, no doubt, is a notable one – solemn, inexpressible, unreadable, the face of the heaven-born hotel keeper. It is more than that. It is the strange dominating personality of the man that somehow holds you captive. I know nothing in history to compare with the position of Mr. Smith among those who drink over his bar, except, though in a lesser degree, the relation of the Emperor Napoleon to the Imperial Guard.

When you meet Mr. Smith first you think he looks like an over-dressed pirate. Then you begin to think him a character. You wonder at his enormous bulk. Then the utter hopelessness of knowing what Smith is thinking by merely looking at his features gets on your mind and makes the Mona Lisa seem an open book and the ordinary human countenance as superficial as a puddle in the sunlight. After you have had a drink in Mr. Smith’s bar, and he has called you by your Christian name, you realize that you are dealing with one of the greatest minds in the hotel business.

Take, for instance, the big sign that sticks out into the street above Mr. Smith’s head as he stands. What is on it? Simply: “JOS. SMITH, PROP.” Nothing more, and yet the thing was a flash of genius. Other men who had had the hotel before Mr. Smith had called it by such feeble names as the Royal Hotel and the Queen’s and the Alexandria. Every one of them failed. When Mr. Smith took over the hotel he simply put up the sign with “JOS. SMITH, PROP.,” and then stood underneath in the sunshine as a living proof that a man who weighs nearly three hundred pounds is the natural king of the hotel business.

But on this particular afternoon, in spite of the sunshine and deep peace, there was something as near to profound concern and anxiety as the features of Mr. Smith were ever known to express.

The moment was indeed an anxious one. Mr. Smith was awaiting a telegram from his legal adviser who had that day journeyed to the county town to represent the proprietor’s interest before the assembled License Commissioners. If you know anything of the hotel business at all, you will understand that as beside the decisions of the License Commissioners of Missinaba County, the opinions of the Lords of the Privy Council are mere trifles.

The matter in question was very grave. The Mariposa Court had just fined Mr. Smith for the second time for selling liquors after hours. The Commissioners, therefore, were entitled to cancel the license.

Mr. Smith knew his fault and acknowledged it. He had broken the law. How he had come to do so, it passed his imagination to recall. Crime always seems impossible in retrospect. By what sheer madness of the moment could he have shut up the bar on the night in question, and shut Judge Pepperleigh, the district judge of Missinaba County, outside of it? The more so inasmuch as the closing up of the bar under the rigid license law of the province was a matter that the proprietor never trusted to any hands but his own. Punctually every night at 11 o’clock Mr. Smith strolled from the desk of the “rotunda” to the door of the bar. If it seemed properly full of people and all was bright and cheerful, then he closed it. If not, he kept it open a few minutes longer till he had enough people inside to warrant closing. But never, never unless he was assured that Pepperleigh, the judge of the court, and Macartney, the prosecuting attorney, were both safely in the bar, or the bar parlour, did the proprietor venture to close up. Yet on this fatal night Pepperleigh and Macartney had been shut out – actually left on the street without a drink, and compelled to hammer and beat at the street door of the bar to gain admittance.

This was the kind of thing not to be tolerated. Either a hotel must be run decently or quit. An information was laid next day and Mr. Smith convicted in four minutes, his lawyers practically refusing to plead. The Mariposa court, when the presiding judge was cold sober, and it had the force of public opinion behind it, was a terrible engine of retributive justice.

So no wonder that Mr. Smith awaited with anxiety the message of his legal adviser.

He looked alternately up the street and down it again, hauled out his watch from the depths of his embroidered pocket, and examined the hour hand and the minute hand and the second hand with frowning scrutiny.

Then wearily, and as one mindful that a hotel man is ever the servant of the public, he turned back into the hotel.

“Billy,” he said to the desk clerk, “if a wire comes bring it into the bar parlour.”

The voice of Mr. Smith is of a deep guttural such as Plancon or Edouard de Reske might have obtained had they had the advantages of the hotel business. And with that, Mr. Smith, as was his custom in off moments, joined his guests in the back room. His appearance, to the untrained eye, was merely that of an extremely stout hotel-keeper walking from the rotunda to the back bar. In reality, Mr. Smith was on the eve of one of the most brilliant and daring strokes ever effected in the history of licensed liquor. When I say that it was out of the agitation of this situation that Smith’s Ladies’ and Gent’s Café originated, anybody who knows Mariposa will understand the magnitude of the moment.

Mr. Smith, then, moved slowly from the doorway of the hotel through the “rotunda,” or more simply the front room with the desk and the cigar case in it, and so to the bar and thence to the little room or back bar behind it. In this room, as I have said, the brightest minds of Mariposa might commonly be found in the quieter part of a summer afternoon.

Today there was a group of four who looked up as Mr. Smith entered, somewhat sympathetically, and evidently aware of the perplexities of the moment.

Henry Mullins and George Duff, the two bank managers, were both present. Mullins is a rather short, rather round, smooth-shaven man of less than forty, wearing one of those round banking suits of pepper and salt, with a round banking hat of hard straw, and with the kind of gold tie-pin and heavy watch-chain and seals necessary to inspire confidence in matters of foreign exchange. Duff is just as round and just as short, and equally smoothly shaven, while his seals and straw hat are calculated to prove that the Commercial is just as sound a bank as the Exchange. From the technical point of view of the banking business, neither of them had any objection to being in Smith’s Hotel or to taking a drink as long as the other was present. This, of course, was one of the cardinal principles of Mariposa banking.

Then there was Mr. Diston, the high school teacher, commonly known as the “one who drank.” None of the other teachers ever entered a hotel unless accompanied by a lady or protected by a child. But as Mr. Diston was known to drink beer on occasions and to go in and out of the Mariposa House and Smith’s Hotel, he was looked upon as a man whose life was a mere wreck. Whenever the School Board raised the salaries of the other teachers, fifty or sixty dollars per annum at one lift, it was well understood that public morality wouldn’t permit of an increase for Mr. Diston.

Still more noticeable, perhaps, was the quiet, sallow looking man dressed in black, with black gloves and with black silk hat heavily craped and placed hollow-side-up on a chair. This was Mr. Golgotha Gingham, the undertaker of Mariposa, and his dress was due to the fact that he had just come from what he called an “interment.” Mr. Gingham had the true spirit of his profession, and such words as “funeral” or “coffin” or “hearse” never passed his lips. He spoke always of “interments,” of “caskets,” and “coaches,” using terms that were calculated rather to bring out the majesty and sublimity of death than to parade its horrors.

To be present at the hotel was in accord with Mr. Gingham’s general conception of his business. No man had ever grasped the true principles of undertaking more thoroughly than Mr. Gingham. I have often heard him explain that to associate with the living, uninteresting though they appear, is the only way to secure the custom of the dead.

“Get to know people really well while they are alive,” said Mr. Gingham; “be friends with them, close friends, and then when they die you don’t need to worry. You’ll get the order every time.”

So, naturally, as the moment was one of sympathy, it was Mr. Gingham who spoke first.

“What’ll you do, Josh,” he said, “if the Commissioners go against you?”

“Boys,” said Mr. Smith, “I don’t rightly know. If I have to quit, the next move is to the city. But I don’t reckon that I will have to quit. I’ve got an idee that I think’s good every time.”

“Could you run a hotel in the city?” asked Mullins.

“I could,” said Mr. Smith. “I’ll tell you. There’s big things doin’ in the hotel business right now, big chances if you go into it right. Hotels in the city is branching out. Why, you take the dining-room side of it,” continued Mr. Smith, looking round at the group, “there’s thousands in it. The old plan’s all gone. Folks won’t eat now in an ordinary dining-room with a high ceiling and windows. You have to get ’em down underground in a room with no windows and lots of sawdust round and waiters that can’t speak English. I seen them places last time I was in the city. They call ’em Rats’ Coolers. And for light meals they want a Caff, a real French Caff, and for folks that come in late another place that they call a Girl Room that don’t shut up at all. If I go to the city that’s the kind of place I mean to run. What’s yours, Gol? It’s on the house?”

And it was just at the moment when Mr. Smith said this that Billy, the desk clerk, entered the room with the telegram in his hand.

But stop – it is impossible for you to understand the anxiety with which Mr. Smith and his associates awaited the news from the Commissioners, without first realizing the astounding progress of Mr. Smith in the three past years, and the pinnacle of public eminence to which he had attained.

Mr. Smith had come down from the lumber country of the Spanish River, where the divide is toward the Hudson Bay – “back north” as they called it in Mariposa.

He had been, it was said, a cook in the lumber shanties. To this day Mr. Smith can fry an egg on both sides with a lightness of touch that is the despair of his own “help.”

After that, he had run a river driver’s boarding-house.

After that, he had taken a food contract for a gang of railroad navvies on the transcontinental.

After that, of course, the whole world was open to him.

He came down to Mariposa and bought out the “inside” of what had been the Royal Hotel.

Those who are educated understand that by the “inside” of a hotel is meant everything except the four outer walls of it – the fittings, the furniture, the bar, Billy the desk-clerk, the three dining-room girls, and above all the license granted by King Edward VII., and ratified further by King George, for the sale of intoxicating liquors.

Till then the Royal had been a mere nothing. As “Smith’s Hotel” it broke into a blaze of effulgence.

From the first, Mr. Smith, as a proprietor, was a wild, rapturous success.

He had all the qualifications.

He weighed two hundred and eighty pounds.

He could haul two drunken men out of the bar each by the scruff of the neck without the faintest anger or excitement.

He carried money enough in his trousers pockets to start a bank, and spent it on anything, bet it on anything, and gave it away in handfuls.

He was never drunk, and, as a point of chivalry to his customers, never quite sober. Anybody was free of the hotel who cared to come in. Anybody who didn’t like it could go out. Drinks of all kinds cost five cents, or six for a quarter. Meals and beds were practically free. Any persons foolish enough to go to the desk and pay for them, Mr. Smith charged according to the expression of their faces.

At first the loafers and the shanty men settled down on the place in a shower. But that was not the “trade” that Mr. Smith wanted. He knew how to get rid of them. An army of charwomen, turned into the hotel, scrubbed it from top to bottom. A vacuum cleaner, the first seen in Mariposa, hissed and screamed in the corridors. Forty brass beds were imported from the city, not, of course, for the guests to sleep in, but to keep them out. A bartender with a starched coat and wicker sleeves was put behind the bar.

The loafers were put out of business. The place had become too “high toned” for them.

To get the high class trade, Mr. Smith set himself to dress the part. He wore wide cut coats of filmy serge, light as gossamer; chequered waistcoats with a pattern for every day in the week; fedora hats light as autumn leaves; four-in-hand ties of saffron and myrtle green with a diamond pin the size of a hazel nut. On his fingers there were as many gems as would grace a native prince of India; across his waistcoat lay a gold watch-chain in huge square links and in his pocket a gold watch that weighed a pound and a half and marked minutes, seconds and quarter seconds. Just to look at Josh Smith’s watch brought at least ten men to the bar every evening.

Every morning Mr. Smith was shaved by Jefferson Thorpe, across the way. All that art could do, all that Florida water could effect, was lavished on his person.

Mr. Smith became a local character. Mariposa was at his feet. All the reputable business-men drank at Mr. Smith’s bar, and in the little parlour behind it you might find at any time a group of the brightest intellects in the town.

Not but what there was opposition at first. The clergy, for example, who accepted the Mariposa House and the Continental as a necessary and useful evil, looked askance at the blazing lights and the surging crowd of Mr. Smith’s saloon. They preached against him. When the Rev. Dean Drone led off with a sermon on the text “Lord be merciful even unto this publican Matthew Six,” it was generally understood as an invitation to strike Mr. Smith dead. In the same way the sermon at the Presbyterian church the week after was on the text “Lo what now doeth Abiram in the land of Melchisideck Kings Eight and Nine?” and it was perfectly plain that what was meant was, “Lo, what is Josh Smith doing in Mariposa?”

But this opposition had been countered by a wide and sagacious philanthropy. I think Mr. Smith first got the idea of that on the night when the steam merry-go-round came to Mariposa. Just below the hostelry, on an empty lot, it whirled and whistled, steaming forth its tunes on the summer evening while the children crowded round it in hundreds. Down the street strolled Mr. Smith, wearing a soft fedora to indicate that it was evening.

“What d’you charge for a ride, boss?” said Mr. Smith.

“Two for a nickel,” said the man.

“Take that,” said Mr. Smith, handing out a ten-dollar bill from a roll of money, “and ride the little folks free all evening.”

That night the merry-go-round whirled madly till after midnight, freighted to capacity with Mariposa children, while up in Smith’s Hotel, parents, friends and admirers, as the news spread, were standing four deep along the bar. They sold forty dollars’ worth of lager alone that night, and Mr. Smith learned, if he had not already suspected it, the blessedness of giving.

The uses of philanthropy went further. Mr. Smith subscribed to everything, joined everything, gave to everything. He became an Oddfellow, a Forester, a Knight of Pythias and a Workman. He gave a hundred dollars to the Mariposa Hospital and a hundred dollars to the Young Men’s Christian Association.

He subscribed to the Ball Club, the Lacrosse Club, the Curling Club, to anything, in fact, and especially to all those things which needed premises to meet in and grew thirsty in their discussions.

As a consequence the Oddfellows held their annual banquet at Smith’s Hotel and the Oyster Supper of the Knights of Pythias was celebrated in Mr. Smith’s dining-room.

Even more effective, perhaps, were Mr. Smith’s secret benefactions, the kind of giving done by stealth of which not a soul in town knew anything, often, for a week after it was done. It was in this way that Mr. Smith put the new font in Dean Drone’s church, and handed over a hundred dollars to Judge Pepperleigh for the unrestrained use of the Conservative party.

So it came about that, little by little, the antagonism had died down. Smith’s Hotel became an accepted institution in Mariposa. Even the temperance people were proud of Mr. Smith as a sort of character who added distinction to the town. There were moments, in the earlier quiet of the morning, when Dean Drone would go so far as to step in to the “rotunda” and collect a subscription. As for the Salvation Army, they ran in and out all the time unreproved.

On only one point difficulty still remained. That was the closing of the bar. Mr. Smith could never bring his mind to it – not as a matter of profit, but as a point of honour. It was too much for him to feel that Judge Pepperleigh might be out on the sidewalk thirsty at midnight, that the night hands of the Times-Herald on Wednesday might be compelled to go home dry. On this point Mr. Smith’s moral code was simplicity itself – do what is right and take the consequences. So the bar stayed open.

Every town, I suppose, has its meaner spirits. In every genial bosom some snake is warmed – or, as Mr. Smith put it to Golgotha Gingham – “there are some fellers even in this town skunks enough to inform.”

At first the Mariposa court quashed all indictments. The presiding judge, with his spectacles on and a pile of books in front of him, threatened the informer with the penitentiary. The whole bar of Mariposa was with Mr. Smith. But by sheer iteration the informations had proved successful. Judge Pepperleigh learned that Mr. Smith had subscribed a hundred dollars for the Liberal party and at once fined him for keeping open after hours. That made one conviction. On the top of this had come the untoward incident just mentioned and that made two. Beyond that was the deluge. This then was the exact situation when Billy, the desk clerk, entered the back bar with the telegram in his hand.

“Here’s your wire, sir,” he said.

“What does it say?” said Mr. Smith.

He always dealt with written documents with a fine air of detachment. I don’t suppose there were ten people in Mariposa who knew that Mr. Smith couldn’t read.

Billy opened the message and read, “Commissioners give you three months to close down.”

“Let me read it,” said Mr. Smith, “that’s right, three months to close down.”

There was dead silence when the message was read. Everybody waited for Mr. Smith to speak. Mr. Gingham instinctively assumed the professional air of hopeless melancholy.

As it was afterwards recorded, Mr. Smith stood and “studied” with the tray in his hand for at least four minutes. Then he spoke.

“Boys,” he said, “I’ll be darned if I close down till I’m ready to close down. I’ve got an idee. You wait and I’ll show you.”

And beyond that, not another word did Mr. Smith say on the subject.

But within forty-eight hours the whole town knew that something was doing. The hotel swarmed with carpenters, bricklayers and painters. There was an architect up from the city with a bundle of blue prints in his hand. There was an engineer taking the street level with a theodolite, and a gang of navvies with shovels digging like fury as if to dig out the back foundations of the hotel.

“That’ll fool ’em,” said Mr. Smith.

Half the town was gathered round the hotel crazy with excitement. But not a word would the proprietor say.

Great dray loads of square timber, and two-by-eight pine joists kept arriving from the planing mill. There was a pile of matched spruce sixteen feet high lying by the sidewalk.

Then the excavation deepened and the dirt flew, and the beams went up and the joists across, and all the day from dawn till dusk the hammers of the carpenters clattered away, working overtime at time and a half.

“It don’t matter what it costs,” said Mr. Smith; “get it done.”

Rapidly the structure took form. It extended down the side street, joining the hotel at a right angle. Spacious and graceful it looked as it reared its uprights into the air.

Already you could see the place where the row of windows was to come, a veritable palace of glass, it must be, so wide and commodious were they. Below it, you could see the basement shaping itself, with a low ceiling like a vault and big beams running across, dressed, smoothed, and ready for staining. Already in the street there were seven crates of red and white awning.

And even then nobody knew what it was, and it was not till the seventeenth day that Mr. Smith, in the privacy of the back bar, broke the silence and explained.

“I tell you, boys,” he says, “it’s a caff – like what they have in the city – a ladies’ and gent’s caff, and that underneath (what’s yours, Mr. Mullins?) is a Rats’ Cooler. And when I get her started, I’ll hire a French Chief to do the cooking, and for the winter I will put in a ‘girl room,’ like what they have in the city hotels. And I’d like to see who’s going to close her up then.”

Within two more weeks the plan was in operation. Not only was the caff built but the very hotel was transformed. Awnings had broken out in a red and white cloud upon its face, its every window carried a box of hanging plants, and above in glory floated the Union Jack. The very stationery was changed. The place was now Smith’s Summer Pavilion. It was advertised in the city as Smith’s Tourists’ Emporium, and Smith’s Northern Health Resort. Mr. Smith got the editor of the Times-Herald to write up a circular all about ozone and the Mariposa pine woods, with illustrations of the maskinonge (piscis mariposis) of Lake Wissanotti.

The Saturday after that circular hit the city in July, there were men with fishing rods and landing nets pouring in on every train, almost too fast to register. And if, in the face of that, a few little drops of whiskey were sold over the bar, who thought of it?

But the caff! that, of course, was the crowning glory of the thing, that and the Rats’ Cooler below.

Light and cool, with swinging windows open to the air, tables with marble tops, palms, waiters in white coats – it was the standing marvel of Mariposa. Not a soul in the town except Mr. Smith, who knew it by instinct, ever guessed that waiters and palms and marble tables can be rented over the long distance telephone.

Mr. Smith was as good as his word. He got a French Chief with an aristocratic saturnine countenance, and a moustache and imperial that recalled the late Napoleon III. No one knew where Mr. Smith got him. Some people in the town said he was a French marquis. Others said he was a count and explained the difference.

No one in Mariposa had ever seen anything like the caff. All down the side of it were the grill fires, with great pewter dish covers that went up and down on a chain, and you could walk along the row and actually pick out your own cutlet and then see the French marquis throw it on to the broiling iron; you could watch a buckwheat pancake whirled into existence under your eyes and see fowls’ legs devilled, peppered, grilled, and tormented till they lost all semblance of the original Mariposa chicken.

Mr. Smith, of course, was in his glory.

“What have you got today, Alf?” he would say, as he strolled over to the marquis. The name of the Chief was, I believe, Alphonse, but “Alf” was near enough for Mr. Smith.

The marquis would extend to the proprietor the menu, “Voilà, m’sieu, la carte du jour.”

Mr. Smith, by the way, encouraged the use of the French language in the caff. He viewed it, of course, solely in its relation to the hotel business, and, I think, regarded it as a recent invention.

“It’s comin’ in all the time in the city,” he said, “and y’aint expected to understand it.”

Mr. Smith would take the carte between his finger and thumb and stare at it. It was all covered with such devices as Potage à la Mariposa – Filet Mignon à la proprietaire – Côtelette à la Smith, and so on.

But the greatest thing about the caff were the prices. Therein lay, as everybody saw at once, the hopeless simplicity of Mr. Smith.

The prices stood fast at 25 cents a meal. You could come in and eat all they had in the caff for a quarter.

“No, sir,” Mr. Smith said stoutly, “I ain’t going to try to raise no prices on the public. The hotel’s always been a quarter and the caff’s a quarter.”

Full? Full of people?

Well, I should think so! From the time the caff opened at 11 till it closed at 8.30, you could hardly find a table. Tourists, visitors, travellers, and half the people of Mariposa crowded at the little tables; crockery rattling, glasses tinkling on trays, corks popping, the waiters in their white coats flying to and fro, Alphonse whirling the cutlets and pancakes into the air, and in and through it all, Mr. Smith, in a white flannel suit and a broad crimson sash about his waist. Crowded and gay from morning to night, and even noisy in its hilarity.

Noisy, yes; but if you wanted deep quiet and cool, if you wanted to step from the glare of a Canadian August to the deep shadow of an enchanted glade – walk down below into the Rats’ Cooler. There you had it; dark old beams (who could believe they were put there a month ago?), great casks set on end with legends such as Amontillado Fino done in gilt on a black ground, tall steins filled with German beer soft as moss, and a German waiter noiseless as moving foam. He who entered the Rats’ Cooler at three of a summer afternoon was buried there for the day. Mr. Golgotha Gingham spent anything from four to seven hours there of every day. In his mind the place had all the quiet charm of an interment, with none of its sorrows.

But at night, when Mr. Smith and Billy, the desk clerk, opened up the cash register and figured out the combined losses of the caff and the Rats’ Cooler, Mr. Smith would say:

“Billy, just wait till I get the license renood, and I’ll close up this damn caff so tight they’ll never know what hit her. What did that lamb cost? Fifty cents a pound, was it? I figure it, Billy, that every one of them hogs eats about a dollar’s worth a grub for every twenty-five cents they pay on it. As for Alf – by gosh, I’m through with him.”

But that, of course, was only a confidential matter as between Mr. Smith and Billy.

I don’t know at what precise period it was that the idea of a petition to the License Commissioners first got about the town. No one seemed to know just who suggested it. But certain it was that public opinion began to swing strongly towards the support of Mr. Smith. I think it was perhaps on the day after the big fish dinner that Alphonse cooked for the Mariposa Canoe Club (at twenty cents a head) that the feeling began to find open expression. People said it was a shame that a man like Josh Smith should be run out of Mariposa by three license commissioners. Who were the license commissioners, anyway? Why, look at the license system they had in Sweden; yes, and in Finland and in South America. Or, for the matter of that, look at the French and Italians, who drink all day and all night. Aren’t they all right? Aren’t they a musical people? Take Napoleon, and Victor Hugo; drunk half the time, and yet look what they did.

I quote these arguments not for their own sake, but merely to indicate the changing temper of public opinion in Mariposa. Men would sit in the caff at lunch perhaps for an hour and a half and talk about the license question in general, and then go down into the Rats’ Cooler and talk about it for two hours more.

It was amazing the way the light broke in in the case of particular individuals, often the most unlikely, and quelled their opposition.

Take, for example, the editor of the Newspacket. I suppose there wasn’t a greater temperance advocate in town. Yet Alphonse queered him with an Omelette à la License in one meal.

Or take Pepperleigh himself, the judge of the Mariposa court. He was put to the bad with a game pie – pâté normand aux fines herbes – the real thing, as good as a trip to Paris in itself. After eating it, Pepperleigh had the common sense to realize that it was sheer madness to destroy a hotel that could cook a thing like that.

In the same way, the secretary of the School Board was silenced with a stuffed duck à la Ossawippi.

Three members of the town council were converted with a Dindon farci à la Josh Smith.

And then, finally, Mr. Diston persuaded Dean Drone to come, and as soon as Mr. Smith and Alphonse saw him they landed him with a fried flounder that even the apostles would have appreciated.

After that, every one knew that the license question was practically settled. The petition was all over the town. It was printed in duplicate at the Newspacket and you could see it lying on the counter of every shop in Mariposa. Some of the people signed it twenty or thirty times.

It was the right kind of document too. It began – “Whereas in the bounty of providence the earth putteth forth her luscious fruits and her vineyards for the delight and enjoyment of mankind——” It made you thirsty just to read it. Any man who read that petition over was wild to get to the Rats’ Cooler.

When it was all signed up they had nearly three thousand names on it.

Then Nivens, the lawyer, and Mr. Gingham (as a provincial official) took it down to the county town, and by three o’clock that afternoon the news had gone out from the long distance telephone office that Smith’s license was renewed for three years.

Rejoicings! Well, I should think so! Everybody was down wanting to shake hands with Mr. Smith. They told him that he had done more to boom Mariposa than any ten men in town. Some of them said he ought to run for the town council, and others wanted to make him the Conservative candidate for the next Dominion election. The caff was a mere babel of voices, and even the Rats’ Cooler was almost floated away from its moorings.

And in the middle of it all, Mr. Smith found time to say to Billy, the desk clerk: “Take the cash registers out of the caff and the Rats’ Cooler and start counting up the books.”

And Billy said: “Will I write the letters for the palms and the tables and the stuff to go back?”

And Mr. Smith said: “Get ’em written right away.”

So all evening the laughter and the chatter and the congratulations went on, and it wasn’t till long after midnight that Mr. Smith was able to join Billy in the private room behind the “rotunda.” Even when he did, there was a quiet and a dignity about his manner that had never been there before. I think it must have been the new halo of the Conservative candidacy that already radiated from his brow. It was, I imagine, at this very moment that Mr. Smith first realized that the hotel business formed the natural and proper threshold of the national legislature.

“Here’s the account of the cash registers,” said Billy.

“Let me see it,” said Mr. Smith. And he studied the figures without a word.

“And here’s the letters about the palms, and here’s Alphonse up to yesterday——”

And then an amazing thing happened.

“Billy,” said Mr. Smith, “tear ’em up. I ain’t going to do it. It ain’t right and I won’t do it. They got me the license for to keep the caff and I’m going to keep the caff. I don’t need to close her. The bar’s good for anything from forty to a hundred a day now, with the Rats’ Cooler going good, and that caff will stay right here.”

And stay it did.

There it stands, mind you, to this day. You’ve only to step round the corner of Smith’s Hotel on the side street and read the sign: LADIES’ AND GENT’S CAFÉ, just as large and as imposing as ever.

Mr. Smith said that he’d keep the caff, and when he said a thing he meant it!

Of course there were changes, small changes.

I don’t say, mind you, that the fillet de beef that you get there now is perhaps quite up to the level of the filet de boeufs aux champignons of the days of glory.

No doubt the lamb chops in Smith’s Caff are often very much the same, nowadays, as the lamb chops of the Mariposa House or the Continental.

Of course, things like Omelette aux Trufles practically died out when Alphonse went. And, naturally, the leaving of Alphonse was inevitable. No one knew just when he went, or why. But one morning he was gone. Mr. Smith said that “Alf had to go back to his folks in the old country.”

So, too, when Alf left, the use of the French language, as such, fell off tremendously in the caff. Even now they use it to some extent. You can still get fillet de beef, and saucisson au juice, but Billy the desk clerk has considerable trouble with the spelling.

The Rats’ Cooler, of course, closed down, or rather Mr. Smith closed it for repairs, and there is every likelihood that it will hardly open for three years. But the caff is there. They don’t use the grills, because there’s no need to, with the hotel kitchen so handy.

The “girl room,” I may say, was never opened. Mr. Smith promised it, it is true, for the winter, and still talks of it. But somehow there’s been a sort of feeling against it. Everyone in town admits that every big hotel in the city has a “girl room” and that it must be all right. Still, there’s a certain – well, you know how sensitive opinion is in a place like Mariposa.

TOC     INDEX

II

The Speculations
of Jefferson Thorpe

It was not until the mining boom, at the time when everybody went simply crazy over the Cobalt and Porcupine mines of the new silver country near the Hudson Bay, that Jefferson Thorpe reached what you might call public importance in Mariposa.

Of course everybody knew Jeff and his little barber shop that stood just across the street from Smith’s Hotel. Everybody knew him and everybody got shaved there. From early morning, when the commercial travellers off the 6.30 express got shaved into the resemblance of human beings, there were always people going in and out of the barber shop.

Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, took his morning shave from Jeff as a form of resuscitation, with enough wet towels laid on his face to stew him and with Jeff moving about in the steam, razor in hand, as grave as an operating surgeon.

Then, as I think I said, Mr. Smith came in every morning and there was a tremendous outpouring of Florida water and rums, essences and revivers and renovators, regardless of expense. What with Jeff’s white coat and Mr. Smith’s flowered waistcoat and the red geranium in the window and the Florida water and the double extract of hyacinth, the little shop seemed multi-coloured and luxurious enough for the annex of a Sultan’s harem.

But what I mean is that, till the mining boom, Jefferson Thorpe never occupied a position of real prominence in Mariposa. You couldn’t, for example, have compared him with a man like Golgotha Gingham, who, as undertaker, stood in a direct relation to life and death, or to Trelawney, the postmaster, who drew money from the Federal Government of Canada, and was regarded as virtually a member of the Dominion Cabinet.

Everybody knew Jeff and liked him, but the odd thing was that till he made money nobody took any stock in his ideas at all. It was only after he made the “clean up” that they came to see what a splendid fellow he was. “Level-headed” I think was the term; indeed in the speech of Mariposa, the highest form of endowment was to have the head set on horizontally as with a theodolite.

As I say, it was when Jeff made money that they saw how gifted he was, and when he lost it – but still, there’s no need to go into that. I believe it’s something the same in other places, too.

The barber shop, you will remember, stands across the street from Smith’s Hotel, and stares at it face to face.

It is one of those wooden structures – I don’t know whether you know them – with a false front that sticks up above its real height and gives it an air at once rectangular and imposing. It is a form of architecture much used in Mariposa and understood to be in keeping with the pretentious and artificial character of modern business. There is a red, white and blue post in front of the shop and the shop itself has a large square window out of proportion to its little flat face.

Painted on the panes of the window is the remains of a legend that once spelt BARBER SHOP, executed with the flourishes that prevailed in the golden age of sign painting in Mariposa. Through the window you can see the geraniums in the window shelf and behind them Jeff Thorpe with his little black skull cap on and his spectacles drooped upon his nose as he bends forward in the absorption of shaving.

As you open the door, it sets in violent agitation a coiled spring up above and a bell that almost rings. Inside, there are two shaving chairs of the heavier, or electrocution pattern, with mirrors in front of them and pigeon holes with individual shaving mugs. There must be ever so many of them, fifteen or sixteen. It is the current supposition of each of Jeff’s customers that everyone else but himself uses a separate mug. One corner of the shop is partitioned off and bears the sign: HOT AND COLD BATHS, 50 cents. There has been no bath inside the partition for twenty years – only old newspapers and a mop. Still, it lends distinction somehow, just as do the faded cardboard signs that hang against the mirror with the legends: TURKISH SHAMPOO, 75 cents, and ROMAN MASSAGE, $1.00.

They said commonly in Mariposa that Jeff made money out of the barber shop. He may have, and it may have been that that turned his mind to investment. But it’s hard to see how he could. A shave cost five cents, and a hair-cut fifteen (or the two, if you liked, for a quarter), and at that it is hard to see how he could make money, even when he had both chairs going and shaved first in one and then in the other.

You see, in Mariposa, shaving isn’t the hurried, perfunctory thing that it is in the city. A shave is looked upon as a form of physical pleasure and lasts anywhere from twenty-five minutes to three-quarters of an hour.

In the morning hours, perhaps, there was a semblance of haste about it, but in the long quiet of the afternoon, as Jeff leaned forward towards the customer and talked to him in a soft confidential monotone, like a portrait painter, the razor would go slower and slower, and pause and stop, move and pause again, till the shave died away into the mere drowse of conversation.

At such hours, the Mariposa barber shop would become a very Palace of Slumber, and as you waited your turn in one of the wooden arm-chairs beside the wall, what with the quiet of the hour, and the low drone of Jeff’s conversation, the buzzing of the flies against the window pane and the measured tick of the clock above the mirror, your head sank dreaming on your breast, and the Mariposa Newspacket rustled unheeded on the floor. It makes one drowsy just to think of it!

The conversation, of course, was the real charm of the place. You see, Jefferson’s forte, or specialty, was information. He could tell you more things within the compass of a half-hour’s shave than you get in days of laborious research in an encyclopaedia. Where he got it all, I don’t know, but I am inclined to think it came more or less out of the newspapers.

In the city, people never read the newspapers, not really, only little bits and scraps of them. But in Mariposa it’s different. There they read the whole thing from cover to cover, and they build up on it, in the course of years, a range of acquirement that would put a college president to the blush. Anybody who has ever heard Henry Mullins and Peter Glover talk about the future of China will know just what I mean.

And, of course, the peculiarity of Jeff’s conversation was that he could suit it to his man every time. He had a kind of divination about it. There was a certain kind of man that Jeff would size up sideways as he stropped the razor, and in whose ear he would whisper: “I see where Saint Louis has took four straight games off Chicago,” – and so hold him fascinated to the end.

In the same way he would say to Mr. Smith: “I see where it says that this ‘Flying Squirl’ run a dead heat for the King’s Plate.”

To a humble intellect like mine he would explain in full the relations of the Keesar to the German Rich Dog.

But first and foremost, Jeff’s specialty in the way of conversation was finance and the money market, the huge fortunes that a man with the right kind of head could make.

I’ve known Jefferson to pause in his shaving with the razor suspended in the air as long as five minutes while he described, with his eye half closed, exactly the kind of a head a man needed in order to make a “haul” or a “clean up.” It was evidently simply a matter of the head, and as far as one could judge, Jeff’s own was the very type required.

I don’t know just at what time or how Jefferson first began his speculative enterprises. It was probably in him from the start. There is no doubt that the very idea of such things as Traction Stock and Amalgamated Asbestos went to his head: and whenever he spoke of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, the yearning tone of his voice made it as soft as lathered soap.

I suppose the most rudimentary form of his speculation was the hens. That was years ago. He kept them out at the back of his house – which itself stood up a grass plot behind and beyond the barber shop – and in the old days Jeff would say, with a certain note of pride in his voice, that The Woman had sold as many as two dozen eggs in a day to the summer visitors.

But what with reading about Amalgamated Asbestos and Consolidated Copper and all that, the hens began to seem pretty small business, and, in any case, the idea of two dozen eggs at a cent apiece almost makes one blush. I suppose a good many of us have felt just as Jeff did about our poor little earnings. Anyway, I remember Jeff telling me one day that he could take the whole lot of the hens and sell them off and crack the money into Chicago wheat on margin and turn it over in twenty-four hours. He did it too. Only somehow when it was turned over it came upside down on top of the hens.

After that the hen house stood empty and The Woman had to throw away chicken feed every day, at a dead loss of perhaps a shave and a half. But it made no difference to Jeff, for his mind had floated away already on the possibilities of what he called “displacement” mining on the Yukon.

So you can understand that when the mining boom struck Mariposa, Jefferson Thorpe was in it right from the very start. Why, no wonder; it seemed like the finger of Providence. Here was this great silver country spread out to north of us, where people had thought there was only a wilderness. And right at our very doors! You could see, as I saw, the night express going north every evening; for all one knew Rockefeller or Carnegie or anyone might be on it! Here was the wealth of Calcutta, as the Mariposa Newspacket put it, poured out at our very feet.

So no wonder the town went wild! All day in the street you could hear men talking of veins, and smelters and dips and deposits and faults – the town hummed with it like a geology class on examination day. And there were men about the hotels with mining outfits and theodolites and dunnage bags, and at Smith’s bar they would hand chunks of rock up and down, some of which would run as high as ten drinks to the pound.

The fever just caught the town and ran through it! Within a fortnight they put a partition down Robertson’s Coal and Wood Office and opened the Mariposa Mining Exchange, and just about every man on the Main Street started buying scrip. Then presently young Fizzlechip, who had been teller in Mullins’s Bank and that everybody had thought a worthless jackass before, came back from the Cobalt country with a fortune, and loafed round in the Mariposa House in English khaki and a horizontal hat, drunk all the time, and everybody holding him up as an example of what it was possible to do if you tried.

They all went in. Jim Eliot mortgaged the inside of the drug store and jammed it into Twin Tamagami. Pete Glover at the hardware store bought Nippewa stock at thirteen cents and sold it to his brother at seventeen and bought it back in less than a week at nineteen. They didn’t care! They took a chance. Judge Pepperleigh put the rest of his wife’s money into Temiskaming Common, and Lawyer Macartney got the fever, too, and put every cent that his sister possessed into Tulip Preferred.

And even when young Fizzlechip shot himself in the back room of the Mariposa House, Mr. Gingham buried him in a casket with silver handles and it was felt that there was a Monte Carlo touch about the whole thing.

They all went in – or all except Mr. Smith. You see, Mr. Smith had come down from there, and he knew all about rocks and mining and canoes and the north country. He knew what it was to eat flour-baked dampers under the lee side of a canoe propped among the underbrush, and to drink the last drop of whiskey within fifty miles. Mr. Smith had mighty little use for the north. But what he did do, was to buy up enough early potatoes to send fifteen carload lots into Cobalt at a profit of five dollars a bag.

Mr. Smith, I say, hung back. But Jeff Thorpe was in the mining boom right from the start. He bought in on the Nippewa mine even before the interim prospectus was out. He took a “block” of 100 shares of Abbitibbi Development at fourteen cents, and he and Johnson, the livery stable-keeper next door, formed a syndicate and got a thousand shares of Metagami Lake at 3 1/4 cents and then “unloaded” them on one of the sausage men at Netley’s butcher shop at a clear cent per cent advance.

Jeff would open the little drawer below the mirror in the barber shop and show you all kinds and sorts of Cobalt country mining certificates – blue ones, pink ones, green ones, with outlandish and fascinating names on them that ran clear from the Mattawa to the Hudson Bay.

And right from the start he was confident of winning.

“There ain’t no difficulty to it,” he said, “there’s lots of silver up there in that country and if you buy some here and some there you can’t fail to come out somewhere. I don’t say,” he used to continue, with the scissors open and ready to cut, “that some of the greenhorns won’t get bit. But if a feller knows the country and keeps his head level, he can’t lose.”

Jefferson had looked at so many prospectuses and so many pictures of mines and pine trees and smelters, that I think he’d forgotten that he’d never been in the country. Anyway, what’s two hundred miles!

To an onlooker it certainly didn’t seem so simple. I never knew the meanness, the trickery, of the mining business, the sheer obstinate determination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when they might, till I heard the accounts of Jeff’s different mines. Take the case of the Corona Jewel. There was a good mine, simply going to ruin for lack of common sense.

“She ain’t been developed,” Jeff would say. “There’s silver enough in her so you could dig it out with a shovel. She’s full of it. But they won’t get at her and work her.”

Then he’d take a look at the pink and blue certificates of the Corona Jewel and slam the drawer on them in disgust.

Worse than that was the Silent Pine – a clear case of stupid incompetence! Utter lack of engineering skill was all that was keeping the Silent Pine from making a fortune for its holders.

“The only trouble with that mine,” said Jeff, “is they won’t go deep enough. They followed the vein down to where it kind o’ thinned out and then they quit. If they’d just go right into her good, they’d get it again. She’s down there all right.”

But perhaps the meanest case of all was the Northern Star. That always seemed to me, every time I heard of it, a straight case for the criminal law. The thing was so evidently a conspiracy.

“I bought her,” said Jeff, “at thirty-two, and she stayed right there tight, like she was stuck. Then a bunch of these fellers in the city started to drive her down and they got her pushed down to twenty-four, and I held on to her and they shoved her down to twenty-one. This morning they’ve got her down to sixteen, but I don’t mean to let go. No, sir.”

In another fortnight they shoved her, the same unscrupulous crowd, down to nine cents, and Jefferson still held on.

“They’re working her down,” he admitted, “but I’m holding her.”

No conflict between vice and virtue was ever grimmer.

“She’s at six,” said Jeff, “but I’ve got her. They can’t squeeze me.”

A few days after that, the same criminal gang had her down further than ever.

“They’ve got her down to three cents,” said Jeff, “but I’m with her. Yes, sir, they think they can shove her clean off the market, but they can’t do it. I’ve boughten in Johnson’s shares, and the whole of Netley’s, and I’ll stay with her till she breaks.”

So they shoved and pushed and clawed her down – that unseen nefarious crowd in the city – and Jeff held on to her and they writhed and twisted at his grip, and then—

And then – well, that’s just the queer thing about the mining business. Why, sudden as a flash of lightning, it seemed, the news came over the wire to the Mariposa Newspacket, that they had struck a vein of silver in the Northern Star as thick as a sidewalk, and that the stock had jumped to seventeen dollars a share, and even at that you couldn’t get it! And Jeff stood there flushed and half-staggered against the mirror of the little shop, with a bunch of mining scrip in his hand that was worth forty thousand dollars!

Excitement! It was all over the town in a minute. They ran off a news extra at the Mariposa Newspacket, and in less than no time there wasn’t standing room in the barber shop, and over in Smith’s Hotel they had three extra bar-keepers working on the lager beer pumps.

They were selling mining shares on the Main Street in Mariposa that afternoon and people were just clutching for them. Then at night there was a big oyster supper in Smith’s caff, with speeches, and the Mariposa band outside.

And the queer thing was that the very next afternoon was the funeral of young Fizzlechip, and Dean Drone had to change the whole text of his Sunday sermon at two days’ notice for fear of offending public sentiment.

But I think what Jeff liked best of it all was the sort of public recognition that it meant. He’d stand there in the shop, hardly bothering to shave, and explain to the men in the arm-chairs how he held her, and they shoved her, and he clung to her, and what he’d said to himself – a perfect Iliad – while he was clinging to her.

The whole thing was in the city papers a few days after with a photograph of Jeff, taken specially at Ed Moore’s studio (upstairs over Netley’s). It showed Jeff sitting among palm trees, as all mining men do, with one hand on his knee, and a dog, one of those regular mining dogs, at his feet, and a look of piercing intelligence in his face that would easily account for forty thousand dollars.

I say that the recognition meant a lot to Jeff for its own sake. But no doubt the fortune meant quite a bit to him too on account of Myra.

Did I mention Myra, Jeff’s daughter? Perhaps not. That’s the trouble with the people in Mariposa; they’re all so separate and so different – not a bit like the people in the cities – that unless you hear about them separately and one by one you can’t for a moment understand what they’re like.

Myra had golden hair and a Greek face and would come bursting through the barber shop in a hat at least six inches wider than what they wear in Paris. As you saw her swinging up the street to the Telephone Exchange in a suit that was straight out of the Delineator and brown American boots, there was style written all over her – the kind of thing that Mariposa recognised and did homage to. And to see her in the Exchange – she was one of the four girls that I spoke of – on her high stool with a steel cap on – jabbing the connecting plugs in and out as if electricity cost nothing – well, all I mean is that you could understand why it was that the commercial travellers would stand round in the Exchange calling up all sorts of impossible villages, and waiting about so pleasant and genial! – it made one realize how naturally good-tempered men are. And then when Myra would go off duty and Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, would come on, the commercial men would be off again like autumn leaves.

It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treated lovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skin to show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, and who bought a forty-cent Ancient History to improve herself: and yet if she’d hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he’d have had her arrested for assault.

Mind you, I don’t mean that Myra was merely flippant and worthless. Not at all. She was a girl with any amount of talent. You should have heard her recite “The Raven,” at the Methodist Social! Simply genius! And when she acted Portia in the Trial Scene of the Merchant of Venice at the High School concert, everybody in Mariposa admitted that you couldn’t have told it from the original.

So, of course, as soon as Jeff made the fortune, Myra had her resignation in next morning and everybody knew that she was to go to a dramatic school for three months in the fall and become a leading actress.

But, as I said, the public recognition counted a lot for Jeff. The moment you begin to get that sort of thing it comes in quickly enough. Brains, you know, are recognized right away. That was why, of course, within a week from this Jeff received the first big packet of stuff from the Cuban Land Development Company, with coloured pictures of Cuba, and fields of bananas, and haciendas and insurrectos with machetes and Heaven knows what. They heard of him, somehow – it wasn’t for a modest man like Jefferson to say how. After all, the capitalists of the world are just one and the same crowd. If you’re in it, you’re in it, that’s all! Jeff realized why it is that of course men like Carnegie or Rockefeller and Morgan all know one another. They have to.

For all I know, this Cuban stuff may have been sent from Morgan himself. Some of the people in Mariposa said yes, others said no. There was no certainty.

Anyway, they were fair and straight, this Cuban crowd that wrote to Jeff. They offered him to come right in and be one of themselves. If a man’s got the brains, you may as well recognize it straight away. Just as well write him to be a director now as wait and hesitate till he forces his way into it.

Anyhow, they didn’t hesitate, these Cuban people that wrote to Jeff from Cuba – or from a post-office box in New York – it’s all the same thing, because Cuba being so near to New York the mail is all distributed from there. I suppose in some financial circles they might have been slower, wanted guarantees of some sort, and so on, but these Cubans, you know, have got a sort of Spanish warmth of heart that you don’t see in business men in America, and that touches you. No, they asked no guarantee. Just send the money – whether by express order or by bank draft or cheque, they left that entirely to oneself, as a matter between Cuban gentlemen.

And they were quite frank about their enterprise – bananas and tobacco in the plantation district reclaimed from the insurrectos. You could see it all there in the pictures – the tobacco plants and the insurrectos – everything. They made no rash promises, just admitted straight out that the enterprise might realize 400 per cent. or might conceivably make less. There was no hint of more.

So within a month, everybody in Mariposa knew that Jeff Thorpe was “in Cuban lands” and would probably clean up half a million by New Year’s. You couldn’t have failed to know it. All round the little shop there were pictures of banana groves and the harbour of Habana, and Cubans in white suits and scarlet sashes, smoking cigarettes in the sun and too ignorant to know that you can make four hundred per cent. by planting a banana tree.

I liked it about Jeff that he didn’t stop shaving. He went on just the same. Even when Johnson, the livery stable man, came in with five hundred dollars and asked him to see if the Cuban Board of Directors would let him put it in, Jeff laid it in the drawer and then shaved him for five cents, in the same old way. Of course, he must have felt proud when, a few days later, he got a letter from the Cuban people, from New York, accepting the money straight off without a single question, and without knowing anything more of Johnson except that he was a friend of Jeff’s. They wrote most handsomely. Any friends of Jeff’s were friends of Cuba. All money they might send would be treated just as Jeff’s would be treated.

One reason, perhaps, why Jeff didn’t give up shaving was because it allowed him to talk about Cuba. You see, everybody knew in Mariposa that Jeff Thorpe had sold out of Cobalts and had gone into Cuban Renovated Lands – and that spread round him a kind of halo of wealth and mystery and outlandishness – oh, something Spanish. Perhaps you’ve felt it about people that you know. Anyhow, they asked him about the climate, and yellow fever and what the negroes were like and all that sort of thing.

“This Cubey, it appears, is an island,” Jeff would explain. Of course, everybody knows how easily islands lend themselves to making money – “and for fruit, they say it comes up so fast you can’t stop it.” And then he would pass into details about the Hash-enders and the resurrectos and technical things like that till it was thought a wonder how he could know it. Still, it was realized that a man with money has got to know these things. Look at Morgan and Rockefeller and all the men that make a pile. They know just as much as Jeff did about the countries where they make it. It stands to reason.

Did I say that Jeff shaved in the same old way? Not quite. There was something even dreamier about it now, and a sort of new element in the way Jeff fell out of his monotone into lapses of thought that I, for one, misunderstood. I thought that perhaps getting so much money – well, you know the way it acts on people in the larger cities. It seemed to spoil one’s idea of Jeff that copper and asbestos and banana lands should form the goal of his thought when, if he knew it, the little shop and the sunlight of Mariposa was so much better.

In fact, I had perhaps borne him a grudge for what seemed to me his perpetual interest in the great capitalists. He always had some item out of the paper about them.

“I see where this here Carnegie has give fifty thousand dollars for one of them observatories,” he would say.

And another day he would pause in the course of shaving, and almost whisper: “Did you ever see this Rockefeller?”

It was only by a sort of accident that I came to know that there was another side to Jefferson’s speculation that no one in Mariposa ever knew, or will ever know now.

I knew it because I went in to see Jeff in his house one night. The house – I think I said it – stood out behind the barber shop. You went out of the back door of the shop, and through a grass plot with petunias beside it, and the house stood at the end. You could see the light of the lamp behind the blind, and through the screen door as you came along. And it was here that Jefferson used to sit in the evenings when the shop got empty.

There was a round table that The Woman used to lay for supper, and after supper there used to be a chequered cloth on it and a lamp with a shade. And beside it Jeff would sit, with his spectacles on and the paper spread out, reading about Carnegie and Rockefeller. Near him, but away from the table, was The Woman doing needlework, and Myra, when she wasn’t working in the Telephone Exchange, was there too with her elbows on the table reading Marie Corelli – only now, of course, after the fortune, she was reading the prospectuses of Dramatic Schools.

So this night – I don’t know just what it was in the paper that caused it – Jeff laid down what he was reading and started to talk about Carnegie.

“This Carnegie, I bet you, would be worth,” said Jeff, closing up his eyes in calculation, “as much as perhaps two million dollars, if you was to sell him up. And this Rockefeller and this Morgan, either of them, to sell them up clean, would be worth another couple of million——”

I may say in parentheses that it was a favourite method in Mariposa if you wanted to get at the real worth of a man, to imagine him clean sold up, put up for auction, as it were. It was the only way to test him.

“And now look at ’em,” Jeff went on. “They make their money and what do they do with it? They give it away. And who do they give it to? Why, to those as don’t want it, every time. They give it to these professors and to this research and that, and do the poor get any of it? Not a cent and never will.

“I tell you, boys,” continued Jeff (there were no boys present, but in Mariposa all really important speeches are addressed to an imaginary audience of boys) – “I tell you, if I was to make a million out of this Cubey, I’d give it straight to the poor, yes, sir – divide it up into a hundred lots of a thousand dollars each and give it to the people that hadn’t nothing.”

So always after that I knew just what those bananas were being grown for.

Indeed, after that, though Jefferson never spoke of his intentions directly, he said a number of things that seemed to bear on them. He asked me, for instance, one day, how many blind people it would take to fill one of these blind homes and how a feller could get ahold of them. And at another time he asked whether if a feller advertised for some of these incurables a feller could get enough of them to make a showing. I know for a fact that he got Nivens, the lawyer, to draw up a document that was to give an acre of banana land in Cuba to every idiot in Missinaba county.

But still – what’s the use of talking of what Jeff meant to do? Nobody knows or cares about it now.

The end of it was bound to come. Even in Mariposa some of the people must have thought so. Else how was it that Henry Mullins made such a fuss about selling a draft for forty thousand on New York? And why was it that Mr. Smith wouldn’t pay Billy, the desk clerk, his back wages when he wanted to put it into Cuba?

Oh yes; some of them must have seen it. And yet when it came it seemed so quiet – ever so quiet – not a bit like the Northern Star mine and the oyster supper and the Mariposa band. It is strange how quiet these things look, the other way round.

You remember the Cuban Land frauds in New York – and Porforio Gomez shooting the detective, and him and Maximo Morez getting clear away with two hundred thousand? No, of course you don’t; why, even in the city papers it only filled an inch or two of type, and anyway the names were hard to remember. That was Jeff’s money – part of it. Mullins got the telegram, from a broker or someone, and he showed it to Jeff just as he was going up the street with an estate agent to look at a big empty lot on the hill behind the town – the very place for these incurables.

And Jeff went back to the shop so quiet – have you ever seen an animal that is stricken through, how quiet it seems to move?

Well, that’s how he walked.

And since that, though it’s quite a little while ago, the shop’s open till eleven every night now, and Jeff is shaving away to pay back that five hundred that Johnson, the livery man, sent to the Cubans, and——

Pathetic? tut! tut! You don’t know Mariposa. Jeff has to work pretty late, but that’s nothing – nothing at all, if you’ve worked hard all your lifetime. And Myra is back at the Telephone Exchange – they were glad enough to get her, and she says now that if there’s one thing she hates, it’s the stage, and she can’t see how the actresses put up with it.

Anyway, things are not so bad. You see it was just at this time that Mr. Smith’s caff opened, and Mr. Smith came to Jeff’s Woman and said he wanted seven dozen eggs a day, and wanted them handy, and so the hens are back, and more of them, and they exult so every morning over the eggs they lay that if you wanted to talk of Rockefeller in the barber shop you couldn’t hear his name for the cackling.

TOC     INDEX

III

The Marine Excursions
of the Knights of Pythias

Half-past six on a July morning! The Mariposa Belle is at the wharf, decked in flags, with steam up ready to start.

Excursion day!

Half-past six on a July morning, and Lake Wissanotti lying in the sun as calm as glass. The opal colours of the morning light are shot from the surface of the water.

Out on the lake the last thin threads of the mist are clearing away like flecks of cotton wool.

The long call of the loon echoes over the lake. The air is cool and fresh. There is in it all the new life of the land of the silent pine and the moving waters. Lake Wissanotti in the morning sunlight! Don’t talk to me of the Italian lakes, or the Tyrol or the Swiss Alps. Take them away. Move them somewhere else. I don’t want them.

Excursion Day, at half-past six of a summer morning! With the boat all decked in flags and all the people in Mariposa on the wharf, and the band in peaked caps with big cornets tied to their bodies ready to play at any minute! I say! Don’t tell me about the Carnival of Venice and the Delhi Durbar. Don’t! I wouldn’t look at them. I’d shut my eyes! For light and colour give me every time an excursion out of Mariposa down the lake to the Indian’s Island out of sight in the morning mist. Talk of your Papal Zouaves and your Buckingham Palace Guard! I want to see the Mariposa band in uniform and the Mariposa Knights of Pythias with their aprons and their insignia and their picnic baskets and their five-cent cigars!

Half-past six in the morning, and all the crowd on the wharf and the boat due to leave in half an hour. Notice it! – in half an hour. Already she’s whistled twice (at six, and at six fifteen), and at any minute now, Christie Johnson will step into the pilot house and pull the string for the warning whistle that the boat will leave in half an hour. So keep ready. Don’t think of running back to Smith’s Hotel for the sandwiches. Don’t be fool enough to try to go up to the Greek Store, next to Netley’s, and buy fruit. You’ll be left behind for sure if you do. Never mind the sandwiches and the fruit! Anyway, here comes Mr. Smith himself with a huge basket of provender that would feed a factory. There must be sandwiches in that. I think I can hear them clinking. And behind Mr. Smith is the German waiter from the caff with another basket – indubitably lager beer; and behind him, the bartender of the hotel, carrying nothing, as far as one can see. But of course if you know Mariposa you will understand that why he looks so nonchalant and empty-handed is because he has two bottles of rye whiskey under his linen duster. You know, I think, the peculiar walk of a man with two bottles of whiskey in the inside pockets of a linen coat. In Mariposa, you see, to bring beer to an excursion is quite in keeping with public opinion. But, whiskey – well, one has to be a little careful.

Do I say that Mr. Smith is here? Why, everybody’s here. There’s Hussell the editor of the Newspacket, wearing a blue ribbon on his coat, for the Mariposa Knights of Pythias are, by their constitution, dedicated to temperance; and there’s Henry Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, also a Knight of Pythias, with a small flask of Pogram’s Special in his hip pocket as a sort of amendment to the constitution. And there’s Dean Drone, the Chaplain of the Order, with a fishing-rod (you never saw such green bass as lie among the rocks at Indian’s Island), and with a trolling line in case of maskinonge, and a landing net in case of pickerel, and with his eldest daughter, Lilian Drone, in case of young men. There never was such a fisherman as the Rev. Rupert Drone.

—

Perhaps I ought to explain that when I speak of the excursion as being of the Knights of Pythias, the thing must not be understood in any narrow sense. In Mariposa practically everybody belongs to the Knights of Pythias just as they do to everything else. That’s the great thing about the town and that’s what makes it so different from the city. Everybody is in everything.

You should see them on the seventeenth of March, for example, when everybody wears a green ribbon and they’re all laughing and glad – you know what the Celtic nature is – and talking about Home Rule.

On St. Andrew’s Day every man in town wears a thistle and shakes hands with everybody else, and you see the fine old Scotch honesty beaming out of their eyes.

And on St. George’s Day! – well, there’s no heartiness like the good old English spirit, after all; why shouldn’t a man feel glad that he’s an Englishman?

Then on the Fourth of July there are stars and stripes flying over half the stores in town, and suddenly all the men are seen to smoke cigars, and to know all about Roosevelt and Bryan and the Philippine Islands. Then you learn for the first time that Jeff Thorpe’s people came from Massachusetts and that his uncle fought at Bunker Hill (it must have been Bunker Hill – anyway Jefferson will swear it was in Dakota all right enough); and you find that George Duff has a married sister in Rochester and that her husband is all right; in fact, George was down there as recently as eight years ago. Oh, it’s the most American town imaginable is Mariposa – on the fourth of July.

But wait, just wait, if you feel anxious about the solidity of the British connection, till the twelfth of the month, when everybody is wearing an orange streamer in his coat and the Orangemen (every man in town) walk in the big procession. Allegiance! Well, perhaps you remember the address they gave to the Prince of Wales on the platform of the Mariposa station as he went through on his tour to the west. I think that pretty well settled that question.

So you will easily understand that of course everybody belongs to the Knights of Pythias and the Masons and Oddfellows, just as they all belong to the Snow Shoe Club and the Girls’ Friendly Society.

And meanwhile the whistle of the steamer has blown again for a quarter to seven: loud and long this time, for anyone not here now is late for certain, unless he should happen to come down in the last fifteen minutes.

What a crowd upon the wharf and how they pile on to the steamer! It’s a wonder that the boat can hold them all. But that’s just the marvellous thing about the Mariposa Belle.

I don’t know – I have never known – where the steamers like the Mariposa Belle come from. Whether they are built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, or whether, on the other hand, they are not built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, is more than one would like to say offhand.

The Mariposa Belle always seems to me to have some of those strange properties that distinguish Mariposa itself. I mean, her size seems to vary so. If you see her there in the winter, frozen in the ice beside the wharf with a snowdrift against the windows of the pilot house, she looks a pathetic little thing the size of a butternut. But in the summer time, especially after you’ve been in Mariposa for a month or two, and have paddled alongside of her in a canoe, she gets larger and taller, and with a great sweep of black sides, till you see no difference between the Mariposa Belle and the Lusitania. Each one is a big steamer and that’s all you can say.

Nor do her measurements help you much. She draws about eighteen inches forward, and more than that – at least half an inch more, astern, and when she’s loaded down with an excursion crowd she draws a good two inches more. And above the water – why, look at all the decks on her! There’s the deck you walk on to, from the wharf, all shut in, with windows along it, and the after cabin with the long table, and above that the deck with all the chairs piled upon it, and the deck in front where the band stand round in a circle, and the pilot house is higher than that, and above the pilot house is the board with the gold name and the flag pole and the steel ropes and the flags; and fixed in somewhere on the different levels is the lunch counter where they sell the sandwiches, and the engine room, and down below the deck level, beneath the water line, is the place where the crew sleep. What with steps and stairs and passages and piles of cordwood for the engine – oh no, I guess Harland and Wolff didn’t build her. They couldn’t have.

Yet even with a huge boat like the Mariposa Belle, it would be impossible for her to carry all of the crowd that you see in the boat and on the wharf. In reality, the crowd is made up of two classes – all of the people in Mariposa who are going on the excursion and all those who are not. Some come for the one reason and some for the other.

The two tellers of the Exchange Bank are both there standing side by side. But one of them – the one with the cameo pin and the long face like a horse – is going, and the other – with the other cameo pin and the face like another horse – is not. In the same way, Hussell of the Newspacket is going, but his brother, beside him, isn’t. Lilian Drone is going, but her sister can’t; and so on all through the crowd.

—

And to think that things should look like that on the morning of a steamboat accident.

How strange life is!

To think of all these people so eager and anxious to catch the steamer, and some of them running to catch it, and so fearful that they might miss it – the morning of a steamboat accident. And the captain blowing his whistle, and warning them so severely that he would leave them behind – leave them out of the accident! And everybody crowding so eagerly to be in the accident.

Perhaps life is like that all through.

Strangest of all to think, in a case like this, of the people who were left behind, or in some way or other prevented from going, and always afterwards told of how they had escaped being on board the Mariposa Belle that day!

Some of the instances were certainly extraordinary.

Nivens, the lawyer, escaped from being there merely by the fact that he was away in the city.

Towers, the tailor, only escaped owing to the fact that, not intending to go on the excursion he had stayed in bed till eight o’clock and so had not gone. He narrated afterwards that waking up that morning at half-past five, he had thought of the excursion and for some unaccountable reason had felt glad that he was not going.

—

The case of Yodel, the auctioneer, was even more inscrutable. He had been to the Oddfellows’ excursion on the train the week before and to the Conservative picnic the week before that, and had decided not to go on this trip. In fact, he had not the least intention of going. He narrated afterwards how the night before someone had stopped him on the corner of Nippewa and Tecumseh Streets (he indicated the very spot) and asked: “Are you going to take in the excursion tomorrow?” and he had said, just as simply as he was talking when narrating it: “No.” And ten minutes after that, at the corner of Dalhousie and Brock Streets (he offered to lead a party of verification to the precise place) somebody else had stopped him and asked: “Well, are you going on the steamer trip tomorrow?” Again he had answered: “No,” apparently almost in the same tone as before.

He said afterwards that when he heard the rumour of the accident it seemed like the finger of Providence, and he fell on his knees in thankfulness.

There was the similar case of Morison (I mean the one in Glover’s hardware store that married one of the Thompsons). He said afterwards that he had read so much in the papers about accidents lately – mining accidents, and airplanes and gasoline – that he had grown nervous. The night before his wife had asked him at supper: “Are you going on the excursion?” He had answered: “No, I don’t think I feel like it,” and had added: “Perhaps your mother might like to go.” And the next evening just at dusk, when the news ran through the town, he said the first thought that flashed through his head was: “Mrs. Thompson’s on that boat.”

He told this right as I say it – without the least doubt or confusion. He never for a moment imagined she was on the Lusitania or the Olympic or any other boat. He knew she was on this one. He said you could have knocked him down where he stood. But no one had. Not even when he got half-way down – on his knees, and it would have been easier still to knock him down or kick him. People do miss a lot of chances.

Still, as I say, neither Yodel nor Morison nor anyone thought about there being an accident until just after sundown when they——

Well, have you ever heard the long booming whistle of a steamboat two miles out on the lake in the dusk, and while you listen and count and wonder, seen the crimson rockets going up against the sky and then heard the fire bell ringing right there beside you in the town, and seen the people running to the town wharf?

That’s what the people of Mariposa saw and felt that summer evening as they watched the Mackinaw life-boat go plunging out into the lake with seven sweeps to a side and the foam clear to the gunwale with the lifting stroke of fourteen men!

But, dear me, I am afraid that this is no way to tell a story. I suppose the true art would have been to have said nothing about the accident till it happened. But when you write about Mariposa, or hear of it, if you know the place, it’s all so vivid and real that a thing like the contrast between the excursion crowd in the morning and the scene at night leaps into your mind and you must think of it.

—

But never mind about the accident – let us turn back again to the morning.

The boat was due to leave at seven. There was no doubt about the hour – not only seven, but seven sharp. The notice in the Newspacket said: “The boat will leave sharp at seven;” and the advertising posters on the telegraph poles on Missinaba Street that began “Ho, for Indian’s Island!” ended up with the words: “Boat leaves at seven sharp.” There was a big notice on the wharf that said: “Boat leaves sharp on time.”

So at seven, right on the hour, the whistle blew loud and long, and then at seven fifteen three short peremptory blasts, and at seven thirty one quick angry call – just one – and very soon after that they cast off the last of the ropes and the Mariposa Belle sailed off in her cloud of flags, and the band of the Knights of Pythias, timing it to a nicety, broke into the “Maple Leaf for Ever!”

I suppose that all excursions when they start are much the same. Anyway, on the Mariposa Belle everybody went running up and down all over the boat with deck chairs and camp stools and baskets, and found places, splendid places to sit, and then got scared that there might be better ones and chased off again. People hunted for places out of the sun and when they got them swore that they weren’t going to freeze to please anybody; and the people in the sun said that they hadn’t paid fifty cents to be roasted. Others said that they hadn’t paid fifty cents to get covered with cinders, and there were still others who hadn’t paid fifty cents to get shaken to death with the propeller.

Still, it was all right presently. The people seemed to get sorted out into the places on the boat where they belonged. The women, the older ones, all gravitated into the cabin on the lower deck and by getting round the table with needlework, and with all the windows shut, they soon had it, as they said themselves, just like being at home.

All the young boys and the toughs and the men in the band got down on the lower deck forward, where the boat was dirtiest and where the anchor was and the coils of rope.

And upstairs on the after deck there were Lilian Drone and Miss Lawson, the high school teacher, with a book of German poetry – Gothey I think it was – and the bank teller and the younger men.

In the centre, standing beside the rail, were Dean Drone and Dr. Gallagher, looking through binocular glasses at the shore.

Up in front on the little deck forward of the pilot house was a group of the older men, Mullins and Duff and Mr. Smith in a deck chair, and beside him Mr. Golgotha Gingham, the undertaker of Mariposa, on a stool. It was part of Mr. Gingham’s principles to take in an outing of this sort, a business matter, more or less – for you never know what may happen at these water parties. At any rate, he was there in a neat suit of black, not, of course, his heavier or professional suit, but a soft clinging effect as of burnt paper that combined gaiety and decorum to a nicety.

—

“Yes,” said Mr. Gingham, waving his black glove in a general way towards the shore, “I know the lake well, very well. I’ve been pretty much all over it in my time.”

“Canoeing?” asked somebody.

“No,” said Mr. Gingham, “not in a canoe.” There seemed a peculiar and quiet meaning in his tone.

“Sailing, I suppose,” said somebody else.

“No,” said Mr. Gingham. “I don’t understand it.”

“I never knowed that you went on to the water at all, Gol,” said Mr. Smith, breaking in.

“Ah, not now,” explained Mr. Gingham; “it was years ago, the first summer I came to Mariposa. I was on the water practically all day. Nothing like it to give a man an appetite and keep him in shape.”

“Was you camping?” asked Mr. Smith.

“We camped at night,” assented the undertaker, “but we put in practically the whole day on the water. You see we were after a party that had come up here from the city on his vacation and gone out in a sailing canoe. We were dragging. We were up every morning at sunrise, lit a fire on the beach and cooked breakfast, and then we’d light our pipes and be off with the net for a whole day. It’s a great life,” concluded Mr. Gingham wistfully.

“Did you get him?” asked two or three together.

There was a pause before Mr. Gingham answered.

“We did,” he said – “down in the reeds past Horseshoe Point. But it was no use. He turned blue on me right away.”

After which Mr. Gingham fell into such a deep reverie that the boat had steamed another half-mile down the lake before anybody broke the silence again.

Talk of this sort – and after all what more suitable for a day on the water? – beguiled the way.

—

Down the lake, mile by mile over the calm water, steamed the Mariposa Belle. They passed Poplar Point where the high sand-banks are with all the swallows’ nests in them, and Dean Drone and Dr. Gallagher looked at them alternately through the binocular glasses, and it was wonderful how plainly one could see the swallows and the banks and the shrubs – just as plainly as with the naked eye.

And a little further down they passed the Shingle Beach, and Dr. Gallagher, who knew Canadian history, said to Dean Drone that it was strange to think that Champlain had landed there with his French explorers three hundred years ago; and Dean Drone, who didn’t know Canadian history, said it was stranger still to think that the hand of the Almighty had piled up the hills and rocks long before that; and Dr. Gallagher said it was wonderful how the French had found their way through such a pathless wilderness; and Dean Drone said that it was wonderful also to think that the Almighty had placed even the smallest shrub in its appointed place. Dr. Gallagher said it filled him with admiration. Dean Drone said it filled him with awe. Dr. Gallagher said he’d been full of it ever since he was a boy; and Dean Drone said so had he.

Then a little further, as the Mariposa Belle steamed on down the lake, they passed the Old Indian Portage where the great grey rocks are; and Dr. Gallagher drew Dean Drone’s attention to the place where the narrow canoe track wound up from the shore to the woods, and Dean Drone said he could see it perfectly well without the glasses.

Dr. Gallagher said that it was just here that a party of five hundred French had made their way with all their baggage and accoutrements across the rocks of the divide and down to the Great Bay. And Dean Drone said that it reminded him of Xenophon leading his ten thousand Greeks over the hill passes of Armenia down to the sea. Dr. Gallagher said that he had often wished he could have seen and spoken to Champlain, and Dean Drone said how much he regretted to have never known Xenophon.

And then after that they fell to talking of relics and traces of the past, and Dr. Gallagher said that if Dean Drone would come round to his house some night he would show him some Indian arrow heads that he had dug up in his garden. And Dean Drone said that if Dr. Gallagher would come round to the rectory any afternoon he would show him a map of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. Only he must come some time between the Infant Class and the Mothers’ Auxiliary.

So presently they both knew that they were blocked out of one another’s houses for some time to come, and Dr. Gallagher walked forward and told Mr. Smith, who had never studied Greek, about Champlain crossing the rock divide.

Mr. Smith turned his head and looked at the divide for half a second and then said he had crossed a worse one up north back of the Wahnipitae and that the flies were Hades – and then went on playing freezeout poker with the two juniors in Duff’s bank.

So Dr. Gallagher realized that that’s always the way when you try to tell people things, and that as far as gratitude and appreciation goes one might as well never read books or travel anywhere or do anything.

In fact, it was at this very moment that he made up his mind to give the arrows to the Mariposa Mechanics’ Institute – they afterwards became, as you know, the Gallagher Collection. But, for the time being, the doctor was sick of them and wandered off round the boat and watched Henry Mullins showing George Duff how to make a John Collins without lemons, and finally went and sat down among the Mariposa band and wished that he hadn’t come.

So the boat steamed on and the sun rose higher and higher, and the freshness of the morning changed into the full glare of noon, and they went on to where the lake began to narrow in at its foot, just where the Indian’s Island is – all grass and trees and with a log wharf running into the water. Below it the Lower Ossawippi runs out of the lake, and quite near are the rapids, and you can see down among the trees the red brick of the power house and hear the roar of the leaping water.

The Indian’s Island itself is all covered with trees and tangled vines, and the water about it is so still that it’s all reflected double and looks the same either way up. Then when the steamer’s whistle blows as it comes into the wharf, you hear it echo among the trees of the island, and reverberate back from the shores of the lake.

The scene is all so quiet and still and unbroken, that Miss Cleghorn – the sallow girl in the telephone exchange, that I spoke of – said she’d like to be buried there. But all the people were so busy getting their baskets and gathering up their things that no one had time to attend to it.

I mustn’t even try to describe the landing and the boat crunching against the wooden wharf and all the people running to the same side of the deck and Christie Johnson calling out to the crowd to keep to the starboard and nobody being able to find it. Everyone who has been on a Mariposa excursion knows all about that.

Nor can I describe the day itself and the picnic under the trees. There were speeches afterwards, and Judge Pepperleigh gave such offence by bringing in Conservative politics that a man called Patriotus Canadiensis wrote and asked for some of the invaluable space of the Mariposa Times-Herald and exposed it.

I should say that there were races too, on the grass on the open side of the island, graded mostly according to ages – races for boys under thirteen and girls over nineteen and all that sort of thing. Sports are generally conducted on that plan in Mariposa. It is realized that a woman of sixty has an unfair advantage over a mere child.

Dean Drone managed the races and decided the ages and gave out the prizes; the Wesleyan minister helped, and he and the young student, who was relieving in the Presbyterian Church, held the string at the winning point.

They had to get mostly clergymen for the races because all the men had wandered off, somehow, to where they were drinking lager beer out of two kegs stuck on pine logs among the trees.

But if you’ve ever been on a Mariposa excursion you know all about these details anyway.

So the day wore on and presently the sun came through the trees on a slant and the steamer whistle blew with a great puff of white steam and all the people came straggling down to the wharf and pretty soon the Mariposa Belle had floated out on to the lake again and headed for the town, twenty miles away.

—

I suppose you have often noticed the contrast there is between an excursion on its way out in the morning and what it looks like on the way home.

In the morning everybody is so restless and animated and moves to and fro all over the boat and asks questions. But coming home, as the afternoon gets later and later and the sun sinks beyond the hills, all the people seem to get so still and quiet and drowsy.

So it was with the people on the Mariposa Belle. They sat there on the benches and the deck chairs in little clusters, and listened to the regular beat of the propeller and almost dozed off asleep as they sat. Then when the sun set and the dusk drew on, it grew almost dark on the deck and so still that you could hardly tell there was anyone on board.

And if you had looked at the steamer from the shore or from one of the islands, you’d have seen the row of lights from the cabin windows shining on the water and the red glare of the burning hemlock from the funnel, and you’d have heard the soft thud of the propeller miles away over the lake.

Now and then, too, you could have heard them singing on the steamer – the voices of the girls and the men blended into unison by the distance, rising and falling in long-drawn melody: “O – Can-a-da – O – Can-a-da.”

You may talk as you will about the intoning choirs of your European cathedrals, but the sound of “O Can-a-da,” borne across the waters of a silent lake at evening is good enough for those of us who know Mariposa.

I think that it was just as they were singing like this: “O – Can-a-da,” that word went round that the boat was sinking.

If you have ever been in any sudden emergency on the water, you will understand the strange psychology of it – the way in which what is happening seems to become known all in a moment without a word being said. The news is transmitted from one to the other by some mysterious process.

At any rate, on the Mariposa Belle first one and then the other heard that the steamer was sinking. As far as I could ever learn the first of it was that George Duff, the bank manager, came very quietly to Dr. Gallagher and asked him if he thought that the boat was sinking. The doctor said no, that he had thought so earlier in the day but that he didn’t now think that she was.

After that Duff, according to his own account, had said to Macartney, the lawyer, that the boat was sinking, and Macartney said that he doubted it very much.

Then somebody came to Judge Pepperleigh and woke him up and said that there was six inches of water in the steamer and that she was sinking. And Pepperleigh said it was perfect scandal and passed the news on to his wife and she said that they had no business to allow it and that if the steamer sank that was the last excursion she’d go on.

So the news went all round the boat and everywhere the people gathered in groups and talked about it in the angry and excited way that people have when a steamer is sinking on one of the lakes like Lake Wissanotti.

Dean Drone, of course, and some others were quieter about it, and said that one must make allowances and that naturally there were two sides to everything. But most of them wouldn’t listen to reason at all. I think, perhaps, that some of them were frightened. You see the last time but one that the steamer had sunk, there had been a man drowned and it made them nervous.

What? Hadn’t I explained about the depth of Lake Wissanotti? I had taken it for granted that you knew; and in any case parts of it are deep enough, though I don’t suppose in this stretch of it from the big reed beds up to within a mile of the town wharf, you could find six feet of water in it if you tried. Oh, pshaw! I was not talking about a steamer sinking in the ocean and carrying down its screaming crowds of people into the hideous depths of green water. Oh, dear me, no! That kind of thing never happens on Lake Wissanotti.

But what does happen is that the Mariposa Belle sinks every now and then, and sticks there on the bottom till they get things straightened up.

On the lakes round Mariposa, if a person arrives late anywhere and explains that the steamer sank, everybody understands the situation.

You see when Harland and Wolff built the Mariposa Belle, they left some cracks in between the timbers that you fill up with cotton waste every Sunday. If this is not attended to, the boat sinks. In fact, it is part of the law of the province that all the steamers like the Mariposa Belle must be properly corked – I think that is the word – every season. There are inspectors who visit all the hotels in the province to see that it is done.

So you can imagine now that I’ve explained it a little straighter, the indignation of the people when they knew that the boat had come uncorked and that they might be stuck out there on a shoal or a mud-bank half the night.

I don’t say either that there wasn’t any danger; anyway, it doesn’t feel very safe when you realize that the boat is settling down with every hundred yards that she goes, and you look over the side and see only the black water in the gathering night.

Safe! I’m not sure now that I come to think of it that it isn’t worse than sinking in the Atlantic. After all, in the Atlantic there is wireless telegraphy, and a lot of trained sailors and stewards. But out on Lake Wissanotti – far out, so that you can only just see the lights of the town away off to the south – when the propeller comes to a stop – and you can hear the hiss of steam as they start to rake out the engine fires to prevent an explosion – and when you turn from the red glare that comes from the furnace doors as they open them, to the black dark that is gathering over the lake – and there’s a night wind beginning to run among the rushes – and you see the men going forward to the roof of the pilot house to send up the rockets to rouse the town – safe? Safe yourself, if you like; as for me, let me once get back into Mariposa again, under the night shadow of the maple trees, and this shall be the last, last time I’ll go on Lake Wissanotti.

Safe! Oh yes! Isn’t it strange how safe other people’s adventures seem after they happen? But you’d have been scared, too, if you’d been there just before the steamer sank, and seen them bringing up all the women on to the top deck.

I don’t see how some of the people took it so calmly; how Mr. Smith, for instance, could have gone on smoking and telling how he’d had a steamer “sink on him” on Lake Nipissing and a still bigger one, a side-wheeler, sink on him in Lake Abbitibbi.

Then, quite suddenly, with a quiver, down she went. You could feel the boat sink, sink – down, down – would it never get to the bottom? The water came flush up to the lower deck, and then – thank heaven – the sinking stopped and there was the Mariposa Belle safe and tight on a reed bank.

Really, it made one positively laugh! It seemed so queer and, anyway, if a man has a sort of natural courage, danger makes him laugh. Danger? pshaw! fiddlesticks! everybody scouted the idea. Why, it is just the little things like this that give zest to a day on the water.

Within half a minute they were all running round looking for sandwiches and cracking jokes and talking of making coffee over the remains of the engine fires.

—

I don’t need to tell at length how it all happened after that.

I suppose the people on the Mariposa Belle would have had to settle down there all night or till help came from the town, but some of the men who had gone forward and were peering out into the dark said that it couldn’t be more than a mile across the water to Miller’s Point. You could almost see it over there to the left – some of them, I think, said “off on the port bow,” because you know when you get mixed up in these marine disasters, you soon catch the atmosphere of the thing.

So pretty soon they had the davits swung out over the side and were lowering the old lifeboat from the top deck into the water.

There were men leaning out over the rail of the Mariposa Belle with lanterns that threw the light as they let her down, and the glare fell on the water and the reeds. But when they got the boat lowered, it looked such a frail, clumsy thing as one saw it from the rail above, that the cry was raised: “Women and children first!” For what was the sense, if it should turn out that the boat wouldn’t even hold women and children, of trying to jam a lot of heavy men into it?

So they put in mostly women and children and the boat pushed out into the darkness so freighted down it would hardly float.

In the bow of it was the Presbyterian student who was relieving the minister, and he called out that they were in the hands of Providence. But he was crouched and ready to spring out of them at the first moment.

So the boat went and was lost in the darkness except for the lantern in the bow that you could see bobbing on the water. Then presently it came back and they sent another load, till pretty soon the decks began to thin out and everybody got impatient to be gone.

It was about the time that the third boat-load put off that Mr. Smith took a bet with Mullins for twenty-five dollars, that he’d be home in Mariposa before the people in the boats had walked round the shore.

No one knew just what he meant, but pretty soon they saw Mr. Smith disappear down below into the lowest part of the steamer with a mallet in one hand and a big bundle of marline in the other.

They might have wondered more about it, but it was just at this time that they heard the shouts from the rescue boat – the big Mackinaw lifeboat – that had put out from the town with fourteen men at the sweeps when they saw the first rockets go up.

I suppose there is always something inspiring about a rescue at sea, or on the water.

After all, the bravery of the lifeboat man is the true bravery – expended to save life, not to destroy it.

Certainly they told for months after of how the rescue boat came out to the Mariposa Belle.

I suppose that when they put her in the water the lifeboat touched it for the first time since the old Macdonald Government placed her on Lake Wissanotti.

Anyway, the water poured in at every seam. But not for a moment – even with two miles of water between them and the steamer – did the rowers pause for that.

By the time they were half-way there the water was almost up to the thwarts, but they drove her on. Panting and exhausted (for mind you, if you haven’t been in a fool boat like that for years, rowing takes it out of you), the rowers stuck to their task. They threw the ballast over and chucked into the water the heavy cork jackets and lifebelts that encumbered their movements. There was no thought of turning back. They were nearer to the steamer than the shore.

“Hang to it, boys,” called the crowd from the steamer’s deck, and hang they did.

They were almost exhausted when they got them; men leaning from the steamer threw them ropes and one by one every man was hauled aboard just as the lifeboat sank under their feet.

Saved! by Heaven, saved, by one of the smartest pieces of rescue work ever seen on the lake.

There’s no use describing it; you need to see rescue work of this kind by lifeboats to understand it.

Nor were the lifeboat crew the only ones that distinguished themselves.

Boat after boat and canoe after canoe had put out from Mariposa to the help of the steamer. They got them all.

Pupkin, the other bank teller, with a face like a horse, who hadn’t gone on the excursion – as soon as he knew that the boat was signalling for help and that Miss Lawson was sending up rockets – rushed for a row boat, grabbed an oar (two would have hampered him), and paddled madly out into the lake. He struck right out into the dark with the crazy skiff almost sinking beneath his feet. But they got him. They rescued him. They watched him, almost dead with exhaustion, make his way to the steamer, where he was hauled up with ropes. Saved! Saved!!

—

They might have gone on that way half the night, picking up the rescuers, only, at the very moment when the tenth load of people left for the shore – just as suddenly and saucily as you please, up came the Mariposa Belle from the mud bottom and floated.

Floated?

Why, of course she did. If you take a hundred and fifty people off a steamer that has sunk, and if you get a man as shrewd as Mr. Smith to plug the timber seams with mallet and marline, and if you turn ten bandsmen of the Mariposa band on to your hand pump on the bow of the lower decks – float? why, what else can she do?

Then, if you stuff in hemlock into the embers of the fire that you were raking out, till it hums and crackles under the boiler, it won’t be long before you hear the propeller thud – thudding at the stern again, and before the long roar of the steam whistle echoes over to the town.

And so the Mariposa Belle, with all steam up again and with the long train of sparks careering from the funnel, is heading for the town.

But no Christie Johnson at the wheel in the pilot house this time.

“Smith! Get Smith!” is the cry.

Can he take her in? Well, now! Ask a man who has had steamers sink on him in half the lakes from Temiscaming to the Bay, if he can take her in? Ask a man who has run a York boat down the rapids of the Moose when the ice is moving, if he can grip the steering wheel of the Mariposa Belle? So there she steams safe and sound to the town wharf!

Look at the lights and the crowd! If only the federal census taker could count us now! Hear them calling and shouting back and forward from the deck to the shore! Listen! There is the rattle of the shore ropes as they get them ready, and there’s the Mariposa band – actually forming in a circle on the upper deck just as she docks, and the leader with his baton – one – two – ready now—

“O CAN-A-DA!”

TOC     INDEX

IV

The Ministrations
of the Rev. Mr. Drone

The Church of England Church in Mariposa is on a side street, where the maple trees are thickest, a little up the hill from the heart of the town. The trees above the church and the grass plot that was once the cemetery, till they made the new one (the Necropolis, over the brow of the hill), fill out the whole corner. Down behind the church, with only the driving shed and a lane between, is the rectory. It is a little brick house with odd angles. There is a hedge and a little gate, and a weeping ash tree with red berries.

At the side of the rectory, churchward, is a little grass lawn with low hedges and at the side of that two wild plum trees, that are practically always in white blossom. Underneath them is a rustic table and chairs, and it is here that you may see Rural Dean Drone, the incumbent of the Church of England Church, sitting, in the chequered light of the plum trees that is neither sun nor shadow. Generally you will find him reading, and when I tell you that at the end of the grass plot where the hedge is highest there is a yellow bee hive with seven bees that belong to Dean Drone, you will realize that it is only fitting that the Dean is reading in the Greek. For what better could a man be reading beneath the blossom of the plum trees, within the very sound of the bees, than the Pastorals of Theocritus? The light trash of modern romance might put a man to sleep in such a spot, but with such food for reflection as Theocritus, a man may safely close his eyes and muse on what he reads without fear of dropping into slumber.

Some men, I suppose, terminate their education when they leave their college. Not so Dean Drone. I have often heard him say that if he couldn’t take a book in the Greek out on the lawn in a spare half-hour, he would feel lost. It’s a certain activity of the brain that must be stilled somehow. The Dean, too, seemed to have a native feeling for the Greek language. I have often heard people who might sit with him on the lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he always refused. One couldn’t translate it, he said. It lost so much in the translation that it was better not to try. It was far wiser not to attempt it. If you undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing immediately. I believe that many classical scholars feel this way, and like to read the Greek just as it is, without the hazard of trying to put it into so poor a medium as English. So that when Dean Drone said that he simply couldn’t translate it, I believe he was perfectly sincere.

Sometimes, indeed, he would read it aloud. That was another matter. Whenever, for example, Dr. Gallagher – I mean, of course, old Dr. Gallagher, not the young doctor (who was always out in the country in the afternoon) – would come over and bring his latest Indian relics to show to the Dean, the latter always read to him a passage or two. As soon as the doctor laid his tomahawk on the table, the Dean would reach for his Theocritus. I remember that on the day when Dr. Gallagher brought over the Indian skull that they had dug out of the railway embankment, and placed it on the rustic table, the Dean read to him so long from Theocritus that the doctor, I truly believe, dozed off in his chair. The Dean had to wait and fold his hands with the book across his knee, and close his eyes till the doctor should wake up again. And the skull was on the table between them, and from above the plum blossoms fluttered down, till they made flakes on it as white as Dr. Gallagher’s hair.

—

I don’t want you to suppose that the Rev. Mr. Drone spent the whole of his time under the trees. Not at all. In point of fact, the rector’s life was one round of activity which he himself might deplore but was powerless to prevent. He had hardly sat down beneath the trees of an afternoon after his mid-day meal when there was the Infant Class at three, and after that, with scarcely an hour between, the Mothers’ Auxiliary at five, and the next morning the Book Club, and that evening the Bible Study Class, and the next morning the Early Workers’ Guild at eleven-thirty. The whole week was like that, and if one found time to sit down for an hour or so to recuperate it was the most one could do. After all, if a busy man spends the little bit of leisure that he gets in advanced classical study, there is surely no harm in it. I suppose, take it all in all, there wasn’t a busier man than the Rural Dean among the Anglican clergy of the diocese.

If the Dean ever did snatch a half-day from his incessant work, he spent it in fishing. But not always that, for as likely as not, instead of taking a real holiday he would put in the whole afternoon amusing the children and the boys that he knew, by making kites and toys and clockwork steamboats for them.

It was fortunate for the Dean that he had the strange interest and aptitude for mechanical advices which he possessed, or otherwise this kind of thing would have been too cruel an imposition. But the Rev. Mr. Drone had a curious liking for machinery. I think I never heard him preach a better sermon than the one on Aeroplanes (Lo, what now see you on high Jeremiah Two).

So it was that he spent two whole days making a kite with Chinese wings for Teddy Moore, the photographer’s son, and closed down the infant class for forty-eight hours so that Teddy Moore should not miss the pleasure of flying it, or rather seeing it flown. It is foolish to trust a Chinese kite to the hands of a young child.

In the same way the Dean made a mechanical top for little Marjorie Trewlaney, the cripple, to see spun: it would have been unwise to allow the afflicted girl to spin it. There was no end to the things that Mr. Drone could make, and always for the children. Even when he was making the sand-clock for poor little Willie Yodel (who died, you know) the Dean went right on with it and gave it to another child with just the same pleasure. Death, you know, to the clergy is a different thing from what it is to us. The Dean and Mr. Gingham used often to speak of it as they walked through the long grass of the new cemetery, the Necropolis. And when your Sunday walk is to your wife’s grave, as the Dean’s was, perhaps it seems different to anybody.

The Church of England Church, I said, stood close to the rectory, a tall, sweeping church, and inside a great reach of polished cedar beams that ran to the point of the roof. There used to stand on the same spot the little stone church that all the grown-up people in Mariposa still remember, a quaint little building in red and grey stone. About it was the old cemetery, but that was all smoothed out later into the grass plot round the new church, and the headstones laid out flat, and no new graves have been put there for ever so long. But the Mariposa children still walk round and read the headstones lying flat in the grass and look for the old ones – because some of them are ever so old – forty or fifty years back.

Nor are you to think from all this that the Dean was not a man with serious perplexities. You could easily convince yourself of the contrary. For if you watched the Rev. Mr. Drone as he sat reading in the Greek, you would notice that no very long period ever passed without his taking up a sheet or two of paper that lay between the leaves of the Theocritus and that were covered close with figures.

And these the Dean would lay upon the rustic table, and he would add them up forwards and backwards, going first up the column and then down it to see that nothing had been left out, and then down it again to see what it was that must have been left out.

Mathematics, you will understand, were not the Dean’s forte. They never were the forte of the men who had been trained at the little Anglican college with the clipped hedges and the cricket ground, where Rupert Drone had taken the gold medal in Greek fifty-two years ago. You will see the medal at any time lying there in its open box on the rectory table, in case of immediate need. Any of the Drone girls, Lilian, or Jocelyn, or Theodora, would show it to you. But, as I say, mathematics were not the rector’s forte, and he blamed for it (in a Christian spirit, you will understand) the memory of his mathematical professor, and often he spoke with great bitterness. I have often heard him say that in his opinion the colleges ought to dismiss, of course in a Christian spirit, all the professors who are not, in the most reverential sense of the term, fit for their jobs.

No doubt many of the clergy of the diocese had suffered more or less just as the Dean had from lack of mathematical training. But the Dean always felt that his own case was especially to be lamented. For you see, if a man is trying to make a model airplane – for a poor family in the lower part of the town – and he is brought to a stop by the need of reckoning the coefficient of torsion of cast-iron rods, it shows plainly enough that the colleges are not truly filling their divine mission.

—

But the figures that I speak of were not those of the model airplane. These were far more serious. Night and day they had been with the rector now for the best part of ten years, and they grew, if anything, more intricate.

If, for example, you try to reckon the debt of a church – a large church with a great sweep of polished cedar beams inside, for the special glorification of the All Powerful, and with imported tiles on the roof for the greater glory of Heaven and with stained-glass windows for the exaltation of the All Seeing – if, I say, you try to reckon up the debt on such a church and figure out its interest and its present worth, less a fixed annual payment, it makes a pretty complicated sum. Then if you try to add to this the annual cost of insurance, and deduct from it three-quarters of a stipend, year by year, and then suddenly remember that three-quarters is too much, because you have forgotten the boarding-school fees of the littlest of the Drones (including French, as an extra – she must have it, all the older girls did), you have got a sum that pretty well defies ordinary arithmetic. The provoking part of it was that the Dean knew perfectly well that with the help of logarithms he could have done the thing in a moment. But at the Anglican college they had stopped short at that very place in the book. They had simply explained that Logos was a word and Arithmos a number, which, at the time, seemed amply sufficient.

So the Dean was perpetually taking out his sheets of figures, and adding them upwards and downwards, and they never came the same. Very often Mr. Gingham, who was a warden, would come and sit beside the rector and ponder over the figures, and Mr. Drone would explain that with a book of logarithms you could work it out in a moment. You would simply open the book and run your finger up the columns (he illustrated exactly the way in which the finger was moved), and there you were. Mr. Gingham said that it was a caution, and that logarithms (I quote his exact phrase) must be a terror.

Very often, too, Nivens, the lawyer, who was a sidesman, and Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, who was the chairman of the vestry, would come and take a look at the figures. But they never could make much of them, because the stipend part was not a matter that one could discuss.

Mullins would notice the item for a hundred dollars due on fire insurance and would say, as a business man, that surely that couldn’t be fire insurance, and the Dean would say surely not, and change it: and Mullins would say surely there couldn’t be fifty dollars for taxes, because there weren’t any taxes, and the Dean would admit that of course it couldn’t be for the taxes. In fact, the truth is that the Dean’s figures were badly mixed, and the fault lay indubitably with the mathematical professor of two generations back.

It was always Mullins’s intention some day to look into the finances of the church, the more so as his father had been with Dean Drone at the little Anglican college with the cricket ground. But he was a busy man. As he explained to the rector himself, the banking business nowadays is getting to be such that a banker can hardly call even his Sunday mornings his own. Certainly Henry Mullins could not. They belonged largely to Smith’s Hotel, and during the fishing season they belonged away down the lake, so far away that practically no one, unless it was George Duff of the Commercial Bank, could see them.

But to think that all this trouble had come through the building of the new church.

That was the bitterness of it.

For the twenty-five years that Rural Dean Drone had preached in the little stone church, it had been his one aim, as he often put it in his sermons, to rear a larger Ark in Gideon. His one hope had been to set up a greater Evidence, or, very simply stated, to kindle a Brighter Beacon.

After twenty-five years of waiting, he had been able at last to kindle it. Everybody in Mariposa remembers the building of the church. First of all they had demolished the little stone church to make way for the newer Evidence. It seemed almost a sacrilege, as the Dean himself said, to lay hands on it. Indeed it was at first proposed to take the stone of it and build it into a Sunday School, as a lesser testimony. Then, when that proved impracticable, it was suggested that the stone be reverently fashioned into a wall that should stand as a token. And when even that could not be managed, the stone of the little church was laid reverently into a stone pile; afterwards it was devoutly sold to a building contractor, and, like so much else in life, was forgotten.

But the building of the church, no one, I think, will forget. The Dean threw himself into the work. With his coat off and his white shirt-sleeves conspicuous among the gang that were working at the foundations, he set his hand to the shovel, himself guided the road-scraper, urging on the horses, cheering and encouraging the men, till they begged him to desist. He mingled with the stone-masons, advising, helping, and giving counsel, till they pleaded with him to rest. He was among the carpenters, sawing, hammering, enquiring, suggesting, till they besought him to lay off. And he was night and day with the architect’s assistants, drawing, planning, revising, till the architect told him to cut it out.

So great was his activity, that I doubt whether the new church would ever have been finished, had not the wardens and the vestry men insisted that Mr. Drone must take a holiday, and sent him on the Mackinaw trip up the lakes – the only foreign travel of the Dean’s life.

—

So in due time the New Church was built and it towered above the maple trees of Mariposa like a beacon on a hill. It stood so high that from the open steeple of it, where the bells were, you could see all the town lying at its feet, and the farmsteads to the south of it, and the railway like a double pencil line, and Lake Wissanotti spread out like a map. You could see and appreciate things from the height of the new church – such as the size and the growing wealth of Mariposa – that you never could have seen from the little stone church at all.

Presently the church was opened and the Dean preached his first sermon in it, and he called it a Greater Testimony, and he said that it was an earnest, or first fruit of endeavour, and that it was a token or pledge, and he named it also a covenant. He said, too, that it was an anchorage and a harbour and a lighthouse as well as being a city set upon a hill; and he ended by declaring it an Ark of Refuge and notified them that the Bible Class would meet in the basement of it on that and every other third Wednesday.

In the opening months of preaching about it the Dean had called the church so often an earnest and a pledge and a guerdon and a tabernacle, that I think he used to forget that it wasn’t paid for. It was only when the agent of the building society and a representative of the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ Co. (Limited), used to call for quarterly payments that he was suddenly reminded of the fact. Always after these men came round the Dean used to preach a special sermon on sin, in the course of which he would mention that the ancient Hebrews used to put unjust traders to death – a thing of which he spoke with Christian serenity.

I don’t think that at first anybody troubled much about the debt on the church. Dean Drone’s figures showed that it was only a matter of time before it would be extinguished; only a little effort was needed, a little girding up of the loins of the congregation and they could shoulder the whole debt and trample it under their feet. Let them but set their hands to the plough and they could soon guide it into the deep water. Then they might furl their sails and sit every man under his own olive tree.

Meantime, while the congregation was waiting to gird up its loins, the interest on the debt was paid somehow, or, when it wasn’t paid, was added to the principal.

I don’t know whether you have had any experience with Greater Testimonies and with Beacons set on Hills. If you have, you will realize how, at first gradually, and then rapidly, their position from year to year grows more distressing. What with the building loan and the organ instalment, and the fire insurance – a cruel charge – and the heat and light, the rector began to realize as he added up the figures that nothing but logarithms could solve them. Then the time came when not only the rector, but all the wardens knew and the sidesmen knew that the debt was more than the church could carry; then the choir knew and the congregation knew and at last everybody knew; and there were special collections at Easter and special days of giving, and special weeks of tribulation, and special arrangements with the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ Co. And it was noticed that when the Rural Dean announced a service of Lenten Sorrow – aimed more especially at the business men – the congregation had diminished by forty per cent.

—

I suppose things are just the same elsewhere – I mean the peculiar kind of discontent that crept into the Church of England congregation in Mariposa after the setting up of the Beacon. There were those who claimed that they had seen the error from the first, though they had kept quiet, as such people always do, from breadth of mind. There were those who had felt years before how it would end, but their lips were sealed from humility of spirit. What was worse was that there were others who grew dissatisfied with the whole conduct of the church.

Yodel, the auctioneer, for example, narrated how he had been to the city and had gone into a service of the Roman Catholic church: I believe, to state it more fairly, he had “dropped in,” – the only recognized means of access to such a service. He claimed that the music that he had heard there was music, and that (outside of his profession) the chanting and intoning could not be touched.

Ed Moore, the photographer, also related that he had listened to a sermon in the city, and that if anyone would guarantee him a sermon like that he would defy you to keep him away from church. Meanwhile, failing the guarantee, he stayed away.

The very doctrines were impeached. Some of the congregation began to cast doubts on eternal punishment – doubts so grave as to keep them absent from the Lenten Services of Sorrow. Indeed, Lawyer Macartney took up the whole question of the Athanasian Creed one afternoon with Joe Milligan, the dentist, and hardly left a clause of it intact.

All this time, you will understand, Dean Drone kept on with his special services, and leaflets, calls, and appeals went out from the Ark of Gideon like rockets from a sinking ship. More and more with every month the debt of the church lay heavy on his mind. At times he forgot it. At other times he woke up in the night and thought about it. Sometimes as he went down the street from the lighted precincts of the Greater Testimony and passed the Salvation Army, praying around a naphtha lamp under the open sky, it smote him to the heart with a stab.

But the congregation were wrong, I think, in imputing fault to the sermons of Dean Drone. There I do think they were wrong. I can speak from personal knowledge when I say that the rector’s sermons were not only stimulating in matters of faith, but contained valuable material in regard to the Greek language, to modern machinery and to a variety of things that should have proved of the highest advantage to the congregation.

There was, I say, the Greek language. The Dean always showed the greatest delicacy of feeling in regard to any translation in or out of it that he made from the pulpit. He was never willing to accept even the faintest shade of rendering different from that commonly given without being assured of the full concurrence of the congregation. Either the translation must be unanimous and without contradiction, or he could not pass it. He would pause in his sermon and would say: “The original Greek is ‘Hoson,’ but perhaps you will allow me to translate it as equivalent to ‘Hoyon.’” And they did. So that if there was any fault to be found it was purely on the side of the congregation for not entering a protest at the time.

It was the same way in regard to machinery. After all, what better illustrates the supreme purpose of the All Wise than such a thing as the dynamo or the reciprocating marine engine or the pictures in the Scientific American?

Then, too, if a man has had the opportunity to travel and has seen the great lakes spread out by the hand of Providence from where one leaves the new dock at the Sound to where one arrives safe and thankful with one’s dear fellow-passengers in the spirit at the concrete landing stage at Mackinaw – is not this fit and proper material for the construction of an analogy or illustration? Indeed, even apart from an analogy, is it not mighty interesting to narrate, anyway? In any case, why should the churchwardens have sent the rector on the Mackinaw trip, if they had not expected him to make some little return for it?

I lay some stress on this point because the criticisms directed against the Mackinaw sermons always seemed so unfair. If the rector had described his experiences in the crude language of the ordinary newspaper, there might, I admit, have been something unfitting about it. But he was always careful to express himself in a way that showed – or, listen, let me explain with an example.

“It happened to be my lot some years ago,” he would say, “to find myself a voyager, just as one is a voyager on the sea of life, on the broad expanse of water which has been spread out to the north-west of us by the hand of Providence, at a height of five hundred and eighty-one feet above the level of the sea – I refer, I may say, to Lake Huron.”

Now, how different that is from saying: “I’ll never forget the time I went on the Mackinaw trip.” The whole thing has a different sound entirely. In the same way the Dean would go on:

“I was voyaging on one of those magnificent leviathans of the water – I refer to the boats of the Northern Navigation Company – and was standing beside the forward rail talking with a dear brother in the faith who was journeying westward also – I may say he was a commercial traveller – and beside us was a dear sister in the spirit seated in a deck chair, while near us were two other dear souls in grace engaged in Christian pastime on the deck – I allude more particularly to the game of deck billiards.”

I leave it to any reasonable man whether, with that complete and fair-minded explanation of the environment, it was not perfectly proper to close down the analogy, as the rector did, with the simple words: “In fact, it was an extremely fine morning.”

Yet there were some people, even in Mariposa, that took exception and spent their Sunday dinner time in making out that they couldn’t understand what Dean Drone was talking about, and asking one another if they knew. Once, as he passed out from the doors of the Greater Testimony, the rector heard some one say: “The Church would be all right if that old mugwump was out of the pulpit.” It went to his heart like a barbed thorn, and stayed there.

You know, perhaps, how a remark of that sort can stay and rankle, and make you wish you could hear it again to make sure of it, because perhaps you didn’t hear it aright, and it was a mistake after all. Perhaps no one said it, anyway. You ought to have written it down at the time. I have seen the Dean take down the encyclopaedia in the rectory, and move his finger slowly down the pages of the letter M, looking for mugwump. But it wasn’t there. I have known him, in his little study upstairs, turn over the pages of the “Animals of Palestine,” looking for a mugwump. But there was none there. It must have been unknown in the greater days of Judea.

—

So things went on from month to month, and from year to year, and the debt and the charges loomed like a dark and gathering cloud on the horizon. I don’t mean to say that efforts were not made to face the difficulty and to fight it. They were. Time after time the workers of the congregation got together and thought out plans for the extinction of the debt. But somehow, after every trial, the debt grew larger with each year, and every system that could be devised turned out more hopeless than the last.

They began, I think, with the “endless chain” of letters of appeal. You may remember the device, for it was all-popular in clerical circles some ten or fifteen years ago. You got a number of people to write each of them three letters asking for ten cents from three each of their friends and asking each of them to send on three similar letters. Three each from three each, and three each more from each! Do you observe the wonderful ingenuity of it? Nobody, I think, has forgotten how the Willing Workers of the Church of England Church of Mariposa sat down in the vestry room in the basement with a pile of stationery three feet high, sending out the letters. Some, I know, will never forget it. Certainly not Mr. Pupkin, the teller in the Exchange Bank, for it was here that he met Zena Pepperleigh, the judge’s daughter, for the first time; and they worked so busily that they wrote out ever so many letters – eight or nine – in a single afternoon, and they discovered that their handwritings were awfully alike, which was one of the most extraordinary and amazing coincidences, you will admit, in the history of chirography.

But the scheme failed – failed utterly. I don’t know why. The letters went out and were copied broadcast and recopied, till you could see the Mariposa endless chain winding its way towards the Rocky Mountains. But they never got the ten cents. The Willing Workers wrote for it in thousands, but by some odd chance they never struck the person who had it.

Then after that there came a regular winter of effort. First of all they had a bazaar that was got up by the Girls’ Auxiliary and held in the basement of the church. All the girls wore special costumes that were brought up from the city, and they had booths, where there was every imaginable thing for sale – pincushion covers, and chair covers, and sofa covers, everything that you can think of. If the people had once started buying them, the debt would have been lifted in no time. Even as it was the bazaar only lost twenty dollars.

After that, I think, was the magic lantern lecture that Dean Drone gave on “Italy and her Invaders.” They got the lantern and the slides up from the city, and it was simply splendid. Some of the slides were perhaps a little confusing, but it was all there – the pictures of the dense Italian jungle and the crocodiles and the naked invaders with their invading clubs. It was a pity that it was such a bad night, snowing hard, and a curling match on, or they would have made a lot of money out of the lecture. As it was the loss, apart from the breaking of the lantern, which was unavoidable, was quite trifling.

—

I can hardly remember all the things that there were after that. I recollect that it was always Mullins who arranged about renting the hall and printing the tickets and all that sort of thing. His father, you remember, had been at the Anglican college with Dean Drone, and though the rector was thirty-seven years older than Mullins, he leaned upon him, in matters of business, as upon a staff; and though Mullins was thirty-seven years younger than the Dean, he leaned against him, in matters of doctrine, as against a rock.

At one time they got the idea that what the public wanted was not anything instructive but something light and amusing. Mullins said that people loved to laugh. He said that if you get a lot of people all together and get them laughing you can do anything you like with them. Once they start to laugh they are lost. So they got Mr. Dreery, the English Literature teacher at the high school, to give an evening of readings from the Great Humorists from Chaucer to Adam Smith. They came mighty near to making a barrel of money out of that. If the people had once started laughing it would have been all over with them. As it was I heard a lot of them say that they simply wanted to scream with laughter: they said they just felt like bursting into peals of laughter all the time. Even when, in the more subtle parts, they didn’t feel like bursting out laughing, they said they had all they could do to keep from smiling. They said they never had such a hard struggle in their lives not to smile.

In fact the chairman said when he put the vote of thanks that he was sure if people had known what the lecture was to be like there would have been a much better “turn-out.” But you see all that the people had to go on was just the announcement of the name of the lecturer, Mr. Dreery, and that he would lecture on English Humour All Seats Twenty-five Cents. As the chairman expressed it himself, if the people had had any idea, any idea at all, of what the lecture would be like they would have been there in hundreds. But how could they get an idea that it would be so amusing with practically nothing to go upon?

—

After that attempt things seemed to go from bad to worse. Nearly everybody was disheartened about it. What would have happened to the debt, or whether they would have ever paid it off, is more than I can say, if it hadn’t occurred that light broke in on Mullins in the strangest and most surprising way you can imagine. It happened that he went away for his bank holidays, and while he was away he happened to be present in one of the big cities and saw how they went at it there to raise money. He came home in such a state of excitement that he went straight up from the Mariposa station to the rectory, valise and all, and he burst in one April evening to where the Rural Dean was sitting with the three girls beside the lamp in the front room, and he cried out:

“Mr. Drone, I’ve got it – I’ve got a way that will clear the debt before you’re a fortnight older. We’ll have a Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa!”

But stay! The change from the depth of depression to the pinnacle of hope is too abrupt. I must pause and tell you in another chapter of the Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa.

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V

The Whirlwind Campaign
in Mariposa

It was Mullins, the banker, who told Mariposa all about the plan of a Whirlwind Campaign and explained how it was to be done. He’d happened to be in one of the big cities when they were raising money by a Whirlwind Campaign for one of the universities, and he saw it all.

He said he would never forget the scene on the last day of it, when the announcement was made that the total of the money raised was even more than what was needed. It was a splendid sight – the business men of the town all cheering and laughing and shaking hands, and the professors with the tears streaming down their faces, and the Deans of the Faculties, who had given money themselves, sobbing aloud.

He said it was the most moving thing he ever saw.

So, as I said, Henry Mullins, who had seen it, explained to the others how it was done. He said that first of all a few of the business men got together quietly – very quietly, indeed the more quietly the better – and talked things over. Perhaps one of them would dine – just quietly – with another one and discuss the situation. Then these two would invite a third man – possibly even a fourth – to have lunch with them and talk in a general way – even talk of other things part of the time. And so on in this way things would be discussed and looked at in different lights and viewed from different angles and then when everything was ready they would go at things with a rush. A central committee would be formed and sub-committees, with captains of each group and recorders and secretaries, and on a stated day the Whirlwind Campaign would begin.

Each day the crowd would all agree to meet at some stated place and eat lunch together – say at a restaurant or at a club or at some eating place. This would go on every day with the interest getting keener and keener, and everybody getting more and more excited, till presently the chairman would announce that the campaign had succeeded and there would be the kind of scene that Mullins had described.

So that was the plan that they set in motion in Mariposa.

—

I don’t wish to say too much about the Whirlwind Campaign itself. I don’t mean to say that it was a failure. On the contrary, in many ways it couldn’t have been a greater success, and yet somehow it didn’t seem to work out just as Henry Mullins had said it would. It may be that there are differences between Mariposa and the larger cities that one doesn’t appreciate at first sight. Perhaps it would have been better to try some other plan.

Yet they followed along the usual line of things closely enough. They began with the regular system of some of the business men getting together in a quiet way.

First of all, for example, Henry Mullins came over quietly to Duff’s rooms, over the Commercial Bank, with a bottle of rye whiskey, and they talked things over. And the night after that George Duff came over quietly to Mullins’s rooms, over the Exchange Bank, with a bottle of Scotch whiskey. A few evenings after that Mullins and Duff went together, in a very unostentatious way, with perhaps a couple of bottles of rye, to Pete Glover’s room over the hardware store. And then all three of them went up one night with Ed Moore, the photographer, to Judge Pepperleigh’s house under pretence of having a game of poker. The very day after that, Mullins and Duff and Ed Moore, and Pete Glover and the judge got Will Harrison, the harness maker, to go out without any formality on the lake on the pretext of fishing. And the next night after that Duff and Mullins and Ed Moore and Pete Glover and Pepperleigh and Will Harrison got Alf Trelawney, the postmaster, to come over, just in a casual way, to the Mariposa House, after the night mail, and the next day Mullins and Duff and——

But, pshaw! you see at once how the thing is worked. There’s no need to follow that part of the Whirlwind Campaign further. But it just shows the power of organization.

And all this time, mind you, they were talking things over, and looking at things first in one light and then in another light – in fact, just doing as the big city men do when there’s an important thing like this under way.

So after things had been got pretty well into shape in this way, Duff asked Mullins one night, straight out, if he would be chairman of the Central Committee. He sprung it on him and Mullins had no time to refuse, but he put it to Duff straight whether he would be treasurer. And Duff had no time to refuse.

—

That gave things a start, and within a week they had the whole organization on foot. There was the Grand Central Committee and six groups or sub-committees of twenty men each, and a captain for every group. They had it all arranged on the lines most likely to be effective.

In one group there were all the bankers, Mullins and Duff and Pupkin (with the cameo pin), and about four others. They had their photographs taken at Ed Moore’s studio, taken in a line with a background of icebergs – a winter scene – and a pretty penetrating crowd they looked, I can tell you. After all, you know, if you get a crowd of representative bank men together in any financial deal, you’ve got a pretty considerable leverage right away.

In the second group were the lawyers Nivens and Macartney and the rest – about as level-headed a lot as you’d see anywhere. Get the lawyers of a town with you on a thing like this and you’ll find you’ve got a sort of brain power with you that you’d never get without them.

Then there were the business men – there was a solid crowd for you – Harrison, the harness maker, and Glover, the hardware man, and all that gang, not talkers, perhaps, but solid men who can tell you to a nicety how many cents there are in a dollar. It’s all right to talk about education and that sort of thing, but if you want driving power and efficiency, get business men. They’re seeing it every day in the city and it’s just the same in Mariposa. Why, in the big concerns in the city, if they found out a man was educated, they wouldn’t have him – wouldn’t keep him there a minute. That’s why the business men have to conceal it so much.

Then in the other teams there were the doctors and the newspaper men and the professional men like Judge Pepperleigh and Yodel the auctioneer.

—

It was all organized so that every team had its headquarters, two of them in each of the three hotels – one upstairs and one down. And it was arranged that there would be a big lunch every day, to be held in Smith’s caff, round the corner of Smith’s Northern Health Resort and Home of the Wissanotti Angler – you know the place. The lunch was divided up into tables, with a captain for each table to see about things to drink, and of course all the tables were in competition with one another. In fact the competition was the very life of the whole thing.

It’s just wonderful how these things run when they’re organized. Take the first luncheon, for example. There they all were, every man in his place, every captain at his post at the top of the table. It was hard, perhaps, for some of them to get there. They had very likely to be in their stores and banks and offices till the last minute and then make a dash for it. It was the cleanest piece of team work you ever saw.

You have noticed already, I am sure, that a good many of the captains and committee men didn’t belong to the Church of England Church. Glover, for instance, was a Presbyterian, till they ran the picket fence of the manse two feet on to his property, and after that he became a free-thinker. But in Mariposa, as I have said, everybody likes to be in everything and naturally a Whirlwind Campaign was a novelty. Anyway it would have been a poor business to keep a man out of the lunches merely on account of his religion. I trust that the day for that kind of religious bigotry is past.

Of course the excitement was when Henry Mullins at the head of the table began reading out the telegrams and letters and messages. First of all there was a telegram of good wishes from the Anglican Lord Bishop of the Diocese to Henry Mullins and calling him Dear Brother in Grace – the Mariposa telegraph office is a little unreliable and it read: “Dear Brother in grease,” but that was good enough. The Bishop said that his most earnest wishes were with them.

Then Mullins read a letter from the Mayor of Mariposa – Pete Glover was mayor that year – stating that his keenest desires were with them; and then one from the Carriage Company saying that its heartiest good will was all theirs; and then one from the Meat Works saying that its nearest thoughts were next to them. Then he read one from himself, as head of the Exchange Bank, you understand, informing him that he had heard of his project and assuring him of his liveliest interest in what he proposed.

At each of these telegrams and messages there was round after round of applause, so that you could hardly hear yourself speak or give an order. But that was nothing to when Mullins got up again, and beat on the table for silence and made one of those cracking, concise speeches – just the way business men speak – the kind of speech that a college man simply can’t make. I wish I could repeat it all. I remember that it began: “Now boys, you know what we’re here for, gentlemen,” and it went on just as good as that all through.

When Mullins had done he took out a fountain pen and wrote out a cheque for a hundred dollars, conditional on the fund reaching fifty thousand. And there was a burst of cheers all over the room.

Just the moment he had done it, up sprang George Duff – you know the keen competition there is, as a straight matter of business, between the banks in Mariposa – up sprang George Duff, I say, and wrote out a cheque for another hundred conditional on the fund reaching seventy thousand. You never heard such cheering in your life.

And then when Netley walked up to the head of the table and laid down a cheque for a hundred dollars conditional on the fund reaching one hundred thousand the room was in an uproar. A hundred thousand dollars! Just think of it! The figures fairly stagger one. To think of a hundred thousand dollars raised in five minutes in a little place like Mariposa!

And even that was nothing! In less than no time there was such a crowd round Mullins trying to borrow his pen all at once that his waistcoat was all stained with ink. Finally when they got order at last, and Mullins stood up and announced that the conditional fund had reached a quarter of a million, the whole place was a perfect babel of cheering. Oh, these Whirlwind Campaigns are wonderful things!

—

I can tell you the Committee felt pretty proud that first day. There was Henry Mullins looking a little bit flushed and excited, with his white waistcoat and an American Beauty rose, and with ink marks all over him from the cheque signing; and he kept telling them that he’d known all along that all that was needed was to get the thing started and telling again about what he’d seen at the University Campaign and about the professors crying, and wondering if the high school teachers would come down for the last day of the meetings.

Looking back on the Mariposa Whirlwind, I can never feel that it was a failure. After all, there is a sympathy and a brotherhood in these things when men work shoulder to shoulder. If you had seen the canvassers of the Committee going round the town that evening shoulder to shoulder from the Mariposa House to the Continental and up to Mullins’s rooms and over to Duff’s, shoulder to shoulder, you’d have understood it.

I don’t say that every lunch was quite such a success as the first. It’s not always easy to get out of the store if you’re a busy man, and a good many of the Whirlwind Committee found that they had just time to hurry down and snatch their lunch and get back again. Still, they came, and snatched it. As long as the lunches lasted, they came. Even if they had simply to rush it and grab something to eat and drink without time to talk to anybody, they came.

No, no, it was not lack of enthusiasm that killed the Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa. It must have been something else. I don’t just know what it was but I think it had something to do with the financial, the book-keeping side of the thing.

It may have been, too, that the organization was not quite correctly planned. You see, if practically everybody is on the committees, it is awfully hard to try to find men to canvass, and it is not allowable for the captains and the committee men to canvass one another, because their gifts are spontaneous. So the only thing that the different groups could do was to wait round in some likely place – say the bar parlour of Smith’s Hotel – in the hope that somebody might come in who could be canvassed.

You might ask why they didn’t canvass Mr. Smith himself, but of course they had done that at the very start, as I should have said. Mr. Smith had given them two hundred dollars in cash conditional on the lunches being held in the caff of his hotel; and it’s awfully hard to get a proper lunch – I mean the kind to which a Bishop can express regret at not being there – under a dollar twenty-five. So Mr. Smith got back his own money, and the crowd began eating into the benefactions, and it got more and more complicated whether to hold another lunch in the hope of breaking even, or to stop the campaign.

It was disappointing, yes. In spite of all the success and the sympathy, it was disappointing. I don’t say it didn’t do good. No doubt a lot of the men got to know one another better than ever they had before. I have myself heard Judge Pepperleigh say that after the campaign he knew all of Pete Glover that he wanted to. There was a lot of that kind of complete satiety. The real trouble about the Whirlwind Campaign was that they never clearly understood which of them were the whirlwind and who were to be the campaign.

Some of them, I believe, took it pretty much to heart. I know that Henry Mullins did. You could see it. The first day he came down to the lunch, all dressed up with the American Beauty and the white waistcoat. The second day he only wore a pink carnation and a grey waistcoat. The third day he had on a dead daffodil and a cardigan undervest, and on the last day, when the high school teachers should have been there, he only wore his office suit and he hadn’t even shaved. He looked beaten.

It was that night that he went up to the rectory to tell the news to Dean Drone. It had been arranged, you know, that the rector should not attend the lunches, so as to let the whole thing come as a surprise; so that all he knew about it was just scraps of information about the crowds at the lunch and how they cheered and all that. Once, I believe, he caught sight of the Newspacket with the two-inch headline: A QUARTER OF A MILLION, but he wouldn’t let himself read further because it would have spoilt the surprise.

I saw Mullins, as I say, go up the street on his way to Dean Drone’s. It was middle April and there was ragged snow on the streets, and the nights were dark still, and cold. I saw Mullins grit his teeth as he walked, and I know that he held in his coat pocket his own cheque for the hundred, with the condition taken off it, and he said that there were so many skunks in Mariposa that a man might as well be in the Head Office in the city.

The Dean came out to the little gate in the dark – you could see the lamplight behind him from the open door of the rectory – and he shook hands with Mullins and they went in together.

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VI

The Beacon
on the Hill

Mullins said afterward that it was ever so much easier than he thought it would have been. The Dean, he said, was so quiet. Of course if Mr. Drone had started to swear at Mullins, or tried to strike him, it would have been much harder. But as it was he was so quiet that part of the time he hardly seemed to follow what Mullins was saying. So Mullins was glad of that, because it proved that the Dean wasn’t feeling disappointed as, in a way, he might have.

Indeed, the only time when the rector seemed animated and excited in the whole interview was when Mullins said that the campaign had been ruined by a lot of confounded mugwumps. Straight away the Dean asked if those mugwumps had really prejudiced the outcome of the campaign. Mullins said there was no doubt of it, and the Dean enquired if the presence of mugwumps was fatal in matters of endeavour, and Mullins said that it was. Then the rector asked if even one mugwump was, in the Christian sense, deleterious. Mullins said that one mugwump would kill anything. After that the Dean hardly spoke at all.

In fact, the rector presently said that he mustn’t detain Mullins too long and that he had detained him too long already and that Mullins must be weary from his train journey and that in cases of extreme weariness nothing but a sound sleep was of any avail; he himself, unfortunately, would not be able to avail himself of the priceless boon of slumber until he had first retired to his study to write some letters; so that Mullins, who had a certain kind of social quickness of intuition, saw that it was time to leave, and went away.

It was midnight as he went down the street, and a dark, still night. That can be stated positively because it came out in court afterwards. Mullins swore that it was a dark night; he admitted, under examination, that there may have been the stars, or at least some of the less important of them, though he had made no attempt, as brought out on cross-examination, to count them: there may have been, too, the electric lights, and Mullins was not willing to deny that it was quite possible that there was more or less moonlight. But that there was no light that night in the form of sunlight, Mullins was absolutely certain. All that, I say, came out in court.

But meanwhile the rector had gone upstairs to his study and had seated himself in front of his table to write his letters. It was here always that he wrote his sermons. From the window of the room you looked through the bare white maple trees to the sweeping outline of the church shadowed against the night sky, and beyond that, though far off, was the new cemetery where the rector walked of a Sunday (I think I told you why): beyond that again, for the window faced the east, there lay, at no very great distance, the New Jerusalem. There were no better things that a man might look towards from his study window, nor anything that could serve as a better aid to writing.

But this night the Dean’s letters must have been difficult indeed to write. For he sat beside the table holding his pen and with his head bent upon his other hand, and though he sometimes put a line or two on the paper, for the most part he sat motionless. The fact is that Dean Drone was not trying to write letters, but only one letter. He was writing a letter of resignation. If you have not done that for forty years it is extremely difficult to get the words.

So at least the Dean found it. First he wrote one set of words and then he sat and thought and wrote something else. But nothing seemed to suit.

The real truth was that Dean Drone, perhaps more than he knew himself, had a fine taste for words and effects, and when you feel that a situation is entirely out of the common, you naturally try, if you have that instinct, to give it the right sort of expression.

I believe that at the time when Rupert Drone had taken the medal in Greek over fifty years ago, it was only a twist of fate that had prevented him from becoming a great writer. There was a buried author in him just as there was a buried financier in Jefferson Thorpe. In fact, there were many people in Mariposa like that, and for all I know you may yourself have seen such elsewhere. For instance, I am certain that Billy Rawson, the telegraph operator at Mariposa, could easily have invented radium. In the same way one has only to read the advertisements of Mr. Gingham, the undertaker, to know that there is still in him a poet, who could have written on death far more attractive verses than the Thanatopsis of Cullen Bryant, and under a title less likely to offend the public and drive away custom. He has told me this himself.

So the Dean tried first this and then that and nothing would seem to suit. First of all he wrote:

“It is now forty years since I came among you, a youth full of life and hope and ardent in the work before me——” Then he paused, doubtful of the accuracy and clearness of the expression, read it over again and again in deep thought and then began again:

“It is now forty years since I came among you, a broken and melancholy boy, without life or hope, desiring only to devote to the service of this parish such few years as might remain of an existence blighted before it had truly begun——” And then again the Dean stopped. He read what he had written; he frowned; he crossed it through with his pen. This was no way to write, this thin egotistical strain of complaint. Once more he started:

“It is now forty years since I came among you, a man already tempered and trained, except possibly in mathematics——” And then again the rector paused and his mind drifted away to the memory of the Anglican professor that I spoke of, who had had so little sense of his higher mission as to omit the teaching of logarithms. And the rector mused so long that when he began again it seemed to him that it was simpler and better to discard the personal note altogether, and he wrote:

“There are times, gentlemen, in the life of a parish, when it comes to an epoch which brings it to a moment when it reaches a point——”

The Dean stuck fast again, but refusing this time to be beaten went resolutely on:

“—reaches a point where the circumstances of the moment make the epoch such as to focus the life of the parish in that time.”

Then the Dean saw that he was beaten, and he knew that he not only couldn’t manage the parish but couldn’t say so in proper English, and of the two the last was the bitterer discovery.

He raised his head, and looked for a moment through the window at the shadow of the church against the night, so outlined that you could almost fancy that the light of the New Jerusalem was beyond it. Then he wrote, and this time not to the world at large but only to Mullins:

“My dear Harry, I want to resign my charge. Will you come over and help me?”

—

When the Dean at last rose from writing that, I think it was far on in the night. As he rose he looked again through the window, looked once and then once more, and so stood with widening eyes, and his face set towards what he saw.

What was that? That light in the sky there, eastward? – near or far he could not say. Was it already the dawn of the New Jerusalem brightening in the east, or was it – look – in the church itself – what is that? – that dull red glow that shines behind the stained-glass windows, turning them to crimson? that fork of flame that breaks now from the casement and flashes upward, along the wood – and see – that sudden sheet of fire that springs the windows of the church with the roar of splintered glass and surges upward into the sky, till the dark night and the bare trees and sleeping street of Mariposa are all illumined with its glow!

Fire! Fire! and the sudden sound of the bell now, breaking upon the night.

So stood the Dean erect, with one hand pressed against the table for support, while the Mariposa fire bell struck out its warning to the sleeping town – stood there while the street grew loud with the tumult of voices – with the roaring gallop of the fire brigade – with the harsh note of the gong – and over all other sounds, the great seething of the flames that tore their way into the beams and rafters of the pointed church and flared above it like a torch into the midnight sky.

So stood the Dean, and as the church broke thus into a very beacon kindled upon a hill – sank forward without a sign, his face against the table, stricken.

—

You need to see a fire in a place such as Mariposa, a town still half of wood, to know what fire means. In the city it is all different. To the onlooker, at any rate, a fire is only a spectacle, nothing more. Everything is arranged, organized, certain. It is only once perhaps in a century that fire comes to a large city as it comes to the little wooden town like Mariposa as a great Terror of the Night.

That, at any rate, is what it meant in Mariposa that night in April, the night the Church of England Church burnt down. Had the fire gained but a hundred feet, or less, it could have reached from the driving shed behind the church to the backs of the wooden shops of the Main Street, and once there not all the waters of Lake Wissanotti could stay the course of its destruction. It was for that hundred feet that they fought, the men of Mariposa, from the midnight call of the bell till the slow coming of the day.

They fought the fire, not to save the church, for that was doomed from the first outbreak of the flames, but to stop the spread of it and save the town. They fought it at the windows, and at the blazing doors, and through the yawning furnace of the open belfry; fought it, with the Mariposa engine thumping and panting in the street, itself aglow with fire like a servant demon fighting its own kind, with tall ladders reaching to the very roof, and with hose that poured their streams of tossing water foaming into the flames.

Most of all they fought to save the wooden driving shed behind the church from which the fire could leap into the heart of Mariposa. That was where the real fight was, for the life of the town. I wish you could have seen how they turned the hose against the shingles, ripping and tearing them from their places with the force of the driven water: how they mounted on the roof, axe in hand, and cut madly at the rafters to bring the building down, while the black clouds of smoke rolled in volumes about the men as they worked. You could see the fire horses harnessed with logging chains to the uprights of the shed to tear the building from its place.

Most of all I wish you could have seen Mr. Smith, proprietor, as I think you know, of Smith’s Hotel, there on the roof with a fireman’s helmet on, cutting through the main beam of solid cedar, twelve by twelve, that held tight still when the rafters and the roof tree were down already, the shed on fire in a dozen places, and the other men driven from the work by the flaming sparks, and by the strangle of the smoke. Not so Mr. Smith! See him there as he plants himself firm at the angle of the beams, and with the full impact of his two hundred and eighty pounds drives his axe into the wood! I tell you it takes a man from the pine country of the north to handle an axe! Right, left, left, right, down it comes, with never a pause or stay, never missing by a fraction of an inch the line of the stroke! At it, Smith! Down with it! Till with a shout from the crowd the beam gapes asunder, and Mr. Smith is on the ground again, roaring his directions to the men and horses as they haul down the shed, in a voice that dominates the fire itself.

Who made Mr. Smith the head and chief of the Mariposa fire brigade that night, I cannot say. I do not know even where he got the huge red helmet that he wore, nor had I ever heard till the night the church burnt down that Mr. Smith was a member of the fire brigade at all. But it’s always that way. Your little narrow-chested men may plan and organize, but when there is something to be done, something real, then it’s the man of size and weight that steps to the front every time. Look at Bismarck and Mr. Gladstone and President Taft and Mr. Smith – the same thing in each case.

I suppose it was perfectly natural that just as soon as Mr. Smith came on the scene he put on somebody’s helmet and shouted his directions to the men and bossed the Mariposa fire brigade like Bismarck with the German parliament.

The fire had broken out late, late at night, and they fought it till the day. The flame of it lit up the town and the bare grey maple trees, and you could see in the light of it the broad sheet of the frozen lake, snow covered still. It kindled such a beacon as it burned that from the other side of the lake the people on the night express from the north could see it twenty miles away. It lit up such a testimony of flame that Mariposa has never seen the like of it before or since. Then when the roof crashed in and the tall steeple tottered and fell, so swift a darkness seemed to come that the grey trees and the frozen lake vanished in a moment as if blotted out of existence.

—

When the morning came the great church of Mariposa was nothing but a ragged group of walls with a sodden heap of bricks and blackened wood, still hissing here and there beneath the hose with the sullen anger of a conquered fire.

Round the ruins of the fire walked the people of Mariposa next morning, and they pointed out where the wreck of the steeple had fallen, and where the bells of the church lay in a molten heap among the bricks, and they talked of the loss that it was and how many dollars it would take to rebuild the church, and whether it was insured and for how much. And there were at least fourteen people who had seen the fire first, and more than that who had given the first alarm, and ever so many who knew how fires of this sort could be prevented.

Most noticeable of all you could see the sidesmen and the wardens and Mullins, the chairman of the vestry, talking in little groups about the fire. Later in the day there came from the city the insurance men and the fire appraisers, and they too walked about the ruins, and talked with the wardens and the vestry men. There was such a luxury of excitement in the town that day that it was just as good as a public holiday.

But the strangest part of it was the unexpected sequel. I don’t know through what error of the Dean’s figures it happened, through what lack of mathematical training the thing turned out as it did. No doubt the memory of the mathematical professor was heavily to blame for it, but the solid fact is that the Church of England Church of Mariposa turned out to be insured for a hundred thousand, and there were the receipts and the vouchers, all signed and regular, just as they found them in a drawer of the rector’s study. There was no doubt about it. The insurance people might protest as they liked. The straight, plain fact was that the church was insured for about twice the whole amount of the cost and the debt and the rector’s salary and the boarding-school fees of the littlest of the Drones all put together.

—

There was a Whirlwind Campaign for you! Talk of raising money – that was something like! I wonder if the universities and the city institutions that go round trying to raise money by the slow and painful method called a Whirlwind Campaign, that takes perhaps all day to raise fifty thousand dollars, ever thought of anything so beautifully simple as this.

The Greater Testimony that had lain so heavily on the congregation went flaming to its end, and burned up its debts and its obligations and enriched its worshippers by its destruction. Talk of a beacon on a hill! You can hardly beat that one.

I wish you could have seen how the wardens and the sidesmen and Mullins, the chairman of the vestry, smiled and chuckled at the thought of it. Hadn’t they said all along that all that was needed was a little faith and effort? And here it was, just as they said, and they’d been right after all.

Protest from the insurance people? Legal proceedings to prevent payment? My dear sir! I see you know nothing about the Mariposa court, in spite of the fact that I have already said that it was one of the most precise instruments of British fair play ever established. Why, Judge Pepperleigh disposed of the case and dismissed the protest of the company in less than fifteen minutes! Just what the jurisdiction of Judge Pepperleigh’s court is I don’t know, but I do know that in upholding the rights of a Christian congregation – I am quoting here the text of the decision – against the intrigues of a set of infernal skunks that make too much money, anyway, the Mariposa court is without an equal. Pepperleigh even threatened the plaintiffs with the penitentiary, or worse.

How the fire started no one ever knew. There was a queer story that went about to the effect that Mr. Smith and Mr. Gingham’s assistant had been seen very late that night carrying an automobile can of kerosene up the street. But that was amply disproved by the proceedings of the court, and by the evidence of Mr. Smith himself. He took his dying oath – not his ordinary one as used in the License cases, but his dying one – that he had not carried a can of kerosene up the street, and that anyway it was the rottenest kind of kerosene he had ever seen and no more use than so much molasses. So that point was settled.

Dean Drone? Did he get well again? Why, what makes you ask that? You mean, was his head at all affected after the stroke? No, it was not. Absolutely not. It was not affected in the least, though how anybody who knows him now in Mariposa could have the faintest idea that his mind was in any way impaired by the stroke is more than I can tell. The engaging of Mr. Uttermost, the curate, whom perhaps you have heard preach in the new church, had nothing whatever to do with Dean Drone’s head. It was merely a case of the pressure of overwork. It was felt very generally by the wardens that, in these days of specialization, the rector was covering too wide a field, and that if he should abandon some of the lesser duties of his office, he might devote his energies more intently to the Infant Class. That was all. You may hear him there any afternoon, talking to them, if you will stand under the maple trees and listen through the open windows of the new Infant School.

And, as for audiences, for intelligence, for attention – well, if I want to find listeners who can hear and understand about the great spaces of Lake Huron, let me tell of it, every time face to face with the blue eyes of the Infant Class, fresh from the infinity of spaces greater still. Talk of grown-up people all you like, but for listeners let me have the Infant Class with their pinafores and their Teddy Bears and their feet not even touching the floor, and Mr. Uttermost may preach to his heart’s content of the newer forms of doubt revealed by the higher criticism.

So you will understand that the Dean’s mind is, if anything, even keener, and his head even clearer than before. And if you want proof of it, notice him there beneath the plum blossoms reading in the Greek: he has told me that he finds that he can read, with the greatest ease, works in the Greek that seemed difficult before. Because his head is so clear now.

And sometimes – when his head is very clear – as he sits there reading beneath the plum blossoms he can hear them singing beyond, and his wife’s voice.

TOC     INDEX

VII

The Extraordinary Entanglement
of Mr. Pupkin

Judge Pepperleigh lived in a big house with hardwood floors and a wide piazza that looked over the lake from the top of Oneida Street.

Every day about half-past five he used to come home from his office in the Mariposa Court House. On some days as he got near the house he would call out to his wife:

“Almighty Moses, Martha! who left the sprinkler on the grass?”

On other days he would call to her from quite a little distance off: “Hullo, mother! Got any supper for a hungry man?”

And Mrs. Pepperleigh never knew which it would be.

On the days when he swore at the sprinkler you could see his spectacles flash like dynamite. But on the days when he called: “Hullo, mother,” they were simply irradiated with kindliness.

Some days, I say, he would cry out with a perfect whine of indignation: “Suffering Caesar! has that infernal dog torn up those geraniums again?” And other days you would hear him singing out: “Hullo, Rover! Well, doggie, well, old fellow!”

In the same way at breakfast, the judge, as he looked over the morning paper, would sometimes leap to his feet with a perfect howl of suffering, and cry: “Everlasting Moses! the Liberals have carried East Elgin.” Or else he would lean back from the breakfast table with the most good-humoured laugh you ever heard and say: “Ha! ha! the Conservatives have carried South Norfolk.”

And yet he was perfectly logical, when you come to think of it. After all, what is more annoying to a sensitive, highly-strung man than an infernal sprinkler playing all over the place, and what more agreeable to a good-natured, even-tempered fellow than a well-prepared supper? Or, what is more likeable than one’s good, old, affectionate dog bounding down the path from sheer delight at seeing you – or more execrable than an infernal whelp that has torn up the geraniums and is too old to keep, anyway?

As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When the Conservatives got in anywhere, Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it, simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fight where the best man wins. When a Liberal got in, it made him mad, and he said so – not, mind you, from any political bias, for his office forbid it – but simply because one can’t bear to see the country go absolutely to the devil.

I suppose, too, it was partly the effect of sitting in court all day listening to cases. One gets what you might call the judicial temper of mind. Pepperleigh had it so strongly developed that I’ve seen him kick a hydrangea pot to pieces with his foot because the accursed thing wouldn’t flower. He once threw the canary cage clear into the lilac bushes because the “blasted bird wouldn’t stop singing.” It was a straight case of judicial temper. Lots of judges have it, developed in just the same broad, all-round way as with Judge Pepperleigh.

—

I think it must be passing sentences that does it. Anyway, Pepperleigh had the aptitude for passing sentences so highly perfected that he spent his whole time at it inside of court and out. I’ve heard him hand out sentences for the Sultan of Turkey and Mrs. Pankhurst and the Emperor of Germany that made one’s blood run cold. He would sit there on the piazza of a summer evening reading the paper, with dynamite sparks flying from his spectacles as he sentenced the Czar of Russia to ten years in the salt mines – and made it fifteen a few minutes afterwards. Pepperleigh always read the foreign news – the news of things that he couldn’t alter – as a form of wild and stimulating torment.

So you can imagine that in some ways the judge’s house was a pretty difficult house to go to. I mean you can see how awfully hard it must have been for Mr. Pupkin. I tell you it took some nerve to step up on that piazza and say, in a perfectly natural, off-hand way: “Oh, how do you do, judge? Is Miss Zena in? No, I won’t stay, thanks; I think I ought to be going. I simply called.” A man who can do that has got to have a pretty fair amount of savoir what do you call it, and he’s got to be mighty well shaved and have his cameo pin put in his tie at a pretty undeniable angle before he can tackle it. Yes, and even then he may need to hang round behind the lilac bushes for half an hour first, and cool off. And he’s apt to make pretty good time down Oneida Street on the way back.

Still, that’s what you call love, and if you’ve got it, and are well shaved, and your boots well blacked, you can do things that seem almost impossible. Yes, you can do anything, even if you do trip over the dog in getting off the piazza.

Don’t suppose for a moment that Judge Pepperleigh was an unapproachable or a harsh man always and to everybody. Even Mr. Pupkin had to admit that that couldn’t be so. To know that, you had only to see Zena Pepperleigh put her arm round his neck and call him Daddy. She would do that even when there were two or three young men sitting on the edge of the piazza. You know, I think, the way they sit on the edge in Mariposa. It is meant to indicate what part of the family they have come to see. Thus when George Duff, the bank manager, came up to the Pepperleigh house, he always sat in a chair on the verandah and talked to the judge. But when Pupkin or Mallory Tompkins or any fellow like that came, he sat down in a sidelong fashion on the edge of the boards and then they knew exactly what he was there for. If he knew the house well, he leaned his back against the verandah post and smoked a cigarette. But that took nerve.

But I am afraid that this is a digression, and, of course, you know all about it just as well as I do. All that I was trying to say was that I don’t suppose that the judge had ever spoken a cross word to Zena in his life. Oh, he threw her novel over the grape-vine, I don’t deny that, but then why on earth should a girl read trash like the Errant Quest of the Palladin Pilgrim, and the Life of Sir Galahad, when the house was full of good reading like The Life of Sir John A. Macdonald, and Pioneer Days in Tecumseh Township?

—

Still, what I mean is that the judge never spoke harshly to Zena, except perhaps under extreme provocation; and I am quite sure that he never, never had to Neil. But then what father ever would want to speak angrily to such a boy as Neil Pepperleigh? The judge took no credit to himself for that; the finest grown boy in the whole county and so broad and big that they took him into the Missinaba Horse when he was only seventeen. And clever – so clever that he didn’t need to study; so clever that he used to come out at the foot of the class in mathematics at the Mariposa high school through sheer surplus of brain power. I’ve heard the judge explain it a dozen times. Why, Neil was so clever that he used to be able to play billiards at the Mariposa House all evening when the other boys had to stay at home and study.

Such a powerful looking fellow, too! Everybody in Mariposa remembers how Neil Pepperleigh smashed in the face of Peter McGinnis, the Liberal organizer, at the big election – you recall it – when the old Macdonald Government went out. Judge Pepperleigh had to try him for it the next morning – his own son. They say there never was such a scene even in the Mariposa court. There was, I believe, something like it on a smaller scale in Roman history, but it wasn’t half as dramatic. I remember Judge Pepperleigh leaning forward to pass the sentence – for a judge is bound, you know, by his oath – and how grave he looked and yet so proud and happy, like a man doing his duty and sustained by it, and he said:

“My boy, you are innocent. You smashed in Peter McGinnis’s face, but you did it without criminal intent. You put a face on him, by Jehoshaphat! that he won’t lose for six months, but you did it without evil purpose or malign design. My boy, look up! Give me your hand! You leave this court without a stain upon your name.”

They said it was one of the most moving scenes ever enacted in the Mariposa Court.

—

But the strangest thing is that if the judge had known what everyone else in Mariposa knew, it would have broken his heart. If he could have seen Neil with the drunken flush on his face in the billiard room of the Mariposa House – if he had known, as everyone else did, that Neil was crazed with drink the night he struck the Liberal organizer when the old Macdonald Government went out – if he could have known that even on that last day Neil was drunk when he rode with the Missinaba Horse to the station to join the Third Contingent for the war, and all the street of the little town was one great roar of people——

But the judge never knew, and now he never will. For if you could find it in the meanness of your soul to tell him, it would serve no purpose now except to break his heart, and there would rise up to rebuke you the pictured vision of an untended grave somewhere in the great silences of South Africa.

Did I say above, or seem to imply, that the judge sometimes spoke harshly to his wife? Or did you gather for a minute that her lot was one to lament over or feel sorry for? If so, it just shows that you know nothing about such things, and that marriage, at least as it exists in Mariposa, is a sealed book to you. You are as ignorant as Miss Spiffkins, the biology teacher at the high school, who always says how sorry she is for Mrs. Pepperleigh. You get that impression simply because the judge howled like an Algonquin Indian when he saw the sprinkler running on the lawn. But are you sure you know the other side of it? Are you quite sure when you talk like Miss Spiffkins does about the rights of it, that you are taking all things into account? You might have thought differently perhaps of the Pepperleighs, anyway, if you had been there that evening when the judge came home to his wife with one hand pressed to his temple and in the other the cablegram that said that Neil had been killed in action in South Africa. That night they sat together with her hand in his, just as they had sat together thirty years ago when he was a law student in the city.

Go and tell Miss Spiffkins that! Hydrangeas – canaries – temper – blazes! What does Miss Spiffkins know about it all?

But in any case, if you tried to tell Judge Pepperleigh about Neil now he wouldn’t believe it. He’d laugh it to scorn. That is Neil’s picture, in uniform, hanging in the dining-room beside the Fathers of Confederation. That military-looking man in the picture beside him is General Kitchener, whom you may perhaps have heard of, for he was very highly spoken of in Neil’s letters. All round the room, in fact, and still more in the judge’s library upstairs, you will see pictures of South Africa and the departure of the Canadians (there are none of the return), and of Mounted Infantry and of Unmounted Cavalry and a lot of things that only soldiers and the fathers of soldiers know about.

So you can realize that for a fellow who isn’t military, and who wears nothing nearer to a uniform than a daffodil tennis blazer, the judge’s house is a devil of a house to come to.

I think you remember young Mr. Pupkin, do you not? I have referred to him several times already as the junior teller in the Exchange Bank. But if you know Mariposa at all you have often seen him. You have noticed him, I am sure, going for the bank mail in the morning in an office suit effect of clinging grey with a gold necktie pin shaped like a riding whip. You have seen him often enough going down to the lake front after supper, in tennis things, smoking a cigarette and with a paddle and a crimson canoe cushion under his arm. You have seen him entering Dean Drone’s church in a top hat and a long frock coat nearly to his feet. You have seen him, perhaps, playing poker in Peter Glover’s room over the hardware store and trying to look as if he didn’t hold three aces – in fact, giving absolutely no sign of it beyond the wild flush in his face and the fact that his hair stands on end.

That kind of reticence is a thing you simply have to learn in banking. I mean, if you’ve got to be in a position where you know for a fact that the Mariposa Packing Company’s account is overdrawn by sixty-four dollars, and yet daren’t say anything about it, not even to the girls that you play tennis with – I don’t say, not a casual hint as a reference, but not really tell them, not, for instance, bring down the bank ledger to the tennis court and show them – you learn a sort of reticence and self-control that people outside of banking circles never can attain.

Why, I’ve known Pupkin at the Firemen’s Ball lean against the wall in his dress suit and talk away to Jim Eliot, the druggist, without giving the faintest hint or indication that Eliot’s note for twenty-seven dollars had been protested that very morning. Not a hint of it. I don’t say he didn’t mention it, in a sort of way, in the supper room, just to one or two, but I mean there was nothing in the way he leant up against the wall to suggest it.

But, however, I don’t mention that as either for or against Mr. Pupkin. That sort of thing is merely the A B C of banking, as he himself told me when explaining why it was that he hesitated to divulge the exact standing of the Mariposa Carriage Company. Of course, once you get past the A B C you can learn a lot that is mighty interesting.

So I think that if you know Mariposa and understand even the rudiments of banking, you are perfectly acquainted with Mr. Pupkin. What? You remember him as being in love with Miss Lawson, the high school teacher? In love with HER? What a ridiculous idea. You mean merely because on the night when the Mariposa Belle sank with every soul on board, Pupkin put off from the town in a skiff to rescue Miss Lawson. Oh, but you’re quite wrong. That wasn’t LOVE. I’ve heard Pupkin explain it himself a dozen times. That sort of thing – paddling out to a sinking steamer at night in a crazy skiff – may indicate a sort of attraction, but not real love, not what Pupkin came to feel afterwards. Indeed, when he began to think of it, it wasn’t even attraction, it was merely respect – that’s all it was. And anyway, that was long before, six or seven months back, and Pupkin admitted that at the time he was a mere boy.

—

Mr. Pupkin, I must explain, lived with Mallory Tompkins in rooms over the Exchange Bank, on the very top floor, the third, with Mullins’s own rooms below them. Extremely comfortable quarters they were, with two bedrooms and a sitting-room that was all fixed up with snowshoes and tennis rackets on the walls and dance programmes and canoe club badges and all that sort of thing.

Mallory Tompkins was a young man with long legs and check trousers who worked on the Mariposa Times-Herald. That was what gave him his literary taste. He used to read Ibsen and that other Dutch author – Bumstone Bumstone, isn’t it? – and you can judge that he was a mighty intellectual fellow. He was so intellectual that he was, as he himself admitted, a complete eggnostic. He and Pupkin used to have the most tremendous arguments about creation and evolution, and how if you study at a school of applied science you learn that there’s no hell beyond the present life.

Mallory Tompkins used to prove absolutely that the miracles were only electricity, and Pupkin used to admit that it was an awfully good argument, but claimed that he had heard it awfully well answered in a sermon, though unfortunately he had forgotten how.

Tompkins used to show that the flood was contrary to geology, and Pupkin would acknowledge that the point was an excellent one, but that he had read a book – the title of which he ought to have written down – which explained geology away altogether.

Mallory Tompkins generally got the best of the merely logical side of the arguments, but Pupkin – who was a tremendous Christian – was much stronger in the things he had forgotten. So the discussions often lasted till far into the night, and Mr. Pupkin would fall asleep and dream of a splendid argument, which would have settled the whole controversy, only unfortunately he couldn’t recall it in the morning.

Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself – either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete.

Meantime, Mallory Tompkins, as I say, was a mighty intellectual fellow. You could see that from the books on the bamboo bookshelves in the sitting-room. There was, for instance, the “Encyclopaedia Metropolitana” in forty volumes, that he bought on the instalment plan for two dollars a month. Then when they took that away, there was the “History of Civilization,” in fifty volumes at fifty cents a week for fifty years. Tompkins had read in it half-way through the Stone Age before they took it from him. After that there was the “Lives of the Painters,” one volume at a time – a splendid thing in which you could read all about Aahrens, and Aachenthal, and Aax and men of that class. After all, there’s nothing like educating oneself. Mallory Tompkins knew about the opening period of all sorts of things, and in regard to people whose names began with “A” you couldn’t stick him.

I don’t mean that he and Mr. Pupkin lived a mere routine of studious evenings. That would be untrue. Quite often their time was spent in much less commendable ways than that, and there were poker parties in their sitting-room that didn’t break up till nearly midnight. Card-playing, after all, is a slow business, unless you put money on it, and, besides, if you are in a bank and are handling money all day, gambling has a fascination.

I’ve seen Pupkin and Mallory Tompkins and Joe Milligan, the dentist, and Mitchell the ticket agent, and the other “boys” sitting round the table with matches enough piled up in front of them to stock a factory. Ten matches counted for one chip and ten chips made a cent – so you see they weren’t merely playing for the fun of the thing. Of course it’s a hollow pleasure. You realize that when you wake up at night parched with thirst, ten thousand matches to the bad. But banking is a wild life and everybody knows it.

Sometimes Pupkin would swear off and keep away from the cursed thing for weeks, and then perhaps he’d see by sheer accident a pile of matches on the table, or a match lying on the floor and it would start the craze in him. I am using his own words – a “craze” – that’s what he called it when he told Miss Lawson all about it, and she promised to cure him of it. She would have, too. Only, as I say, Pupkin found that what he had mistaken for attraction was only respect. And there’s no use worrying a woman that you respect about your crazes.

—

It was from Mallory Tompkins that Pupkin learned all about the Mariposa people, because Pupkin came from away off – somewhere down in the Maritime Provinces – and didn’t know a soul. Mallory Tompkins used to tell him about Judge Pepperleigh, and what a wonderfully clever man he was and how he would have been in the Supreme Court for certain if the Conservative Government had stayed in another fifteen or twenty years instead of coming to a premature end. He used to talk so much about the Pepperleighs, that Pupkin was sick of the very name. But just as soon as he had seen Zena Pepperleigh he couldn’t hear enough of them. He would have talked with Tompkins for hours about the judge’s dog Rover. And as for Zena, if he could have brought her name over his lips, he would have talked of her forever.

He first saw her – by one of the strangest coincidences in the world – on the Main Street of Mariposa. If he hadn’t happened to be going up the street and she to be coming down it, the thing wouldn’t have happened. Afterwards they both admitted that it was one of the most peculiar coincidences they ever heard of. Pupkin owned that he had had the strangest feeling that morning as if something were going to happen – a feeling not at all to be classed with the one of which he had once spoken to Miss Lawson, and which was, at the most, a mere anticipation of respect.

But, as I say, Pupkin met Zena Pepperleigh on the 26th of June, at twenty-five minutes to eleven. And at once the whole world changed. The past was all blotted out. Even in the new forty volume edition of the “Instalment Record of Humanity” that Mallory Tompkins had just received – Pupkin wouldn’t have bothered with it.

She – that word henceforth meant Zena – had just come back from her boarding-school, and of all times of year coming back from a boarding-school and for wearing a white shirt waist and a crimson tie and for carrying a tennis racket on the stricken street of a town – commend me to the month of June in Mariposa.

And, for Pupkin, straight away the whole town was irradiated with sunshine, and there was such a singing of the birds, and such a dancing of the rippled waters of the lake, and such a kindliness in the faces of all the people, that only those who have lived in Mariposa, and been young there, can know at all what he felt.

The simple fact is that just the moment he saw Zena Pepperleigh, Mr. Pupkin was clean, plumb, straight, flat, absolutely in love with her.

Which fact is so important that it would be folly not to close the chapter and think about it.

TOC     INDEX

VIII

The Fore-Ordained Attachment
of Zena Pepperleigh
and Peter Pupkin

Zena Pepperleigh used to sit reading novels on the piazza of the judge’s house, half hidden by the Virginia creepers. At times the book would fall upon her lap and there was such a look of unstilled yearning in her violet eyes that it did not entirely disappear even when she picked up the apple that lay beside her and took another bite out of it.

With hands clasped she would sit there dreaming all the beautiful day-dreams of girlhood. When you saw that far-away look in her eyes, it meant that she was dreaming that a plumed and armoured knight was rescuing her from the embattled keep of a castle beside the Danube. At other times she was being borne away by an Algerian corsair over the blue waters of the Mediterranean and was reaching out her arms towards France to say farewell to it.

Sometimes when you noticed a sweet look of resignation that seemed to rest upon her features, it meant that Lord Ronald de Chevereux was kneeling at her feet, and that she was telling him to rise, that her humbler birth must ever be a bar to their happiness, and Lord Ronald was getting into an awful state about it, as English peers do at the least suggestion of anything of the sort.

Or, if it wasn’t that, then her lover had just returned to her side, tall and soldierly and sunburned, after fighting for ten years in the Soudan for her sake, and had come back to ask her for her answer and to tell her that for ten years her face had been with him even in the watches of the night. He was asking her for a sign, any kind of sign – ten years in the Soudan entitles them to a sign – and Zena was plucking a white rose, just one, from her hair, when she would hear her father’s step on the piazza and make a grab for the Pioneers of Tecumseh Townships, and start reading it like mad.

She was always, as I say, being rescued and being borne away, and being parted, and reaching out her arms to France and to Spain, and saying good-bye forever to Valladolid or the old grey towers of Hohenbranntwein.

And I don’t mean that she was in the least exceptional or romantic, because all the girls in Mariposa were just like that. An Algerian corsair could have come into the town and had a dozen of them for the asking, and as for a wounded English officer – well, perhaps it’s better not to talk about it outside or the little town would become a regular military hospital.

Because, mind you, the Mariposa girls are all right. You’ve only to look at them to realize that. You see, you can get in Mariposa a print dress of pale blue or pale pink for a dollar twenty that looks infinitely better than anything you ever see in the city – especially if you can wear with it a broad straw hat and a background of maple trees and the green grass of a tennis court. And if you remember, too, that these are cultivated girls who have all been to the Mariposa high school and can do decimal fractions, you will understand that an Algerian corsair would sharpen his scimitar at the very sight of them.

Don’t think either that they are all dying to get married; because they are not. I don’t say they wouldn’t take an errant knight, or a buccaneer or a Hungarian refugee, but for the ordinary marriages of ordinary people they feel nothing but a pitying disdain. So it is that each one of them in due time marries an enchanted prince and goes to live in one of the little enchanted houses in the lower part of the town.

I don’t know whether you know it, but you can rent an enchanted house in Mariposa for eight dollars a month, and some of the most completely enchanted are the cheapest. As for the enchanted princes, they find them in the strangest places, where you never expected to see them, working – under a spell, you understand – in drug-stores and printing offices, and even selling things in shops. But to be able to find them you have first to read ever so many novels about Sir Galahad and the Errant Quest and that sort of thing.

—

Naturally then Zena Pepperleigh, as she sat on the piazza, dreamed of bandits and of wounded officers and of Lord Ronalds riding on foam-flecked chargers. But that she ever dreamed of a junior bank teller in a daffodil blazer riding past on a bicycle, is pretty hard to imagine. So, when Mr. Pupkin came tearing past up the slope of Oneida Street at a speed that proved that he wasn’t riding there merely to pass the house, I don’t suppose that Zena Pepperleigh was aware of his existence.

That may be a slight exaggeration. She knew, perhaps, that he was the new junior teller in the Exchange Bank and that he came from the Maritime Provinces, and that nobody knew who his people were, and that he had never been in a canoe in his life till he came to Mariposa, and that he sat four pews back in Dean Drone’s church, and that his salary was eight hundred dollars. Beyond that, she didn’t know a thing about him. She presumed, however, that the reason why he went past so fast was because he didn’t dare to go slow.

This, of course, was perfectly correct. Ever since the day when Mr. Pupkin met Zena in the Main Street he used to come past the house on his bicycle just after bank hours. He would have gone past twenty times a day but he was afraid to. As he came up Oneida Street, he used to pedal faster and faster – he never meant to, but he couldn’t help it – till he went past the piazza where Zena was sitting at an awful speed with his little yellow blazer flying in the wind. In a second he had disappeared in a buzz and a cloud of dust, and the momentum of it carried him clear out into the country for miles and miles before he ever dared to pause or look back.

Then Mr. Pupkin would ride in a huge circuit about the country, trying to think he was looking at the crops, and sooner or later his bicycle would be turned towards the town again and headed for Oneida Street, and would get going quicker and quicker and quicker, till the pedals whirled round with a buzz and he came past the judge’s house again, like a bullet out of a gun. He rode fifteen miles to pass the house twice, and even then it took all the nerve that he had.

The people on Oneida Street thought that Mr. Pupkin was crazy, but Zena Pepperleigh knew that he was not. Already, you see, there was a sort of dim parallel between the passing of the bicycle and the last ride of Tancred the Inconsolable along the banks of the Danube.

I have already mentioned, I think, how Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh first came to know one another. Like everything else about them, it was a sheer matter of coincidence, quite inexplicable unless you understand that these things are foreordained.

That, of course, is the way with foreordained affairs and that’s where they differ from ordinary love.

—

I won’t even try to describe how Mr. Pupkin felt when he first spoke with Zena and sat beside her as they copied out the “endless chain” letter asking for ten cents. They wrote out, as I said, no less than eight of the letters between them, and they found out that their handwritings were so alike that you could hardly tell them apart, except that Pupkin’s letters were round and Zena’s letters were pointed and Pupkin wrote straight up and down and Zena wrote on a slant. Beyond that the writing was so alike that it was the strangest coincidence in the world. Of course when they made figures it was different and Pupkin explained to Zena that in the bank you have to be able to make a seven so that it doesn’t look like a nine.

So, as I say, they wrote the letters all afternoon and when it was over they walked up Oneida Street together, ever so slowly. When they got near the house, Zena asked Pupkin to come in to tea, with such an easy off-hand way that you couldn’t have told that she was half an hour late and was taking awful chances on the judge. Pupkin hadn’t had time to say yes before the judge appeared at the door, just as they were stepping up on to the piazza, and he had a table napkin in his hand and the dynamite sparks were flying from his spectacles as he called out:

“Great heaven! Zena, why in everlasting blazes can’t you get in to tea at a Christian hour?”

Zena gave one look of appeal to Pupkin, and Pupkin looked one glance of comprehension, and turned and fled down Oneida Street. And if the scene wasn’t quite as dramatic as the renunciation of Tancred the Troubadour, it at least had something of the same elements in it.

Pupkin walked home to his supper at the Mariposa House on air, and that evening there was a gentle distance in his manner towards Sadie, the dining-room girl, that I suppose no bank clerk in Mariposa ever showed before. It was like Sir Galahad talking with the tire-women of Queen Guinevere and receiving huckleberry pie at their hands.

After that Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh constantly met together. They played tennis as partners on the grass court behind Dr. Gallagher’s house – the Mariposa Tennis Club rent it, you remember, for fifty cents a month – and Pupkin used to perform perfect prodigies of valour, leaping in the air to serve with his little body hooked like a letter S. Sometimes, too, they went out on Lake Wissanotti in the evening in Pupkin’s canoe, with Zena sitting in the bow and Pupkin paddling in the stern and they went out ever so far and it was after dark and the stars were shining before they came home. Zena would look at the stars and say how infinitely far away they seemed, and Pupkin would realize that a girl with a mind like that couldn’t have any use for a fool such as him. Zena used to ask him to point out the Pleiades and Jupiter and Ursa minor, and Pupkin showed her exactly where they were. That impressed them both tremendously, because Pupkin didn’t know that Zena remembered the names out of the astronomy book at her boarding-school, and Zena didn’t know that Pupkin simply took a chance on where the stars were.

And ever so many times they talked so intimately that Pupkin came mighty near telling her about his home in the Maritime Provinces and about his father and mother, and then kicked himself that he hadn’t the manliness to speak straight out about it and take the consequences.

Please don’t imagine from any of this that the course of Mr. Pupkin’s love ran smooth. On the contrary, Pupkin himself felt that it was absolutely hopeless from the start.

There were, it might be admitted, certain things that seemed to indicate progress.

In the course of the months of June and July and August, he had taken Zena out in his canoe thirty-one times. Allowing an average of two miles for each evening, Pupkin had paddled Zena sixty-two miles, or more than a hundred thousand yards. That surely was something.

He had played tennis with her on sixteen afternoons. Three times he had left his tennis racket up at the judge’s house in Zena’s charge, and once he had, with her full consent, left his bicycle there all night. This must count for something. No girl could trifle with a man to the extent of having his bicycle leaning against the verandah post all night and mean nothing by it.

More than that – he had been to tea at the judge’s house fourteen times, and seven times he had been asked by Lilian Drone to the rectory when Zena was coming, and five times by Nora Gallagher to tea at the doctor’s house because Zena was there.

Altogether he had eaten so many meals where Zena was that his meal ticket at the Mariposa lasted nearly double its proper time, and the face of Sadie, the dining-room girl, had grown to wear a look of melancholy resignation, sadder than romance.

Still more than that, Pupkin had bought for Zena, reckoning it altogether, about two buckets of ice cream and perhaps half a bushel of chocolate. Not that Pupkin grudged the expense of it. On the contrary, over and above the ice cream and the chocolate he had bought her a white waistcoat and a walking stick with a gold top, a lot of new neckties and a pair of patent leather boots – that is, they were all bought on account of her, which is the same thing.

Add to all this that Pupkin and Zena had been to the Church of England Church nearly every Sunday evening for two months, and one evening they had even gone to the Presbyterian Church “for fun,” which, if you know Mariposa, you will realize to be a wild sort of escapade that ought to speak volumes.

—

Yet in spite of this, Pupkin felt that the thing was hopeless: which only illustrates the dreadful ups and downs, the wild alternations of hope and despair that characterise an exceptional affair of this sort.

Yes, it was hopeless.

Every time that Pupkin watched Zena praying in church, he knew that she was too good for him. Every time that he came to call for her and found her reading Browning and Omar Khayyam he knew that she was too clever for him. And every time that he saw her at all he realized that she was too beautiful for him.

You see, Pupkin knew that he wasn’t a hero. When Zena would clasp her hands and talk rapturously about crusaders and soldiers and firemen and heroes generally, Pupkin knew just where he came in. Not in it, that was all. If a war could have broken out in Mariposa, or the judge’s house been invaded by the Germans, he might have had a chance, but as it was – hopeless.

Then there was Zena’s father. Heaven knows Pupkin tried hard to please the judge. He agreed with every theory that Judge Pepperleigh advanced, and that took a pretty pliable intellect in itself. They denounced female suffrage one day and they favoured it the next. One day the judge would claim that the labour movement was eating out the heart of the country and the next day he would hold that the hope of the world lay in the organization of the toiling masses. Pupkin shifted his opinions like the glass in a kaleidoscope. Indeed, the only things on which he was allowed to maintain a steadfast conviction were the purity of the Conservative party of Canada and the awful wickedness of the recall of judges.

But with all that the judge was hardly civil to Pupkin. He hadn’t asked him to the house till Zena brought him there, though, as a rule, all the bank clerks in Mariposa treated Judge Pepperleigh’s premises as their own. He used to sit and sneer at Pupkin after he had gone till Zena would throw down the Pioneers of Tecumseh Township in a temper and flounce off the piazza to her room. After which the judge’s manner would change instantly and he would relight his corn cob pipe and sit and positively beam with contentment. In all of which there was something so mysterious as to prove that Mr. Pupkin’s chances were hopeless.

Nor was that all of it. Pupkin’s salary was eight hundred dollars a year and the Exchange Bank limit for marriage was a thousand.

I suppose you are aware of the grinding capitalistic tyranny of the banks in Mariposa whereby marriage is put beyond the reach of ever so many mature and experienced men of nineteen and twenty and twenty-one, who are compelled to go on eating on a meal ticket at the Mariposa House and living over the bank to suit the whim of a group of capitalists.

Whenever Pupkin thought of this two hundred dollars he understood all that it meant by social unrest. In fact, he interpreted all forms of social discontent in terms of it. Russian Anarchism, German Socialism, the Labour Movement, Henry George, Lloyd George – he understood the whole lot of them by thinking of his two hundred dollars.

When I tell you that at this period Mr. Pupkin read Memoirs of the Great Revolutionists and even thought of blowing up Henry Mullins with dynamite, you can appreciate his state of mind.

—

But not even by all these hindrances and obstacles to his love for Zena Pepperleigh would Peter Pupkin have been driven to commit suicide (oh, yes; he committed it three times, as I’m going to tell you), had it not been for another thing that he knew stood once and for all and in cold reality between him and Zena.

He felt it in a sort of way, as soon as he knew her. Each time that he tried to talk to her about his home and his father and mother and found that something held him back, he realized more and more the kind of thing that stood between them. Most of all did he realize it, with a sudden sickness of heart, when he got word that his father and mother wanted to come to Mariposa to see him and he had all he could do to head them off from it.

Why? Why stop them? The reason was, simple enough, that Pupkin was ashamed of them, bitterly ashamed. The picture of his mother and father turning up in Mariposa and being seen by his friends there and going up to the Pepperleighs’ house made him feel faint with shame.

No, I don’t say it wasn’t wrong. It only shows what difference of fortune, the difference of being rich and being poor, means in this world. You perhaps have been so lucky that you cannot appreciate what it means to feel shame at the station of your own father and mother. You think it doesn’t matter, that honesty and kindliness of heart are all that counts. That only shows that you have never known some of the bitterest feelings of people less fortunate than yourself.

So it was with Mr. Pupkin. When he thought of his father and mother turning up in Mariposa, his face reddened with unworthy shame.

He could just picture the scene! He could see them getting out of their Limousine touring car, with the chauffeur holding open the door for them, and his father asking for a suite of rooms – just think of it, a suite of rooms! – at the Mariposa House.

The very thought of it turned him ill.

What! You have mistaken my meaning? Ashamed of them because they were poor? Good heavens, no, but because they were rich! And not rich in the sense in which they use the term in Mariposa, where a rich person merely means a man who has money enough to build a house with a piazza and to have everything he wants; but rich in the other sense – motor cars, Ritz hotels, steam yachts, summer islands and all that sort of thing.

Why, Pupkin’s father – what’s the use of trying to conceal it any longer? – was the senior partner in the law firm of Pupkin, Pupkin and Pupkin. If you know the Maritime Provinces at all, you’ve heard of the Pupkins. The name is a household word from Chedabucto to Chidabecto. And, for the matter of that, the law firm and the fact that Pupkin senior had been an Attorney General was the least part of it. Attorney General! Why, there’s no money in that! It’s no better than the Senate. No, no, Pupkin senior, like so many lawyers, was practically a promoter, and he blew companies like bubbles, and when he wasn’t in the Maritime Provinces he was in Boston and New York raising money and floating loans, and when they had no money left in New York he floated it in London: and when he had it, he floated on top of it big rafts of lumber on the Miramichi and codfish on the Grand Banks and lesser fish in the Fundy Bay. You’ve heard perhaps of the Tidal Transportation Company, and Fundy Fisheries Corporation, and the Paspebiac Pulp and Paper Unlimited? Well, all of those were Pupkin senior under other names. So just imagine him in Mariposa! Wouldn’t he be utterly foolish there? Just imagine him meeting Jim Eliot and treating him like a druggist merely because he ran a drug store! or speaking to Jefferson Thorpe as if he were a barber simply because he shaved for money! Why, a man like that could ruin young Pupkin in Mariposa in half a day, and Pupkin knew it.

That wouldn’t matter so much, but think of the Pepperleighs and Zena! Everything would be over with them at once. Pupkin knew just what the judge thought of riches and luxuries. How often had he heard the judge pass sentences of life imprisonment on Pierpont Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller. How often had Pupkin heard him say that any man who received more than three thousand dollars a year (that was the judicial salary in the Missinaba district) was a mere robber, unfit to shake the hand of an honest man. Bitter! I should think he was! He was not so bitter, perhaps, as Mr. Muddleson, the principal of the Mariposa high school, who said that any man who received more than fifteen hundred dollars was a public enemy. He was certainly not so bitter as Trelawney, the post-master, who said that any man who got from society more than thirteen hundred dollars (apart from a legitimate increase in recognition of a successful election) was a danger to society. Still, he was bitter. They all were in Mariposa. Pupkin could just imagine how they would despise his father!

And Zena! That was the worst of all. How often had Pupkin heard her say that she simply hated diamonds, wouldn’t wear them, despised them, wouldn’t give a thank you for a whole tiara of them! As for motor cars and steam yachts – well, it was pretty plain that that sort of thing had no chance with Zena Pepperleigh. Why, she had told Pupkin one night in the canoe that she would only marry a man who was poor and had his way to make and would hew down difficulties for her sake. And when Pupkin couldn’t answer the argument she was quite cross and silent all the way home.

—

What was Peter Pupkin doing, then, at eight hundred dollars in a bank in Mariposa? If you ask that, it means that you know nothing of the life of the Maritime Provinces and the sturdy temper of the people. I suppose there are no people in the world who hate luxury and extravagance and that sort of thing quite as much as the Maritime Province people, and, of them, no one hated luxury more than Pupkin senior.

Don’t mistake the man. He wore a long sealskin coat in winter, yes; but mark you, not as a matter of luxury, but merely as a question of his lungs. He smoked, I admit it, a thirty-five cent cigar, not because he preferred it, but merely through a delicacy of the thorax that made it imperative. He drank champagne at lunch, I concede the point, not in the least from the enjoyment of it, but simply on account of a peculiar affection of the tongue and lips that positively dictated it. His own longing – and his wife shared it – was for the simple, simple life – an island somewhere, with birds and trees. They had bought three or four islands – one in the St. Lawrence, and two in the Gulf, and one off the coast of Maine – looking for this sort of thing. Pupkin senior often said that he wanted to have some place that would remind him of the little old farm up the Aroostook where he was brought up. He often bought little old farms, just to try them, but they always turned out to be so near a city that he cut them into real estate lots, without even having had time to look at them.

But – and this is where the emphasis lay – in the matter of luxury for his only son, Peter, Pupkin senior was a Maritime Province man right to the core, with all the hardihood of the United Empire Loyalists ingrained in him. No luxury for that boy! No, sir! From his childhood, Pupkin senior had undertaken, at the least sign of luxury, to “tan it out of him,” after the fashion still in vogue in the provinces. Then he sent him to an old-fashioned school to get it “thumped out of him,” and after that he had put him for a year on a Nova Scotia schooner to get it “knocked out of him.” If, after all that, young Pupkin, even when he came to Mariposa, wore cameo pins and daffodil blazers, and broke out into ribbed silk saffron ties on pay day, it only shows that the old Adam still needs further tanning even in the Maritime Provinces.

Young Pupkin, of course, was to have gone into law. That was his father’s cherished dream and would have made the firm Pupkin, Pupkin, Pupkin, and Pupkin, as it ought to have been. But young Peter was kept out of the law by the fool system of examinations devised since his father’s time. Hence there was nothing for it but to sling him into a bank; “sling him” was, I think, the expression. So his father decided that if Pupkin was to be slung, he should be slung good and far – clean into Canada (you know the way they use that word in the Maritime Provinces). And to sling Pupkin he called in the services of an old friend, a man after his own heart, just as violent as himself, who used to be at the law school in the city with Pupkin senior thirty years ago. So this friend, who happened to live in Mariposa, and who was a violent man, said at once: “Edward, by Jehosephat! send the boy up here.”

So that is how Pupkin came to Mariposa. And if, when he got there, his father’s friend gave no sign, and treated the boy with roughness and incivility, that may have been, for all I know, a continuation of the “tanning” process of the Maritime people.

Did I mention that the Pepperleigh family, generations ago, had taken up land near the Aroostook, and that it was from there the judge’s father came to Tecumseh township? Perhaps not, but it doesn’t matter.

But surely after such reminiscences as these, the awful things that are impending over Mr. Pupkin must be kept for another chapter.

TOC     INDEX

IX

The Mariposa Bank Mystery

Suicide is a thing that ought not to be committed without very careful thought. It often involves serious consequences, and in some cases brings pain to others than oneself.

I don’t say that there is no justification for it. There often is. Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances upon the concertina, will admit that there are some lives which ought not to be continued, and that even suicide has its brighter aspects.

But to commit suicide on grounds of love is at the best a very dubious experiment. I know that in this I am expressing an opinion contrary to that of most true lovers who embrace suicide on the slightest provocation as the only honourable termination of an existence that never ought to have begun.

I quite admit that there is a glamour and a sensation about the thing which has its charm, and that there is nothing like it for causing a girl to realize the value of the heart that she has broken and which breathed forgiveness upon her at the very moment when it held in its hand the half-pint of prussic acid that was to terminate its beating for ever.

But apart from the general merits of the question, I suppose there are few people, outside of lovers, who know what it is to commit suicide four times in five weeks.

Yet this was what happened to Mr. Pupkin, of the Exchange Bank of Mariposa.

Ever since he had known Zena Pepperleigh he had realized that his love for her was hopeless. She was too beautiful for him and too good for him; her father hated him and her mother despised him; his salary was too small and his own people were too rich.

If you add to all that that he came up to the judge’s house one night and found a poet reciting verses to Zena, you will understand the suicide at once. It was one of those regular poets with a solemn jackass face, and lank parted hair and eyes like puddles of molasses. I don’t know how he came there – up from the city, probably – but there he was on the Pepperleighs’ verandah that August evening. He was reciting poetry – either Tennyson’s or Shelley’s, or his own, you couldn’t tell – and about him sat Zena with her hands clasped and Nora Gallagher looking at the sky and Jocelyn Drone gazing into infinity, and a little tubby woman looking at the poet with her head falling over sideways – in fact, there was a whole group of them.

—

I don’t know what it is about poets that draws women to them in this way. But everybody knows that a poet has only to sit and saw the air with his hands and recite verses in a deep stupid voice, and all the women are crazy over him. Men despise him and would kick him off the verandah if they dared, but the women simply rave over him.

So Pupkin sat there in the gloom and listened to this poet reciting Browning and he realized that everybody understood it but him. He could see Zena with her eyes fixed on the poet as if she were hanging on to every syllable (she was; she needed to), and he stood it just about fifteen minutes and then slid off the side of the verandah and disappeared without even saying good-night.

He walked straight down Oneida Street and along the Main Street just as hard as he could go. There was only one purpose in his mind – suicide. He was heading straight for Jim Eliot’s drug store on the main corner and his idea was to buy a drink of chloroform and drink it and die right there on the spot.

As Pupkin walked down the street, the whole thing was so vivid in his mind that he could picture it to the remotest detail. He could even see it all in type, in big headings in the newspapers of the following day:

APPALLING SUICIDE.
PETER PUPKIN POISONED.

He perhaps hoped that the thing might lead to some kind of public enquiry and that the question of Browning’s poetry and whether it is altogether fair to allow of its general circulation would be fully ventilated in the newspapers.

Thinking all that, Pupkin came to the main corner.

On a warm August evening the drug store of Mariposa, as you know, is all a blaze of lights. You can hear the hissing of the soda-water fountain half a block away, and inside the store there are ever so many people – boys and girls and old people too – all drinking sarsaparilla and chocolate sundaes and lemon sours and foaming drinks that you take out of long straws. There is such a laughing and a talking as you never heard, and the girls are all in white and pink and cambridge blue, and the soda fountain is of white marble with silver taps, and it hisses and sputters, and Jim Eliot and his assistant wear white coats with red geraniums in them, and it’s all just as gay as gay.

The foyer of the opera in Paris may be a fine sight, but I doubt if it can compare with the inside of Eliot’s drug store in Mariposa – for real gaiety and joy of living.

This night the store was especially crowded because it was a Saturday and that meant early closing for all the hotels, except, of course, Smith’s. So as the hotels were shut, the people were all in the drug store, drinking like fishes. It just shows the folly of Local Option and the Temperance Movement and all that. Why, if you shut the hotels you simply drive the people to the soda fountains and there’s more drinking than ever, and not only of the men, too, but the girls and young boys and children. I’ve seen little things of eight and nine that had to be lifted up on the high stools at Eliot’s drug store, drinking great goblets of lemon soda, enough to burst them – brought there by their own fathers, and why? Simply because the hotel bars were shut.

What’s the use of thinking you can stop people drinking merely by cutting off whiskey and brandy? The only effect is to drive them to taking lemon sour and sarsaparilla and cherry pectoral and caroka cordial and things they wouldn’t have touched before. So in the long run they drink more than ever. The point is that you can’t prevent people having a good time, no matter how hard you try. If they can’t have it with lager beer and brandy, they’ll have it with plain soda and lemon pop, and so the whole gloomy scheme of the temperance people breaks down, anyway.

But I was only saying that Eliot’s drug store in Mariposa on a Saturday night is the gayest and brightest spot in the world.

And just imagine what a fool of a place to commit suicide in!

Just imagine going up to the soda-water fountain and asking for five cents’ worth of chloroform and soda! Well, you simply can’t, that’s all.

That’s the way Pupkin found it. You see, as soon as he came in, somebody called out: “Hello, Pete!” and one or two others called: “Hullo, Pup!” and some said: “How goes it?” and others: “How are you toughing it?” and so on, because you see they had all been drinking more or less and naturally they felt jolly and glad-hearted.

So the upshot of it was that instead of taking chloroform, Pupkin stepped up to the counter of the fountain and he had a bromo-seltzer with cherry soda, and after that he had one of those aerated seltzers, and then a couple of lemon seltzers and a bromophizzer.

I don’t know if you know the mental effect of a bromo-seltzer.

But it’s a hard thing to commit suicide on.

You can’t.

You feel so buoyant.

Anyway, what with the phizzing of the seltzer and the lights and the girls, Pupkin began to feel so fine that he didn’t care a cuss for all the Browning in the world, and as for the poet – oh, to blazes with him! What’s poetry, anyway? – only rhymes.

So, would you believe it, in about ten minutes Peter Pupkin was off again and heading straight for the Pepperleighs’ house, poet or no poet, and, what was more to the point, he carried with him three great bricks of Eliot’s ice cream – in green, pink and brown layers. He struck the verandah just at the moment when Browning was getting too stale and dreary for words. His brain was all sizzling and jolly with the bromo-seltzer, and when he fetched out the ice cream bricks and Zena ran to get plates and spoons to eat it with, and Pupkin went with her to help fetch them and they picked out the spoons together, they were so laughing and happy that it was just a marvel. Girls, you know, need no bromo-seltzer. They’re full of it all the time.

And as for the poet – well, can you imagine how Pupkin felt when Zena told him that the poet was married, and that the tubby little woman with her head on sideways was his wife?

So they had the ice cream, and the poet ate it in bucketsful. Poets always do. They need it. And after it the poet recited some stanzas of his own and Pupkin saw that he had misjudged the man, because it was dandy poetry, the very best. That night Pupkin walked home on air and there was no thought of chloroform, and it turned out that he hadn’t committed suicide, but like all lovers he had commuted it.

—

I don’t need to describe in full the later suicides of Mr. Pupkin, because they were all conducted on the same plan and rested on something the same reasons as above.

Sometimes he would go down at night to the offices of the bank below his bedroom and bring up his bank revolver in order to make an end of himself with it. This, too, he could see headed up in the newspapers as:

BRILLIANT BOY BANKER
BLOWS OUT BRAINS.

But blowing your brains out is a noisy, rackety performance, and Pupkin soon found that only special kinds of brains are suited for it. So he always sneaked back again later in the night and put the revolver in its place, deciding to drown himself instead. Yet every time that he walked down to the Trestle Bridge over the Ossawippi he found it was quite unsuitable for drowning – too high, and the water too swift and black, and the rushes too gruesome – in fact, not at all the kind of place for a drowning.

Far better, he realized, to wait there on the railroad track and throw himself under the wheels of the express and be done with it. Yet, though Pupkin often waited in this way for the train, he was never able to pick out a pair of wheels that suited him. Anyhow, it’s awfully hard to tell an express from a fast freight.

I wouldn’t mention these attempts at suicide if one of them hadn’t finally culminated in making Peter Pupkin a hero and solving for him the whole perplexed entanglement of his love affair with Zena Pepperleigh. Incidentally it threw him into the very centre of one of the most impenetrable bank mysteries that ever baffled the ingenuity of some of the finest legal talent that ever adorned one of the most enterprising communities in the country.

It happened one night, as I say, that Pupkin decided to go down into the office of the bank and get his revolver and see if it would blow his brains out. It was the night of the Firemen’s Ball and Zena had danced four times with a visitor from the city, a man who was in the fourth year at the University and who knew everything. It was more than Peter Pupkin could bear. Mallory Tompkins was away that night, and when Pupkin came home he was all alone in the building, except for Gillis, the caretaker, who lived in the extension at the back.

He sat in his room for hours brooding. Two or three times he picked up a book – he remembered afterwards distinctly that it was Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – and tried to read it, but it seemed meaningless and trivial. Then with a sudden access of resolution he started from his chair and made his way down the stairs and into the office room of the bank, meaning to get a revolver and kill himself on the spot and let them find his body lying on the floor.

It was then far on in the night and the empty building of the bank was as still as death. Pupkin could hear the stairs creak under his feet, and as he went he thought he heard another sound like the opening or closing of a door. But it sounded not like the sharp ordinary noise of a closing door but with a dull muffled noise as if someone had shut the iron door of a safe in a room under the ground. For a moment Pupkin stood and listened with his heart thumping against his ribs. Then he kicked his slippers from his feet and without a sound stole into the office on the ground floor and took the revolver from his teller’s desk. As he gripped it, he listened to the sounds on the back-stairway and in the vaults below.

I should explain that in the Exchange Bank of Mariposa the offices are on the ground floor level with the street. Below this is another floor with low dark rooms paved with flagstones, with unused office desks and with piles of papers stored in boxes. On this floor are the vaults of the bank, and lying in them in the autumn – the grain season – there is anything from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in currency tied in bundles. There is no other light down there than the dim reflection from the lights out on the street, that lies in patches on the stone floor.

I think as Peter Pupkin stood, revolver in hand, in the office of the bank, he had forgotten all about the maudlin purpose of his first coming. He had forgotten for the moment all about heroes and love affairs, and his whole mind was focused, sharp and alert, with the intensity of the night-time, on the sounds that he heard in the vault and on the back-stairway of the bank.

Straight away, Pupkin knew what it meant as plainly as if it were written in print. He had forgotten, I say, about being a hero and he only knew that there was sixty thousand dollars in the vault of the bank below, and that he was paid eight hundred dollars a year to look after it.

As Peter Pupkin stood there listening to the sounds in his stockinged feet, his face showed grey as ashes in the light that fell through the window from the street. His heart beat like a hammer against his ribs. But behind its beatings was the blood of four generations of Loyalists, and the robber who would take that sixty thousand dollars from the Mariposa bank must take it over the dead body of Peter Pupkin, teller.

—

Pupkin walked down the stairs to the lower room, the one below the ground with the bank vault in it, with as fine a step as any of his ancestors showed on parade. And if he had known it, as he came down the stairway in the front of the vault room, there was a man crouched in the shadow of the passage way by the stairs at the back. This man, too, held a revolver in his hand, and, criminal or not, his face was as resolute as Pupkin’s own. As he heard the teller’s step on the stair, he turned and waited in the shadow of the doorway without a sound.

There is no need really to mention all these details. They are only of interest as showing how sometimes a bank teller in a corded smoking jacket and stockinged feet may be turned into such a hero as even the Mariposa girls might dream about.

All of this must have happened at about three o’clock in the night. This much was established afterwards from the evidence of Gillis, the caretaker. When he first heard the sounds he had looked at his watch and noticed that it was half-past two; the watch he knew was three-quarters of an hour slow three days before and had been gaining since. The exact time at which Gillis heard footsteps in the bank and started downstairs, pistol in hand, became a nice point afterwards in the cross-examination.

But one must not anticipate. Pupkin reached the iron door of the bank safe, and knelt in front of it, feeling in the dark to find the fracture of the lock. As he knelt, he heard a sound behind him, and swung round on his knees and saw the bank robber in the half light of the passage way and the glitter of a pistol in his hand. The rest was over in an instant. Pupkin heard a voice that was his own, but that sounded strange and hollow, call out: “Drop that, or I’ll fire!” and then just as he raised his revolver, there came a blinding flash of light before his eyes, and Peter Pupkin, junior teller of the bank, fell forward on the floor and knew no more.

—

At that point, of course, I ought to close down a chapter, or volume, or, at least, strike the reader over the head with a sandbag to force him to stop and think. In common fairness one ought to stop here and count a hundred or get up and walk round a block, or, at any rate, picture to oneself Peter Pupkin lying on the floor of the bank, motionless, his arms distended, the revolver still grasped in his hand. But I must go on.

By half-past seven on the following morning it was known all over Mariposa that Peter Pupkin the junior teller of the Exchange had been shot dead by a bank robber in the vault of the building. It was known also that Gillis, the caretaker, had been shot and killed at the foot of the stairs, and that the robber had made off with fifty thousand dollars in currency; that he had left a trail of blood on the sidewalk and that the men were out tracking him with bloodhounds in the great swamps to the north of the town.

This, I say, and it is important to note it, was what they knew at half-past seven. Of course as each hour went past they learned more and more. At eight o’clock it was known that Pupkin was not dead, but dangerously wounded in the lungs. At eight-thirty it was known that he was not shot in the lungs, but that the ball had traversed the pit of his stomach.

At nine o’clock it was learned that the pit of Pupkin’s stomach was all right, but that the bullet had struck his right ear and carried it away. Finally it was learned that his ear had not exactly been carried away, that is, not precisely removed by the bullet, but that it had grazed Pupkin’s head in such a way that it had stunned him, and if it had been an inch or two more to the left it might have reached his brain. This, of course, was just as good as being killed from the point of view of public interest.

Indeed, by nine o’clock Pupkin could be himself seen on the Main Street with a great bandage sideways on his head, pointing out the traces of the robber. Gillis, the caretaker, too, it was known by eight, had not been killed. He had been shot through the brain, but whether the injury was serious or not was only a matter of conjecture. In fact, by ten o’clock it was understood that the bullet from the robber’s second shot had grazed the side of the caretaker’s head, but as far as could be known his brain was just as before. I should add that the first report about the bloodstains and the swamp and the bloodhounds turned out to be inaccurate. The stains may have been blood, but as they led to the cellar way of Netley’s store they may have also been molasses, though it was argued, to be sure, that the robber might well have poured molasses over the bloodstains from sheer cunning.

It was remembered, too, that there were no bloodhounds in Mariposa, although, mind you, there are any amount of dogs there.

So you see that by ten o’clock in the morning the whole affair was settling into the impenetrable mystery which it ever since remained.

Not that there wasn’t evidence enough. There was Pupkin’s own story and Gillis’s story, and the stories of all the people who had heard the shots and seen the robber (some said, the bunch of robbers) go running past (others said, walking past), in the night. Apparently the robber ran up and down half the streets of Mariposa before he vanished.

But the stories of Pupkin and Gillis were plain enough. Pupkin related that he heard sounds in the bank and came downstairs just in time to see the robber crouching in the passage-way, and that the robber was a large hulking, villainous looking man, wearing a heavy coat. Gillis told exactly the same story, having heard the noises at the same time, except that he first described the robber as a small thin fellow (peculiarly villainous looking, however, even in the dark), wearing a short jacket; but on thinking it over, Gillis realized that he had been wrong about the size of the criminal, and that he was even bigger, if anything, than what Mr. Pupkin thought. Gillis had fired at the robber; just at the same moment had Mr. Pupkin.

Beyond that, all was mystery, absolute and impenetrable.

By eleven o’clock the detectives had come up from the city under orders from the head of the bank.

—

I wish you could have seen the two detectives as they moved to and fro in Mariposa – fine looking, stern, impenetrable men that they were. They seemed to take in the whole town by instinct and so quietly. They found their way to Mr. Smith’s Hotel just as quietly as if it wasn’t design at all and stood there at the bar, picking up scraps of conversation – you know the way detectives do it. Occasionally they allowed one or two bystanders – confederates, perhaps – to buy a drink for them, and you could see from the way they drank it that they were still listening for a clue. If there had been the faintest clue in Smith’s Hotel or in the Mariposa House or in the Continental, those fellows would have been at it like a flash.

To see them moving round the town that day – silent, massive, imperturbable – gave one a great idea of their strange, dangerous calling. They went about the town all day and yet in such a quiet peculiar way that you couldn’t have realized that they were working at all. They ate their dinner together at Smith’s café and took an hour and a half over it to throw people off the scent. Then when they got them off it, they sat and talked with Josh Smith in the back bar to keep them off. Mr. Smith seemed to take to them right away. They were men of his own size, or near it, and anyway hotel men and detectives have a general affinity and share in the same impenetrable silence and in their confidential knowledge of the weaknesses of the public.

Mr. Smith, too, was of great use to the detectives. “Boys,” he said, “I wouldn’t ask too close as to what folks was out late at night: in this town it don’t do.”

When those two great brains finally left for the city on the five-thirty, it was hard to realize that behind each grand, impassible face a perfect vortex of clues was seething.

But if the detectives were heroes, what was Pupkin? Imagine him with his bandage on his head standing in front of the bank and talking of the midnight robbery with that peculiar false modesty that only heroes are entitled to use.

I don’t know whether you have ever been a hero, but for sheer exhilaration there is nothing like it. And for Mr. Pupkin, who had gone through life thinking himself no good, to be suddenly exalted into the class of Napoleon Bonaparte and John Maynard and the Charge of the Light Brigade – oh, it was wonderful. Because Pupkin was a brave man now and he knew it and acquired with it all the brave man’s modesty. In fact, I believe he was heard to say that he had only done his duty, and that what he did was what any other man would have done: though when somebody else said: “That’s so, when you come to think of it,” Pupkin turned on him that quiet look of the wounded hero, bitterer than words.

And if Pupkin had known that all of the afternoon papers in the city reported him dead, he would have felt more luxurious still.

That afternoon the Mariposa court sat in enquiry – technically it was summoned in inquest on the dead robber – though they hadn’t found the body – and it was wonderful to see them lining up the witnesses and holding cross-examinations. There is something in the cross-examination of great criminal lawyers like Nivens, of Mariposa, and in the counter examinations of presiding judges like Pepperleigh that thrills you to the core with the astuteness of it.

They had Henry Mullins, the manager, on the stand for an hour and a half, and the excitement was so breathless that you could have heard a pin drop. Nivens took him on first.

“What is your name?” he said.

“Henry Augustus Mullins.”

“What position do you hold?”

“I am manager of the Exchange Bank.”

“When were you born?”

“December 30, 1869.”

After that, Nivens stood looking quietly at Mullins. You could feel that he was thinking pretty deeply before he shot the next question at him.

“Where did you go to school?”

Mullins answered straight off: “The high school down home,” and Nivens thought again for a while and then asked:

“How many boys were at the school?”

“About sixty.”

“How many masters?”

“About three.”

After that Nivens paused a long while and seemed to be digesting the evidence, but at last an idea seemed to strike him and he said:

“I understand you were not on the bank premises last night. Where were you?”

“Down the lake duck shooting.”

You should have seen the excitement in the court when Mullins said this. The judge leaned forward in his chair and broke in at once.

“Did you get any, Harry?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mullins said, “about six.”

“Where did you get them? What? In the wild rice marsh past the river? You don’t say so! Did you get them on the sit or how?”

All of these questions were fired off at the witness from the court in a single breath. In fact, it was the knowledge that the first ducks of the season had been seen in the Ossawippi marsh that led to the termination of the proceedings before the afternoon was a quarter over. Mullins and George Duff and half the witnesses were off with shotguns as soon as the court was cleared.

—

I may as well state at once that the full story of the robbery of the bank at Mariposa never came to the light. A number of arrests – mostly of vagrants and suspicious characters – were made, but the guilt of the robbery was never brought home to them. One man was arrested twenty miles away, at the other end of Missinaba county, who not only corresponded exactly with the description of the robber, but, in addition to this, had a wooden leg. Vagrants with one leg are always regarded with suspicion in places like Mariposa, and whenever a robbery or a murder happens they are arrested in batches.

It was never even known just how much money was stolen from the bank. Some people said ten thousand dollars, others more. The bank, no doubt for business motives, claimed that the contents of the safe were intact and that the robber had been foiled in his design.

But none of this matters to the exaltation of Mr. Pupkin. Good fortune, like bad, never comes in small instalments. On that wonderful day, every good thing happened to Peter Pupkin at once. The morning saw him a hero. At the sitting of the court, the judge publicly told him that his conduct was fit to rank among the annals of the pioneers of Tecumseh Townships, and asked him to his house for supper. At five o’clock he received the telegram of promotion from the head office that raised his salary to a thousand dollars, and made him not only a hero but a marriageable man. At six o’clock he started up to the judge’s house with his resolution nerved to the most momentous step of his life.

His mind was made up.

He would do a thing seldom if ever done in Mariposa. He would propose to Zena Pepperleigh. In Mariposa this kind of step, I say, is seldom taken. The course of love runs on and on through all its stages of tennis playing and dancing and sleigh riding, till by sheer notoriety of circumstance an understanding is reached. To propose straight out would be thought priggish and affected and is supposed to belong only to people in books.

But Pupkin felt that what ordinary people dare not do, heroes are allowed to attempt. He would propose to Zena, and more than that, he would tell her in a straight, manly way that he was rich and take the consequences.

And he did it.

That night on the piazza, where the hammock hangs in the shadow of the Virginia creeper, he did it. By sheer good luck the judge had gone indoors to the library, and by a piece of rare good fortune Mrs. Pepperleigh had gone indoors to the sewing room, and by a happy trick of coincidence the servant was out and the dog was tied up – in fact, no such chain of circumstances was ever offered in favour of mortal man before.

What Zena said – beyond saying yes – I do not know. I am sure that when Pupkin told her of the money, she bore up as bravely as so fine a girl as Zena would, and when he spoke of diamonds she said she would wear them for his sake.

They were saying these things and other things – ever so many other things – when there was such a roar and a clatter up Oneida Street as you never heard, and there came bounding up to the house one of the most marvellous Limousine touring cars that ever drew up at the home of a judge on a modest salary of three thousand dollars. When it stopped there sprang from it an excited man in a long sealskin coat – worn not for the luxury of it at all but from the sheer chilliness of the autumn evening. And it was, as of course you know, Pupkin’s father. He had seen the news of his son’s death in the evening paper in the city. They drove the car through, so the chauffeur said, in two hours and a quarter, and behind them there was to follow a special trainload of detectives and emergency men, but Pupkin senior had cancelled all that by telegram half way up when he heard that Peter was still living.

For a moment as his eye rested on young Pupkin you would almost have imagined, had you not known that he came from the Maritime Provinces, that there were tears in them and that he was about to hug his son to his heart. But if he didn’t hug Peter to his heart, he certainly did within a few moments clasp Zena to it, in that fine fatherly way in which they clasp pretty girls in the Maritime Provinces. The strangest thing is that Pupkin senior seemed to understand the whole situation without any explanations at all.

Judge Pepperleigh, I think, would have shaken both of Pupkin senior’s arms off when he saw him; and when you heard them call one another “Ned” and “Phillip” it made you feel that they were boys again attending classes together at the old law school in the city.

If Pupkin thought that his father wouldn’t make a hit in Mariposa, it only showed his ignorance. Pupkin senior sat there on the judge’s verandah smoking a corn cob pipe as if he had never heard of Havana cigars in his life. In the three days that he spent in Mariposa that autumn, he went in and out of Jeff Thorpe’s barber shop and Eliot’s drug store, shot black ducks in the marsh and played poker every evening at a hundred matches for a cent as if he had never lived any other life in all his days. They had to send him telegrams enough to fill a satchel to make him come away.

So Pupkin and Zena in due course of time were married, and went to live in one of the enchanted houses on the hillside in the newer part of the town, where you may find them to this day.

You may see Pupkin there at any time cutting enchanted grass on a little lawn in as gaudy a blazer as ever.

But if you step up to speak to him or walk with him into the enchanted house, pray modulate your voice a little – musical though it is – for there is said to be an enchanted baby on the premises whose sleep must not lightly be disturbed.

TOC     INDEX

X

The Great Election
in Missinaba County

Don’t ask me what election it was, whether Dominion or Provincial or Imperial or Universal, for I scarcely know.

It must, of course, have been going on in other parts of the country as well, but I saw it all from Missinaba County which, with the town of Mariposa, was, of course, the storm centre and focus point of the whole turmoil.

I only know that it was a huge election and that on it turned issues of the most tremendous importance, such as whether or not Mariposa should become part of the United States, and whether the flag that had waved over the school house at Tecumseh Township for ten centuries should be trampled under the hoof of an alien invader, and whether Britons should be slaves, and whether Canadians should be Britons, and whether the farming class would prove themselves Canadians, and tremendous questions of that kind.

And there was such a roar and a tumult to it, and such a waving of flags and beating of drums and flaring of torchlights that such parts of the election as may have been going on elsewhere than in Missinaba county must have been quite unimportant and didn’t really matter.

Now that it is all over, we can look back at it without heat or passion. We can see – it’s plain enough now – that in the great election Canada saved the British Empire, and that Missinaba saved Canada and that the vote of the Third Concession of Tecumseh Township saved Missinaba County, and that those of us who carried the third concession – well, there’s no need to push it further. We prefer to be modest about it. If we still speak of it, it is only quietly and simply and not more than three or four times a day.

But you can’t understand the election at all, and the conventions and the campaigns and the nominations and the balloting, unless you first appreciate the peculiar complexion of politics in Mariposa.

Let me begin at the beginning. Everybody in Mariposa is either a Liberal or a Conservative or else is both. Some of the people are or have been Liberals or Conservatives all their lives and are called dyed-in-the-wool Grits or old-time Tories and things of that sort. These people get from long training such a swift penetrating insight into national issues that they can decide the most complicated question in four seconds: in fact, just as soon as they grab the city papers out of the morning mail, they know the whole solution of any problem you can put to them. There are other people whose aim it is to be broad-minded and judicious and who vote Liberal or Conservative according to their judgment of the questions of the day. If their judgment of these questions tells them that there is something in it for them in voting Liberal, then they do so. But if not, they refuse to be the slaves of a party or the henchmen of any political leader. So that anybody looking for henches has got to keep away from them.

But the one thing that nobody is allowed to do in Mariposa is to have no politics. Of course there are always some people whose circumstances compel them to say that they have no politics. But that is easily understood. Take the case of Trelawney, the postmaster. Long ago he was a letter carrier under the old Mackenzie Government, and later he was a letter sorter under the old Macdonald Government, and after that a letter stamper under the old Tupper Government, and so on. Trelawney always says that he has no politics, but the truth is that he has too many.

So, too, with the clergy in Mariposa. They have no politics – absolutely none. Yet Dean Drone round election time always announces as his text such a verse as: “Lo! is there not one righteous man in Israel?” or: “What ho! is it not time for a change?” And that is a signal for all the Liberal business men to get up and leave their pews.

Similarly over at the Presbyterian Church, the minister says that his sacred calling will not allow him to take part in politics and that his sacred calling prevents him from breathing even a word of harshness against his fellow man, but that when it comes to the elevation of the ungodly into high places in the commonwealth (this means, of course, the nomination of the Conservative candidate) then he’s not going to allow his sacred calling to prevent him from saying just what he thinks of it. And by that time, having pretty well cleared the church of Conservatives, he proceeds to show from the scriptures that the ancient Hebrews were Liberals to a man, except those who were drowned in the flood or who perished, more or less deservedly, in the desert.

There are, I say, some people who are allowed to claim to have no politics – the office holders, and the clergy and the school teachers and the hotel keepers. But beyond them, anybody in Mariposa who says that he has no politics is looked upon as crooked, and people wonder what it is that he is “out after.”

In fact, the whole town and county is a hive of politics, and people who have only witnessed gatherings such as the House of Commons at Westminster and the Senate at Washington and never seen a Conservative Convention at Tecumseh Corners or a Liberal Rally at the Concession school house, don’t know what politics means.

So you may imagine the excitement in Mariposa when it became known that King George had dissolved the parliament of Canada and had sent out a writ or command for Missinaba County to elect for him some other person than John Henry Bagshaw because he no longer had confidence in him.

The king, of course, is very well known, very favourably known, in Mariposa. Everybody remembers how he visited the town on his great tour in Canada, and stopped off at the Mariposa station. Although he was only a prince at the time, there was quite a big crowd down at the depôt and everybody felt what a shame it was that the prince had no time to see more of Mariposa, because he would get such a false idea of it, seeing only the station and the lumber yards. Still, they all came to the station and all the Liberals and Conservatives mixed together perfectly freely and stood side by side without any distinction, so that the prince should not observe any party differences among them. And he didn’t – you could see that he didn’t. They read him an address all about the tranquillity and loyalty of the Empire, and they purposely left out any reference to the trouble over the town wharf or the big row there had been about the location of the new post-office. There was a general decent feeling that it wouldn’t be fair to disturb the prince with these things: later on, as king, he would, of course, have to know all about them, but meanwhile it was better to leave him with the idea that his empire was tranquil.

So they deliberately couched the address in terms that were just as reassuring as possible and the prince was simply delighted with it. I am certain that he slept pretty soundly after hearing that address. Why, you could see it taking effect even on his aides-de-camp and the people round him, so imagine how the prince must have felt!

I think in Mariposa they understand kings perfectly. Every time that a king or a prince comes, they try to make him see the bright side of everything and let him think that they’re all united. Judge Pepperleigh walked up and down arm in arm with Dr. Gallagher, the worst Grit in the town, just to make the prince feel fine.

So when they got the news that the king had lost confidence in John Henry Bagshaw, the sitting member, they never questioned it a bit. Lost confidence? All right, they’d elect him another right away. They’d elect him half a dozen if he needed them. They don’t mind; they’d elect the whole town man after man rather than have the king worried about it.

In any case, all the Conservatives had been wondering for years how the king and the governor-general and men like that had tolerated such a man as Bagshaw so long.

Missinaba County, I say, is a regular hive of politics, and not the miserable, crooked, money-ridden politics of the cities, but the straight, real old-fashioned thing that is an honour to the country side. Any man who would offer to take a bribe or sell his convictions for money, would be an object of scorn. I don’t say they wouldn’t take money – they would, of course, why not? – but if they did they would take it in a straight fearless way and say nothing about it. They might – it’s only human – accept a job or a contract from the government, but if they did, rest assured it would be in a broad national spirit and not for the sake of the work itself. No, sir. Not for a minute.

Any man who wants to get the votes of the Missinaba farmers and the Mariposa business men has got to persuade them that he’s the right man. If he can do that – if he can persuade anyone of them that he is the right man and that all the rest know it, then they’ll vote for him.

The division, I repeat, between the Liberals and the Conservatives, is intense. Yet you might live for a long while in the town, between elections, and never know it. It is only when you get to understand the people that you begin to see that there is a cross division running through them that nothing can ever remove. You gradually become aware of fine subtle distinctions that miss your observation at first. Outwardly, they are all friendly enough. For instance, Joe Milligan the dentist is a Conservative, and has been for six years, and yet he shares the same boat-house with young Dr. Gallagher, who is a Liberal, and they even bought a motor boat between them. Pete Glover and Alf McNichol were in partnership in the hardware and paint store, though they belonged on different sides.

But just as soon as elections drew near, the differences in politics became perfectly apparent. Liberals and Conservatives drew away from one another. Joe Milligan used the motor boat one Saturday and Dr. Gallagher the next, and Pete Glover sold hardware on one side of the store and Alf McNichol sold paint on the other. You soon realized too that one of the newspapers was Conservative and the other was Liberal, that there was a Liberal drug store and a Conservative drug store, and so on. Similarly round election time, the Mariposa House was the Liberal Hotel, and the Continental Conservative, though Mr. Smith’s place, where they always put on a couple of extra bar tenders, was what you might call Independent-Liberal-Conservative, with a dash of Imperialism thrown in. Mr. Gingham, the undertaker, was, as a natural effect of his calling, an advanced Liberal, but at election time he always engaged a special assistant for embalming Conservative customers.

So now, I think, you understand something of the general political surroundings of the great election in Missinaba County.

John Henry Bagshaw was the sitting member, the Liberal member, for Missinaba County.

The Liberals called him the old war horse, and the old battle-axe, and the old charger and the old champion and all sorts of things of that kind. The Conservatives called him the old jackass and the old army mule and the old booze fighter and the old grafter and the old scoundrel.

John Henry Bagshaw was, I suppose, one of the greatest political forces in the world. He had flowing white hair crowned with a fedora hat, and a smooth statesmanlike face which it cost the country twenty-five cents a day to shave.

Altogether the Dominion of Canada had spent over two thousand dollars in shaving that face during the twenty years that Bagshaw had represented Missinaba County. But the result had been well worth it.

Bagshaw wore a long political overcoat that it cost the country twenty cents a day to brush, and boots that cost the Dominion fifteen cents every morning to shine.

But it was money well spent.

Bagshaw of Mariposa was one of the most representative men of the age, and it’s no wonder that he had been returned for the county for five elections running, leaving the Conservatives nowhere. Just think how representative he was. He owned two hundred acres out on the Third Concession and kept two men working on it all the time to prove that he was a practical farmer. They sent in fat hogs to the Missinaba County Agricultural Exposition and World’s Fair every autumn, and Bagshaw himself stood beside the pig pens with the judges, and wore a pair of corduroy breeches and chewed a straw all afternoon. After that if any farmer thought that he was not properly represented in Parliament, it showed that he was an ass.

Bagshaw owned a half share in the harness business and a quarter share in the tannery and that made him a business man. He paid for a pew in the Presbyterian Church and that represented religion in Parliament. He attended college for two sessions thirty years ago, and that represented education and kept him abreast with modern science, if not ahead of it. He kept a little account in one bank and a big account in the other, so that he was a rich man or a poor man at the same time.

Add to that that John Henry Bagshaw was perhaps the finest orator in Mariposa. That, of course, is saying a great deal. There are speakers there, lots of them that can talk two or three hours at a stretch, but the old war horse could beat them all. They say that when John Henry Bagshaw got well started, say after a couple of hours of talk, he could speak as Pericles or Demosthenes or Cicero never could have spoken.

You could tell Bagshaw a hundred yards off as a member of the House of Commons. He wore a pepper-and-salt suit to show that he came from a rural constituency, and he wore a broad gold watch-chain with dangling seals to show that he also represents a town. You could see from his quiet low collar and white tie that his electorate were a God-fearing, religious people, while the horseshoe pin that he wore showed that his electorate were not without sporting instincts and knew a horse from a jackass.

Most of the time, John Henry Bagshaw had to be at Ottawa (though he preferred the quiet of his farm and always left it, as he said, with a sigh). If he was not in Ottawa, he was in Washington, and of course at any time they might need him in London, so that it was no wonder that he could only be in Mariposa about two months in the year.

That is why everybody knew, when Bagshaw got off the afternoon train one day early in the spring, that there must be something very important coming and that the rumours about a new election must be perfectly true.

Everything that he did showed this. He gave the baggage man twenty-five cents to take the check off his trunk, the ’bus driver fifty cents to drive him up to the Main Street, and he went into Callahan’s tobacco store and bought two ten-cent cigars and took them across the street and gave them to Mallory Tompkins of the Times-Herald as a present from the Prime Minister.

All that afternoon, Bagshaw went up and down the Main Street of Mariposa, and you could see, if you knew the signs of it, that there was politics in the air. He bought nails and putty and glass in the hardware store, and harness in the harness shop, and drugs in the drug store and toys in the toy shop, and all the things like that that are needed for a big campaign.

Then when he had done all this he went over with McGinnis the Liberal organizer and Mallory Tompkins, the Times-Herald man, and Gingham (the great Independent-Liberal undertaker) to the back parlour in the Mariposa House.

You could tell from the way John Henry Bagshaw closed the door before he sat down that he was in a pretty serious frame of mind.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “the election is a certainty. We’re going to have a big fight on our hands and we’ve got to get ready for it.”

“Is it going to be on the tariff?” asked Tompkins.

“Yes, gentlemen, I’m afraid it is. The whole thing is going to turn on the tariff question. I wish it were otherwise. I think it madness, but they’re bent on it, and we got to fight it on that line. Why they can’t fight it merely on the question of graft,” continued the old war horse, rising from his seat and walking up and down, “Heaven only knows. I warned them. I appealed to them. I said, fight the thing on graft and we can win easy. Take this constituency – why not have fought the thing out on whether I spent too much money on the town wharf or the post-office? What better issues could a man want? Let them claim that I am crooked, and let me claim that I’m not. Surely that was good enough without dragging in the tariff. But now, gentlemen, tell me about things in the constituency. Is there any talk yet of who is to run?”

Mallory Tompkins lighted up the second of the Prime Minister’s cigars and then answered for the group:

“Everybody says that Edward Drone is going to run.”

“Ah!” said the old war horse, and there was joy upon his face, “is he? At last! That’s good, that’s good – now what platform will he run on?”

“Independent.”

“Excellent,” said Mr. Bagshaw. “Independent, that’s fine. On a programme of what?”

“Just simple honesty and public morality.”

“Come now,” said the member, “that’s splendid: that will help enormously. Honesty and public morality! The very thing! If Drone runs and makes a good showing, we win for a certainty. Tompkins, you must lose no time over this. Can’t you manage to get some articles in the other papers hinting that at the last election we bribed all the voters in the county, and that we gave out enough contracts to simply pervert the whole constituency. Imply that we poured the public money into this county in bucketsful and that we are bound to do it again. Let Drone have plenty of material of this sort and he’ll draw off every honest unbiassed vote in the Conservative party.

“My only fear is,” continued the old war horse, losing some of his animation, “that Drone won’t run after all. He’s said it so often before and never has. He hasn’t got the money. But we must see to that. Gingham, you know his brother well; you must work it so that we pay Drone’s deposit and his campaign expenses. But how like Drone it is to come out at this time!”

It was indeed very like Edward Drone to attempt so misguided a thing as to come out an Independent candidate in Missinaba County on a platform of public honesty. It was just the sort of thing that anyone in Mariposa would expect from him.

Edward Drone was the Rural Dean’s younger brother – young Mr. Drone, they used to call him, years ago, to distinguish him from the rector. He was a somewhat weaker copy of his elder brother, with a simple, inefficient face and kind blue eyes. Edward Drone was, and always had been, a failure. In training he had been, once upon a time, an engineer and built dams that broke and bridges that fell down and wharves that floated away in the spring floods. He had been a manufacturer and failed, had been a contractor and failed, and now lived a meagre life as a sort of surveyor or land expert on goodness knows what.

In his political ideas Edward Drone was and, as everybody in Mariposa knew, always had been crazy. He used to come up to the autumn exercises at the high school and make speeches about the ancient Romans and Titus Manlius and Quintus Curtius at the same time when John Henry Bagshaw used to make a speech about the Maple Leaf and ask for an extra half holiday. Drone used to tell the boys about the lessons to be learned from the lives of the truly great, and Bagshaw used to talk to them about the lessons learned from the lives of the extremely rich. Drone used to say that his heart filled whenever he thought of the splendid patriotism of the ancient Romans, and Bagshaw said that whenever he looked out over this wide Dominion his heart overflowed.

Even the youngest boy in the school could tell that Drone was foolish. Not even the school teachers would have voted for him.

“What about the Conservatives?” asked Bagshaw presently; “is there any talk yet as to who they’ll bring out?”

Gingham and Mallory Tompkins looked at one another. They were almost afraid to speak.

“Hadn’t you heard?” said Gingham; “they’ve got their man already.”

“Who is it?” said Bagshaw quickly.

“They’re going to put up Josh Smith.”

“Great Heaven!” said Bagshaw, jumping to his feet; “Smith! the hotel keeper.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Gingham, “that’s the man.”

Do you remember, in history, how Napoleon turned pale when he heard that the Duke of Wellington was to lead the allies in Belgium? Do you remember how when Themistocles heard that Aristogiton was to lead the Spartans, he jumped into the sea? Possibly you don’t, but it may help you to form some idea of what John Henry Bagshaw felt when he heard that the Conservatives had selected Josh Smith, proprietor of Smith’s Hotel.

You remember Smith. You’ve seen him there on the steps of his hotel – two hundred and eighty pounds in his stockinged feet. You’ve seen him selling liquor after hours through sheer public spirit, and you recall how he saved the lives of hundreds of people on the day when the steamer sank, and how he saved the town from being destroyed the night when the Church of England Church burnt down. You know that hotel of his, too, half way down the street, Smith’s Northern Health Resort, though already they were beginning to call it Smith’s British Arms.

So you can imagine that Bagshaw came as near to turning pale as a man in federal politics can.

“I never knew Smith was a Conservative,” he said faintly; “he always subscribed to our fund.”

“He is now,” said Mr. Gingham ominously; “he says the idea of this reciprocity business cuts him to the heart.”

“The infernal liar!” said Mr. Bagshaw.

There was silence for a few moments. Then Bagshaw spoke again.

“Will Smith have anything else in his platform besides the trade question?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Gingham gloomily, “he will.”

“What is it?”

“Temperance and total prohibition!”

John Henry Bagshaw sank back in his chair as if struck with a club. There let me leave him for a chapter.

TOC     INDEX

XI

The Candidacy
of Mr. Smith

“Boys,” said Mr. Smith to the two hostlers, stepping out on to the sidewalk in front of the hotel – “hoist that there British Jack over the place and hoist her up good.”

Then he stood and watched the flag fluttering in the wind.

“Billy,” he said to the desk clerk, “get a couple more and put them up on the roof of the caff behind the hotel. Wire down to the city and get a quotation on a hundred of them. Take them signs ‘American Drinks’ out of the bar. Put up noo ones with ‘British Beer at all Hours;’ clear out the rye whiskey and order in Scotch and Irish, and then go up to the printing office and get me them placards.”

Then another thought struck Mr. Smith.

“Say, Billy,” he said, “wire to the city for fifty pictures of King George. Get ’em good, and get ’em coloured. It don’t matter what they cost.”

“All right, sir,” said Billy.

“And Billy,” called Mr. Smith, as still another thought struck him (indeed, the moment Mr. Smith went into politics you could see these thoughts strike him like waves), “get fifty pictures of his father, old King Albert.”

“All right, sir.”

“And say, I tell you, while you’re at it, get some of the old queen, Victorina, if you can. Get ’em in mourning, with a harp and one of them lions and a three-pointed prong.”

—

It was on the morning after the Conservative Convention. Josh Smith had been chosen the candidate. And now the whole town was covered with flags and placards and there were bands in the streets every evening, and noise and music and excitement that went on from morning till night.

Election times are exciting enough even in the city. But there the excitement dies down in business hours. In Mariposa there aren’t any business hours and the excitement goes on all the time.

Mr. Smith had carried the Convention before him. There had been a feeble attempt to put up Nivens. But everybody knew that he was a lawyer and a college man and wouldn’t have a chance by a man with a broader outlook like Josh Smith.

So the result was that Smith was the candidate and there were placards out all over the town with SMITH AND BRITISH ALLEGIANCE in big letters, and people were wearing badges with Mr. Smith’s face on one side and King George’s on the other, and the fruit store next to the hotel had been cleaned out and turned into committee rooms with a gang of workers smoking cigars in it all day and half the night.

There were other placards, too, with BAGSHAW AND LIBERTY, BAGSHAW AND PROSPERITY, VOTE FOR THE OLD MISSINABA STANDARD BEARER, and up town beside the Mariposa House there were the Bagshaw committee rooms with a huge white streamer across the street, and with a gang of Bagshaw workers smoking their heads off.

But Mr. Smith had an estimate made which showed that nearly two cigars to one were smoked in his committee rooms as compared with the Liberals. It was the first time in five elections that the Conservative had been able to make such a showing as that.

One might mention, too, that there were Drone placards out – five or six of them – little things about the size of a pocket handkerchief, with a statement that “Mr. Edward Drone solicits the votes of the electors of Missinaba County.” But you would never notice them. And when Drone tried to put up a streamer across the Main Street with DRONE AND HONESTY the wind carried it away into the lake.

The fight was really between Smith and Bagshaw, and everybody knew it from the start.

I wish that I were able to narrate all the phases and the turns of the great contest from the opening of the campaign till the final polling day. But it would take volumes.

First of all, of course, the trade question was hotly discussed in the two newspapers of Mariposa, and the Newspacket and the Times-Herald literally bristled with statistics. Then came interviews with the candidates and the expression of their convictions in regard to tariff questions.

“Mr. Smith,” said the reporter of the Mariposa Newspacket, “we’d like to get your views of the effect of the proposed reduction of the differential duties.”

“By gosh, Pete,” said Mr. Smith, “you can search me. Have a cigar.”

“What do you think, Mr. Smith, would be the result of lowering the ad valorem British preference and admitting American goods at a reciprocal rate?”

“It’s a corker, ain’t it?” answered Mr. Smith. “What’ll you take, lager or domestic?”

And in that short dialogue Mr. Smith showed that he had instantaneously grasped the whole method of dealing with the press. The interview in the paper next day said that Mr. Smith, while unwilling to state positively that the principle of tariff discrimination was at variance with sound fiscal science, was firmly of opinion that any reciprocal interchange of tariff preferences with the United States must inevitably lead to a serious per capita reduction of the national industry.

—

“Mr. Smith,” said the chairman of a delegation of the manufacturers of Mariposa, “what do you propose to do in regard to the tariff if you’re elected?”

“Boys,” answered Mr. Smith, “I’ll put her up so darned high they won’t never get her down again.”

—

“Mr. Smith,” said the chairman of another delegation, “I’m an old free trader——”

“Put it there,” said Mr. Smith, “so’m I. There ain’t nothing like it.”

—

“What do you think about imperial defence?” asked another questioner.

“Which?” said Mr. Smith.

“Imperial defence.”

“Of what?”

“Of everything.”

“Who says it?” said Mr. Smith.

“Everybody is talking of it.”

“What do the Conservative boys at Ottaway think about it?” answered Mr. Smith.

“They’re all for it.”

“Well, I’m fer it too,” said Mr. Smith.

—

These little conversations represented only the first stage, the argumentative stage of the great contest. It was during this period, for example, that the Mariposa Newspacket absolutely proved that the price of hogs in Mariposa was decimal six higher than the price of oranges in Southern California and that the average decennial import of eggs into Missinaba County had increased four decimal six eight two in the last fifteen years more than the import of lemons in New Orleans.

Figures of this kind made the people think. Most certainly.

After all this came the organizing stage, and after that the big public meetings and the rallies. Perhaps you have never seen a county being “organized.” It is a wonderful sight. First of all the Bagshaw men drove through crosswise in top buggies and then drove through it again lengthwise. Whenever they met a farmer they went in and ate a meal with him, and after the meal they took him out to the buggy and gave him a drink. After that the man’s vote was absolutely solid until it was tampered with by feeding a Conservative.

In fact, the only way to show a farmer that you are in earnest is to go in and eat a meal with him. If you can’t eat it, he won’t vote for you. That is the recognized political test.

But, of course, just as soon as the Bagshaw men had begun to get the farming vote solidified, the Smith buggies came driving through in the other direction, eating meals and distributing cigars and turning all the farmers back into Conservatives.

Here and there you might see Edward Drone, the Independent candidate, wandering round from farm to farm in the dust of the political buggies. To each of the farmers he explained that he pledged himself to give no bribes, to spend no money and to offer no jobs, and each one of them gripped him warmly by the hand and showed him the way to the next farm.

After the organization of the county there came the period of the public meetings and the rallies and the joint debates between the candidates and their supporters.

I suppose there was no place in the whole Dominion where the trade question – the Reciprocity question – was threshed out quite so thoroughly and in quite such a national patriotic spirit as in Mariposa. For a month, at least, people talked of nothing else. A man would stop another in the street and tell him that he had read last night that the average price of an egg in New York was decimal ought one more than the price of an egg in Mariposa, and the other man would stop the first one later in the day and tell him that the average price of a hog in Idaho was point six of a cent per pound less (or more – he couldn’t remember which for the moment) than the average price of beef in Mariposa.

People lived on figures of this sort, and the man who could remember most of them stood out as a born leader.

But of course it was at the public meetings that these things were most fully discussed. It would take volumes to do full justice to all the meetings that they held in Missinaba County. But here and there single speeches stood out as masterpieces of convincing oratory. Take, for example, the speech of John Henry Bagshaw at the Tecumseh Corners School House. The Mariposa Times-Herald said next day that that speech would go down in history, and so it will – ever so far down.

Anyone who has heard Bagshaw knows what an impressive speaker he is, and on this night when he spoke with the quiet dignity of a man old in years and anxious only to serve his country, he almost surpassed himself. Near the end of his speech somebody dropped a pin, and the noise it made in falling fairly rattled the windows.

“I am an old man now, gentlemen,” Bagshaw said, “and the time must soon come when I must not only leave politics, but must take my way towards that goal from which no traveller returns.”

There was a deep hush when Bagshaw said this. It was understood to imply that he thought of going to the United States.

“Yes, gentlemen, I am an old man, and I wish, when my time comes to go, to depart leaving as little animosity behind me as possible. But before I do go, I want it pretty clearly understood that there are more darn scoundrels in the Conservative party than ought to be tolerated in any decent community. I bear,” he continued, “malice towards none and I wish to speak with gentleness to all, but what I will say is that how any set of rational responsible men could nominate such a skunk as the Conservative candidate passes the bounds of my comprehension. Gentlemen, in the present campaign there is no room for vindictive abuse. Let us rise to a higher level than that. They tell me that my opponent, Smith, is a common saloon keeper. Let it pass. They tell me that he has stood convicted of horse stealing, that he is a notable perjurer, that he is known as the blackest-hearted liar in Missinaba County. Let us not speak of it. Let no whisper of it pass our lips.

“No, gentlemen,” continued Bagshaw, pausing to take a drink of water, “let us rather consider this question on the high plane of national welfare. Let us not think of our own particular interests but let us consider the good of the country at large. And to do this, let me present to you some facts in regard to the price of barley in Tecumseh Township.”

Then, amid a deep stillness, Bagshaw read off the list of prices of sixteen kinds of grain in sixteen different places during sixteen years.

“But let me turn,” Bagshaw went on to another phase of the national subject, “and view for a moment the price of marsh hay in Missinaba County——”

When Bagshaw sat down that night it was felt that a Liberal vote in Tecumseh Township was a foregone conclusion.

But here they hadn’t reckoned on the political genius of Mr. Smith. When he heard next day of the meeting, he summoned some of his leading speakers to him and he said:

“Boys, they’re beating us on them statissicks. Ourn ain’t good enough.”

Then he turned to Nivens and he said:

“What was them figures you had here the other night?”

Nivens took out a paper and began reading.

“Stop,” said Mr. Smith, “what was that figure for bacon?”

“Fourteen million dollars,” said Nivens.

“Not enough,” said Mr. Smith, “make it twenty. They’ll stand for it, them farmers.”

Nivens changed it.

“And what was that for hay?”

“Two dollars a ton.”

“Shove it up to four,” said Mr. Smith. “And I tell you,” he added, “if any of them farmers says the figures ain’t correct, tell them to go to Washington and see for themselves; say that if any man wants the proof of your figures let him go over to England and ask – tell him to go straight to London and see it all for himself in the books.”

—

After this, there was no more trouble over statistics. I must say though that it is a wonderfully convincing thing to hear trade figures of this kind properly handled. Perhaps the best man on this sort of thing in the campaign was Mullins, the banker. A man of his profession simply has to have figures of trade and population and money at his fingers’ ends and the effect of it in public speaking is wonderful.

No doubt you have listened to speakers of this kind, but I question whether you have ever heard anything more typical of the sort of effect that I allude to than Mullins’s speech at the big rally at the Fourth Concession.

Mullins himself, of course, knows the figures so well that he never bothers to write them into notes and the effect is very striking.

“Now, gentlemen,” he said very earnestly, “how many of you know just to what extent the exports of this country have increased in the last ten years? How many could tell what per cent. of increase there has been in one decade of our national importation?” – then Mullins paused and looked round. Not a man knew it.

“I don’t recall,” he said, “exactly the precise amount myself – not at this moment – but it must be simply tremendous. Or take the question of population,” Mullins went on, warming up again as a born statistician always does at the proximity of figures, “how many of you know, how many of you can state, what has been the decennial percentage increase in our leading cities——?”

There he paused, and would you believe it, not a man could state it.

“I don’t recall the exact figures,” said Mullins, “but I have them at home and they are positively colossal.”

But just in one phase of the public speaking, the candidacy of Mr. Smith received a serious set-back.

It had been arranged that Mr. Smith should run on a platform of total prohibition. But they soon found that it was a mistake. They had imported a special speaker from the city, a grave man with a white tie, who put his whole heart into the work and would take nothing for it except his expenses and a sum of money for each speech. But beyond the money, I say, he would take nothing.

He spoke one night at the Tecumseh Corners social hall at the same time when the Liberal meeting was going on at the Tecumseh Corners school house.

“Gentlemen,” he said, as he paused half way in his speech – “while we are gathered here in earnest discussion, do you know what is happening over at the meeting place of our opponents? Do you know that seventeen bottles of rye whiskey were sent out from the town this afternoon to that innocent and unsuspecting school house? Seventeen bottles of whiskey hidden in between the blackboard and the wall, and every single man that attends that meeting – mark my words, every single man – will drink his fill of the abominable stuff at the expense of the Liberal candidate!”

Just as soon as the speaker said this, you could see the Smith men at the meeting look at one another in injured surprise, and before the speech was half over the hall was practically emptied.

After that the total prohibition plank was changed and the committee substituted a declaration in favour of such a form of restrictive license as should promote temperance while encouraging the manufacture of spirituous liquors, and by a severe regulation of the liquor traffic should place intoxicants only in the hands of those fitted to use them.

—

Finally there came the great day itself, the Election Day that brought, as everybody knows, the crowning triumph of Mr. Smith’s career. There is no need to speak of it at any length, because it has become a matter of history.

In any case, everybody who has ever seen Mariposa knows just what election day is like. The shops, of course, are, as a matter of custom, all closed, and the bar rooms are all closed by law so that you have to go in by the back way. All the people are in their best clothes and at first they walk up and down the street in a solemn way just as they do on the twelfth of July and on St. Patrick’s Day, before the fun begins. Everybody keeps looking in at the different polling places to see if anybody else has voted yet, because, of course, nobody cares to vote first for fear of being fooled after all and voting on the wrong side.

Most of all did the supporters of Mr. Smith, acting under his instructions, hang back from the poll in the early hours. To Mr. Smith’s mind voting was to be conducted on the same plan as bear-shooting.

“Hold back your votes, boys,” he said, “and don’t be too eager. Wait till when she begins to warm up and then let ’em have it good and hard.”

In each of the polling places in Mariposa there is a returning officer and with him are two scrutineers, and the electors, I say, peep in and out like mice looking into a trap. But if once the scrutineers get a man well into the polling booth, they push him in behind a little curtain and make him vote. The voting, of course, is by secret ballot, so that no one except the scrutineers and the returning officer and the two or three people who may be round the poll can possibly tell how a man has voted.

That’s how it comes about that the first results are often so contradictory and conflicting. Sometimes the poll is badly arranged and the scrutineers are unable to see properly just how the ballots are being marked and they count up the Liberals and Conservatives in different ways. Often, too, a voter makes his mark so hurriedly and carelessly that they have to pick it out of the ballot box and look at it to see what it is.

I suppose that may have been why it was that in Mariposa the results came out at first in such a conflicting way.

Perhaps that was how it was that the first reports showed that Edward Drone the Independent candidate was certain to win. You should have seen how the excitement grew upon the streets when the news was circulated. In the big rallies and meetings of the Liberals and Conservatives, everybody had pretty well forgotten all about Drone, and when the news got round at about four o’clock that the Drone vote was carrying the poll, the people were simply astounded. Not that they were not pleased. On the contrary. They were delighted. Everybody came up to Drone and shook hands and congratulated him and told him that they had known all along that what the country wanted was a straight, honest, non-partisan representation. The Conservatives said openly that they were sick of party, utterly done with it, and the Liberals said that they hated it. Already three or four of them had taken Drone aside and explained that what was needed in the town was a straight, clean, non-partisan post-office, built on a piece of ground of a strictly non-partisan character, and constructed under contracts that were not tainted and smirched with party affiliation. Two or three men were willing to show to Drone just where a piece of ground of this character could be bought. They told him too that in the matter of the postmastership itself they had nothing against Trelawney, the present postmaster, in any personal sense, and would say nothing against him except merely that he was utterly and hopelessly unfit for his job and that if Drone believed, as he had said he did, in a purified civil service, he ought to begin by purifying Trelawney.

Already Edward Drone was beginning to feel something of what it meant to hold office and there was creeping into his manner the quiet self-importance which is the first sign of conscious power.

In fact, in that brief half-hour of office, Drone had a chance to see something of what it meant. Henry McGinnis came to him and asked straight out for a job as federal census-taker on the ground that he was hard up and had been crippled with rheumatism all winter. Nelson Williamson asked for the post of wharf master on the plea that he had been laid up with sciatica all winter and was absolutely fit for nothing. Erasmus Archer asked him if he could get his boy Pete into one of the departments at Ottawa, and made a strong case of it by explaining that he had tried his cussedest to get Pete a job anywhere else and it was simply impossible. Not that Pete wasn’t a willing boy, but he was slow – even his father admitted it – slow as the devil, blast him, and with no head for figures and unfortunately he’d never had the schooling to bring him on. But if Drone could get him in at Ottawa, his father truly believed it would be the very place for him. Surely in the Indian Department or in the Astronomical Branch or in the New Canadian Navy there must be any amount of opening for a boy like this? And to all of these requests Drone found himself explaining that he would take the matter under his very earnest consideration and that they must remember that he had to consult his colleagues and not merely follow the dictates of his own wishes. In fact, if he had ever in his life had any envy of Cabinet Ministers, he lost it in this hour.

But Drone’s hour was short. Even before the poll had closed in Mariposa, the news came sweeping in, true or false, that Bagshaw was carrying the county. The second concession had gone for Bagshaw in a regular landslide – six votes to only two for Smith – and all down the township line road (where the hay farms are) Bagshaw was said to be carrying all before him.

Just as soon as that news went round the town, they launched the Mariposa band of the Knights of Pythias (every man in it is a Liberal) down the Main Street with big red banners in front of it with the motto BAGSHAW FOREVER in letters a foot high. Such rejoicing and enthusiasm began to set in as you never saw. Everybody crowded round Bagshaw on the steps of the Mariposa House and shook his hand and said they were proud to see the day and that the Liberal party was the glory of the Dominion and that as for this idea of non-partisan politics the very thought of it made them sick. Right away in the committee rooms they began to organize the demonstration for the evening with lantern slides and speeches and they arranged for a huge bouquet to be presented to Bagshaw on the platform by four little girls (all Liberals) all dressed in white.

And it was just at this juncture, with one hour of voting left, that Mr. Smith emerged from his committee rooms and turned his voters on the town, much as the Duke of Wellington sent the whole line to the charge at Waterloo. From every committee room and sub-committee room they poured out in flocks with blue badges fluttering on their coats.

“Get at it, boys,” said Mr. Smith, “vote and keep on voting till they make you quit.”

Then he turned to his campaign assistant. “Billy,” he said, “wire down to the city that I’m elected by an overwhelming majority and tell them to wire it right back. Send word by telephone to all the polling places in the county that the hull town has gone solid Conservative and tell them to send the same news back here. Get carpenters and tell them to run up a platform in front of the hotel; tell them to take the bar door clean off its hinges and be all ready the minute the poll quits.”

It was that last hour that did it. Just as soon as the big posters went up in the windows of the Mariposa Newspacket with the telegraphic despatch that Josh Smith was reported in the city to be elected, and was followed by the messages from all over the county, the voters hesitated no longer. They had waited, most of them, all through the day, not wanting to make any error in their vote, but when they saw the Smith men crowding into the polls and heard the news from the outside, they went solid in one great stampede, and by the time the poll was declared closed at five o’clock there was no shadow of doubt that the county was saved and that Josh Smith was elected for Missinaba.

—

I wish you could have witnessed the scene in Mariposa that evening. It would have done your heart good – such joy, such public rejoicing as you never saw. It turned out that there wasn’t really a Liberal in the whole town and that there never had been. They were all Conservatives and had been for years and years. Men who had voted, with pain and sorrow in their hearts, for the Liberal party for twenty years, came out that evening and owned up straight that they were Conservatives. They said they could stand the strain no longer and simply had to confess. Whatever the sacrifice might mean, they were prepared to make it.

Even Mr. Golgotha Gingham, the undertaker, came out and admitted that in working for John Henry Bagshaw he’d been going straight against his conscience. He said that right from the first he had had his misgivings. He said it had haunted him. Often at night when he would be working away quietly, one of these sudden misgivings would overcome him so that he could hardly go on with his embalming. Why, it appeared that on the very first day when reciprocity was proposed, he had come home and said to Mrs. Gingham that he thought it simply meant selling out the country. And the strange thing was that ever so many others had just the same misgivings. Trelawney admitted that he had said to Mrs. Trelawney that it was madness, and Jeff Thorpe, the barber, had, he admitted, gone home to his dinner, the first day reciprocity was talked of, and said to Mrs. Thorpe that it would simply kill business in the country and introduce a cheap, shoddy, American form of hair-cut that would render true loyalty impossible. To think that Mrs. Gingham and Mrs. Trelawney and Mrs. Thorpe had known all this for six months and kept quiet about it! Yet I think there were a good many Mrs. Ginghams in the country. It is merely another proof that no woman is fit for politics.

—

The demonstration that night in Mariposa will never be forgotten. The excitement in the streets, the torchlights, the music of the band of the Knights of Pythias (an organization which is conservative in all but name), and above all the speeches and the patriotism.

They had put up a big platform in front of the hotel, and on it were Mr. Smith and his chief workers, and behind them was a perfect forest of flags. They presented a huge bouquet of flowers to Mr. Smith, handed to him by four little girls in white – the same four that I spoke of above, for it turned out that they were all Conservatives.

Then there were the speeches. Judge Pepperleigh spoke and said that there was no need to dwell on the victory that they had achieved, because it was history; there was no occasion to speak of what part he himself had played, within the limits of his official position, because what he had done was henceforth a matter of history; and Nivens, the lawyer, said that he would only say just a few words, because anything that he might have done was now history; later generations, he said, might read it but it was not for him to speak of it, because it belonged now to the history of the country. And, after them, others spoke in the same strain and all refused absolutely to dwell on the subject (for more than half an hour) on the ground that anything that they might have done was better left for future generations to investigate. And no doubt this was very true, as to some things, anyway.

Mr. Smith, of course, said nothing. He didn’t have to – not for four years – and he knew it.

TOC     INDEX

L’Envoi:

The Train to Mariposa

It leaves the city every day about five o’clock in the evening, the train for Mariposa.

Strange that you did not know of it, though you come from the little town – or did, long years ago.

Odd that you never knew, in all these years, that the train was there every afternoon, puffing up steam in the city station, and that you might have boarded it any day and gone home. No, not “home,” – of course you couldn’t call it “home” now; “home” means that big red sandstone house of yours in the costlier part of the city. “Home” means, in a way, this Mausoleum Club where you sometimes talk with me of the times that you had as a boy in Mariposa.

But of course “home” would hardly be the word you would apply to the little town, unless perhaps, late at night, when you’d been sitting reading in a quiet corner somewhere such a book as the present one.

Naturally you don’t know of the Mariposa train now. Years ago, when you first came to the city as a boy with your way to make, you knew of it well enough, only too well. The price of a ticket counted in those days, and though you knew of the train you couldn’t take it, but sometimes from sheer homesickness you used to wander down to the station on a Friday afternoon after your work, and watch the Mariposa people getting on the train and wish that you could go.

Why, you knew that train at one time better, I suppose, than any other single thing in the city, and loved it too for the little town in the sunshine that it ran to.

Do you remember how when you first began to make money you used to plan that just as soon as you were rich, really rich, you’d go back home again to the little town and build a great big house with a fine verandah – no stint about it, the best that money could buy, planed lumber, every square foot of it, and a fine picket fence in front of it.

It was to be one of the grandest and finest houses that thought could conceive; much finer, in true reality, than that vast palace of sandstone with the porte cochère and the sweeping conservatories that you afterwards built in the costlier part of the city.

But if you have half forgotten Mariposa, and long since lost the way to it, you are only like the greater part of the men here in this Mausoleum Club in the city. Would you believe it that practically every one of them came from Mariposa once upon a time, and that there isn’t one of them that doesn’t sometimes dream in the dull quiet of the long evening here in the club, that some day he will go back and see the place.

They all do. Only they’re half ashamed to own it.

Ask your neighbour there at the next table whether the partridge that they sometimes serve to you here can be compared for a moment to the birds that he and you, or he and some one else, used to shoot as boys in the spruce thickets along the lake. Ask him if he ever tasted duck that could for a moment be compared to the black ducks in the rice marsh along the Ossawippi. And as for fish, and fishing – no, don’t ask him about that, for if he ever starts telling you of the chub they used to catch below the mill dam and the green bass that used to lie in the water-shadow of the rocks beside the Indian’s Island, not even the long dull evening in this club would be long enough for the telling of it.

But no wonder they don’t know about the five o’clock train for Mariposa. Very few people know about it. Hundreds of them know that there is a train that goes out at five o’clock, but they mistake it. Ever so many of them think it’s just a suburban train. Lots of people that take it every day think it’s only the train to the golf grounds, but the joke is that after it passes out or the city and the suburbs and the golf grounds, it turns itself little by little into the Mariposa train, thundering and pounding towards the north with hemlock sparks pouring out into the darkness from the funnel of it.

Of course you can’t tell it just at first. All those people that are crowding into it with golf clubs, and wearing knickerbockers and flat caps, would deceive anybody. That crowd of suburban people going home on commutation tickets and sometimes standing thick in the aisles, those are, of course, not Mariposa people. But look round a little bit and you’ll find them easily enough. Here and there in the crowd those people with the clothes that are perfectly all right and yet look odd in some way, the women with the peculiar hats and the – what do you say? – last year’s fashions? Ah yes, of course, that must be it.

Anyway, those are the Mariposa people all right enough. That man with the two-dollar panama and the glaring spectacles is one of the greatest judges that ever adorned the bench of Missinaba County. That clerical gentleman with the wide black hat, who is explaining to the man with him the marvellous mechanism of the new air brake (one of the most conspicuous illustrations of the divine structure of the physical universe), surely you have seen him before. Mariposa people! Oh yes, there are any number of them on the train every day.

But of course you hardly recognize them while the train is still passing through the suburbs and the golf district and the outlying parts of the city area. But wait a little, and you will see that when the city is well behind you, bit by bit the train changes its character. The electric locomotive that took you through the city tunnels is off now and the old wood engine is hitched on in its place. I suppose, very probably, you haven’t seen one of these wood engines since you were a boy forty years ago – the old engine with a wide top like a hat on its funnel, and with sparks enough to light up a suit for damages once in every mile.

Do you see, too, that the trim little cars that came out of the city on the electric suburban express are being discarded now at the way stations, one by one, and in their place is the old familiar car with the stuff cushions in red plush (how gorgeous it once seemed!) and with a box stove set up in one end of it? The stove is burning furiously at its sticks this autumn evening, for the air sets in chill as you get clear away from the city and are rising up to the higher ground of the country of the pines and the lakes.

Look from the window as you go. The city is far behind now and right and left of you there are trim farms with elms and maples near them and with tall windmills beside the barns that you can still see in the gathering dusk. There is a dull red light from the windows of the farmstead. It must be comfortable there after the roar and clatter of the city, and only think of the still quiet of it.

As you sit back half dreaming in the car, you keep wondering why it is that you never came up before in all these years. Ever so many times you planned that just as soon as the rush and strain of business eased up a little, you would take the train and go back to the little town to see what it was like now, and if things had changed much since your day. But each time when your holidays came, somehow you changed your mind and went down to Naragansett or Nagahuckett or Nagasomething, and left over the visit to Mariposa for another time.

It is almost night now. You can still see the trees and the fences and the farmsteads, but they are fading fast in the twilight. They have lengthened out the train by this time with a string of flat cars and freight cars between where we are sitting and the engine. But at every crossway we can hear the long muffled roar of the whistle, dying to a melancholy wail that echoes into the woods; the woods, I say, for the farms are thinning out and the track plunges here and there into great stretches of bush – tall tamerack and red scrub willow and with a tangled undergrowth of brush that has defied for two generations all attempts to clear it into the form of fields.

Why, look, that great space that seems to open out in the half-dark of the falling evening – why, surely yes – Lake Ossawippi, the big lake, as they used to call it, from which the river runs down to the smaller lake – Lake Wissanotti – where the town of Mariposa has lain waiting for you there for thirty years.

This is Lake Ossawippi surely enough. You would know it anywhere by the broad, still, black water with hardly a ripple, and with the grip of the coming frost already on it. Such a great sheet of blackness it looks as the train thunders along the side, swinging the curve of the embankment at a breakneck speed as it rounds the corner of the lake.

How fast the train goes this autumn night! You have travelled, I know you have, in the Empire State Express, and the New Limited and the Maritime Express that holds the record of six hundred whirling miles from Paris to Marseilles. But what are they to this, this mad career, this breakneck speed, this thundering roar of the Mariposa local driving hard to its home! Don’t tell me that the speed is only twenty-five miles an hour. I don’t care what it is. I tell you, and you can prove it for yourself if you will, that that train of mingled flat cars and coaches that goes tearing into the night, its engine whistle shrieking out its warning into the silent woods and echoing over the dull still lake, is the fastest train in the whole world.

Yes, and the best too – the most comfortable, the most reliable, the most luxurious and the speediest train that ever turned a wheel.

And the most genial, the most sociable too. See how the passengers all turn and talk to one another now as they get nearer and nearer to the little town. That dull reserve that seemed to hold the passengers in the electric suburban has clean vanished and gone. They are talking – listen – of the harvest, and the late election, and of how the local member is mentioned for the cabinet and all the old familiar topics of the sort. Already the conductor has changed his glazed hat for an ordinary round Christie and you can hear the passengers calling him and the brakesman “Bill” and “Sam” as if they were all one family.

What is it now – nine thirty? Ah, then we must be nearing the town – this big bush that we are passing through, you remember it surely as the great swamp just this side of the bridge over the Ossawippi? There is the bridge itself, and the long roar of the train as it rushes sounding over the trestle work that rises above the marsh. Hear the clatter as we pass the semaphores and the switch lights! We must be close in now!

What? it feels nervous and strange to be coming here again after all these years? It must indeed. No, don’t bother to look at the reflection of your face in the window-pane shadowed by the night outside. Nobody could tell you now after all these years. Your face has changed in these long years of money-getting in the city. Perhaps if you had come back now and again, just at odd times, it wouldn’t have been so.

There – you hear it? – the long whistle of the locomotive, one, two, three! You feel the sharp slackening of the train as it swings round the curve of the last embankment that brings it to the Mariposa station. See, too, as we round the curve, the row of the flashing lights, the bright windows of the depôt.

How vivid and plain it all is. Just as it used to be thirty years ago. There is the string of the hotel ’buses, drawn up all ready for the train, and as the train rounds in and stops hissing and panting at the platform, you can hear above all other sounds the cry of the brakesmen and the porters:

“MARIPOSA! MARIPOSA!”

—

And as we listen, the cry grows fainter and fainter in our ears and we are sitting here again in the leather chairs of the Mausoleum Club, talking of the little Town in the Sunshine that once we knew.

TOC     INDEX

Behind the Beyond
and Other Contributions
to Human Knowledge

(1913)

~

Behind the Beyond

Familiar Incidents

With the Photographer
The Dentist and the Gas
My Lost Opportunities
My Unknown Friend
Under the Barber’s Knife

Parisian Pastimes

The Advantages of a Polite Education
The Joys of Philanthropy
The Simple Life in Paris
A Visit to Versailles
Paris at Night

The Retroactive Existence of Mr. Juggins
Making a Magazine
Homer and Humbug

Behind the Beyond

ACT I.

Behind the Beyond

The curtain rises, disclosing the ushers of the theatre still moving up and down the aisles. Cries of “Program!” “Program!” are heard. There is a buzz of brilliant conversation, illuminated with flashes of opera glasses and the rattle of expensive jewelry.

Then suddenly, almost unexpectedly, in fact just as if done, so to speak, by machinery, the lights all over the theatre, except on the stage, are extinguished. Absolute silence falls. Here and there is heard the crackle of a shirt front. But there is no other sound.

In this expectant hush, a man in a check tweed suit walks on the stage: only one man, one single man. Because if he had been accompanied by a chorus, that would have been a burlesque; if four citizens in togas had been with him, that would have been Shakespeare; if two Russian soldiers had walked after him, that would have been melodrama. But this is none of these. This is a problem play. So he steps in alone, all alone, and with that absolute finish of step, that ability to walk as if – how can one express it? – as if he were walking, that betrays the finished actor.

He has, in fact, barely had time to lay down his silk hat, when he is completely betrayed. You can see that he is a finished actor – finished about fifteen years ago. He lays the hat, hollow side up, on the silk hat table on the stage right centre – bearing north, northeast, half a point west from the red mica fire on the stage which warms the theatre.

All this is done very, very quietly, very impressively. No one in the theatre has ever seen a man lay a silk hat on a table before, and so there is a breathless hush. Then he takes off his gloves, one by one, not two or three at a time, and lays them in his hat. The expectancy is almost painful. If he had thrown his gloves into the mica fire it would have been a relief. But he doesn’t.

The man on the stage picks up a pile of letters from the letter department of the hat table. There are a great many of these letters, because all his business correspondence, as well as his private letters, are sent here by the General Post Office. Getting his letters in this way at night, he is able to read them like lightning. Some of them he merely holds upside down for a fraction of a second.

Then at last he speaks. It has become absolutely necessary or he wouldn’t do it. “So – Sao Paolo risen two – hum – Rio Tinto down again – Moreby anxious, ‘better sell for half a million sterling’ – hum . . .”

(Did you hear that? Half a million sterling and he takes it just as quietly as that. And it isn’t really in the play either. Sao Paolo and Rio Tinto just come in to let you know the sort of man you’re dealing with.)

“Lady Gathorne – dinner – Thursday the ninth – lunch with the Ambassador – Friday the tenth.”

(And mind you even this is just patter. The Ambassador doesn’t come into the play either. He and Lady Gathorne are just put in to let the people in the cheaper seats know the kind of thing they’re up against.)

Then the man steps across the stage and presses a button. A bell rings. Even before it has finished ringing, nay, just before it begins to ring, a cardboard door swings aside and a valet enters. You can tell he is a valet because he is dressed in the usual home dress of a stage valet.

He says, “Did you ring, Sir John?”

There is a rustle of programs all over the house. You can hear a buzz of voices say, “He’s Sir John Trevor.” They’re all on to him.

When the valet says, “Did you ring, Sir John,” he ought to answer, “No, I merely knocked the bell over to see how it would sound,” but he misses it and doesn’t say it.

“Has her ladyship come home?”

“Yes, Sir John.”

“Has any one been here?”

“Mr. Harding, Sir John.”

“Any one else?”

“No, Sir John.”

“Very good.”

The valet bows and goes out of the cardboard door, and everybody in the theatre, or at least everybody in the seats worth over a dollar, knows that there’s something strange in the relations of Lady Cicely Trevor and Mr. Harding. You notice – Mr. Harding was there and no one else was there. That’s enough in a problem play.

The double door at the back of the stage, used only by the principal characters, is opened and Lady Cicely Trevor enters. She is young and very beautiful, and wears a droopy hat and long slinky clothes which she drags across the stage. She throws down her feather hat and her crêpe de what-you-call-it boa on the boa stand. Later on the valet comes in and gathers them up. He is always gathering up things like this on the stage – hats and boas and walking sticks thrown away by the actors – but nobody notices him. They are his perquisites.

Sir John says to Lady Cicely, “Shall I ring for tea?”

And Lady Cicely says, “Thanks. No,” in a weary tone.

This shows that they are the kind of people who can have tea at any time. All through a problem play it is understood that any of the characters may ring for tea and get it. Tea in a problem play is the same as whisky in a melodrama.

Then there ensues a dialogue to this effect: Sir John asks Lady Cicely if she has been out. He might almost have guessed it from her coming in in a hat and cloak, but Sir John is an English baronet.

Lady Cicely says, “Yes, the usual round,” and distributes a few details about Duchesses and Princesses, for the general good of the audience.

Then Lady Cicely says to Sir John, “You are going out?”

“Yes, immediately.”

“To the House, I suppose.”

This is very impressive. It doesn’t mean, as you might think, the Workhouse, or the White House, or the Station House, or the Bon Marché. It is the name given by people of Lady Cicely’s class to the House of Commons.

“Yes. I am extremely sorry. I had hoped I might ask to go with you to the opera. I fear it is impossible – an important sitting – the Ministers will bring down the papers – the Kafoonistan business. The House will probably divide in committee. Gatherson will ask a question. We must stop it at all costs. The fate of the party hangs on it.”

Sir John has risen. His manner has changed. His look is altered. You can see him alter it. It is now that of a statesman. The technical details given above have gone to his head. He can’t stop.

He goes on: “They will force a closure on the second reading, go into committee, come out of it again, redivide, subdivide and force us to bring down the estimates.”

While Sir John speaks, Lady Cicely’s manner has been that of utter weariness. She has picked up the London Times and thrown it aside; taken up a copy of Punch and let it fall with a thud to the floor, looked idly at a piece of music and decided, evidently, not to sing it. Sir John runs out of technical terms and stops.

The dialogue has clearly brought out the following points: Sir John is in the House of Commons. Lady Cicely is not. Sir John is twenty-five years older than Lady Cicely. He doesn’t see – isn’t he a fool, when everybody in the gallery can see it? – that his parliamentary work is meaningless to her, that her life is insufficient. That’s it. Lady Cicely is being “starved.” All that she has is money, position, clothes, and jewelry. These things starve any woman. They cramp her. That’s what makes problem plays.

Lady Cicely speaks, very quietly, “Are you taking Mr. Harding with you?”

“Why?”

“Nothing. I thought perhaps I might ask him to take me to the opera. Puffi is to sing.”

“Do, pray do. Take Harding with you by all means. Poor boy, do take him with you.”

Sir John pauses. He looks at Lady Cicely very quietly for a moment. He goes on with a slight change in his voice.

“Do you know, Cicely, I’ve been rather troubled about Harding lately. There’s something the matter with the boy, something wrong.”

“Yes?”

“He seems abstracted, moody – I think, in fact I’m sure that the boy is in love.”

“Yes?”

Lady Cicely has turned slightly pale. The weariness is out of her manner.

“Trust the instinct of an old man, my dear. There’s a woman in it. We old parliamentary hands are very shrewd, you know, even in these things. Some one is playing the devil with Jack – with Harding.”

Sir John is now putting on his gloves again and gathering up his parliamentary papers from the parliamentary paper stand on the left.

He cannot see the change in Lady Cicely’s face. He is not meant to see it. But even the little girls in the tenth row of the gallery are wise.

He goes on. “Talk to Harding. Get it out of him. You women can do these things. Find out what the trouble is and let me know. I must help him.” (A pause. Sir John is speaking almost to himself – and the gallery.) “I promised his mother when she sent him home, sent him to England, that I would.”

Lady Cicely speaks. “You knew Mr. Harding’s mother very well?”

Sir John: “Very well.”

“That was long ago, wasn’t it?”

“Long ago.”

“Was she married then?”

“No, not then.”

“Here in London?”

“Yes, in London. I was only a barrister then with my way to make and she a famous beauty.” (Sir John is speaking with a forced levity that doesn’t deceive even the ushers.) “She married Harding of the Guards. They went to India. And there he spent her fortune – and broke her heart.” Sir John sighs.

“You have seen her since?”

“Never.”

“She has never written you?”

“Only once. She sent her boy home and wrote to me for help. That was how I took him as my secretary.”

“And that was why he came to us in Italy two years ago, just after our marriage.”

“Yes, that was why.”

“Does Mr. Harding know?”

“Know what?”

“That you – knew his mother?”

Sir John shakes his head. “I have never talked with him about his mother’s early life.”

The stage clock on the mantelpiece begins to strike. Sir John lets it strike up to four or five, and then says, “There, eight o’clock. I must go. I shall be late at the House. Good-by.”

He moves over to Lady Cicely and kisses her. There is softness in his manner – such softness that he forgets the bundle of parliamentary papers that he had laid down. Everybody can see that he has forgotten them. They were right there under his very eye.

Sir John goes out.

Lady Cicely stands looking fixedly at the fire. She speaks out loud to herself. “How his voice changed – twenty-five years ago – so long as that – I wonder if Jack knows.”

There is heard the ring of a bell off the stage. The valet enters.

“Mr. Harding is downstairs, my lady.”

“Show him up, Ransome.”

A moment later Mr. Harding enters. He is a narrow young man in a frock coat. His face is weak. It has to be. Mr. Harding is meant to typify weakness. Lady Cicely walks straight to him. She puts her two hands on his shoulders and looks right into his face.

“MY DARLING,” she says. Just like that. In capital letters. You can feel the thrill of it run through the orchestra chairs. All the audience look at Mr. Harding, some with opera glasses, others with eyeglasses on sticks. They can see that he is just the sort of ineffectual young man that a starved woman in a problem play goes mad over.

Lady Cicely repeats “My darling” several times. Mr. Harding says “Hush,” and tries to disengage himself. She won’t let him. He offers to ring for tea. She won’t have any. “Oh, Jack,” she says. “I can’t go on any longer. I can’t. When first you loved me, I thought I could. But I can’t. It throttles me here – this house, this life, everything——” She has drawn him to a sofa and has sunk down in a wave at his feet. “Do you remember, Jack, when first you came, in Italy, that night, at Amalfi, when we sat on the piazza of the palazzo?” She is looking rapturously into his face.

Mr. Harding says that he does.

“And that day at Fiesole among the orange trees, and Pisa and the Capello de Terisa and the Mona Lisa – Oh, Jack, take me away from all this, take me to the Riviera, among the contadini, where we can stand together with my head on your shoulder just as we did in the Duomo at Milano, or on the piaggia at Verona. Take me to Corfu, to the Campo Santo, to Civita Vecchia, to Para Noia – anywhere——”

Mr. Harding, smothered with her kisses, says, “My dearest, I will, I will.” Any man in the audience would do as much. They’d take her to Honolulu.

While she is speaking, Sir John’s voice had been heard off the stage. “No, thank you, Ransome, I’ll get them myself, I know just where I left them.” Sir John enters hurriedly, advances and picks up his papers on the table – turns – and stands——

He sees his wife’s attitude and hears her say “Riviera, Amalfi, Orangieri, Contadini and Capello Santo.” It is enough. He drops his parliamentary papers. They fall against the fire irons with a crash. These in falling upset a small table with one leg. The ball of wool that is on it falls to the floor. The noise of this disturbs the lovers.

They turn. All three look at one another. For a moment they make a motion as if to ring for tea. Then they stand petrified.

“You!” gasps Lady Cicely. She does this awfully well. Everybody says afterward that it was just splendid when she said “You.”

Sir John stands gazing in horror. “Him! My God! He!” Mr. Harding says nothing. He looks very weak.

Lady Cicely unpetrifies first.

She breaks out, speaking through her nostrils. “Yes, I love him, I love him. I’m not ashamed of it. What right have you to deny it me? You gave me nothing. You made me a chattel, a thing——”

You can feel the rustle of indignation through the house at this. To make a woman a thing is the crowning horror of a problem play.

“You starved me here. You throttled me.” Lady Cicely takes herself by the neck and throttles herself a little to show how.

“You smothered me. I couldn’t breathe – and now I’m going, do you hear, going away, to life, to love, behind the beyond!” She gathers up Mr. Harding (practically) and carries him passionately away. He looks back weakly as he goes.

Sir John has sunk down upon a chair. His face is set.

“Jack,” he mutters, “my God, Jack!”

As he sits there, the valet enters with a telegram on a tray.

“A telegram, Sir John.”

Sir John (dazed and trying to collect himself), “What?”

“A telegram, sir – a cablegram.”

Sir John takes it, opens it and reads aloud:

“He is dead. My duty is ended. I am coming home – Margaret Harding.”

“Margaret coming home. It only needed that – my God.”

.    .    .    .    .

As he says it, the curtain falls.

The lights flick up. There is a great burst of applause. The curtain rises and falls. Lady Cicely and Mr. Harding and Sir John all come out and bow charmingly. There is no trace of worry on their faces, and they hold one another’s hands. Then the curtain falls and the orchestra breaks out into a Winter Garden waltz. The boxes buzz with discussion. Some of the people think that Lady Cicely is right in claiming the right to realize herself: others think that before realizing herself she should have developed herself. Others ask indignantly how she could know herself if her husband refused to let her be herself. But everybody feels that the subject is a delicious one.

Those of the people who have seen the play before very kindly explain how it ends, so as to help the rest to enjoy it. But the more serious-minded of the men have risen, very gently, and are sneaking up the aisles. Their expression is stamped with deep thought as if pondering over the play. But their step is as that of leopards on the march, and no one is deceived as to their purpose.

The music continues. The discussion goes on.

The leopards come stealing back. The orchestra boils over in a cadence and stops. The theatre is darkened again. The footlights come on with a flash. The curtain silently lifts, and it is—

ACT II.

Six Months Later

The programs rustle. The people look to see where it is. And they find that it is “An Apartment in Paris.” Notice that this place which is used in every problem play is just called An Apartment. It is not called Mr. Harding’s Apartment, or an Apartment for which Mr. Harding pays the Rent. Not a bit. It is just an Apartment. Even if it were “A Apartment” it would feel easier. But “An Apartment”!! The very words give the audience a delicious shiver of uncomfortableness.

When the curtain rises it discloses a French maid moving about the stage in four-dollar silk stockings. She is setting things on a little table, evidently for supper. She explains this in French as she does it, so as to make it clear.

“Bon! la serviette de monsieur! bon! la serviette de madame, bien – du champagne, bon! langouste aux champignons, bien, bon.—” This is all the French she knows, poor little thing, but langouste aux champignons beats the audience, so she is all right.

Anyway, this supper scene has to come in. It is symbolical. You can’t really show Amalfi and Fiesole and the orange trees, so this kind of supper takes their place.

As the maid moves about there is a loud knock at the cardboard door of the apartment. A man in official clothes sticks his head in. He is evidently a postal special messenger because he is all in postal attire with a postal glazed hat.

“Monsieur Arrding?” he says.

“Oui.”

“Bon! Une lettre.”

“Merci, monsieur.” He goes out. The audience feel a thrill of pride at having learned French and being able to follow the intense realism of this dialogue. The maid lays the letter on the supper table.

Just as she does it the door opens and there enter Mr. Harding and Lady Cicely. Yes, them. Both of them. The audience catches it like a flash. They live here.

Lady Cicely throws aside her cloak. There is great gaiety in her manner. Her face is paler. There is a bright spot in each cheek. Her eyes are very bright.

.    .    .    .    .

There follows the well-known supper scene. Lady Cicely is very gay. She pours champagne into Mr. Harding’s glass. They both drink from it. She asks him if he is a happy boy now. He says he is. She runs her fingers through his hair. He kisses her on the bare shoulder. This is also symbolic.

Lady Cicely rattles on about Amalfi and Fiesole. She asks Mr. Harding if he remembers that night in the olive trees at Santa Clara, with just one thrush singing in the night sky. He says he does. He remembers the very thrush. You can see from the talk that they have been all over Baedeker’s guide to the Adriatic.

At times Lady Cicely’s animation breaks. She falls into a fit of coughing and presses her hand to her side. Mr. Harding looks at her apprehensively. She says, “It is nothing, silly boy, it will be gone in a moment.” It is only because she is so happy.

Then, quite suddenly, she breaks down and falls at Mr. Harding’s knees.

“Oh, Jack, Jack, I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it any longer. It is choking me!”

“My darling, what is it?”

“This, all this, it is choking me – this apartment, these pictures, the French maid, all of it. I can’t stand it. I’m being suffocated. Oh, Jack, take me away – take me somewhere where it is quiet, take me to Norway to the great solemn hills and the fjords——”

Then suddenly Mr. Harding sees the letter in its light blue envelope lying on the supper table. It has been lying right beside him for ten minutes. Everybody in the theatre could see it and was getting uncomfortable about it. He clutches it and tears it open. There is a hunted look in his face as he reads.

“What is it?”

“My mother – good God, she is coming. She is at the Bristol and is coming here. What can I do?”

Lady Cicely is quiet now.

“Does she know?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“How did she find you?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine. I knew when I saw in the papers that my father was dead that she would come home. But I kept back the address. I told the solicitors, curse them, to keep it secret.”

Mr. Harding paces the stage giving an imitation of a weak man trapped. He keeps muttering, “What can I do?”

Lady Cicely speaks very firmly and proudly. “Jack.”

“What?”

“There is only one thing to do. Tell her.”

Mr. Harding, aghast, “Tell her?”

“Yes, tell her about our love, about everything. I am not ashamed. Let her judge me.”

Mr. Harding sinks into a chair. He keeps shivering and saying, “I tell you, I can’t; I can’t. She wouldn’t understand.” The letter is fluttering in his hand. His face is contemptible. He does it splendidly. Lady Cicely picks the letter from his hand. She reads it aloud, her eyes widening as she reads:

Hotel Bristol, Paris.

My Darling Boy:

I have found you at last – why have you sought to avoid me? God grant there is nothing wrong. He is dead, the man I taught you to call your father, and I can tell you all now. I am coming to you this instant.

Margaret Harding.

Lady Cicely reads, her eyes widen and her voice chokes with horror.

She advances to him and grips his hand. “What does it mean, Jack, tell me what does it mean?”

“Good God, Cicely, don’t speak like that.”

“This – these lines – about your father.”

“I don’t know what it means – I don’t care – I hated him, the brute. I’m glad he’s dead. I don’t care for that. But she’s coming here, any minute, and I can’t face it.”

Lady Cicely, more quietly, “Jack, tell me, did my – did Sir John Trevor ever talk to you about your father?”

“No. He never spoke of him.”

“Did he know him?”

“Yes – I think so – long ago. But they were enemies – Trevor challenged him to a duel – over some woman – and he wouldn’t fight – the cur.”

Lady Cicely (dazed and aghast) – “I – understand – it – now.” She recovers herself and speaks quickly.

“Listen. There is time yet. Go to the hotel. Go at once. Tell your mother nothing. Nothing, you understand. Keep her from coming here. Anything, but not that. Ernestine,” – She calls to the maid who reappears for a second – “a taxi – at once.”

She hurriedly gets Harding’s hat and coat. The stage is full of bustle. There is a great sense of hurry. The audience are in an agony for fear Ernestine is too slow, or calls a four-wheel cab by mistake. If the play is really well put on, you can presently hear the taxi buzzing outside. Mr. Harding goes to kiss Lady Cicely. She puts him from her in horror and hastens him out.

She calls the maid. “Ernestine, quick, put my things, anything, into a valise.”

“Madame is going away!”

“Yes, yes, at once.”

“Madame will not eat?”

“No, no.”

“Madame will not first rest?” (The slow comprehension of these French maids is something exasperating.) “Madame will not await monsieur?

“Madame will not first eat, nor drink – no? Madame will not sleep?”

“No, no – quick, Ernestine. Bring me what I want. Summon a fiacre. I shall be ready in a moment.” Lady Cicely passes through a side door into an inner room.

She is scarcely gone when Mrs. Harding enters. She is a woman about forty-five, still very beautiful. She is dressed in deep black.

(The play is now moving very fast. You have to sit tight to follow it all.)

She speaks to Ernestine. “Is this Mr. Harding’s apartment?”

“Yes, madame.”

“Is he here?” She looks about her.

“No, madame, he is gone this moment in a taxi – to the Hotel Bristol, I heard him say.”

Mrs. Harding, faltering. “Is – anyone – here?”

“No, madame, no one – milady was here a moment ago. She, too, has gone out.” (This is a lie but of course the maid is a French maid.)

“Then it is true – there is some one——” She is just saying this when the bell rings, the door opens and there enters – Sir John Trevor.

“You!” says Mrs. Harding.

“I am too late!” gasps Sir John.

She goes to him tremblingly – “After all these years,” she says.

“It is a long time.”

“You have not changed.”

She has taken his hands and is looking into his face, and she goes on speaking. “I have thought of you so often in all these bitter years – it sustained me even at the worst – and I knew, John, that it was for my sake that you had never married——”

.    .    .    .    .

Then, as she goes on talking, the audience realize with a thrill that Mrs. Harding does not know that Sir John married two years ago, that she has come home, as she thought, to the man who loved her, and, more than that, they get another thrill when they realize that Lady Cicely is learning it too. She has pushed the door half open and is standing there unseen, listening. She wears a hat and cloak; there is a folded letter in her hand – her eyes are wide. Mrs. Harding continues:

“And now, John, I want your help, only you can help me, you are so strong – my Jack, I must save him.” She looks about the room. Something seems to overcome her. “Oh, John, this place – his being here like this – it seems a judgment on us.”

The audience are getting it fast now. And when Mrs. Harding speaks of “our awful moment of folly,” “the retribution of our own sins,” they grasp it and shiver with the luxury of it.

After that when Mrs. Harding says: “Our wretched boy, we must save him,” – they all know why she says “our.”

She goes on more calmly. “I realized. I knew – he is not alone here.”

Sir John’s voice is quiet, almost hollow. “He is not alone.”

“But this woman – can you not deal with her – persuade her – beg her for my sake – bribe her to leave my boy?”

Lady Cicely steps out. “There is no bribe needed. I am going. If I have wronged him, and you, it shall be atoned.”

Sir John has given no sign. He is standing stunned. She turns to him. “I have heard and know now. I cannot ask for pity. But when I am gone – when it is over – I want you to give him this letter – and I want you, you two, to – to be as if I had never lived.”

She lays the letter in his hand. Then without a sign, Lady Cicely passes out. There is a great stillness in the house. Mrs. Harding has watched Lady Cicely and Sir John in amazement. Sir John has sunk into a chair. She breaks out, “John, for God’s sake what does it mean – this woman – speak – there is something awful, I must know.”

“Yes, you must know. It is fate. Margaret, you do not know all. Two years ago I married——”

“But this woman, this woman——”

“She is – she was – my wife.”

.    .    .    .    .

And at this moment Harding breaks into the room. “Cicely, Cicely, I was too late——” He sees the others. “Mother,” he says in agony, “and you——” He looks about. “Where is she? What is happening? I must know——”

Sir John, as if following a mechanical impulse, has handed Harding the letter. He tears it open and reads:

“Dearest, I am going away, to die. It cannot be long now. The doctor told me today. That was why I couldn’t speak or explain it to you and was so strange at supper. But I am glad now. Good-by.”

Harding turns upon Sir John with the snarl of a wolf. “What have you done? Why have you driven her away? What right had you to her, you devil? I loved her – She was mine——”

He had seized a pointed knife from the supper table. His shoulders are crouched – he is about to spring on Sir John. Mrs. Harding has thrown herself between them.

“Jack, Jack, you mustn’t strike.”

“Out of the way, I say, I’ll——”

“Jack, Jack, you mustn’t strike. Can’t you understand? Don’t you see – what it is. . . .”

“What do you mean – stand back from me.”

“Jack he – is – your – father.”

The knife clatters to the floor. “My God!”

.    .    .    .    .

And then the curtain falls – and there’s a burst of applause and, in accordance with all the best traditions of the stage, one moment later, Lady Cicely and Mr. Harding and Sir John and Mrs. Harding are all bowing and smiling like anything, and even the little French maid sneaks on in a corner of the stage and simpers.

Then the orchestra plays and the leopards sneak out and the people in the boxes are all talking gayly to show that they’re not the least affected. And everybody is wondering how it will come out, or rather how it can possibly come out at all, because some of them explain that it’s all wrong, and just as they are making it clear that there shouldn’t be any third act, the curtain goes up and it’s——

ACT III.

Three Months Later

The curtain rises on a drawing-room in Mrs. Harding’s house in London. Mrs. Harding is sitting at a table. She is sorting out parcels. There is a great air of quiet about the scene. The third act of a problem play always has to be very quiet. It is like a punctured football with the wind going out of it. The play has to just poof itself out noiselessly.

For instance, this is the way it is done.

Does Mrs. Harding start to talk about Lady Cicely and Jack, and Paris? Not a bit. She is simply looking over the parcels and writing names and talking to herself so that the audience can get the names.

“For the Orphans’ Home – poor little things. For the Foundlings’ Protection Society. For the Lost Infants’ Preservation League” (a deep sigh) – “poor, poor children.”

Now what is all this about? What has this to do with the play? Why, don’t you see that it is the symbol of philanthropy, of gentleness, of melancholy sadness? The storm is over and there is nothing in Mrs. Harding’s heart but pity. Don’t you see that she is dressed in deeper black than ever, and do you notice that look on her face – that third-act air – that resignation?

Don’t you see that the play is really all over? They’re just letting the wind out of it.

A man announces “Sir John Trevor.”

Sir John steps in. Mrs. Harding goes to meet him with both hands out.

“My dear, dear friend,” she says in rich, sad tones.

Sir John is all in black. He is much aged, but very firm and very quiet. You can feel that he’s been spending the morning with the committee of the Homeless Newsboys’ League or among the Directorate of the Lost Waifs’ Encouragement Association. In fact he begins to talk of these things at once. The people who are not used to third acts are wondering what it is all about. The real playgoers know that this is atmosphere.

Then presently——

“Tea?” says Mrs. Harding, “shall I ring?”

“Pray do,” says Sir John. He seats himself with great weariness. The full melancholy of the third act is on him. The tea which has been made for three acts is brought in. They drink it and it begins to go to their heads. The “atmosphere” clears off just a little.

“You have news, I know,” says Mrs. Harding, “you have seen him?”

“I have seen him.”

“And he is gone?”

“Yes, he has sailed,” says Sir John. “He went on board last night, only a few hours after my return to London. I saw him off. Poor Jack. Gatherson has been most kind. They will take him into the embassy at Lima. There, please God, he can begin life again. The Peruvian Ambassador has promised to do all in his power.”

Sir John sighs deeply and is silent. This to let the fact soak into the audience that Jack has gone to Peru. Any reasonable person would have known it. Where else could he go to?

“He will do well in Peru,” says Mrs. Harding. She is imitating a woman being very brave.

“Yes, I trust so,” says Sir John. There is silence again. In fact the whole third act is diluted with thirty per cent. of silence. Presently Mrs. Harding speaks again in a low tone.

“You have other news, I know.”

“I have other news.”

“Of her?”

“Yes. I have been to Switzerland. I have seen the curé – a good man. He has told me all there is to tell. I found him at the hospice, busy with his oeuvre de bienfaisance. He led me to her grave.”

Sir John is bowed in deep silence.

Lady Cicely dead! Everybody in the theatre gasps. Dead! But what an unfair way to kill her! To face an open death on the stage in fair hand to hand acting is one thing, but this new system of dragging off the characters to Switzerland between the acts, and then returning and saying that they are dead is quite another.

Presently Mrs. Harding speaks, very softly. “And you? You will take up your work here again?”

“No; I am going away.”

“Going?”

“Yes, far away. I am going to Kafoonistan.”

Mrs. Harding looks at him in pain. “To Kafoonistan?”

“Yes. To Kafoonistan. There’s work there for me to do.”

.    .    .    .    .

There is silence again. Then Sir John speaks. “And you? You will settle down here in London?”

“No. I am going away.”

“Going away?”

“Yes, back to Balla Walla. I want to be alone. I want to forget. I want to think. I want to try to realize.”

“You are going alone?”

“Yes, quite alone. But I shall not feel alone when I get there. The Maharanee will receive me with open arms. And my life will be useful there. The women need me; I will teach them to read, to sew, to sing.”

“Mrs. Harding – Margaret – you must not do this. You have sacrificed your life enough – you have the right to live——”

There is emotion in Sir John’s tone. It is very rough on him to find his plan of going to Kafoonistan has been outdone by Mrs. Harding’s going to Balla Walla. She shakes her head.

“No, no; my life is of no account now. But you, John, you are needed here, the country needs you. Men look to you to lead them.”

Mrs. Harding would particularize if she could, but she can’t just for the minute remember what it is Sir John can lead them to. Sir John shakes his head.

“No, no; my work lies there in Kafoonistan. There is a man’s work to be done there. The tribes are ignorant, uncivilized.”

This dialogue goes on for some time. Mrs. Harding keeps shaking her head and saying that Sir John must not go to Kafoonistan, and Sir John says she must not go to Balla Walla. He protests that he wants to work and she claims that she wants to try to think clearly. But it is all a bluff. They are not going. Neither of them. And everybody knows it. Presently Mrs. Harding says:

“You will think of me sometimes?”

“I shall never forget you.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“Wherever I am, I shall think of you – out there in the deserts, or at night, alone there among the great silent hills with only the stars overhead, I shall think of you. Your face will guide me wherever I am.”

He has taken her hand.

“And you,” he says, “you will think of me sometimes in Balla Walla?”

“Yes, always. All day while I am with the Maharanee and her women, and at night, the great silent Indian night when all the palace is asleep and there is heard nothing but the sounds of the jungle, the cry of the hyena and the bray of the laughing jackass, I shall seem to hear your voice.”

She is much moved. She rises, clenches her hands and then adds, “I have heard it so for five and twenty years.”

He has moved to her.

“Margaret!”

“John!”

“I cannot let you go, your life lies here – with me – next my heart – I want your help, your love, here inside the beyond.”

And as he speaks and takes her in his arms, the curtain sinks upon them, rises, falls, rises, and then sinks again asbestos and all, and the play is over. The lights are on, the audience rises in a body and puts on its wraps. All over the theatre you can hear the words “perfectly rotten,” “utterly untrue,” and so on. The general judgment seems to be that it is a perfectly rotten play, but very strong.

They are saying this as they surge out in great waves of furs and silks, with black crush hats floating on billows of white wraps among the foam of gossamer scarfs. Through it all is the squawk of the motor horn, the call of the taxi numbers and the inrush of the fresh night air.

But just inside the theatre, in the office, is a man in a circus waistcoat adding up dollars with a blue pencil, and he knows that the play is all right.

TOC     INDEX

Familiar Incidents

–1–
With the Photographer

“I want my photograph taken,” I said. The photographer looked at me without enthusiasm. He was a drooping man in a grey suit, with the dim eye of a natural scientist. But there is no need to describe him. Everybody knows what a photographer is like.

“Sit there,” he said, “and wait.”

I waited an hour. I read the Ladies Companion for 1912, the Girls Magazine for 1902 and the Infants Journal for 1888. I began to see that I had done an unwarrantable thing in breaking in on the privacy of this man’s scientific pursuits with a face like mine.

After an hour the photographer opened the inner door.

“Come in,” he said severely.

I went into the studio.

“Sit down,” said the photographer.

I sat down in a beam of sunlight filtered through a sheet of factory cotton hung against a frosted skylight.

The photographer rolled a machine into the middle of the room and crawled into it from behind.

He was only in it a second – just time enough for one look at me – and then he was out again, tearing at the cotton sheet and the window panes with a hooked stick, apparently frantic for light and air.

Then he crawled back into the machine again and drew a little black cloth over himself. This time he was very quiet in there. I knew that he was praying and I kept still.

When the photographer came out at last, he looked very grave and shook his head.

“The face is quite wrong,” he said.

“I know,” I answered quietly; “I have always known it.”

He sighed.

“I think,” he said, “the face would be better three-quarters full.”

“I’m sure it would,” I said enthusiastically, for I was glad to find that the man had such a human side to him. “So would yours. In fact,” I continued, “how many faces one sees that are apparently hard, narrow, limited, but the minute you get them three-quarters full they get wide, large, almost boundless in——”

But the photographer had ceased to listen. He came over and took my head in his hands and twisted it sideways. I thought he meant to kiss me, and I closed my eyes.

But I was wrong.

He twisted my face as far as it would go and then stood looking at it.

He sighed again.

“I don’t like the head,” he said.

Then he went back to the machine and took another look.

“Open the mouth a little,” he said.

I started to do so.

“Close it,” he added quickly.

Then he looked again.

“The ears are bad,” he said; “droop them a little more. Thank you. Now the eyes. Roll them in under the lids. Put the hands on the knees, please, and turn the face just a little upward. Yes, that’s better. Now just expand the lungs! So! And hump the neck – that’s it – and just contract the waist – ha! – and twist the hip up toward the elbow – now! I still don’t quite like the face, it’s just a trifle too full, but——”

I swung myself round on the stool.

“Stop,” I said with emotion but, I think, with dignity. “This face is my face. It is not yours, it is mine. I’ve lived with it for forty years and I know its faults. I know it’s out of drawing. I know it wasn’t made for me, but it’s my face, the only one I have—” I was conscious of a break in my voice but I went on – “such as it is, I’ve learned to love it. And this is my mouth, not yours. These ears are mine, and if your machine is too narrow—” Here I started to rise from the seat.

Snick!

The photographer had pulled a string. The photograph taken. I could see the machine still staggering from the shock.

“I think,” said the photographer, pursing his lips in a pleased smile, “that I caught the features just in a moment of animation.”

“So!” I said bitingly – “features, eh? You didn’t think I could animate them, I suppose? But let me see the picture.”

“Oh, there’s nothing to see yet,” he said, “I have to develop the negative first. Come back on Saturday and I’ll let you see a proof of it.”

On Saturday I went back.

The photographer beckoned me in. I thought he seemed quieter and graver than before. I think, too, there was a certain pride in his manner.

He unfolded the proof of a large photograph, and we both looked at it in silence.

“Is it me?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “it is you,” and we went on looking at it.

“The eyes,” I said hesitatingly, “don’t look very much like mine.”

“Oh, no,” he answered, “I’ve retouched them. They come out splendidly, don’t they?”

“Fine,” I said, “but surely my eyebrows are not like that?”

“No,” said the photographer, with a momentary glance at my face, “the eyebrows are removed. We have a process now – the Delphide – for putting in new ones. You’ll notice here where we’ve applied it to carry the hair away from the brow. I don’t like the hair low on the skull.”

“Oh, you don’t, don’t you?” I said.

“No,” he went on, “I don’t care for it. I like to get the hair clear back to the superficies and make out a new brow line.”

“What about the mouth?” I said with a bitterness that was lost on the photographer; “is that mine?”

“It’s adjusted a little,” he said, “yours is too low. I found I couldn’t use it.”

“The ears, though,” I said, “strike me as a good likeness; they’re just like mine.”

“Yes,” said the photographer thoughtfully, “that’s so; but I can fix that all right in the print. We have a process now – the Sulphide – for removing the ears entirely. I’ll see if——”

“Listen!” I interrupted, drawing myself up and animating my features to their full extent and speaking with a withering scorn that should have blasted the man on the spot. “Listen! I came here for a photograph – a picture – something which (mad though it seems) would have looked like me. I wanted something that would depict my face as Heaven gave it to me, humble though the gift may have been. I wanted something that my friends might keep after my death, to reconcile them to my loss. It seems that I was mistaken. What I wanted is no longer done. Go on, then, with your brutal work. Take your negative, or whatever it is you call it – dip it in sulphide, bromide, oxide, cowhide – anything you like – remove the eyes, correct the mouth, adjust the face, restore the lips, reanimate the necktie and reconstruct the waistcoat. Coat it with an inch of gloss, shade it, emboss it, gild it, till even you acknowledge that it is finished. Then when you have done all that – keep it for yourself and your friends. They may value it. To me it is but a worthless bauble.”

I broke into tears and left.

TOC     INDEX

–2–
The Dentist and the Gas

“I think,” said the dentist, stepping outside again, “I’d better give you gas.”

Then he moved aside and hummed an air from a light opera while he mixed up cement.

I sat up in my shroud.

“Gas!” I said.

“Yes,” he repeated, “gas, or else ether or a sulphuric anesthetic, or else beat you into insensibility with a club, or give you three thousand bolts of electricity.”

These may not have been his exact words. But they convey the feeling of them very nicely.

I could see the light of primitive criminality shining behind the man’s spectacles.

And to think that this was my fault – the result of my own reckless neglect. I had grown so used to sitting back dozing in my shroud in the dentist’s chair, listening to the twittering of the birds outside, my eyes closed in the sweet half sleep of perfect security, that the old apprehensiveness and mental agony had practically all gone.

He didn’t hurt me, and I knew it.

I had grown – I know it sounds mad – almost to like him.

For a time I had kept up the appearance of being hurt every few minutes, just as a precaution. Then even that had ceased and I had dropped into vainglorious apathy.

It was this, of course, which had infuriated the dentist. He meant to reassert his power. He knew that nothing but gas could rouse me out of my lethargy and he meant to apply it – either gas or some other powerful pain stimulant.

So, as soon as he said “gas,” my senses were alert in a moment.

“When are you going to do it?” I said in horror.

“Right now, if you like,” he answered.

His eyes were glittering with what the Germans call Blutlust. All dentists have it.

I could see that if I took my eye off him for a moment he might spring at me, gas in hand, and throttle me.

“No, not now, I can’t stay now,” I said, “I have an appointment, a whole lot of appointments, urgent ones, the most urgent I ever had.” I was unfastening my shroud as I spoke.

“Well, then, tomorrow,” said the dentist.

“No,” I said, “tomorrow is Saturday. And Saturday is a day when I simply can’t take gas. If I take gas, even the least bit of gas on a Saturday, I find it’s misunderstood——”

“Monday then.”

“Monday, I’m afraid, won’t do. It’s a bad day for me – worse than I can explain.”

“Tuesday?” said the dentist.

“Not Tuesday,” I answered. “Tuesday is the worst day of all. On Tuesday my church society meets, and I must go to it.”

I hadn’t been near it, in reality, for three years, but suddenly I felt a longing to attend it.

“On Wednesday,” I went on, speaking hurriedly and wildly, “I have another appointment, a swimming club, and on Thursday two appointments, a choral society and a funeral. On Friday I have another funeral. Saturday is market day. Sunday is washing day. Monday is drying day——”

“Hold on,” said the dentist, speaking very firmly. “You come tomorrow morning: I’ll write the engagement for ten o’clock.”

I think it must have been hypnotism.

Before I knew it, I had said “Yes.”

I went out.

On the street I met a man I knew.

“Have you ever taken gas from a dentist?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” he said; “it’s nothing.”

Soon after I met another man.

“Have you ever taken gas?” I asked.

“Oh, certainly,” he answered, “it’s nothing, nothing at all.”

Altogether I asked about fifty people that day about gas, and they all said that it was absolutely nothing. When I said that I was to take it tomorrow, they showed no concern whatever. I looked in their faces for traces of anxiety. There weren’t any. They all said that it wouldn’t hurt me, that it was nothing.

So then I was glad because I knew that gas was nothing.

It began to seem hardly worth while to keep the appointment. Why go all the way downtown for such a mere nothing?

But I did go.

I kept the appointment.

What followed was such an absolute nothing that I shouldn’t bother to relate it except for the sake of my friends.

The dentist was there with two assistants. All three had white coats on, as rigid as naval uniforms.

I forget whether they carried revolvers.

Nothing could exceed their quiet courage. Let me pay them that tribute.

I was laid out in my shroud in a long chair and tied down to it (I think I was tied down; perhaps I was fastened with nails). This part of it was a mere nothing. It simply felt like being tied down by three strong men armed with pinchers.

After that a gas tank and a pump were placed beside me and a set of rubber tubes fastened tight over my mouth and nose. Even those who have never taken gas can realize how ridiculously simple this is.

Then they began pumping in gas. The sensation of this part of it I cannot, unfortunately, recall. It happened that just as they began to administer the gas, I fell asleep. I don’t quite know why. Perhaps I was overtired. Perhaps it was the simple home charm of the surroundings, the soft drowsy hum of the gas pump, the twittering of the dentists in the trees – did I say the trees? No; of course they weren’t in the trees – imagine dentists in the trees – ha! ha! Here, take off this gaspipe from my face till I laugh – really I just want to laugh – only to laugh——

Well – that’s what it felt like.

Meanwhile they were operating.

Of course I didn’t feel it. All I felt was that someone dealt me a powerful blow in the face with a sledgehammer. After that somebody took a pickax and cracked in my jaw with it. That was all.

It was a mere nothing. I felt at the time that a man who objects to a few taps on the face with a pickax is overcritical.

I didn’t happen to wake up till they had practically finished. So I really missed the whole thing.

The assistants had gone, and the dentist was mixing up cement and humming airs from light opera just like old times. It made the world seem a bright place.

I went home with no teeth. I only meant them to remove one, but I realized that they had taken them all out. Still it didn’t matter.

Not long after I received my bill. I was astounded at the nerve of it! For administering gas, debtor, so much; for removing teeth, debtor, so much; – and so on.

In return I sent in my bill:

Dr. William Jaws
DEBTOR

To mental agony | $ 50.00

To gross lies in regard
to the nothingness of gas

100.00

To putting me under gas | 50.00
To having fun with me under gas | 100.00

To Brilliant Ideas, occurred
to me under gas and lost

100.00

Grand Total: | $400.00

My bill has been contested and is in the hands of a solicitor. The matter will prove, I understand, a test case and will go to the final courts. If the judges have toothache during the trial, I shall win.

TOC     INDEX

–3–
My Lost Opportunities

The other day I took a walk with a real estate man. Out in the suburbs he leaned over the wooden fence of an empty lot and waved his hand at it.

“There’s a lot,” he said, “that we sold last week for half a million dollars.”

“Did you really!” I exclaimed.

“Yes,” he said, “and do you know that twenty-five years ago you could have picked that up for fifty thousand!”

“What,” I said, “do you mean to say that I could have had all that beautiful grass and those mullin stalks for fifty thousand dollars?”

“I do.”

“You mean that when I was a student at college, feeding on four dollars a week, this opportunity was knocking at the door and I missed it?”

I turned my head away in bitterness as I thought of my own folly. Why had I never happened to walk out this way with fifty thousand dollars in my pocket and buy all this beautiful mud?

The real estate man smiled complacently at my grief.

“I can show you more than that,” he said. “Do you see that big stretch of empty ground out there past that last fence?”

“Yes, yes,” I said excitedly, “the land with the beautiful tar-paper shack and the withered cedar tree – the one withered cedar tree – standing in its lonely isolation and seeming to beckon——”

“Say,” he said, “was you ever in the real estate business yourself?”

“No,” I answered, “but I have a poetic mind, and I begin to see the poetry, the majesty, of real estate.”

“Oh, is that it,” he answered. “Well, that land out there – it’s an acre and a half – was sold yesterday for three million dollars!!”

“For what!”

“For three million dollars, cold.”

“Not COLD!” I said, “don’t tell me it was cold.”

“Yes,” went on the real estate man, “and only three years ago you could have come out here and had it for a song!”

“For a song!” I repeated.

Just think of it! And I had missed it! With a voice like mine. If I had known what I know now, I would have come out to that land and sung to it all night. I never knew in the days when I was content with fifteen dollars a week what a hidden gift my voice was. I should have taken up land-singing and made a fortune out of it.

The thought of it saddened me all the way home: and the talk of the real estate man as he went made me feel still worse.

He showed me a church that I could have bought for a hundred thousand and sold now at half a million for a motor garage. If I had started buying churches instead of working on a newspaper, I’d have been rich today.

There was a skating rink I could have bought, and a theatre and a fruit store, a beautiful little one-story wooden fruit store, right on a corner, with the darlingest Italian in it that you ever saw. There was the cutest little pet of a cow-stable that I could have turned into an apartment store at a profit of a million – at the time when I was studying Greek and forgetting it. Oh! the wasted opportunities of life!

And that evening when I got back to the club and talked about it at dinner to my business friends, I found that I had only heard a small part of it.

Real estate! That’s nothing! Why they told me that fifteen years ago I could have had all sorts of things – trunk line railways, sugar refineries, silver mines – any of them for a song. When I heard it I was half glad I hadn’t sung for the land. They told me that there was a time when I could have bought out the Federal Steel Co. for twenty million dollars! And I let it go.

The whole Canadian Pacific Railway, they said, was thrown on the market for fifty millions. I left it there writhing, and didn’t pick it up. Sheer lack of confidence! I see now why these men get rich. It’s their fine, glorious confidence, that enables them to write out a cheque for fifty million dollars and think nothing of it.

If I wrote a cheque like that, I’d be afraid of going to Sing Sing. But they aren’t, and so they get what they deserve.

Forty-five years ago – a man at the club told me this with almost a sob in his voice – either Rockefeller or Carnegie could have been bought clean up for a thousand dollars!

Think of it!

Why didn’t my father buy them for me, as pets, for my birthday and let me keep them till I grew up?

If I had my life over again, no school or education for me! Not with all this beautiful mud and these tar-paper shacks and corner lot fruit stores lying round! I’d buy out the whole United States and take a chance, a sporting chance, on the rise in values.

TOC     INDEX

–4–
My Unknown Friend

He stepped into the smoking compartment of the Pullman, where I was sitting alone.

He had on a long fur-lined coat, and he carried a fifty-dollar suit case that he put down on the seat.

Then he saw me.

“Well! well!” he said, and recognition broke out all over his face like morning sunlight.

“Well! well!” I repeated.

“By Jove!” he said, shaking hands vigorously, “who would have thought of seeing you?”

“Who, indeed,” I thought to myself.

He looked at me more closely.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” he said.

“Neither have you,” said I heartily.

“You may be a little stouter,” he went on critically.

“Yes,” I said, “a little; but you’re stouter yourself.”

This of course would help to explain away any undue stoutness on my part.

“No,” I continued boldly and firmly, “you look just about the same as ever.”

And all the time I was wondering who he was. I didn’t know him from Adam; I couldn’t recall him a bit. I don’t mean that my memory is weak. On the contrary, it is singularly tenacious. True, I find it very hard to remember people’s names; very often, too, it is hard for me to recall a face, and frequently I fail to recall a person’s appearance, and of course clothes are a thing one doesn’t notice. But apart from these details I never forget anybody, and I am proud of it. But when it does happen that a name or face escapes me I never lose my presence of mind. I know just how to deal with the situation. It only needs coolness and intellect, and it all comes right.

My friend sat down.

“It’s a long time since we met,” he said.

“A long time,” I repeated with something of a note of sadness. I wanted him to feel that I, too, had suffered from it.

“But it has gone very quickly.”

“Like a flash,” I assented cheerfully.

“Strange,” he said, “how life goes on and we lose track of people, and things alter. I often think about it. I sometimes wonder,” he continued, “where all the old gang are gone to.”

“So do I,” I said. In fact I was wondering about it at the very moment. I always find in circumstances like these that a man begins sooner or later to talk of the “old gang” or “the boys” or “the crowd.” That’s where the opportunity comes in to gather who he is.

“Do you ever go back to the old place?” he asked.

“Never,” I said, firmly and flatly. This had to be absolute. I felt that once and for all the “old place” must be ruled out of the discussion till I could discover where it was.

“No,” he went on, “I suppose you’d hardly care to.”

“Not now,” I said very gently.

“I understand. I beg your pardon,” he said, and there was silence for a few moments.

So far I had scored the first point. There was evidently an old place somewhere to which I would hardly care to go. That was something to build on.

Presently he began again.

“Yes,” he said, “I sometimes meet some of the old boys and they begin to talk of you and wonder what you’re doing.”

“Poor things,” I thought, but I didn’t say it.

I knew it was time now to make a bold stroke; so I used the method that I always employ. I struck in with great animation.

“Say!” I said, “where’s Billy? Do you ever hear anything of Billy now?”

This is really a very safe line. Every old gang has a Billy in it.

“Yes,” said my friend, “sure – Billy is ranching out in Montana. I saw him in Chicago last spring – weighed about two hundred pounds – you wouldn’t know him.”

“No, I certainly wouldn’t,” I murmured to myself.

“And where’s Pete?” I said. This was safe ground. There is always a Pete.

“You mean Billy’s brother,” he said.

“Yes, yes, Billy’s brother Pete. I often think of him.”

“Oh,” answered the unknown man, “old Pete’s quite changed – settled down altogether.” Here he began to chuckle, “Why, Pete’s married!”

I started to laugh, too. Under these circumstances it is always supposed to be very funny if a man has got married. The notion of old Peter (whoever he is) being married is presumed to be simply killing. I kept on chuckling away quietly at the mere idea of it. I was hoping that I might manage to keep on laughing till the train stopped. I had only fifty miles more to go. It’s not hard to laugh for fifty miles if you know how.

But my friend wouldn’t be content with it.

“I often meant to write to you,” he said, his voice falling to a confidential tone, “especially when I heard of your loss.”

I remained quiet. What had I lost? Was it money? And if so, how much? And why had I lost it? I wondered if it had ruined me or only partly ruined me.

“One can never get over a loss like that,” he continued solemnly.

Evidently I was plumb ruined. But I said nothing and remained under cover, waiting to draw his fire.

“Yes,” the man went on, “death is always sad.”

Death! Oh, that was it, was it? I almost hiccoughed with joy. That was easy. Handling a case of death in these conversations is simplicity itself. One has only to sit quiet and wait to find out who is dead.

“Yes,” I murmured, “very sad. But it has its other side, too.”

“Very true, especially, of course, at that age.”

“As you say at that age, and after such a life.”

“Strong and bright to the last I suppose,” he continued, very sympathetically.

“Yes,” I said, falling on sure ground, “able to sit up in bed and smoke within a few days of the end.”

“What,” he said, perplexed, “did your grandmother——”

My grandmother! That was it, was it?

“Pardon me,” I said provoked at my own stupidity; “when I say smoked, I mean able to sit up and be smoked to, a habit she had – being read to, and being smoked to – only thing that seemed to compose her——”

As I said this I could hear the rattle and clatter of the train running past the semaphores and switch points and slacking to a stop.

My friend looked quickly out of the window.

His face was agitated.

“Great heavens!” he said, “that’s the junction. I’ve missed my stop. I should have got out at the last station. Say, porter,” he called out into the alleyway, “how long do we stop here?”

“Just two minutes, sah,” called a voice back. “She’s late now, she’s makin’ up tahm!”

My friend had hopped up now and had pulled out a bunch of keys and was fumbling at the lock of the suit case.

“I’ll have to wire back or something,” he gasped. “Confound this lock – my money’s in the suit case.”

My one fear now was that he would fail to get off.

“Here,” I said, pulling some money out of my pocket, “don’t bother with the lock. Here’s money.”

“Thanks,” he said grabbing the roll of money out of my hand – in his excitement he took all that I had. – “I’ll just have time.”

He sprang from the train. I saw him through the window, moving toward the waiting-room. He didn’t seem going very fast.

I waited.

The porters were calling, “All abawd! All abawd.” There was the clang of a bell, a hiss of steam, and in a second the train was off.

“Idiot,” I thought, “he’s missed it;” and there was his fifty-dollar suit case lying on the seat.

I waited, looking out of the window and wondering who the man was, anyway.

Then presently I heard the porter’s voice again. He evidently was guiding someone through the car.

“Ah looked all through the kyar for it, sah,” he was saying.

“I left it in the seat in the car there behind my wife,” said the angry voice of a stranger, a well-dressed man who put his head into the door of the compartment.

Then his face, too, beamed all at once with recognition. But it was not for me. It was for the fifty-dollar valise.

“Ah, there it is,” he cried, seizing it and carrying it off.

I sank back in dismay. The “old gang!” Pete’s marriage! My grandmother’s death! Great heavens! And my money! I saw it all; the other man was “making talk,” too, and making it with a purpose.

Stung!

And next time that I fall into talk with a casual stranger in a car, I shall not try to be quite so extraordinarily clever.

TOC     INDEX

–5–
Under the Barber’s Knife

“Was you to the Arena the other night?” said the barber, leaning over me and speaking in his confidential whisper.

“Yes,” I said, “I was there.”

He saw from this that I could still speak. So he laid another thick wet towel over my face before he spoke again.

“What did you think of the game,” he asked.

But he had miscalculated. I could still make a faint sound through the wet towels. He laid three or four more very thick ones over my face and stood with his five finger tips pressed against my face for support. A thick steam rose about me. Through it I could hear the barber’s voice and the flick-flack of the razor as he stropped it.

“Yes, sir,” he went on in his quiet professional tone, punctuated with the noise of the razor, “I knowed from the start them boys was sure to win,” – flick-flack-flick-flack – “as soon as I seen the ice that night and seen the get-away them boys made I knowed it,” – flick-flack – “and just as soon as Jimmy got aholt of the puck——”

This was more than the barber at the next chair could stand.

“Him get de puck,” he cried, giving an angry dash with a full brush of soap into the face of the man under him – “him get ut-dat stiff – why, boys,” he said, and he turned appealingly to the eight barbers, who all rested their elbows on the customers’ faces while they listened to the rising altercation; even the manicure girl, thrilled to attention, clasped tight the lumpy hand of her client in her white digits and remained motionless – “why boys, dat feller can’t no more play hockey than——”

“See here,” said the barber, suddenly and angrily, striking his fist emphatically on the towels that covered my face. “I’ll bet you five dollars to one Jimmy can skate rings round any two men in the league.”

“Him skate,” sneered the other squirting a jet of blinding steam in the face of the client he was treating, “he ain’t got no more go in him than dat rag,” – and he slapped a wet towel across his client’s face.

All the barbers were excited now. There was a babel of talk from behind each of the eight chairs. “He can’t skate;” “He can skate;” “I’ll bet you ten.”

Already they were losing their tempers, slapping their customers with wet towels and jabbing great brushfuls of soap into their mouths. My barber was leaning over my face with his whole body. In another minute one or the other of them would have been sufficiently provoked to have dealt his customer a blow behind the ear.

Then suddenly there was a hush.

“The boss,” said one.

In another minute I could realize, though I couldn’t see it, that a majestic figure in a white coat was moving down the line. All was still again except the quiet hum of the mechanical shampoo brush and the soft burble of running water.

The barber began removing the wet towels from my face one by one. He peeled them off with the professional neatness of an Egyptologist unwrapping a mummy. When he reached my face he looked searchingly at it. There was suspicion in his eye.

“Been out of town?” he questioned.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Who’s been doing your work?” he asked. This question, from a barber, has no reference to one’s daily occupation. It means “who has been shaving you.”

I knew it was best to own up. I’d been in the wrong, and I meant to acknowledge it with perfect frankness.

“I’ve been shaving myself,” I said.

My barber stood back from me in contempt. There was a distinct sensation all down the line of barbers. One of them threw a wet rag in a corner with a thud, and another sent a sudden squirt from an atomizer into his customer’s eyes as a mark of disgust.

My barber continued to look at me narrowly.

“What razor do you use?” he said.

“A safety razor,” I answered.

The barber had begun to dash soap over my face; but he stopped – aghast at what I had said.

A safety razor to a barber is like a red rag to a bull.

“If it was me,” he went on, beating lather into me as he spoke, “I wouldn’t let one of them things near my face: No, sir: There ain’t no safety in them. They tear the hide clean off you – just rake the hair right out by the follicles,” as he said this he was illustrating his meaning with jabs of his razor – “them things just cut a man’s face all to pieces,” he jabbed a stick of alum against an open cut that he had made – “And as for cleanliness, for sanitation, for this here hygiene and for germs, I wouldn’t have them round me for a fortune.”

I said nothing. I knew I had deserved it, and I kept quiet.

The barber gradually subsided. Under other circumstances he would have told me something of the spring training of the baseball clubs, or the last items from the Jacksonville track, or any of those things which a cultivated man loves to hear discussed between breakfast and business. But I was not worth it. As he neared the end of the shaving he spoke again, this time in a confidential, almost yearning, tone.

“Massage?” he said.

“No thank you.”

“Shampoo the scalp?” he whispered.

“No thanks.”

“Singe the hair?” he coaxed.

“No thanks.”

The barber made one more effort.

“Say,” he said in my ear, as a thing concerning himself and me alone, “your hair’s pretty well all falling out. You’d better let me just shampoo up the scalp a bit and stop up them follicles or pretty soon you won’t—”

“No, thank you,” I said, “not today.”

This was all the barber could stand. He saw that I was just one of those miserable dead-beats who come to a barber shop merely for a shave, and who carry away the scalp and the follicles and all the barber’s perquisites as if they belonged to them.

In a second he had me thrown out of the chair.

“Next,” he shouted.

As I passed down the line of the barbers, I could see contempt in every eye while they turned on the full clatter of their revolving shampoo brushes and drowned the noise of my miserable exit in the roar of machinery.

TOC     INDEX

Parisian Pastimes

–1–
The Advantages
of a Polite Education

“Take it from me,” said my friend from Kansas, leaning back in his seat at the Taverne Royale and holding his cigar in his two fingers – “don’t talk no French here in Paris. They don’t expect it, and they don’t seem to understand it.”

This man from Kansas, mind you, had a right to speak. He knew French. He had learned French – he told me so himself – good French, at the Fayetteville Classical Academy. Later on he had had the natural method “off” a man from New Orleans. It had cost him “fifty cents a throw.” All this I have on his own word. But in France something seemed to go wrong with his French.

“No,” he said reflectively, “I guess what most of them speak here is a sort of patois.”

When he said it was a patois, I knew just what he meant. It was equivalent to saying that he couldn’t understand it.

I had seen him strike patois before. There had been a French steward on the steamer coming over, and the man from Kansas, after a couple of attempts, had said it was no use talking French to that man. He spoke a hopeless patois. There were half a dozen cabin passengers, too, returning to their homes in France. But we soon found from listening to their conversation on deck that what they were speaking was not French but some sort of patois.

It was the same thing coming through Normandy. Patois, everywhere, not a word of French – not a single sentence of the real language, in the way they had it at Fayetteville. We stopped off a day at Rouen to look at the cathedral. A sort of abbot showed us round. Would you believe it, that man spoke patois, straight patois – the very worst kind, and fast. The man from Kansas had spotted it at once. He hadn’t listened to more than ten sentences before he recognized it. “Patois,” he said.

Of course, it’s fine to be able to detect patois like this. It’s impressive. The mere fact that you know the word patois shows that you must be mighty well educated.

Here in Paris it was the same way. Everybody that the man from Kansas tried – waiters, hotel clerks, shop people – all spoke patois. An educated person couldn’t follow it.

On the whole, I think the advice of the man from Kansas is good. When you come to Paris, leave French behind. You don’t need it, and they don’t expect it of you.

In any case, you soon learn from experience not to use it.

If you try to, this is what happens. You summon a waiter to you and you say to him very slowly, syllable by syllable, so as to give him every chance in case he’s not an educated man:

“Bringez moi de la soupe, de la fish, de la roast pork et de la fromage.”

And he answers:

“Yes, sir, roast pork, sir, and a little bacon on the side?”

That waiter was raised in Illinois.

Or suppose you stop a man on the street and you say to him:

“Musshoo, s’il vous plait, which is la direction pour aller à le Palais Royal?”

And he answers:

“Well, I tell you, I’m something of a stranger here myself, but I guess it’s straight down there a piece.”

Now it’s no use speculating whether that man comes from Dordogne Inférieure or from Auvergne-sur-les-Puits because he doesn’t.

On the other hand, you may strike a real Frenchman – there are some even in Paris. I met one the other day in trying to find my way about, and I asked him:

“Musshoo, s’il vous plait, which is la direction pour aller à Thomas Cook & Son?”

“B’n’m’ss’ulvla’n’fsse’n’sse’pas!”

I said: “Thank you so much! I had half suspected it myself.” But I didn’t really know what he meant.

So I have come to make it a rule never to use French unless driven to it. Thus, for example, I had a tremendous linguistic struggle in a French tailors shop.

There was a sign in the window to the effect that “completes” might be had “for a hundred.” It seemed a chance not to be missed. Moreover, the same sign said that English and German were spoken.

So I went in. True to my usual principle of ignoring the French language, I said to the head man:

“You speak English?”

He shrugged his shoulders, spread out his hands and looked at the clock on the wall.

“Presently,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, “you’ll speak it presently. That’s splendid. But why not speak it right away?”

The tailor again looked at the clock with a despairing shrug.

“At twelve o’clock,” he said.

“Come now,” I said, “be fair about this. I don’t want to wait an hour and a half for you to begin to talk. Let’s get at it right now.”

But he was obdurate. He merely shook his head and repeated:

“Speak English at twelve o’clock.”

Judging that he must be under a vow of abstinence during the morning, I tried another idea.

“Allemand?” I asked, “German, Deutsch, eh! speak that?”

Again the French tailor shook his head, this time with great decision.

“Not till four o’clock,” he said.

This was evidently final. He might be lax enough to talk English at noon, but he refused point-blank to talk German till he had his full strength.

I was just wondering whether there wasn’t some common sense in this after all, when the solution of it struck me.

“Ah!” I said, speaking in French, “très bong! there is somebody who comes at twelve, quelqu’un qui vient à midi, who can talk English.”

“Precisément,” said the tailor, wreathed in smiles and waving his tape coquettishly about his neck.

“You flirt!” I said, “but let’s get to business. I want a suit, un soot, un complete, complet, comprenez-vous, veston, gilet, une pair de panteloon – everything – do you get it?”

The tailor was now all animation.

“Ah, certainement,” he said, “monsieur desires a fantasy, une fantaisie, is it not?”

A fantasy! Good heavens!

The man had evidently got the idea from my naming so many things that I wanted a suit for a fancy dress carnival.

“Fantasy nothing!” I said – “pas de fantaisie! un soot anglais” – here an idea struck me and I tapped myself on the chest – “like this,” I said, “comme ceci.”

“Bon,” said the tailor, now perfectly satisfied, “une fantaisie comme porte monsieur.”

Here I got mad.

“Blast you,” I said, “this is not a fantaisie. Do you take me for a dragon-fly, or what? Now come, let’s get this fantaisie business cleared up. This is what I want” – and here I put my hand on a roll of very quiet grey cloth on the counter.

“Très bien,” said the tailor, “une fantaisie.”

I stared at him.

“Is that a fantaisie?”

“Certainement, monsieur.”

“Now,” I said, “let’s go into it further,” and I touched another piece of plain pepper and salt stuff of the kind that is called in the simple and refined language of my own country, gents’ panting.

“This?”

“Une fantaisie,” said the French tailor.

“Well,” I said, “you’ve got more imagination than I have.”

Then I touched a piece of purple blue that would have been almost too loud for a Carolina nigger.

“Is this a fantaisie?”

The tailor shrugged his shoulders.

“Ah, non,” he said in deprecating tones.

“Tell me,” I said, speaking in French, “just exactly what it is you call a fantasy.”

The tailor burst into a perfect paroxysm of French, gesticulating and waving his tape as he put the sentences over the plate one after another. It was fast pitching, but I took them every one, and I got him.

What he meant was that any single colour or combination of single colours – for instance, a pair of sky blue breeches with pink insertion behind – is not regarded by a French tailor as a fantaisie or fancy. But any mingled colour, such as the ordinary drab grey of the business man is a fantaisie of the daintiest kind. To the eye of a Parisian tailor, a Quakers’ meeting is a glittering panorama of fantaisies, whereas a negro ball at midnight in a yellow room with a band in scarlet, is a plain, simple scene.

I thanked him. Then I said:

“Measure me, mesurez-moi, passez le tape line autour de moi.”

He did it.

I don’t know what it is they measure you in, whether in centimètres or cubic feet or what it is. But the effect is appalling.

The tailor runs his tape round your neck and calls “sixty!” Then he puts it round the lower part of the back – at the major circumference, you understand – and shouts, “a hundred and fifty!”

It sounded a record breaker. I felt that there should have been a burst of applause. But, to tell the truth, I have friends – quiet sedentary men in the professoriate – who would easily hit up four or five hundred on the same scale.

Then came the last item.

“Now,” I said, “when will this ‘complete’ be ready?”

“Ah, monsieur,” said the tailor, with winsome softness, “we are very busy, crushed, écrasés with commands! Give us time, don’t hurry us!”

“Well,” I said, “how long do you want?”

“Ah, monsieur,” he pleaded, “give us four days!”

I never moved an eyelash.

“What!” I said indignantly, “four days! Monstrous! Let me have this whole complete fantasy in one day or I won’t buy it.”

“Ah, monsieur, three days?”

“No,” I said, “make it two days.”

“Two days and a half, monsieur.”

“Two days and a quarter,” I said; “give it me the day after tomorrow at three o’clock in the morning.”

“Ah, monsieur, ten o’clock.”

“Make it ten minutes to ten and it’s a go,” I said.

“Bon,” said the tailor.

He kept his word. I am wearing the fantaisie as I write. For a fantaisie, it is fairly quiet, except that it has three pockets on each side outside, and a rolled back collar suitable for the throat of an opera singer, and as many buttons as a harem skirt. Beyond that, it’s a first-class, steady, reliable, quiet, religious fantaisie, such as any retired French ballet master might be proud to wear.

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–2–
The Joys of Philanthropy

“Good-morning,” said the valet de chambre, as I stepped from my room.

“Good-morning,” I answered. “Pray accept twenty-five centimes.”

“Good-morning, sir,” said the maître d’hôtel, as I passed down the corridor, “a lovely morning, sir.”

“So lovely,” I replied, “that I must at once ask you to accept forty-five centimes on the strength of it.”

“A beautiful day, monsieur,” said the head waiter, rubbing his hands, “I trust that monsieur has slept well.”

“So well,” I answered, “that monsieur must absolutely insist on your accepting seventy-five centimes on the spot. Come, don’t deny me. This is personal matter. Every time I sleep I simply have to give money away.”

“Monsieur is most kind.”

Kind? I should think not. If the valet de chambre and the maître d’hôtel and the chef de service and the others of the ten men needed to supply me with fifteen cents worth of coffee, could read my heart, they would find it an abyss of the blackest hatred.

Yet they take their handful of coppers – great grown men dressed up in monkey suits of black at eight in the morning – and bow double for it.

If they tell you it is a warm morning, you must give them two cents. If you ask the time, it costs you two cents. If you want a real genuine burst of conversation, it costs anywhere from a cent to a cent and a half a word.

Such is Paris all day long. Tip, tip, tip, till the brain is weary, not with the cost of it, but with the arithmetical strain.

No pleasure is perfect. Every rose has its thorn. The thorn of the Parisian holiday-maker is the perpetual necessity of handing out small gratuities to a set of overgrown flunkies too lazy to split wood.

Not that the amount of the tips, all added together, is anything serious. No rational man would grudge it if it could be presented in a bill as a lump sum at breakfast time every morning and done with for the day.

But the incessant necessity of handing out small tips of graded amounts gets on one’s nerves. It is necessary in Paris to go round with enough money of different denominations in one’s pocket to start a bank – gold and paper notes for serious purchases, and with them a huge dead weight of great silver pieces, five franc bits as large as a Quaker’s shoebuckle, and a jingling mass of coppers in a side pocket. These one must distribute as extras to cabmen, waiters, news-vendors, beggars, anybody and everybody in fact that one has anything to do with.

The whole mass of the coppers carried only amounts perhaps to twenty-five cents in honest Canadian money. But the silly system of the French currency makes the case appear worse than it is, and gives one the impression of being a walking treasury.

Morning, noon, and night the visitor is perpetually putting his hand into his side pocket and pulling out coppers. He drips coppers all day in an unending stream. You enter a French theatre. You buy a programme, fifty centimes, and ten more to the man who sells it. You hand your coat and cane to an aged harpy, who presides over what is called the vestiaire, pay her twenty-five centimes and give her ten. You are shown to your seat by another old fairy in dingy black (she has a French name, but I forget it) and give her twenty centimes. Just think of the silly business of it. Your ticket, if it is a good seat in a good theatre, has cost you about three dollars and a half. One would almost think the theatre could afford to throw in eight cents worth of harpies for the sake of international good will.

Similarly, in your hotel, you ring the bell and there appears the valet de chambre, dressed in a red waistcoat and a coat effect of black taffeta. You tell him that you want a bath. “Bien, monsieur!” He will fetch the maître d’hôtel. Oh, he will, will he, how good of him, but really one can’t witness such kindness on his part without begging him to accept a twenty-five centime remembrance. “Merci bien, monsieur.” The maître d’hôtel comes. He is a noble looking person who wears a dress suit at eight o’clock in the morning with patent leather shoes of the kind that I have always wanted but am still unable to afford. Yet I know from experience that the man merely lives and breathes at fifty centimes a breath. For fifty centimes he’ll bow low enough to crack himself. If you gave him a franc, he’d lie down on the floor and lick your boots. I know he would; I’ve seen them do it.

So when the news comes that you propose to take a bath, he’s right along side of you in a minute, all civility. Mind you, in a really French hotel, one with what is called the old French atmosphere, taking a bath is quite an event, and the maître d’hôtel sees a dead sure fifty centimes in it, with perhaps an extra ten centimes if times are good. That is to say, he may clear anything from ten to twelve cents on the transaction. A bath, monsieur? Nothing more simple, this moment, tout de suite, right off, he will at once give orders for it. So you give him eleven cents and he then tells the hotel harpy, dressed in black, like the theatre harpies, to get the bath and she goes and gets it. She was there, of course, all the time, right in the corridor, and heard all that proceeded, but she doesn’t “enter into her functions” until the valet de chambre tells the maître d’hôtel and the maître d’hôtel informs her officially of the coming event.

She gets the bath. What does she do? Why, merely opens the door of the bathroom, which wasn’t locked, and turns on the water. But, of course, no man with any chivalry in him could allow a harpy to be put to all that labour without pressing her to accept three cents as a mark of personal appreciation.

Thus the maître d’hôtel and the valet de chambre and the harpy go on all day, from six in the morning when they first “enter into functions” until heaven knows when at night when they leave off, and they keep gathering in two cents and three cents and even five cents at a time. Then presently, I suppose, they go off and spend it in their own way. The maître d’hôtel transformed into a cheap Parisian with a dragon-fly coat and a sixty cent panama, dances gaily at the Bal Wagram, and himself hands out coppers to the musicians, and gives a one cent tip to a lower order of maître d’hôtel. The harpy goes forth, and with other harpies absorbs red wine and indescribable cheese at eleven at night in a crowded little café on the crowded sidewalk of a street about as wide as a wagon. She tips the waiter who serves her at the rate of one cent per half hour of attendance, and he, I suppose, later on tips someone else, and so on endlessly.

In this way about fifty thousand people in Paris eke out a livelihood by tipping one another.

The worst part of the tipping system is that very often the knowledge that tips are expected and the uncertainty of their amount, causes one to forego a great number of things that might otherwise be enjoyable.

I brought with me to Paris, for example, a letter of introduction to the President of the Republic. I don’t say this in any boasting spirit. A university professor can always get all the letters of introduction that he wants. Everyone knows that he is too simple to make any commercial use of them. But I never presented this letter to the President. What was the use? It wouldn’t have been worth it. He would have expected a tip, and of course in his case it would have had to be a liberal one, twenty-five cents straight out. Perhaps, too, some of his ministers would have strolled in, as soon as they saw a stranger, on the chance of picking up something. Put it as three ministers at fifteen cents each, that’s forty-five cents or a total of seventy cents for ten minutes’ talk with the French Government. It’s not worth it.

In all Paris, I only found one place where tipping is absolutely out of the question. That was at the British Embassy. There they don’t allow it. Not only the clerks and the secretaries, but even the Ambassador himself is forbidden to take so much as the smallest gratuity.

And they live up to it.

That is why I still feel proud of having made an exception to the rule.

I went there because the present ambassador is a personal friend of mine. I hadn’t known this till I went to Paris, and I may say in fairness that we are friends no longer: as soon as I came away, our friendship seemed to have ceased.

I will make no secret of the matter. I wanted permission to read in the National Library in Paris. All Frenchmen are allowed to read there and, in addition, all the personal friends of the foreign ambassadors. By a convenient fiction, everybody is the friend of this ambassador, and is given a letter to prove it, provided he will call at the Embassy and get it. That is how I came to be a friend of the British Ambassador. Whether our friendship will ripen into anything warmer and closer, it is not for me to say.

But I went to the Embassy.

The young man that I dealt with was, I think, a secretary. He was – I could see it at once – that perfect thing called an English gentleman. I have seldom seen, outside of baseball circles, so considerate a manner. He took my card, and from sheer considerateness left me alone for half an hour. Then he came back for a moment and said it was a glorious day. I had heard this phrase so often in Paris that I reached into my pocket for ten cents. But something in the quiet dignity of the young man held me back. So I merely answered that it was indeed a glorious day, and that the crops would soon head out nicely if we got this sunshine, provided there wasn’t dew enough to start the rust, in which case I was afraid that if an early frost set in we might be badly fooled. He said “indeed,” and asked me if I had read the last London Weekly Times. I said that I had not seen the last one; but that I had read one about a year ago and that it seemed one of the most sparkling things I had ever read; I had simply roared over it from cover to cover.

He looked pleased and went away.

When he came back, he had the letter of commendation in his hand.

Would you believe it? The civility of it! They had printed the letter, every word of it – except my own name – and it explained all about the ambassador and me being close friends, and told of his desire to have me read in the National Library.

I took the letter, and I knew of course that the moment had come to do something handsome for the young man. But he looked so calm that I still hesitated.

I took ten cents out of my pocket and held it where the light could glitter from every point of its surface full in his face.

And I said——

“My dear young friend, I hope I don’t insult you. You are, I can see it, an English gentleman. Your manner betrays it. I, too, though I may seem only what I am, had I not been brought up in Toronto, might have been like you. But enough of this weakness – will you take ten cents?”

He hesitated. He looked all round. I could see that he was making a great effort. The spirit of Paris battled against his better nature. He was tempted, but he didn’t fall.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I’d like to take it, but I’m afraid I mustn’t.”

“Young man,” I said, “I respect your feelings. You have done me a service. If you ever fall into want and need a position in the Canadian Cabinet, or a seat in our Senate, let me know at once.”

I left him.

Then by an odd chance, as I passed to the outer door, there was the British Ambassador himself. He was standing beside the door waiting to open it. There was no mistaking him. I could tell by his cocked hat and brass buttons and the brass chain across his chest that it was the Ambassador. The way in which he swung the door back and removed his hat showed him a trained diplomat.

The moment had come. I still held my ten cents.

“My lord,” I said, “I understand your position as the only man in Paris who must not accept a tip, but I insist.”

I slipped the money into his hand.

“Thank’ee kindly, sir,” said the Ambassador.

Diplomatically speaking, the incident was closed.

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–3–
The Simple Life in Paris

Paris – at least the Paris of luxury and fashion – is a childless city. Its streets are thronged all day with a crowd that passes in endless succession but with never a child among them. You may stand on the boulevards and count a thousand grown-up persons for one child that goes by.

The case, of course, is not so extreme in the quieter parts of the city. I have seen children, sometimes two or three together, in the Champs Elysées. In the garden of the Tuileries I once saw six all in a group. They seemed to be playing. A passer-by succeeded in getting a snapshot of them without driving them away. In the poorer districts, there are any quantity of children, even enough to sell, but in the Paris of the rich, the child is conspicuous by its absence. The foreign visitors come without their children. The true Parisian lady has pretty well gone out of the business.

Here and there you may see driving past with its mother in an open barouche, or parading the Rue de la Paix on the hand of its nurse, the doll-like substitute for old-time infancy, the fashionable Parisian child. As far as the sex can be determined by looking at it, it is generally a girl. It is dressed in the height of fashion. A huge picture hat reaches out in all directions from its head. Long gloves encase its little arms to prevent it from making a free use of them. A dainty coat of powder on its face preserves it from the distorting effect of a smile. Its little hundred dollar frock reaches down in a sweet simplicity of outline. It has a belt that runs round its thighs to divide it into two harmonious parts. Below that are bare pink legs ending in little silk socks at a dollar an inch and wee slippers clasped with a simple emerald buckle. Therein, of course, the child only obeys the reigning fashion. Simplicity – so I am informed by the last number of La Mode Parisienne – is the dominant note of Parisian dress today – simplicity, plainness, freedom from all display. A French lady wears in her hair at the Opera a single, simple tiara bound with a plain row of solitaire diamonds. It is so exquisitely simple in its outline that you can see the single diamonds sticking out from it and can count up the price of each. The Parisian gentleman wears in his button-hole merely a single orchid – not half a dozen – and pins his necktie with one plain, ordinary ruby, set in a perfectly unostentatious sunburst of sapphires. There is no doubt of the superiority of this Parisian simplicity. To me, when it broke upon me in reading La Mode Parisienne, it came as a kind of inspiration. I took away the stuffy black ribbon with its stupidly elaborate knot from my Canadian Christie hat and wound a single black ostrich feather about it fastened with just the plainest silver aigrette. When I had put that on and pinned a piece of old lace to the tail of my coat with just one safety pin, I walked the street with the quiet dignity of a person whose one idea is not to be conspicuous.

But this is a digression. The child, I was saying, wears about two hundred worth of visible clothing upon it; and I believe that if you were to take it up by its ten-dollar slipper and hold it upside down, you would see about fifty dollars more. The French child has been converted into an elaborately dressed doll. It is altogether a thing of show, an appendage of its fashionably dressed mother, with frock and parasol to match. It is no longer a child, but a living toy or plaything.

Even on these terms the child is not a success. It has a rival who is rapidly beating it off the ground. This is the Parisian dog. As an implement of fashion, as a set-off to the fair sex, as the recipient of ecstatic kisses and ravishing hugs, the Parisian dog can give the child forty points in a hundred and win out. It can dress better, look more intelligent, behave better, bark better – in fact, the child is simply not in it.

This is why, I suppose, in the world of Parisian luxury, the dog is ousting the infant altogether. You will see, as I said, no children on the boulevards and avenues. You will see dogs by the hundred. Every motor or open barouche that passes up the Champs Elysées, with its little white cloud of fluffy parasols and garden-hats, has a dainty, beribboned dog sitting among its occupants: in every avenue and promenade you will see hundreds of clipped poodles and toy spaniels; in all the fashionable churches you will see dogs bowed at their devotions.

It was a fair struggle. The child had its chance and was beaten. The child couldn’t dress: the dog could. The child couldn’t or wouldn’t pray: the dog could – or at least he learnt how. No doubt it came awkwardly at first, but he set himself to it till nowadays a French dog can enter a cathedral with just as much reverence as his mistress, and can pray in the corner of the pew with the same humility as hers. When you get to know the Parisian dogs, you can easily tell a Roman Catholic dog from a Low Church Anglican. I knew a dog once that was converted – everybody said from motives of policy – from a Presbyterian – but, stop, it’s not fair to talk about it – the dog is dead now, and it’s not right to speak ill of its belief, no matter how mistaken it may have been.

However, let that pass, what I was saying was that between the child and the dog, each had its chance in a fair open contest and the child is nowhere.

People, who have never seen, even from the outside, the Parisian world of fashion, have no idea to what an extent it has been invaded by the dog craze. Dogs are driven about in motors and open carriages. They are elaborately clipped and powdered and beribboned by special “coiffeurs.” They wear little buckled coats and blankets, and in motors – I don’t feel quite sure of this – they wear motor goggles. There are at least three or four – and for all I know there may be more – fashionable shops in Paris for dogs’ supplies. There is one that any curious visitor may easily find at once in the Rue des Petits Champs close to the Avenue de l’Opera. There is another one midway in the galleries of the Palais Royal. In these shops you will see, in the first place, the chains, collars, and whips that are marks of the servitude in which dogs still live (though, by the way, there are already, I think, dog suffragettes heading a very strong movement). You will see also the most delicious, fashionable dog coats, very, very simple, fastened in front with one silver clasp, only one. In the Palais Royal shop they advertise, “Newest summer models for 1913 in dogs’ tailoring.” There are also dogs’ beds made in wickerwork in cradle shape with eider-down coverlets worked over with silk.

A little while ago, the New York papers were filled with an account of a dog’s lunch given at the Vanderbilt Hotel by an ultra-fashionable American lady. It was recorded that Vi Sin, the Pekin Spaniel of Mrs. H. of New York, was host to about ten thousand dollars worth of “smart” dogs. I do not know whether or not this story is true, for I only read it in the Parisian papers. But certain it is that the episode would have made no sensation in Paris. A dog eating in a restaurant is a most ordinary spectacle. Only a few days ago I had lunch with a dog – a very quiet, sensible Belgian poodle, very simply dressed in a plain morning stomach coat of ultramarine with leather insertions. I took quite a fancy to him. When I say that I had lunch with him, I ought to explain that he had a lady, his mistress, with him – that also is quite usual in Paris. But I didn’t know her, and she sat on the further side of him, so that I confined myself to ordinary table civilities with the dog. I was having merely a plain omelette, from motives of economy, and the dog had a little dish of entrecote d’agneau aux asperges maître d’hôtel. I took some of it while the lady was speaking to the waiter and found it excellent. You may believe it or not, but the entry of a dog into a French restaurant and his being seated at a table and having his food ordered creates not the slightest sensation. To bring a child into a really good restaurant would, I imagine, be looked upon as rather a serious affair.

Not only is the dog the darling of the hour during his lifetime, but even in death he is not forgotten. There is in Paris a special dog cemetery. It lies among the drooping trees of a little island in the Seine, called the Isle de la Recette, and you may find it by taking the suburban tramway for Asnières. It has little tombstones, monuments, and flowered walks. One sorrow-stricken master has inscribed over a dog’s grave—”Plus je vois les hommes, plus j’aime mon chien.” The most notable feature of the cemetery is the monument of Barry, a St. Bernard dog. The inscription states that he saved forty lives in the Alps.

But the dog craze is after all only a sign and sample of the prevailing growth and extent of fashionable luxury. Nowhere in the world, I suppose, is this more conspicuous than in Paris, the very Vanity Fair of mundane pleasure. The hostesses of dinners, dances and fêtes vie with one another in seeking bizarre and extravagant effects. Here is a good example of it taken from actual life the other day. It is an account of an “oriental fête” given at a private mansion in Paris.

It runs thus: “The sumptuous Paris mansion of the Comtesse Aynard de Chabrillan in the Rue Christophe-Colomb was converted into a veritable scene from the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ on the occasion of a Persian fête given by her to a large company of friends.

“In the courtyard an immense tent was erected, hung with superb Persian stuffs and tapestries, and here the élite of Paris assembled in gorgeous Oriental costumes.

“The countess herself presided in a magnificent Persian costume of green and gold, with an immense white aigrette in her hair.”

Notice it. The simplicity of it! Only green and gold in her costume, no silver, no tin, no galvanized iron, just gold, plain gold; and only “one immense white aigrette.” The quiet dignity of it!

The article goes on: “Each of the sensational entries was announced by M. André de Fouquières, the arbiter of Parisian elegance.

“One of the most striking spectacles of the evening was the appearance of Princesse P. d’Arenberg, mounted on an elephant, richly bedecked with Indian trappings. Then came the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre and the Comtesse Stanislas de Castellane in gold cages, followed by the Marquise de Brantes, in a flower-strewn Egyptian litter, accompanied by Pharaoh and his slaves.

“The Comtesse de Lubersac danced an Oriental measure with charming grace, and Prince Luis Fernando of Spain, in an ethereal costume, his features stained a greenish hue, executed a Hindoo dance before the assembly.”

Can you beat it? His features stained with a greenish hue! Now look at that! He might have put on high grade prepared paint or clear white lead – he’s rich enough – but, no, just a quiet shingle stain is enough for him.

I cannot resist adding from the same source the list of the chief guests. Anybody desiring a set of names for a burlesque show to run three hundred nights on the circuit may have them free of charge or without infringement of copyright.

“Nearly everyone prominent in Paris society was present, including the Maharajah of Kapurthala, Princess Prem Kaur, Prince Aga Khan, the Austrian Ambassador and Countess Szecsen, the Persian and Bulgarian Ministers, Mme. Stancioff, Duc and Duchesse de Noailles, Comtesse A. Potocka, Marquis and Marquise de Mun, Comtesse du Bourg de Bozas, Mrs. Moore, Comte and Comtesse G. de Segonzec and Prince and Princess de Croy.”

I am sorry that “Mrs. Moore” was there. She must have slipped in unnoticed.

What is not generally known is that I was there myself. I appeared – in rivalry with Prince Luis Fernando – dressed as a Bombay soda water bottle, with aerial opalescent streaks of light flashing from the costume which was bound with single wire.

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–4–
A Visit to Versailles

“What!” said the man from Kansas, looking up from his asparagus, “do you mean to say that you have never seen the Palace of Versailles?”

“No,” I said very firmly, “I have not.”

“Nor the fountains in the gardens?”

“No.”

“Nor the battle pictures?”

“No.”

“And the Hall of Mirrors,” – added the fat lady from Georgia.

“And Madame du Barry’s bed” – said her husband.

“Her which,” I asked, with some interest.

“Her bed.”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll go.”

I knew, of course, that I had to. Every tourist in Paris has got to go and see Versailles. Otherwise the superiority of the others becomes insufferable, with foreigners it is different. If they worry one about palaces and cathedrals and such – the Château at Versailles, and the Kaiserhof and the Duomo at Milan – I answer them in kind. I ask them if they have ever seen the Schlitzerhof at Milwaukee and the Anheuserbusch at St. Louis, and the Dammo at Niagara, and the Toboggo at Montreal. That quiets them wonderfully.

But, as I say, I had to go.

You get to Versailles – as the best of various ways of transport – by means of a contrivance something between a train and a street car. It has a little puffing steam-engine and two cars – double deckers – with the top deck open to the air and covered with a wooden roof on rods. The lower part inside is called the first-class and a seat in it costs ten cents extra. Otherwise nobody would care to ride in it. The engine is a quaint little thing and wears a skirt, painted green, all around it, so that you can just see the tips of its wheels peeping modestly out below. It was a great relief to me to see this engine. It showed that there is such a thing as French delicacy after all. There are so many sights along the boulevards that bring the carmine blush to the face of the tourist (from the twisting of his neck in trying to avoid seeing them), that it is well to know that the French draw the line somewhere. The sight of the bare wheels of an engine is too much for them.

The little train whirls its way out of Paris, past the great embankment and the fortifications, and goes rocking along among green trees whose branches sweep its sides, and trim villas with stone walls around quaint gardens. At every moment it passes little inns and suburban restaurants with cool arbours in front of them, and waiters in white coats pouring out glasses of red wine. It makes one thirsty just to look at them.

In due time the little train rattles and rocks itself over the dozen miles or so that separate Paris from Versailles, and sets you down right in front of the great stone court-yard of the palace. There through the long hours of a summer afternoon you may feast your eyes upon the wonderland of beauty that rose at the command of the grand monarch, Louis XIV, from the sanded plains and wooded upland that marked the spot two hundred and fifty years ago.

All that royal munificence could effect was lavished on the making of the palace. So vast is it in size that in the days of its greatest splendour it harboured ten thousand inmates. The sheer length of it from side to side is only about a hundred yards short of half a mile. To make the grounds the King’s chief landscape artist and his hundreds of workers laboured for twenty years. They took in, as it were, the whole landscape. The beauty of their work lies not only in the wonderful terraces, gardens, groves and fountains that extend from the rear of the Château, but in its blending with the scene beyond. It is so planned that no distant house or building breaks into the picture. The vista ends everywhere with the waving woods of the purple distance.

Louis XIV spent in all, they say, a hundred million dollars on the making of the palace. When made it was filled with treasures of art not to be measured in price. It was meant to be, and it remains, the last word of royal grandeur. The King’s court at Versailles became the sun round which gravitated the fate and fortune of his twenty million subjects. Admission within its gates was itself a mark of royal favour. Now, any person with fifteen cents may ride out from Paris on the double-decked street car and wander about the palace at will. For a five cent tip to a guide you may look through the private apartments of Marie Antoinette, and for two cents you may check your umbrella while you inspect the bedroom of Napoleon the First. For nothing at all you may stand on the vast terrace behind the Château and picture to yourself the throng of gay ladies in paniered skirts, and powdered gentlemen, in sea-green inexpressibles, who walked among its groves and fountains two hundred years ago. The palace of the Kings has become the playground of the democracy.

The palace – or the Château, as it is modestly named – stands crosswise upon an elevation that dominates the scene for miles around. The whole building throughout is only of three stories, for French architecture has a horror of high buildings. The two great wings of the Château reach sideways, north and south; and one, a shorter one, runs westwards towards the rear. In the front space between the wings is a vast paved court-yard – the Royal Court – shut in by a massive iron fence. Into this court penetrated, one autumn evening in 1789, the raging mob led by the women of Paris, who had come to drag the descendant of the Grand Monarch into the captivity that ended only with the guillotine. Here they lighted their bonfires and here they sang and shrieked and shivered throughout the night. That night of the fifth of October was the real end of monarchy in France.

No one, I think – not even my friend from Kansas who boasted that he had “put in” three hours at Versailles – could see all that is within the Château. But there are certain things which no tourist passes by. One of them is the suite of rooms of Louis XIV, a great series of square apartments all opening sideways into each other with gilded doors as large as those of a barn, and with about as much privacy as a railway station. One room was the King’s council chamber; next to this, a larger one, was the “wig-room,” where the royal mind selected its wig for the day and where the royal hair-dresser performed his stupendous task. Besides this again is the King’s bedroom. Preserved in it, within a little fence, still stands the bed in which Louis XIV died in 1715, after a reign of seventy-two years. The bedroom would easily hold three hundred people. Outside of it is a great antechamber, where the courtiers jealously waited their turn to be present at the King’s “lever,” or “getting up,” eager to have the supreme honour of holding the royal breeches.

But if the King’s apartments are sumptuous, they are as nothing to the Hall of Mirrors, the showroom of the whole palace, and estimated to be the most magnificent single room in the world. It extends clear across the end of the rear wing and has a length of 236 feet. It is lighted by vast windows that reach almost to the lofty arch that forms its ceiling; the floor is of polished inlaid wood, on which there stood in Louis the Great’s time, tables, chairs, and other furniture of solid silver. The whole inner side of the room is formed by seventeen enormous mirrors set in spaces to correspond in shape to the window opposite, and fitted in between with polished marble. Above them runs a cornice of glittering gilt, and over that again the ceiling curves in a great arch, each panel of it bearing some picture to recall the victories of the Grand Monarch. Ungrateful posterity has somewhat forgotten the tremendous military achievements of Louis XIV – the hardships of his campaign in the Netherlands in which the staff of the royal cuisine was cut down to one hundred cooks – the passage of the Rhine, in which the King actually crossed the river from one side to the other, and so on. But the student of history can live again the triumphs of Louis in this Hall of Mirrors. It is an irony of history that in this room, after the conquest of 1871, the King of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor by his subjects and his allies.

But if one wants to see battle pictures, one has but to turn to the north wing of the Château. There you have them, room after room – twenty, thirty, fifty roomsful – I don’t know how many – the famous gallery of battles, depicting the whole military history of France from the days of King Clovis till the French Revolution. They run in historical order. The pictures begin with battles of early barbarians – men with long hair wielding huge battle-axes with their eyes blazing, while other barbarians prod at them with pikes or take a sweep at them with a two-handed club. After that there are rooms full of crusade pictures – crusaders fighting the Arabs, crusaders investing Jerusalem, crusaders raising the siege of Malta and others raising the siege of Rhodes; all very picturesque, with the blue Mediterranean, the yellow sand of the desert, prancing steeds in nickel-plated armour and knights plumed and caparisoned, or whatever it is, and wearing as many crosses as an ambulance emergency staff. All of these battles were apparently quite harmless, that is the strange thing about these battle pictures: the whole thing, as depicted for the royal eye, is wonderfully full of colour and picturesque, but, as far as one can see, quite harmless. Nobody seems to be getting hurt, wild-looking men are swinging maces round, but you can see that they won’t hit anybody. A battle-axe is being brought down with terrific force, but somebody is thrusting up a steel shield just in time to meet it. There are no signs of blood or injury. Everybody seems to be getting along finely and to be having the most invigorating physical exercise. Here and here, perhaps, the artist depicts somebody jammed down under a beam or lying under the feet of a horse; but if you look close you see that the beam isn’t really pressing on him, and that the horse is not really stepping on his stomach. In fact the man is perfectly comfortable, and is, at the moment, taking aim at somebody else with a two-string crossbow, which would have deadly effect if he wasn’t ass enough to aim right at the middle of a cowhide shield.

You notice this quality more and more in the pictures as the history moves on. After the invention of gunpowder, when the combatants didn’t have to be locked together, but could be separated by fields, and little groves and quaint farm-houses, the battle seems to get quite lost in the scenery. It spreads out into the landscape until it becomes one of the prettiest, quietest scenes that heart could wish. I know nothing so drowsily comfortable as the pictures in this gallery that show the battles of the seventeenth century – the Grand Monarch’s own particular epoch. This is a wide, rolling landscape with here and there little clusters of soldiers to add a touch of colour to the foliage of the woods; there are woolly little puffs of smoke rising in places to show that the artillery is at its dreamy work on a hill side; near the foreground is a small group of generals standing about a tree and gazing through glasses at the dim purple of the background. There are sheep and cattle grazing in all the unused parts of the battle, the whole thing has a touch of quiet, rural feeling that goes right to the heart. I have seen people from the ranching district of the Middle West stand before these pictures in tears.

It is strange to compare this sort of thing with some of the modern French pictures. There is realism enough and to spare in them. In the Salon exhibition a year or two ago, for instance, there was one that represented lions turned loose into an arena to eat up Christians. I can imagine exactly how a Louis Quatorze artist would have dealt with the subject – an arena, prettily sanded, with here and there gooseberry bushes and wild gilly flowers (not too wild, of course), lions with flowing manes, in noble attitudes, about to roar – tigers, finely developed, about to spring – Christians just going to pray – and through it all a genial open-air feeling very soothing to the royal senses. Not so the artist of today. The picture in the Salon is of blood. There are torn limbs gnawed by crouching beasts, as a dog holds and gnaws a bone; there are faces being torn, still quivering, from the writhing body – in fact, perhaps after all there is something to be said for the way the Grand Monarch arranged his gallery.

The battle pictures and the Hall of Mirrors, and the fountains and so on, are, I say, the things best worth seeing at Versailles. Everybody says so. I really wish now that I had seen them. But I am free to confess that I am a poor sightseer at the best. As soon as I get actually in reach of a thing it somehow dwindles in importance. I had a friend once, now a distinguished judge in the United States, who suffered much in this way. He travelled a thousand miles to reach the World’s Fair, but as soon as he had arrived at a comfortable hotel in Chicago, he was unable to find the energy to go out to the Fair grounds. He went once to visit Niagara Falls, but failed to see the actual water, partly because it no longer seemed necessary, partly because his room in the hotel looked the other way.

Personally I plead guilty to something of the same spirit. Just where you alight from the steam tramway at Versailles, you will find close on your right, a little open-air café, with tables under a trellis of green vines. It is as cool a retreat of mingled sun and shadow as I know. There is red wine at two francs and long imported cigars of as soft a flavour as even Louis the Fourteenth could have desired. The idea of leaving a grotto like that to go trapesing all over a hot stuffy palace with a lot of fool tourists, seemed ridiculous. But I bought there a little illustrated book called the Château de Versailles, which interested me so extremely that I decided that, on some reasonable opportunity, I would go and visit the place.

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–5–
Paris at Night

“What Ah’d like to do,” says the Fat Lady from Georgia, settling back comfortably in her seat after her five-dollar dinner at the Café American, while her husband is figuring whether ten francs is enough to give to the waiter, “is to go and see something real wicked. Ah tell him (the word ‘him’ is used in Georgia to mean husband) that while we’re here Ah just want to see everything that’s going.”

“All right,” says the Man from Kansas who “knows” Paris, “I’ll get a guide right here, and he’ll take us round and show us the sights.”

“Can you get him heah?” asks the gentleman from Georgia, looking round at the glittering mirrors and gold cornices of the restaurant.

Can you get a guide? Well, now! Can you keep away from them? All day from the dewy hour of breakfast till late at night they meet you in the street and sidle up with the enquiry, “Guide, sir?”

Where the Parisian guide comes from and how he graduates for his job I do not know. He is not French and, as a rule, he doesn’t know Paris. He knows his way to the Louvre and to two or three American bars and to the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre. But he doesn’t need to know his way. For that he falls back on the taxi-driver. “Now, sir,” says the guide briskly to the gentleman who has engaged his services, “where would you like to go?” “I should like to see Napoleon’s tomb.” “All right,” says the guide, “get into the taxi.” Then he turns to the driver. “Drive to Napoleon’s tomb,” he says. After they have looked at it the guide says, “What would you like to see next, sir?” “I am very anxious to see Victor Hugo’s house, which I understand is now made open to the public.” The guide turns to the taxi man. “Drive to Victor Hugo’s house,” he says.

After looking through the house the visitor says in a furtive way, “I was just wondering if I could get a drink anywhere in this part of the town?” “Certainly,” says the guide. “Drive to an American bar.”

Isn’t that simple? Can you imagine any more agreeable way of earning five dollars in three hours than that? Of course, what the guide says to the taxi man is said in the French language, or in something resembling it, and the gentleman in the cab doesn’t understand it. Otherwise, after six or seven days of driving round in this way he begins to wonder what the guide is for. But of course, the guide’s life, when you come to think of it, is one full of difficulty and danger. Just suppose that, while he was away off somewhere in Victor Hugo’s house or at Napoleon’s grave, the taxi-driver were to be struck by lightning. How on earth would he get home? He might, perhaps, be up in the Eiffel Tower and the taxi man get a stroke of paralysis, and then he’d starve to death trying to find his way back. After all, the guide has to have the kind of pluck and hardihood that ought to be well rewarded. Why, in other countries, like Switzerland, they have to use dogs for it, and in France, when these plucky fellows throw themselves into it, surely one wouldn’t grudge the nominal fee of five dollars for which they risk their lives.

But I am forgetting about the Lady from Georgia and her husband. Off they go in due course from the glittering doors of the restaurant in a huge taxi with a guide in a peaked hat. The party is all animation. The lady’s face is aglow with moral enthusiasm. The gentleman and his friend have their coats buttoned tight to their chins for fear that thieves might leap over the side of the taxi and steal their neckties.

So they go buzzing along the lighted boulevard looking for “something real wicked.” What they want is to see something really and truly wicked; they don’t know just what, but “something bad.” They’ve got the idea that Paris is one of the wickedest places on earth, and they want to see it.

Strangely enough, in their own home, the Lady from Georgia is one of the leaders of the Social Purity movement, and her husband, whose skin at this moment is stretched as tight as a football with French brandy and soda, is one of the finest speakers on the Georgia temperance platform, with a reputation that reaches from Chattanooga to Chickamauga. They have a son at Yale College whom they are trying to keep from smoking cigarettes. But here in Paris, so they reckon it, everything is different. It doesn’t occur to them that perhaps it is wicked to pay out a hundred dollars in an evening hiring other people to be wicked.

So off they go and are whirled along in the brilliant glare of the boulevards and up the gloomy, narrow streets that lead to Montmartre. They visit the Moulin Rouge and the Bal Tabarin, and they see the Oriental Dances and the Café of Hell and the hundred and one other glittering fakes and false appearances that poor old meretricious Paris works overtime to prepare for such people as themselves. And the Lady from Georgia, having seen it all, thanks Heaven that she at least is pure – which is a beginning – and they go home more enthusiastic than ever in the Social Purity movement.

But the fact is that if you have about twenty-five thousand new visitors pouring into a great city every week with their pockets full of money and clamouring for “something wicked,” you’ve got to do the best you can for them.

Hence it results that Paris – in appearance, anyway – is a mighty gay place at night. The sidewalks are crowded with the little tables of the coffee and liqueur drinkers. The music of a hundred orchestras bursts forth from the lighted windows. The air is soft with the fragrance of a June evening, tempered by the curling smoke of fifty thousand cigars. Through the noise and chatter of the crowd there sounds unending the wail of the motor horn.

The hours of Parisian gaiety are late. Ordinary dinner is eaten at about seven o’clock, but fashionable dinners begin at eight or eight thirty. Theatres open at a quarter to nine and really begin at nine o’clock. Special features and acts – famous singers and vaudeville artists – are brought on at eleven o’clock so that dinner-party people may arrive in time to see them. The theatres come out at midnight. After that there are the night suppers which flourish till two or half past. But if you wish, you can go between the theatre and supper to some such side-long place as the Moulin Rouge or the Bal Tabarin, which reach the height of their supposed merriment at about one in the morning.

At about two or two thirty the motors come whirling home, squawking louder than ever, with a speed limit of fifty miles an hour. Only the best of them can run faster than that. Quiet, conservative people in Paris like to get to bed at three o’clock; after all, what is the use of keeping late hours and ruining one’s health and complexion? If you make it a strict rule to be in bed by three, you feel all the better for it in the long run – health better, nerves steadier, eyes clearer – and you’re able to get up early – at half-past eleven – and feel fine.

Those who won’t or don’t go to bed at three wander about the town, eat a second supper in an all-night restaurant, circulate round with guides, and visit the slums of the Market, where gaunt-eyed wretches sleep in crowded alleys in the mephitic air of a summer night, and where the idle rich may feed their luxurious curiosity on the sufferings of the idle poor.

The dinners, the theatres, the boulevards, and the rest of it are all fun enough, at any rate for one visit in a lifetime. The “real wicked” part of it is practically fake – served up for the curious foreigner with money to throw away. The Moulin Rouge whirls the wide sails of its huge sign, crimson with electric bulbs, amid the false glaze of the Place Blanche. Inside of it there is more red – the full red of bad claret and the bright red of congested faces and painted cheeks. Part of the place is a theatre with a vaudeville show much like any other. Another part is a vast “promenoir” where you may walk up and down or sit at a little table and drink bad brandy at one franc and a half. In a fenced off part are the Oriental Dances, a familiar feature of every Parisian Show. These dances – at twenty cents a turn – are supposed to represent all the languishing allurement of the Oriental houri – I think that is the word. The dancers in Paris – it is only fair to state – have never been nearer to the Orient than the Faubourg St. Antoine, where they were brought up and where they learned all the Orientalism that they know. Their “dance” is performed with their feet continuously on the ground – never lifted, I mean – and is done by gyrations of the stomach, beside which the paroxysms of an overdose of Paris green are child’s play. In seeing these dances one realizes all the horrors of life in the East.

Not everyone, however, can be an Oriental dancer in a French pleasure show. To qualify you must be as scrawny as a Parisian cab-horse, and it appears as if few débutantes could break into the profession under the age of forty. The dances go on at intervals till two in the morning, after which the Oriental houri crawls to her home at the same time as the Parisian cab-horse – her companion in arms.

Under the Moulin Rouge, and in all similar places, is a huge dance hall: It has a “Hungarian Orchestra” – a fact which is proved by the red and green jackets, the tyrolese caps, and by the printed sign which says, “This is a Hungarian Orchestra.” I knew that they were Hungarians the night I saw them, because I distinctly heard one of them say, “what t’ell do we play next boys?” The reference to William Tell was obvious. After every four tunes the Orchestra are given a tall stein of beer, and they all stand up and drink it, shouting “Hoch!” or “Ha!” or “Hoo!” or something of the sort. This is supposed to give a high touch of local colour. Everybody knows how Hungarians always shout out loud when they see a glass of beer. I’ve noticed it again and again in sugar refineries.

The Hungarians have to drink the beer whether they like it or not – it’s part of their contract. I noticed one poor fellow who was playing the long bassoon, and who was doing a double night-shift overtime. He’d had twenty-four pints of beer already, and there were still two hours before closing time. You could tell what he was feeling like by the sobbing of his instrument. But he stood up every now and then and yelled “Hoch!” or “Hiccough!” – or whatever it was – along with the others.

On the big floor in front of the Hungarians the dance goes on. Most of the time the dances are endless waltzes and polkas shared in by the nondescript frequenters of the place, while the tourist visitors sit behind a railing and watch. To look at, the dancing is about as interesting, nothing more or less, than the round dances at a Canadian picnic on the first of July.

Every now and then, to liven things up, comes the can-can. In theory this is a wild dance, breaking out from sheer ebullience of spirit, and shared in by a bevy of merry girls carried away by gaiety and joy of living. In reality the can-can is performed by eight or ten old nags – ex-Oriental dancers, I should think – at eighty cents a night. But they are deserving women, and work hard – like all the rest of the brigade in the factory of Parisian gaiety.

After the Moulin Rouge or the Bal Tabarin or such, comes, of course, a visit to one of the night cafés of the Montmartre district. Their names in themselves are supposed to indicate their weird and alluring character – the Café of Heaven, the Café of Nothingness, and – how dreadful – the Café of Hell. “Montmartre,” says one of the latest English writers on Paris, “is the scene of all that is wild, mad, and extravagant. Nothing is too grotesque, too terrible, too eccentric for the Montmartre mind.” Fiddlesticks! What he means is that nothing is too damn silly for people to pay to go to see.

Take, for example, the notorious Café of Hell. The portals are low and gloomy. You enter in the dark. A pass-word is given – “Stranger, who cometh here?” – “More food for worms.” You sit and eat among coffins and shrouds. There are muffled figures shuffling around to represent monks in cowls, saints, demons, and apostles. The “Angel Gabriel” watches at the door. “Father Time” moves among the eaters. The waiters are dressed as undertakers. There are skulls and cross-bones in the walls. The light is that of dim tapers. And so on.

And yet I suppose some of the foreign visitors to the Café of Hell think that this is a truly French home scene, and discuss the queer characteristics of the French people suggested by it.

I got to know a family in Paris that worked in one of these Montmartre night cafés – quiet, decent people they were, with a little home of their own in the suburbs. The father worked as Beelzebub mostly, but he could double with St. Anthony and do a very fair St. Luke when it was called for. The mother worked as Mary Magdalene, but had grown so stout that it was hard for her to hold it. There were two boys, one of whom was working as John the Baptist, but had been promised to be promoted to Judas Iscariot in the fall; they were good people, and worked well, but were tired of their present place. Like everyone else they had heard of Canada and thought of coming out. They were very anxious to know what openings there were in their line; whether there would be any call for a Judas Iscariot in a Canadian restaurant, or whether a man would have any chance as St. Anthony in the West.

I told them frankly that these jobs were pretty well filled up.

Listen! It is striking three. The motors are whirling down the asphalt street. The brilliant lights of the boulevard windows are fading out. Here, as in the silent woods of Canada, night comes at last. The restless city of pleasure settles to its short sleep.

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The Retroactive Existence
of Mr. Juggins

I first met Juggins – really to notice him – years and years ago as a boy out camping. Somebody was trying to nail up a board on a tree for a shelf and Juggins interfered to help him.

“Stop a minute,” he said, “you need to saw the end of that board off before you put it up.” Then Juggins looked round for a saw, and when he got it he had hardly made more than a stroke or two with it before he stopped. “This saw,” he said, “needs to be filed up a bit.” So he went and hunted up a file to sharpen the saw, but found that before he could use the file he needed to put a proper handle on it, and to make a handle he went to look for a sapling in the bush, but to cut the sapling he found that he needed to sharpen up the axe. To do this, of course, he had to fix the grindstone so as to make it run properly. This involved making wooden legs for the grindstone. To do this decently Juggins decided to make a carpenter’s bench. This was quite impossible without a better set of tools. Juggins went to the village to get the tools required, and, of course, he never came back.

He was re-discovered – weeks later – in the city, getting prices on wholesale tool machinery.

After that first episode I got to know Juggins very well. For some time we were students at college together. But Juggins somehow never got far with his studies. He always began with great enthusiasm and then something happened. For a time he studied French with tremendous eagerness. But he soon found that for a real knowledge of French you need first to get a thorough grasp of Old French and Provençal. But it proved impossible to do anything with these without an absolutely complete command of Latin. This Juggins discovered could only be obtained, in any thorough way, through Sanskrit, which of course lies at the base of it. So Juggins devoted himself to Sanskrit until he realized that for a proper understanding of Sanskrit one needs to study the ancient Iranian, the root-language underneath. This language however is lost.

So Juggins had to begin over again. He did, it is true, make some progress in natural science. He studied physics and rushed rapidly backwards from forces to molecules, and from molecules to atoms, and from atoms to electrons, and then his whole studies exploded backward into the infinities of space, still searching a first cause.

Juggins, of course, never took a degree, so he made no practical use of his education. But it didn’t matter. He was very well off and was able to go straight into business with a capital of about a hundred thousand dollars. He put it at first into a gas plant, but found that he lost money at that because of the high price of the coal needed to make gas. So he sold out for ninety thousand dollars and went into coal mining. This was unsuccessful because of the awful cost of mining machinery. So Juggins sold his share in the mine for eighty thousand dollars and went in for manufacturing mining machinery. At this he would have undoubtedly made money but for the enormous cost of gas needed as motive-power for the plant. Juggins sold out of the manufacture for seventy thousand, and after that he went whirling in a circle, like skating backwards, through the different branches of allied industry.

He lost a certain amount of money each year, especially in good years when trade was brisk. In dull times when everything was unsalable he did fairly well.

Juggins’ domestic life was very quiet.

Of course he never married. He did, it is true, fall in love several times; but each time it ended without result. I remember well his first love story for I was very intimate with him at the time. He had fallen in love with the girl in question utterly and immediately. It was literally love at first sight. There was no doubt of his intentions. As soon as he had met her he was quite frank about it. “I intend,” he said, “to ask her to be my wife.”

“When?” I asked; “right away?”

“No,” he said, “I want first to fit myself to be worthy of her.”

So he went into moral training to fit himself. He taught in a Sunday school for six weeks, till he realized that a man has no business in Divine work of that sort without first preparing himself by serious study of the history of Palestine. And he felt that a man was a cad to force his society on a girl while he is still only half acquainted with the history of the Israelites. So Juggins stayed away. It was nearly two years before he was fit to propose. By the time he was fit, the girl had already married a brainless thing in patent leather boots who didn’t even know who Moses was.

Of course Juggins fell in love again. People always do. And at any rate by this time he was in a state of moral fitness that made it imperative.

So he fell in love – deeply in love this time – with a charming girl, commonly known as the eldest Miss Thorneycroft. She was only called eldest because she had five younger sisters; and she was very poor and awfully clever and trimmed all her own hats. Any man, if he’s worth the name, falls in love with that sort of thing at first sight. So, of course, Juggins would have proposed to her; only when he went to the house he met her next sister: and of course she was younger still; and, I suppose, poorer: and made not only her own hats but her own blouses. So Juggins fell in love with her. But one night when he went to call, the door was opened by the sister younger still, who not only made her own blouses and trimmed her own hats, but even made her own tailor-made suits. After that Juggins backed up from sister to sister till he went through the whole family, and in the end got none of them.

Perhaps it was just as well that Juggins never married. It would have made things very difficult because, of course, he got poorer all the time. You see after he sold out his last share in his last business he bought with it a diminishing life annuity, so planned that he always got rather less next year than this year, and still less the year after. Thus, if he lived long enough, he would starve to death.

Meantime he has become a quaint-looking elderly man, with coats a little too short and trousers a little above his boots – like a boy. His face too is like that of a boy, with wrinkles.

And his talk now has grown to be always reminiscent. He is perpetually telling long stories of amusing times that he has had with different people that he names.

He says for example—

“I remember a rather queer thing that happened to me in a train one day——”

And if you say – “When was that Juggins?” – he looks at you in a vague way as if calculating and says – “in 1875, or 1876, I think, as near as I recall it—”

I notice, too, that his reminiscences are going further and further back. He used to base his stories on his recollections as a young man, now they are further back.

The other day he told me a story about himself and two people that he called the Harper brothers – Ned and Joe. Ned, he said was a tremendously powerful fellow.

I asked how old Ned was and Juggins said that he was three. He added that there was another brother not so old, but a very clever fellow about – here Juggins paused and calculated – about eighteen months.

So then I realized where Juggins retroactive existence is carrying him to. He has passed back through childhood into infancy, and presently, just as his annuity runs to a point and vanishes, he will back up clear through the Curtain of Existence and die – or be born, I don’t know which to call it.

Meantime he remains to me as one of the most illuminating allegories I have met.

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Making a Magazine

The Dream of a Contributor

I dreamt one night not long ago that I was the editor of a great illustrated magazine. I offer no apology for this: I have often dreamt even worse of myself than that.

In any case I didn’t do it on purpose: very often, I admit, I try to dream that I am President Wilson, or Mr. Bryan, or the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, or a share of stock in the Standard Oil Co. for the sheer luxury and cheapness of it. But this was an accident. I had been sitting up late at night writing personal reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln. I was writing against time. The presidential election was drawing nearer every day and the market for reminiscences of Lincoln was extremely brisk, but, of course, might collapse any moment. Writers of my class have to consider this sort of thing. For instance, in the middle of Lent, I find that I can do fairly well with “Recent Lights on the Scriptures.” Then, of course, when the hot weather comes, the market for Christmas poetry opens and there’s a fairly good demand for voyages in the Polar Seas. Later on, in the quiet of the autumn I generally write some “Unpublished Letters from Goethe to Balzac,” and that sort of thing.

But it’s a wearing occupation, full of disappointments, and needing the very keenest business instinct to watch every turn of the market.

I am afraid that this is a digression. I only wanted to explain how a man’s mind could be so harassed and overwrought as to make him dream that he was an editor.

I knew at once in my dream where and what I was. As soon as I saw the luxury of the surroundings – the spacious room with its vaulted ceiling, lit with stained glass – the beautiful mahogany table at which I sat writing with a ten-dollar fountain pen, the gift of the manufacturers – on embossed stationery, the gift of the embossers – on which I was setting down words at eight and a half cents a word and deliberately picking out short ones through sheer business acuteness; – as soon as I saw – this I said to myself—

“I am an editor, and this is my editorial sanctum.” Not that I have ever seen an editor or a sanctum. But I have sent so many manuscripts to so many editors and received them back with such unfailing promptness, that the scene before me was as familiar to my eye as if I had been wide awake.

As I thus mused, revelling in the charm of my surroundings and admiring the luxurious black alpaca coat and the dainty dickie which I wore, there was a knock at the door.

A beautiful creature entered. She evidently belonged to the premises, for she wore no hat and there were white cuffs upon her wrists. She has that indescribable beauty of effectiveness such as is given to hospital nurses.

This, I thought to myself, must be my private secretary.

“I hope I don’t interrupt you, sir,” said the girl.

“My dear child,” I answered, speaking in that fatherly way in which an editor might well address a girl almost young enough to be his wife, “pray do not mention it. Sit down. You must be fatigued after your labours of the morning. Let me ring for a club sandwich.”

“I came to say, sir,” the secretary went on, “that there’s a person downstairs waiting to see you.”

My manner changed at once.

“Is he a gentleman or a contributor?” I asked.

“He doesn’t look exactly like a gentleman.”

“Very good,” I said. “He’s a contributor for sure. Tell him to wait. Ask the caretaker to lock him in the coal cellar, and kindly slip out and see if there’s a policeman on the beat in case I need him.”

“Very good, sir,” said the secretary.

I waited for about an hour, wrote a few editorials advocating the rights of the people, smoked some Turkish cigarettes, drank a glass of sherry, and ate part of an anchovy sandwich.

Then I rang the bell. “Bring that man here,” I said.

Presently they brought him in. He was a timid-looking man with an embarrassed manner and all the low cunning of an author stamped on his features. I could see a bundle of papers in his hand, and I knew that the scoundrel was carrying a manuscript.

“Now, sir,” I said, “speak quickly. What’s your business?”

“I’ve got here a manuscript,” he began.

“What!” I shouted at him. “A manuscript! You’d dare, would you! Bringing manuscripts in here! What sort of a place do you think this is?”

“It’s the manuscript of a story,” he faltered.

“A story!” I shrieked. “What on earth do you think we’d want stories for! Do you think we’ve nothing better to do than to print your idiotic ravings? Have you any idea, you idiot, of the expense we’re put to in setting up our fifty pages of illustrated advertising? Look here,” I continued, seizing a bundle of proof illustrations that lay in front of me, “do you see this charming picture of an Asbestos Cooker, guaranteed fireless, odourless, and purposeless? Do you see this patent motor-car with pneumatic cushions, and the full-page description of its properties? Can you form any idea of the time and thought that we have to spend on these things, and yet you dare to come in here with your miserable stories. By heaven,” I said, rising in my seat, “I’ve a notion to come over there and choke you: I’m entitled to do it by the law, and I think I will.”

“Don’t, don’t,” he pleaded. “I’ll go away. I meant no harm. I’ll take it with me.”

“No you don’t,” I interrupted; “none of your sharp tricks with this magazine. You’ve submitted this manuscript to me, and it stays submitted. If I don’t like it, I shall prosecute you, and, I trust, obtain full reparation from the courts.”

To tell the truth, it had occurred to me that perhaps I might need after all to buy the miserable stuff. Even while I felt that my indignation at the low knavery of the fellow was justified, I knew that it might be necessary to control it. The present low state of public taste demands a certain amount of this kind of matter distributed among the advertising.

I rang the bell again.

“Please take this man away and shut him up again. Have them keep a good eye on him. He’s an author.”

“Very good, sir,” said the secretary.

I called her back for one moment.

“Don’t feed him anything,” I said.

“No,” said the girl.

The manuscript lay before me on the table. It looked bulky. It bore the title Dorothy Dacres, or, Only a Clergyman’s Daughter.

I rang the bell again.

“Kindly ask the janitor to step this way.”

He came in. I could see from the straight, honest look in his features that he was a man to be relied upon.

“Jones,” I said, “can you read?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, “some.”

“Very good. I want you to take this manuscript and read it. Read it all through and then bring it back here.”

The janitor took the manuscript and disappeared. I turned to my desk again and was soon absorbed in arranging a full-page display of plumbers’ furnishings for the advertising. It had occurred to me that by arranging the picture matter in a neat device with verses from “Home Sweet Home” running through it in double-leaded old English type, I could set up a page that would be the delight of all business readers and make this number of the magazine a conspicuous success. My mind was so absorbed that I scarcely noticed that over an hour elapsed before the janitor returned.

“Well, Jones,” I said as he entered, “have you read that manuscript?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you find it all right – punctuation good, spelling all correct?”

“Very good indeed, sir.”

“And there is, I trust, nothing of what one would call a humorous nature in it? I want you to answer me quite frankly, Jones – there is nothing in it that would raise a smile, or even a laugh, is there?”

“Oh, no, sir,” said Jones, “nothing at all.”

“And now tell me – for remember that the reputation of our magazine is at stake – does this story make a decided impression on you? Has it,” and here I cast my eye casually at the latest announcement of a rival publication, “the kind of tour de force which at once excites you to the full qui vive and which contains a sustained brio that palpitates on every page? Answer carefully, Jones, because if it hasn’t, I won’t buy it.”

“I think it has,” he said.

“Very well,” I answered; “now bring the author to me.”

In the interval of waiting, I hastily ran my eye through the pages of the manuscript.

Presently they brought the author back again. He had assumed a look of depression.

“I have decided,” I said, “to take your manuscript.”

Joy broke upon his face. He came nearer to me as if to lick my hand.

“Stop a minute,” I said. “I am willing to take your story, but there are certain things, certain small details which I want to change.”

“Yes?” he said timidly.

“In the first place, I don’t like your title. Dorothy Dacres, or, Only a Clergyman’s Daughter is too quiet. I shall change it to read Dorothea Dashaway, or, The Quicksands of Society.”

“But surely,” began the contributor, beginning to wring his hands——

“Don’t interrupt me,” I said. “In the next place, the story is much too long.” Here I reached for a large pair of tailor’s scissors that lay on the table. “This story contains nine thousand words. We never care to use more than six thousand. I must therefore cut some of it off.” I measured the story carefully with a pocket tape that lay in front of me, cut off three thousand words and handed them back to the author. “These words,” I said, “you may keep. We make no claim on them at all. You are at liberty to make any use of them that you like.”

“But please,” he said, “you have cut off all the end of the story: the whole conclusion is gone. The readers can’t possibly tell——”

I smiled at him with something approaching kindness.

“My dear sir,” I said, “they never get beyond three thousand words of the end of a magazine story. The end is of no consequence whatever. The beginning, I admit, may be, but the end! Come! Come! And in any case in our magazine we print the end of each story separately, distributed among the advertisements to break the type. But just at present we have plenty of these on hand. You see,” I continued, for there was something in the man’s manner that almost touched me, “all that is needed is that the last words printed must have a look of finality. That’s all. Now, let me see,” and I turned to the place where the story was cut, “what are the last words: here: ‘Dorothea sank into a chair. There we must leave her!’ Excellent! What better end could you want? She sank into a chair and you leave her. Nothing more natural.”

The contributor seemed about to protest. But I stopped him.

“There is one other small thing,” I said. “Our coming number is to be a Plumbers’ and Motor Number. I must ask you to introduce a certain amount of plumbing into your story.” I rapidly turned over the pages. “I see,” I said, “that your story as written is laid largely in Spain in the summer. I shall ask you to alter this to Switzerland and make it winter time to allow for the breaking of steam-pipes. Such things as these, however, are mere details; we can easily arrange them.”

I reached out my hand.

“And now,” I said, “I must wish you a good afternoon.”

The contributor seemed to pluck up courage.

“What about remuneration” – he faltered.

I waived the question gravely aside. “You will, of course, be duly paid at our usual rate. You receive a cheque two years after publication. It will cover all your necessary expenses, including ink, paper, string, sealing-wax and other incidentals, in addition to which we hope to be able to make you a compensation for your time on a reasonable basis per hour. Good-bye.”

He left, and I could hear them throwing him downstairs.

Then I sat down, while my mind was on it, and wrote the advance notice of the story. It ran like this:

NEXT MONTH’S NUMBER OF THE MEGALOMANIA MAGAZINE WILL CONTAIN A THRILLING STORY, ENTITLED

“Dorothea Dashaway,
Or, The Quicksands of Society.”

The author has lately leaped into immediate recognition as the greatest master of the short story in the American World. His style has a brio, a poise, a savoir faire, a je ne sais quoi, which stamps all his work with the cachet of literary superiority. The sum paid for the story of Dorothea Dashaway is said to be the largest ever paid for a single MS. Every page palpitates with interest, and at the conclusion of this remarkable narrative the reader lays down the page in utter bewilderment, to turn perhaps to the almost equally marvellous illustration of Messrs. Spiggott and Fawcett’s Home Plumbing Device Exposition which adorns the same number of the great review.

I wrote this out, rang the bell, and was just beginning to say to the secretary—

“My dear child – pray pardon my forgetfulness. You must be famished for lunch. Will you permit me——”

And then I woke up – at the wrong minute, as one always does.

TOC     INDEX

Homer and Humbug

An Academic Discussion

The following discussion is of course only of interest to scholars. But, as the public schools returns show that in the United States there are now over a million coloured scholars alone, the appeal is wide enough.

I do not mind confessing that for a long time past I have been very sceptical about the classics. I was myself trained as a classical scholar. It seemed the only thing to do with me. I acquired such a singular facility in handling Latin and Greek that I could take a page of either of them, distinguish which it was by merely glancing at it, and, with the help of a dictionary and a pair of compasses, whip off a translation of it in less than three hours.

But I never got any pleasure from it. I lied about it. At first, perhaps, I lied through vanity. Any coloured scholar will understand the feeling. Later on I lied through habit; later still because, after all, the classics were all that I had and so I valued them. I have seen thus a deceived dog value a pup with a broken leg, and a pauper child nurse a dead doll with the sawdust out of it. So I nursed my dead Homer and my broken Demosthenes though I knew in my heart that there was more sawdust in the stomach of one modern author than in the whole lot of them. Observe, I am not saying which it is that has it full of it.

So, as I say, I began to lie about the classics. I said to people who knew no Greek that there was a sublimity, a majesty about Homer which they could never hope to grasp. I said it was like the sound of the sea beating against the granite cliffs of the Ionian Esophagus: or words to that effect. As for the truth of it, I might as well have said that it was like the sound of a rum distillery running a night shift on half time. At any rate this is what I said about Homer, and when I spoke of Pindar – the dainty grace of his strophes – and Aristophanes, the delicious sallies of his wit, sally after sally, each sally explained in a note calling it a sally – I managed to suffuse my face with an animation which made it almost beautiful.

I admitted of course that Virgil in spite of his genius had a hardness and a cold glitter which resembled rather the brilliance of a cut diamond than the soft grace of a flower. Certainly I admitted this: the mere admission of it would knock the breath out of anyone who was arguing.

From such talks my friends went away sad. The conclusion was too cruel. It had all the cold logic of a syllogism (like that almost brutal form of argument so much admired in the Paraphernalia of Socrates). For if:

Virgil and Homer and Pindar had all this grace, and pith and these sallies,—

And if I read Virgil and Homer and Pindar,

And if they only read Mrs. Wharton and Mrs. Humphrey Ward

Then where were they?

So continued lying brought its own reward in the sense of superiority and I lied more.

When I reflect that I have openly expressed regret, as a personal matter, even in the presence of women, for the missing books of Tacitus, and the entire loss of the Abacadabra of Polyphemus of Syracuse, I can find no words in which to beg for pardon. In reality I was just as much worried over the loss of the ichthyosaurus. More, indeed: I’d like to have seen it: but if the books Tacitus lost were like those he didn’t, I wouldn’t.

I believe all scholars lie like this. An ancient friend of mine, a clergyman, tells me that in Hesiod he finds a peculiar grace that he doesn’t find elsewhere. He’s a liar. That’s all. Another man, in politics and in the legislature, tells me that every night before going to bed he reads over a page or two of Thucydides to keep his mind fresh. Either he never goes to bed or he’s a liar. Doubly so: no one could read Greek at that frantic rate: and anyway his mind isn’t fresh. How could it be, he’s in the legislature. I don’t object to this man talking freely of the classics, but he ought to keep it for the voters. My own opinion is that before he goes to bed he takes whiskey: why call it Thucydides?

I know there are solid arguments advanced in favour of the classics. I often hear them from my colleagues. My friend the professor of Greek tells me that he truly believes the classics have made him what he is. This is a very grave statement, if well founded. Indeed I have heard the same argument from a great many Latin and Greek scholars. They all claim, with some heat, that Latin and Greek have practically made them what they are. This damaging charge against the classics should not be too readily accepted. In my opinion some of these men would have been what they are, no matter what they were.

Be this as it may, I for my part bitterly regret the lies I have told about my appreciation of Latin and Greek literature. I am anxious to do what I can to set things right. I am therefore engaged on, indeed have nearly completed, a work which will enable all readers to judge the matter for themselves. What I have done is a translation of all the great classics, not in the usual literal way but on a design that brings them into harmony with modern life. I will explain what I mean in a minute.

The translation is intended to be within reach of everybody. It is so designed that the entire set of volumes can go on a shelf twenty-seven feet long, or even longer. The first edition will be an édition de luxe bound in vellum, or perhaps in buckskin, and sold at five hundred dollars. It will be limited to five hundred copies and, of course, sold only to the feeble minded. The next edition will be the Literary Edition, sold to artists, authors, actors and contractors. After that will come the Boarding House Edition, bound in board and paid for in the same way.

My plan is to so transpose the classical writers as to give, not the literal translation word for word, but what is really the modern equivalent. Let me give an odd sample or two to show what I mean. Take the passage in the First Book of Homer that describes Ajax the Greek dashing into the battle in front of Troy. Here is the way it runs (as nearly as I remember), in the usual word for word translation of the classroom, as done by the very best professor, his spectacles glittering with the literary rapture of it.

“Then he too Ajax on the one hand leaped (or possibly jumped) into the fight wearing on the other hand, yes certainly a steel corselet (or possibly a bronze under tunic) and on his head of course, yes without doubt he had a helmet with a tossing plume taken from the mane (or perhaps extracted from the tail) of some horse which once fed along the banks of the Scamander (and it sees the herd and raises its head and paws the ground) and in his hand a shield worth a hundred oxen and on his knees too especially in particular greaves made by some cunning artificer (or perhaps blacksmith) and he blows the fire and it is hot. Thus Ajax leapt (or, better, was propelled from behind), into the fight.”

Now that’s grand stuff. There is no doubt of it. There’s a wonderful movement and force to it. You can almost see it move, it goes so fast. But the modern reader can’t get it. It won’t mean to him what it meant to the early Greek. The setting, the costume, the scene has all got to be changed in order to let the reader have a real equivalent to judge just how good the Greek verse is. In my translation I alter it just a little, not much but just enough to give the passage a form that reproduces the proper literary value of the verses, without losing anything of the majesty. It describes, I may say, the Directors of the American Industrial Stocks rushing into the Balkan War Cloud.

Then there came rushing to the shock of war

Mr. McNicoll of the C. P. R.

He wore suspenders and about his throat

High rose the collar of a sealskin coat.

He had on gaiters and he wore a tie,

He had his trousers buttoned good and high;

About his waist a woollen undervest

Bought from a sad-eyed farmer of the West.

(And every time he clips a sheep he sees

Some bloated plutocrat who ought to freeze),

Thus in the Stock Exchange he burst to view,

Leaped to the post, and shouted, “Ninety-two!”

There! That’s Homer, the real thing! Just as it sounded to the rude crowd of Greek peasants who sat in a ring and guffawed at the rhymes and watched the minstrel stamp it out into “feet” as he recited it!

Or let me take another example from the so-called Catalogue of the Ships that fills up nearly an entire book of Homer. This famous passage names all the ships, one by one, and names the chiefs who sailed on them, and names the particular town or hill or valley that they came from. It has been much admired. It has that same majesty of style that has been brought to an even loftier pitch in the New York Business Directory and the City Telephone Book. It runs along, as I recall it, something like this—

“And first, indeed, oh yes, was the ship of Homistogetes the Spartan, long and swift, having both its masts covered with cowhide and two rows of oars. And he, Homistogetes, was born of Hermogenes and Ophthalmia and was at home in Syncope beside the fast flowing Paresis. And after him came the ship of Preposterus the Eurasian, son of Oasis and Hyteria,” . . . and so on endlessly.

Instead of this I substitute, with the permission of the New York Central Railway, the official catalogue of their locomotives taken almost word for word from the list compiled by their superintendent of works. I admit that he wrote in hot weather. Part of it runs:

Out in the yard and steaming in the sun

Stands locomotive engine number forty-one;

Seated beside the windows of the cab

Are Pat McGaw and Peter James McNab.

Pat comes from Troy and Peter from Cohoes,

And when they pull the throttle off she goes;

And as she vanishes there comes to view

Steam locomotive engine number forty-two.

Observe her mighty wheels, her easy roll,

With William J. Macarthy in control.

They say her engineer some time ago

Lived on a farm outside of Buffalo

Whereas his fireman, Henry Edward Foy,

Attended School in Springfield, Illinois.

Thus does the race of man decay or rot—

Some men can hold their jobs and some can not.

Please observe that if Homer had actually written that last line it would have been quoted for a thousand years as one of the deepest sayings ever said. Orators would have rounded out their speeches with the majestic phrase, quoted in sonorous and unintelligible Greek verse, “some men can hold their jobs and some can not”: essayists would have begun their most scholarly dissertations with the words – “It has been finely said by Homer that (in Greek) ‘some men can hold their jobs’”: and the clergy in mid-pathos of a funeral sermon would have raised their eyes aloft and echoed “Some men can not”!

This is what I should like to do. I’d like to take a large stone and write on it in very plain writing—

“The classics are only primitive literature. They belong in the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine,” – and then throw it through the windows of a University and hide behind a fence to see the professors buzz!!

TOC     INDEX

Arcadian Adventures
with the Idle Rich

(1914)

~

1 … A Little Dinner with Mr. Lucullus Fyshe

2 … The Wizard of Finance

3 … The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson

4 … The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown

5 … The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins

6 … The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph

7 … The Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing

8 … The Great Fight for Clean Government

I

A Little Dinner
with Mr. Lucullus Fyshe

The Mausoleum Club stands on the quietest corner of the best residential street in the City. It is a Grecian building of white stone. About it are great elm trees with birds – the most expensive kind of birds – singing in the branches.

The street in the softer hours of the morning has an almost reverential quiet. Great motors move drowsily along it, with solitary chauffeurs returning at 10.30 after conveying the earlier of the millionaires to their downtown offices. The sunlight flickers through the elm trees, illuminating expensive nurse-maids wheeling valuable children in little perambulators. Some of the children are worth millions and millions. In Europe, no doubt, you may see in the Unter den Linden avenue or the Champs Elysées a little prince or princess go past with a clattering military guard of honour. But that is nothing. It is not half so impressive, in the real sense, as what you may observe every morning on Plutoria Avenue beside the Mausoleum Club in the quietest part of the city. Here you may see a little toddling princess in a rabbit suit who owns fifty distilleries in her own right. There, in a lacquered perambulator, sails past a little hooded head that controls from its cradle an entire New Jersey corporation. The United States attorney-general is suing her as she sits, in a vain attempt to make her dissolve herself into constituent companies. Near by is a child of four, in a khaki suit, who represents the merger of two trunk-line railways. You may meet in the flickered sunlight any number of little princes and princesses far more real than the poor survivals of Europe. Incalculable infants wave their fifty-dollar ivory rattles in an inarticulate greeting to one another. A million dollars of preferred stock laughs merrily in recognition of a majority control going past in a go-cart drawn by an imported nurse. And through it all the sunlight falls through the elm trees, and the birds sing and the motors hum, so that the whole world as seen from the boulevard of Plutoria Avenue is the very pleasantest place imaginable.

Just below Plutoria Avenue, and parallel with it, the trees die out and the brick and stone of the City begins in earnest. Even from the Avenue you see the tops of the sky-scraping buildings in the big commercial streets, and can hear or almost hear the roar of the elevated railway, earning dividends. And beyond that again the City sinks lower, and is choked and crowded with the tangled streets and little houses of the slums.

In fact, if you were to mount to the roof of the Mausoleum Club itself on Plutoria Avenue you could almost see the slums from there. But why should you? And on the other hand, if you never went up on the roof, but only dined inside among the palm trees, you would never know that the slums existed which is much better.

There are broad steps leading up to the club, so broad and so agreeably covered with matting that the physical exertion of lifting oneself from one’s motor to the door of the club is reduced to the smallest compass. The richer members are not ashamed to take the steps one at a time, first one foot and then the other; and at tight money periods, when there is a black cloud hanging over the Stock Exchange, you may see each and every one of the members of the Mausoleum Club dragging himself up the steps after this fashion, his restless eyes filled with the dumb pathos of a man wondering where he can put his hand on half a million dollars.

But at gayer times, when there are gala receptions at the club, its steps are all buried under expensive carpet, soft as moss and covered over with a long pavilion of red and white awning to catch the snowflakes; and beautiful ladies are poured into the club by the motorful. Then, indeed, it is turned into a veritable Arcadia; and for a beautiful pastoral scene, such as would have gladdened the heart of a poet who understood the cost of things, commend me to the Mausoleum Club on just such an evening. Its broad corridors and deep recesses are filled with shepherdesses such as you never saw, dressed in beautiful shimmering gowns, and wearing feathers in their hair that droop off sideways at every angle known to trigonometry. And there are shepherds, too, with broad white waistcoats and little patent leather shoes and heavy faces and congested cheeks. And there is dancing and conversation among the shepherds and shepherdesses, with such brilliant flashes of wit and repartee about the rise in Wabash and the fall in Cement that the soul of Louis Quatorze would leap to hear it. And later there is supper at little tables, when the shepherds and shepherdesses consume preferred stocks and gold-interest bonds in the shape of chilled champagne and iced asparagus, and great platefuls of dividends and special quarterly bonuses are carried to and fro in silver dishes by Chinese philosophers dressed up to look like waiters.

But on ordinary days there are no ladies in the club, but only the shepherds. You may see them sitting about in little groups of two and three under the palm trees drinking whiskey and soda; though of course the more temperate among them drink nothing but whiskey and Lithia water, and those who have important business to do in the afternoon limit themselves to whiskey and Radnor, or whiskey and Magi water. There are as many kinds of bubbling, gurgling, mineral waters in the caverns of the Mausoleum Club as ever sparkled from the rocks of Homeric Greece. And when you have once grown used to them, it is as impossible to go back to plain water as it is to live again in the forgotten house in a side street that you inhabited long before you became a member.

Thus the members sit and talk in undertones that float to the ear through the haze of Havana smoke. You may hear the older men explaining that the country is going to absolute ruin, and the younger ones explaining that the country is forging ahead as it never did before; but chiefly they love to talk of great national questions, such as the protective tariff and the need of raising it, the sad decline of the morality of the working man, the spread of syndicalism and the lack of Christianity in the labour class, and the awful growth of selfishness among the mass of the people.

So they talk, except for two or three that drop off to directors’ meetings; till the afternoon fades and darkens into evening, and the noiseless Chinese philosophers turn on soft lights here and there among the palm trees. Presently they dine at white tables glittering with cut glass and green and yellow Rhine wines; and after dinner they sit again among the palm-trees, half-hidden in the blue smoke, still talking of the tariff and the labour class and trying to wash away the memory and the sadness of it in floods of mineral waters. So the evening passes into night, and one by one the great motors come throbbing to the door, and the Mausoleum Club empties and darkens till the last member is borne away and the Arcadian day ends in well-earned repose.

—

“I want you to give me your opinion very, very frankly,” said Mr. Lucullus Fyshe on one side of the luncheon table to the Rev. Fareforth Furlong on the other.

“By all means,” said Mr. Furlong.

Mr. Fyshe poured out a wineglassful of soda and handed it to the rector to drink.

“Now tell me very truthfully,” he said, “is there too much carbon in it?”

“By no means,” said Mr. Furlong.

“And – quite frankly – not too much hydrogen?”

“Oh, decidedly not.”

“And you would not say that the percentage of sodium bicarbonate was too great for the ordinary taste?”

“I certainly should not,” said Mr. Furlong, and in this he spoke the truth.

“Very good then,” said Mr. Fyshe, “I shall use it for the Duke of Dulham this afternoon.”

He uttered the name of the Duke with that quiet, democratic carelessness which meant that he didn’t care whether half a dozen other members lunching at the club could hear or not. After all, what was a duke to a man who was president of the People’s Traction and Suburban Co., and the Republican Soda and Siphon Co-operative, and chief director of the People’s District Loan and Savings? If a man with a broad basis of popular support like that was proposing to entertain a duke, surely there could be no doubt about his motives? None at all.

Naturally, too, if a man manufactures soda himself, he gets a little over-sensitive about the possibility of his guests noticing the existence of too much carbon in it.

In fact, ever so many of the members of the Mausoleum Club manufacture things, or cause them to be manufactured, or – what is the same thing – merge them when they are manufactured. This gives them their peculiar chemical attitude towards their food. One often sees a member suddenly call the head waiter at breakfast to tell him that there is too much ammonia in the bacon; and another one protest at the amount of glucose in the olive oil; and another that there is too high a percentage of nitrogen in the anchovy. A man of distorted imagination might think this tasting of chemicals in the food a sort of nemesis of fate upon the members. But that would be very foolish, for in every case the head waiter, who is the chief of the Chinese philosophers mentioned above, says that he’ll see to it immediately and have the percentage removed. And as for the members themselves, they are about as much ashamed of manufacturing and merging things as the Marquis of Salisbury is ashamed of the founders of the Cecil family.

What more natural, therefore, than that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, before serving the soda to the Duke, should try it on somebody else? And what better person could be found for this than Mr. Furlong, the saintly young rector of St. Asaph’s, who had enjoyed the kind of expensive college education calculated to develop all the faculties. Moreover, a rector of the Anglican Church who has been in the foreign mission field is the kind of person from whom one can find out, more or less incidentally, how one should address and converse with a duke, and whether you call him, “Your Grace,” or “His Grace,” or just “Grace,” or “Duke,” or what. All of which things would seem to a director of the People’s Bank and the president of the Republican Soda Co. so trivial in importance that he would scorn to ask about them.

So that was why Mr. Fyshe had asked Mr. Furlong to lunch with him, and to dine with him later on in the same day at the Mausoleum Club to meet the Duke of Dulham. And Mr. Furlong, realizing that a clergyman must be all things to all men and not avoid a man merely because he is a duke, had accepted the invitation to lunch, and had promised to come to dinner, even though it meant postponing the Willing Workers’ Tango Class of St. Asaph’s until the following Friday.

Thus it had come about that Mr. Fyshe was seated at lunch, consuming a cutlet and a pint of Moselle in the plain downright fashion of a man so democratic that he is practically a revolutionary socialist, and doesn’t mind saying so; and the young rector of St. Asaph’s was sitting opposite to him in a religious ecstasy over a salmi of duck.

“The Duke arrived this morning, did he not?” said Mr. Furlong.

“From New York,” said Mr. Fyshe. “He is staying at the Grand Palaver. I sent a telegram through one of our New York directors of the Traction, and his Grace has very kindly promised to come over here to dine.”

“Is he here for pleasure?” asked the rector.

“I understand he is—” Mr. Fyshe was going to say “about to invest a large part of his fortune in American securities,” but he thought better of it. Even with the clergy it is well to be careful. So he substituted “is very much interested in studying American conditions.”

“Does he stay long?” asked Mr. Furlong.

Had Mr. Lucullus Fyshe replied quite truthfully, he would have said, “Not if I can get his money out of him quickly,” but he merely answered, “That I don’t know.”

“He will find much to interest him,” went on the rector in a musing tone. “The position of the Anglican Church in America should afford him an object of much consideration. I understand,” he added, feeling his way, “that his Grace is a man of deep piety.”

“Very deep,” said Mr. Fyshe.

“And of great philanthropy?”

“Very great.”

“And I presume,” said the rector, taking a devout sip of the unfinished soda, “that he is a man of immense wealth?”

“I suppose so,” answered Mr. Fyshe quite carelessly. “All these fellows are.” (Mr. Fyshe generally referred to the British aristocracy as “these fellows.”) “Land, you know, feudal estates; sheer robbery, I call it. How the working-class, the proletariat, stand for such tyranny is more than I can see. Mark my words, Furlong, some day they’ll rise and the whole thing will come to a sudden end.”

Mr. Fyshe was here launched upon his favourite topic; but he interrupted himself, just for a moment, to speak to the waiter.

“What the devil do you mean,” he said, “by serving asparagus half-cold?”

“Very sorry, sir,” said the waiter, “shall I take it out?”

“Take it out? Of course take it out, and see that you don’t serve me stuff of that sort again, or I’ll report you.”

“Very sorry, sir,” said the waiter.

Mr. Fyshe looked at the vanishing waiter with contempt upon his features. “These pampered fellows are getting unbearable.” he said. “By Gad, if I had my way I’d fire the whole lot of them: lock ’em out, put ’em on the street. That would teach ’em. Yes, Furlong, you’ll live to see it that the whole working-class will one day rise against the tyranny of the upper classes, and society will be overwhelmed.”

But if Mr. Fyshe had realized that at that moment, in the kitchen of the Mausoleum Club, in those sacred precincts themselves, there was a walking delegate of the Waiters’ International Union leaning against a sideboard, with his bowler hat over one corner of his eye, and talking to a little group of the Chinese philosophers, he would have known that perhaps the social catastrophe was a little nearer than even he suspected.

—

“Are you inviting anyone else tonight?” asked Mr. Furlong.

“I should have liked to ask your father,” said Mr. Fyshe, “but unfortunately he is out of town.”

What Mr. Fyshe really meant was, “I am extremely glad not to have to ask your father, whom I would not introduce to the Duke on any account.”

Indeed, Mr. Furlong, senior, the father of the rector of St. Asaph’s, who was President of the New Amalgamated Hymnal Corporation, and Director of the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ, Limited, was entirely the wrong man for Mr. Fyshe’s present purpose. In fact, he was reputed to be as smart a man as ever sold a Bible. At this moment he was out of town, busied in New York with the preparation of the plates of his new Hindu Testament (copyright); but had he learned that a duke with several millions to invest was about to visit the city, he would not have left it for the whole of Hindustan.

“I suppose you are asking Mr. Boulder,” said the rector.

“No,” answered Mr. Fyshe very decidedly, dismissing the name absolutely.

Indeed, there was even better reason not to introduce Mr. Boulder to the Duke. Mr. Fyshe had made that sort of mistake once, and never intended to make it again. It was only a year ago, on the occasion of the visit of young Viscount FitzThistle to the Mausoleum Club, that Mr. Fyshe had introduced Mr. Boulder to the Viscount and had suffered grievously thereby. For Mr. Boulder had no sooner met the Viscount than he invited him up to his hunting-lodge in Wisconsin, and that was the last thing known of the investment of the FitzThistle fortune.

This Mr. Boulder of whom Mr. Fyshe spoke might indeed have been seen at that moment at a further table of the lunch room eating a solitary meal, an oldish man with a great frame suggesting broken strength, with a white beard and with falling under-eyelids that made him look as if he were just about to cry. His eyes were blue and far away, and his still, mournful face and his great bent shoulders seemed to suggest all the power and mystery of high finance.

Gloom indeed hung over him. For, when one heard him talk of listed stocks and cumulative dividends, there was as deep a tone in his quiet voice as if he spoke of eternal punishment and the wages of sin.

Under his great hands a chattering viscount, or a sturdy duke, or a popinjay Italian marquis was as nothing.

Mr. Boulder’s methods with titled visitors investing money in America were deep. He never spoke to them of money, not a word. He merely talked of the great American forest – he had been born sixty-five years back, in a lumber state – and, when he spoke of primeval trees and the howl of the wolf at night among the pines, there was the stamp of reality about it that held the visitor spellbound; and when he fell to talking of his hunting-lodge far away in the Wisconsin timber, duke, earl, or baron that had ever handled a double-barrelled express rifle listened and was lost.

“I have a little place,” Mr. Boulder would say in his deep tones that seemed almost like a sob, “a sort of shooting box, I think you’d call it, up in Wisconsin; just a plain place” – he would add, almost crying – “made of logs.”

“Oh, really,” the visitor would interject, “made of logs. By Jove, how interesting!”

All titled people are fascinated at once with logs, and Mr. Boulder knew it – at least subconsciously.

“Yes, logs,” he would continue, still in deep sorrow; “just the plain cedar, not squared, you know, the old original timber; I had them cut right out of the forest.”

By this time the visitor’s excitement was obvious. “And is there game there?” he would ask.

“We have the timber-wolf,” said Mr. Boulder, his voice half choking at the sadness of the thing, “and of course the jack wolf and the lynx.”

“And are they ferocious?”

“Oh, extremely so – quite uncontrollable.”

On which the titled visitor was all excitement to start for Wisconsin at once, even before Mr. Boulder’s invitation was put in words.

And when he returned a week later, all tanned and wearing bush-whackers’ boots, and covered with wolf bites, his whole available fortune was so completely invested in Mr. Boulder’s securities that you couldn’t have shaken twenty-five cents out of him upside down.

Yet the whole thing had been done merely incidentally round a big fire under the Wisconsin timber, with a dead wolf or two lying in the snow.

So no wonder that Mr. Fyshe did not propose to invite Mr. Boulder to his little dinner. No, indeed. In fact, his one aim was to keep Mr. Boulder and his log house hidden from the Duke.

And equally no wonder that as soon as Mr. Boulder read of the Duke’s arrival in New York, and saw by the Commercial Echo and Financial Undertone that he might come to the City looking for investments, he telephoned at once to his little place in Wisconsin – which had, of course, a primeval telephone wire running to it – and told his steward to have the place well aired and good fires lighted; and he especially enjoined him to see if any of the shanty men thereabouts could catch a wolf or two, as he might need them.

—

“Is no one else coming then?” asked the rector.

“Oh yes. President Boomer of the University. We shall be a party of four. I thought the Duke might be interested in meeting Boomer. He may care to hear something of the archaeological remains of the continent.”

If the Duke did so care, he certainly had a splendid chance in meeting the gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president of Plutoria University.

If he wanted to know anything of the exact distinction between the Mexican Pueblo and the Navajo tribal house, he had his opportunity right now. If he was eager to hear a short talk – say half an hour – on the relative antiquity of the Neanderthal skull and the gravel deposits of the Missouri, his chance had come. He could learn as much about the stone age and the bronze age, in America, from President Boomer, as he could about the gold age and the age of paper securities from Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Boulder.

So what better man to meet a duke than an archaeological president?

And if the Duke should feel inclined, as a result of his American visit (for Dr. Boomer, who knew everything, understood what the Duke had come for), inclined, let us say, to endow a chair in Primitive Anthropology, or do any useful little thing of the sort, that was only fair business all round; or if he even was willing to give a moderate sum towards the general fund of Plutoria University – enough, let us say, to enable the president to dismiss an old professor and hire a new one-that surely was reasonable enough.

The president, therefore, had said yes to Mr. Fyshe’s invitation with alacrity, and had taken a look through the list of his more incompetent professors to refresh his memory.

—

The Duke of Dulham had landed in New York five days before and had looked round eagerly for a field of turnips, but hadn’t seen any. He had been driven up Fifth Avenue and had kept his eyes open for potatoes, but there were none. Nor had he seen any shorthorns in Central Park, nor any Southdowns on Broadway. For the Duke, of course, like all dukes, was agricultural from his Norfolk jacket to his hobnailed boots.

At his restaurant he had cut a potato in two and sent half of it to the head waiter to know if it was Bermudian. It had all the look of an early Bermudian, but the Duke feared from the shading of it that it might be only a late Trinidad. And the head waiter sent it to the chef, mistaking it for a complaint, and the chef sent it back to the Duke with a message that it was not a Bermudian but a Prince Edward Island. And the Duke sent his compliments to the chef, and the chef sent his compliments to the Duke. And the Duke was so pleased at learning this that he had a similar potato wrapped up for him to take away, and tipped the head waiter twenty-five cents, feeling that in an extravagant country the only thing to do is to go the people one better. So the Duke carried the potato round for five days in New York and showed it to everybody. But beyond this he got no sign of agriculture out of the place at all. No one who entertained him seemed to know what the beef that they gave him had been fed on; no one, even in what seemed the best society, could talk rationally about preparing a hog for the breakfast table. People seemed to eat cauliflower without distinguishing the Denmark variety from the Oldenburg, and few, if any, knew Silesian bacon even when they tasted it. And when they took the Duke out twenty-five miles into what was called the country, there were still no turnips, but only real estate, and railway embankments, and advertising signs; so that altogether the obvious and visible decline of American agriculture in what should have been its leading centre saddened the Duke’s heart. Thus the Duke passed four gloomy days. Agriculture vexed him, and still more, of course, the money concerns which had brought him to America.

Money is a troublesome thing. But it has got to be thought about even by those who were not brought up to it. If, on account of money matters, one has been driven to come over to America in the hope of borrowing money, the awkwardness of how to go about it naturally makes one gloomy and preoccupied. Had there been broad fields of turnips to walk in and Holstein cattle to punch in the ribs, one might have managed to borrow it in the course of gentlemanly intercourse, as from one cattle-man to another. But in New York, amid piles of masonry and roaring street-traffic and glittering lunches and palatial residences one simply couldn’t do it.

Herein lay the truth about the Duke of Dulham’s visit and the error of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. Mr. Fyshe was thinking that the Duke had come to lend money. In reality he had come to borrow it. In fact, the Duke was reckoning that by putting a second mortgage on Dulham Towers for twenty thousand sterling, and by selling his Scotch shooting and leasing his Irish grazing and sub-letting his Welsh coal rent he could raise altogether a hundred thousand pounds. This for a duke, is an enormous sum. If he once had it he would be able to pay off the first mortgage on Dulham Towers, buy in the rights of the present tenant of the Scotch shooting and the claim of the present mortgagee of the Irish grazing, and in fact be just where he started. This is ducal finance, which moves always in a circle.

In other words the Duke was really a poor man – not poor in the American sense, where poverty comes as a sudden blighting stringency, taking the form of an inability to get hold of a quarter of a million dollars, no matter how badly one needs it, and where it passes like a storm-cloud and is gone, but poor in that permanent and distressing sense known only to the British aristocracy. The Duke’s case, of course, was notorious, and Mr. Fyshe ought to have known of it. The Duke was so poor that the Duchess was compelled to spend three or four months every year at a fashionable hotel on the Riviera simply to save money, and his eldest son, the young Marquis of Beldoodle, had to put in most of his time shooting big game in Uganda, with only twenty or twenty-five beaters, and with so few carriers and couriers and such a dearth of elephant men and hyena boys that the thing was a perfect scandal. The Duke indeed was so poor that a younger son, simply to add his efforts to those of the rest, was compelled to pass his days in mountain climbing in the Himalayas, and the Duke’s daughter was obliged to pay long visits to minor German princesses, putting up with all sorts of hardship. And while the ducal family wandered about in this way – climbing mountains, and shooting hyenas, and saving money, the Duke’s place or seat, Dulham Towers, was practically shut up, with no one in it but servants and housekeepers and gamekeepers and tourists; and the picture galleries, except for artists and visitors and villagers, were closed; and the town house, except for the presence of servants and tradesmen and secretaries, was absolutely shut. But the Duke knew that rigid parsimony of this sort, if kept up for a generation or two, will work wonders, and this sustained him; and the Duchess knew it, and it sustained her; in fact, all the ducal family, knowing that it was only a matter of a generation or two, took their misfortune very cheerfully.

The only thing that bothered the Duke was borrowing money. This was necessary from time to time when loans or mortgages fell in, but he hated it. It was beneath him. His ancestors had often taken money, but had never borrowed it, and the Duke chafed under the necessity. There was something about the process that went against the grain. To sit down in pleasant converse with a man, perhaps almost a gentleman, and then lead up to the subject and take his money from him, seemed to the Duke’s mind essentially low. He could have understood knocking a man over the head with a fire shovel and taking his money, but not borrowing it.

So the Duke had come to America, where borrowing is notoriously easy. Any member of the Mausoleum Club, for instance, would borrow fifty cents to buy a cigar, or fifty thousand dollars to buy a house, or five millions to buy a railroad with complete indifference, and pay it back, too, if he could, and think nothing of it. In fact, ever so many of the Duke’s friends were known to have borrowed money in America with magical ease, pledging for it their seats or their pictures, or one of their daughters – anything.

So the Duke knew it must be easy. And yet, incredible as it may seem, he had spent four days in New York, entertained everywhere, and made much of, and hadn’t borrowed a cent. He had been asked to lunch in a Riverside palace, and, fool that he was, had come away without so much as a dollar to show for it. He had been asked to a country house on the Hudson, and, like an idiot – he admitted it himself – hadn’t asked his host for as much as his train fare. He had been driven twice round Central Park in a motor and had been taken tamely back to his hotel not a dollar the richer. The thing was childish, and he knew it. But to save his life the Duke didn’t know how to begin. None of the things that he was able to talk about seemed to have the remotest connection with the subject of money. The Duke was able to converse reasonably well over such topics as the approaching downfall of England (they had talked of it at Dulham Towers for sixty years), or over the duty of England towards China, or the duty of England to Persia, or its duty to aid the Young Turk Movement, and its duty to check the Old Servia agitation. The Duke became so interested in these topics and in explaining that while he had never been a Little Englander he had always been a Big Turk, and that he stood for a Small Bulgaria and a Restricted Austria, that he got further and further away from the topic of money, which was what he really wanted to come to; and the Duke rose from his conversations with a look of such obvious distress on his face that everybody realized that his anxiety about England was killing him.

And then suddenly light had come. It was on his fourth day in New York that he unexpectedly ran into the Viscount Belstairs (they had been together as young men in Nigeria, and as middle-aged men in St. Petersburg), and Belstairs, who was in abundant spirits and who was returning to England on the Gloritania at noon the next day, explained to the Duke that he had just borrowed fifty thousand pounds, on security that wouldn’t be worth a halfpenny in England.

And the Duke said with a sigh, “How the deuce do you do it. Belstairs?”

“Do what?”

“Borrow it,” said the Duke. “How do you manage to get people to talk about it? Here I am wanting to borrow a hundred thousand, and I’m hanged if I can even find an opening.”

At which the Viscount had said, “Pooh, pooh! you don’t need any opening. Just borrow it straight out – ask for it across a dinner table, just as you’d ask for a match; they think nothing of it here.”

“Across the dinner table?” repeated the Duke, who was a literal man.

“Certainly,” said the Viscount. “Not too soon, you know – say after a second glass of wine. I assure you it’s absolutely nothing.”

And it was just at that moment that a telegram was handed to the Duke from Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, praying him, as he was reported to be visiting the next day the City where the Mausoleum Club stands, to make acquaintance with him by dining at that institution.

And the Duke, being as I say a literal man, decided that just as soon as Mr. Fyshe should give him a second glass of wine, that second glass should cost Mr. Fyshe a hundred thousand pounds sterling.

And oddly enough, at about the same moment, Mr. Fyshe was calculating that provided he could make the Duke drink a second glass of the Mausoleum champagne, that glass would cost the Duke about five million dollars.

—

So the very morning after that the Duke had arrived on the New York express in the City; and being an ordinary, democratic, commercial sort of place, absorbed in its own affairs, it made no fuss over him whatever. The morning edition of the Plutopian Citizen simply said, “We understand that the Duke of Dulham arrives at the Grand Palaver this morning,” after which it traced the Duke’s pedigree back to Jock of Ealing in the twelfth century and let the matter go at that; and the noon edition of the People’s Advocate merely wrote, “We learn that Duke Dulham is in town. He is a relation of Jack Ealing.” But the Commercial Echo and Financial Undertone, appearing at four o’clock, printed in its stock-market columns the announcement: “We understand that the Duke of Dulham, who arrives in town today, is proposing to invest a large sum of money in American Industrials.”

And, of course, that announcement reached every member of the Mausoleum Club within twenty minutes.

—

The Duke of Dulham entered the Mausoleum Club that evening at exactly seven of the clock. He was a short, thick man with a shaven face, red as a brick, and grizzled hair, and from the look of him he could have got a job at sight in any lumber camp in Wisconsin. He wore a dinner jacket, just like an ordinary person, but even without his Norfolk coat and his hobnailed boots there was something in the way in which he walked up the long main hall of the Mausoleum Club that every imported waiter in the place recognized in an instant.

The Duke cast his eye about the club and approved of it. It seemed to him a modest, quiet place, very different from the staring ostentation that one sees too often in a German hof or an Italian palazzo. He liked it.

Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Furlong were standing in a deep alcove or bay where there was a fire and india-rubber trees and pictures with shaded lights and a whiskey-and-soda table. There the Duke joined them. Mr. Fyshe he had met already that afternoon at the Palaver, and he called him “Fyshe” as if he had known him forever; and indeed, after a few minutes he called the rector of St. Asaph’s simply “Furlong,” for he had been familiar with the Anglican clergy in so many parts of the world that he knew that to attribute any peculiar godliness to them, socially, was the worst possible taste.

“By Jove,” said the Duke, turning to tap the leaf of a rubber tree with his finger, “that fellow’s a Nigerian, isn’t he?”

“I hardly know,” said Mr. Fyshe, “I imagine so”; and he added, “You’ve been in Nigeria, Duke?”

“Oh, some years ago,” said the Duke, “after big game, you know – fine place for it.”

“Did you get any?” asked Mr. Fyshe.

“Not much,” said the Duke; “a hippo or two.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Fyshe.

“And, of course, now and then a giro,” the Duke went on, and added, “My sister was luckier, though; she potted a rhino one day, straight out of a doolie; I call that rather good.”

Mr. Fyshe called it that too.

“Ah, now here’s a good thing,” the Duke went on, looking at a picture. He carried in his waistcoat pocket an eyeglass that he used for pictures and for Tamworth hogs, and he put it to his eye with one hand, keeping the other in the left pocket of his jacket; “and this – this is a very good thing.”

“I believe so,” said Mr. Fyshe.

“You really have some awfully good things here,” continued the Duke. He had seen far too many pictures in too many places ever to speak of “values” or “compositions” or anything of that sort. The Duke merely looked at a picture and said, “Now here’s a good thing,” or “Ah! here now is a very good thing,” or, “I say, here’s a really good thing.”

No one could get past this sort of criticism. The Duke had long since found it bullet-proof.

“They showed me some rather good things in New York,” he went on, “but really the things you have here seem to be awfully good things.”

Indeed, the Duke was truly pleased with the pictures, for something in their composition, or else in the soft, expensive light that shone on them, enabled him to see in the distant background of each a hundred thousand sterling. And that is a very beautiful picture indeed.

“When you come to our side of the water, Fyshe,” said the Duke, “I must show you my Botticelli.”

Had Mr. Fyshe, who knew nothing of art, expressed his real thought, he would have said, “Show me your which?” But he only answered, “I shall be delighted to see it.”

In any case there was no time to say more, for at this moment the portly figure and the great face of Dr. Boomer, president of Plutoria University, loomed upon them. And with him came a great burst of conversation that blew all previous topics into fragments. He was introduced to the Duke, and shook hands with Mr. Furlong, and talked to both of them, and named the kind of cocktail that he wanted, all in one breath, and in the very next he was asking the Duke about the Babylonian hieroglyphic bricks that his grandfather, the thirteenth Duke, had brought home from the Euphrates, and which every archaeologist knew were preserved in the Duke’s library at Dulham Towers. And though the Duke hadn’t known about the bricks himself, he assured Dr. Boomer that his grandfather had collected some really good things, quite remarkable.

And the Duke, having met a man who knew about his grandfather, felt in his own element. In fact, he was so delighted with Dr. Boomer and the Nigerian rubber tree and the shaded pictures and the charm of the whole place and the certainty that half a million dollars was easily findable in it, that he put his eyeglass back in his pocket and said.

“A charming club you have here, really most charming.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Fyshe, in a casual tone, “a comfortable place, we like to think.”

But if he could have seen what was happening below in the kitchens of the Mausoleum Club, Mr. Fyshe would have realized that just then it was turning into a most uncomfortable place.

For the walking delegate with his hat on sideways, who had haunted it all day, was busy now among the assembled Chinese philosophers, writing down names and distributing strikers’ cards of the International Union and assuring them that the “boys” of the Grand Palaver had all walked out at seven, and that all the “boys” of the Commercial and the Union and of every restaurant in town were out an hour ago.

And the philosophers were taking their cards and hanging up their waiters’ coats and putting on shabby jackets and bowler hats, worn sideways, and changing themselves by a wonderful transformation from respectable Chinese to slouching loafers of the lowest type.

But Mr. Fyshe, being in an alcove and not in the kitchens, saw nothing of these things. Not even when the head waiter, shaking with apprehension, appeared with cocktails made by himself, in glasses that he himself had had to wipe, did Mr. Fyshe, absorbed in the easy urbanity of the Duke, notice that anything was amiss.

Neither did his guests. For Dr. Boomer, having discovered that the Duke had visited Nigeria, was asking him his opinion of the famous Bimbaweh remains of the lower Niger. The Duke confessed that he really hadn’t noticed them, and the Doctor assured him that Strabo had indubitably mentioned them (he would show the Duke the very passage), and that they apparently lay, if his memory served him, about halfway between Oohat and Ohat; whether above Oohat and below Ohat or above Ohat and below Oohat he would not care to say for a certainty; for that the Duke must wait till the president had time to consult his library.

And the Duke was fascinated forthwith with the president’s knowledge of Nigerian geography, and explained that he had once actually descended from below Timbuctoo to Oohat in a doolie manned only by four swats.

So presently, having drunk the cocktails, the party moved solemnly in a body from the alcove towards the private dining-room upstairs, still busily talking of the Bimbaweh remains, and the swats, and whether the doolie was, or was not, the original goatskin boat of the book of Genesis.

And when they entered the private dining-room with its snow-white table and cut glass and flowers (as arranged by a retreating philosopher now heading towards the Gaiety Theatre with his hat over his eyes), the Duke again exclaimed,

“Really, you have a most comfortable club – delightful.”

So they sat down to dinner, over which Mr. Furlong offered up a grace as short as any that are known even to the Anglican clergy. And the head waiter, now in deep distress – for he had been sending out telephone messages in vain to the Grand Palaver and the Continental, like the captain of a sinking ship – served oysters that he had opened himself and poured Rhine wine with a trembling hand. For he knew that unless by magic a new chef and a waiter or two could be got from the Palaver, all hope was lost.

But the guests still knew nothing of his fears. Dr. Boomer was eating his oysters as a Nigerian hippo might eat up the crew of a doolie, in great mouthfuls, and commenting as he did so upon the luxuriousness of modern life.

And in the pause that followed the oysters he illustrated for the Duke with two pieces of bread the essential difference in structure between the Mexican pueblo and the tribal house of the Navajos, and lest the Duke should confound either or both of them with the adobe hut of the Bimbaweh tribes he showed the difference at once with a couple of olives.

By this time, of course, the delay in the service was getting noticeable. Mr. Fyshe was directing angry glances towards the door, looking for the reappearance of the waiter, and growling an apology to his guests. But the president waved the apology aside.

“In my college days,” he said, “I should have considered a plate of oysters an ample meal. I should have asked for nothing more. We eat,” he said, “too much.”

This, of course, started Mr. Fyshe on his favourite topic. “Luxury!” he exclaimed, “I should think so! It is the curse of the age. The appalling growth of luxury, the piling up of money, the ease with which huge fortunes are made” (Good! thought the Duke, here we are coming to it), “these are the things that are going to ruin us. Mark my words, the whole thing is bound to end in a tremendous crash. I don’t mind telling you, Duke-my friends here, I am sure, know it already – that I am more or less a revolutionary socialist. I am absolutely convinced, sir, that our modern civilization will end in a great social catastrophe. Mark what I say” – and here Mr. Fyshe became exceedingly impressive – “a great social catastrophe. Some of us may not live to see it, perhaps; but you, for instance, Furlong, are a younger man; you certainly will.”

But here Mr. Fyshe was understating the case. They were all going to live to see it, right on the spot.

For it was just at this moment, when Mr. Fyshe was talking of the social catastrophe and explaining with flashing eyes that it was bound to come, that it came; and when it came it lit, of all places in the world, right there in the private dining-room of the Mausoleum Club.

For the gloomy head waiter re-entered and leaned over the back of Mr. Fyshe’s chair and whispered to him.

“Eh? what?” said Mr. Fyshe.

The head waiter, his features stricken with inward agony, whispered again.

“The infernal, damn scoundrels!” said Mr. Fyshe, starting back in his chair. “On strike: in this club! It’s an outrage!”

“I’m very sorry sir. I didn’t like to tell you, sir. I’d hoped I might have got help from the outside, but it seems, sir, the hotels are all the same way.”

“Do you mean to say,” said Mr. Fyshe, speaking very slowly, “that there is no dinner?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” moaned the waiter. “It appears the chef hadn’t even cooked it. Beyond what’s on the table, sir, there’s nothing.”

The social catastrophe had come.

Mr. Fyshe sat silent with his fist clenched. Dr. Boomer, with his great face transfixed, stared at the empty oyster-shells, thinking perhaps of his college days. The Duke, with his hundred thousand dashed from his lips in the second cup of champagne that was never served, thought of his politeness first and murmured something about taking them to his hotel.

But there is no need to follow the unhappy details of the unended dinner. Mr. Fyshe’s one idea was to be gone: he was too true an artist to think that finance could be carried on over the table-cloth of a second-rate restaurant, or on an empty stomach in a deserted club. The thing must be done over again; he must wait his time and begin anew.

And so it came about that the little dinner party of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe dissolved itself into its constituent elements, like broken pieces of society in the great cataclysm portrayed by Mr. Fyshe himself.

The Duke was bowled home in a snorting motor to the brilliant rotunda of the Grand Palaver, itself waiterless and supperless.

The rector of St. Asaph’s wandered off home to his rectory, musing upon the contents of its pantry.

And Mr. Fyshe and the gigantic Doctor walked side by side homewards along Plutoria Avenue, beneath the elm trees. Nor had they gone any great distance before Dr. Boomer fell to talking of the Duke.

“A charming man,” he said, “delightful. I feel extremely sorry for him.”

“No worse off, I presume, than any of the rest of us,” growled Mr. Fyshe, who was feeling in the sourest of democratic moods; “a man doesn’t need to be a duke to have a stomach.”

“Oh, pooh, pooh!” said the president, waving the topic aside with his hand in the air; “I don’t refer to that. Oh, not at all. I was thinking of his financial position – an ancient family like the Dulhams; it seems too bad altogether.”

For, of course, to an archaeologist like Dr. Boomer an intimate acquaintance with the pedigree and fortunes of the greater ducal families from Jock of Ealing downwards was nothing. It went without saying. As beside the Neanderthal skull and the Bimbaweh ruins it didn’t count.

Mr. Fyshe stopped absolutely still in his tracks. “His financial position?” he questioned, quick as a lynx.

“Certainly,” said Dr. Boomer; “I had taken it for granted that you knew. The Dulham family are practically ruined. The Duke, I imagine, is under the necessity of mortgaging his estates; indeed, I should suppose he is here in America to raise money.”

Mr. Fyshe was a man of lightning action. Any man accustomed to the Stock Exchange learns to think quickly.

“One moment!” he cried; “I see we are right at your door. May I just run in and use your telephone? I want to call up Boulder for a moment.”

Two minutes later Mr. Fyshe was saying into the telephone, “Oh, is that you, Boulder? I was looking for you in vain today – wanted you to meet the Duke of Dulham, who came in quite unexpectedly from New York; felt sure you’d like to meet him. Wanted you at the club for dinner, and now it turns out that the club’s all upset – waiters’ strike or some such rascality – and the Palaver, so I hear, is in the same fix. Could you possibly—”

Here Mr. Fyshe paused, listening a moment, and then went on, “Yes, yes; an excellent idea – most kind of you. Pray do send your motor to the hotel and give the Duke a bite of dinner. No, I wouldn’t join you, thanks. Most kind. Good night—”

And within a few minutes more the motor of Mr. Boulder was rolling down from Plutoria Avenue to the Grand Palaver Hotel.

What passed between Mr. Boulder and the Duke that evening is not known. That they must have proved congenial company to one another there is no doubt. In fact, it would seem that, dissimilar as they were in many ways, they found a common bond of interest in sport. And it is quite likely that Mr. Boulder may have mentioned that he had a hunting-lodge – what the Duke would call a shooting-box – in Wisconsin woods, and that it was made of logs, rough cedar logs not squared, and that the timber wolves and others which surrounded it were of a ferocity without parallel.

Those who know the Duke best could measure the effect of that upon his temperament.

At any rate, it is certain that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe at his breakfast-table next morning chuckled with suppressed joy to read in the Plutopian Citizen the item:

“We learn that the Duke of Dulham, who has been paying a brief visit to the City, leaves this morning with Mr. Asmodeus Boulder for the Wisconsin woods. We understand that Mr. Boulder intends to show his guest, who is an ardent sportsman, something of the American wolf.”

—

And so the Duke went whirling westwards and northwards with Mr. Boulder in the drawing-room end of a Pullman car, that was all littered up with double-barrelled express rifles and leather game bags and lynx catchers and wolf traps and Heaven knows what. And the Duke had on his very roughest sporting-suit, made, apparently, of alligator hide; and as he sat there with a rifle across his knees, while the train swept onwards through open fields and broken woods, the real country at last, towards the Wisconsin forest, there was such a light of genial happiness in his face that had not been seen there since he had been marooned in the mud jungles of Upper Burmah.

And opposite, Mr. Boulder looked at him with fixed silent eyes, and murmured from time to time some renewed information of the ferocity of the timber-wolf.

But of wolves other than the timber-wolf, and fiercer still into whose hands the Duke might fall in America, he spoke never a word.

Nor is it known in the record what happened in Wisconsin, and to the Mausoleum Club the Duke and his visit remained only as a passing and a pleasant memory.

TOC     INDEX

II

The Wizard of Finance

Down in the City itself, just below the residential street where the Mausoleum Club is situated, there stands overlooking Central Square the Grand Palaver Hotel. It is, in truth, at no great distance from the club, not half a minute in one’s motor. In fact, one could almost walk it.

But in Central Square the quiet of Plutoria Avenue is exchanged for another atmosphere. There are fountains that splash unendingly and mingle their music with the sound of the motor-horns and the clatter of the cabs. There are real trees and little green benches, with people reading yesterday’s newspaper, and grass cut into plots among the asphalt. There is at one end a statue of the first governor of the state, life-size, cut in stone; and at the other a statue of the last, ever so much larger than life, cast in bronze. And all the people who pass by pause and look at this statue and point at it with walking-sticks, because it is of extraordinary interest; in fact, it is an example of the new electro-chemical process of casting by which you can cast a state governor any size you like, no matter what you start from. Those who know about such things explain what an interesting contrast the two statues are; for in the case of the governor of a hundred years ago one had to start from plain, rough material and work patiently for years to get the effect, whereas now the material doesn’t matter at all, and with any sort of scrap, treated in the gas furnace under tremendous pressure, one may make a figure of colossal size like the one in Central Square.

So naturally Central Square with its trees and its fountains and its statues is one of the places of chief interest in the City. But especially because there stands along one side of it the vast pile of the Grand Palaver Hotel. It rises fifteen stories high and fills all one side of the square. It has, overlooking the trees in the square, twelve hundred rooms with three thousand windows, and it would have held all George Washington’s army. Even people in other cities who have never seen it know it well from its advertising; “the most homelike hotel in America,” so it is labelled in all the magazines, the expensive ones, on the continent. In fact, the aim of the company that owns the Grand Palaver – and they do not attempt to conceal it – is to make the place as much a home as possible. Therein lies its charm. It is a home. You realize that when you look up at the Grand Palaver from the square at night when the twelve hundred guests have turned on the lights of the three thousand windows. You realize it at theatre time when the great string of motors come sweeping to the doors of the Palaver, to carry the twelve hundred guests to twelve hundred seats in the theatres at four dollars a seat. But most of all do you appreciate the character of the Grand Palaver when you step into its rotunda. Aladdin’s enchanted palace was nothing to it. It has a vast ceiling with a hundred glittering lights, and within it night and day is a surging crowd that is never still and a babel of voices that is never hushed, and over all there hangs an enchanted cloud of thin blue tobacco smoke such as might enshroud the conjured vision of a magician of Baghdad or Damascus.

In and through the rotunda there are palm trees to rest the eye and rubber trees in boxes to soothe the mind, and there are great leather lounges and deep armchairs, and here and there huge brass ash-bowls as big as Etruscan tear-jugs. Along one side is a counter with grated wickets like a bank, and behind it are five clerks with flattened hair and tall collars, dressed in long black frock-coats all day like members of a legislature. They have great books in front of them in which they study unceasingly, and at their lightest thought they strike a bell with the open palm of their hand, and at the sound of it a page boy in a monkey suit, with G.P. stamped all over him in brass, bounds to the desk and off again, shouting a call into the unheeding crowd vociferously. The sound of it fills for a moment the great space of the rotunda; it echoes down the corridors to the side; it floats, softly melodious, through the palm trees of the ladies’ palm room; it is heard, fainter and fainter, in the distant grill; and in the depths of the barber shop below the level of the street the barber arrests a moment-the drowsy hum of his shampoo brushes to catch the sound – as might a miner in the sunken galleries of a coastal mine cease in his toil a moment to hear the distant murmur of the sea.

And the clerks call for the pages, the pages call for the guests, and the guests call for the porters, the bells clang, the elevators rattle, till home itself was never half so homelike.

—

“A call for Mr. Tomlinson! A call for Mr. Tomlinson!”

So went the sound, echoing through the rotunda.

And as the page boy found him and handed him on a salver a telegram to read, the eyes of the crowd about him turned for a moment to look upon the figure of Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance.

There he stood in his wide-awake hat and his long black coat, his shoulders slightly bent with his fifty-eight years. Anyone who had known him in the olden days on his bush farm beside Tomlinson’s Creek in the country of the Great Lakes would have recognized him in a moment. There was still on his face that strange, puzzled look that it habitually wore, only now, of course, the financial papers were calling it “unfathomable.” There was a certain way in which his eye roved to and fro inquiringly that might have looked like perplexity, were it not that the Financial Undertone had recognized it as the “searching look of a captain of industry.” One might have thought that for all the goodness in it there was something simple in his face, were it not that the Commercial and Pictorial Review had called the face “inscrutable,” and had proved it so with an illustration that left no doubt of the matter. Indeed, the face of Tomlinson of Tomlinson’s Creek, now Tomlinson the Wizard of Finance, was not commonly spoken of as a face by the paragraphers of the Saturday magazine sections, but was more usually referred to as a mask; and it would appear that Napoleon the First had had one also. The Saturday editors were never tired of describing the strange, impressive personality of Tomlinson, the great dominating character of the newest and highest finance. From the moment when the interim prospectus of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated had broken like a tidal wave over Stock Exchange circles, the picture of Tomlinson, the sleeping shareholder of uncomputed millions, had filled the imagination of every dreamer in a nation of poets.

They all described him. And when each had finished he began again.

“The face,” so wrote the editor of the “Our Own Men” section of Ourselves Monthly, “is that of a typical American captain of finance, hard, yet with a certain softness, broad but with a certain length, ductile but not without its own firmness.”

“The mouth,” so wrote the editor of the “Success” column of Brains, “is strong but pliable, the jaw firm and yet movable, while there is something in the set of the ear that suggests the swift, eager mind of the born leader of men.”

So from state to state ran the portrait of Tomlinson of Tomlinson’s Creek, drawn by people who had never seen him; so did it reach out and cross the ocean, till the French journals inserted a picture which they used for such occasions, and called it Monsieur Tomlinson, nouveau capitaine de la haute finance en Amerique; and the German weeklies, inserting also a suitable picture from their stock, marked it Herr Tomlinson, Amerikanischer Industrie und Finanzcapitan. Thus did Tomlinson float from Tomlinson’s Creek beside Lake Erie to the very banks of the Danube and the Drave.

Some writers grew lyric about him. What visions, they asked, could one but read them, must lie behind the quiet, dreaming eyes of that inscrutable face?

They might have read them easily enough, had they but had the key. Anyone who looked upon Tomlinson as he stood there in the roar and clatter of the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver with the telegram in his hand, fumbling at the wrong end to open it, might have read the visions of the master-mind had he but known their nature. They were simple enough. For the visions in the mind of Tomlinson, Wizard of Finance, were for the most part those of a wind-swept hillside farm beside Lake Erie, where Tomlinson’s Creek runs down to the low edge of the lake, and where the off-shore wind ripples the rushes of the shallow water: that, and the vision of a frame house, and the snake fences of the fourth concession road where it falls to the lakeside. And if the eyes of the man are dreamy and abstracted, it is because there lies over the vision of this vanished farm an infinite regret, greater in its compass than all the shares the Erie Auriferous Consolidated has ever thrown upon the market.

—

When Tomlinson had opened the telegram he stood with it for a moment in his hand, looking the boy full in the face. His look had in it that peculiar far-away quality that the newspapers were calling “Napoleonic abstraction.” In reality he was wondering whether to give the boy twenty-five cents or fifty.

The message that he had just read was worded, “Morning quotations show preferred A. G. falling rapidly recommend instant sale no confidence send instructions.”

The Wizard of Finance took from his pocket a pencil (it was a carpenter’s pencil) and wrote across the face of the message: “Buy me quite a bit more of the same yours truly.”

This he gave to the boy. “Take it over to him,” he said, pointing to the telegraph corner of the rotunda. Then after another pause he mumbled, “Here, sonny,” and gave the boy a dollar.

With that he turned to walk towards the elevator, and all the people about him who had watched the signing of the message knew that some big financial deal was going through – a coup, in fact, they called it.

The elevator took the Wizard to the second floor. As he went up he felt in his pocket and gripped a quarter, then changed his mind and felt for a fifty-cent piece, and finally gave them both to the elevator boy, after which he walked along the corridor till he reached the corner suite of rooms, a palace in itself, for which he was paying a thousand dollars a month ever since the Erie Auriferous Consolidated Company had begun tearing up the bed of Tomlinson’s Creek in Cahoga County with its hydraulic dredges.

“Well, mother,” he said as he entered.

There was a woman seated near the window, a woman with a plain, homely face such as they wear in the farm kitchens of Cahoga County, and a set of fashionable clothes upon her such as they sell to the ladies of Plutoria Avenue.

This was “mother,” the wife of the Wizard of Finance and eight years younger than himself. And she, too, was in the papers and the public eye; and whatsoever the shops had fresh from Paris, at fabulous prices, that they sold to mother. They had put a Balkan hat upon her with an upright feather, and they had hung gold chains on her, and everything that was most expensive they had hung and tied on mother. You might see her emerging any morning from the Grand Palaver in her beetle-back jacket and her Balkan hat, a figure of infinite pathos. And whatever she wore, the lady editors of Spring Notes and Causerie du Boudoir wrote it out in French, and one paper had called her a belle chatelaine, and another had spoken of her as a grande dame, which the Tomlinsons thought must be a misprint.

But in any case, for Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, it was a great relief to have as his wife a woman like mother, because he knew that she had taught school in Cahoga County and could hold her own in the city with any of them.

So mother spent her time sitting in her beetle jacket in the thousand-dollar suite, reading new novels in brilliant paper covers. And the Wizard on his trips up and down to the rotunda brought her the very best, the ones that cost a dollar fifty, because he knew that out home she had only been able to read books like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walter Scott, that were only worth ten cents.

—

“How’s Fred?” said the Wizard, laying aside his hat, and looking towards the closed door of an inner room. “Is he better?”

“Some,” said mother. “He’s dressed, but he’s lying down.”

Fred was the son of the Wizard and mother. In the inner room he lay on a sofa, a great hulking boy of seventeen in a flowered dressing-gown, fancying himself ill. There was a packet of cigarettes and a box of chocolates on a chair beside him, and he had the blind drawn and his eyes half-closed to impress himself.

Yet this was the same boy that less than a year ago on Tomlinson’s Creek had worn a rough store suit and set his sturdy shoulders to the buck-saw. At present Fortune was busy taking from him the golden gifts which the fairies of Cahoga County, Lake Erie, had laid in his cradle seventeen years ago.

The Wizard tip-toed into the inner room, and from the open door his listening wife could hear the voice of the boy saying, in a tone as of one distraught with suffering.

“Is there any more of that jelly?”

“Could he have any, do you suppose?” asked Tomlinson coming back.

“It’s all right,” said mother, “if it will sit on his stomach.” For this, in the dietetics of Cahoga County, is the sole test. All those things can be eaten which will sit on the stomach. Anything that won’t sit there is not eatable.

“Do you suppose I could get them to get any?” questioned Tomlinson. “Would it be all right to telephone down to the office, or do you think it would be better to ring?”

“Perhaps,” said his wife, “it would be better to look out into the hall and see if there isn’t someone round that would tell them.”

This was the kind of problem with which Tomlinson and his wife, in their thousand-dollar suite in the Grand Palaver, grappled all day. And when presently a tall waiter in dress-clothes appeared, and said, “Jelly? Yes, sir, immediately, sir; would you like, sir, Maraschino, sir, or Portovino, sir?” Tomlinson gazed at him gloomily, wondering if he would take five dollars.

“What does the doctor say is wrong with Fred?” asked Tomlinson, when the waiter had gone.

“He don’t just say,” said mother; “he said he must keep very quiet. He looked in this morning for a minute or two, and he said he’d look in later in the day again. But he said to keep Fred very quiet.”

Exactly! In other words Fred had pretty much the same complaint as the rest of Dr. Slyder’s patients on Plutoria Avenue, and was to be treated in the same way. Dr. Slyder, who was the most fashionable practitioner in the City, spent his entire time moving to and fro in an almost noiseless motor earnestly advising people to keep quiet. “You must keep very quiet for a little while,” he would say with a sigh, as he sat beside a sick-bed. As he drew on his gloves in the hall below he would shake his head very impressively and say, “You must keep him very quiet,” and so pass out, quite soundlessly. By this means Dr. Slyder often succeeded in keeping people quiet for weeks. It was all the medicine that he knew. But it was enough. And as his patients always got well – there being nothing wrong with them – his reputation was immense.

Very naturally the Wizard and his wife were impressed with him. They had never seen such therapeutics in Cahoga County, where the practice of medicine is carried on with forceps, pumps, squirts, splints, and other instruments of violence.

The waiter had hardly gone when a boy appeared at the door. This time he presented to Tomlinson not one telegram but a little bundle of them.

The Wizard read them with a lengthening face. The first ran something like this, “Congratulate you on your daring market turned instantly”; and the next, “Your opinion justified market rose have sold at 20 points profit”; and a third, “Your forecast entirely correct C. P. rose at once send further instructions.”

These and similar messages were from brokers’ offices, and all of them were in the same tone; one told him that C. P. was up, and another T. G. P. had passed 129, and another that T. C. R. R. had risen ten – all of which things were imputed to the wonderful sagacity of Tomlinson. Whereas if they had told him that X. Y. Z. had risen to the moon he would have been just as wise as to what it meant.

“Well,” said the wife of the Wizard as her husband finished looking through the reports, “how are things this morning? Are they any better?”

“No,” said Tomlinson, and he sighed as he said it; “this is the worst day yet. It’s just been a shower of telegrams, and mostly all the same. I can’t do the figuring of it like you can, but I reckon I must have made another hundred thousand dollars since yesterday.”

“You don’t say so!” said mother, and they looked at one another gloomily.

“And half a million last week, wasn’t it?” said Tomlinson as he sank into a chair. “I’m afraid, mother,” he continued, “it’s no good. We don’t know how. We weren’t brought up to it.”

All of which meant that if the editor of the Monetary Afternoon or Financial Sunday had been able to know what was happening with the two wizards, he could have written up a news story calculated to electrify all America.

For the truth was that Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, was attempting to carry out a coup greater than any as yet attributed to him by the Press. He was trying to lose his money. That, in the sickness of his soul, crushed by the Grand Palaver, overwhelmed with the burden of high finance, had become his aim, to be done with it, to get rid of his whole fortune.

But if you own a fortune that is computed anywhere from fifty millions up, with no limit at the top, if you own one-half of all the preferred stock of an Erie Auriferous Consolidated that is digging gold in hydraulic bucketfuls from a quarter of a mile of river bed, the task of losing it is no easy matter.

There are men, no doubt, versed in finance, who might succeed in doing it. But they have a training that Tomlinson lacked. Invest it as he would in the worst securities that offered, the most rickety of stock, the most fraudulent bonds, back it came to him. When he threw a handful away, back came two in its place. And at every new coup the crowd applauded the incomparable daring, the unparalleled prescience of the Wizard.

Like the touch of Midas, his hand turned everything to gold.

“Mother,” he repeated, “it’s no use. It’s like this here Destiny, as the books call it.”

—

The great fortune that Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, was trying his best to lose had come to him with wonderful suddenness. As yet it was hardly six months old. As to how it had originated, there were all sorts of stories afloat in the weekly illustrated press. They agreed mostly on the general basis that Tomlinson had made his vast fortune by his own indomitable pluck and dogged industry. Some said that he had been at one time a mere farm hand who, by sheer doggedness, had fought his way from the hay-mow to the control of the produce market of seventeen states. Others had it that he had been a lumberjack who, by sheer doggedness, had got possession of the whole lumber forest of the Lake district. Others said that he had been a miner in a Lake Superior copper mine who had, by the doggedness of his character, got a practical monopoly of the copper supply. These Saturday articles, at any rate, made the Saturday reader rigid with sympathetic doggedness himself, which was all that the editor (who was doggedly trying to make the paper pay) wanted to effect.

But in reality the making of Tomlinson’s fortune was very simple. The recipe for it is open to anyone. It is only necessary to own a hillside farm beside Lake Erie where the uncleared bush and the broken fields go straggling down to the lake, and to have running through it a creek, such as that called Tomlinson’s, brawling among the stones and willows, and to discover in the bed of a creek – a gold mine.

That is all.

Nor is it necessary in these well-ordered days to discover the gold for one’s self. One might have lived a lifetime on the farm, as Tomlinson’s father had, and never discover it for one’s self. For that indeed the best medium of destiny is a geologist, let us say the senior professor of geology at Plutoria University. That was how it happened.

The senior professor, so it chanced, was spending his vacation near by on the shores of the lake, and his time was mostly passed – for how better can a man spend a month of pleasure? – in looking for outcroppings of Devonian rock of the post-tertiary period. For which purpose he carried a vacation hammer in his pocket, and made from time to time a note or two as he went along, or filled his pockets with the chippings of vacation rocks.

So it chanced that he came to Tomlinson’s Creek at the very point where a great slab of Devonian rock bursts through the clay of the bank. When the senior professor of geology saw it and noticed a stripe like a mark on a tiger’s back – a fault he called it – that ran over the face of the block, he was at it in an instant, beating off fragments with his little hammer.

Tomlinson and his boy Fred were logging in the underbrush near by with a long chain and yoke of oxen, but the geologist was so excited that he did not see them till the sound of his eager hammer had brought them to his side. They took him up to the frame house in the clearing, where the chatelaine was hoeing a potato patch with a man’s hat on her head, and they gave him buttermilk and soda cakes, but his hand shook so that he could hardly eat them.

The geologist left Cahoga station that night for the City with a newspaper full of specimens inside his suit-case, and he knew that if any person or persons would put up money enough to tear that block of rock away and follow the fissure down, there would be found there something to astonish humanity, geologists and all.

—

After that point in the launching of a gold mine the rest is easy. Generous, warm-hearted men, interested in geology, were soon found. There was no stint of money. The great rock was torn sideways from its place, and from beneath it the crumbled, glittering rock-dust that sparkled in the sun was sent in little boxes to the testing laboratories of Plutoria University. There the senior professor of geology had sat up with it far into the night in a darkened laboratory, with little blue flames playing underneath crucibles, as in a magician’s cavern, and with the door locked. And as each sample that he tested was set aside and tied in a cardboard box by itself, he labelled it “aur. p. 75,” and the pen shook in his hand as he marked it. For to professors of geology those symbols mean “this is seventy-five per cent pure gold.” So it was no wonder that the senior professor of geology working far into the night among the blue flames shook with excitement; not, of course, for the gold’s sake as money (he had no time to think of that), but because if this thing was true it meant that an auriferous vein had been found in what was Devonian rock of the post-tertiary stratification, and if that was so it upset enough geology to spoil a textbook. It would mean that the professor could read a paper at the next Pan-Geological Conference that would turn the whole assembly into a bedlam.

It pleased him, too, to know that the men he was dealing with were generous. They had asked him to name his own price or the tests that he made and when he had said two dollars per sample they had told him to go right ahead. The professor was not, I suppose, a mercenary man, but it pleased him to think that he could, clean up sixteen dollars in a single evening in his laboratory. It showed, at any rate, that businessmen put science at its proper value. Strangest of all was the fact that the men had told him that even this ore was apparently nothing to what there was; it had all come out of one single spot in the creek, not the hundredth part of the whole claim. Lower down, where they had thrown the big dam across to make the bed dry, they were taking out this same stuff and even better, so they said, in cartloads. The hydraulic dredges were tearing it from the bed of the creek all day, and at night a great circuit of arc lights gleamed and sputtered over the roaring labour of the friends of geological research.

Thus had the Erie Auriferous Consolidated broken in a tidal wave over financial circles. On the Stock Exchange, in the downtown offices, and among the palm trees of the Mausoleum Club they talked of nothing else. And so great was the power of the wave that it washed Tomlinson and his wife along on the crest of it, and landed them fifty feet up in their thousand-dollar suite in the Grand Palaver. And as a result of it “mother” wore a beetle-back jacket; and Tomlinson received a hundred telegrams a day, and Fred quit school and ate chocolates.

But in the business world the most amazing thing about it was the wonderful shrewdness of Tomlinson.

The first sign of it had been that he had utterly refused to allow the Erie Auriferous Consolidated (as the friends of geology called themselves) to take over the top half of the Tomlinson farm. For the bottom part he let them give him one-half of the preferred stock in the company in return for their supply of development capital. This was their own proposition; in fact, they reckoned that in doing this they were trading about two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of machinery for, say ten million dollars of gold. But it frightened them when Tomlinson said “Yes” to the offer, and when he said that as to common stock they might keep it, it was no use to him, they were alarmed and uneasy till they made him take a block of it for the sake of market confidence.

But the top end of the farm he refused to surrender, and the friends of applied geology knew that there must be something pretty large behind this refusal; the more so as the reason that Tomlinson gave was such a simple one. He said that he didn’t want to part with the top end of the place because his father was buried on it beside the creek, and so he didn’t want the dam higher up, not for any consideration.

This was regarded in business circles as a piece of great shrewdness. “Says his father is buried there, eh? Devilish shrewd that!”

It was so long since any of the members of the Exchange or the Mausoleum Club had wandered into such places as Cahoga County that they did not know that there was nothing strange in what Tomlinson said. His father was buried there, on the farm itself, in a grave overgrown with raspberry bushes, and with a wooden headstone encompassed by a square of cedar rails, and slept as many another pioneer of Cahoga is sleeping.

“Devilish smart idea!” they said; and forthwith half the financial men of the city buried their fathers, or professed to have done so, in likely places – along the prospective right-of-way of a suburban railway, for example; in fact, in any place that marked them out for the joyous resurrection of an expropriation purchase.

Thus the astounding shrewdness of Tomlinson rapidly became a legend, the more so as he turned everything he touched to gold.

They narrated little stories of him in the whiskey-and-soda corners of the Mausoleum Club.

“I put it to him in a casual way,” related, for example, Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, “casually, but quite frankly. I said, ‘See here, this is just a bagatelle to you, no doubt, but to me it might be of some use. T. C. bonds,’ I said, ‘have risen twenty-two and a half in a week. You know as well as I do that they are only collateral trust, and that the stock underneath never could and never can earn a par dividend. Now,’ I said, ‘Mr. Tomlinson, tell me what all that means?’ Would you believe it, the fellow looked me right in the face in that queer way he has and he said, ‘I don’t know!’”

“He said he didn’t know!” repeated the listener, in a tone of amazement and respect. “By Jove! eh? he said he didn’t know! The man’s a wizard!”

“And he looked as if he didn’t!” went on Mr. Fyshe. “That’s the deuce of it. That man when he wants to can put on a look, sir, that simply means nothing, absolutely nothing.”

In this way Tomlinson had earned his name of the Wizard of American Finance.

And meantime Tomlinson and his wife, within their suite at the Grand Palaver, had long since reached their decision. For there was one aspect and only one in which Tomlinson was really and truly a wizard. He saw clearly that for himself and his wife the vast fortune that had fallen to them was of no manner of use. What did it bring them? The noise and roar of the City in place of the silence of the farm and the racket of the great rotunda to drown the remembered murmur of the waters of the creek.

So Tomlinson had decided to rid himself of his new wealth, save only such as might be needed to make his son a different kind of man from himself.

“For Fred, of course,” he said, “it’s different. But out of such a lot as that it’ll be easy to keep enough for him. It’ll be a grand thing for Fred, this money. He won’t have to grow up like you and me. He’ll have opportunities we never got.” He was getting them already. The opportunity to wear seven dollar patent leather shoes and a bell-shaped overcoat with a silk collar, to lounge into moving-picture shows and eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes – all these opportunities he was gathering immediately. Presently, when he learned his way round a little, he would get still bigger ones.

“He’s improving fast,” said mother. She was thinking of his patent leather shoes.

“He’s popular,” said his father. “I notice it downstairs. He sasses any of them just as he likes; and no matter how busy they are, as soon as they see it’s Fred they’re all ready to have a laugh with him.”

Certainly they were, as any hotel clerk with plastered hair is ready to laugh with the son of a multimillionaire. It’s a certain sense of humour that they develop.

“But for us, mother,” said the Wizard, “we’ll be rid of it. The gold is there. It’s not right to keep it back. But we’ll just find a way to pass it on to folks that need it worse than we do.”

For a time they had thought of giving away the fortune. But how? Who did they know that would take it?

It had crossed their minds – for who could live in the City a month without observing the imposing buildings of Plutoria University, as fine as any departmental store in town? – that they might give it to the college.

But there, it seemed, the way was blocked.

“You see, mother,” said the puzzled Wizard, “we’re not known. We’re strangers. I’d look fine going up there to the college and saying, ‘I want to give you people a million dollars.’ They’d laugh at me!”

“But don’t one read it in the papers,” his wife had protested, “where Mr. Carnegie gives ever so much to the colleges, more than all we’ve got, and they take it?”

“That’s different,” said the Wizard. “He’s in with them. They all know him. Why, he’s a sort of chairman of different boards of colleges, and he knows all the heads of the schools, and the professors, so it’s no wonder that if he offers to give a pension, or anything, they take it. Just think of me going up to one of the professors up there in the middle of his teaching and saying; ‘I’d like to give you a pension for life!’ Imagine it! Think what he’d say!”

But the Tomlinsons couldn’t imagine it, which was just as well.

So it came about that they had embarked on their system. Mother, who knew most arithmetic, was the leading spirit. She tracked out all the stocks and bonds in the front page of the Financial Undertone, and on her recommendation the Wizard bought. They knew the stocks only by their letters, but this itself gave a touch of high finance to their deliberations.

“I’d buy some of this R.O.P. if I was you,” said mother; “it’s gone down from 127 to 107 in two days, and I reckon it’ll be all gone in ten days or so.”

“Wouldn’t ‘G.G. deb.’ be better? It goes down quicker.”

“Well, it’s a quick one,” she assented, “but it don’t go down so steady. You can’t rely on it. You take ones like R.O.P. and T.R.R. pfd.; they go down all the time and you know where you are.”

As a result of which, Tomlinson would send his instructions. He did it all from the rotunda in a way of his own that he had evolved with a telegraph clerk who told him the names of brokers, and he dealt thus through brokers whom he never saw. As a result of this, the sluggish R.O.P. and T.R.R. would take as sudden a leap into the air as might a mule with a galvanic shock applied to its tail. At once the word was whispered that the “Tomlinson interests” were after the R.O.P. to reorganize it, and the whole floor of the Exchange scrambled for the stock.

And so it was that after a month or two of these operations the Wizard of Finance saw himself beaten.

“It’s no good, mother,” he repeated, “it’s just a kind of Destiny.”

Destiny perhaps it was.

But, if the Wizard of Finance had known it, at this very moment when he sat with the Aladdin’s palace of his golden fortune reared so strangely about him, Destiny was preparing for him still stranger things.

Destiny, so it would seem, was devising Its own ways and means of dealing with Tomlinson’s fortune. As one of the ways and means, Destiny was sending at this moment as its special emissaries two huge, portly figures, wearing gigantic goloshes, and striding downwards from the halls of Plutoria University to the Grand Palaver Hotel. And one of these was the gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president of the college, and the other was his professor of Greek, almost as gigantic as himself. And they carried in their capacious pockets bundles of pamphlets on “Archaeological Remains of Mitylene,” and the “Use of the Greek Pluperfect,” and little treatises such as “Education and Philanthropy,” by Dr. Boomer, and “The Excavation of Mitylene: An Estimate of Cost,” by Dr. Boyster, “Boomer on the Foundation and Maintenance of Chairs,” etc.

Many a man in city finance who had seen Dr. Boomer enter his office with a bundle of these monographs and a fighting glitter in his eyes had sunk back in his chair in dismay. For it meant that Dr. Boomer had tracked him out for a benefaction to the University, and that all resistance was hopeless.

When Dr. Boomer once laid upon a capitalist’s desk his famous pamphlet on the “Use of the Greek Pluperfect,” it was as if an Arabian sultan had sent the fatal bow-string to a condemned pasha, or Morgan the buccaneer had served the death-sign on a shuddering pirate.

So they came nearer and nearer, shouldering the passers-by. The sound of them as they talked was like the roaring of the sea as Homer heard it. Never did Castor and Pollux come surging into battle as Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster bore down upon the Grand Palaver Hotel.

Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, had hesitated about going to the university. The university was coming to him. As for those millions of his, he could take his choice – dormitories, apparatus, campuses, buildings, endowment, anything he liked but choose he must. And if he feared that, after all, his fortune was too vast even for such a disposal, Dr. Boomer would show him how he might use it in digging up ancient Mitylene, or modern Smyrna, or the lost cities of the Plain of Pactolus. If the size of the fortune troubled him, Dr. Boomer would dig him up the whole African Sahara from Alexandria to Morocco, and ask for more.

But if Destiny held all this for Tomlinson in its outstretched palm before it, it concealed stranger things still beneath the folds of its toga.

There were enough surprises there to turn the faces of the whole directorate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated as yellow as the gold they mined.

For at this very moment, while the president of Plutoria University drew nearer and nearer to the Grand Palaver Hotel, the senior professor of geology was working again beside the blue flames in his darkened laboratory. And this time there was no shaking excitement over him. Nor were the labels that he marked, as sample followed sample in the tests, the same as those of the previous marking. Not by any means.

And his grave face as he worked in silence was as still as the stones of the post-tertiary period.

TOC     INDEX

III

The Arrested Philanthropy
of Mr. Tomlinson

“This, Mr. Tomlinson, is our campus,” said President Boomer as they passed through the iron gates of Plutoria University.

“For camping?” said the Wizard.

“Not exactly,” answered the president, “though it would, of course, suit for that. Nihil humunum alienum, eh?” and he broke into a loud, explosive laugh, while his spectacles irradiated that peculiar form of glee derived from a Latin quotation by those able to enjoy it. Dr. Boyster, walking on the other side of Mr. Tomlinson, joined in the laugh in a deep, reverberating chorus.

The two had the Wizard of Finance between them, and they were marching him up to the University. He was taken along much as is an arrested man who has promised to go quietly. They kept their hands off him, but they watched him sideways through their spectacles. At the least sign of restlessness they doused him with Latin. The Wizard of Finance, having been marked out by Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster as a prospective benefactor, was having Latin poured over him to reduce him to the proper degree of plasticity.

They had already put him through the first stage. They had, three days ago, called on him at the Grand Palaver and served him with a pamphlet on “The Excavation of Mitylene” as a sort of writ. Tomlinson and his wife had looked at the pictures of the ruins, and from the appearance of them they judged that Mitylene was in Mexico, and they said that it was a shame to see it in that state and that the United States ought to intervene.

As the second stage on the path of philanthropy, the Wizard of Finance was now being taken to look at the university. Dr. Boomer knew by experience that no rich man could look at it without wanting to give it money.

And here the president had found that there is no better method of dealing with businessmen than to use Latin on them. For other purposes the president used other things. For example at a friendly dinner at the Mausoleum Club where light conversation was in order, Dr. Boomer chatted, as has been seen, on the archaeological remains of the Navajos. In the same way, at Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s Dante luncheons, he generally talked of the Italian cinquecentisti and whether Gian Gobbo della Scala had left a greater name than Can Grande della Spiggiola. But such talk as that was naturally only for women. Businessmen are much too shrewd for that kind of thing; in fact, so shrewd are they, as President Boomer had long since discovered, that nothing pleases them so much as the quiet, firm assumption that they know Latin. It is like writing them up an asset. So it was that Dr. Boomer would greet a business acquaintance with a roaring salutation of, “Terque quaterque beatus,” or stand wringing his hand off to the tune of “Oh et presidium et dulce decus meum.”

This caught them every time.

“You don’t,” said Tomlinson the Wizard in a hesitating tone as he looked at the smooth grass of the campus, “I suppose, raise anything on it?”

“No, no; this is only for field sports,” said the president; “sunt quos curriculo—”

To which Dr. Boyster on the other side added, like a chorus, “pulverem Olympicum.”

This was their favourite quotation. It always gave President Boomer a chance to speak of the final letter “m” in Latin poetry, and to say that in his opinion the so-called elision of the final “m” was more properly a dropping of the vowel with a repercussion of the two last consonants. He supported this by quoting Ammianus, at which Dr. Boyster exclaimed, “Pooh! Ammianus: more dog Latin!” and appealed to Mr. Tomlinson as to whether any rational man nowadays cared what Ammianus thought?

To all of which Tomlinson answered never a word, but looked steadily first at one and then at the other. Dr. Boomer said afterwards that the penetration of Tomlinson was wonderful, and that it was excellent to see how Boyster tried in vain to draw him; and Boyster said afterwards that the way in which Tomlinson quietly refused to be led on by Boomer was delicious, and that it was a pity that Aristophanes was not there to do it justice.

All of which was happening as they went in at the iron gates and up the elm avenue of Plutoria University.

The university, as everyone knows, stands with its great gates on Plutoria Avenue, and with its largest buildings, those of the faculties of industrial and mechanical science, fronting full upon the street.

These buildings are exceptionally fine, standing fifteen stories high and comparing favourably with the best departmental stores or factories in the City. Indeed, after nightfall, when they are all lighted up for the evening technical classes and when their testing machinery is in full swing and there are students going in and out in overall suits, people have often mistaken the university, or this newer part of it, for a factory. A foreign visitor once said that the students looked like plumbers, and President Boomer was so proud of it that he put the phrase into his next Commencement address; and from there the newspapers got it and the Associated Press took it up and sent it all over the United States with the heading, “Have Appearance of Plumbers; Plutoria University Congratulated on Character of Students,” and it was a proud day indeed for the heads of the Industrial Science faculty.

But the older part of the university stands so quietly and modestly at the top end of the elm avenue, so hidden by the leaves of it, that no one could mistake it for a factory. This, indeed, was once the whole university, and had stood there since colonial days under the name Concordia College. It had been filled with generations of presidents and professors of the older type with long white beards and rusty black clothes, and salaries of fifteen hundred dollars.

But the change both of name and of character from Concordia College to Plutoria University was the work of President Boomer. He had changed it from an old-fashioned college of the by-gone type to a university in the true modern sense. At Plutoria they now taught everything. Concordia College, for example, had no teaching of religion except lectures on the Bible. Now they had lectures also on Confucianism, Mohammedanism Buddhism, with an optional course on atheism for students in the final year.

And, of course, they had long since admitted women, and there were now beautiful creatures with Cleo de Merode hair studying astronomy at oaken desks and looking up at the teacher with eyes like comets. The university taught everything and did everything. It had whirling machines on the top of it that measured the speed of the wind, and deep in its basements it measured earthquakes with a seismograph; it held classes on forestry and dentistry and palmistry; it sent life classes into the slums, and death classes to the city morgue. It offered such a vast variety of themes, topics and subjects to the students, that there was nothing that a student was compelled to learn, while from its own presses in its own press-building it sent out a shower of bulletins and monographs like driven snow from a rotary plough.

In fact, it had become, as President Boomer told all the businessmen in town, not merely a university, but a universitas in the true sense, and every one of its faculties was now a facultas in the real acceptance of the word, and its studies properly and truly studia; indeed, if the businessmen would only build a few more dormitories and put up enough money to form an adequate fondatum or fundum, then the good work might be looked upon as complete.

As the three walked up the elm avenue there met them a little stream of students with college books, and female students with winged-victory hats, and professors with last year’s overcoats. And some went past with a smile and others with a shiver.

“That’s Professor Withers,” said the president in a sympathetic voice as one of the shivering figures went past; “poor Withers,” and he sighed.

“What’s wrong with him?” said the Wizard; “is he sick?”

“No, not sick,” said the president quietly and sadly, “merely inefficient.”

“Inefficient?”

“Unfortunately so. Mind you, I don’t mean ‘inefficient’ in every sense. By no means. If anyone were to come to me and say, ‘Boomer, can you put your hand for me on a first-class botanist?’ I’d say, ‘Take Withers.’ I’d say it in a minute.” This was true. He would have. In fact, if anyone had made this kind of rash speech, Dr. Boomer would have given away half the professoriate.

“Well, what’s wrong with him?” repeated Tomlinson, “I suppose he ain’t quite up to the mark in some ways, eh?”

“Precisely,” said the president, “not quite up to the mark – a very happy way of putting it. Capax imperii nisi imperasset, as no doubt you are thinking to yourself. The fact is that Withers, though an excellent fellow, can’t manage large classes. With small classes he is all right, but with large classes the man is lost. He can’t handle them.”

“He can’t, eh?” said the Wizard.

“No. But what can I do? There he is. I can’t dismiss him. I can’t pension him. I’ve no money for it.”

Here the president slackened a little in his walk and looked sideways at the prospective benefactor. But Tomlinson gave no sign.

A second professorial figure passed them on the other side.

“There again,” said the president, “that’s another case of inefficiency – Professor Shottat, our senior professor of English.”

“What’s wrong with him?” asked the Wizard.

“He can’t handle small classes,” said the president. “With large classes he is really excellent, but with small ones the man is simply hopeless.”

In this fashion, before Mr. Tomlinson had measured the length of the avenue, he had had ample opportunity to judge of the crying need of money at Plutoria University, and of the perplexity of its president. He was shown professors who could handle the first year, but were powerless with the second; others who were all right with the second but broke down with the third, while others could handle the third but collapsed with the fourth. There were professors who were all right in their own subject, but perfectly impossible outside of it; others who were so occupied outside of their own subject that they were useless inside of it; others who knew their subject, but couldn’t lecture; and others again who lectured admirably, but didn’t know their subject.

In short it was clear – as it was meant to be – that the need of the moment was a sum of money sufficient to enable the president to dismiss everybody but himself and Dr. Boyster. The latter stood in a class all by himself. He had known the president for forty-five years, ever since he was a fat little boy with spectacles in a classical academy, stuffing himself on irregular Greek verbs as readily as if on oysters.

But it soon appeared that the need for dismissing the professors was only part of the trouble. There were the buildings to consider.

“This, I am ashamed to say,” said Dr. Boomer, as they passed the imitation Greek portico of the old Concordia College building, “is our original home, the fons et origo of our studies, our faculty of arts.”

It was indeed a dilapidated building, yet there was a certain majesty about it, too, especially when one reflected that it had been standing there looking much the same at the time when its students had trooped off in a flock to join the army of the Potomac, and much the same, indeed, three generations before that, when the classes were closed and the students clapped three-cornered hats on their heads and were off to enlist as minute men with flintlock muskets under General Washington.

But Dr. Boomer’s one idea was to knock the building down and to build on its site a real facultas ten storeys high, with elevators in it.

Tomlinson looked about him humbly as he stood in the main hall. The atmosphere of the place awed him. There were bulletins and time-tables and notices stuck on the walls that gave evidence of the activity of the place. “Professor Slithers will be unable to meet his classes today,” ran one of them, and another “Professor Withers will not meet his classes this week,” and another, “Owing to illness, Professor Shottat will not lecture this month,” while still another announced, “Owing to the indisposition of Professor Podge, all botanical classes are suspended, but Professor Podge hopes to be able to join in the Botanical Picnic Excursion to Loon Lake on Saturday afternoon.” You could judge of the grinding routine of the work from the nature of these notices. Anyone familiar with the work of colleges would not heed it, but it shocked Tomlinson to think how often the professors of the college were stricken down by overwork.

Here and there in the hall, set into niches, were bronze busts of men with Roman faces and bare necks, and the edge of a toga cast over each shoulder.

“Who would these be?” asked Tomlinson, pointing at them. “Some of the chief founders and benefactors of the faculty,” answered the president, and at this the hopes of Tomlinson sank in his heart. For he realized the class of man one had to belong to in order to be accepted as a university benefactor.

“A splendid group of men, are they not?” said the president. “We owe them much. This is the late Mr. Hogworth, a man of singularly large heart.” Here he pointed to a bronze figure wearing a wreath of laurel and inscribed GULIEMUS HOGWORTH, LITT. DOC. “He had made a great fortune in the produce business and wishing to mark his gratitude to the community he erected the anemometer, the wind-measure, on the roof of the building, attaching to it no other condition than that his name should be printed in the weekly reports immediately beside the velocity of the wind. The figure beside him is the late Mr. Underbugg, who founded our lectures on the Four Gospels on the sole stipulation that henceforth any reference of ours to the four gospels should be coupled with his name.”

“What’s that after his name?” asked Tomlinson.

“Litt. Doc.?” said the president. “Doctor of Letters, our honorary degree. We are always happy to grant it to our benefactors by a vote of the faculty.”

Here Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster wheeled half round and looked quietly and steadily at the Wizard of Finance. To both their minds it was perfectly plain that an honourable bargain was being struck.

“Yes, Mr. Tomlinson,” said the president, as they emerged from the building, “no doubt you begin to realize our unhappy position. Money, money, money,” he repeated half-musingly. “If I had the money I’d have that whole building down and dismantled in a fortnight.”

From the central building the three passed to the museum building, where Tomlinson was shown a vast skeleton of a Diplodocus Maximus, and was specially warned not to confuse it with the Dinosaurus Perfectus, whose bones, however, could be bought if anyone, any man of large heart; would come to the university and say straight out, “Gentlemen, what can I do for you?” Better still, it appeared the whole museum which was hopelessly antiquated, being twenty-five years old, could be entirely knocked down if a sufficient sum was forthcoming; and its curator, who was as ancient as the Dinosaurus itself, could be dismissed on half-pay if any man had a heart large enough for the dismissal.

From the museum they passed to the library, where there were full-length portraits of more founders and benefactors in long red robes, holding scrolls of paper, and others sitting holding pens and writing on parchment, with a Greek temple and a thunderstorm in the background.

And here again it appeared that the crying need of the moment was for someone to come to the university and say, “Gentlemen, what can I do for you?” On which the whole library, for it was twenty years old and out of date, might be blown up with dynamite and carted away.

But at all this the hopes of Tomlinson sank lower and lower. The red robes and the scrolls were too much for him.

From the library they passed to the tall buildings that housed the faculty of industrial and mechanical science. And here again the same pitiful lack of money was everywhere apparent. For example, in the physical science department there was a mass of apparatus for which the university was unable to afford suitable premises, and in the chemical department there were vast premises for which the university was unable to buy apparatus, and so on. Indeed it was part of Dr. Boomer’s method to get himself endowed first with premises too big for the apparatus, and then by appealing to public spirit to call for enough apparatus to more than fill the premises, by means of which system industrial science at Plutoria University advanced with increasing and gigantic strides.

But most of all, the electric department interested the Wizard of Finance. And this time his voice lost its hesitating tone and he looked straight at Dr. Boomer as he began,

“I have a boy—”

“Ah!” said Dr. Boomer, with a huge ejaculation of surprise and relief; “you have a boy!”

There were volumes in his tone. What it meant was, “Now, indeed, we have got you where we want you,” and he exchanged a meaning look with the professor of Greek.

Within five minutes the president and Tomlinson and Dr. Boyster were gravely discussing on what terms and in what way Fred might be admitted to study in the faculty of industrial science. The president, on learning that Fred had put in four years in Cahoga County Section No. 3 School, and had been head of his class in ciphering, nodded his head gravely and said it would simply be a matter of a pro tanto; that, in fact, he felt sure that Fred might be admitted ad eundem. But the real condition on which they meant to admit him was, of course, not mentioned.

One door only in the faculty of industrial and mechanical science they did not pass, a heavy oak door at the end of a corridor bearing the painted inscription: Geological and Metallurgical Laboratories. Stuck in the door was a card with the words (they were conceived in the courteous phrases of mechanical science, which is almost a branch of business in the real sense): Busy – keep out.

Dr. Boomer looked at the card. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Gildas is no doubt busy with his tests. We won’t disturb him.” The president was always proud to find a professor busy; it looked well.

But if Dr. Boomer had known what was going on behind the oaken door of the Department of Geology and Metallurgy, he would have felt considerably disturbed himself.

For here again Gildas, senior professor of geology, was working among his blue flames at a final test on which depended the fate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated and all connected with it.

Before him there were some twenty or thirty packets of crumpled dust and splintered ore that glittered on the testing-table. It had been taken up from the creek along its whole length, at even spaces twenty yards apart, by an expert sent down in haste by the directorate, after Gildas’s second report, and heavily bribed to keep his mouth shut.

And as Professor Gildas stood and worked at the samples and tied them up after analysis in little white cardboard boxes, he marked each one very carefully and neatly with the words, PYRITES: WORTHLESS.

Beside the professor worked a young demonstrator of last year’s graduation class. It was he, in fact, who had written the polite notice on the card.

“What is the stuff, anyway?” he asked.

“A sulphuret of iron,” said the professor, “or iron pyrites. In colour and appearance it is practically identical with gold. Indeed, in all ages,” he went on, dropping at once into the classroom tone and adopting the professional habit of jumping backwards twenty centuries in order to explain anything properly, “it has been readily mistaken for the precious metal. The ancients called it ‘fool’s gold.’ Martin Frobisher brought back four shiploads of it from Baffin Land thinking that he had discovered an Eldorado. There are large deposits of it in the mines of Cornwall, and it is just possible,” here the professor measured his words as if speaking of something that he wouldn’t promise, “that the Cassiterides of the Phoenicians contained deposits of the same sulphuret. Indeed, I defy anyone,” he continued, for he was piqued in his scientific pride, “to distinguish it from gold without a laboratory-test. In large quantities, I concede, its lack of weight would betray it to a trained hand, but without testing its solubility in nitric acid, or the fact of its burning with a blue flame under the blow-pipe, it cannot be detected. In short, when crystallized in dodecahedrons—”

“Is it any good?” broke in the demonstrator.

“Good?” said the professor. “Oh, you mean commercially? Not in the slightest. Much less valuable than, let us say, ordinary mud or clay. In fact, it is absolutely good for nothing.”

They were silent for a moment, watching the blue flames above the brazier.

Then Gildas spoke again. “Oddly enough,” he said, “the first set of samples were undoubtedly pure gold – not the faintest doubt of that. That is the really interesting part of the matter. These gentlemen concerned in the enterprise will, of course, lose their money, and I shall therefore decline to accept the very handsome fee which they had offered me for my services. But the main feature, the real point of interest in this matter remains. Here we have undoubtedly a sporadic deposit – what miners call a pocket – of pure gold in a Devonian formation of the post-tertiary period. This once established, we must revise our entire theory of the distribution of igneous and aqueous rocks. In fact, I am already getting notes together for a paper for the Pan-Geological under the heading, Auriferous Excretions in the Devonian Strata: a Working Hypothesis. I hope to read it at the next meeting.”

The young demonstrator looked at the professor with one eye half-closed.

“I don’t think I would if I were you.” he said.

Now this young demonstrator knew nothing or practically nothing, of geology, because he came of one of the richest and best families in town and didn’t need to. But he was a smart young man, dressed in the latest fashion with brown boots and a crosswise tie, and he knew more about money and business and the stock exchange in five minutes than Professor Gildas in his whole existence.

“Why not?” said the professor.

“Why, don’t you see what’s happened?”

“Eh?” said Gildas.

“What happened to those first samples? When that bunch got interested and planned to float the company? Don’t you see? Somebody salted them on you.”

“Salted them on me?” repeated the professor, mystified.

“Yes, salted them. Somebody got wise to what they were and swopped them on you for the real thing, so as to get your certified report that the stuff was gold.”

“I begin to see,” muttered the professor. “Somebody exchanged the samples, some person no doubt desirous of establishing the theory that a sporadic outcropping of the sort might be found in a post-tertiary formation. I see, I see. No doubt he intended to prepare a paper on it, and prove his thesis by these tests. I see it all!”

The demonstrator looked at the professor with a sort of pity.

“You’re on!” he said, and he laughed softly to himself.

—

“Well,” said Dr. Boomer, after Tomlinson had left the university, “what do you make of him?” The president had taken Dr. Boyster over to his house beside the campus, and there in his study had given him a cigar as big as a rope and taken another himself. This was a sign that Dr. Boomer wanted Dr. Boyster’s opinion in plain English, without any Latin about it.

“Remarkable man,” said the professor of Greek; “wonderful penetration, and a man of very few words. Of course his game is clear enough?”

“Entirely so,” asserted Dr. Boomer.

“It’s clear enough that he means to give the money on two conditions.”

“Exactly,” said the president.

“First that we admit his son, who is quite unqualified, to the senior studies in electrical science, and second that we grant him the degree of Doctor of Letters. Those are his terms.” “Can we meet them?”

“Oh, certainly. As to the son, there is no difficulty, of course; as to the degree, it’s only a question of getting the faculty to vote it. I think we can manage it.”

—

Vote it they did that very afternoon. True, if the members of the faculty had known the things that were being whispered, and more than whispered, in the City about Tomlinson and his fortune, no degree would ever have been conferred on him. But it so happened that at that moment the whole professoriate was absorbed in one of those great educational crises which from time to time shake a university to its base. The meeting of the faculty that day bid fair to lose all vestige of decorum in the excitement of the moment. For, as Dean Elderberry Foible, the head of the faculty, said, the motion that they had before them amounted practically to a revolution. The proposal was nothing less than the permission of the use of lead-pencils instead of pen and ink in the sessional examinations of the university. Anyone conversant with the inner life of a college will realize that to many of the professoriate this was nothing less than a last wild onslaught of socialistic democracy against the solid bulwarks of society. They must fight it back or die on the walls. To others it was one more step in the splendid progress of democratic education, comparable only to such epoch-making things as the abandonment of the cap and gown, and the omission of the word “sir” in speaking to a professor.

No wonder that the fight raged. Elderberry Foible, his fluffed white hair almost on end, beat in vain with his gavel for order. Finally, Chang of Physiology, who was a perfect dynamo of energy and was known frequently to work for three or four hours at a stretch, proposed that the faculty should adjourn the question and meet for its further discussion on the following Saturday morning. This revolutionary suggestion, involving work on Saturday, reduced the meeting to a mere turmoil, in the midst of which Elderberry Foible proposed that the whole question of the use of lead-pencils should be adjourned till that day six months, and that meantime a new special committee of seventeen professors, with power to add to their number, to call witnesses and, if need be, to hear them, should report on the entire matter de novo. This motion, after the striking out of the words de novo and the insertion of ab initio, was finally carried, after which the faculty sank back completely exhausted into its chair, the need of afternoon tea and toast stamped on every face.

And it was at this moment that President Boomer, who understood faculties as few men have done, quietly entered the room, laid his silk hat on a volume of Demosthenes, and proposed the vote of a degree of Doctor of Letters for Edward Tomlinson. He said that there was no need to remind the faculty of Tomlinson’s services to the nation; they knew them. Of the members of the faculty, indeed, some thought that he meant the Tomlinson who wrote the famous monologue on the Iota Subscript, while others supposed that he referred to the celebrated philosopher Tomlinson, whose new book on the Indivisibility of the Inseparable was just then maddening the entire world. In any case, they voted the degree without a word, still faint with exhaustion.

—

But while the university was conferring on Tomlinson the degree of Doctor of Letters, all over the City in business circles they were conferring on him far other titles. “Idiot,” “Scoundrel,” “Swindler,” were the least of them. Every stock and share with which his name was known to be connected was coming down with a run, wiping out the accumulated profits of the Wizard at the rate of a thousand dollars a minute.

They not only questioned his honesty, but they went further and questioned his business capacity.

“The man,” said Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, sitting in the Mausoleum Club and breathing freely at last after having disposed of all his holdings in the Erie Auriferous, “is an ignoramus. I asked him only the other day, quite casually, a perfectly simple business question. I said to him. ‘T.C. Bonds have risen twenty-two and a half in a week. You know and I know that they are only collateral trust, and that the stock underneath never could and never would earn a par dividend. Now,’ I said, for I wanted to test the fellow, ‘tell me what that means?’ Would you believe me, he looked me right in the face in that stupid way of his, and he said, ‘I don’t know!’”

“He said he didn’t know!” repeated the listener contemptuously; “the man is a damn fool!”

—

The reason of all this was that the results of the researches of the professor of geology were being whispered among the directorate of the Erie Auriferous. And the directors and chief shareholders were busily performing the interesting process called unloading. Nor did ever a farmer of Cahoga County in haying time with a thunderstorm threatening, unload with greater rapidity than did the major shareholders of the Auriferous. Mr. Lucullus Fyshe traded off a quarter of his stock to an unwary member of the Mausoleum Club at a drop of thirty per cent, and being too prudent to hold the rest on any terms, he conveyed it at once as a benefaction in trust to the Plutorian Orphans’ and Foundlings’ Home; while the purchaser of Mr. Fyshe’s stock, learning too late of his folly, rushed for his lawyers to have the shares conveyed as a gift to the Home for Incurables.

Mr. Asmodeus Boulder transferred his entire holdings to the Imbeciles’ Relief Society, and Mr. Furlong, senior, passed his over to a Chinese mission as fast as pen could traverse paper.

Down at the office of Skinyer and Beatem, the lawyers of the company, they were working overtime drawing up deeds and conveyances and trusts in perpetuity, with hardly time to put them into typewriting. Within twenty-four hours the entire stock of the company bid fair to be in the hands of Idiots, Orphans, Protestants, Foundlings, Imbeciles, Missionaries, Chinese, and other unfinancial people, with Tomlinson the Wizard of Finance as the senior shareholder and majority control. And whether the gentle Wizard, as he sat with mother planning his vast benefaction to Plutoria University, would have felt more at home with his new group of fellow-shareholders than his old, it were hard to say.

But, meantime, at the office of Skinyer and Beatem all was activity. For not only were they drafting the conveyances of the perpetual trusts as fast as legal brains working overtime could do it, but in another part of the office a section of the firm were busily making their preparations against the expected actions for fraud and warrants of distraint and injunctions against disposal of assets and the whole battery of artillery which might open on them at any moment. And they worked like a corps of military engineers fortifying an escarpment, with the joy of battle in their faces.

The storm might break at any moment. Already at the office of the Financial Undertone the type was set for a special extra with a heading three inches high:

COLLAPSE
OF THE ERIE CONSOLIDATED

ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON
EXPECTED THIS AFTERNOON

Skinyer and Beatem had paid the editor, who was crooked, two thousand dollars cash to hold back that extra for twenty-four hours; and the editor had paid the reporting staff, who were crooked, twenty-five dollars each to keep the news quiet, and the compositors, who were also crooked, ten dollars per man to hold their mouths shut till the morning, with the result that from editors and sub-editors and reporters and compositors the news went seething forth in a flood that the Erie Auriferous Consolidated was going to shatter into fragments like the bursting of a dynamite bomb. It rushed with a thousand whispering tongues from street to street till it filled the corridors of the law courts and the lobbies of the offices, and till every honest man that held a share of the stock shivered in his tracks and reached out to give, sell, or destroy it. Only the unwinking Idiots, and the mild Orphans, and the calm Deaf mutes and the impassive Chinese held tight to what they had. So gathered the storm, till all the town, like the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver, was filled with a silent “call for Mr. Tomlinson,” voiceless and ominous.

And while all this was happening, and while at Skinyer and Beatem’s they worked with frantic pens and clattering type there came a knock at the door, hesitant and uncertain, and before the eyes of the astounded office there stood in his wide-awake hat and long black coat the figure of “the man Tomlinson” himself.

And Skinyer, the senior partner, no sooner heard what Tomlinson wanted than he dashed across the outer office to his partner’s room with his hyena face all excitement as he said:

“Beatem, Beatem, come over to my room. This man is absolutely the biggest thing in America. For sheer calmness and nerve I never heard of anything to approach him. What do you think he wants to do?”

“What?” said Beatem.

“Why, he’s giving his entire fortune to the university.”

“By Gad!” ejaculated Beatem, and the two lawyers looked at one another, lost in admiration of the marvellous genius and assurance of Tomlinson.

—

Yet what had happened was very simple.

Tomlinson had come back from the university filled with mingled hope and hesitation. The university, he saw, needed the money and he hoped to give it his entire fortune, to put Dr. Boomer in a position to practically destroy the whole place. But, like many a modest man, he lacked the assurance to speak out. He felt that up to the present the benefactors of the university had been men of an entirely different class from himself. It was mother who solved the situation for him.

“Well, father,” she said, “there’s one thing I’ve learned already since we’ve had money. If you want to get a thing done you can always find people to do it for you if you pay them. Why not go to those lawyers that manage things for the company and get them to arrange it all for you with the college?”

As a result, Tomlinson had turned up at the door of the Skinyer and Beatem office.

—

“Quite so, Mr. Tomlinson,” said Skinyer, with his pen already dipped in the ink, “a perfectly simple matter. I can draw up a draft of conveyance with a few strokes of the pen. In fact, we can do it on the spot.”

What he meant was, “In fact, we can do it so fast that I can pocket a fee of five hundred dollars right here and now while you have the money to pay me.”

“Now then,” he continued, “let us see how it is to run.”

“Well,” said Tomlinson, “I want you to put it that I give all my stock in the company to the university.”

“All of it?” said Skinyer, with a quiet smile to Beatem.

“Every cent of it, sir,” said Tomlinson; “just write down that I give all of it to the college.”

“Very good,” said Skinyer, and he began to write, “I, so-and-so, and so-and-so, of the county of so-and-so – Cahoga, I think you said, Mr. Tomlinson?”

“Yes, sir,” said the Wizard, “I was raised there.”

“—do hereby give, assign, devise, transfer, and the transfer is hereby given, devised and assigned, all those stocks, shares, hereditaments, etc., which I hold in the etc., etc., all, several and whatever – you will observe, Mr. Tomlinson, I am expressing myself with as great brevity as possible – to that institution, academy, college, school, university, now known and reputed to be Plutoria University, of the city of etc., etc.”

He paused a moment. “Now what special objects or purposes shall I indicate?” he asked.

Whereupon Tomlinson explained as best he could, and Skinyer, working with great rapidity, indicated that the benefaction was to include a Demolition Fund for the removal of buildings, a Retirement Fund for the removal of professors, an Apparatus Fund for the destruction of apparatus, and a General Sinking Fund for the obliteration of anything not otherwise mentioned.

“And I’d like to do something, if I could, for Mr. Boomer himself, just as man to man,” said Tomlinson.

“All right,” said Beatem, and he could hardly keep his face straight. “Give him a chunk of the stock – give him half a million.”

“I will,” said Tomlinson; “he deserves it.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Mr. Skinyer.

And within a few minutes the whole transaction was done, and Tomlinson, filled with joy, was wringing the hands of Skinyer and Beatem, and telling them to name their own fee.

They had meant to, anyway.

—

“Is that legal, do you suppose?” said Beatem to Skinyer, after the Wizard had gone. “Will it hold water?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Skinyer, “not for a minute. In fact, rather the other way. If they make an arrest for fraudulent flotation, this conveyance, I should think, would help to send him to the penitentiary. But I very much doubt if they can arrest him. Mind you, the fellow is devilish shrewd. You know, and I know that he planned this whole flotation with a full knowledge of the fraud. You and I know it – very good – but we know it more from our trained instinct in such things than by any proof. The fellow has managed to surround himself with such an air of good faith from start to finish that it will be deuced hard to get at him.”

“What will he do now?” said Beatem.

“I tell you what he’ll do. Mark my words. Within twenty-four hours he’ll clear out and be out of the state, and if they want to get him they’ll have to extradite. I tell you he’s a man of extraordinary capacity. The rest of us are nowhere beside him.”

In which, perhaps, there was some truth.

—

“Well, mother,” said the Wizard, when he reached the thousand-dollar suite, after his interview with Skinyer and Beatem, his face irradiated with simple joy, “it’s done. I’ve put the college now in a position it never was in before, nor any other college; the lawyers say so themselves.”

“That’s good,” said mother.

“Yes, and it’s a good thing I didn’t lose the money when I tried to. You see, mother, what I hadn’t realized was the good that could be done with all that money if a man put his heart into it. They can start in as soon as they like and tear down those buildings. My! but it’s just wonderful what you can do with money. I’m glad I didn’t lose it!”

So they talked far into the evening. That night they slept in an Aladdin’s palace filled with golden fancies.

And in the morning the palace and all its visions fell tumbling about their heads in sudden and awful catastrophe. For with Tomlinson’s first descent to the rotunda it broke. The whole great space seemed filled with the bulletins and the broadside sheets of the morning papers, the crowd surging to and fro buying the papers, men reading them as they stood, and everywhere in great letters there met his eye:

COLLAPSE
OF THE ERIE AURIFEROUS

THE GREAT GOLD SWINDLE

ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON
EXPECTED THIS MORNING

So stood the Wizard of Finance beside a pillar, the paper fluttering in his hand, his eyes fixed, while about him a thousand eager eyes and rushing tongues sent shame into his stricken heart.

And there his boy Fred, sent from upstairs, found him; and at the sight of the seething crowd and his father’s stricken face, aged as it seemed all in a moment, the boy’s soul woke within him. What had happened he could not tell, only that his father stood there, dazed, beaten, and staring at him on every side in giant letters:

ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON

“Come, father come upstairs,” he said, and took him by the arm, dragging him through the crowd.

In the next half-hour as they sat and waited for the arrest in the false grandeur of the thousand-dollar suite-Tomlinson, his wife, and Fred-the boy learnt more than all the teaching of the industrial faculty of Plutoria University could have taught him in a decade. Adversity laid its hand upon him, and at its touch his adolescent heart turned to finer stuff than the salted gold of the Erie Auriferous. As he looked upon his father’s broken figure waiting meekly for arrest, and his mother’s blubbered face, a great wrath burned itself into his soul.

“When the sheriff comes—” said Tomlinson, and his lip trembled as he spoke. He had no other picture of arrest than that.

“They can’t arrest you, father,” broke out the boy. “You’ve done nothing. You never swindled them. I tell you, if they try to arrest you, I’ll—” and his voice broke and stopped upon a sob, and his hands clenched in passion.

“You stay here, you and mother. I’ll go down. Give me your money and I’ll go and pay them and we’ll get out of this and go home. They can’t stop us; there’s nothing to arrest you for.”

Nor was there. Fred paid the bill unmolested, save for the prying eyes and babbling tongues of the rotunda.

And a few hours from that, while the town was still ringing with news of his downfall, the Wizard with his wife and son walked down from their thousand-dollar suite into the corridor, their hands burdened with their satchels. A waiter, with something between a sneer and an obsequious smile upon his face, reached out for the valises, wondering if it was still worth while.

“You get to hell out of that!” said Fred. He had put on again his rough store suit in which he had come from Cahoga County, and there was a dangerous look about his big shoulders and his set jaw. And the waiter slunk back.

So did they pass, unarrested and unhindered, through corridor and rotunda to the outer portals of the great hotel.

Beside the door of the Palaver as they passed out was a tall official with a uniform and a round hat. He was called by the authorities a chasseur or a commissionaire, or some foreign name to mean that he did nothing.

At the sight of him the Wizard’s face flushed for a moment, with a look of his old perplexity.

“I wonder,” he began to murmur, “how much I ought—”

“Not a damn cent, father,” said Fred, as he shouldered past the magnificent chasseur; “let him work.”

With which admirable doctrine the Wizard and his son passed from the portals of the Grand Palaver.

—

Nor was there any arrest either then or later. In spite of the expectations of the rotunda and the announcements of the Financial Undertone, the “man Tomlinson” was not arrested, neither as he left the Grand Palaver nor as he stood waiting at the railroad station with Fred and mother for the outgoing train for Cahoga County.

There was nothing to arrest him for. That was not the least strange part of the career of the Wizard of Finance. For when all the affairs of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated were presently calculated up by the labours of Skinyer and Beatem and the legal representatives of the Orphans and the Idiots and the Deaf-mutes they resolved themselves into the most beautiful and complete cipher conceivable. The salted gold about paid for the cost of the incorporation certificate: the development capital had disappeared, and those who lost most preferred to say the least about it; and as for Tomlinson, if one added up his gains on the stock market before the fall and subtracted his bill at the Grand Palaver and the thousand dollars which he gave to Skinyer and Beatem to recover his freehold on the lower half of his farm, and the cost of three tickets to Cahoga station, the debit and credit account balanced to a hair.

Thus did the whole fortune of Tomlinson vanish in a night, even as the golden palace seen in the mirage of a desert sunset may fade before the eyes of the beholder, and leave no trace behind.

—

It was some months after the collapse of the Erie Auriferous that the university conferred upon Tomlinson the degree of Doctor of Letters in absentia. A university must keep its word, and Dean Elderberry Foible, who was honesty itself, had stubbornly maintained that a vote of the faculty of arts once taken and written in the minute book became as irrefragable as the Devonian rock itself.

So the degree was conferred. And Dean Elderberry Foible, standing in a long red gown before Dr. Boomer, seated in a long blue gown, read out after the ancient custom of the college the Latin statement of the award of the degree of Doctor of Letters, “Eduardus Tomlinsonius, vir clarrisimus, doctissimus, praestissimus,” and a great many other things all ending in issimus.

But the recipient was not there to receive. He stood at that moment with his boy Fred on a windy hillside beside Lake Erie, where Tomlinson’s Creek ran again untrammelled to the lake. Nor was the scene altered to the eye, for Tomlinson and his son had long since broken a hole in the dam with pickaxe and crowbar, and day by day the angry water carried down the vestiges of the embankment till all were gone. The cedar poles of the electric lights had been cut into fence-rails; the wooden shanties of the Italian gang of Auriferous workers had been torn down and split into fire wood; and where they had stood, the burdocks and the thistles of the luxuriant summer conspired to hide the traces of their shame. Nature reached out its hand and drew its coverlet of green over the grave of the vanished Eldorado.

And as the Wizard and his son stood upon the hillside, they saw nothing but the land sloping to the lake and the creek murmuring again to the willows, while the off-shore wind rippled the rushes of the shallow water.

TOC     INDEX

IV

The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society
of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown

Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown lived on Plutoria Avenue in a vast sandstone palace, in which she held those fashionable entertainments which have made the name of Rasselyer-Brown what it is. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown lived there also.

The exterior of the house was more or less a model of the facade of an Italian palazzo of the sixteenth century. If one questioned Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown at dinner in regard to this (which was only a fair return for drinking five dollar champagne), she answered that the facade was cinquecentisti, but that it reproduced also the Saracenic mullioned window of the Siennese School. But if the guest said later in the evening to Mr. Rasselyer-Brown that he understood that his house was cinquecentisti, he answered that he guessed it was. After which remark and an interval of silence, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would probably ask the guest if he was dry.

So from that one can tell exactly the sort of people the Rasselyer-Browns were.

In other words, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown was a severe handicap to Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. He was more than that; the word isn’t strong enough. He was, as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself confessed to her confidential circle of three hundred friends, a drag. He was also a tie, and a weight, and a burden, and in Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s religious moments a crucifix. Even in the early years of their married life, some twenty or twenty-five years ago, her husband had been a drag on her by being in the coal and wood business. It is hard for a woman to have to realize that her husband is making a fortune out of coal and wood and that people know it. It ties one down. What a woman wants most of all – this, of course, is merely a quotation from Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s own thoughts as expressed to her three hundred friends – is room to expand, to grow. The hardest thing in the world is to be stifled: and there is nothing more stifling than a husband who doesn’t know a Giotto from a Carlo Dolci, but who can distinguish nut coal from egg and is never asked to dinner without talking about the furnace.

These, of course, were early trials. They had passed to some extent, or were, at any rate, garlanded with the roses of time.

But the drag remained.

Even when the retail coal and wood stage was long since over, it was hard to have to put up with a husband who owned a coal mine and who bought pulp forests instead of illuminated missals of the twelfth century. A coal mine is a dreadful thing at a dinner-table. It humbles one so before one’s guests.

It wouldn’t have been so bad – this Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself admitted – if Mr. Rasselyer-Brown did anything. This phrase should be clearly understood. It meant if there was any one thing that he did. For instance if he had only collected anything. Thus, there was Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, who made soda-water, but at the same time everybody knew that he had the best collection of broken Italian furniture on the continent; there wasn’t a sound piece among the lot.

And there was the similar example of old Mr. Feathertop. He didn’t exactly collect things; he repudiated the name. He was wont to say, “Don’t call me a collector, I’m not. I simply pick things up. Just where I happen to be, Rome, Warsaw, Bucharest, anywhere” – and it is to be noted what fine places these are to happen to be. And to think that Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would never put his foot outside of the United States! Whereas Mr. Feathertop would come back from what he called a run to Europe, and everybody would learn in a week that he had picked up the back of a violin in Dresden (actually discovered it in a violin shop), and the lid of an Etruscan kettle (he had lighted on it, by pure chance, in a kettle shop in Etruria), and Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown would feel faint with despair at the nonentity of her husband.

So one can understand how heavy her burden was.

“My dear,” she often said to her bosom friend, Miss Snagg, “I shouldn’t mind things so much” (the things she wouldn’t mind were, let us say, the two million dollars of standing timber which Brown Limited, the ominous business name of Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, were buying that year) “if Mr. Rasselyer-Brown did anything. But he does nothing. Every morning after breakfast off to his wretched office, and never back till dinner, and in the evening nothing but his club, or some business meeting. One would think he would have more ambition. How I wish I had been a man.”

It was certainly a shame.

So it came that, in almost everything she undertook Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown had to act without the least help from her husband. Every Wednesday, for instance, when the Dante Club met at her house (they selected four lines each week to meditate on, and then discussed them at lunch), Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown had to carry the whole burden of it – her very phrase, “the whole burden” – alone. Anyone who has carried four lines of Dante through a Moselle lunch knows what a weight it is.

In all these things her husband was useless, quite useless. It is not right to be ashamed of one’s husband. And to do her justice, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown always explained to her three hundred intimates that she was not ashamed of him; in fact, that she refused to be. But it was hard to see him brought into comparison at their own table with superior men. Put him, for instance, beside Mr. Sikleigh Snoop, the sex-poet, and where was he? Nowhere. He couldn’t even understand what Mr. Snoop was saying. And when Mr. Snoop would stand on the hearth-rug with a cup of tea balanced in his hand, and discuss whether sex was or was not the dominant note in Botticelli, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown would be skulking in a corner in his ill-fitting dress suit. His wife would often catch with an agonized ear such scraps of talk as, “When I was first in the coal and wood business,” or, “It’s a coal that burns quicker than egg, but it hasn’t the heating power of nut,” or even in a low undertone the words, “If you’re feeling dry while he’s reading—” And this at a time when everybody in the room ought to have been listening to Mr. Snoop.

Nor was even this the whole burden of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. There was another part of it which was perhaps more real, though Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself never put it into words. In fact, of this part of her burden she never spoke, even to her bosom friend Miss Snagg; nor did she talk about it to the ladies of the Dante Club, nor did she make speeches on it to the members of the Women’s Afternoon Art Society, nor to the Monday Bridge Club.

But the members of the Bridge Club and the Art Society and the Dante Club all talked about it among themselves.

Stated very simply, it was this: Mr. Rasselyer-Brown drank. It was not meant that he was a drunkard or that he drank too much, or anything of that sort. He drank. That was all.

There was no excess about it. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, of course, began the day with an eye-opener – and after all, what alert man does not wish his eyes well open in the morning? He followed it usually just before breakfast with a bracer – and what wiser precaution can a businessman take than to brace his breakfast? On his way to business he generally had his motor stopped at the Grand Palaver for a moment, if it was a raw day, and dropped in and took something to keep out the damp. If it was a cold day he took something to keep out the cold, and if it was one of those clear, sunny days that are so dangerous to the system he took whatever the bartender (a recognized health expert) suggested to tone the system up. After which he could sit down in his office and transact more business, and bigger business, in coal, charcoal, wood, pulp, pulpwood, and woodpulp, in two hours than any other man in the business could in a week. Naturally so. For he was braced, and propped, and toned up, and his eyes had been opened, and his brain cleared, till outside of very big business, indeed, few men were on a footing with him.

In fact, it was business itself which had compelled Mr. Rasselyer-Brown to drink. It is all very well for a junior clerk on twenty dollars a week to do his work on sandwiches and malted milk. In big business it is not possible. When a man begins to rise in business, as Mr. Rasselyer-Brown had begun twenty-five years ago, he finds that if he wants to succeed he must cut malted milk clear out. In any position of responsibility a man has got to drink. No really big deal can be put through without it. If two keen men, sharp as flint, get together to make a deal in which each intends to outdo the other, the only way to succeed is for them to adjourn to some such place as the luncheon-room of the Mausoleum Club and both get partially drunk. This is what is called the personal element in business. And, beside it, plodding industry is nowhere.

Most of all do these principles hold true in such manly out-of-door enterprises as the forest and timber business, where one deals constantly with chief rangers, and pathfinders, and wood-stalkers, whose very names seem to suggest a horn of whiskey under a hemlock tree.

But – let it be repeated and carefully understood – there was no excess about Mr. Rasselyer-Brown’s drinking. Indeed, whatever he might be compelled to take during the day, and at the Mausoleum Club in the evening, after his return from his club at night Mr. Rasselyer-Brown made it a fixed rule to take nothing. He might, perhaps, as he passed into the house, step into the dining-room and take a very small drink at the sideboard. But this he counted as part of the return itself, and not after it. And he might, if his brain were over-fatigued, drop down later in the night in his pyjamas and dressing-gown when the house was quiet, and compose his mind with a brandy and water, or something suitable to the stillness of the hour. But this was not really a drink. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown called it a nip; and of course any man may need a nip at a time when he would scorn a drink.

—

But after all, a woman may find herself again in her daughter. There, at least, is consolation. For, as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself admitted, her daughter, Dulphemia, was herself again. There were, of course, differences, certain differences of face and appearance. Mr. Snoop had expressed this fact exquisitely when he said that it was the difference between a Burne-Jones and a Dante Gabriel Rossetti. But even at that the mother and daughter were so alike that people, certain people, were constantly mistaking them on the street. And as everybody that mistook them was apt to be asked to dine on five-dollar champagne there was plenty of temptation towards error.

There is no doubt that Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown was a girl of remarkable character and intellect. So is any girl who has beautiful golden hair parted in thick bands on her forehead, and deep blue eyes soft as an Italian sky.

Even the oldest and most serious men in town admitted that in talking to her they were aware of a grasp, a reach, a depth that surprised them. Thus old Judge Longerstill, who talked to her at dinner for an hour on the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission, felt sure from the way in which she looked up in his face at intervals and said, “How interesting!” that she had the mind of a lawyer. And Mr. Brace, the consulting engineer, who showed her on the table-cloth at dessert with three forks and a spoon the method in which the overflow of the spillway of the Gatun Dam is regulated, felt assured, from the way she leaned her face on her hand sideways and said, “How extraordinary!” that she had the brain of an engineer. Similarly foreign visitors to the social circles of the city were delighted with her. Viscount FitzThistle, who explained to Dulphemia for half an hour the intricacies of the Irish situation, was captivated at the quick grasp she showed by asking him at the end, without a second’s hesitation, “And which are the Nationalists?”

This kind of thing represents female intellect in its best form. Every man that is really a man is willing to recognize it at once. As to the young men, of course they flocked to the Rasselyer-Brown residence in shoals. There were batches of them every Sunday afternoon at five o’clock, encased in long black frock-coats, sitting very rigidly in upright chairs, trying to drink tea with one hand. One might see athletic young college men of the football team trying hard to talk about Italian music; and Italian tenors from the Grand Opera doing their best to talk about college football. There were young men in business talking about art, and young men in art talking about religion, and young clergymen talking about business. Because, of course, the Rasselyer-Brown residence was the kind of cultivated home where people of education and taste are at liberty to talk about things they don’t know, and to utter freely ideas that they haven’t got. It was only now and again, when one of the professors from the college across the avenue came booming into the room, that the whole conversation was pulverized into dust under the hammer of accurate knowledge.

The whole process was what was called, by those who understood such things, a salon. Many people said that Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s afternoons at home were exactly like the delightful salons of the eighteenth century: and whether the gatherings were or were not salons of the eighteenth century, there is no doubt that Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, under whose care certain favoured guests dropped quietly into the back alcove of the dining-room, did his best to put the gathering on a par with the best saloons of the twentieth.

Now it so happened that there had come a singularly slack moment in the social life of the City. The Grand Opera had sung itself into a huge deficit and closed. There remained nothing of it except the efforts of a committee of ladies to raise enough money to enable Signor Puffi to leave town, and the generous attempt of another committee to gather funds in order to keep Signor Pasti in the City. Beyond this, opera was dead, though the fact that the deficit was nearly twice as large as it had been the year before showed that public interest in music was increasing. It was indeed a singularly trying time of the year. It was too early to go to Europe; and too late to go to Bermuda. It was too warm to go south, and yet still too cold to go north. In fact, one was almost compelled to stay at home – which was dreadful.

As a result Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown and her three hundred friends moved backwards and forwards on Plutoria Avenue, seeking novelty in vain. They washed in waves of silk from tango teas to bridge afternoons. They poured in liquid avalanches of colour into crowded receptions, and they sat in glittering rows and listened to lectures on the enfranchisement of the female sex. But for the moment all was weariness.

Now it happened, whether by accident or design, that just at this moment of general ennui Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown and her three hundred friends first heard of the presence in the city of Mr. Yahi-Bahi, the celebrated Oriental mystic. He was so celebrated that nobody even thought of asking who he was or where he came from. They merely told one another, and repeated it, that he was the celebrated Yahi-Bahi. They added for those who needed the knowledge that the name was pronounced Yahhy-Bahhy, and that the doctrine taught by Mr. Yahi-Bahi was Boohooism. This latter, if anyone inquired further, was explained to be a form of Shoodooism, only rather more intense. In fact, it was esoteric – on receipt of which information everybody remarked at once how infinitely superior the Oriental peoples are to ourselves.

Now as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown was always a leader in everything that was done in the best circles on Plutoria Avenue, she was naturally among the first to visit Mr. Yahi-Bahi.

“My dear,” she said, in describing afterwards her experience to her bosom friend, Miss Snagg, “it was most interesting. We drove away down to the queerest part of the City, and went to the strangest little house imaginable, up the narrowest stairs one ever saw – quite Eastern, in fact, just like a scene out of the Koran.”

“How fascinating!” said Miss Snagg. But as a matter of fact, if Mr. Yahi-Bahi’s house had been inhabited, as it might have been, by a streetcar conductor or a railway brakesman, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown wouldn’t have thought it in any way peculiar or fascinating.

“It was all hung with curtains inside,” she went on, “with figures of snakes and Indian gods, perfectly weird.”

“And did you see Mr. Yahi-Bahi?” asked Miss Snagg.

“Oh no, my dear. I only saw his assistant Mr. Ram Spudd; such a queer little round man, a Bengalee, I believe. He put his back against a curtain and spread out his arms sideways and wouldn’t let me pass. He said that Mr. Yahi-Bahi was in meditation and mustn’t be disturbed.”

“How delightful!” echoed Miss Snagg.

But in reality Mr. Yahi-Bahi was sitting behind the curtain eating a ten-cent can of pork and beans.

“What I like most about eastern people,” went on Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown, “is their wonderful delicacy of feeling. After I had explained about my invitation to Mr. Yahi-Bahi to come and speak to us on Boohooism, and was going away, I took a dollar bill out of my purse and laid it on the table. You should have seen the way Mr. Ram Spudd took it. He made the deepest salaam and said, ‘Isis guard you, beautiful lady.’ Such perfect courtesy, and yet with the air of scorning the money. As I passed out I couldn’t help slipping another dollar into his hand, and he took it as if utterly unaware of it, and muttered, ‘Osiris keep you, O flower of women!’ And as I got into the motor I gave him another dollar and he said, ‘Osis and Osiris both prolong your existence, O lily of the ricefield,’ and after he had said it he stood beside the door of the motor and waited without moving till I left. He had such a strange, rapt look, as if he were still expecting something!”

“How exquisite!” murmured Miss Snagg. It was her business in life to murmur such things as this for Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. On the whole, reckoning Grand Opera tickets and dinners, she did very well out of it.

“Is it not?” said Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. “So different from our men. I felt so ashamed of my chauffeur, our new man, you know; he seemed such a contrast beside Ram Spudd. The rude way in which the opened the door, and the rude way in which he climbed on to his own seat, and the rudeness with which he turned on the power – I felt positively ashamed. And he so managed it – I am sure he did it on purpose – that the car splashed a lot of mud over Mr. Spudd as it started.”

Yet, oddly enough, the opinion of other people on this new chauffeur, that of Miss Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown herself, for example, to whose service he was specially attached, was very different.

The great recommendation of him in the eyes of Miss Dulphemia and her friends, and the thing that gave him a touch of mystery was – and what higher qualification can a chauffeur want? – that he didn’t look like a chauffeur at all.

“My dear Dulphie,” whispered Miss Philippa Furlong, the rector’s sister (who was at that moment Dulphemia’s second self), as they sat behind the new chauffeur, “don’t tell me that he is a chauffeur, because he isn’t. He can chauffe, of course, but that’s nothing.”

For the new chauffeur had a bronzed face, hard as metal, and a stern eye; and when he put on a chauffeur’s overcoat some how it seemed to turn into a military greatcoat; and even when he put on the round cloth cap of his profession it was converted straightway into a military shako. And by Miss Dulphemia and her friends it was presently reported – or was invented? – that he had served in the Philippines; which explained at once the scar upon his forehead, which must have been received at Iloilo, or Huila-Huila, or some other suitable place.

But what affected Miss Dulphemia Brown herself was the splendid rudeness of the chauffeur’s manner. It was so different from that of the young men of the salon. Thus, when Mr. Sikleigh Snoop handed her into the car at any time he would dance about saying, “Allow me,” and “Permit me,” and would dive forward to arrange the robes. But the Philippine chauffeur merely swung the door open and said to Dulphemia, “Get in,” and then slammed it.

This, of course, sent a thrill up the spine and through the imagination of Miss Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown, because it showed that the chauffeur was a gentleman in disguise. She thought it very probable that he was a British nobleman, a younger son, very wild, of a ducal family; and she had her own theories as to why he had entered the service of the Rasselyer-Browns. To be quite candid about it, she expected that the Philippine chauffeur meant to elope with her, and every time he drove her from a dinner or a dance she sat back luxuriously, wishing and expecting the elopement to begin.

—

But for the time being the interest of Dulphemia, as of everybody else that was anybody at all, centred round Mr. Yahi-Bahi and the new cult of Boohooism.

After the visit of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown a great number of ladies, also in motors, drove down to the house of Mr. Yahi-Bahi. And all of them, whether they saw Mr. Yahi-Bahi himself or his Bengalee assistant, Mr. Ram Spudd, came back delighted.

“Such exquisite tact!” said one. “Such delicacy! As I was about to go I laid a five dollar gold piece on the edge of the little table. Mr. Spudd scarcely seemed to see it. He murmured, ‘Osiris help you!’ and pointed to the ceiling. I raised my eyes instinctively, and when I lowered them the money had disappeared. I think he must have caused it to vanish.”

“Oh, I’m sure he did,” said the listener.

Others came back with wonderful stories of Mr. Yahi-Bahi’s occult powers, especially his marvellous gift of reading the future.

Mrs. Buncomhearst, who had just lost her third husband – by divorce – had received from Mr. Yahi-Bahi a glimpse into the future that was almost uncanny in its exactness. She had asked for a divination, and Mr. Yahi-Bahi had effected one by causing her to lay six ten-dollar pieces on the table arranged in the form of a mystic serpent. Over these he had bent and peered deeply, as if seeking to unravel their meaning, and finally he had given her the prophecy, “Many things are yet to happen before others begin.”

“How does he do it?” asked everybody.

—

As a result of all this it naturally came about that Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd were invited to appear at the residence of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown; and it was understood that steps would be taken to form a special society, to be known as the Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society.

Mr. Sikleigh Snoop, the sex-poet, was the leading spirit in the organization. He had a special fitness for the task: he had actually resided in India. In fact, he had spent six weeks there on a stop-over ticket of a round-the-world 635 dollar steamship pilgrimage; and he knew the whole country from Jehumbapore in Bhootal to Jehumbalabad in the Carnatic. So he was looked upon as a great authority on India, China, Mongolia, and all such places, by the ladies of Plutoria Avenue.

Next in importance was Mrs. Buncomhearst, who became later, by a perfectly natural process, the president of the society. She was already president of the Daughters of the Revolution, a society confined exclusively to the descendants of Washington’s officers and others; she was also president of the Sisters of England, an organization limited exclusively to women born in England and elsewhere; of the Daughters of Kossuth, made up solely of Hungarians and friends of Hungary and other nations; and of the Circle of Franz Joseph, which was composed exclusively of the partisans, and others, of Austria. In fact, ever since she had lost her third husband, Mrs. Buncomhearst had thrown herself – that was her phrase – into outside activities. Her one wish was, on her own statement, to lose herself. So very naturally Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown looked at once to Mrs. Buncomhearst to preside over the meetings of the new society.

—

The large dining-room at the Rasselyer-Browns’ had been cleared out as a sort of auditorium, and in it some fifty or sixty of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s more intimate friends had gathered. The whole meeting was composed of ladies, except for the presence of one or two men who represented special cases. There was, of course, little Mr. Spillikins, with his vacuous face and football hair, who was there, as everybody knew, on account of Dulphemia; and there was old Judge Longerstill, who sat leaning on a gold-headed stick with his head sideways, trying to hear some fraction of what was being said. He came to the gathering in the hope that it would prove a likely place for seconding a vote of thanks and saying a few words – half an hour’s talk, perhaps – on the constitution of the United States. Failing that, he felt sure that at least someone would call him “this eminent old gentleman,” and even that was better than staying at home.

But for the most part the audience was composed of women, and they sat in a little buzz of conversation waiting for Mr. Yahi-Bahi.

“I wonder,” called Mrs. Buncomhearst from the chair, “if some lady would be good enough to write minutes? Miss Snagg, I wonder if you would be kind enough to write minutes? Could you?”

“I shall be delighted,” said Miss Snagg, “but I’m afraid there’s hardly time to write them before we begin, is there?”

“Oh, but it would be all right to write them afterwards,” chorussed several ladies who understood such things; “it’s quite often done that way.”

“And I should like to move that we vote a constitution,” said a stout lady with a double eye-glass.

“Is that carried?” said Mrs. Buncomhearst. “All those in favour please signify.”

Nobody stirred.

“Carried,” said the president. “And perhaps you would be good enough, Mrs. Fyshe,” she said, turning towards the stout lady, “to write the constitution.”

“Do you think it necessary to write it?” said Mrs. Fyshe. “I should like to move, if I may, that I almost wonder whether it is necessary to write the constitution – unless, of course, anybody thinks that we really ought to.”

“Ladies,” said the president, “you have heard the motion. All those against it—”

There was no sign.

“All those in favour of it—”

There was still no sign.

“Lost,” she said.

Then, looking across at the clock on the mantel-piece, and realizing that Mr. Yahi-Bahi must have been delayed and that something must be done, she said:

“And now, ladies, as we have in our midst a most eminent gentleman who probably has thought more deeply about constitutions than—”

All eyes turned at once towards Judge Longerstill, but as fortune had it at this very moment Mr. Sikleigh Snoop entered, followed by Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd.

Mr. Yahi-Bahi was tall. His drooping Oriental costume made him taller still. He had a long brown face and liquid brown eyes of such depth that when he turned them full upon the ladies before him a shiver of interest and apprehension followed in the track of his glance.

“My dear,” said Miss Snagg afterwards, “he seemed simply to see right through us.”

This was correct. He did.

Mr. Ram Spudd presented a contrast to his superior. He was short and round, with a dimpled mahogany face and eyes that twinkled in it like little puddles of molasses. His head was bound in a turban and his body was swathed in so many bands and sashes that he looked almost circular. The clothes of both Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd were covered with the mystic signs of Buddha and the seven serpents of Vishnu.

It was impossible, of course, for Mr. Yahi-Bahi or Mr. Ram Spudd to address the audience. Their knowledge of English was known to be too slight for that. Their communications were expressed entirely through the medium of Mr. Snoop, and even he explained afterwards that it was very difficult. The only languages of India which he was able to speak, he said, with any fluency were Gargamic and Gumaic both of these being old Dravidian dialects with only two hundred and three words in each, and hence in themselves very difficult to converse in. Mr. Yahi-Bahi answered in what Mr. Snoop understood to be the Iramic of the Vedas, a very rich language, but one which unfortunately he did not understand. The dilemma is one familiar to all Oriental scholars.

All of this Mr. Snoop explained in the opening speech which he proceeded to make. And after this he went on to disclose, amid deep interest, the general nature of the cult of Boohooism. He said that they could best understand it if he told them that its central doctrine was that of Bahee. Indeed, the first aim of all followers of the cult was to attain to Bahee. Anybody who could spend a certain number of hours each day, say sixteen, in silent meditation on Boohooism would find his mind gradually reaching a condition of Bahee. The chief aim of Bahee itself was sacrifice: a true follower of the cult must be willing to sacrifice his friends, or his relatives, and even strangers, in order to reach Bahee. In this way one was able fully to realize oneself and enter into the Higher Indifference. Beyond this, further meditation and fasting – by which was meant living solely on fish, fruit, wine, and meat – one presently attained to complete Swaraj or Control of Self, and might in time pass into the absolute Nirvana, or the Negation of Emptiness, the supreme goal of Boohooism.

As a first step to all this, Mr. Snoop explained, each neophyte or candidate for holiness must, after searching his own heart, send ten dollars to Mr. Yahi-Bahi. Gold, it appeared, was recognized in the cult of Boohooism as typifying the three chief virtues, whereas silver or paper money did not; even national banknotes were only regarded as do or, a halfway palliation; and outside currencies such as Canadian or Mexican bills were looked upon as entirely boo, or contemptible. The Oriental view of money, said Mr. Snoop, was far superior to our own, but it also might be attained by deep thought, and, as a beginning, by sending ten dollars to Mr. Yahi-Bahi.

After this Mr. Snoop, in conclusion, read a very beautiful Hindu poem, translating it as he went along. It began, “O cow, standing beside the Ganges, and apparently without visible occupation,” and it was voted exquisite by all who heard it. The absence of rhyme and the entire removal of ideas marked it as far beyond anything reached as yet by Occidental culture.

When Mr. Snoop had concluded, the president called upon Judge Longerstill for a few words of thanks, which he gave, followed by a brief talk on the constitution of the United States.

After this the society was declared constituted, Mr. Yahi-Bahi made four salaams, one to each point of the compass, and the meeting dispersed.

And that evening, over fifty dinner tables, everybody discussed the nature of Bahee, and tried in vain to explain it to men too stupid to understand.

—

Now it so happened that on the very afternoon of this meeting at Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s, the Philippine chauffeur did a strange and peculiar thing. He first asked Mr. Rasselyer-Brown for a few hours’ leave of absence to attend the funeral of his mother in-law. This was a request which Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, on principle, never refused to a man-servant.

Whereupon, the Philippine chauffeur, no longer attired as one, visited the residence of Mr. Yahi-Bahi. He let himself in with a marvellous little key which he produced from a very wonderful bunch of such. He was in the house for nearly half an hour, and when he emerged, the notebook in his breast pocket, had there been an eye to read it, would have been seen to be filled with stranger details in regard to Oriental mysticism than even Mr. Yahi-Bahi had given to the world. So strange were they that before the Philippine chauffeur returned to the Rasselyer-Brown residence he telegraphed certain and sundry parts of them to New York. But why he should have addressed them to the head of a detective bureau instead of to a college of Oriental research it passes the imagination to conceive. But as the chauffeur duly reappeared at motor-time in the evening the incident passed unnoticed.

—

It is beyond the scope of the present narrative to trace the progress of Boohooism during the splendid but brief career of the Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society. There could be no doubt of its success. Its principles appealed with great strength to all the more cultivated among the ladies of Plutoria Avenue. There was something in the Oriental mysticism of its doctrines which rendered previous belief stale and puerile. The practice of the sacred rites began at once. The ladies’ counters of the Plutorian banks were inundated with requests for ten-dollar pieces in exchange for banknotes. At dinner in the best houses nothing was eaten except a thin soup (or bru), followed by fish, succeeded by meat or by game, especially such birds as are particularly pleasing to Buddha, as the partridge, the pheasant, and the woodcock. After this, except for fruits and wine, the principle of Swaraj, or denial of self, was rigidly imposed. Special Oriental dinners of this sort were given, followed by listening to the reading of Oriental poetry, with closed eyes and with the mind as far as possible in a state of Stoj, or Negation of Thought.

By this means the general doctrine of Boohooism spread rapidly. Indeed, a great many of the members of the society soon attained to a stage of Bahee, or the Higher Indifference, that it would have been hard to equal outside of Juggapore or Jumbumbabad. For example, when Mrs. Buncomhearst learned of the remarriage of her second husband – she had lost him three years before, owing to a difference of opinion on the emancipation of women – she showed the most complete Bahee possible. And when Miss Snagg learned that her brother in Venezuela had died – a very sudden death brought on by drinking rum for seventeen years – and had left her ten thousand dollars, the Bahee which she exhibited almost amounted to Nirvana.

In fact, the very general dissemination of the Oriental idea became more and more noticeable with each week that passed. Some members attained to so complete a Bahee, or Higher Indifference, that they even ceased to attend the meetings of the society; others reached a Swaraj, or Control of Self, so great that they no longer read its pamphlets; while others again actually passed into Nirvana, to a Complete Negation of Self, so rapidly that they did not even pay their subscriptions.

But features of this sort, of course, are familiar wherever a successful occult creed makes its way against the prejudices of the multitude.

The really notable part of the whole experience was the marvellous demonstration of occult power which attended the final séance of the society, the true nature of which is still wrapped in mystery.

For some weeks it had been rumoured that a very special feat or demonstration of power by Mr. Yahi-Bahi was under contemplation. In fact, the rapid spread of Swaraj and of Nirvana among the members rendered such a feat highly desirable. Just what form the demonstration would take was for some time a matter of doubt. It was whispered at first that Mr. Yahi-Bahi would attempt the mysterious eastern rite of burying Ram Spudd alive in the garden of the Rasselyer-Brown residence and leaving him there in a state of Stoj, or Suspended Inanition, for eight days. But this project was abandoned, owing to some doubt, apparently, in the mind of Mr. Ram Spudd as to his astral fitness for the high state of Stoj necessitated by the experiment.

At last it became known to the members of the Poosh, or Inner Circle, under the seal of confidence, that Mr. Yahi-Bahi would attempt nothing less than the supreme feat of occultism, namely, a reincarnation, or more correctly a reastralization of Buddha.

The members of the Inner Circle shivered with a luxurious sense of mystery when they heard of it.

“Has it ever been done before?” they asked of Mr. Snoop.

“Only a few times,” he said; “once, I believe, by Jam-bum, the famous Yogi of the Carnatic; once, perhaps twice, by Boohoo, the founder of the sect. But it is looked upon as extremely rare. Mr. Yahi tells me that the great danger is that, if the slightest part of the formula is incorrectly observed, the person attempting the astralization is swallowed up into nothingness. However, he declares himself willing to try.”

—

The séance was to take place at Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s residence, and was to be at midnight.

“At midnight!” said each member in surprise. And the answer was, “Yes, at midnight. You see, midnight here is exactly midday in Allahabad in India.”

This explanation was, of course, ample. “Midnight,” repeated everybody to everybody else, “is exactly midday in Allahabad.” That made things perfectly clear. Whereas if midnight had been midday in Timbuctoo the whole situation would have been different.

Each of the ladies was requested to bring to the séance some ornament of gold; but it must be plain gold, without any setting of stones.

It was known already that, according to the cult of Boohooism, gold, plain gold, is the seat of the three virtues – beauty, wisdom and grace. Therefore, according to the creed of Boohooism, anyone who has enough gold, plain gold, is endowed with these virtues and is all right. All that is needed is to have enough of it; the virtues follow as a consequence.

But for the great experiment the gold used must not be set with stones, with the one exception of rubies, which are known to be endowed with the three attributes of Hindu worship, modesty, loquacity, and pomposity.

In the present case it was found that as a number of ladies had nothing but gold ornaments set with diamonds, a second exception was made; especially as Mr. Yahi-Bahi, on appeal, decided that diamonds, though less pleasing to Buddha than rubies, possessed the secondary Hindu virtues of divisibility, movability, and disposability.

On the evening in question the residence of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown might have been observed at midnight wrapped in utter darkness. No lights were shown. A single taper, brought by Ram Spudd from the Taj Mohal, and resembling in its outer texture those sold at the five-and-ten store near Mr. Spudd’s residence, burned on a small table in the vast dining-room. The servants had been sent upstairs and expressly enjoined to retire at half past ten. Moreover, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown had had to attend that evening, at the Mausoleum Club, a meeting of the trustees of the Church of St. Asaph, and he had come home at eleven o’clock, as he always did after diocesan work of this sort, quite used up; in fact, so fatigued that he had gone upstairs to his own suite of rooms sideways, his knees bending under him. So utterly used up was he with his church work that, as far as any interest in what might be going on in his own residence, he had attained to a state of Bahee, or Higher Indifference, that even Buddha might have envied.

The guests, as had been arranged, arrived noiselessly and on foot. All motors were left at least a block away. They made their way up the steps of the darkened house, and were admitted without ringing, the door opening silently in front of them. Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd, who had arrived on foot carrying a large parcel, were already there, and were behind a screen in the darkened room, reported to be in meditation.

At a whispered word from Mr. Snoop, who did duty at the door, all furs and wraps were discarded in the hall and laid in a pile. Then the guests passed silently into the great dining room. There was no light in it except the dim taper which stood on a little table. On this table each guest, as instructed, laid an ornament of gold, and at the same time was uttered in a low voice the word Ksvoo. This means, “O Buddha, I herewith lay my unworthy offering at thy feet; take it and keep it for ever.” It was explained that this was only a form.

—

“What is he doing?” whispered the assembled guests as they saw Mr. Yahi-Bahi pass across the darkened room and stand in front of the sideboard.

“Hush!” said Mr. Snoop; “he’s laying the propitiatory offering for Buddha.”

“It’s an Indian rite,” whispered Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown.

Mr. Yahi-Bahi could be seen dimly moving to and fro in front of the sideboard. There was a faint clinking of glass.

“He has to set out a glass of Burmese brandy, powdered over with nutmeg and aromatics,” whispered Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. “I had the greatest hunt to get it all for him. He said that nothing but Burmese brandy would do, because in the Hindu religion the god can only be invoked with Burmese brandy, or, failing that, Hennessy’s with three stars, which is not entirely displeasing to Buddha.”

“The aromatics,” whispered Mr. Snoop, “are supposed to waft a perfume or incense to reach the nostrils of the god. The glass of propitiatory wine and the aromatic spices are mentioned in the Vishnu-Buddayat.”

Mr. Yahi-Bahi, his preparations completed, was now seen to stand in front of the sideboard bowing deeply four times in an Oriental salaam. The light of the single taper had by this time burned so dim that his movements were vague and uncertain. His body cast great flickering shadows on the half-seen wall. From his throat there issued a low wail in which the word wah! wah! could be distinguished.

The excitement was intense.

“What does wah mean?” whispered Mr. Spillikins.

“Hush!” said Mr. Snoop; “it means, ‘O Buddha, wherever thou art in thy lofty Nirvana, descend yet once in astral form before our eyes!’”

Mr. Yahi-Bahi rose. He was seen to place one finger on his lips and then, silently moving across the room, he disappeared behind the screen. Of what Mr. Ram Spudd was doing during this period there is no record. It was presumed that he was still praying.

The stillness was now absolute.

“We must wait in perfect silence,” whispered Mr. Snoop from the extreme tips of his lips.

Everybody sat in strained intensity, silent, looking towards the vague outline of the sideboard.

The minutes passed. No one moved. All were spellbound in expectancy.

Still the minutes passed. The taper had flickered down till the great room was almost in darkness.

Could it be that by some neglect in the preparations, the substitution perhaps of the wrong brandy, the astralization could not be effected?

But no.

Quite suddenly, it seemed, everybody in the darkened room was aware of a presence. That was the word as afterwards repeated in a hundred confidential discussions. A presence. One couldn’t call it a body. It wasn’t. It was a figure, an astral form, a presence.

“Buddha!” they gasped as they looked at it.

Just how the figure entered the room, the spectators could never afterwards agree. Some thought it appeared through the wall, deliberately astralizing itself as it passed through the bricks. Others seemed to have seen it pass in at the farther door of the room, as if it had astralized itself at the foot of the stairs in the back of the hall outside.

Be that as it may, there it stood before them, the astralized shape of the Indian deity, so that to every lip there rose the half-articulated word, “Buddha”; or at least to every lip except that of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. From her there came no sound.

The figure as afterwards described was attired in a long shirak, such as is worn by the Grand Llama of Tibet, and resembling, if the comparison were not profane, a modern dressing-gown. The legs, if one might so call them, of the apparition were enwrapped in loose punjahamas, a word which is said to be the origin of the modern pyjamas; while the feet, if they were feet, were encased in loose slippers.

Buddha moved slowly across the room. Arrived at the sideboard the astral figure paused, and even in the uncertain light Buddha was seen to raise and drink the propitiatory offering. That much was perfectly clear. Whether Buddha spoke or not is doubtful. Certain of the spectators thought that he said, ‘Must a fagotnit’, which is Hindustanee for “Blessings on this house.” To Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s distracted mind it seemed as if Buddha said, “I must have forgotten it” But this wild fancy she never breathed to a soul.

Silently Buddha recrossed the room, slowly wiping one arm across his mouth after the Hindu gesture of farewell.

For perhaps a full minute after the disappearance of Buddha not a soul moved. Then quite suddenly Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown, unable to stand the tension any longer, pressed an electric switch and the whole room was flooded with light.

There sat the affrighted guests staring at one another with pale faces.

But, to the amazement and horror of all, the little table in the centre stood empty – not a single gem, not a fraction of the gold that had lain upon it was left. All had disappeared.

The truth seemed to burst upon everyone at once. There was no doubt of what had happened.

The gold and the jewels had been deastralized. Under the occult power of the vision they had been demonetized, engulfed into the astral plane along with the vanishing Buddha.

Filled with the sense of horror still to come, somebody pulled aside the little screen. They fully expected to find the lifeless bodies of Mr. Yahi-Bahi and the faithful Ram Spudd. What they saw before them was more dreadful still. The outer Oriental garments of the two devotees lay strewn upon the floor. The long sash of Yahi-Bahi and the thick turban of Ram Spudd were side by side near them; almost sickening in its repulsive realism was the thick black head of hair of the junior devotee, apparently torn from his scalp as if by lightning and bearing a horrible resemblance to the cast-off wig of an actor.

The truth was too plain.

“They are engulfed!” cried a dozen voices at once.

It was realized in a flash that Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd had paid the penalty of their daring with their lives. Through some fatal neglect, against which they had fairly warned the participants of the séance, the two Orientals had been carried bodily in the astral plane.

“How dreadful!” murmured Mr. Snoop. “We must have made some awful error.”

“Are they deastralized?” murmured Mrs. Buncomhearst.

“Not a doubt of it,” said Mr. Snoop.

And then another voice in the group was heard to say, “We must hush it up. We can’t have it known!”

On which a chorus of voices joined in, everybody urging that it must be hushed up.

“Couldn’t you try to reastralize them?” said somebody to Mr. Snoop.

“No, no,” said Mr. Snoop, still shaking. “Better not try to. We must hush it up if we can.”

And the general assent to this sentiment showed that, after all, the principles of Bahee, or Indifference to Others, had taken a real root in the society.

“Hush it up,” cried everybody, and there was a general move towards the hall.

“Good Heavens!” exclaimed Mrs. Buncomhearst; “our wraps!”

“Deastralized!” said the guests.

There was a moment of further consternation as everybody gazed at the spot where the ill-fated pile of furs and wraps had lain.

“Never mind,” said everybody, “let’s go without them – don’t stay. Just think if the police should—”

And at the word police, all of a sudden there was heard in the street the clanging of a bell and the racing gallop of the horses of the police patrol wagon.

“The police!” cried everybody. “Hush it up! Hush it up!” For of course the principles of Bahee are not known to the police.

In another moment the doorbell of the house rang with a long and violent peal, and in a second as it seemed, the whole hall was filled with bulky figures uniformed in blue.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown,” cried a loud, firm voice from the sidewalk. “We have them both. Everything is here. We got them before they’d gone a block. But if you don’t mind, the police must get a couple of names for witnesses in the warrant.”

It was the Philippine chauffeur. But he was no longer attired as such. He wore the uniform of an inspector of police, and there was the metal badge of the Detective Department now ostentatiously outside his coat.

And beside him, one on each side of him, there stood the deastralized forms of Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd. They wore long overcoats, doubtless the contents of the magic parcels, and the Philippine chauffeur had a grip of iron on the neck of each as they stood. Mr. Spudd had lost his Oriental hair, and the face of Mr. Yahi-Bahi, perhaps in the struggle which had taken place, had been scraped white in patches.

They were making no attempt to break away. Indeed, Mr. Spudd, with that complete Bahee, or Submission to Fate, which is attained only by long services in state penitentiaries, was smiling and smoking a cigarette.

“We were waiting for them,” explained a tall police officer to the two or three ladies who now gathered round him with a return of courage. “They had the stuff in a hand-cart and were pushing it away. The chief caught them at the corner, and rang the patrol from there. You’ll find everything all right, I think, ladies,” he added, as a burly assistant was seen carrying an armload of furs up the steps.

Somehow many of the ladies realized at the moment what cheery, safe, reliable people policemen in blue are, and what a friendly, familiar shelter they offer against the wiles of Oriental occultism.

“Are they old criminals?” someone asked.

“Yes, ma’am. They’ve worked this same thing in four cities already, and both of them have done time, and lots of it. They’ve only been out six months. No need to worry over them,” he concluded with a shrug of the shoulders.

So the furs were restored and the gold and the jewels parcelled out among the owners, and in due course Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd were lifted up into the patrol wagon where they seated themselves with a composure worthy of the best traditions of Jehumbabah and Bahoolapore. In fact, Mr. Spudd was heard to address the police as “boys,” and to remark that they had “got them good” that time.

So the séance ended and the guests vanished, and the Yahi-Bahi Society terminated itself without even a vote of dissolution.

And in all the later confidential discussions of the episode only one point of mysticism remained. After they had time really to reflect on it, free from all danger of arrest, the members of the society realized that on one point the police were entirely off the truth of things. For Mr. Yahi-Bahi, whether a thief or not, and whether he came from the Orient, or, as the police said, from Missouri, had actually succeeded in reastralizing Buddha.

Nor was anyone more emphatic on this point than Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself.

“For after all,” she said, “if it was not Buddha, who was it?”

And the question was never answered.

TOC     INDEX

V

The Love Story
of Mr. Peter Spillikins

Almost any day, on Plutoria Avenue or thereabouts, you may see little Mr. Spillikins out walking with his four tall sons, who are practically as old as himself.

To be exact, Mr. Spillikins is twenty-four, and Bob, the oldest of the boys, must be at least twenty. Their exact ages are no longer known, because, by a dreadful accident, their mother forgot them. This was at a time when the boys were all at Mr. Wackem’s Academy for Exceptional Youths in the foothills of Tennessee, and while their mother, Mrs. Everleigh, was spending the winter on the Riviera and felt that for their own sake she must not allow herself to have the boys with her.

But now, of course, since Mrs. Everleigh has remarried and become Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins there is no need to keep them at Mr. Wackem’s any longer. Mr. Spillikins is able to look after them.

Mr. Spillikins generally wears a little top hat and an English morning coat. The boys are in Eton jackets and black trousers, which, at their mother’s wish, are kept just a little too short for them. This is because Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins feels that the day will come some day – say fifteen years hence – when the boys will no longer be children, and meantime it is so nice to feel that they are still mere boys. Bob is the eldest, but Sib the youngest is the tallest, whereas Willie the third boy is the dullest, although this has often been denied by those who claim that Gib the second boy is just a trifle duller. Thus at any rate there is a certain equality and good fellowship all round.

Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is not to be seen walking with them. She is probably at the race-meet, being taken there by Captain Cormorant of the United States navy, which Mr. Spillikins considers very handsome of him. Every now and then the captain, being in the navy, is compelled to be at sea for perhaps a whole afternoon or even several days; in which case Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is very generally taken to the Hunt Club or the Country Club by Lieutenant Hawk, which Mr. Spillikins regards as awfully thoughtful of him. Or if Lieutenant Hawk is also out of town for the day, as he sometimes has to be, because he is in the United States army, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is taken out by old Colonel Shake, who is in the State militia and who is at leisure all the time.

During their walks on Plutoria Avenue one may hear the four boys addressing Mr. Spillikins as “father” and “dad” in deep bull-frog voices.

“Say, dad,” drawls Bob, “couldn’t we all go to the ball game?”

“No. Say, dad,” says Gib, “let’s all go back to the house and play five-cent pool in the billiard-room.”

“All right, boys,” says Mr. Spillikins. And a few minutes later one may see them all hustling up the steps of the Everleigh-Spillikins’s mansion, quite eager at the prospect, and all talking together.

—

Now the whole of this daily panorama, to the eye that can read it, represents the outcome of the tangled love story of Mr. Spillikins, which culminated during the summer houseparty at Castel Casteggio, the woodland retreat of Mr. and Mrs. Newberry.

But to understand the story one must turn back a year or so to the time when Mr. Peter Spillikins used to walk on Plutoria Avenue alone, or sit in the Mausoleum Club listening to the advice of people who told him that he really ought to get married.

—

In those days the first thing that one noticed about Mr. Peter Spillikins was his exalted view of the other sex. Every time he passed a beautiful woman in the street he said to himself, “I say!” Even when he met a moderately beautiful one he murmured, “By Jove!” When an Easter hat went sailing past, or a group of summer parasols stood talking on a leafy corner, Mr. Spillikins ejaculated, “My word!” At the opera and at tango teas his projecting blue eyes almost popped out of his head.

Similarly, if he happened to be with one of his friends, he would murmur, “I say, do look at that beautiful girl,” or would exclaim, “I say, don’t look, but isn’t that an awfully pretty girl across the street?” or at the opera, “Old man, don’t let her see you looking, but do you see that lovely girl in the box opposite?”

One must add to this that Mr. Spillikins, in spite of his large and bulging blue eyes, enjoyed the heavenly gift of short sight. As a consequence he lived in a world of amazingly beautiful women. And as his mind was focused in the same way as his eyes he endowed them with all the virtues and graces which ought to adhere to fifty-dollar flowered hats and cerise parasols with ivory handles.

Nor, to do him justice, did Mr. Spillikins confine his attitude to his view of women alone. He brought it to bear on everything. Every time he went to the opera he would come away enthusiastic, saying, “By Jove, isn’t it simply splendid! Of course I haven’t the ear to appreciate it – I’m not musical, you know – but even with the little that I know, it’s great; it absolutely puts me to sleep.” And of each new novel that he bought he said, “It’s a perfectly wonderful book! Of course I haven’t the head to understand it, so I didn’t finish it, but it’s simply thrilling.” Similarly with painting, “It’s one of the most marvellous pictures I ever saw,” he would say. “Of course I’ve no eye for pictures, and I couldn’t see anything in it, but it’s wonderful!”

The career of Mr. Spillikins up to the point of which we are speaking had hitherto not been very satisfactory, or at least not from the point of view of Mr. Boulder, who was his uncle and trustee. Mr. Boulder’s first idea had been to have Mr. Spillikins attend the university. Dr. Boomer, the president, had done his best to spread abroad the idea that a university education was perfectly suitable even for the rich; that it didn’t follow that because a man was a university graduate he need either work or pursue his studies any further; that what the university aimed to do was merely to put a certain stamp upon a man. That was all. And this stamp, according to the tenor of the president’s convocation addresses, was perfectly harmless. No one ought to be afraid of it. As a result, a great many of the very best young men in the City, who had no need for education at all, were beginning to attend college. “It marked,” said Dr. Boomer, “a revolution.”

Mr. Spillikins himself was fascinated with his studies. The professors seemed to him living wonders.

“By Jove!” he said, “the professor of mathematics is a marvel. You ought to see him explaining trigonometry on the blackboard. You can’t understand a word of it.” He hardly knew which of his studies he liked best. “Physics,” he said, “is a wonderful study. I got five per cent in it. But, by Jove! I had to work for it. I’d go in for it altogether if they’d let me.”

But that was just the trouble – they wouldn’t. And so in course of time Mr. Spillikins was compelled, for academic reasons, to abandon his life work. His last words about it were, “Gad! I nearly passed in trigonometry!” and he always said afterwards that he had got a tremendous lot out of the university.

After that, as he had to leave the university, his trustee, Mr. Boulder, put Mr. Spillikins into business. It was, of course, his own business, one of the many enterprises for which Mr. Spillikins, ever since he was twenty-one, had already been signing documents and countersigning cheques. So Mr. Spillikins found himself in a mahogany office selling wholesale oil. And he liked it. He said that business sharpened one up tremendously.

“I’m afraid, Mr. Spillikins,” a caller in the mahogany office would say, “that we can’t meet you at five dollars. Four seventy is the best we can do on the present market.”

“My dear chap,” said Mr. Spillikins, “that’s all right. After all, thirty cents isn’t much, eh what? Dash it, old man, we won’t fight about thirty cents. How much do you want?”

“Well, at four seventy we’ll take twenty thousand barrels.”

“By Jove!” said Mr. Spillikins; “twenty thousand barrels. Gad! you want a lot, don’t you? Pretty big sale, eh, for a beginner like me? I guess uncle’ll be tickled to death.”

So tickled was he that after a few weeks of oil-selling Mr. Boulder urged Mr. Spillikins to retire, and wrote off many thousand dollars from the capital value of his estate.

So after this there was only one thing for Mr. Spillikins to do, and everybody told him so – namely to get married. “Spillikins,” said his friends at the club after they had taken all his loose money over the card table, “you ought to get married.”

“Think so?” said Mr. Spillikins.

Goodness knows he was willing enough. In fact, up to this point Mr. Spillikins’s whole existence had been one long aspiring sigh directed towards the joys of matrimony.

In his brief college days his timid glances had wandered by an irresistible attraction towards the seats on the right-hand side of the class room, where the girls of the first year sat, with golden pigtails down their backs, doing trigonometry.

He would have married any of them. But when a girl can work out trigonometry at sight, what use can she possibly have for marriage? None. Mr. Spillikins knew this and it kept him silent. And even when the most beautiful girl in the class married the demonstrator and thus terminated her studies in her second year, Spillikins realized that it was only because the man was, undeniably, a demonstrator and knew things.

Later on, when Spillikins went into business and into society, the same fate pursued him. He loved, for at least six months, Georgiana McTeague, the niece of the presbyterian minister of St. Osoph’s. He loved her so well that for her sake he temporarily abandoned his pew at St. Asaph’s, which was episcopalian, and listened to fourteen consecutive sermons on hell. But the affair got no further than that. Once or twice, indeed, Spillikins walked home with Georgiana from church and talked about hell with her; and once her uncle asked him into the manse for cold supper after evening service, and they had a long talk about hell all through the meal and upstairs in the sitting-room afterwards. But somehow Spillikins could get no further with it. He read up all he could about hell so as to be able to talk with Georgiana, but in the end it failed: a young minister fresh from college came and preached at St. Osoph’s six special sermons on the absolute certainty of eternal punishment, and he married Miss McTeague as a result of it.

And, meantime, Mr. Spillikins had got engaged, or practically so, to Adelina Lightleigh; not that he had spoken to her, but he considered himself bound to her. For her sake he had given up hell altogether, and was dancing till two in the morning and studying action bridge out of a book. For a time he felt so sure that she meant to have him that he began bringing his greatest friend, Edward Ruff of the college football team, of whom Spillikins was very proud, up to the Lightleighs’ residence. He specially wanted Adelina and Edward to be great friends, so that Adelina and he might ask Edward up to the house after he was married. And they got to be such great friends, and so quickly, that they were married in New York that autumn. After which Spillikins used to be invited up to the house by Edward and Adelina. They both used to tell him how much they owed him; and they, too, used to join in the chorus and say, “You know, Peter, you’re awfully silly not to get married.”

Now all this had happened and finished at about the time when the Yahi-Bahi Society ran its course. At its first meeting Mr. Spillikins had met Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown. At the very sight of her he began reading up the life of Buddha and a translation of the Upanishads so as to fit himself to aspire to live with her. Even when the society ended in disaster Mr. Spillikins’s love only burned the stronger. Consequently, as soon as he knew that Mr. and Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown were going away for the summer, and that Dulphemia was to go to stay with the Newberrys at Castel Casteggio, this latter place, the summer retreat of the Newberrys, became the one spot on earth for Mr. Peter Spillikins.

Naturally, therefore, Mr. Spillikins was presently transported to the seventh heaven when in due course of time he received a note which said, “We shall be so pleased if you can come out and spend a week or two with us here. We will send the car down to the Thursday train to meet you. We live here in the simplest fashion possible; in fact, as Mr. Newberry says, we are just roughing it, but I am sure you don’t mind for a change. Dulphemia is with us, but we are quite a small party.”

The note was signed “Margaret Newberry” and was written on heavy cream paper with a silver monogram such as people use when roughing it.

—

The Newberrys, like everybody else, went away from town in the summertime. Mr. Newberry being still in business, after a fashion, it would not have looked well for him to remain in town throughout the year. It would have created a bad impression on the market as to how much he was making.

In fact, in the early summer everybody went out of town. The few who ever revisited the place in August reported that they hadn’t seen a soul on the street.

It was a sort of longing for the simple life, for nature, that came over everybody. Some people sought it at the seaside, where nature had thrown out her broad plank walks and her long piers and her vaudeville shows. Others sought it in the heart of the country, where nature had spread her oiled motor roads and her wayside inns. Others, like the Newberrys, preferred to “rough it” in country residences of their own.

Some of the people, as already said, went for business reasons, to avoid the suspicion of having to work all the year round. Others went to Europe to avoid the reproach of living always in America. Others, perhaps most people, went for medical reasons, being sent away by their doctors. Not that they were ill; but the doctors of Plutoria Avenue, such as Doctor Slyder, always preferred to send all their patients out of town during the summer months. No well-to-do doctor cares to be bothered with them. And of course patients, even when they are anxious to go anywhere on their own account, much prefer to be sent there by their doctor.

“My dear madam,” Dr. Slyder would say to a lady who, as he knew, was most anxious to go to Virginia, “there’s really nothing I can do for you.” Here he spoke the truth. “It’s not a case of treatment. It’s simply a matter of dropping everything and going away. Now why don’t you go for a month or two to some quiet place, where you will simply do nothing?” (She never, as he knew, did anything, anyway.) “What do you say to Hot Springs, Virginia? – absolute quiet, good golf, not a soul there, plenty of tennis.” Or else he would say, “My dear madam, you’re simply worn out. Why don’t you just drop everything and go to Canada? – perfectly quiet, not a soul there, and, I believe, nowadays quite fashionable.”

Thus, after all the patients had been sent away, Dr. Slyder and his colleagues of Plutoria Avenue managed to slip away themselves for a month or two, heading straight for Paris and Vienna. There they were able, so they said, to keep in touch with what continental doctors were doing. They probably were.

Now it so happened that both the parents of Miss Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown had been sent out of town in this fashion. Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s distressing experience with Yahi-Bahi had left her in a condition in which she was utterly fit for nothing, except to go on a Mediterranean cruise, with about eighty other people also fit for nothing.

Mr. Rasselyer-Brown himself, though never exactly an invalid, had confessed that after all the fuss of the Yahi-Bahi business he needed bracing up, needed putting into shape, and had put himself into Dr. Slyder’s hands. The doctor had examined him, questioned him searchingly as to what he drank, and ended by prescribing port wine to be taken firmly and unflinchingly during the evening, and for the daytime, at any moment of exhaustion, a light cordial such as rye whiskey, or rum and Vichy water. In addition to which Dr. Slyder had recommended Mr. Rasselyer-Brown to leave town.

“Why don’t you go down to Nagahakett on the Atlantic?” he said.

“Is that in Maine?” said Mr. Rasselyer-Brown in horror.

“Oh, dear me, no!” answered the doctor reassuringly. “It’s in New Brunswick, Canada; excellent place, most liberal licence laws; first class cuisine and a bar in the hotel. No tourists, no golf, too cold to swim – just the place to enjoy oneself.”

So Mr. Rasselyer-Brown had gone away also, and as a result Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown, at the particular moment of which we speak, was declared by the Boudoir and Society column of the Plutorian Daily Dollar to be staying with Mr. and Mrs. Newberry at their charming retreat, Castel Casteggio.

The Newberrys belonged to the class of people whose one aim in the summer is to lead the simple life. Mr. Newberry himself said that his one idea of a vacation was to get right out into the bush, and put on old clothes, and just eat when he felt like it.

This was why he had built Castel Casteggio. It stood about forty miles from the city, out among the wooded hills on the shore of a little lake. Except for the fifteen or twenty residences like it that dotted the sides of the lake it was entirely isolated. The only way to reach it was by the motor road that wound its way among leafy hills from the railway station fifteen miles away. Every foot of the road was private property, as all nature ought to be. The whole country about Castel Casteggio was absolutely primeval, or at any rate as primeval as Scotch gardeners and French landscape artists could make it. The lake itself lay like a sparkling gem from nature’s workshop – except that they had raised the level of it ten feet, stone-banked the sides, cleared out the brush, and put a motor road round it. Beyond that it was pure nature.

Castel Casteggio itself, a beautiful house of white brick with sweeping piazzas and glittering conservatories, standing among great trees with rolling lawns broken with flower-beds as the ground sloped to the lake, was perhaps the most beautiful house of all; at any rate, it was an ideal spot to wear old clothes in, to dine early (at 7.30) and, except for tennis parties, motor-boat parties, lawn teas, and golf, to live absolutely to oneself.

It should be explained that the house was not called Castel Casteggio because the Newberrys were Italian: they were not; nor because they owned estates in Italy: they didn’t nor had travelled there: they hadn’t. Indeed, for a time they had thought of giving it a Welsh name, or a Scotch. But the beautiful country residence of the Asterisk-Thomsons had stood close by in the same primeval country was already called Penny-gw-rydd, and the woodland retreat of the Hyphen-Joneses just across the little lake was called Strathythan-na-Clee, and the charming chalet of the Wilson-Smiths was called Yodel-Dudel; so it seemed fairer to select an Italian name.

—

“By Jove! Miss Furlong, how awfully good of you to come down!”

The little suburban train – two cars only, both first class, for the train went nowhere except out into the primeval wilderness – had drawn up at the diminutive roadside station. Mr. Spillikins had alighted, and there was Miss Philippa Furlong sitting behind the chauffeur in the Newberrys’ motor. She was looking as beautiful as only the younger sister of a High Church episcopalian rector can look, dressed in white, the colour of saintliness, on a beautiful morning in July.

There was no doubt about Philippa Furlong. Her beauty was of that peculiar and almost sacred kind found only in the immediate neighbourhood of the High Church clergy. It was admitted by all who envied or admired her that she could enter a church more gracefully, move more swimmingly up the aisle, and pray better than any girl on Plutoria Avenue.

Mr. Spillikins, as he gazed at her in her white summer dress and wide picture hat, with her parasol nodding above her head, realized that after all, religion, as embodied in the younger sisters of the High Church clergy, fills a great place in the world.

“By Jove!” he repeated, “how awfully good of you!”

“Not a bit,” said Philippa. “Hop in. Dulphemia was coming, but she couldn’t. Is that all you have with you?”

The last remark was ironical. It referred to the two quite large steamer trunks of Mr. Spillikins that were being loaded, together with his suit-case, tennis racket, and golf kit, on to the fore part of the motor. Mr. Spillikins, as a young man of social experience, had roughed it before. He knew what a lot of clothes one needs for it.

So the motor sped away, and went bowling noiselessly over the oiled road, and turning corners where the green boughs of the great trees almost swished in their faces, and rounding and twisting among curves of the hills as it carried Spillikins and Philippa away from the lower domain or ordinary fields and farms up into the enchanted country of private property and the magic castles of Casteggio and Penny-gw-rydd.

Mr. Spillikins must have assured Philippa at least a dozen times in starting off how awfully good it was of her to come down in the motor; and he was so pleased at her coming to meet him that Philippa never even hinted that the truth was that she had expected somebody else on the same train. For to a girl brought up in the principles of the High Church the truth is a very sacred thing. She keeps it to herself.

And naturally, with such a sympathetic listener, it was not long before Mr. Spillikins had begun to talk of Dulphemia and his hopes.

“I don’t know whether she really cares for me or not,” said Mr. Spillikins, “but I have pretty good hope. The other day, or at least about two months ago, at one of the Yahi-Bahi meetings – you were not in that, were you?” he said breaking off.

“Only just at the beginning,” said Philippa; “we went to Bermuda.”

“Oh yes, I remember. Do you know, I thought it pretty rough at the end, especially on Ram Spudd. I liked him. I sent him two pounds of tobacco to the penitentiary last week; you can get it in to them, you know, if you know how.”

“But what were you going to say?” asked Philippa.

“Oh yes,” said Mr. Spillikins. And he realized that he had actually drifted off the topic of Dulphemia, a thing that had never happened to him before. “I was going to say that at one of the meetings, you know, I asked her if I might call her Dulphemia.”

“And what did she say to that?” asked Philippa.

“She said she didn’t care what I called her. So I think that looks pretty good, don’t you?”

“Awfully good,” said Philippa.

“And a little after that I took her slippers home from the Charity Ball at the Grand Palaver. Archie Jones took her home herself in his car, but I took her slippers. She’d forgotten them. I thought that a pretty good sign, wasn’t it? You wouldn’t let a chap carry round your slippers unless you knew him pretty well, would you, Miss Philippa?”

“Oh no, nobody would,” said Philippa. This of course, was a standing principle of the Anglican Church.

“And a little after that Dulphemia and Charlie Mostyn and I were walking to Mrs. Buncomhearst’s musical, and we’d only just started along the street, when she stopped and sent me back for her music – me, mind you, not Charlie. That seems to me awfully significant.”

“It seems to speak volumes,” said Philippa.

“Doesn’t it?” said Mr. Spillikins. “You don’t mind my telling you all about this Miss Philippa?” he added.

Incidentally Mr. Spillikins felt that it was all right to call her Miss Philippa, because she had a sister who was really Miss Furlong, so it would have been quite wrong, as Mr. Spillikins realized, to have called Miss Philippa by her surname. In any case, the beauty of the morning was against it.

“I don’t mind a bit,” said Philippa. “I think it’s awfully nice of you to tell me about it.”

She didn’t add that she knew all about it already.

“You see,” said Mr. Spillikins, “you’re so awfully sympathetic. It makes it so easy to talk to you. With other girls, especially with clever ones, even with Dulphemia. I often feel a perfect jackass beside them. But I don t feel that way with you at all.”

“Don’t you really?” said Philippa, but the honest admiration in Mr. Spillikin’s protruding blue eyes forbade a sarcastic answer.

“By Jove!” said Mr. Spillikins presently, with complete irrelevance, “I hope you don’t mind my saying it, but you look awfully well in white – stunning.” He felt that a man who was affianced, or practically so, was allowed the smaller liberty of paying honest compliments.

“Oh, this old thing,” laughed Philippa, with a contemptuous shake of her dress. “But up here, you know, we just wear anything.” She didn’t say that this old thing was only two weeks old and had cost eighty dollars, or the equivalent of one person’s pew rent at St. Asaph’s for six months.

And after that they had only time, so it seemed to Mr. Spillikins, for two or three remarks, and he had scarcely had leisure to reflect what a charming girl Philippa had grown to be since she went to Bermuda – the effect, no doubt, of the climate of those fortunate islands – when quite suddenly they rounded a curve into an avenue of nodding trees, and there were the great lawn and wide piazzas and the conservatories of Castel Casteggio right in front of them.

“Here we are,” said Philippa, “and there’s Mr. Newberry out on the lawn.”

—

“Now, here,” Mr. Newberry was saying a little later, waving his hand, “is where you get what I think the finest view of the place.”

He was standing at the corner of the lawn where it sloped, dotted with great trees, to the banks of the little lake, and was showing Mr. Spillikins the beauties of Castel Casteggio.

Mr. Newberry wore on his short circular person the summer costume of a man taking his ease and careless of dress: plain white flannel trousers, not worth more than six dollars a leg, an ordinary white silk shirt with a rolled collar, that couldn’t have cost more than fifteen dollars, and on his head an ordinary Panama hat, say forty dollars.

“By Jove!” said Mr. Spillikins, as he looked about him at the house and the beautiful lawn with its great trees, “it’s a lovely place.”

“Isn’t it?” said Mr. Newberry. “But you ought to have seen it when I took hold of it. To make the motor road alone I had to dynamite out about a hundred yards of rock, and then I fetched up cement, tons and tons of it, and boulders to buttress the embankment.”

“Did you really!” said Mr. Spillikins, looking at Mr. Newberry with great respect.

“Yes, and even that was nothing to the house itself. Do you know, I had to go at least forty feet for the foundations. First I went through about twenty feet of loose clay, after that I struck sand, and I’d no sooner got through that than, by George! I landed in eight feet of water. I had to pump it out; I think I took out a thousand gallons before I got clear down to the rock. Then I took my solid steel beams in fifty-foot lengths,” here Mr. Newberry imitated with his arms the action of a man setting up a steel beam, “and set them upright and bolted them on the rock. After that I threw my steel girders across, clapped on my roof rafters, all steel, in sixty-foot pieces, and then just held it easily, just supported it a bit, and let it sink gradually to its place.”

Mr. Newberry illustrated with his two arms the action of a huge house being allowed to sink slowly to a firm rest.

“You don’t say so!” said Mr. Spillikins, lost in amazement at the wonderful physical strength that Mr. Newberry must have.

“Excuse me just a minute,” broke off Mr. Newberry, “while I smooth out the gravel where you’re standing. You’ve rather disturbed it, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I’m awfully sorry,” said Mr. Spillikins.

“Oh, not at all, not at all,” said his host. “I don’t mind in the least. It’s only on account of McAlister.”

“Who?” asked Mr. Spillikins.

“My gardener. He doesn’t care to have us walk on the gravel paths. It scuffs up the gravel so. But sometimes one forgets.”

It should be said here, for the sake of clearness, that one of the chief glories of Castel Casteggio lay in its servants. All of them, it goes without saying, had been brought from Great Britain. The comfort they gave to Mr. and Mrs. Newberry was unspeakable. In fact, as they themselves admitted, servants of the kind are simply not to be found in America.

“Our Scotch gardener,” Mrs. Newberry always explained “is a perfect character. I don’t know how we could get another like him. Do you know, my dear, he simply won’t allow us to pick the roses; and if any of us walk across the grass he is furious. And he positively refuses to let us use the vegetables. He told me quite plainly that if we took any of his young peas or his early cucumbers he would leave. We are to have them later on when he’s finished growing them.”

“How delightful it is to have servants of that sort,” the lady addressed would murmur; “so devoted and so different from servants on this side of the water. Just imagine, my dear, my chauffeur, when I was in Colorado, actually threatened to leave me merely because I wanted to reduce his wages. I think it’s these wretched labour unions.”

“I’m sure it is. Of course we have trouble with McAlister at times, but he’s always very reasonable when we put things in the right light. Last week, for example, I was afraid that we had gone too far with him. He is always accustomed to have a quart of beer every morning at half-past ten – the maids are told to bring it out to him, and after that he goes to sleep in the little arbour beside the tulip bed. And the other day when he went there he found that one of our guests who hadn’t been told, was actually sitting in there reading. Of course he was furious. I was afraid for the moment that he would give notice on the spot.”

“What would you have done?”

“Positively, my dear, I don’t know. But we explained to him at once that it was only an accident and that the person hadn’t known and that of course it wouldn’t occur again. After that he was softened a little, but he went off muttering to himself, and that evening he dug up all the new tulips and threw them over the fence. We saw him do it, but we didn’t dare say anything.”

“Oh no,” echoed the other lady; “if you had you might have lost him.”

“Exactly. And I don’t think we could possibly get another man like him; at least, not on this side of the water.”

—

“But come,” said Mr. Newberry, after he had finished adjusting the gravel with his foot, “there are Mrs. Newberry and the girls on the verandah. Let’s go and join them.”

A few minutes later Mr. Spillikins was talking with Mrs. Newberry and Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown, and telling Mrs. Newberry what a beautiful house she had. Beside them stood Philippa Furlong, and she had her arm around Dulphemia’s waist; and the picture that they thus made, with their heads close together, Dulphemia’s hair being golden and Philippa’s chestnut-brown, was such that Mr. Spillikins had no eyes for Mrs. Newberry nor for Castel Casteggio nor for anything. So much so that he practically didn’t see at all the little girl in green that stood unobtrusively on the further side of Mrs. Newberry. Indeed, though somebody had murmured her name in introduction, he couldn’t have repeated it if asked two minutes afterwards. His eyes and his mind were elsewhere.

But hers were not.

For the Little Girl in Green looked at Mr. Spillikins with wide eyes, and when she looked at him she saw all at once such wonderful things about him as nobody had ever seen before.

For she could see from the poise of his head how awfully clever he was; and from the way he stood with his hands in his side pockets she could see how manly and brave he must be; and of course there was firmness and strength written all over him. In short, she saw as she looked such a Peter Spillikins as truly never existed, or could exist – or at least such a Peter Spillikins as no one else in the world had ever suspected before.

All in a moment she was ever so glad that she accepted Mrs. Newberry’s invitation to Castel Casteggio and hadn’t been afraid to come. For the Little Girl in Green, whose Christian name was Norah, was only what is called a poor relation of Mrs. Newberry, and her father was a person of no account whatever, who didn’t belong to the Mausoleum Club or to any other club, and who lived, with Norah, on a street that nobody who was anybody lived upon. Norah had been asked up a few days before out of the City to give her air – which is the only thing that can be safely and freely given to poor relations. Thus she had arrived at Castel Casteggio with one diminutive trunk, so small and shabby that even the servants who carried it upstairs were ashamed of it. In it were a pair of brand new tennis shoes (at ninety cents reduced to seventy-five) and a white dress of the kind that is called “almost evening,” and such few other things as poor relations might bring with fear and trembling to join in the simple rusticity of the rich.

Thus stood Norah looking at Mr. Spillikins.

As for him, such is the contrariety of human things, he had no eyes for her at all.

“What a perfectly charming house this is,” Mr. Spillikins was saying. He always said this on such occasions, but it seemed to the Little Girl in Green that he spoke with wonderful social ease.

“I am so glad you think so,” said Mrs. Newberry (this was what she always answered); “you’ve no idea what work it has been. This year we put in all this new glass in the east conservatory, over a thousand panes. Such a tremendous business!”

“I was just telling Mr. Spillikins,” said Mr. Newberry, “about the work we had blasting out the motor road. You can see the gap where it lies better from here, I think, Spillikins. I must have exploded a ton and a half of dynamite on it.”

“By Jove!” said Mr. Spillikins; “it must be dangerous work eh? I wonder you aren’t afraid of it.”

“One simply gets used to it, that’s all,” said Newberry, shrugging his shoulders; “but of course it is dangerous. I blew up two Italians on the last job.” He paused a minute and added musingly, “Hardy fellows, the Italians. I prefer them to any other people for blasting.”

“Did you blow them up yourself?” asked Mr. Spillikins.

“I wasn’t here,” answered Mr. Newberry. “In fact, I never care to be here when I’m blasting. We go to town. But I had to foot the bill for them all the same. Quite right, too. The risk, of course, was mine, not theirs; that’s the law, you know. They cost me two thousand each.”

“But come,” said Mrs. Newberry, “I think we must go and dress for dinner. Franklin will be frightfully put out if we’re late. Franklin is our butler,” she went on, seeing that Mr. Spillikins didn’t understand the reference, “and as we brought him out from England we have to be rather careful. With a good man like Franklin one is always so afraid of losing him – and after last night we have to be doubly careful.”

“Why last night?” asked Mr. Spillikins.

“Oh, it wasn’t much,” said Mrs. Newberry. “In fact, it was merely an accident. Only it just chanced that at dinner, quite late in the meal, when we had had nearly everything (we dine very simply here, Mr. Spillikins), Mr. Newberry, who was thirsty and who wasn’t really thinking what he was saying, asked Franklin to give him a glass of hock. Franklin said at once, ‘I’m very sorry, sir, I don’t care to serve hock after the entree!’”

“And of course he was right,” said Dulphemia with emphasis. “Exactly; he was perfectly right. They know, you know. We were afraid that there might be trouble, but Mr. Newberry went and saw Franklin afterwards and he behaved very well over it. But suppose we go and dress? It’s half-past six already and we’ve only an hour.”

—

In this congenial company Mr. Spillikins spent the next three days.

Life at Castel Casteggio, as the Newberrys loved to explain, was conducted on the very simplest plan. Early breakfast, country fashion, at nine o’clock; after that nothing to eat till lunch, unless one cared to have lemonade or bottled ale sent out with a biscuit or a macaroon to the tennis court. Lunch itself was a perfectly plain midday meal, lasting till about 1.30, and consisting simply of cold meats (say four kinds) and salads, with perhaps a made dish or two, and, for anybody who cared for it, a hot steak or a chop, or both. After that one had coffee and cigarettes in the shade of the piazza and waited for afternoon tea. This latter was served at a wicker table in any part of the grounds that the gardener was not at that moment clipping, trimming, or otherwise using. Afternoon tea being over, one rested or walked on the lawn till it was time to dress for dinner.

This simple routine was broken only by irruptions of people in motors or motor boats from Penny-gw-rydd or Yodel-Dudel Chalet.

The whole thing, from the point of view of Mr. Spillikins or Dulphemia or Philippa, represented rusticity itself.

To the Little Girl in Green it seemed as brilliant as the Court of Versailles; especially evening dinner – a plain home meal as the others thought it – when she had four glasses to drink out of and used to wonder over such problems as whether you were supposed, when Franklin poured out wine, to tell him to stop or to wait till he stopped without being told to stop; and other similar mysteries, such as many people before and after have meditated upon.

During all this time Mr. Spillikins was nerving himself to propose to Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown. In fact, he spent part of his time walking up and down under the trees with Philippa Furlong and discussing with her the proposal that he meant to make, together with such topics as marriage in general and his own unworthiness.

He might have waited indefinitely had he not learned, on the third day of his visit, that Dulphemia was to go away in the morning to join her father at Nagahakett.

That evening he found the necessary nerve to speak, and the proposal in almost every aspect of it was most successful.

“By Jove!” Spillikins said to Philippa Furlong next morning, in explaining what had happened, “she was awfully nice about it. I think she must have guessed, in a way, don’t you, what I was going to say? But at any rate she was awfully nice – let me say everything I wanted, and when I explained what a fool I was, she said she didn’t think I was half such a fool as people thought me. But it’s all right. It turns out that she isn’t thinking of getting married. I asked her if I might always go on thinking of her, and she said I might.”

And that morning when Dulphemia was carried off in the motor to the station, Mr. Spillikins, without exactly being aware how he had done it, had somehow transferred himself to Philippa.

“Isn’t she a splendid girl!” he said at least ten times a day to Norah, the Little Girl in Green. And Norah always agreed, because she really thought Philippa a perfectly wonderful creature. There is no doubt that, but for a slight shift of circumstances, Mr. Spillikins would have proposed to Miss Furlong. Indeed, he spent a good part of his time rehearsing little speeches that began, “Of course I know I’m an awful ass in a way,” or, “Of course I know that I’m not at all the sort of fellow,” and so on.

But not one of them ever was delivered.

For it so happened that on the Thursday, one week after Mr. Spillikins’s arrival, Philippa went again to the station in the motor. And when she came back there was another passenger with her, a tall young man in tweed, and they both began calling out to the Newberrys from a distance of at least a hundred yards.

And both the Newberrys suddenly exclaimed, “Why, it’s Tom!” and rushed off to meet the motor. And there was such a laughing and jubilation as the two descended and carried Tom’s valises to the verandah, that Mr. Spillikins felt as suddenly and completely out of it as the Little Girl in Green herself – especially as his ear had caught, among the first things said, the words, “Congratulate us, Mrs. Newberry, we’re engaged.”

After which Mr. Spillikins had the pleasure of sitting and listening while it was explained in wicker chairs on the verandah, that Philippa and Tom had been engaged already for ever so long – in fact, nearly two weeks, only they had agreed not to say a word to anybody till Tom had gone to North Carolina and back, to see his people.

And as to who Tom was, or what was the relation between Tom and the Newberrys, Mr. Spillikins neither knew or cared; nor did it interest him in the least that Philippa had met Tom in Bermuda, and that she hadn’t known that he even knew the Newberry’s nor any other of the exuberant disclosures of the moment. In fact, if there was any one period rather than another when Mr. Spillikins felt corroborated in his private view of himself, it was at this moment.

So the next day Tom and Philippa vanished together.

“We shall be quite a small party now,” said Mrs. Newberry; “in fact, quite by ourselves till Mrs. Everleigh comes, and she won’t be here for a fortnight.”

At which the heart of the Little Girl in Green was glad, because she had been afraid that other girls might be coming, whereas she knew that Mrs. Everleigh was a widow with four sons and must be ever so old, past forty.

The next few days were spent by Mr. Spillikins almost entirely in the society of Norah. He thought them on the whole rather pleasant days, but slow. To her they were an uninterrupted dream of happiness never to be forgotten.

The Newberrys left them to themselves; not with any intent; it was merely that they were perpetually busy walking about the grounds of Castel Casteggio, blowing up things with dynamite, throwing steel bridges over gullies, and hoisting heavy timber with derricks. Nor were they to blame for it. For it had not always been theirs to command dynamite and control the forces of nature. There had been a time, now long ago, when the two Newberrys had lived, both of them, on twenty dollars a week, and Mrs. Newberry had made her own dresses, and Mr. Newberry had spent vigorous evenings in making hand-made shelves for their sitting-room. That was long ago, and since then Mr. Newberry, like many other people of those earlier days, had risen to wealth and Castel Casteggio, while others, like Norah’s father, had stayed just where they were.

So the Newberrys left Peter and Norah to themselves all day. Even after dinner, in the evening, Mr. Newberry was very apt to call to his wife in the dusk from some distant corner of the lawn:

“Margaret, come over here and tell me if you don’t think we might cut down this elm, tear the stump out by the roots, and throw it into the ravine.”

And the answer was, “One minute, Edward; just wait till I get a wrap.”

Before they came back, the dusk had grown to darkness, and they had redynamited half the estate.

During all of which time Mr. Spillikins sat with Norah on the piazza. He talked and she listened. He told her, for instance, all about his terrific experiences in the oil business, and about his exciting career at college; or presently they went indoors and Norah played the piano and Mr. Spillikins sat and smoked and listened. In such a house as the Newberry’s, where dynamite and the greater explosives were everyday matters, a little thing like the use of tobacco in the drawing-room didn’t count. As for the music, “Go right ahead,” said Mr. Spillikins; “I’m not musical, but I don’t mind music a bit.”

In the daytime they played tennis. There was a court at one end of the lawn beneath the trees, all chequered with sunlight and mingled shadow; very beautiful, Norah thought, though Mr. Spillikins explained that the spotted light put him off his game. In fact, it was owing entirely to this bad light that Mr. Spillikins’s fast drives, wonderful though they were, somehow never got inside the service court.

Norah, of course, thought Mr. Spillikins a wonderful player. She was glad – in fact, it suited them both – when he beat her six to nothing. She didn’t know and didn’t care that there was no one else in the world that Mr. Spillikins could beat like that. Once he even said to her.

“By Gad! you don’t play half a bad game, you know. I think you know, with practice you’d come on quite a lot.”

After that the games were understood to be more or less in the form of lessons, which put Mr. Spillikins on a pedestal of superiority, and allowed any bad strokes on his part to be viewed as a form of indulgence.

Also, as the tennis was viewed in this light, it was Norah’s part to pick up the balls at the net and throw them back to Mr. Spillikins. He let her do this, not from rudeness, for it wasn’t in him, but because in such a primeval place as Castel Casteggio the natural primitive relation of the sexes is bound to reassert itself.

But of love Mr. Spillikins never thought. He had viewed it so eagerly and so often from a distance that when it stood here modestly at his very elbow he did not recognize its presence. His mind had been fashioned, as it were, to connect love with something stunning and sensational, with Easter hats and harem skirts and the luxurious consciousness of the unattainable.

Even at that, there is no knowing what might have happened. Tennis, in the chequered light of sun and shadow cast by summer leaves, is a dangerous game. There came a day when they were standing one each side of the net and Mr. Spillikins was explaining to Norah the proper way to hold a racquet so as to be able to give those magnificent backhand sweeps of his, by which he generally drove the ball halfway to the lake; and explaining this involved putting his hand right over Norah’s on the handle of the racquet, so that for just half a second her hand was clasped tight in his; and if that half-second had been lengthened out into a whole second it is quite possible that what was already subconscious in his mind would have broken its way triumphantly to the surface, and Norah’s hand would have stayed in his – how willingly – ! for the rest of their two lives.

But just at that moment Mr. Spillikins looked up, and he said in quite an altered tone.

“By Jove! who’s that awfully good-looking woman getting out of the motor?”

And their hands unclasped. Norah looked over towards the house and said:

“Why, it’s Mrs. Everleigh. I thought she wasn’t coming for another week.”

“I say,” said Mr. Spillikins, straining his short sight to the uttermost, “what perfectly wonderful golden hair, eh?” “Why, it’s—” Norah began, and then she stopped. It didn’t seem right to explain that Mrs. Everleigh’s hair was dyed. “And who’s that tall chap standing beside her?” said Mr. Spillikins.

“I think it’s Captain Cormorant, but I don’t think he’s going to stay. He’s only brought her up in the motor from town.” “By Jove, how good of him!” said Spillikins; and this sentiment in regard to Captain Cormorant, though he didn’t know it, was to become a keynote of his existence.

“I didn’t know she was coming so soon,” said Norah, and there was weariness already in her heart. Certainly she didn’t know it; still less did she know, or anyone else, that the reason of Mrs. Everleigh’s coming was because Mr. Spillikins was there. She came with a set purpose, and she sent Captain Cormorant directly back in the motor because she didn’t want him on the premises.

“Oughtn’t we to go up to the house?” said Norah.

“All right,” said Mr. Spillikins with great alacrity, “let’s go.”

—

Now as this story began with the information that Mrs. Everleigh is at present Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins, there is no need to pursue in detail the stages of Mr. Spillikins’s wooing. Its course was swift and happy. Mr. Spillikins, having seen the back of Mrs. Everleigh’s head, had decided instantly that she was the most beautiful woman in the world; and that impression is not easily corrected in the half-light of a shaded drawing-room; nor across a dinner-table lighted only with candles with deep red shades; nor even in the daytime through a veil. In any case, it is only fair to state that if Mrs. Everleigh was not and is not a singularly beautiful woman, Mr. Spillikins still doesn’t know it. And in point of attraction the homage of such experts as Captain Cormorant and Lieutenant Hawk speaks for itself.

So the course of Mr. Spillikins’s love, for love it must have been, ran swiftly to its goal. Each stage of it was duly marked by his comments to Norah.

“She is a splendid woman,” he said, “so sympathetic. She always seems to know just what one’s going to say.”

So she did, for she was making him say it.

“By Jove!” he said a day later, “Mrs. Everleigh’s an awfully fine woman, isn’t she? I was telling her about my having been in the oil business for a little while, and she thinks that I’d really be awfully good in money things. She said she wished she had me to manage her money for her.”

This also was quite true, except that Mrs. Everleigh had not made it quite clear that the management of her money was of the form generally known as deficit financing. In fact, her money was, very crudely stated, nonexistent, and it needed a lot of management.

A day or two later Mr. Spillikins was saying, “I think Mrs. Everleigh must have had great sorrow, don’t you? Yesterday she was showing me a photograph of her little boy – she has a little boy you know—”

“Yes, I know,” said Norah. She didn’t add that she knew that Mrs. Everleigh had four.

“—and she was saying how awfully rough it is having him always away from her at Dr. Something’s academy where he is.”

And very soon after that Mr. Spillikins was saying, with quite a quaver in his voice,

“By Jove! yes, I’m awfully lucky; I never thought for a moment that she’d have me, you know – a woman like her, with so much attention and everything. I can’t imagine what she sees in me.”

Which was just as well.

And then Mr. Spillikins checked himself, for he noticed – this was on the verandah in the morning – that Norah had a hat and jacket on and that the motor was rolling towards the door.

“I say,” he said, “are you going away?”

“Yes, didn’t you know?” Norah said. “I thought you heard them speaking of it at dinner last night. I have to go home; father’s alone, you know.”

“Oh, I’m awfully sorry,” said Mr. Spillikins; “we shan’t have any more tennis.”

“Goodbye,” said Norah, and as she said it and put out her hand there were tears brimming up into her eyes. But Mr. Spillikins, being short of sight, didn’t see them.

“Goodbye,” he said.

Then as the motor carried her away he stood for a moment in a sort of reverie. Perhaps certain things that might have been rose unformed and inarticulate before his mind. And then, a voice called from the drawing-room within, in a measured and assured tone,

“Peter, darling, where are you?”

“Coming,” cried Mr. Spillikins, and he came.

—

On the second day of the engagement Mrs. Everleigh showed to Peter a little photograph in a brooch.

“This is Gib, my second little boy,” she said.

Mr. Spillikins started to say, “I didn’t know—” and then checked himself and said, “By Gad! what a fine-looking little chap, eh? I’m awfully fond of boys.”

“Dear little fellow, isn’t he?” said Mrs. Everleigh. “He’s really rather taller than that now, because this picture was taken a little while ago.”

And the next day she said, “This is Willie, my third boy,” and on the day after that she said, “This is Sib, my youngest boy; I’m sure you’ll love him.”

“I’m sure I shall,” said Mr. Spillikins. He loved him already for being the youngest.

—

And so in the fulness of time – nor was it so very full either, in fact, only about five weeks – Peter Spillikins and Mrs. Everleigh were married in St. Asaph’s Church on Plutoria Avenue. And the wedding was one of the most beautiful and sumptuous of the weddings of the September season. There were flowers, and bridesmaids in long veils, and tall ushers in frock-coats, and awnings at the church door, and strings of motors with wedding-favours on imported chauffeurs, and all that goes to invest marriage on Plutoria Avenue with its peculiar sacredness. The face of the young rector, Mr. Fareforth Furlong, wore the added saintliness that springs from a five-hundred dollar fee. The whole town was there, or at least everybody that was anybody; and if there was one person absent, one who sat by herself in the darkened drawing-room of a dull little house on a shabby street, who knew or cared?

So after the ceremony the happy couple – for were they not so? – left for New York. There they spent their honeymoon. They had thought of going – it was Mr. Spillikins’s idea – to the coast of Maine. But Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins said that New York was much nicer, so restful, whereas, as everyone knows, the coast of Maine is frightfully noisy.

Moreover, it so happened that before the Everleigh-Spillikinses had been more than four or five days in New York the ship of Captain Cormorant dropped anchor in the Hudson; and when the anchor of that ship was once down it generally stayed there. So the captain was able to take the Everleigh-Spillikinses about in New York, and to give a tea for Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins on the deck of his vessel so that she might meet the officers, and another tea in a private room of a restaurant on Fifth Avenue so that she might meet no one but himself.

And at this tea Captain Cormorant said, among other things, “Did he kick up rough at all when you told him about the money?”

And Mrs. Everleigh, now Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins, said, “Not he! I think he is actually pleased to know that I haven’t any. Do you know, Arthur, he’s really an awfully good fellow,” and as she said it she moved her hand away from under Captain Cormorant’s on the tea-table.

“I say,” said the Captain, “don’t get sentimental over him.”

—

So that is how it is that the Everleigh-Spillikinses came to reside on Plutoria Avenue in a beautiful stone house, with a billiard-room in an extension on the second floor. Through the windows of it one can almost hear the click of the billiard balls, and a voice saying, “Hold on, father, you had your shot.”

TOC     INDEX

VI

The Rival Churches
of St. Asaph and St. Osoph

The church of St. Asaph, more properly call St. Asaph’s in the Fields, stands among the elm trees of Plutoria Avenue opposite the university, its tall spire pointing to the blue sky. Its rector is fond of saying that it seems to him to point, as it were, a warning against the sins of a commercial age. More particularly does he say this in his Lenten services at noonday, when the businessmen sit in front of him in rows, their bald heads uncovered and their faces stamped with contrition as they think of mergers that they should have made, and real estate that they failed to buy for lack of faith.

The ground on which St. Asaph’s stands is worth seven dollars and a half a foot. The mortgagees, as they kneel in prayer in their long frock-coats, feel that they have built upon a rock. It is a beautifully appointed church. There are windows with priceless stained glass that were imported from Normandy, the rector himself swearing out the invoices to save the congregation the grievous burden of the customs duty. There is a pipe organ in the transept that cost ten thousand dollars to install. The debenture-holders, as they join in the morning anthem, love to hear the dulcet notes of the great organ and to reflect that it is as good as new. Just behind the church is St. Asaph’s Sunday School, with a ten-thousand dollar mortgage of its own. And below that again on the side street, is the building of the Young Men’s Guild with a bowling-alley and a swimming-bath deep enough to drown two young men at a time, and a billiard-room with seven tables. It is the rector’s boast that with a Guild House such as that there is no need for any young man of the congregation to frequent a saloon. Nor is there.

And on Sunday mornings, when the great organ plays, and the mortgagees and the bond-holders and the debenture-holders and the Sunday school teachers and the billiard-markers all lift up their voices together, there is emitted from St. Asaph’s a volume of praise that is practically as fine and effective as paid professional work.

St. Asaph’s is episcopal. As a consequence it has in it and about it all those things which go to make up the episcopal church – brass tablets let into its walls, blackbirds singing in its elm trees, parishioners who dine at eight o’clock, and a rector who wears a little crucifix and dances the tango.

On the other hand, there stands upon the same street, not a hundred yards away, the rival church of St. Osoph – presbyterian down to its very foundations in bed-rock, thirty feet below the level of the avenue. It has a short, squat tower – and a low roof, and its narrow windows are glazed with frosted glass. It has dark spruce trees instead of elms, crows instead of blackbirds, and a gloomy minister with a shovel hat who lectures on philosophy on week-days at the university. He loves to think that his congregation are made of the lowly and the meek in spirit, and to reflect that, lowly and meek as they are, there are men among them that could buy out half the congregation of St. Asaph’s.

St. Osoph’s is only presbyterian in a special sense. It is, in fact, too presbyterian to be any longer connected with any other body whatsoever. It seceded some forty years ago from the original body to which it belonged, and later on, with three other churches, it seceded from the group of seceding congregations. Still later it fell into a difference with the three other churches on the question of eternal punishment, the word “eternal” not appearing to the elders of St. Osoph’s to designate a sufficiently long period. The dispute ended in a secession which left the church of St. Osoph practically isolated in a world of sin whose approaching fate it neither denied nor deplored.

In one respect the rival churches of Plutoria Avenue had had a similar history. Each of them had moved up by successive stages from the lower and poorer parts of the city. Forty years ago St. Asaph’s had been nothing more than a little frame church with a tin spire, away in the west of the slums, and St. Osoph’s a square, diminutive building away in the east. But the site of St. Asaph’s had been bought by a brewing company, and the trustees, shrewd men of business, themselves rising into wealth, had rebuilt it right in the track of the advancing tide of a real estate boom. The elders of St. Osoph, quiet men, but illumined by an inner light, had followed suit and moved their church right against the side of an expanding distillery. Thus both the churches, as decade followed decade, made their way up the slope of the City till St. Asaph’s was presently gloriously expropriated by the street railway company, and planted its spire in triumph on Plutoria Avenue itself. But St. Osoph’s followed. With each change of site it moved nearer and nearer to St. Asaph’s. Its elders were shrewd men. With each move of their church they took careful thought in the rebuilding. In the manufacturing district it was built with sixteen windows on each side and was converted at a huge profit into a bicycle factory. On the residential street it was made long and deep and was sold to a moving-picture company without the alteration of so much as a pew. As a last step a syndicate, formed among the members of the congregation themselves, bought ground on Plutoria Avenue, and sublet it to themselves as a site for the church, at a nominal interest of five per cent per annum, payable nominally every three months and secured by a nominal mortgage.

As the two churches moved, their congregations, or at least all that was best of them – such members as were sharing in the rising fortunes of the City – moved also, and now for some six or seven years the two churches and the two congregations had confronted one another among the elm trees of the Avenue opposite to the university.

But at this point the fortunes of the churches had diverged. St. Asaph’s was a brilliant success; St. Osoph’s was a failure. Even its own trustees couldn’t deny it. At a time when St. Asaph’s was not only paying its interest but showing a handsome surplus on everything it undertook, the church of St. Osoph was moving steadily backwards.

There was no doubt, of course, as to the cause. Everybody knew it. It was simply a question of men, and, as everybody said, one had only to compare the two men conducting the churches to see why one succeeded and the other failed.

The Reverend Edward Fareforth Furlong of St. Asaph’s was a man who threw his whole energy into his parish work. The subtleties of theological controversy he left to minds less active than his own. His creed was one of works rather than of words, and whatever he was doing he did it with his whole heart. Whether he was lunching at the Mausoleum Club with one of his church wardens, or playing the flute – which he played as only the episcopal clergy can play it – accompanied on the harp by one of the fairest of the ladies of his choir, or whether he was dancing the new episcopal tango with the younger daughters of the elder parishioners, he threw himself into it with all his might. He could drink tea more gracefully and play tennis better than any clergyman on this side of the Atlantic. He could stand beside the white stone font of St. Asaph’s in his long white surplice holding a white-robed infant, worth half a million dollars, looking as beautifully innocent as the child itself, and drawing from every matron of the congregation with unmarried daughters the despairing cry, “What a pity that he has no children of his own!”

Equally sound was his theology. No man was known to preach shorter sermons or to explain away the book of Genesis more agreeably than the rector of St. Asaph’s; and if he found it necessary to refer to the Deity he did so under the name of Jehovah or Jah, or even Yaweh in a manner calculated not to hurt the sensitiveness of any of the parishioners. People who would shudder at brutal talk of the older fashion about the wrath of God listened with well-bred interest to a sermon on the personal characteristics of Jah. In the same way Mr. Furlong always referred to the devil, not as Satan but as Su or Swa, which took all the sting out of him. Beelzebub he spoke of as Behel-Zawbab, which rendered him perfectly harmless. The Garden of Eden he spoke of as the Paradeisos, which explained it entirely; the flood as the Diluvium, which cleared it up completely; and Jonah he named, after the correct fashion Jon Nah, which put the whole situation (his being swallowed by Baloo or the Great Lizard) on a perfectly satisfactory footing. Hell itself was spoken of as She-ol, and it appeared that it was not a place of burning, but rather of what one might describe as moral torment. This settled She-ol once and for all: nobody minds moral torment. In short, there was nothing in the theological system of Mr. Furlong that need have occasioned in any of his congregation a moment’s discomfort.

There could be no greater contrast with Mr. Fareforth Furlong than the minister of St. Osoph’s, the Rev. Dr. McTeague, who was also honorary professor of philosophy at the university. The one was young, the other was old; the one could dance the other could not; the one moved about at church picnics and lawn teas among a bevy of disciples in pink and blue sashes; the other moped around under the trees of the university campus with blinking eyes that saw nothing and an abstracted mind that had spent fifty years in trying to reconcile Hegel with St. Paul, and was still busy with it. Mr. Furlong went forward with the times; Dr. McTeague slid quietly backwards with the centuries.

Dr. McTeague was a failure, and all his congregation knew it. “He is not up to date,” they said. That was his crowning sin. “He don’t go forward any,” said the business members of the congregation. “That old man believes just exactly the same sort of stuff now that he did forty years ago. What’s more, he preaches it. You can’t run a church that way, can you?”

His trustees had done their best to meet the difficulty. They had offered Dr. McTeague a two-years’ vacation to go and see the Holy Land. He refused; he said he could picture it. They reduced his salary by fifty per cent; he never noticed it. They offered him an assistant; but he shook his head, saying that he didn’t know where he could find a man to do just the work that he was doing. Meantime he mooned about among the trees concocting a mixture of St. Paul with Hegel, three parts to one, for his Sunday sermon, and one part to three for his Monday lecture.

No doubt it was his dual function that was to blame for his failure. And this, perhaps, was the fault of Dr. Boomer, the president of the university. Dr. Boomer, like all university presidents of today, belonged to the presbyterian church; or rather, to state it more correctly, he included presbyterianism within himself. He was of course, a member of the board of management of St. Osoph’s and it was he who had urged, very strongly, the appointment of Dr. McTeague, then senior professor of philosophy, as minister.

“A saintly man,” he said, “the very man for the post. If you should ask me whether he is entirely at home as a professor of philosophy on our staff at the university, I should be compelled to say no. We are forced to admit that as a lecturer he does not meet our views. He appears to find it difficult to keep religion out of his teaching. In fact, his lectures are suffused with a rather dangerous attempt at moral teaching which is apt to contaminate our students. But in the Church I should imagine that would be, if anything, an advantage. Indeed, if you were to come to me and say, ‘Boomer, we wish to appoint Dr. McTeague as our minister,’ I should say, quite frankly, ‘Take him.’”

So Dr. McTeague had been appointed. Then, to the surprise of everybody he refused to give up his lectures in philosophy. He said he felt a call to give them. The salary, he said, was of no consequence. He wrote to Mr. Furlong senior (the father of the episcopal rector and honorary treasurer of the Plutoria University) and stated that he proposed to give his lectures for nothing. The trustees of the college protested; they urged that the case might set a dangerous precedent which other professors might follow. While fully admitting that Dr. McTeague’s lectures were well worth giving for nothing, they begged him to reconsider his offer. But he refused; and from that day on, in spite of all offers that he should retire on double his salary, that he should visit the Holy Land, or Syria, or Armenia, where the dreadful massacres of Christians were taking place, Dr. McTeague clung to his post with a tenacity worthy of the best traditions of Scotland. His only internal perplexity was that he didn’t see how, when the time came for him to die, twenty or thirty years hence, they would ever be able to replace him. Such was the situation of the two churches on a certain beautiful morning in June, when an unforeseen event altered entirely the current of their fortunes.

—

“No, thank you, Juliana,” said the young rector to his sister across the breakfast table – and there was something as near to bitterness in his look as his saintly, smooth-shaven face was capable of reflecting – “no, thank you, no more porridge. Prunes? no, no, thank you; I don’t think I care for any. And, by the way,” he added, “don’t bother to keep any lunch for me. I have a great deal of business – that is, of work in the parish – to see to, and I must just find time to get a bite of something to eat when and where I can.”

In his own mind he was resolving that the place should be the Mausoleum Club and the time just as soon as the head waiter would serve him.

After which the Reverend Edward Fareforth Furlong bowed his head for a moment in a short, silent blessing – the one prescribed by the episcopal church in America for a breakfast of porridge and prunes.

It was their first breakfast together, and it spoke volumes to the rector. He knew what it implied. It stood for his elder sister Juliana’s views on the need of personal sacrifice as a means of grace. The rector sighed as he rose. He had never missed his younger sister Philippa, now married and departed, so keenly. Philippa had had opinions of her own on bacon and eggs and on lamb chops with watercress as a means of stimulating the soul. But Juliana was different. The rector understood now exactly why it was that his father had exclaimed, on the news of Philippa’s engagement, without a second’s hesitation, “Then, of course, Juliana must live with you! Nonsense, my dear boy, nonsense! It’s my duty to spare her to you. After all, I can always eat at the club; they can give me a bite of something or other, surely. To a man of my age, Edward, food is really of no consequence. No, no; Juliana must move into the rectory at once.”

The rector’s elder sister rose. She looked tall and sallow and forbidding in the plain black dress that contrasted sadly with the charming clerical costumes of white and pink and the broad episcopal hats with flowers in them that Philippa used to wear for morning work in the parish.

“For what time shall I order dinner?” she asked. “You and Philippa used to have it at half-past seven, did you not? Don’t you think that rather too late?”

“A trifle perhaps,” said the rector uneasily. He didn’t care to explain to Juliana that it was impossible to get home any earlier from the kind of the dansant that everybody was giving just now. “But don’t trouble about dinner. I may be working very late. If I need anything to eat I shall get a biscuit and some tea at the Guild Rooms, or—”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but in his mind he added, “or else a really first-class dinner at the Mausoleum Club, or at the Newberrys’ or the Rasselyer-Browns’ – anywhere except here.”

“If you are going, then,” said Juliana, “may I have the key of the church.”

A look of pain passed over the rector’s face. He knew perfectly well what Juliana wanted the key for. She meant to go into his church and pray in it.

The rector of St. Asaph’s was, he trusted, as broad-minded a man as an Anglican clergyman ought to be. He had no objection to any reasonable use of his church – for a thanksgiving festival or for musical recitals for example – but when it came to opening up the church and using it to pray in, the thing was going a little too far. What was more, he had an idea from the look on Juliana’s face that she meant to pray for him. This, for a clergy man, was hard to bear. Philippa, like the good girl that she was, had prayed only for herself, and then only at the proper times and places, and in a proper praying costume. The rector began to realize what difficulties it might make for a clergyman to have a religious sister as his house-mate.

But he was never a man for unseemly argument. “It is hanging in my study,” he said.

And with that the Rev. Fareforth Furlong passed into the hall took up the simple silk hat, the stick and gloves of the working clergyman and walked out on to the avenue to begin his day’s work in the parish.

The rector’s parish viewed in its earthly aspect, was a singularly beautiful place. For it extended all along Plutoria Avenue, where the street is widest and the elm trees are at their leafiest and the motors at their very drowsiest. It lay up and down the shaded side streets of the residential district, darkened with great chestnuts and hushed in a stillness that was almost religion itself. There was not a house in the parish assessed at less than twenty-five thousand, and in very heart of it the Mausoleum Club, with its smooth white stone and its Grecian architecture, carried one back to the ancient world and made one think of Athens and of Paul preaching on Mars Hill. It was, all considered, a splendid thing to fight sin in such a parish and to keep it out of it. For kept out it was. One might look the length and breadth of the broad avenue and see no sign of sin all along it. There was certainly none in the smooth faces of the chauffeurs trundling their drowsy motors; no sign of it in the expensive children paraded by imported nursemaids in the chequered light of the shaded street; least of all was there any sign of it in the Stock Exchange members of the congregation as they walked along side by side to their lunch at the Mausoleum Club, their silk hats nodding together in earnest colloquy on Shares Preferred and Profits Undivided. So might have walked, so must have walked, the very Fathers of the Church themselves.

Whatever sin there was in the City was shoved sideways into the roaring streets of commerce where the elevated railway ran, and below that again into the slums. Here there must have been any quantity of sin. The rector of St. Asaph’s was certain of it. Many of the richer of his parishioners had been down in parties late at night to look at it, and the ladies of his congregation were joined together into all sorts of guilds and societies and bands of endeavour for stamping it out and driving it under or putting it into jail till it surrendered.

But the slums lay outside the rector’s parish. He had no right to interfere. They were under the charge of a special mission or auxiliary, a remnant of the St. Asaph’s of the past, placed under the care of a divinity student, at four hundred dollars per annum. His charge included all the slums and three police courts and two music halls and the City jail. One Sunday afternoon in every three months the rector and several ladies went down and sang hymns for him in his mission-house. But his work was really very easy. A funeral, for example, at the mission, was a simple affair, meaning nothing more than the preparation of a plain coffin and a glassless hearse and the distribution of a few artificial everlasting flowers to women crying in their aprons; a thing easily done: whereas in St. Asaph’s parish, where all the really important souls were, a funeral was a large event, requiring taste and tact, and a nice shading of delicacy in distinguishing mourners from beneficiaries, and private grief from business representation at the ceremony. A funeral with a plain coffin and a hearse was as nothing beside an interment, with a casket smothered in hot-house syringas, borne in a coach and followed by special reporters from the financial papers.

It appeared to the rector afterwards as almost a shocking coincidence that the first person whom he met upon the avenue should have been the Rev. Dr. McTeague himself. Mr. Furlong gave him the form of amiable “good morning” that the episcopal church always extends to those in error. But he did not hear it. The minister’s head was bent low, his eyes gazed into vacancy, and from the movements of his lips and from the fact that he carried a leather case of notes, he was plainly on his way to his philosophical lecture. But the rector had no time to muse upon the abstracted appearance of his rival. For, as always happened to him, he was no sooner upon the street than his parish work of the day began. In fact, he had hardly taken a dozen steps after passing Dr. McTeague when he was brought up standing by two beautiful parishioners with pink parasols.

“Oh, Mr. Furlong,” exclaimed one of them, “so fortunate to happen to catch you; we were just going into the rectory to consult you. Should the girls – for the lawn tea for the Guild on Friday, you know – wear white dresses with light blue sashes all the same, or do you think we might allow them to wear any coloured sashes that they like? What do you think?”

This was an important problem. In fact, there was a piece of parish work here that it took the Reverend Fareforth half an hour to attend to standing the while in earnest colloquy with the two ladies under the shadow of the elm trees. But a clergyman must never be grudging of his time.

“Goodbye then,” they said at last. “Are you coming to the Browning Club this morning? Oh, so sorry! but we shall see you at the musicale this afternoon, shall we not?”

“Oh, I trust so,” said the rector.

“How dreadfully hard he works,” said the ladies to one another as they moved away.

Thus slowly and with many interruptions the rector made his progress along the avenue. At times he stopped to permit a pink-cheeked infant in a perambulator to beat him with a rattle while he inquired its age of an episcopal nurse, gay with flowing ribbons. He lifted his hat to the bright parasols of his parishioners passing in glistening motors, bowed to episcopalians, nodded amiably to presbyterians, and even acknowledged with his lifted hat the passing of persons of graver forms of error.

Thus he took his way along the avenue and down a side street towards the business district of the City, until just at the edge of it, where the trees were about to stop and the shops were about to begin, he found himself at the door of the Hymnal Supply Corporation, Limited. The premises as seen from the outside combined the idea of an office with an ecclesiastical appearance. The door was as that of a chancel or vestry; there was a large plate-glass window filled with Bibles and Testaments, all spread open and showing every variety of language in their pages. These were marked, Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, Ojibway, Irish and so forth. On the window in small white lettering were the words, HYMNAL SUPPLY CORPORATION, and below that, HOSANNA PIPE AND STEAM ORGAN INCORPORATED, and still lower the legend BIBLE SOCIETY OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD LIMITED.

There was no doubt of the sacred character of the place. Here laboured Mr. Furlong senior, the father of the Rev. Edward Fareforth. He was a man of many activities; president and managing director of the companies just mentioned, trustee and secretary of St. Asaph’s, honorary treasurer of the university, etc.; and each of his occupations and offices was marked by something of a supramundane character, something higher than ordinary business. His different official positions naturally overlapped and brought him into contact with himself from a variety of angles. Thus he sold himself hymn books at a price per thousand, made as a business favour to himself, negotiated with himself the purchase of the ten-thousand-dollar organ (making a price on it to himself that he begged himself to regard as confidential), and as treasurer of the college he sent himself an informal note of enquiry asking if he knew of any sound investment for the annual deficit of the college funds, a matter of some sixty thousand dollars a year, which needed very careful handling. Any man – and there are many such – who has been concerned with business dealings of this sort with himself realizes that they are more satisfactory than any other kind.

To what better person, then, could the rector of St. Asaph’s bring the quarterly accounts and statements of his church than to Mr. Furlong senior.

The outer door was opened to the rector by a sanctified boy with such a face as is only found in the choirs of the episcopal church. In an outer office through which the rector passed were two sacred stenographers with hair as golden as the daffodils of Sheba, copying confidential letters on absolutely noiseless typewriters. They were making offers of Bibles in half-car-load lots at two and a half per cent reduction, offering to reduce St. Mark by two cents on condition of immediate export, and to lay down St. John f.o.b. San Francisco for seven cents, while regretting that they could deliver fifteen thousand Rock of Ages in Missouri on no other terms than cash.

The sacred character of their work lent them a preoccupation beautiful to behold.

In the room beyond them was a white-haired confidential clerk, venerable as the Song of Solomon, and by him Mr. Fareforth Furlong was duly shown into the office of his father.

“Good morning, Edward,” said Mr. Furlong senior, as he shook hands. “I was expecting you. And while I think of it, I have just had a letter from Philippa. She and Tom will be home in two or three weeks. She writes from Egypt. She wishes me to tell you, as no doubt you have already anticipated, that she thinks she can hardly continue to be a member of the congregation when they come back. No doubt you felt this yourself?”

“Oh, entirely,” said the rector. “Surely in matters of belief a wife must follow her husband.”

“Exactly; especially as Tom’s uncles occupy the position they do with regard to—” Mr. Furlong jerked his head backwards and pointed with his thumb over his shoulder in a way that his son knew was meant to indicate St. Osoph’s Church.

The Overend brothers, who were Tom’s uncles (his name being Tom Overend) were, as everybody knew, among the principal supporters of St. Osoph’s. Not that they were, by origin, presbyterians. But they were self-made men, which put them once and for all out of sympathy with such a place as St. Asaph’s. “We made ourselves,” the two brothers used to repeat in defiance of the catechism of the Anglican Church. They never wearied of explaining how Mr. Dick, the senior brother, had worked overtime by day to send Mr. George, the junior brother, to school by night, and how Mr. George had then worked overtime by night to send Mr. Dick to school by day. Thus they had come up the business ladder hand over hand, landing later on in life on the platform of success like two corpulent acrobats, panting with the strain of it. “For years,” Mr. George would explain, “we had father and mother to keep as well; then they died, and Dick and me saw daylight.” By which he meant no harm at all, but only stated a fact, and concealed the virtue of it.

And being self-made men they made it a point to do what they could to lessen the importance of such an institution as St. Asaph’s Church. By the same contrariety of nature the two Overend brothers (their business name was Overend Brothers, Limited) were supporters of the dissentient Young Men’s Guild, and the second or rival University Settlement, and of anything or everything that showed a likelihood of making trouble. On this principle they were warm supporters and friends of the Rev. Dr. McTeague. The minister had even gone so far as to present to the brothers a copy of his philosophical work “McTeague’s Exposition of the Kantian Hypothesis.” and the two brothers had read it through in the office, devoting each of them a whole morning to it. Mr. Dick, the senior brother, had said that he had never seen anything like it, and Mr. George, the junior, had declared that a man who could write that was capable of anything.

On the whole it was evident that the relations between the Overend family and the presbyterian religion were too intimate to allow Mrs. Tom Overend, formerly Miss Philippa Furlong, to sit anywhere else of a Sunday than under Dr. McTeague.

“Philippa writes,” continued Mr. Furlong “that under the circumstances she and Tom would like to do something for your church. She would like – yes, I have the letter here – to give you, as a surprise, of course, either a new font or a carved pulpit; or perhaps a cheque; she wishes me on no account to mention it to you directly, but to ascertain indirectly from you, what would be the better surprise.”

“Oh, a cheque, I think,” said the rector; “one can do so much more with it, after all.”

“Precisely,” said his father; he was well aware of many things that can be done with a cheque that cannot possibly be done with a font.

“That’s settled then,” resumed Mr. Furlong; “and now I suppose you want me to run my eye over your quarterly statements, do you not, before we send them in to the trustees? That is what you’ve come for, is it not?”

“Yes,” said the rector, drawing a bundle of blue and white papers from his pocket. “I have everything with me. Our showing is, I believe, excellent, though I fear I fail to present it as clearly as it might be done.”

Mr. Furlong senior spread the papers on the table before him and adjusted his spectacles to a more convenient angle. He smiled indulgently as he looked at the documents before him.

“I am afraid you would never make an accountant, Edward,” he said.

“I fear not,” said the rector.

“Your items,” said his father, “are entered wrongly. Here, for example, in the general statement, you put down Distribution of Coals to the Poor to your credit. In the same way, Bibles and Prizes to the Sunday School you again mark to your credit. Why? Don’t you see, my boy, that these things are debits? When you give out Bibles or distribute fuel to the poor you give out something for which you get no return. It is a debit. On the other hand, such items as Church Offertory, Scholars’ Pennies, etc., are pure profit. Surely the principle is clear.”

“I think I see it better now,” said the Rev. Edward.

“Perfectly plain, isn’t it?” his father went on. “And here again. Paupers’ Burial Fund, a loss; enter it as such. Christmas Gift to Verger and Sexton, an absolute loss – you get nothing in return. Widows’ Mite, Fines inflicted in Sunday School, etc., these are profit; write them down as such. By this method, you see, in ordinary business we can tell exactly where we stand: anything which we give out without return or reward we count as a debit; all that we take from others without giving in return we count as so much to our credit.”

“Ah, yes,” murmured the rector. “I begin to understand.”

“Very good. But after all, Edward, I mustn’t quarrel with the mere form of your accounts; the statement is really a splendid showing. I see that not only is our mortgage and debenture interest all paid to date, but that a number of our enterprises are making a handsome return. I notice, for example, that the Girls’ Friendly Society of the church not only pays for itself, but that you are able to take something out of its funds and transfer it to the Men’s Book Club. Excellent! And I observe that you have been able to take a large portion of the Soup Kitchen Fund and put it into the Rector’s Picnic Account. Very good indeed. In this respect your figures are a model for church accounts anywhere.”

Mr. Furlong continued his scrutiny of the accounts. “Excellent,” he murmured, “and on the whole an annual surplus, I see, of several thousands. But stop a bit,” he continued, checking himself; “what’s this? Are you aware, Edward, that you are losing money on your Foreign Missions Account?”

“I feared as much,” said Edward.

“It’s incontestable. Look at the figures for yourself: missionary’s salary so much, clothes and books to converts so much, voluntary and other offerings of converts so much why, you’re losing on it, Edward!” exclaimed Mr. Furlong, and he shook his head dubiously at the accounts before him.

“I thought,” protested his son, “that in view of the character of the work itself—”

“Quite so,” answered his father, “quite so. I fully admit the force of that. I am only asking you, is it worth it? Mind you, I am not speaking now as a Christian, but as a businessman. Is it worth it?”

“I thought that perhaps, in view of the fact of our large surplus in other directions—”

“Exactly,” said his father, “a heavy surplus. It is precisely on that point that I wished to speak to you this morning. You have at present a large annual surplus, and there is every prospect under Providence – in fact, I think in any case – of it continuing for years to come. If I may speak very frankly I should say that as long as our reverend friend, Dr. McTeague, continues in his charge of St. Osoph’s – and I trust that he may be spared for many years to come – you are likely to enjoy the present prosperity of your church. Very good. The question arises, what disposition are we to make of our accumulating funds?”

“Yes,” said the rector, hesitating.

“I am speaking to you now,” said his father “not as the secretary of your church, but as president of the Hymnal Supply Company which I represent here. Now please understand, Edward, I don’t want in any way to force or control your judgment. I merely wish to show you certain – shall I say certain opportunities that present themselves for the disposal of our funds? The matter can be taken up later, formally, by yourself and the trustees of the church. As a matter of fact, I have already written to myself as secretary in the matter, and I have received what I consider a quite encouraging answer. Let me explain what I propose.”

Mr. Furlong senior rose, and opening the door of the office,

“Everett,” he said to the ancient clerk, “kindly give me a Bible.”

It was given to him.

Mr. Furlong stood with the Bible poised in his hand.

“Now we,” he went on, “I mean the Hymnal Supply Corporation, have an idea for bringing out an entirely new Bible.”

A look of dismay appeared on the saintly face of the rector.

“A new Bible!” he gasped.

“Precisely!” said his father, “a new Bible! This one – and we find it every day in our business – is all wrong.”

“All wrong!” said the rector with horror in his face.

“My dear boy,” exclaimed his father, “pray, pray, do not misunderstand me. Don’t imagine for a moment that I mean wrong in a religious sense. Such a thought could never, I hope, enter my mind. All that I mean is that this Bible is badly made up.”

“Badly made up?” repeated his son, as mystified as ever.

“I see that you do not understand me. What I mean is this. Let me try to make myself quite clear. For the market of today this Bible” – and he poised it again on his hand, as if to test its weight, “is too heavy. The people of today want something lighter, something easier to get hold of. Now if—”

But what Mr. Furlong was about to say was lost forever to the world.

For just at this juncture something occurred calculated to divert not only Mr. Furlong’s sentence, but the fortunes and the surplus of St. Asaph’s itself. At the very moment when Mr. Furlong was speaking a newspaper delivery man in the street outside handed to the sanctified boy the office copy of the noonday paper. And the boy had no sooner looked at its headlines than he said, “How dreadful!” Being sanctified, he had no stronger form of speech than that. But he handed the paper forthwith to one of the stenographers with hair like the daffodils of Sheba, and when she looked at it she exclaimed, “How awful!” And she knocked at once at the door of the ancient clerk and gave the paper to him; and when he looked at it and saw the headline the ancient clerk murmured, “Ah!” in the gentle tone in which very old people greet the news of catastrophe or sudden death.

But in his turn he opened Mr. Furlong’s door and put down the paper, laying his finger on the column for a moment without a word.

Mr. Furlong stopped short in his sentence. “Dear me!” he said as his eyes caught the item of news. “How very dreadful!”

“What is it?” said the rector.

“Dr. McTeague,” answered his father. “He has been stricken with paralysis!”

“How shocking!” said the rector, aghast. “But when? I saw him only this morning.”

“It has just happened,” said his father, following down the column of the newspaper as he spoke, “this morning, at the university, in his classroom, at a lecture. Dear me, how dreadful! I must go and see the president at once.”

Mr. Furlong was about to reach for his hat and stick when at that moment the aged clerk knocked at the door.

“Dr. Boomer,” he announced in a tone of solemnity suited to the occasion.

Dr. Boomer entered, shook hands in silence and sat down.

“You have heard our sad news, I suppose?” he said. He used the word “our” as between the university president and his honorary treasurer.

“How did it happen?” asked Mr. Furlong.

“Most distressing,” said the president. “Dr. McTeague, it seems, had just entered his ten o’clock class (the hour was about ten-twenty) and was about to open his lecture, when one of his students rose in his seat and asked a question. It is a practice,” continued Dr. Boomer, “which, I need hardly say, we do not encourage; the young man, I believe, was a newcomer in the philosophy class. At any rate, he asked Dr. McTeague, quite suddenly it appears; how he could reconcile his theory of transcendental immaterialism with a scheme of rigid moral determinism. Dr. McTeague stared for a moment, his mouth, so the class assert, painfully open. The student repeated the question, and poor McTeague fell forward over his desk, paralysed.”

“Is he dead?” gasped Mr. Furlong.

“No,” said the president. “But we expect his death at any moment. Dr. Slyder, I may say, is with him now and is doing all he can.”

“In any case, I suppose, he could hardly recover enough to continue his college duties,” said the young rector.

“Out of the question,” said the president. “I should not like to state that of itself mere paralysis need incapacitate a professor. Dr. Thrum, our professor of the theory of music, is, as you know, paralysed in his ears, and Mr. Slant, our professor of optics, is paralysed in his right eye. But this is a case of paralysis of the brain. I fear it is incompatible with professorial work.”

“Then, I suppose,” said Mr. Furlong senior, “we shall have to think of the question of a successor.”

They had both been thinking of it for at least three minutes. “We must,” said the president. “For the moment I feel too stunned by the sad news to act. I have merely telegraphed to two or three leading colleges for a locum tenens and sent out a few advertisements announcing the chair as vacant. But it will be difficult to replace McTeague. He was a man,” added Dr. Boomer, rehearsing in advance, unconsciously, no doubt, his forthcoming oration over Dr. McTeague’s death, “of a singular grasp, a breadth of culture, and he was able, as few men are, to instil what I might call a spirit of religion into his teaching. His lectures, indeed, were suffused with moral instruction, and exercised over his students an influence second only to that of the pulpit itself.”

He paused.

“Ah yes, the pulpit,” said Mr. Furlong, “there indeed you will miss him.”

“That,” said Dr. Boomer very reverently, “is our real loss, deep, irreparable. I suppose, indeed I am certain, we shall never again see such a man in the pulpit of St. Osoph’s. Which reminds me,” he added more briskly, “I must ask the newspaper people to let it be known that there will be service as usual the day after tomorrow, and that Dr. McTeague’s death will, of course, make no difference – that is to say – I must see the newspaper people at once.”

—

That afternoon all the newspaper editors in the City were busy getting their obituary notices ready for the demise of Dr. McTeague.

“The death of Dr. McTeague,” wrote the editor of the Commercial and Financial Undertone, a paper which had almost openly advocated the minister’s dismissal for five years back, “comes upon us as an irreparable loss. His place will be difficult, nay, impossible, to fill. Whether as a philosopher or a divine he cannot be replaced.”

“We have no hesitation in saying,” so wrote the editor of the Plutorian Times, a three-cent morning paper, which was able to take a broad or three-cent point of view of men and things, “that the loss of Dr. McTeague will be just as much felt in Europe as in America. To Germany the news that the hand that penned ‘McTeague’s Shorter Exposition of the Kantian Hypothesis’ has ceased to write will come with the shock of poignant anguish; while to France—”

The editor left the article unfinished at that point. After all, he was a ready writer, and he reflected that there would be time enough before actually going to press to consider from what particular angle the blow of McTeague’s death would strike down the people of France.

So ran in speech and in writing, during two or three days, the requiem of Dr. McTeague.

Altogether there were more kind things said of him in the three days during which he was taken for dead, than in thirty years of his life – which seemed a pity.

And after it all, at the close of the third day, Dr. McTeague feebly opened his eyes.

But when he opened them the world had already passed on, and left him behind.

TOC     INDEX

VII

The Ministrations
of the Rev. Uttermust
Dumfarthing

“Well, then, gentlemen, I think we have all agreed upon our man?”

Mr. Dick Overend looked around the table as he spoke at the managing trustees of St. Osoph’s church. They were assembled in an upper committee room of the Mausoleum Club. Their official place of meeting was in a board room off the vestry of the church. But they had felt a draught in it, some four years ago, which had wafted them over to the club as their place of assembly. In the club there were no draughts.

Mr. Dick Overend sat at the head of the table, his brother George beside him, and Dr. Boomer at the foot. Beside them were Mr. Boulder, Mr. Skinyer (of Skinyer and Beatem) and the rest of the trustees.

“You are agreed, then, on the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing?”

“Quite agreed,” murmured several trustees together.

“A most remarkable man,” said Dr. Boomer. “I heard him preach in his present church. He gave utterance to thoughts that I have myself been thinking for years. I never listened to anything so sound or so scholarly.”

“I heard him the night he preached in New York,” said Mr. Boulder. “He preached a sermon to the poor. He told them they were no good. I never heard, outside of a Scotch pulpit, such splendid invective.”

“Is he Scotch?” said one of the trustees.

“Of Scotch parentage,” said the university president. “I believe he is one of the Dumfarthings of Dunfermline, Dumfries.”

Everybody said “Oh,” and there was a pause.

“Is he married?” asked one of the trustees. “I understand,” answered Dr. Boomer, “that he is a widower with one child, a little girl.”

“Does he make any conditions?”

“None whatever,” said the chairman, consulting a letter before him, “except that he is to have absolute control, and in regard to salary. These two points settled, he says, he places himself entirely in our hands.”

“And the salary?” asked someone.

“Ten thousand dollars,” said the chairman, “payable quarterly in advance.”

A chorus of approval went round the table. “Good,” “Excellent,” “A first-class man,” muttered the trustees, “just what we want.”

“I am sure, gentlemen,” said Mr. Dick Overend, voicing the sentiments of everybody, “we do not want a cheap man. Several of the candidates whose names have been under consideration here have been in many respects – in point of religious qualification, let us say – most desirable men. The name of Dr. McSkwirt, for example, has been mentioned with great favour by several of the trustees. But he’s a cheap man. I feel we don’t want him.”

“What is Mr. Dumfarthing getting where he is?” asked Mr. Boulder.

“Nine thousand nine hundred,” said the chairman.

“And Dr. McSkwirt?”

“Fourteen hundred dollars.”

“Well, that settles it!” exclaimed everybody with a burst of enlightenment.

And so it was settled.

In fact, nothing could have been plainer.

“I suppose,” said Mr. George Overend as they were about to rise, “that we are quite justified in taking it for granted that Dr. McTeague will never be able to resume work?”

“Oh, absolutely for granted,” said Dr. Boomer. “Poor McTeague! I hear from Slyder that he was making desperate efforts this morning to sit up in bed. His nurse with difficulty prevented him.”

“Is his power of speech gone?” asked Mr. Boulder.

“Practically so; in any case, Dr. Slyder insists on his not using it. In fact, poor McTeague’s mind is a wreck. His nurse was telling me that this morning he was reaching out his hand for the newspaper, and seemed to want to read one of the editorials. It was quite pathetic,” concluded Dr. Boomer, shaking his head.

So the whole matter was settled, and next day all the town knew that St. Osoph’s Church had extended a call to the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing, and that he had accepted it.

—

Within a few weeks of this date the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing moved into the manse of St. Osoph’s and assumed his charge. And forthwith he became the sole topic of conversation on Plutoria Avenue. “Have you seen the new minister of St. Osoph’s?” everybody asked. “Have you been to hear Dr. Dumfarthing?” “Were you at St. Osoph’s Church on Sunday morning? Ah, you really should go! most striking sermon I ever listened to.”

The effect of him was absolute and instantaneous; there was no doubt of it.

“My dear,” said Mrs. Buncomhearst to one of her friends, in describing how she had met him, “I never saw a more striking man. Such power in his face! Mr. Boulder introduced him to me on the avenue, and he hardly seemed to see me at all, simply scowled! I was never so favourably impressed with any man.”

On his very first Sunday he preached to his congregation on eternal punishment, leaning forward in his black gown and shaking his fist at them. Dr. McTeague had never shaken his fist in thirty years, and as for the Rev. Fareforth Furlong, he was incapable of it.

But the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing told his congregation that he was convinced that at least seventy per cent of them were destined for eternal punishment; and he didn’t call it by that name, but labelled it simply and forcibly “hell.” The word had not been heard in any church in the better part of the City for a generation. The congregation was so swelled next Sunday that the minister raised the percentage to eighty-five, and everybody went away delighted. Young and old flocked to St. Osoph’s. Before a month had passed the congregation at the evening service at St. Asaph’s Church was so slender that the offertory, as Mr. Furlong senior himself calculated, was scarcely sufficient to pay the overhead charge of collecting it.

The presence of so many young men sitting in serried files close to the front was the only feature of his congregation that extorted from the Rev. Mr. Dumfarthing something like approval.

“It is a joy to me to see,” he remarked to several of his trustees, “that there are in the City so many godly young men, whatever the elders may be.”

But there may have been a secondary cause at work, for among the godly young men of Plutoria Avenue the topic of conversation had not been, “Have you heard the new presbyterian minister?” but, “Have you seen his daughter? You haven’t? Well, say!”

For it turned out that the “child” of Dr. Uttermust Dumfarthing, so-called by the trustees, was the kind of child that wears a little round hat, straight from Paris, with an upright feather in it, and a silk dress in four sections, and shoes with high heels that would have broken the heart of John Calvin. Moreover, she had the distinction of being the only person on Plutoria Avenue who was not one whit afraid of the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing. She even amused herself, in violation of all rules, by attending evening service at St. Asaph’s, where she sat listening to the Reverend Edward, and feeling that she had never heard anything so sensible in her life.

“I’m simply dying to meet your brother,” she said to Mrs. Tom Overend, otherwise Philippa; “he’s such a complete contrast with father.” She knew no higher form of praise: “Father’s sermons are always so frightfully full of religion.”

And Philippa promised that meet him she should.

But whatever may have been the effect of the presence of Catherine Dumfarthing, there is no doubt the greater part of the changed situation was due to Dr. Dumfarthing himself.

Everything he did was calculated to please. He preached sermons to the rich and told them they were mere cobwebs, and they liked it; he preached a special sermon to the poor and warned them to be mighty careful; he gave a series of weekly talks to workingmen, and knocked them sideways; and in the Sunday School he gave the children so fierce a talk on charity and the need of giving freely and quickly, that such a stream of pennies and nickels poured into Catherine Dumfarthing’s Sunday School Fund as hadn’t been seen in the church in fifty years.

Nor was Mr. Dumfarthing different in his private walk of life. He was heard to speak openly of the Overend brothers as “men of wrath,” and they were so pleased that they repeated it to half the town. It was the best business advertisement they had had for years.

Dr. Boomer was captivated with the man. “True scholarship,” he murmured, as Dr. Dumfarthing poured undiluted Greek and Hebrew from the pulpit, scorning to translate a word of it. Under Dr. Boomer’s charge the minister was taken over the length and breadth of Plutoria University, and reviled it from the foundations up.

“Our library,” said the president, “two hundred thousand volumes!”

“Aye,” said the minister, “a powerful heap of rubbish, I’ll be bound!”

“The photograph of our last year’s graduating class,” said the president.

“A poor lot, to judge by the faces of them,” said the minister.

“This, Dr. Dumfarthing, is our new radiographic laboratory; Mr. Spiff, our demonstrator, is preparing slides which, I believe, actually show the movements of the atom itself, do they not, Mr. Spiff?”

“Ah,” said the minister, piercing Mr. Spiff from beneath his dark brows, “it will not avail you, young man.”

Dr. Boomer was delighted. “Poor McTeague,” he said – “and by the way, Boyster, I hear that McTeague is trying to walk again; a great error, it shouldn’t be allowed! – poor McTeague knew nothing of science.”

The students themselves shared in the enthusiasm, especially after Dr. Dumfarthing had given them a Sunday afternoon talk in which he showed that their studies were absolutely futile. As soon as they knew this they went to work with a vigour that put new life into the college.

—

Meantime the handsome face of the Reverend Edward Fareforth Furlong began to wear a sad and weary look that had never been seen on it before. He watched the congregation drifting from St. Asaph’s to St. Osoph’s and was powerless to prevent it. His sadness reached its climax one bright afternoon in the late summer, when he noticed that even his episcopal blackbirds were leaving his elms and moving westward to the spruce trees of the manse.

He stood looking at them with melancholy on his face. “Why, Edward,” cried his sister, Philippa, as her motor stopped beside him, “how doleful you look! Get into the car and come out into the country for a ride. Let the parish teas look after themselves for today.”

Tom, Philippa’s husband, was driving his own car – he was rich enough to be able to – and seated with Philippa in the car was an unknown person, as prettily dressed as Philippa herself. To the rector she was presently introduced as Miss Catherine Something – he didn’t hear the rest of it. Nor did he need to. It was quite plain that her surname, whatever it was, was a very temporary and transitory affair.

So they sped rapidly out of the City and away out into the country, mile after mile, through cool, crisp air, and among woods with the touch of autumn bright already upon them, and with blue sky and great still clouds white overhead. And the afternoon was so beautiful and so bright that as they went along there was no talk about religion at all! nor was there any mention of Mothers’ Auxiliaries, or Girls’ Friendly Societies, nor any discussion of the poor. It was too glorious a day. But they spoke instead of the new dances, and whether they had come to stay, and of such sensible topics as that. Then presently, as they went on still further, Philippa leaned forwards and talked to Tom over his shoulder and reminded him that this was the very road to Castel Casteggio, and asked him if he remembered coming up it with her to join the Newberry’s ever so long ago. Whatever it was that Tom answered it is not recorded, but it is certain that it took so long in the saying that the Reverend Edward talked in tete-a-tete with Catherine for fifteen measured miles, and was unaware that it was more than five minutes. Among other things he said, and she agreed – or she said and he agreed – that for the new dances it was necessary to have always one and the same partner, and to keep that partner all the time. And somehow simple sentiments of that sort, when said direct into a pair of listening blue eyes behind a purple motor veil, acquire an infinite significance.

Then, not much after that, say three or four minutes, they were all of a sudden back in town again, running along Plutoria Avenue, and to the rector’s surprise the motor was stopping outside the manse, and Catherine was saying, “Oh, thank you ever so much, Philippa; it was just heavenly!” which showed that the afternoon had had its religious features after all. “What!” said the rector’s sister, as they moved off again, “didn’t you know? That’s Catherine Dumfarthing!”

—

When the Rev. Fareforth Furlong arrived home at the rectory he spent an hour or so in the deepest of deep thought in an armchair in his study. Nor was it any ordinary parish problem that he was revolving in his mind. He was trying to think out some means by which his sister Juliana might be induced to commit the sin of calling on the daughter of a presbyterian minister.

The thing had to be represented as in some fashion or other an act of self-denial, a form of mortification of the flesh. Otherwise he knew Juliana would never do it. But to call on Miss Catherine Dumfarthing seemed to him such an altogether delightful and unspeakably blissful process that he hardly knew how to approach the topic. So when Juliana presently came home the rector could find no better way of introducing the subject than by putting it on the ground of Philippa’s marriage to Miss Dumfarthing’s father’s trustee’s nephew.

“Juliana,” he said, “don’t you think that perhaps, on account of Philippa and Tom, you ought – or at least it might be best for you to call on Miss Dumfarthing?”

Juliana turned to her brother as he laid aside her bonnet and her black gloves.

“I’ve just been there this afternoon,” she said.

There was something as near to a blush on her face as her brother had ever seen.

“But she was not there!” he said.

“No,” answered Juliana, “but Mr. Dumfarthing was. I stayed and talked some time with him, waiting for her.”

The rector gave a sort of whistle, or rather that blowing out of air which is the episcopal symbol for it.

“Didn’t you find him pretty solemn?” he said.

“Solemn!” answered his sister. “Surely, Edward, a man in such a calling as his ought to be solemn.”

“I don’t mean that exactly,” said the rector; “I mean – er – hard, bitter, so to speak.”

“Edward!” exclaimed Juliana, “how can you speak so. Mr. Dumfarthing hard! Mr. Dumfarthing bitter! Why, Edward, the man is gentleness and kindness itself. I don’t think I ever met anyone so full of sympathy, of compassion with suffering.”

Juliana’s face had flushed It was quite plain that she saw things in the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing – as some one woman does in every man – that no one else could see.

The Reverend Edward was abashed. “I wasn’t thinking of his character,” he said. “I was thinking rather of his doctrines. Wait till you have heard him preach.”

Juliana flushed more deeply still. “I heard him last Sunday evening,” she said.

The rector was silent, and his sister, as if impelled to speak, went on,

“And I don’t see, Edward, how anyone could think him a hard or bigoted man in his creed. He walked home with me to the gate just now, and he was speaking of all the sin in the world, and of how few, how very few people, can be saved, and how many will have to be burned as worthless; and he spoke so beautifully. He regrets it, Edward, regrets it deeply. It is a real grief to him.”

On which Juliana, half in anger, withdrew, and her brother the rector sat back in his chair with smiles rippling all over his saintly face. For he had been wondering whether it would be possible, even remotely possible, to get his sister to invite the Dumfarthings to high tea at the rectory some day at six o’clock (evening dinner was out of the question), and now he knew within himself that the thing was as good as done.

—

While such things as these were happening and about to happen, there were many others of the congregation of St. Asaph’s beside the rector to whom the growing situation gave cause for serious perplexities. Indeed, all who were interested in the church, the trustees and the mortgagees and the underlying debenture-holders, were feeling anxious. For some of them underlay the Sunday School, whose scholars’ offerings had declined forty per cent, and others underlay the new organ, not yet paid for, while others were lying deeper still beneath the ground site of the church with seven dollars and a half a square foot resting on them.

“I don’t like it,” said Mr. Lucullus Fyshe to Mr. Newberry (they were both prominent members of the congregation). “I don’t like the look of things. I took up a block of Furlong’s bonds on his Guild building from what seemed at the time the best of motives. The interest appeared absolutely certain. Now it’s a month overdue on the last quarter. I feel alarmed.”

“Neither do I like it,” said Mr. Newberry, shaking his head; “and I’m sorry for Fareforth Furlong. An excellent fellow, Fyshe, excellent. I keep wondering Sunday after Sunday, if there isn’t something I can do to help him out. One might do something further, perhaps, in the way of new buildings or alterations. I have, in fact, offered – by myself, I mean, and without other aid – to dynamite out the front of his church, underpin it, and put him in a Norman gateway; either that, or blast out the back of it where the choir sit, just as he likes. I was thinking about it last Sunday as they were singing the anthem, and realizing what a lot one might do there with a few sticks of dynamite.”

“I doubt it,” said Mr. Fyshe. “In fact, Newberry, to speak very frankly, I begin to ask myself, Is Furlong the man for the post?”

“Oh, surely,” said Mr. Newberry in protest.

“Personally a charming fellow,” went on Mr. Fyshe; “but is he, all said and done, quite the man to conduct a church? In the first place, he is not a businessman.”

“No,” said Mr. Newberry reluctantly, “that I admit.”

“Very good. And, secondly, even in the matter of his religion itself, one always feels as if he were too little fixed, too unstable. He simply moves with the times. That, at least, is what people are beginning to say of him, that he is perpetually moving with the times. It doesn’t do, Newberry, it doesn’t do.” Whereupon Mr. Newberry went away troubled and wrote to Fareforth Furlong a confidential letter with a signed cheque in it for the amount of Mr. Fyshe’s interest, and with such further offerings of dynamite, of underpinning and blasting as his conscience prompted.

When the rector received and read the note and saw the figures of the cheque, there arose such a thankfulness in his spirit as he hadn’t felt for months, and he may well have murmured, for the repose of Mr. Newberry’s soul, a prayer not found in the rubric of King James.

All the more cause had he to feel light at heart, for as it chanced, it was on that same evening that the Dumfarthings, father and daughter, were to take tea at the rectory. Indeed, a few minutes before six o’clock they might have been seen making their way from the manse to the rectory.

On their way along the avenue the minister took occasion to reprove his daughter for the worldliness of her hat (it was a little trifle from New York that she had bought out of the Sunday School money – a temporary loan); and a little further on he spoke to her severely about the parasol she carried; and further yet about the strange fashion, specially condemned by the Old Testament, in which she wore her hair. So Catherine knew in her heart from this that she must be looking her very prettiest, and went into the rectory radiant.

The tea was, of course, an awkward meal at the best. There was an initial difficulty about grace, not easily surmounted. And when the Rev. Mr. Dumfarthing sternly refused tea as a pernicious drink weakening to the system, the Anglican rector was too ignorant of the presbyterian system to know enough to give him Scotch whiskey.

But there were bright spots in the meal as well. The rector was even able to ask Catherine, sideways as a personal question, if she played tennis; and she was able to whisper behind her hand, “Not allowed,” and to make a face in the direction of her father, who was absorbed for the moment in a theological question with Juliana. Indeed, before the conversation became general again the rector had contrived to make a rapid arrangement with Catherine whereby she was to come with him to the Newberry’s tennis court the day following and learn the game, with or without permission.

So the tea was perhaps a success in its way. And it is noteworthy that Juliana spent the days that followed it in reading Calvin’s “Institutes” (specially loaned to her) and “Dumfarthing on the Certainty of Damnation” (a gift), and in praying for her brother – a task practically without hope. During which same time the rector in white flannels, and Catherine in a white duck skirt and blouse, were flying about on the green grass of the Newberrys’ court, and calling, “love,” “love all,” to one another so gaily and so brazenly that even Mr. Newberry felt that there must be something in it.

But all these things came merely as interludes in the moving currents of greater events; for as the summer faded into autumn and autumn into winter the anxieties of the trustees of St. Asaph’s began to call for action of some sort.

—

“Edward,” said the rector’s father on the occasion of their next quarterly discussion, “I cannot conceal from you that the position of things is very serious. Your statements show a falling off in every direction. Your interest is everywhere in arrears; your current account overdrawn to the limit. At this rate, you know, the end is inevitable. Your debenture and bondholders will decide to foreclose; and if they do, you know, there is no power that can stop them. Even with your limited knowledge of business you are probably aware that there is no higher power that can influence or control the holder of a first mortgage.”

“I fear so,” said the Rev. Edward very sadly.

“Do you not think perhaps that some of the shortcoming lies with yourself?” continued Mr. Furlong. “Is it not possible that as a preacher you fail somewhat, do not, as it were, deal sufficiently with fundamental things as others do? You leave untouched the truly vital issues, such things as the creation, death, and, if I may refer to it, the life beyond the grave.”

As a result of which the Reverend Edward preached a series of special sermons on the creation for which he made a special and arduous preparation in the library of Plutoria University. He said that it had taken a million, possibly a hundred million years of quite difficult work to accomplish, and that though when we looked at it all was darkness still we could not be far astray if we accepted and held fast to the teachings of Sir Charles Lyell. The book of Genesis, he said was not to be taken as meaning a day when it said a day, but rather something other than a mere day; and the word “light” meant not exactly light but possibly some sort of phosphorescence, and that the use of the word “darkness” was to be understood not as meaning darkness, but to be taken as simply indicating obscurity. And when he had quite finished, the congregation declared the whole sermon to be mere milk and water. It insulted their intelligence, they said. After which, a week later, the Rev. Dr. Dumfarthing took up the same subject, and with the aid of seven plain texts pulverized the rector into fragments.

One notable result of the controversy was that Juliana Furlong refused henceforth to attend her brother’s church and sat, even at morning service, under the minister of St. Osoph’s.

“The sermon was, I fear, a mistake,” said Mr. Furlong senior; “perhaps you had better not dwell too much on such topics. We must look for aid in another direction. In fact, Edward, I may mention to you in confidence that certain of your trustees are already devising ways and means that may help us out of our dilemma.”

Indeed, although the Reverend Edward did not know it, a certain idea, or plan, was already germinating in the minds of the most influential supporters of St. Asaph’s.

Such was the situation of the rival churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph as the autumn slowly faded into winter: during which time the elm trees on Plutoria Avenue shivered and dropped their leaves and the chauffeurs of the motors first turned blue in their faces and then, when the great snows came, were suddenly converted into liveried coachmen with tall bearskins and whiskers like Russian horseguards, changing back again to blue-nosed chauffeurs the very moment of a thaw. During this time also the congregation of the Reverend Fareforth Furlong was diminishing month by month, and that of the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing was so numerous that they filled up the aisles at the back of the church. Here the worshippers stood and froze, for the minister had abandoned the use of steam heat in St. Osoph’s on the ground that he could find no warrant for it.

During the same period other momentous things were happening, such as that Juliana Furlong was reading, under the immediate guidance of Dr. Dumfarthing, the History of the Progress of Disruption in the Churches of Scotland in ten volumes; such also as that Catherine Dumfarthing was wearing a green and gold winter suit with Russian furs and a Balkan hat and a Circassian feather, which cut a wide swath of destruction among the young men on Plutoria Avenue every afternoon as she passed. Moreover by the strangest of coincidences she scarcely ever seemed to come along the snow-covered avenue without meeting the Reverend Edward – a fact which elicited new exclamations of surprise from them both every day: and by an equally strange coincidence they generally seemed, although coming in different directions, to be bound for the same place; towards which they wandered together with such slow steps and in such oblivion of the passers-by that even the children on the avenue knew by instinct whither they were wandering.

It was noted also that the broken figure of Dr. McTeague had reappeared upon the street, leaning heavily upon a stick and greeting those he met with such a meek and willing affability, as if in apology for his stroke of paralysis, that all who talked with him agreed that McTeague’s mind was a wreck.

“He stood and spoke to me about the children for at least a quarter of an hour,” related one of his former parishioners, “asking after them by name, and whether they were going to school yet and a lot of questions like that. He never used to speak of such things. Poor old McTeague, I’m afraid he is getting soft in the head.” “I know,” said the person addressed. “His mind is no good. He stopped me the other day to say how sorry he was to hear about my brother’s illness. I could see from the way he spoke that his brain is getting feeble. He’s losing his grip. He was speaking of how kind people had been to him after his accident and there were tears in his eyes. I think he’s getting batty.”

Nor were even these things the most momentous happenings of the period. For as winter slowly changed to early spring it became known that something of great portent was under way. It was rumoured that the trustees of St. Asaph’s Church were putting their heads together. This was striking news. The last time that the head of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, for example, had been placed side by side with that of Mr. Newberry, there had resulted a merger of four soda-water companies, bringing what was called industrial peace over an area as big as Texas and raising the price of soda by three peaceful cents per bottle. And the last time that Mr. Furlong senior’s head had been laid side by side with those of Mr. Rasselyer-Brown and Mr. Skinyer, they had practically saved the country from the horrors of a coal famine by the simple process of raising the price of nut coal seventy-five cents a ton and thus guaranteeing its abundance.

Naturally, therefore, when it became known that such redoubtable heads as those of the trustees and the underlying mortgagees of St. Asaph’s were being put together, it was fully expected that some important development would follow. It was not accurately known from which of the assembled heads first proceeded the great idea which was presently to solve the difficulties of the church. It may well have come from that of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. Certainly a head which had brought peace out of civil war in the hardware business by amalgamating ten rival stores and had saved the very lives of five hundred employees by reducing their wages fourteen per cent, was capable of it.

At any rate it was Mr. Fyshe who first gave the idea a definite utterance.

“It’s the only thing, Furlong,” he said, across the lunch table at the Mausoleum Club. “It’s the one solution. The two churches can’t live under the present conditions of competition. We have here practically the same situation as we had with two rum distilleries – the output is too large for the demand. One or both of the two concerns must go under. It’s their turn just now, but these fellows are business men enough to know that it may be ours tomorrow. We’ll offer them a business solution. We’ll propose a merger.”

“I’ve been thinking of it,” said Mr. Furlong senior, “I suppose it’s feasible?”

“Feasible!” exclaimed Mr. Fyshe. “Why look what’s being done every day everywhere, from the Standard Oil Company downwards.”

“You would hardly, I think,” said Mr. Furlong, with a quiet smile, “compare the Standard Oil Company to a church?” “Well, no, I suppose not,” said Mr. Fyshe, and he too smiled – in fact he almost laughed. The notion was too ridiculous. One could hardly compare a mere church to a thing of the magnitude and importance of the Standard Oil Company.

“But on a lesser scale,” continued Mr. Fyshe, “it’s the same sort of thing. As for the difficulties of it, I needn’t remind you of the much greater difficulties we had to grapple with in the rum merger. There, you remember, a number of the women held out as a matter of principle. It was not mere business with them. Church union is different. In fact it is one of the ideas of the day and everyone admits that what is needed is the application of the ordinary business principles of harmonious combination, with a proper – er – restriction of output and general economy of operation.”

“Very good,” said Mr. Furlong, “I’m sure if you’re willing to try, the rest of us are.”

“All right,” said Mr. Fyshe. “I thought of setting Skinyer, of Skinyer and Beatem, to work on the form of the organization. As you know he is not only a deeply religious man but he has already handled the Tin Pot Combination and the United Hardware and the Associated Tanneries. He ought to find this quite simple.”

—

Within a day or two Mr. Skinyer had already commenced his labours. “I must first,” he said, “get an accurate idea of the existing legal organization of the two churches.”

For which purpose he approached the rector of St. Asaph’s. “I just want to ask you, Mr. Furlong,” said the lawyer, “a question or two as to the exact constitution, the form so to speak, of your church. What is it? Is it a single corporate body?”

“I suppose,” said the rector thoughtfully, “one would define it as an indivisible spiritual unit manifesting itself on earth.” “Quite so,” interrupted Mr. Skinyer, “but I don’t mean what it is in the religious sense: I mean, in the real sense.” “I fail to understand,” said Mr. Furlong.

“Let me put it very clearly,” said the lawyer. “Where does it get its authority?”

“From above.” said the rector reverently.

“Precisely,” said Mr. Skinyer, “no doubt, but I mean its authority in the exact sense of the term.”

“It was enjoined on St. Peter,” began the rector, but Mr. Skinyer interrupted him.

“That I am aware of,” he said, “but what I mean is – where does your church get its power, for example, to hold property, to collect debts, to use distraint against the property of others, to foreclose its mortgages and to cause judgement to be executed against those who fail to pay their debts to it? You will say at once that it has these powers direct from Heaven. No doubt that is true and no religious person would deny it. But we lawyers are compelled to take a narrower, a less elevating point of view. Are these powers conferred on you by the state legislature or by some higher authority?”

“Oh, by a higher authority, I hope,” said the rector very fervently. Whereupon Mr. Skinyer left him without further questioning, the rector’s brain being evidently unfit for the subject of corporation law.

On the other hand he got satisfaction from the Rev. Dr. Dumfarthing at once.

“The church of St. Osoph,” said the minister, “is a perpetual trust, holding property as such under a general law of the state and able as such to be made the object of suit or distraint. I speak with some assurance as I had occasion to enquire into the matter at the time when I was looking for guidance in regard to the call I had received to come here.”

—

“It’s a quite simple matter,” Mr. Skinyer presently reported to Mr. Fyshe. “One of the churches is a perpetual trust, the other practically a state corporation. Each has full control over its property provided nothing is done by either to infringe the purity of its doctrine.”

“Just what does that mean?” asked Mr. Fyshe.

“It must maintain its doctrine absolutely pure. Otherwise if certain of its trustees remain pure and the rest do not, those who stay pure are entitled to take the whole of the property. This, I believe, happens every day in Scotland where, of course, there is great eagerness to remain pure in doctrine.”

“And what do you define as pure doctrine?” asked Mr. Fyshe.

“If the trustees are in dispute,” said Mr. Skinyer, “the courts decide, but any doctrine is held to be a pure doctrine if all the trustees regard it as a pure doctrine.”

“I see,” said Mr. Fyshe thoughtfully, “it’s the same thing as what we called ‘permissible policy’ on the part of directors in the Tin Pot Combination.”

“Exactly,” assented Mr. Skinyer, “and it means that for the merger we need nothing – I state it very frankly – except general consent.”

—

The preliminary stages of the making of the merger followed along familiar business lines. The trustees of St. Asaph’s went through the process known as ‘approaching’ the trustees of St. Osoph’s. First of all, for example, Mr. Lucullus Fyshe invited Mr. Asmodeus Boulder of St. Osoph’s to lunch with him at the Mausoleum Club; the cost of the lunch, as is usual in such cases, was charged to the general expense account of the church. Of course nothing whatever was said during the lunch about the churches or their finances or anything concerning them. Such discussion would have been a gross business impropriety. A few days later the two brothers Overend dined with Mr. Furlong senior, the dinner being charged directly to the contingencies account of St. Asaph’s. After which Mr. Skinyer and his partner, Mr. Beatem, went to the spring races together on the Profit and Loss account of St. Osoph’s, and Philippa Overend and Catherine Dumfarthing were taken (by the Unforeseen Disbursements Account) to the grand opera, followed by a midnight supper.

All of these things constituted what was called the promotion of the merger and were almost exactly identical with the successive stages of the making of the Amalgamated Distilleries and the Associated Tin Pot Corporation; which was considered a most hopeful sign.

—

“Do you think they’ll go into it?” asked Mr. Newberry of Mr. Furlong senior, anxiously. “After all, what inducement have they?”

“Every inducement,” said Mr. Furlong. “All said and done they’ve only one large asset – Dr. Dumfarthing. We’re really offering to buy up Dr. Dumfarthing by pooling our assets with theirs.”

“And what does Dr. Dumfarthing himself say to it?”

“Ah, there I am not so sure,” said Mr. Furlong; “that may be a difficulty. So far there hasn’t been a word from him, and his trustees are absolutely silent about his views. However, we shall soon know all about it. Skinyer is asking us all to come together one evening next week to draw up the articles of agreement.”

“Has he got the financial basis arranged then?”

“I believe so,” said Mr. Furlong. “His idea is to form a new corporation to be known as the United Church Limited or by some similar name. All the present mortgagees will be converted into unified bondholders, the pew rents will be capitalized into preferred stock and the common stock, drawing its dividend from the offertory, will be distributed among all members in standing. Skinyer says that it is really an ideal form of church union, one that he thinks is likely to be widely adopted. It has the advantage of removing all questions of religion, which he says are practically the only remaining obstacle to a union of all the churches. In fact it puts the churches once and for all on a business basis.”

“But what about the question of doctrine, of belief?” asked Mr. Newberry.

“Skinyer says he can settle it,” answered Mr. Furlong.

—

About a week after the above conversation the united trustees of St. Asaph’s and St. Osoph’s were gathered about a huge egg-shaped table in the board room of the Mausoleum Club. They were seated in intermingled fashion after the precedent of the recent Tin Pot Amalgamation and were smoking huge black cigars specially kept by the club for the promotion of companies and chargeable to expenses of organization at fifty cents a cigar. There was an air of deep peace brooding over the assembly, as among men who have accomplished a difficult and meritorious task.

“Well, then,” said Mr. Skinyer, who was in the chair, with a pile of documents in front of him, “I think that our general basis of financial union may be viewed as settled.”

A murmur of assent went round the meeting. “The terms are set forth in the memorandum before us, which you have already signed. Only one other point – a minor one – remains to be considered. I refer to the doctrines or the religious belief of the new amalgamation.”

“Is it necessary to go into that?” asked Mr. Boulder.

“Not entirely, perhaps,” said Mr. Skinyer. “Still there have been, as you all know, certain points – I won’t say of disagreement – but let us say of friendly argument – between the members of the different churches – such things for example,” here he consulted his papers, “as the theory of the creation, the salvation of the soul, and so forth, have been mentioned in this connection. I have a memorandum of them here, though the points escape me for the moment. These, you may say, are not matters of first importance, especially as compared with the intricate financial questions which we have already settled in a satisfactory manner. Still I think it might be well if I were permitted with your unanimous approval to jot down a memorandum or two to be afterwards embodied in our articles.”

There was a general murmur of approval. “Very good,” said Mr. Skinyer, settling himself back in his chair. “Now, first, in regard to the creation,” here he looked all round the meeting in a way to command attention – “Is it your wish that we should leave that merely to a gentlemen’s agreement or do you want an explicit clause?”

“I think it might be well,” said Mr. Dick Overend, “to leave no doubt about the theory of the creation.”

“Good,” said Mr. Skinyer. “I am going to put it down then something after this fashion: ‘On and after, let us say, August 1st proximo, the process of the creation shall be held, and is hereby held, to be such and such only as is acceptable to a majority of the holders of common and preferred stock voting pro rata.’ Is that agreed?”

“Carried,” cried several at once.

“Carried,” repeated Mr. Skinyer. “Now let us pass on” – here he consulted his notes – “to item two, eternal punishment. I have made a memorandum as follows, ‘Should any doubts arise, on or after August first proximo, as to the existence of eternal punishment they shall be settled absolutely and finally by a pro-rata vote of all the holders of common and preferred stock.’ Is that agreed?”

“One moment!” said Mr. Fyshe, “do you think that quite fair to the bondholders? After all, as the virtual holders of the property, they are the persons most interested. I should like to amend your clause and make it read – I am not phrasing it exactly but merely giving the sense of it – that eternal punishment should be reserved for the mortgagees and bondholders.”

At this there was an outbreak of mingled approval and dissent, several persons speaking at once. In the opinion of some the stockholders of the company, especially the preferred stockholders, had as good a right to eternal punishment as the bondholders. Presently Mr. Skinyer, who had been busily writing notes, held up his hand for silence.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “will you accept this as a compromise? We will keep the original clause but merely add to it the words, ‘but no form of eternal punishment shall be declared valid if displeasing to a three-fifths majority of the holders of bonds.’”

“Carried, carried,” cried everybody.

“To which I think we need only add,” said Mr. Skinyer, “a clause to the effect that all other points of doctrine, belief or religious principle may be freely altered, amended, reversed or entirely abolished at any general annual meeting!”

There was a renewed chorus of “Carried, carried,” and the trustees rose from the table shaking hands with one another, and lighting fresh cigars as they passed out of the club into the night air.

“The only thing that I don’t understand,” said Mr. Newberry to Dr. Boomer as they went out from the club arm in arm (for they might now walk in that fashion with the same propriety as two of the principals in a distillery merger), “the only thing that I don’t understand is why the Reverend Mr. Dumfarthing should be willing to consent to the amalgamation.”

“Do you really not know?” said Dr. Boomer.

“No.”

“You have heard nothing?”

“Not a word,” said Mr. Newberry.

“Ah,” rejoined the president, “I see that our men have kept it very quiet – naturally so, in view of the circumstances. The truth is that the Reverend Mr. Dumfarthing is leaving us.”

“Leaving St. Osoph’s!” exclaimed Mr. Newberry in utter astonishment.

“To our great regret. He has had a call – a most inviting field of work, he says, a splendid opportunity. They offered him ten thousand one hundred; we were only giving him ten thousand here, though of course that feature of the situation would not weigh at all with a man like Dumfarthing.”

“Oh no, of course not,” said Mr. Newberry.

“As soon as we heard of the call we offered him ten thousand three hundred – not that that would make any difference to a man of his character. Indeed Dumfarthing was still waiting and looking for guidance when they offered him eleven thousand. We couldn’t meet it. It was beyond us, though we had the consolation of knowing that with such a man as Dumfarthing the money made no difference.”

“And he has accepted the call?”

“Yes. He accepted it today. He sent word to Mr. Dick Overend our chairman, that he would remain in his manse, looking for light, until two-thirty, after which, if we had not communicated with him by that hour, he would cease to look for it.”

“Dear me,” said Mr. Newberry, deep in reflection, “so that when your trustees came to the meeting—”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Boomer – and something like a smile passed across his features for a moment “Dr. Dumfarthing had already sent away his telegram of acceptance.”

“Why, then,” said Mr. Newberry, “at the time of our discussion tonight, you were in the position of having no minister.”

“Not at all. We had already appointed a successor.”

“A successor?”

“Certainly. It will be in tomorrow morning’s papers. The fact is that we decided to ask Dr. McTeague to resume his charge.”

“Dr. McTeague!” repeated Mr. Newberry in amazement. “But surely his mind is understood to be—”

“Oh not at all,” interrupted Dr. Boomer. “His mind appears if anything, to be clearer and stronger than ever. Dr. Slyder tells us that paralysis of the brain very frequently has this effect; it soothes the brain – clears it, as it were, so that very often intellectual problems which occasioned the greatest perplexity before present no difficulty whatever afterwards. Dr. McTeague, I believe, finds no trouble now in reconciling St. Paul’s dialectic with Hegel as he used to. He says that so far as he can see they both mean the same thing.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Newberry, “and will Dr. McTeague also resume his philosophical lectures at the university?”

“We think it wiser not,” said the president. “While we feel that Dr. McTeague’s mind is in admirable condition for clerical work we fear that professorial duties might strain it. In order to get the full value of his remarkable intelligence, we propose to elect him to the governing body of the university. There his brain will be safe from any shock. As a professor there would always be the fear that one of his students might raise a question in his class. This of course is not a difficulty that arises in the pulpit or among the governors of the university.”

“Of course not,” said Mr. Newberry.

—

Thus was constituted the famous union or merger of the churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph, viewed by many of those who made it as the beginning of a new era in the history of the modern church.

There is no doubt that it has been in every way an eminent success.

Rivalry, competition, and controversies over points of dogma have become unknown on Plutoria Avenue. The parishioners of the two churches may now attend either of them just as they like. As the trustees are fond of explaining it doesn’t make the slightest difference. The entire receipts of the churches, being now pooled, are divided without reference to individual attendance. At each half year there is issued a printed statement which is addressed to the shareholders of the United Churches Limited and is hardly to be distinguished in style or material from the annual and semi-annual reports of the Tin Pot Amalgamation and the United Hardware and other quasi-religious bodies of the sort. “Your directors,” the last of these documents states, “are happy to inform you that in spite of the prevailing industrial depression the gross receipts of the corporation have shown such an increase as to justify the distribution of a stock dividend of special Offertory Stock Cumulative, which will be offered at par to all holders of common or preferred shares. You will also be gratified to learn that the directors have voted unanimously in favour of a special presentation to the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing on the occasion of his approaching marriage. It was earnestly debated whether this gift should take the form, as at first suggested, of a cash presentation, or as afterwards suggested, of a written testimonial in the form of an address. The latter course was finally adopted as being more fitting to the circumstances and the address has accordingly been prepared, setting forth to the Rev. Dr. Dumfarthing, in old English lettering and wording, the opinion which is held of him by his former parishioners.”

The “approaching marriage” referred of course to Dr. Dumfarthing’s betrothal to Juliana Furlong. It was not known that he had ever exactly proposed to her. But it was understood that before giving up his charge he drew her attention, in very severe terms, to the fact that, as his daughter was now leaving him, he must either have someone else to look after his manse or else be compelled to incur the expense of a paid housekeeper. This latter alternative, he said, was not one that he cared to contemplate. He also reminded her that she was now at a time of life when she could hardly expect to pick and choose and that her spiritual condition was one of, at least, great uncertainty. These combined statements are held, under the law of Scotland at any rate, to be equivalent to an offer of marriage.

Catherine Dumfarthing did not join her father in his new manse. She first remained behind him, as the guest of Philippa Overend for a few weeks while she was occupied in packing up her things. After that she stayed for another two or three weeks to unpack them. This had been rendered necessary by a conversation held with the Reverend Edward Fareforth Furlong, in a shaded corner of the Overend’s garden. After which, in due course of time, Catherine and Edward were married, the ceremony being performed by the Reverend Dr. McTeague whose eyes filled with philosophical tears as he gave them his blessing.

So the two churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph stand side by side united and at peace. Their bells call softly back and forward to one another on Sunday mornings and such is the harmony between them that even the episcopal rooks in the elm trees of St. Asaph’s and the presbyterian crows in the spruce trees of St. Osoph’s are known to exchange perches on alternate Sundays.

TOC     INDEX

VIII

The Great Fight
for Clean Government

“As to the government of this city,” said Mr. Newberry, leaning back in a leather armchair at the Mausoleum Club and lighting a second cigar, “it’s rotten, that’s all.”

“Absolutely rotten,” assented Mr. Dick Overend, ringing the bell for a second whiskey and soda.

“Corrupt,” said Mr. Newberry, between two puffs of his cigar.

“Full of graft,” said Mr. Overend, flicking his ashes into the grate.

“Crooked aldermen,” said Mr. Newberry.

“A bum city solicitor,” said Mr. Overend, “and an infernal grafter for treasurer.”

“Yes,” assented Mr. Newberry, and then, leaning forwards in his chair and looking carefully about the corridors of the club, he spoke behind his hand and said, “And the mayor’s the biggest grafter of the lot. And what’s more,” he added, sinking his voice to a whisper, “the time has come to speak out about it fearlessly.”

Mr. Overend nodded. “It’s a tyranny,” he said.

“Worse than Russia,” rejoined Mr. Newberry.

—

They had been sitting in a quiet corner of the club – it was on a Sunday evening – and had fallen into talking, first of all, of the present rottenness of the federal politics of the United States – not argumentatively or with any heat, but with the reflective sadness that steals over an elderly man when he sits in the leather armchair of a comfortable club smoking a good cigar and musing on the decadence of the present day. The rottenness of the federal government didn’t anger them. It merely grieved them.

They could remember – both of them – how different everything was when they were young men just entering on life. When Mr. Newberry and Mr. Dick Overend were young, men went into congress from pure patriotism; there was no such thing as graft or crookedness, as they both admitted, in those days; and as for the United States Senate – here their voices were almost hushed in awe – why, when they were young, the United States Senate—

But no, neither of them could find a phrase big enough for their meaning.

They merely repeated “as for the United States Senate—” and then shook their heads and took long drinks of whiskey and soda.

Then, naturally, speaking of the rottenness of the federal government had led them to talk of the rottenness of the state legislature. How different from the state legislatures that they remembered as young men! Not merely different in the matter of graft, but different, so Mr. Newberry said, in the calibre of the men. He recalled how he had been taken as a boy of twelve by his father to hear a debate. He would never forget it. Giants! he said, that was what they were. In fact, the thing was more like a Witenagemot than a legislature. He said he distinctly recalled a man, whose name he didn’t recollect, speaking on a question he didn’t just remember what, either for or against he just couldn’t recall which; it thrilled him. He would never forget it. It stayed in his memory as if it were yesterday.

But as for the present legislature – here Mr. Dick Overend sadly nodded assent in advance to what he knew was coming – as for the present legislature – well – Mr. Newberry had had, he said, occasion to visit the state capital a week before in connection with a railway bill that he was trying to – that is, that he was anxious to – in short in connection with a railway bill, and when he looked about him at the men in the legislature – positively he felt ashamed; he could put it no other way than that – ashamed.

After which, from speaking of the crookedness of the state government Mr. Newberry and Mr. Dick Overend were led to talk of the crookedness of the city government! And they both agreed, as above, that things were worse than in Russia. What secretly irritated them both most was that they had lived and done business under this infernal corruption for thirty or forty years and hadn’t noticed it. They had been too busy.

The fact was that their conversation reflected not so much their own original ideas as a general wave of feeling that was passing over the whole community.

There had come a moment – quite suddenly it seemed – when it occurred to everybody at the same time that the whole government of the city was rotten. The word is a strong one. But it is the one that was used. Look at the aldermen, they said – rotten! Look at the city solicitor, rotten! And as for the mayor himself – phew!

The thing came like a wave. Everybody felt it at once. People wondered how any sane, intelligent community could tolerate the presence of a set of corrupt scoundrels like the twenty aldermen of the city. Their names, it was said, were simply a byword throughout the United States for rank criminal corruption. This was said so widely that everybody started hunting through the daily papers to try to find out who in blazes were aldermen, anyhow. Twenty names are hard to remember, and as a matter of fact, at the moment when this wave of feeling struck the city, nobody knew or cared who were aldermen, anyway.

To tell the truth, the aldermen had been much the same persons for about fifteen or twenty years. Some were in the produce business, others were butchers, two were grocers, and all of them wore blue checkered waistcoats and red ties and got up at seven in the morning to attend the vegetable and other markets. Nobody had ever really thought about them – that is to say, nobody on Plutoria Avenue. Sometimes one saw a picture in the paper and wondered for a moment who the person was; but on looking more closely and noticing what was written under it, one said, “Oh, I see, an alderman,” and turned to something else.

“Whose funeral is that?” a man would sometimes ask on Plutoria Avenue. “Oh just one of the city aldermen,” a passerby would answer hurriedly. “Oh I see, I beg your pardon, I thought it might be somebody important.”

At which both laughed.

—

It was not just clear how and where this movement of indignation had started. People said that it was part of a new wave of public morality that was sweeping over the entire United States. Certainly it was being remarked in almost every section of the country. Chicago newspapers were attributing its origin to the new vigour and the fresh ideals of the middle west. In Boston it was said to be due to a revival of the grand old New England spirit. In Philadelphia they called it the spirit of William Penn. In the south it was said to be the reassertion of southern chivalry making itself felt against the greed and selfishness of the north, while in the north they recognized it at once as a protest against the sluggishness and ignorance of the south. In the west they spoke of it as a revolt against the spirit of the east and in the east they called it a reaction against the lawlessness of the west. But everywhere they hailed it as a new sign of the glorious unity of the country.

If therefore Mr. Newberry and Mr. Overend were found to be discussing the corrupt state of their city they only shared in the national sentiments of the moment. In fact in the same city hundreds of other citizens, as disinterested as themselves, were waking up to the realization of what was going on. As soon as people began to look into the condition of things in the city they were horrified at what they found. It was discovered, for example, that Alderman Schwefeldampf was an undertaker! Think of it! In a city with a hundred and fifty deaths a week, and sometimes even better, an undertaker sat on the council! A city that was about to expropriate land and to spend four hundred thousand dollars for a new cemetery, had an undertaker on the expropriation committee itself! And worse than that! Alderman Undercutt was a butcher! In a city that consumed a thousand tons of meat every week! And Alderman O’Hooligan – it leaked out – was an Irishman! Imagine it! An Irishman sitting on the police committee of the council in a city where thirty-eight and a half out of every hundred policemen were Irish, either by birth or parentage! The thing was monstrous.

So when Mr. Newberry said “It’s worse than Russia!” he meant it, every word.

—

Now just as Mr. Newberry and Mr. Dick Overend were finishing their discussion, the huge bulky form of Mayor McGrath came ponderously past them as they sat. He looked at them sideways out of his eyes – he had eyes like plums in a mottled face – and, being a born politician, he knew by the very look of them that they were talking of something that they had no business to be talking about. But – being a politician – he merely said, “Good evening, gentlemen,” without a sign of disturbance.

“Good evening, Mr. Mayor,” said Mr. Newberry, rubbing his hands feebly together and speaking in an ingratiating tone. There is no more pitiable spectacle than an honest man caught in the act of speaking boldly and fearlessly of the evil-doer.

“Good evening, Mr. Mayor,” echoed Mr. Dick Overend, also rubbing his hands; “warm evening, is it not?”

The mayor gave no other answer than that deep guttural grunt which is technically known in municipal interviews as refusing to commit oneself.

“Did he hear?” whispered Mr. Newberry as the mayor passed out of the club.

“I don’t care if he did,” whispered Mr. Dick Overend.

Half an hour later Mayor McGrath entered the premises of the Thomas Jefferson Club, which was situated in the rear end of a saloon and pool room far down in the town.

“Boys,” he said to Alderman O’Hooligan and Alderman Gorfinkel, who were playing freeze-out poker in a corner behind the pool tables, “you want to let the boys know to keep pretty dark and go easy. There’s a lot of talk I don’t like about the elections going round the town. Let the boys know that just for a while the darker they keep the better.”

Whereupon the word was passed from the Thomas Jefferson Club to the George Washington Club and thence to the Eureka Club (coloured), and to the Kossuth Club (Hungarian), and to various other centres of civic patriotism in the lower parts of the city. And forthwith such a darkness began to spread over them that not even honest Diogenes with his lantern could have penetrated their doings.

“If them stiffs wants to make trouble,” said the president of the George Washington Club to Mayor McGrath a day or two later, “they won’t never know what they’ve bumped up against.”

“Well,” said the heavy mayor, speaking slowly and cautiously and eyeing his henchman with quiet scrutiny, “you want to go pretty easy now, I tell you.”

The look which the mayor directed at his satellite was much the same glance that Morgan the buccaneer might have given to one of his lieutenants before throwing him overboard.

—

Meantime the wave of civic enthusiasm as reflected in the conversations of Plutoria Avenue grew stronger with every day.

“The thing is a scandal,” said Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. “Why, these fellows down at the city hall are simply a pack of rogues. I had occasion to do some business there the other day (it was connected with the assessment of our soda factories) and do you know, I actually found that these fellows take money!”

“I say!” said Mr. Peter Spillikins, to whom he spoke, “I say! You don’t say!”

“It’s a fact,” repeated Mr. Fyshe. “They take money. I took the assistant treasurer aside and I said, ‘I want such and such done,’ and I slipped a fifty dollar bill into his hand. And the fellow took it, took it like a shot.”

“He took it!” gasped Mr. Spillikins.

“He did,” said Mr. Fyshe. “There ought to be a criminal law for that sort of thing.”

“I say!” exclaimed Mr. Spillikins, “they ought to go to jail for a thing like that.”

“And the infernal insolence of them,” Mr. Fyshe continued. “I went down the next day to see the deputy assistant (about a thing connected with the same matter), told him what I wanted and passed a fifty dollar bill across the counter and the fellow fairly threw it back at me, in a perfect rage. He refused it!”

“Refused it,” gasped Mr. Spillikins, “I say!”

Conversations such as this filled up the leisure and divided the business time of all the best people in the city.

In the general gloomy outlook, however, one bright spot was observable. The “wave” had evidently come just at the opportune moment. For not only were civic elections pending but just at this juncture four or five questions of supreme importance would be settled by the incoming council. There was, for instance, the question of the expropriation of the Traction Company (a matter involving many millions); there was the decision as to the renewal of the franchise of the Citizens’ Light Company – a vital question; there was also the four hundred thousand dollar purchase of land for the new addition to the cemetery, a matter that must be settled. And it was felt, especially on Plutoria Avenue, to be a splendid thing that the city was waking up, in the moral sense, at the very time when these things were under discussion. All the shareholders of the Traction Company and the Citizens’ Light – and they included the very best, the most high-minded, people in the city – felt that what was needed now was a great moral effort, to enable them to lift the city up and carry it with them, or, if not all of it, at any rate as much of it as they could.

“It’s a splendid movement!” said Mr. Fyshe (he was a leading shareholder and director of the Citizens’ Light), “what a splendid thing to think that we shan’t have to deal for our new franchise with a set of corrupt rapscallions like these present aldermen. Do you know, Furlong, that when we approached them first with a proposition for a renewal for a hundred and fifty years they held us up! Said it was too long! Imagine that! A hundred and fifty years (only a century and a half) too long for the franchise! They expect us to install all our poles, string our wires, set up our transformers in their streets and then perhaps at the end of a hundred years find ourselves compelled to sell out at a beggarly valuation. Of course we knew what they wanted. They meant us to hand them over fifty dollars each to stuff into their rascally pockets.”

“Outrageous!” said Mr. Furlong.

“And the same thing with the cemetery land deal,” went on Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. “Do you realize that, if the movement hadn’t come along and checked them, those scoundrels would have given that rogue Schwefeldampf four hundred thousand dollars for his fifty acres! Just think of it!”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Furlong with a thoughtful look upon his face, “that four hundred thousand dollars is an excessive price, in and of itself, for that amount of land.”

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Fyshe, very quietly and decidedly, looking at Mr. Furlong in a searching way as he spoke. “It is not a high price. It seems to me, speaking purely as an outsider, a very fair, reasonable price for fifty acres of suburban land, if it were the right land. If, for example, it were a case of making an offer for that very fine stretch of land, about twenty acres, is it not, which I believe your Corporation owns on the other side of the cemetery, I should say four hundred thousand is a most modest price.”

Mr. Furlong nodded his head reflectively.

“You had thought, had you not, of offering it to the city?” said Mr. Fyshe.

“We did,” said Mr. Furlong, “at a more or less nominal sum – four hundred thousand or whatever it might be. We felt that for such a purpose, almost sacred as it were, one would want as little bargaining as possible.”

“Oh, none at all,” assented Mr. Fyshe.

“Our feeling was,” went on Mr. Furlong, “that if the city wanted our land for the cemetery extension, it might have it at its own figure – four hundred thousand, half a million, in fact at absolutely any price, from four hundred thousand up, that they cared to put on it. We didn’t regard it as a commercial transaction at all. Our reward lay merely in the fact of selling it to them.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Fyshe, “and of course your land was more desirable from every point of view. Schwefeldampf’s ground is encumbered with a growth of cypress and evergreens and weeping willows which make it quite unsuitable for an up-to-date cemetery; whereas yours, as I remember it, is bright and open – a loose sandy soil with no trees and very little grass to overcome.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Furlong. “We thought, too, that our ground, having the tanneries and the chemical factory along the farther side of it, was an ideal place for—” he paused, seeking a mode of expressing his thought.

“For the dead,” said Mr. Fyshe, with becoming reverence. And after this conversation Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Furlong senior understood one another absolutely in regard to the new movement.

It was astonishing in fact how rapidly the light spread.

“Is Rasselyer-Brown with us?” asked someone of Mr. Fyshe a few days later.

“Heart and soul,” answered Mr. Fyshe. “He’s very bitter over the way these rascals have been plundering the city on its coal supply. He says that the city has been buying coal wholesale at the pit mouth at three fifty – utterly worthless stuff, he tells me. He has heard it said that everyone of these scoundrels has been paid from twenty-five to fifty dollars a winter to connive at it.”

“Dear me,” said the listener.

“Abominable, is it not?” said Mr. Fyshe. “But as I said to Rasselyer-Brown, what can one do if the citizens themselves take no interest in these things. ‘Take your own case,’ I said to him, ‘how is it that you, a coal man, are not helping the city in this matter? Why don’t you supply the city?’ He shook his head, ‘I wouldn’t do it at three-fifty,’ he said. ‘No,’ I answered, ‘but will you at five?’ He looked at me for a moment and then he said, ‘Fyshe, I’ll do it; at five, or at anything over that they like to name. If we get a new council in they may name their own figure.’ ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I hope all the other businessmen will be animated with the same spirit.’”

—

Thus it was that the light broke and spread and illuminated in all directions. People began to realize the needs of the city as they never had before. Mr. Boulder, who owned, among other things, a stone quarry and an asphalt company, felt that the paving of the streets was a disgrace. Mr. Skinyer, of Skinyer and Beatem, shook his head and said that the whole legal department of the city needed reorganization; it needed, he said, new blood. But he added always in a despairing tone, how could one expect to run a department with the head of it drawing only six thousand dollars; the thing was impossible. If, he argued, they could superannuate the present chief solicitor and get a man, a good man (Mr. Skinyer laid emphasis on this) at, say, fifteen thousand there might be some hope.

“Of course,” said Mr. Skinyer to Mr. Newberry in discussing the topic, “one would need to give him a proper staff of assistants so as to take off his hands all the routine work – the mere appearance in court, the preparation of briefs, the office consultation, the tax revision and the purely legal work. In that case he would have his hands free to devote himself entirely to those things, which – in fact to turn his attention in whatever direction he might feel it was advisable to turn it.”

—

Within a week or two the public movement had found definite expression and embodied itself in the Clean Government Association. This was organized by a group of leading and disinterested citizens who held their first meeting in the largest upstairs room of the Mausoleum Club. Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, Mr. Boulder, and others keenly interested in obtaining simply justice for the stockholders of the Traction and the Citizens’ Light were prominent from the start. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, Mr. Furlong senior and others were there, not from special interest in the light or traction questions, but, as they said themselves, from pure civic spirit. Dr. Boomer was there to represent the university with three of his most presentable professors, cultivated men who were able to sit in a first-class club and drink whiskey and soda and talk as well as any businessman present. Mr. Skinyer, Mr. Beatem and others represented the bar. Dr. McTeague, blinking in the blue tobacco smoke, was there to stand for the church. There were all-round enthusiasts as well, such as Mr. Newberry and the Overend brothers and Mr. Peter Spillikins.

“Isn’t it fine,” whispered Mr. Spillikins to Mr. Newberry, “to see a set of men like these all going into a thing like this, not thinking of their own interests a bit?”

—

Mr. Fyshe, as chairman, addressed the meeting. He told them they were there to initiate a great free voluntary movement of the people. It had been thought wise, he said, to hold it with closed doors and to keep it out of the newspapers. This would guarantee the league against the old underhand control by a clique that had hitherto disgraced every part of the administration of the city. He wanted, he said, to see everything done henceforth in broad daylight: and for this purpose he had summoned them there at night to discuss ways and means of action. After they were once fully assured of exactly what they wanted to do and how they meant to do it, the league he said, would invite the fullest and freest advice from all classes in the city. There were none he said, amid great applause, that were so lowly that they would not be invited – once the platform of the league was settled – to advise and co-operate. All might help, even the poorest. Subscription lists would be prepared which would allow any sum at all, from one to five dollars, to be given to the treasurer. The league was to be democratic or nothing. The poorest might contribute as little as one dollar: even the richest would not be allowed to give more than five. Moreover he gave notice that he intended to propose that no actual official of the league should be allowed under its by-laws to give anything. He himself – if they did him the honour to make him president as he had heard it hinted was their intention – would be the first to bow to this rule. He would efface himself. He would obliterate himself, content in the interests of all, to give nothing. He was able to announce similar pledges from his friends, Mr. Boulder, Mr. Furlong, Dr. Boomer, and a number of others.

Quite a storm of applause greeted these remarks by Mr. Fyshe, who flushed with pride as he heard it.

“Now, gentlemen,” he went on, “this meeting is open for discussion. Remember it is quite informal, anyone may speak. I as chairman make no claim to control or monopolize the discussion. Let everyone understand—”

“Well then, Mr. Chairman,” began Mr. Dick Overend.

“One minute, Mr. Overend,” said Mr. Fyshe. “I want everyone to understand that he may speak as—”

“May I say then—” began Mr. Newberry.

“Pardon me, Mr. Newberry,” said Mr. Fyshe, “I was wishing first to explain that not only may all participate but that we invite—”

“In that case—” began Mr. Newberry.

“Before you speak,” interrupted Mr. Fyshe, “let me add one word. We must make our discussion as brief and to the point as possible. I have a great number of things which I wish to say to the meeting and it might be well if all of you would speak as briefly and as little as possible. Has anybody anything to say?”

“Well,” said Mr. Newberry, “what about organization and officers?”

“We have thought of it,” said Mr. Fyshe. “We were anxious above all things to avoid the objectionable and corrupt methods of a ‘slate’ and a prepared list of officers which has disgraced every part of our city politics until the present time. Mr. Boulder, Mr. Furlong and Mr. Skinyer and myself have therefore prepared a short list of offices and officers which we wish to submit to your fullest, freest consideration. It runs thus: Hon. President Mr. L. Fyshe, Hon. Vice-president, Mr. A. Boulder, Hon. Secretary Mr. Furlong, Hon. Treasurer Mr. O. Skinyer, et cetera – I needn’t read it all. You’ll see it posted in the hall later. Is that carried? Carried! Very good,” said Mr. Fyshe.

There was a moment’s pause while Mr. Furlong and Mr. Skinyer moved into seats beside Mr. Fyshe and while Mr. Furlong drew from his pocket and arranged the bundle of minutes of the meeting which he had brought with him. As he himself said he was too neat and methodical a writer to trust to jotting them down on the spot.

“Don’t you think,” said Mr. Newberry, “I speak as a practical man, that we ought to do something to get the newspapers with us?”

“Most important,” assented several members.

“What do you think, Dr. Boomer?” asked Mr. Fyshe of the university president, “will the newspapers be with us?”

Dr. Boomer shook his head doubtfully. “It’s an important matter,” he said. “There is no doubt that we need, more than anything, the support of a clean, wholesome unbiassed press that can’t be bribed and is not subject to money influence. I think on the whole our best plan would be to buy up one of the city newspapers.”

“Might it not be better simply to buy up the editorial staff?” said Mr. Dick Overend.

“We might do that,” admitted Dr. Boomer. “There is no doubt that the corruption of the press is one of the worst factors that we have to oppose. But whether we can best fight it by buying the paper itself or buying the staff is hard to say.”

“Suppose we leave it to a committee with full power to act,” said Mr. Fyshe. “Let us direct them to take whatever steps may in their opinion be best calculated to elevate the tone of the press, the treasurer being authorized to second them in every way. I for one am heartily sick of old underhand connection between city politics and the city papers. If we can do anything to alter and elevate it, it will be a fine work, gentlemen, well worth whatever it costs us.”

—

Thus after an hour or two of such discussion the Clean Government League found itself organized and equipped with a treasury and a programme and a platform. The latter was very simple. As Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Boulder said there was no need to drag in specific questions or try to define the action to be taken towards this or that particular detail, such as the hundred-and-fifty-year franchise, beforehand. The platform was simply expressed as Honesty, Purity, Integrity. This, as Mr. Fyshe said, made a straight, flat, clean issue between the league and all who opposed it.

This first meeting was, of course, confidential. But all that it did was presently done over again, with wonderful freshness and spontaneity at a large public meeting open to all citizens. There was a splendid impromptu air about everything. For instance when somebody away back in the hall said, “I move that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe be president of the league,” Mr. Fyshe lifted his hand in unavailing protest as if this were the newest idea he had ever heard in his life.

After all of which the Clean Government League set itself to fight the cohorts of darkness. It was not just known where these were. But it was understood that they were there all right, somewhere. In the platform speeches of the epoch they figured as working underground, working in the dark, working behind the scenes, and so forth. But the strange thing was that nobody could state with any exactitude just who or what it was that the league was fighting. It stood for “honesty, purity, and integrity.” That was all you could say about it.

Take, for example, the case of the press. At the inception of the league it has been supposed that such was the venality and corruption of the city newspapers that it would be necessary to buy one of them. But the word “clean government” had been no sooner uttered than it turned out that every one of the papers in the city was in favour of it: in fact had been working for it for years.

They vied with one another now in giving publicity to the idea. The Plutorian Times printed a dotted coupon on the corner of its front sheet with the words, “Are you in favour of Clean Government? If so, send us ten cents with this coupon and your name and address.” The Plutorian Citizen and Home Advocate, went even further. It printed a coupon which said, “Are you out for a clean city? If so send us twenty-five cents to this office. We pledge ourselves to use it.”

The newspapers did more than this. They printed from day to day such pictures as the portrait of Mr. Fyshe with the legend below, “Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, who says that government ought to be by the people, from the people, for the people and to the people”; and the next day another labelled. “Mr. P. Spillikins, who says that all men are born free and equal”; and the next day a picture with the words, “Tract of ground offered for cemetery by Mr. Furlong, showing rear of tanneries, with head of Mr. Furlong inserted.”

It was, of course, plain enough that certain of the aldermen of the old council were to be reckoned as part of the cohort of darkness. That at least was clear. “We want no more men in control of the stamp of Alderman Gorfinkel and Alderman Schwefeldampf,” so said practically every paper in the city. “The public sense revolts at these men. They are vultures who have feasted too long on the prostrate corpses of our citizens.” And so on. The only trouble was to discover who or what had ever supported Alderman Gorfinkel and Alderman Schwefeldampf. The very organizations that might have seemed to be behind them were evidently more eager for clean government than the league itself.

“The Thomas Jefferson Club Out for Clean Government,” so ran the newspaper headings of one day; and of the next, “Will help to clean up City Government. Eureka Club (Coloured) endorses the League; Is done with Darkness”; and the day after that, “Sons of Hungary Share in Good Work: Kossuth Club will vote with the League.”

So strong, indeed, was the feeling against the iniquitous aldermen that the public demand arose to be done with a council of aldermen altogether and to substitute government by a Board. The newspapers contained editorials on the topic each day and it was understood that one of the first efforts of the league would be directed towards getting the necessary sanction of the legislature in this direction. To help to enlighten the public on what such government meant Professor Proaser of the university (he was one of the three already referred to) gave a public lecture on the growth of Council Government. He traced it from the Amphictionic Council of Greece as far down as the Oligarchical Council of Venice; it was thought that had the evening been longer he would have traced it clean down to modern times.

But most amazing of all was the announcement that was presently made, and endorsed by Mr. Lucullus Fyshe in an interview, that Mayor McGrath himself would favour clean government, and would become the official nominee of the league itself. This certainly was strange. But it would perhaps have been less mystifying to the public at large, had they been able to listen to certain of the intimate conversations of Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Boulder.

“You say then,” said Mr. Boulder, “to let McGrath’s name stand.”

“We can’t do without him,” said Mr. Fyshe, “he has seven of the wards in the hollow of his hand. If we take his offer he absolutely pledges us every one of them.”

“Can you rely on his word?” said Mr. Boulder.

“I think he means to play fair with us,” answered Mr. Fyshe. “I put it to him as a matter of honour, between man and man, a week ago. Since then, I have had him carefully dictaphoned and I’m convinced he’s playing straight.”

“How far will he go with us?” said Mr. Boulder.

“He is willing to throw overboard Gorfinkel, Schwefeldampf and Undercutt. He says he must find a place for O’Hooligan. The Irish, he says, don’t care for clean government; they want Irish Government.”

“I see,” said Mr. Boulder very thoughtfully, “and in regard to the renewal of the franchise and the expropriation, tell me just exactly what his conditions are.”

But Mr. Fyshe’s answer to this was said so discreetly and in such a low voice, that not even the birds listening in the elm trees outside the Mausoleum Club could hear it.

No wonder, then, that if even the birds failed to know everything about the Clean Government League, there were many things which such good people as Mr. Newberry and Mr. Peter Spillikins never heard at all and never guessed.

—

Each week and every day brought fresh triumphs to the onward march of the movement.

“Yes, gentlemen,” said Mr. Fyshe to the assembled committee of the Clean Government League a few days later, “I am glad to be able to report our first victory. Mr. Boulder and I have visited the state capital and we are able to tell you definitely that the legislature will consent to change our form of government so as to replace our council by a Board.”

“Hear, hear!” cried all the committee men together.

“We saw the governor,” said Mr. Fyshe. “Indeed he was good enough to lunch with us at the Pocahontas Club. He tells us that what we are doing is being done in every city and town of the state. He says that the days of the old-fashioned city council are numbered. They are setting up boards everywhere.”

“Excellent!” said Mr. Newberry.

“The governor assures us that what we want will be done. The chairman of the Democratic State Committee (he was good enough to dine with us at the Buchanan Club) has given us the same assurance. So also does the chairman of the Republican State Committee, who was kind enough to be our guest in a box at the Lincoln Theatre. It is most gratifying,” concluded Mr. Fyshe, “to feel that the legislature will give us such a hearty, such a thoroughly American support.”

“You are sure of this, are you?” questioned Mr. Newberry. “You have actually seen the members of the legislature?”

“It was not necessary,” said Mr. Fyshe. “The governor and the different chairmen have them so well fixed – that is to say, they have such confidence in the governor and their political organizers that they will all be prepared to give us what I have described as thoroughly American support.”

“You are quite sure,” persisted Mr. Newberry, “about the governor and the others you mentioned?”

Mr. Fyshe paused a moment and then he said very quietly, “We are quite sure,” and he exchanged a look with Mr. Boulder that meant volumes to those who would read it.

—

“I hope you didn’t mind my questioning you in that fashion,” said Mr. Newberry, as he and Mr. Fyshe strolled home from the club. “The truth is I didn’t feel sure in my own mind just what was meant by a ‘Board,’ and ‘getting them to give us government by a Board.’ I know I’m speaking like an ignoramus. I’ve really not paid as much attention in the past to civic politics as I ought to have. But what is the difference between a council and a board?”

“The difference between a council and a board?” repeated Mr. Fyshe.

“Yes,” said Mr. Newberry, “the difference between a council and a board.”

“Or call it,” said Mr. Fyshe reflectively, “the difference between a board and a council.”

“Precisely,” said Mr Newberry.

“It’s not altogether easy to explain,” said Mr. Fyshe. “One chief difference is that in the case of a board, sometimes called a Commission, the salary is higher. You see the salary of an alderman or councillor in most cities is generally not more than fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars. The salary of a member of a board or commission is at least ten thousand. That gives you at once a very different class of men. As long as you only pay fifteen hundred you get your council filled up with men who will do any kind of crooked work for fifteen hundred dollars; as soon as you pay ten thousand you get men with larger ideas.”

“I see,” said Mr. Newberry.

“If you have a fifteen hundred dollar man,” Mr. Fyshe went on, “you can bribe him at any time with a fifty-dollar bill. On the other hand your ten-thousand-dollar man has a wider outlook. If you offer him fifty dollars for his vote on the board, he’d probably laugh at you.”

“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Newberry, “I see the idea. A fifteen-hundred-dollar salary is so low that it will tempt a lot of men into office merely for what they can get out of it.”

“That’s it exactly,” answered Mr. Fyshe.

—

From all sides support came to the new league. The women of the city – there were fifty thousand of them on the municipal voters list – were not behind the men. Though not officials of the league they rallied to its cause.

“Mr. Fyshe,” said Mrs. Buncomhearst, who called at the office of the president of the league with offers of support, “tell me what we can do. I represent fifty thousand women voters of this city—”

(This was a favourite phrase of Mrs. Buncomhearst’s, though it had never been made quite clear how or why she represented them.)

“We want to help, we women. You know we’ve any amount of initiative, if you’ll only tell us what to do. You know, Mr. Fyshe, we’ve just as good executive ability as you men, if you’ll just tell us what to do. Couldn’t we hold a meeting of our own, all our own, to help the league along?”

“An excellent idea,” said Mr. Fyshe.

“And could you not get three or four men to come and address it so as to stir us up?” asked Mrs. Buncomhearst anxiously.

“Oh, certainly,” said Mr. Fyshe.

So it was known after this that the women were working side by side with the men. The tea rooms of the Grand Palaver and the other hotels were filled with them every day, busy for the cause. One of them even invented a perfectly charming election scarf to be worn as a sort of badge to show one’s allegiance; and its great merit was that it was so fashioned that it would go with anything.

“Yes,” said Mr. Fyshe to his committee, “one of the finest signs of our movement is that the women of the city are with us. Whatever we may think, gentlemen, of the question of woman’s rights in general – and I think we know what we do think – there is no doubt that the influence of women makes for purity in civic politics. I am glad to inform the committee that Mrs. Buncomhearst and her friends have organized all the working women of the city who have votes. They tell me that they have been able to do this at a cost as low as five dollars per woman. Some of the women – foreigners of the lower classes whose sense of political morality is as yet imperfectly developed – have been organized at a cost as low as one dollar per vote. But of course with our native American women, with a higher standard of education and morality, we can hardly expect to do it as low as that.”

—

Nor were the women the only element of support added to the league.

“Gentlemen,” reported Dr. Boomer, the president of the university, at the next committee meeting, “I am glad to say that the spirit which animates us has spread to the students of the university. They have organized, entirely by themselves and on their own account, a Students’ Fair Play League which has commenced its activities. I understand that they have already ducked Alderman Gorfinkel in a pond near the university. I believe they are looking for Alderman Schwefeldampf tonight. I understand they propose to throw him into the reservoir. The leaders of them – a splendid set of young fellows – have given me a pledge that they will do nothing to bring discredit on the university.”

“I think I heard them on the street last night,” said Mr. Newberry.

“I believe they had a procession,” said the president.

“Yes, I heard them; they were shouting ‘Rah! rah! rah! Clean Government! Clean Government! Rah! rah!’ It was really inspiring to hear them.”

“Yes,” said the president, “they are banded together to put down all the hoodlumism and disturbance on the street that has hitherto disgraced our municipal elections. Last night, as a demonstration, they upset two streetcars and a milk wagon.”

“I heard that two of them were arrested,” said Mr. Dick Overend.

“Only by an error,” said the president. “There was a mistake. It was not known that they were students. The two who were arrested were smashing the windows of the car, after it was upset, with their hockey sticks. A squad of police mistook them for rioters. As soon as they were taken to the police station, the mistake was cleared up at once. The chief-of-police telephoned an apology to the university. I believe the league is out again tonight looking for Alderman Schwefeldampf. But the leaders assure me there will be no breach of the peace whatever. As I say, I think their idea is to throw him into the reservoir.”

In the face of such efforts as these, opposition itself melted rapidly away. The Plutorian Times was soon able to announce that various undesirable candidates were abandoning the field. “Alderman Gorfinkel,” it said, “who, it will be recalled, was thrown into a pond last week by the students of the college, was still confined to his bed when interviewed by our representative. Mr. Gorfinkel stated that he should not offer himself as a candidate in the approaching election. He was, he said, weary of civic honours. He had had enough. He felt it incumbent on him to step out and make way for others who deserved their turn as well as himself: in future he proposed to confine his whole attention to his Misfit Semi-Ready Establishment which he was happy to state was offering as nobby a line of early fall suiting as was ever seen at the price.”

—

There is no need to recount here in detail the glorious triumph of the election day itself. It will always be remembered as the purest, cleanest election ever held in the precincts of the city. The citizens’ organization turned out in overwhelming force to guarantee that it should be so. Bands of Dr. Boomer’s students, armed with baseball bats, surrounded the polls to guarantee fair play. Any man wishing to cast an unclean vote was driven from the booth: all those attempting to introduce any element of brute force or rowdyism into the election were cracked over the head. In the lower part of the town scores of willing workers, recruited often from the humblest classes, kept order with pickaxes. In every part of the city motor cars, supplied by all the leading businessmen, lawyers, and doctors of the city, acted as patrols to see that no unfair use should be made of other vehicles in carrying voters to the polls.

It was a foregone victory from the first – overwhelming and complete. The cohorts of darkness were so completely routed that it was practically impossible to find them. As it fell dusk the streets were filled with roaring and surging crowds celebrating the great victory for clean government, while in front of every newspaper office huge lantern pictures of Mayor McGrath the Champion of Pure Government, and O. Skinyer, the People’s Solicitor, and the other nominees of the league, called forth cheer after cheer of frenzied enthusiasm.

—

They held that night in celebration a great reception at the Mausoleum Club on Plutoria Avenue, given at its own suggestion by the city. The city, indeed, insisted on it.

Nor was there ever witnessed even in that home of art and refinement a scene of greater charm. In the spacious corridor of the club a Hungarian band wafted Viennese music from Tyrolese flutes through the rubber trees. There was champagne bubbling at a score of sideboards where noiseless waiters poured it into goblets as broad and flat as floating water-lily leaves. And through it all moved the shepherds and shepherdesses of that beautiful Arcadia – the shepherds in their Tuxedo jackets, with vast white shirt-fronts broad as the map of Africa, with spotless white waistcoats girdling their equators, wearing heavy gold watch-chains and little patent shoes blacker than sin itself – and the shepherdesses in foaming billows of silks of every colour of the kaleidoscope, their hair bound with glittering headbands or coiled with white feathers, the very symbol of municipal purity. One would search in vain the pages of pastoral literature to find the equal of it.

And as they talked, the good news spread from group to group that it was already known that the new franchise of the Citizens’ Light was to be made for two centuries so as to give the company a fair chance to see what it could do. At the word of it, the grave faces of manly bondholders flushed with pride, and the soft eyes of listening shareholders laughed back in joy. For they had no doubt or fear, now that clean government had come. They knew what the company could do.

Thus all night long, outside of the club, the soft note of the motor horns arriving and departing wakened the sleeping leaves of the elm trees with their message of good tidings. And all night long, within its lighted corridors, the bubbling champagne whispered to the listening rubber trees of the new salvation of the city. So the night waxed and waned till the slow day broke, dimming with its cheap prosaic glare the shaded beauty of the artificial light, and the people of the city – the best of them – drove home to their well-earned sleep; and the others – in the lower parts of the city – rose to their daily toil.

TOC     INDEX

Moonbeams
from the Larger Lunacy

(1915)

~

Preface
Spoof. A Thousand-Guinea Novel
The Reading Public

Afternoon Adventures at My Club

The Anecdotes of Dr. So and So
The Shattered Health of Mr. Podge
The Amazing Travels of Mr. Yarner
The Spiritual Outlook of Mr. Doomer
The Reminiscences of Mr. Apricot
The Last Man Out of Europe
The War Mania of Mr. Jinks and Mr. Blinks
The Ground Floor
The Hallucination of Mr. Butt

Ram Spudd the New World Singer
Aristocratic Anecdotes
Education Made Agreeable
An Every-Day Experience
Truthful Oratory
Our Literary Bureau
Speeding Up Business
Who Is Also Who
Passionate Paragraphs
Weejee the Pet Dog
Sidelights on the Supermen
The Survival of the Fittest
The First Newspaper
In the Good Time After the War

Preface

The prudent husbandman, after having taken from his field all the straw that is there, rakes it over with a wooden rake and gets as much again. The wise child, after the lemonade jug is empty, takes the lemons from the bottom of it and squeezes them into a still larger brew. So does the sagacious author, after having sold his material to the magazines and been paid for it, clap it into book-covers and give it another squeeze. But in the present case the author is of a nice conscience and anxious to place responsibility where it is due. He therefore wishes to make all proper acknowledgments to the editors of Vanity Fair, The American Magazine, The Popular Magazine, Life, Puck, The Century, Methuen’s Annual, and all others who are in any way implicated in the making of this book.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

McGill University

Montreal

Oct. 1, 1915

Spoof. A Sample of a Thousand-Guinea Novel

New! Fascinating! Perplexing!

CHAPTER I

Readers are requested to note that this novel has taken our special prize of a cheque for a thousand guineas. This alone guarantees for all intelligent readers a palpitating interest in every line of it. Among the thousands of MSS. which reached us – many of them coming in carts early in the morning, and moving in a dense phalanx, indistinguishable from the Covent Garden Market waggons; others pouring down our coal-chute during the working hours of the day; and others again being slipped surreptitiously into our letter-box by pale, timid girls, scarcely more than children, after nightfall (in fact many of them came in their night-gowns) – this manuscript alone was the sole one – in fact the only one – to receive the prize of a cheque of a thousand guineas. To other competitors we may have given, inadvertently perhaps, a bag of sovereigns or a string of pearls, but to this story alone is awarded the first prize by the unanimous decision of our judges.

When we say that the latter body included two members of the Cabinet, two Lords of the Admiralty, and two bishops, with power in case of dispute to send all the MSS. to the Czar of Russia, our readers will breathe a sigh of relief to learn that the decision was instant and unanimous. Each one of them, in reply to our telegram, answered immediately SPOOF.

This novel represents the last word in up-to-date fiction. It is well known that the modern novel has got far beyond the point of mere story-telling. The childish attempt to interest the reader has long since been abandoned by all the best writers. They refuse to do it. The modern novel must convey a message, or else it must paint a picture, or remove a veil, or open a new chapter in human psychology. Otherwise it is no good. SPOOF does all of these things. The reader rises from its perusal perplexed, troubled, and yet so filled with information that rising itself is a difficulty.

We cannot, for obvious reasons, insert the whole of the first chapter. But the portion here presented was praised by The Saturday Afternoon Review as giving one of the most graphic and at the same time realistic pictures of America ever written in fiction.

Of the characters whom our readers are to imagine seated on the deck – on one of the many decks (all connected by elevators) – of the Gloritania, one word may be said. Vere de Lancy is (as the reviewers have under oath declared) a typical young Englishman of the upper class. He is nephew to the Duke of – , but of this fact no one on the ship, except the captain, the purser, the steward, and the passengers are, or is, aware.

In order entirely to conceal his identity, Vere de Lancy is travelling under the assumed name of Lancy de Vere. In order the better to hide the object of his journey, Lancy de Vere (as we shall now call him, though our readers will be able at any moment to turn his name backwards) has given it to be understood that he is travelling merely as a gentleman anxious to see America. This naturally baffles all those in contact with him.

The girl at his side – but perhaps we may best let her speak for herself.

—

Somehow as they sat together on the deck of the great steamer in the afterglow of the sunken sun, listening to the throbbing of the propeller (a rare sound which neither of them of course had ever heard before), de Vere felt that he must speak to her. Something of the mystery of the girl fascinated him. What was she doing here alone with no one but her mother and her maid, on the bosom of the Atlantic? Why was she here? Why was she not somewhere else? The thing puzzled, perplexed him. It would not let him alone. It fastened upon his brain. Somehow he felt that if he tried to drive it away, it might nip him in the ankle.

In the end he spoke.

“And you, too,” he said, leaning over her deck-chair, “are going to America?”

He had suspected this ever since the boat left Liverpool. Now at length he framed his growing conviction into words.

“Yes,” she assented, and then timidly, “it is 3,213 miles wide, is it not?”

“Yes,” he said, “and 1,781 miles deep! It reaches from the forty-ninth parallel to the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Oh,” cried the girl, “what a vivid picture! I seem to see it.”

“Its major axis,” he went on, his voice sinking almost to a caress, “is formed by the Rocky Mountains, which are practically a prolongation of the Cordilleran Range. It is drained,” he continued——

“How splendid!” said the girl.

“Yes, is it not? It is drained by the Mississippi, by the St. Lawrence, and – dare I say it? – by the Upper Colorado.”

Somehow his hand had found hers in the half gloaming, but she did not check him.

“Go on,” she said very simply; “I think I ought to hear it.”

“The great central plain of the interior,” he continued, “is formed by a vast alluvial deposit carried down as silt by the Mississippi. East of this the range of the Alleghenies, nowhere more than eight thousand feet in height, forms a secondary or subordinate axis from which the watershed falls to the Atlantic.”

He was speaking very quietly but earnestly. No man had ever spoken to her like this before.

“What a wonderful picture!” she murmured half to herself, half aloud, and half not aloud and half not to herself.

“Through the whole of it,” de Vere went on, “there run railways, most of them from east to west, though a few run from west to east. The Pennsylvania system alone has twenty-one thousand miles of track.”

“Twenty-one thousand miles,” she repeated; already she felt her will strangely subordinate to his.

He was holding her hand firmly clasped in his and looking into her face.

“Dare I tell you,” he whispered, “how many employees it has?”

“Yes,” she gasped, unable to resist.

“A hundred and fourteen thousand,” he said.

There was silence. They were both thinking. Presently she spoke, timidly.

“Are there any cities there?”

“Cities!” he said enthusiastically, “ah, yes! let me try to give you a word-picture of them. Vast cities – with tall buildings, reaching to the very sky. Why, for instance, the new Woolworth Building in New York—”

“Yes, yes,” she broke in quickly, “how high is it?”

“Seven hundred and fifty feet.”

The girl turned and faced him.

“Don’t,” she said. “I can’t bear it. Some other time, perhaps, but not now.”

She had risen and was gathering up her wraps. “And you,” she said, “why are you going to America?”

“Why?” he answered. “Because I want to see, to know, to learn. And when I have learned and seen and known, I want other people to see and to learn and to know. I want to write it all down, all the vast palpitating picture of it. Ah! if I only could – I want to see” (and here he passed his hand through his hair as if trying to remember) “something of the relations of labour and capital, of the extraordinary development of industrial machinery, of the new and intricate organisation of corporation finance, and in particular I want to try to analyse – no one has ever done it yet – the men who guide and drive it all. I want to set down the psychology of the multimillionaire!”

He paused. The girl stood irresolute. She was thinking (apparently, for if not, why stand there?).

“Perhaps,” she faltered, “I could help you.”

“You!”

“Yes, I might.” She hesitated. “I – I – come from America.”

“You!” said de Vere in astonishment. “With a face and voice like yours! It is impossible!”

The boldness of the compliment held her speechless for a moment.

“I do,” she said; “my people lived just outside of Cohoes.”

“They couldn’t have,” he said passionately.

“I shouldn’t speak to you like this,” the girl went on, “but it’s because I feel from what you have said that you know and love America. And I think I can help you.”

“You mean,” he said, divining her idea, “that you can help me to meet a multimillionaire?”

“Yes,” she answered, still hesitating.

“You know one?”

“Yes,” still hesitating, “I know one.”

She seemed about to say more, her lips had already opened, when suddenly the dull raucous blast of the foghorn (they used a raucous one on this ship on purpose) cut the night air. Wet fog rolled in about them, wetting everything.

The girl shivered.

“I must go,” she said; “good night.”

For a moment de Vere was about to detain her. The wild thought leaped to his mind to ask her her name or at least her mother’s. With a powerful effort he checked himself.

“Good night,” he said.

She was gone.

CHAPTER II

Limits of space forbid the insertion of the whole of this chapter. Its opening contains one of the most vivid word-pictures of the inside of an American customs house ever pictured in words. From the customs wharf de Vere is driven in a taxi to the Belmont. Here he engages a room; here, too, he sleeps; here also, though cautiously at first, he eats. All this is so admirably described that only those who have driven in a taxi to an hotel and slept there can hope to appreciate it.

Limits of space also forbid our describing in full de Vere’s vain quest in New York of the beautiful creature whom he had met on the steamer and whom he had lost from sight in the aigrette department of the customs house. A thousand times he cursed his folly in not having asked her name.

Meanwhile no word comes from her, till suddenly, mysteriously, unexpectedly, on the fourth day a note is handed to de Vere by the Third Assistant Head Waiter of the Belmont. It is addressed in a lady’s hand. He tears it open. It contains only the written words, “Call on Mr. J. Superman Overgold. He is a multimillionaire. He expects you.”

To leap into a taxi (from the third story of the Belmont) was the work of a moment. To drive to the office of Mr. Overgold was less. The portion of the novel which follows is perhaps the most notable part of it. It is this part of the chapter which the Hibbert Journal declares to be the best piece of psychological analysis that appears in any novel of the season. We reproduce it here.

“Exactly, exactly,” said de Vere, writing rapidly in his note-book as he sat in one of the deep leather armchairs of the luxurious office of Mr. Overgold. “So you sometimes feel as if the whole thing were not worth while.”

“I do,” said Mr. Overgold. “I can’t help asking myself what it all means. Is life, after all, merely a series of immaterial phenomena, self-developing and based solely on sensation and reaction, or is it something else?”

He paused for a moment to sign a cheque for $10,000 and throw it out of the window, and then went on, speaking still with the terse brevity of a man of business.

“Is sensation everywhere or is there perception too? On what grounds, if any, may the hypothesis of a self-explanatory consciousness be rejected? In how far are we warranted in supposing that innate ideas are inconsistent with pure materialism?”

De Vere listened, fascinated. Fortunately for himself, he was a University man, fresh from the examination halls of his Alma Mater. He was able to respond at once.

“I think,” he said modestly, “I grasp your thought. You mean – to what extent are we prepared to endorse Hegel’s dictum of immaterial evolution?”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Overgold. “How far, if at all, do we substantiate the Kantian hypothesis of the transcendental?”

“Precisely,” said de Vere eagerly. “And for what reasons [naming them] must we reject Spencer’s theory of the unknowable?”

“Entirely so,” continued Mr. Overgold. “And why, if at all, does Bergsonian illusionism differ from pure nothingness?”

They both paused.

Mr. Overgold had risen. There was great weariness in his manner.

“It saddens one, does it not?” he said.

He had picked up a bundle of Panama two per cent gold bonds and was looking at them in contempt.

“The emptiness of it all!” he muttered. He extended the bonds to de Vere.

“Do you want them,” he said, “or shall I throw them away?”

“Give them to me,” said de Vere quietly; “they are not worth the throwing.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Overgold, speaking half to himself, as he replaced the bonds in his desk. “It is a burden that I must carry alone. I have no right to ask any one to share it. But come,” he continued, “I fear I am sadly lacking in the duties of international hospitality. I am forgetting what I owe to Anglo-American courtesy. I am neglecting the new obligations of our common Indo-Chinese policy. My motor is at the door. Pray let me take you to my house to lunch.”

De Vere assented readily, telephoned to the Belmont not to keep lunch waiting for him, and in a moment was speeding up the magnificent Riverside Drive towards Mr. Overgold’s home. On the way Mr. Overgold pointed out various objects of interest – Grant’s tomb, Lincoln’s tomb, Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, the ticket office of the New York Subway, and various other points of historic importance.

On arriving at the house, de Vere was ushered up a flight of broad marble steps to a hall fitted on every side with almost priceless objets d’art and others, ushered to the cloak-room and out of it, butlered into the lunch-room and footmanned to a chair.

As they entered, a lady already seated at the table turned to meet them.

One glance was enough – plenty.

It was she – the object of de Vere’s impassioned quest. A rich lunch-gown was girdled about her with a twelve-o’clock band of pearls.

She reached out her hand, smiling.

“Dorothea,” said the multimillionaire, “this is Mr. de Vere. Mr. de Vere – my wife.”

CHAPTER III

Of this next chapter we need only say that the Blue Review (Adults Only) declares it to be the most daring and yet conscientious handling of the sex-problem ever attempted and done. The fact that the Congregational Times declares that this chapter will undermine the whole foundations of English Society and let it fall, we pass over: we hold certificates in writing from a great number of the Anglican clergy, to the effect that they have carefully read the entire novel and see nothing in it.

—

They stood looking at one another.

“So you didn’t know,” she murmured.

In a flash de Vere realized that she hadn’t known that he didn’t know and knew now that he knew.

He found no words.

The situation was a tense one. Nothing but the woman’s innate tact could save it. Dorothea Overgold rose to it with the dignity of a queen.

She turned to her husband.

“Take your soup over to the window,” she said, “and eat it there.”

The millionaire took his soup to the window and sat beneath a little palm tree, eating it.

“You didn’t know,” she repeated.

“No,” said de Vere; “how could I?”

“And yet,” she went on, “you loved me, although you didn’t know that I was married?”

“Yes,” answered de Vere simply. “I loved you, in spite of it.”

“How splendid!” she said.

There was a moment’s silence. Mr. Overgold had returned to the table, the empty plate in his hand. His wife turned to him again with the same unfailing tact.

“Take your asparagus to the billiard-room,” she said, “and eat it there.”

“Does he know, too?” asked de Vere.

“Mr. Overgold?” she said carelessly. “I suppose he does. Eh après, mon ami?”

French? Another mystery! Where and how had she learned it? de Vere asked himself. Not in France, certainly.

“I fear that you are very young, amico mio,” Dorothea went on carelessly. “After all, what is there wrong in it, piccolo pochito? To a man’s mind perhaps – but to a woman, love is love.”

She beckoned to the butler.

“Take Mr. Overgold a cutlet to the music-room,” she said, “and give him his gorgonzola on the inkstand in the library.”

“And now,” she went on, in that caressing way which seemed so natural to her, “don’t let us think about it any more! After all, what is is, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is,” said de Vere, half convinced in spite of himself.

“Or at any rate,” said Dorothea, “nothing can at the same time both be and not be. But come,” she broke off, gaily dipping a macaroon in a glass of crème de menthe and offering it to him with a pretty gesture of camaraderie, “don’t let’s be gloomy any more. I want to take you with me to the matinée.”

“Is he coming?” asked de Vere, pointing at Mr. Overgold’s empty chair.

“Silly boy,” laughed Dorothea. “Of course John is coming. You surely don’t want to buy the tickets yourself.”

—

The days that followed brought a strange new life to de Vere.

Dorothea was ever at his side. At the theatre, at the polo ground, in the park, everywhere they were together. And with them was Mr. Overgold.

The three were always together. At times at the theatre Dorothea and de Vere would sit downstairs and Mr. Overgold in the gallery; at other times, de Vere and Mr. Overgold would sit in the gallery and Dorothea downstairs; at times one of them would sit in Row A, another in Row B, and a third in Row C; at other times two would sit in Row B and one in Row C; at the opera, at times, one of the three would sit listening, the others talking, at other times two listening and one talking, and at other times three talking and none listening.

Thus the three formed together one of the most perplexing, maddening triangles that ever disturbed the society of the metropolis.

—

The dénouement was bound to come.

It came.

It was late at night.

De Vere was standing beside Dorothea in the brilliantly lighted hall of the Grand Palaver Hotel, where they had had supper. Mr. Overgold was busy for a moment at the cashier’s desk.

“Dorothea,” de Vere whispered passionately, “I want to take you away, away from all this. I want you.”

She turned and looked him full in the face. Then she put her hand in his, smiling bravely.

“I will come,” she said.

“Listen,” he went on, “the Gloritania sails for England tomorrow at midnight. I have everything ready. Will you come?”

“Yes,” she answered, “I will”; and then passionately, “Dearest, I will follow you to England, to Liverpool, to the end of the earth.”

She paused in thought a moment and then added.

“Come to the house just before midnight. William, the second chauffeur (he is devoted to me), shall be at the door with the third car. The fourth footman will bring my things – I can rely on him; the fifth housemaid can have them all ready – she would never betray me. I will have the undergardener – the sixth – waiting at the iron gate to let you in; he would die rather than fail me.”

She paused again – then she went on.

“There is only one thing, dearest, that I want to ask. It is not much. I hardly think you would refuse it at such an hour. May I bring my husband with me?”

De Vere’s face blanched.

“Must you?” he said.

“I think I must,” said Dorothea. “You don’t know how I’ve grown to value, to lean upon, him. At times I have felt as if I always wanted him to be near me; I like to feel wherever I am – at the play, at a restaurant, anywhere – that I can reach out and touch him. I know,” she continued, “that it’s only a wild fancy and that others would laugh at it, but you can understand, can you not – carino caruso mio? And think, darling, in our new life, how busy he, too, will be – making money for all of us – in a new money market. It’s just wonderful how he does it.”

A great light of renunciation lit up de Vere’s face.

“Bring him,” he said.

“I knew that you would say that,” she murmured, “and listen, pochito pocket-edition, may I ask one thing more, one weeny thing? William, the second chauffeur – I think he would fade away if I were gone – may I bring him, too? Yes! O my darling, how can I repay you? And the second footman, and the third housemaid – if I were gone I fear that none of——”

“Bring them all,” said de Vere half bitterly; “we will all elope together.”

And as he spoke Mr. Overgold sauntered over from the cashier’s desk, his open purse still in his hand, and joined them. There was a dreamy look upon his face.

“I wonder,” he murmured, “whether personality survives or whether it, too, when up against the irresistible, dissolves and resolves itself into a series of negative reactions?”

De Vere’s empty heart echoed the words.

Then they passed out and the night swallowed them up.

CHAPTER IV

At a little before midnight on the next night, two motors filled with muffled human beings might have been perceived, or seen, moving noiselessly from Riverside Drive to the steamer wharf where lay the Gloritania.

A night of intense darkness enveloped the Hudson. Outside the inside of the dockside a dense fog wrapped the Statue of Liberty. Beside the steamer customs officers and deportation officials moved silently to and fro in long black cloaks, carrying little deportation lanterns in their hands.

To these Mr. Overgold presented in silence his deportation certificates, granting his party permission to leave the United States under the imbecility clause of the Interstate Commerce Act.

No objection was raised.

A few moments later the huge steamer was slipping away in the darkness.

On its deck a little group of people, standing beside a pile of first-class cabin luggage, directed a last sad look through their heavy black disguise at the rapidly vanishing shore which they could not see.

De Vere, who stood in the midst of them, clasping their hands, thus stood and gazed his last at America.

“Spoof!” he said.

(We admit that this final panorama, weird in its midnight mystery, and filling the mind of the reader with a sense of something like awe, is only appended to Spoof in order to coax him to read our forthcoming sequel, Spiff!)

TOC     INDEX

The Reading Public

A Book Store Study

“Wish to look about the store? Oh, oh, by all means, sir,” he said. Then as he rubbed his hands together in an urbane fashion he directed a piercing glance at me through his spectacles.

“You’ll find some things that might interest you,” he said, “in the back of the store on the left. We have there a series of reprints – Universal Knowledge from Aristotle to Arthur Balfour – at seventeen cents. Or perhaps you might like to look over the Pantheon of Dead Authors at ten cents. Mr. Sparrow,” he called, “just show this gentleman our classical reprints – the ten-cent series.”

With that he waved his hand to an assistant and dismissed me from his thought.

In other words, he had divined me in a moment. There was no use in my having bought a sage-green fedora in Broadway, and a sporting tie done up crosswise with spots as big as nickels. These little adornments can never hide the soul within. I was a professor, and he knew it, or at least, as part of his business, he could divine it on the instant.

The sales manager of the biggest book store for ten blocks cannot be deceived in a customer. And he knew, of course, that, as a professor, I was no good. I had come to the store, as all professors go to book stores, just as a wasp comes to an open jar of marmalade. He knew that I would hang around for two hours, get in everybody’s way, and finally buy a cheap reprint of the Dialogues of Plato, or the Prose Works of John Milton, or Locke on the Human Understanding, or some trash of that sort.

As for real taste in literature – the ability to appreciate at its worth a dollar-fifty novel of last month, in a spring jacket with a tango frontispiece – I hadn’t got it and he knew it.

He despised me, of course. But it is a maxim of the book business that a professor standing up in a corner buried in a book looks well in a store. The real customers like it.

So it was that even so up-to-date a manager as Mr. Sellyer tolerated my presence in a back corner of his store: and so it was that I had an opportunity of noting something of his methods with his real customers – methods so successful, I may say, that he is rightly looked upon by all the publishing business as one of the mainstays of literature in America.

I had no intention of standing in the place and listening as a spy. In fact, to tell the truth, I had become immediately interested in a new translation of the Moral Discourses of Epictetus. The book was very neatly printed, quite well bound and was offered at eighteen cents; so that for the moment I was strongly tempted to buy it, though it seemed best to take a dip into it first.

I had hardly read more than the first three chapters when my attention was diverted by a conversation going on in the front of the store.

“You’re quite sure it’s his latest?” a fashionably dressed lady was saying to Mr. Sellyer.

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Rasselyer,” answered the manager. “I assure you this is his very latest. In fact, they only came in yesterday.”

As he spoke, he indicated with his hand a huge pile of books, gayly jacketed in white and blue. I could make out the title in big gilt lettering – GOLDEN DREAMS.

“Oh, yes,” repeated Mr. Sellyer. “This is Mr. Slush’s latest book. It’s having a wonderful sale.”

“That’s all right, then,” said the lady. “You see, one sometimes gets taken in so: I came in here last week and took two that seemed very nice, and I never noticed till I got home that they were both old books, published, I think, six months ago.”

“Oh, dear me, Mrs. Rasselyer,” said the manager in an apologetic tone, “I’m extremely sorry. Pray let us send for them and exchange them for you.”

“Oh, it does not matter,” said the lady; “of course I didn’t read them. I gave them to my maid. She probably wouldn’t know the difference, anyway.”

“I suppose not,” said Mr. Sellyer, with a condescending smile. “But of course, madam,” he went on, falling into the easy chat of the fashionable bookman, “such mistakes are bound to happen sometimes. We had a very painful case only yesterday. One of our oldest customers came in in a great hurry to buy books to take on the steamer, and before we realized what he had done – selecting the books I suppose merely by the titles, as some gentlemen are apt to do – he had taken two of last year’s books. We wired at once to the steamer, but I’m afraid it’s too late.”

“But now, this book,” said the lady, idly turning over the leaves, “is it good? What is it about?”

“It’s an extremely powerful thing,” said Mr. Sellyer, “in fact, masterly. The critics are saying that it’s perhaps the most powerful book of the season. It has a——” and here Mr. Sellyer paused, and somehow his manner reminded me of my own when I am explaining to a university class something that I don’t know myself – “It has a— a— power, so to speak – a very exceptional power; in fact, one may say without exaggeration it is the most powerful book of the month. Indeed,” he added, getting on to easier ground, “it’s having a perfectly wonderful sale.”

“You seem to have a great many of them,” said the lady.

“Oh, we have to,” answered the manager. “There’s a regular rush on the book. Indeed, you know it’s a book that is bound to make a sensation. In fact, in certain quarters, they are saying that it’s a book that ought not to——” And here Mr. Sellyer’s voice became so low and ingratiating that I couldn’t hear the rest of the sentence.

“Oh, really!” said Mrs. Rasselyer. “Well, I think I’ll take it then. One ought to see what these talked-of things are about, anyway.”

She had already begun to button her gloves, and to readjust her feather boa with which she had been knocking the Easter cards off the counter. Then she suddenly remembered something.

“Oh, I was forgetting,” she said. “Will you send something to the house for Mr. Rasselyer at the same time? He’s going down to Virginia for the vacation. You know the kind of thing he likes, do you not?”

“Oh, perfectly, madam,” said the manager. “Mr. Rasselyer generally reads works of – er – I think he buys mostly books on – er—”

“Oh, travel and that sort of thing,” said the lady.

“Precisely. I think we have here,” and he pointed to the counter on the left, “what Mr. Rasselyer wants.”

He indicated a row of handsome books – “Seven Weeks in the Sahara, seven dollars; Six Months in a Waggon, six-fifty net; Afternoons in an Oxcart, two volumes, four-thirty, with twenty off.”

“I think he has read those,” said Mrs. Rasselyer. “At least there are a good many at home that seem like that.”

“Oh, very possibly – but here, now, Among the Cannibals of Corfu – yes, that I think he has had – Among the – that, too, I think – but this I am certain he would like, just in this morning – Among the Monkeys of New Guinea – ten dollars, net.”

And with this Mr. Sellyer laid his hand on a pile of new books, apparently as numerous as the huge pile of Golden Dreams.

“Among the Monkeys,” he repeated, almost caressingly.

“It seems rather expensive,” said the lady.

“Oh, very much so – a most expensive book,” the manager repeated in a tone of enthusiasm. “You see, Mrs. Rasselyer, it’s the illustrations, actual photographs” – he ran the leaves over in his fingers – “of actual monkeys, taken with the camera – and the paper, you notice – in fact, madam, the book costs, the mere manufacture of it, nine dollars and ninety cents – of course we make no profit on it. But it’s a book we like to handle.”

Everybody likes to be taken into the details of technical business; and of course everybody likes to know that a bookseller is losing money. These, I realized, were two axioms in the methods of Mr. Sellyer.

So very naturally Mrs. Rasselyer bought Among the Monkeys, and in another moment Mr. Sellyer was directing a clerk to write down an address on Fifth Avenue, and was bowing deeply as he showed the lady out of the door.

As he turned back to his counter his manner seemed much changed.

“That Monkey book,” I heard him murmur to his assistant, “is going to be a pretty stiff proposition.”

But he had no time for further speculation.

Another lady entered.

This time even to an eye less trained than Mr. Sellyer’s, the deep, expensive mourning and the pensive face proclaimed the sentimental widow.

“Something new in fiction,” repeated the manager, “yes, madam – here’s a charming thing – Golden Dreams” – he hung lovingly on the words – “a very sweet story, singularly sweet; in fact, madam, the critics are saying it is the sweetest thing that Mr. Slush has done.”

“Is it good?” said the lady. I began to realize that all customers asked this.

“A charming book,” said the manager. “It’s a love story – very simple and sweet, yet wonderfully charming. Indeed, the reviews say it’s the most charming book of the month. My wife was reading it aloud only last night. She could hardly read for tears.”

“I suppose it’s quite a safe book, is it?” asked the widow. “I want it for my little daughter.”

“Oh, quite safe,” said Mr. Sellyer, with an almost parental tone, “in fact, written quite in the old style, like the dear old books of the past – quite like” – here Mr. Sellyer paused with a certain slight haze of doubt visible in his eye – “like Dickens and Fielding and Sterne and so on. We sell a great many to the clergy, madam.”

The lady bought Golden Dreams, received it wrapped up in green enameled paper, and passed out.

“Have you any good light reading for vacation time?” called out the next customer in a loud, breezy voice – he had the air of a stock broker starting on a holiday.

“Yes,” said Mr. Sellyer, and his face almost broke into a laugh as he answered, “here’s an excellent thing – Golden Dreams – quite the most humorous book of the season – simply screaming – my wife was reading it aloud only yesterday. She could hardly read for laughing.”

“What’s the price, one dollar? One-fifty. All right, wrap it up.” There was a clink of money on the counter, and the customer was gone. I began to see exactly where professors and college people who want copies of Epictetus at 18 cents and sections of World Reprints of Literature at 12 cents a section come in, in the book trade.

“Yes, Judge!” said the manager to the next customer, a huge, dignified personage in a wide-awake hat, “sea stories? Certainly. Excellent reading, no doubt, when the brain is overcharged as yours must be. Here is the very latest – Among the Monkeys of New Guinea, ten dollars, reduced to four-fifty. The manufacture alone costs six-eighty. We’re selling it out. Thank you, Judge. Send it? Yes. Good morning.”

After that the customers came and went in a string. I noticed that though the store was filled with books – ten thousand of them, at a guess – Mr. Sellyer was apparently only selling two. Every woman who entered went away with Golden Dreams: every man was given a copy of the Monkeys of New Guinea. To one lady Golden Dreams was sold as exactly the reading for a holiday, to another as the very book to read after a holiday; another bought it as a book for a rainy day, and a fourth as the right sort of reading for a fine day. The Monkeys was sold as a sea story, a land story, a story of the jungle, and a story of the mountains, and it was put at a price corresponding to Mr. Sellyer’s estimate of the purchaser.

At last after a busy two hours, the store grew empty for a moment.

“Wilfred,” said Mr. Sellyer, turning to his chief assistant, “I am going out to lunch. Keep those two books running as hard as you can. We’ll try them for another day and then cut them right out. And I’ll drop round to Dockem & Discount, the publishers, and make a kick about them, and see what they’ll do.”

I felt that I had lingered long enough. I drew near with the Epictetus in my hand.

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Sellyer, professional again in a moment. “Epictetus? A charming thing. Eighteen cents. Thank you. Perhaps we have some other things there that might interest you. We have a few second-hand things in the alcove there that you might care to look at. There’s an Aristotle, two volumes – a very fine thing – practically illegible, that you might like: and a Cicero came in yesterday – very choice – damaged by damp – and I think we have a Machiavelli, quite exceptional – practically torn to pieces, and the covers gone – a very rare old thing, sir, if you’re an expert.”

“No, thanks,” I said. And then from a curiosity that had been growing in me and that I couldn’t resist, “That book – Golden Dreams,” I said, “you seem to think it a very wonderful work?”

Mr. Sellyer directed one of his shrewd glances at me. He knew I didn’t want to buy the book, and perhaps, like lesser people, he had his off moments of confidence.

He shook his head.

“A bad business,” he said. “The publishers have unloaded the thing on us, and we have to do what we can. They’re stuck with it, I understand, and they look to us to help them. They’re advertising it largely and may pull it off. Of course, there’s just a chance. One can’t tell. It’s just possible we may get the church people down on it and if so we’re all right. But short of that we’ll never make it. I imagine it’s perfectly rotten.”

“Haven’t you read it?” I asked.

“Dear me, no!” said the manager. His air was that of a milkman who is offered a glass of his own milk. “A pretty time I’d have if I tried to read the new books. It’s quite enough to keep track of them without that.”

“But those people,” I went on, deeply perplexed, “who bought the book. Won’t they be disappointed?”

Mr. Sellyer shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said; “you see, they won’t read it. They never do.”

“But at any rate,” I insisted, “your wife thought it a fine story.”

Mr. Sellyer smiled widely.

“I am not married, sir,” he said.

TOC     INDEX

Afternoon Adventures
at My Club

–1–
The Anecdotes
of Dr. So and So

That is not really his name. I merely call him that from his manner of talking.

His specialty is telling me short anecdotes of his professional life from day to day.

They are told with wonderful dash and power, except for one slight omission, which is, that you never know what the doctor is talking about. Beyond this, his little stories are of unsurpassed interest – but let me illustrate.

—

He came into the semi-silence room of the club the other day and sat down beside me.

“Have something or other?” he said.

“No, thanks,” I answered.

“Smoke anything?” he asked.

“No, thanks.”

The doctor turned to me. He evidently wanted to talk.

“I’ve been having a rather peculiar experience,” he said. “Man came to me the other day – three or four weeks ago – and said, ‘Doctor, I feel out of sorts. I believe I’ve got so and so.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, taking a look at him, ‘been eating so and so, eh?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very good,’ I said, ‘take so and so.’

“Well, off the fellow went – I thought nothing of it – simply wrote such and such in my note-book, such and such a date, symptoms such and such – prescribed such and such, and so forth, you understand?”

“Oh, yes, perfectly, doctor,” I answered.

“Very good. Three days later – a ring at the bell in the evening – my servant came to the surgery. ‘Mr. So and So is here. Very anxious to see you.’ ‘All right!’ I went down. There he was, with every symptom of so and so written all over him – every symptom of it – this and this and this——”

“Awful symptoms, doctor,” I said, shaking my head.

“Are they not?” he said, quite unaware that he hadn’t named any. “There he was with every symptom, heart so and so, eyes so and so, pulse this – I looked at him right in the eye and I said – ‘Do you want me to tell you the truth?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very good,’ I answered, ‘I will. You’ve got so and so.’ He fell back as if shot. ‘So and so!’ he repeated, dazed. I went to the sideboard and poured him out a drink of such and such. ‘Drink this,’ I said. He drank it. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘listen to what I say: You’ve got so and so. There’s only one chance,’ I said, ‘you must limit your eating and drinking to such and such, you must sleep such and such, avoid every form of such and such – I’ll give you a cordial, so many drops every so long, but mind you, unless you do so and so, it won’t help you.’ ‘All right, very good.’ Fellow promised. Off he went.”

The doctor paused a minute and then resumed:

“Would you believe it – two nights later, I saw the fellow – after the theatre, in a restaurant – whole party of people – big plate of so and so in front of him – quart bottle of so and so on ice – such and such and so forth. I stepped over to him – tapped him on the shoulder: ‘See here,’ I said, ‘if you won’t obey my instructions, you can’t expect me to treat you.’ I walked out of the place.”

“And what happened to him?” I asked.

“Died,” said the doctor, in a satisfied tone. “Died. I’ve just been filling in the certificate: So and so, aged such and such, died of so and so!”

“An awful disease,” I murmured.

TOC     INDEX

–2–
The Shattered Health
of Mr. Podge

“How are you, Podge?” I said, as I sat down in a leather armchair beside him.

I only meant “How-do-you-do?” but he rolled his big eyes sideways at me in his flabby face (it was easier than moving his face) and he answered:

“I’m not as well today as I was yesterday afternoon. Last week I was feeling pretty good part of the time, but yesterday about four o’clock the air turned humid, and I don’t feel so well.”

“Have a cigarette?” I said.

“No, thanks; I find they affect the bronchial toobes.”

“Whose?” I asked.

“Mine,” he answered.

“Oh, yes,” I said, and I lighted one. “So you find the weather trying,” I continued cheerfully.

“Yes, it’s too humid. It’s up to a saturation of sixty-six. I’m all right till it passes sixty-four. Yesterday afternoon it was only about sixty-one, and I felt fine. But after that it went up. I guess it must be a contraction of the epidermis pressing on some of the sebaceous glands, don’t you?”

“I’m sure it is,” I said. “But why don’t you just sleep it off till it’s over?”

“I don’t like to sleep too much,” he answered. “I’m afraid of it developing into hypersomnia. There are cases where it’s been known to grow into a sort of lethargy that pretty well stops all brain action altogether—”

“That would be too bad,” I murmured. “What do you do to prevent it?”

“I generally drink from half to three-quarters of a cup of black coffee, or nearly black, every morning at from eleven to five minutes past, so as to keep off hypersomnia. It’s the best thing, the doctor says.”

“Aren’t you afraid,” I said, “of its keeping you awake?”

“I am,” answered Podge, and a spasm passed over his big yellow face. “I’m always afraid of insomnia. That’s the worst thing of all. The other night I went to bed about half-past ten, or twenty-five minutes after – I forget which – and I simply couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t. I read a magazine story, and I still couldn’t; and I read another, and still I couldn’t sleep. It scared me bad.”

“Oh, pshaw,” I said; “I don’t think sleep matters as long as one eats properly and has a good appetite.”

He shook his head very dubiously. “I ate a plate of soup at lunch,” he said, “and I feel it still.”

“You feel it!”

“Yes,” repeated Podge, rolling his eyes sideways in a pathetic fashion that he had, “I still feel it. I oughtn’t to have eaten it. It was some sort of a bean soup, and of course it was full of nitrogen. I oughtn’t to touch nitrogen,” he added, shaking his head.

“Not take any nitrogen?” I repeated.

“No, the doctor – both doctors – have told me that. I can eat starches, and albumens, all right, but I have to keep right away from all carbons and nitrogens. I’ve been dieting that way for two years, except that now and again I take a little glucose or phosphates.”

“That must be a nice change,” I said, cheerfully.

“It is,” he answered in a grateful sort of tone.

There was a pause. I looked at his big twitching face, and listened to the heavy wheezing of his breath, and I felt sorry for him.

“See here, Podge,” I said, “I want to give you some good advice.”

“About what?”

“About your health.”

“Yes, yes, do,” he said. Advice about his health was right in his line. He lived on it.

“Well, then, cut out all this fool business of diet and drugs and nitrogen. Don’t bother about anything of the sort. Forget it. Eat everything you want to, just when you want it. Drink all you like. Smoke all you can – and you’ll feel a new man in a week.”

“Say, do you think so!” he panted, his eyes filled with a new light.

“I know it,” I answered. And as I left him I shook hands with a warm feeling about my heart of being a benefactor to the human race.

Next day, sure enough, Podge’s usual chair at the club was empty.

“Out getting some decent exercise,” I thought. “Thank Heaven!”

Nor did he come the next day, nor the next, nor for a week.

“Leading a rational life at last,” I thought. “Out in the open getting a little air and sunlight, instead of sitting here howling about his stomach.”

The day after that I saw Dr. Slyder in black clothes glide into the club in that peculiar manner of his, like an amateur undertaker.

“Hullo, Slyder,” I called to him, “you look as solemn as if you had been to a funeral.”

“I have,” he said very quietly, and then added, “poor Podge!”

“What about him?” I asked with sudden apprehension.

“Why, he died on Tuesday,” answered the doctor. “Hadn’t you heard? Strangest case I’ve known in years. Came home suddenly one day, pitched all his medicines down the kitchen sink, ordered a couple of cases of champagne and two hundred havanas, and had his housekeeper cook a dinner like a Roman banquet! After being under treatment for two years! Lived, you know, on the narrowest margin conceivable. I told him and Silk told him – we all told him – his only chance was to keep away from every form of nitrogenous ultra-stimulants. I said to him often, ‘Podge, if you touch heavy carbonized food, you’re lost.’”

“Dear me,” I thought to myself, “there are such things after all!”

“It was a marvel,” continued Slyder, “that we kept him alive at all. And, of course” – here the doctor paused to ring the bell to order two Manhattan cocktails – “as soon as he touched alcohol he was done.”

So that was the end of the valetudinarianism of Mr. Podge.

I have always considered that I killed him.

—

But anyway, he was a nuisance at the club.

TOC     INDEX

–3–
The Amazing Travels
of Mr. Yarner

There was no fault to be found with Mr. Yarner till he made his trip around the world.

It was that, I think, which disturbed his brain and unfitted him for membership in the club.

—

“Well,” he would say, as he sat ponderously down with the air of a man opening an interesting conversation, “I was just figuring it out that eleven months ago today I was in Pekin.”

“That’s odd,” I said, “I was just reckoning that eleven days ago I was in Poughkeepsie.”

“They don’t call it Pekin over there,” he said. “It’s sounded Pei-Chang.”

“I know,” I said, “it’s the same way with Poughkeepsie, they pronounce it P’Keepsie.”

“The Chinese,” he went on musingly, “are a strange people.”

“So are the people in P’Keepsie,” I added, “awfully strange.”

That kind of retort would sometimes stop him, but not always. He was especially dangerous if he was found with a newspaper in his hand; because that meant that some item of foreign intelligence had gone to his brain.

Not that I should have objected to Yarner describing his travels. Any man who has bought a ticket round the world and paid for it, is entitled to that.

But it was his manner of discussion that I considered unpermissible.

Last week, for example, in an unguarded moment I fell a victim. I had been guilty of the imprudence – I forget in what connection – of speaking of lions. I realized at once that I had done wrong – lions, giraffes, elephants, rickshaws and natives of all brands, are topics to avoid in talking with a traveller.

“Speaking of lions,” began Yarner.

He was right, of course; I had spoken of lions.

“—I shall never forget,” he went on (of course, I knew he never would), “a rather bad scrape I got into in the up-country of Uganda. Imagine yourself in a wild, rolling country covered here and there with kwas along the sides of the nullahs.”

I did so.

“Well,” continued Yarner, “we were sitting in our tent one hot night – too hot to sleep – when all at once we heard, not ten feet in front of us, the most terrific roar that ever came from the throat of a lion.”

As he said this Yarner paused to take a gulp of bubbling whiskey and soda and looked at me so ferociously that I actually shivered.

Then quite suddenly his manner cooled down in the strangest way, and his voice changed to a commonplace tone as he said—

“Perhaps I ought to explain that we hadn’t come up to the up-country looking for big game. In fact, we had been down in the down country with no idea of going higher than Mombasa. Indeed, our going even to Mombasa itself was more or less an afterthought. Our first plan was to strike across from Aden to Singapore. But our second plan was to strike direct from Colombo to Karuchi—”

“And what was your third plan?” I asked.

“Our third plan,” said Yarner deliberately, feeling that the talk was now getting really interesting, “let me see, our third plan was to cut across from Socotra to Tananarivo.”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“However, all that was changed, and changed under the strangest circumstances. We were sitting, Gallon and I, on the piazza of the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo – you know the Galle Face?”

“No, I do not,” I said very positively.

“Very good. Well, I was sitting on the piazza watching a snake charmer who was seated, with a boa, immediately in front of me.

“Poor Gallon was actually within two feet of the hideous reptile. All of a sudden the beast whirled itself into a coil, its eyes fastened with hideous malignity on poor Gallon, and with its head erect it emitted the most awful hiss I have heard proceed from the mouth of any living snake.”

Here Yarner paused and took a long, hissing drink of whiskey and soda: and then as the malignity died out of his face—

“I should explain,” he went on, very quietly, “that Gallon was not one of our original party. We had come down to Colombo from Mongolia, going by the Pekin Hankow and the Nippon Yushen Keisha.”

“That, I suppose, is the best way?” I said.

“Yes. And oddly enough but for the accident of Gallon joining us, we should have gone by the Amoy, Cochin, Singapore route, which was our first plan. In fact, but for Gallon we should hardly have got through China at all. The Boxer insurrection had taken place only fourteen years before our visit, so you can imagine the awful state of the country.

“Our meeting with Gallon was thus absolutely providential. Looking back on it, I think it perhaps saved our lives. We were in Mongolia (this, you understand, was before we reached China), and had spent the night at a small Yak about four versts from Kharbin, when all of a sudden, just outside the miserable hut that we were in, we heard a perfect fusillade of shots followed immediately afterwards by one of the most blood-curdling and terrifying screams I have ever imagined—”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “and that was how you met Gallon. Well, I must be off.”

And as I happened at that very moment to be rescued by an incoming friend, who took but little interest in lions, and even less in Yarner, I have still to learn why the lion howled so when it met Yarner. But surely the lion had reason enough.

TOC     INDEX

–4–
The Spiritual Outlook
of Mr. Doomer

One generally saw old Mr. Doomer looking gloomily out of the windows of the library of the club. If not there, he was to be found staring sadly into the embers of a dying fire in a deserted sitting-room.

His gloom always appeared out of place as he was one of the richest of the members.

But the cause of it – as I came to know – was that he was perpetually concerned with thinking about the next world. In fact he spent his whole time brooding over it.

I discovered this accidentally by happening to speak to him of the recent death of Podge, one of our fellow members.

“Very sad,” I said, “Podge’s death.”

“Ah,” returned Mr. Doomer, “very shocking. He was quite unprepared to die.”

“Do you think so?” I said, “I’m awfully sorry to hear it.”

“Quite unprepared,” he answered. “I had reason to know it as one of his executors – everything is confusion – nothing signed – no proper power of attorney – codicils drawn up in blank and never witnessed – in short, sir, no sense apparently of the nearness of his death and of his duty to be prepared.

“I suppose,” I said, “poor Podge didn’t realize that he was going to die.”

“Ah, that’s just it,” resumed Mr. Doomer with something like sternness, “a man ought to realize it. Every man ought to feel that at any moment – one can’t tell when – day or night – he may be called upon to meet his,” – Mr. Doomer paused here as if seeking a phrase – “to meet his Financial Obligations, face to face. At any time, sir, he may be hurried before the Judge – or rather his estate may be – before the Judge of the probate court. It is a solemn thought, sir. And yet when I come here I see about me men laughing, talking, and playing billiards, as if there would never be a day when their estate would pass into the hands of their administrators and an account must be given of every cent.”

“But after all,” I said, trying to fall in with his mood, “death and dissolution must come to all of us.”

“That’s just it,” he said solemnly. “They’ve dissolved the tobacco people, and they’ve dissolved the oil people and you can’t tell whose turn it may be next.”

Mr. Doomer was silent a moment and then resumed, speaking in a tone of humility that was almost reverential.

“And yet there is a certain preparedness for death, a certain fitness to die that we ought all to aim at. Any man can at least think solemnly of the Inheritance Tax, and reflect whether by a contract inter vivos drawn in blank he may not obtain redemption; any man if he thinks death is near may at least divest himself of his purely speculative securities and trust himself entirely to those gold bearing bonds of the great industrial corporations whose value will not readily diminish or pass away.” Mr. Doomer was speaking with something like religious rapture.

“And yet what does one see?” he continued. “Men affected with fatal illness and men stricken in years occupied still with idle talk and amusements instead of reading the financial newspapers – and at the last carried away with scarcely time perhaps to send for their brokers when it is already too late.”

“It is very sad,” I said.

“Very,” he repeated, “and saddest of all, perhaps, is the sense of the irrevocability of death and the changes that must come after it.”

We were silent a moment.

“You think of these things a great deal, Mr. Doomer?” I said.

“I do,” he answered. “It may be that it is something in my temperament, I suppose one would call it a sort of spiritual mindedness. But I think of it all constantly. Often as I stand here beside the window and see these cars go by” – he indicated a passing street car – “I cannot but realize that the time will come when I am no longer a managing director and wonder whether they will keep on trying to hold the dividend down by improving the rolling stock or will declare profits to inflate the securities. These mysteries beyond the grave fascinate me, sir. Death is a mysterious thing. Who for example will take my seat on the Exchange? What will happen to my majority control of the power company? I shudder to think of the changes that may happen after death in the assessment of my real estate.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is all beyond our control, isn’t it?”

“Quite,” answered Mr. Doomer; “especially of late years one feels that, all said and done, we are in the hands of a Higher Power, and that the State Legislature is after all supreme. It gives one a sense of smallness. It makes one feel that in these days of drastic legislation with all one’s efforts the individual is lost and absorbed in the controlling power of the state legislature. Consider the words that are used in the text of the Income Tax Case, Folio Two, or the text of the Trans-Missouri Freight Decision, and think of the revelation they contain.”

I left Mr. Doomer still standing beside the window, musing on the vanity of life and on things, such as the future control of freight rates, that lay beyond the grave.

I noticed as I left him how broken and aged he had come to look. It seemed as if the chafings of the spirit were wearing the body that harboured it.

—

It was about a month later that I learned of Mr. Doomer’s death.

Dr. Slyder told me of it in the club one afternoon, over two cocktails in the sitting-room.

“A beautiful bedside,” he said, “one of the most edifying that I have ever attended. I knew that Doomer was failing and of course the time came when I had to tell him.

“‘Mr. Doomer,’ I said, ‘all that I, all that any medical can do for you is done; you are going to die. I have to warn you that it is time for other ministrations than mine.’

“‘Very good,’ he said faintly but firmly, ‘send for my broker.’

“They sent out and fetched Jarvis – you know him I think – most sympathetic man and yet most business-like – he does all the firm’s business with the dying – and we two sat beside Doomer holding him up while he signed stock transfers and blank certificates.

“Once he paused and turned his eyes on Jarvis. ‘Read me from the text of the State Inheritance Tax Statute,’ he said. Jarvis took the book and read aloud very quietly and simply the part at the beginning – ‘Whenever and wheresoever it shall appear,’ down to the words, ‘shall be no longer a subject of judgment or appeal but shall remain in perpetual possession.’

“Doomer listened with his eyes closed. The reading seemed to bring him great comfort. When Jarvis ended he said with a sign, ‘That covers it. I’ll put my faith in that.’ After that he was silent a moment and then said: ‘I wish I had already crossed the river. Oh, to have already crossed the river and be safe on the other side.’ We knew what he meant. He had always planned to move over to New Jersey. The inheritance tax is so much more liberal.

“Presently it was all done.

“‘There,’ I said, ‘it is finished now.’

“‘No,’ he answered, ‘there is still one thing. Doctor, you’ve been very good to me. I should like to pay your account now without it being a charge on the estate. I will pay it as’ – he paused for a moment and a fit of coughing seized him, but by an effort of will he found the power to say – ‘cash.’

“I took the account from my pocket (I had it with me, fearing the worst), and we laid his cheque-book before him on the bed. Jarvis thinking him too faint to write tried to guide his hand as he filled in the sum. But he shook his head.

“‘The room is getting dim,’ he said. ‘I can see nothing but the figures.’

“‘Never mind,’ said Jarvis, much moved, ‘that’s enough.’

“‘Is it four hundred and thirty?’ he asked faintly.

“‘Yes,’ I said, and I could feel the tears rising in my eyes, ‘and fifty cents.’

“After signing the cheque his mind wandered for a moment and he fell to talking, with his eyes closed, of the new federal banking law, and of the prospect of the reserve associations being able to maintain an adequate gold supply.

“Just at the last he rallied.

“‘I want,’ he said in quite a firm voice, ‘to do something for both of you before I die.’

“‘Yes, yes,’ we said.

“‘You are both interested, are you not,’ he murmured, ‘in City Traction?’

“‘Yes, yes,’ we said. We knew of course that he was the managing director.

“He looked at us faintly and tried to speak.

“‘Give him a cordial,’ said Jarvis. But he found his voice.

“‘The value of that stock,’ he said, ‘is going to take a sudden – ’

“His voice grew faint.

“‘Yes, yes,’ I whispered, bending over him (there were tears in both our eyes), ‘tell me is it going up, or going down?’

“‘It is going’ – he murmured – then his eyes closed – ‘it is going – ’

“‘Yes, yes,’ I said, ‘which?’

“‘It is going’ – he repeated feebly and then, quite suddenly he fell back on the pillows and his soul passed. And we never knew which way it was going. It was very sad. Later on, of course, after he was dead, we knew, as everybody knew, that it went down.”

TOC     INDEX

–5–
The Reminiscences
of Mr. Apricot

“Rather a cold day, isn’t it?” I said as I entered the club.

The man I addressed popped his head out from behind a newspaper and I saw it was old Mr. Apricot. So I was sorry that I had spoken.

“Not so cold as the winter of 1866,” he said, beaming with benevolence.

He had an egg-shaped head, bald, with some white hair fluffed about the sides of it. He had a pink face with large blue eyes, behind his spectacles, benevolent to the verge of imbecility.

“Was that a cold winter?” I asked.

“Bitter cold,” he said. “I have never told you, have I, of my early experiences in life?”

“I think I have heard you mention them,” I murmured, but he had already placed a detaining hand on my sleeve. “Sit down,” he said. Then he continued: “Yes, it was a cold winter. I was going to say that it was the coldest I have ever experienced, but that might be an exaggeration. But it was certainly colder than any winter that you have ever seen, or that we ever have now, or are likely to have. In fact the winters now are a mere nothing,” – here Mr. Apricot looked toward the club window where the driven snow was beating in eddies against the panes – “simply nothing. One doesn’t feel them at all,” – here he turned his eyes towards the glowing fire that flamed in the open fireplace. “But when I was a boy things were very different. I have probably never mentioned to you, have I, the circumstances of my early life?”

He had, many times. But he had turned upon me the full beam of his benevolent spectacles and I was too weak to interrupt.

“My father,” went on Mr. Apricot, settling back in his chair and speaking with a far-away look in his eyes, “had settled on the banks of the Wabash River——”

“Oh, yes, I know it well,” I interjected.

“Not as it was then,” said Mr. Apricot very quickly. “At present as you, or any other thoughtless tourist sees it, it appears a broad river pouring its vast flood in all directions. At the time I speak of it was a mere stream scarcely more than a few feet in circumference. The life we led there was one of rugged isolation and of sturdy self-reliance and effort such as it is, of course, quite impossible for you, or any other member of this club to understand – I may give you some idea of what I mean when I say that at that time there was no town nearer to Pittsburgh than Chicago, or to St. Paul than Minneapolis——”

“Impossible!” I said.

Mr. Apricot seemed not to notice the interruption.

“There was no place nearer to Springfield than St. Louis,” he went on in a peculiar sing-song voice, “and there was nothing nearer to Denver than San Francisco, nor to New Orleans than Rio Janeiro——”

He seemed as if he would go on indefinitely.

“You were speaking of your father?” I interrupted.

“My father,” said Mr. Apricot, “had settled on the banks, both banks, of the Wabash. He was like so many other men of his time, a disbanded soldier, a veteran——”

“Of the Mexican War or of the Civil War?” I asked.

“Exactly,” answered Mr. Apricot, hardly heeding the question – “of the Mexican Civil War.”

“Was he under Lincoln?” I asked.

“Over Lincoln,” corrected Mr. Apricot gravely. And he added – “It is always strange to me the way in which the present generation regards Abraham Lincoln. To us, of course, at the time of which I speak, Lincoln was simply one of ourselves.”

“In 1866?” I asked.

“This was 1856,” said Mr. Apricot. “He came often to my father’s cabin, sitting down with us to our humble meal of potatoes and whiskey (we lived with a simplicity which of course you could not possibly understand), and would spend the evening talking with my father over the interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. We children used to stand beside them listening open-mouthed beside the fire in our plain leather night-gowns. I shall never forget how I was thrilled when I first heard Lincoln lay down his famous theory of the territorial jurisdiction of Congress as affected by the Supreme Court decision of 1857. I was only nine years old at the time, but it thrilled me!”

“Is it possible!” I exclaimed, “how ever could you understand it?”

“Ah! my friend,” said Mr. Apricot, almost sadly, “in those days the youth of the United States were educated in the real sense of the word. We children followed the decisions of the Supreme Court with breathless interest. Our books were few but they were good. We had nothing to read but the law reports, the agriculture reports, the weather bulletins and the almanacs. But we read them carefully from cover to cover. How few boys have the industry to do so now, and yet how many of our greatest men were educated on practically nothing else except the law reports and the almanacs. Franklin, Jefferson, Jackson, Johnson,” – Mr. Apricot had relapsed into his sing-song voice, and his eye had a sort of misty perplexity in it as he went on – “Harrison, Thomson, Peterson, Emerson——”

I thought it better to stop him.

“But you were speaking,” I said, “of the winter of eighteen fifty-six.”

“Of eighteen forty-six,” corrected Mr. Apricot. “I shall never forget it. How distinctly I remember – I was only a boy then, in fact a mere lad – fighting my way to school. The snow lay in some places as deep as ten feet” – Mr. Apricot paused – “and in others twenty. But we made our way to school in spite of it. No boys of today – nor, for the matter of that, even men such as you – would think of attempting it. But we were keen, anxious to learn. Our school was our delight. Our teacher was our friend. Our books were our companions. We gladly trudged five miles to school every morning and seven miles back at night, did chores till midnight, studied algebra by candlelight” – here Mr. Apricot’s voice had fallen into its characteristic sing-song, and his eyes were vacant – “rose before daylight, dressed by lamplight, fed the hogs by lantern-light, fetched the cows by twilight—”

I thought it best to stop him.

“But you did eventually get off the farm, did you not?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “my opportunity presently came to me as it came in those days to any boy of industry and intelligence who knocked at the door of fortune till it opened. I shall never forget how my first chance in life came to me. A man, an entire stranger, struck no doubt with the fact that I looked industrious and willing, offered me a dollar to drive a load of tan bark to the nearest market—”

“Where was that?” I asked.

“Minneapolis, seven hundred miles. But I did it. I shall never forget my feelings when I found myself in Minneapolis with one dollar in my pocket and with the world all before me.”

“What did you do?” I said.

“First,” said Mr. Apricot, “I laid out seventy-five cents for a suit of clothes (things were cheap in those days); for fifty cents I bought an overcoat, for twenty-five I got a hat, for ten cents a pair of boots, and with the rest of my money I took a room for a month with a Swedish family, paid a month’s board with a German family, arranged to have my washing done by an Irish family, and—”

“But surely, Mr. Apricot—” I began.

—

But at this point the young man who is generally in attendance on old Mr. Apricot when he comes to the club, appeared on the scene.

“I am afraid,” he said to me aside as Mr. Apricot was gathering up his newspapers and his belongings, “that my uncle has been rather boring you with his reminiscences.”

“Not at all,” I said, “he’s been telling me all about his early life in his father’s cabin on the Wabash—”

“I was afraid so,” said the young man. “Too bad. You see he wasn’t really there at all.”

“Not there!” I said.

“No. He only fancies that he was. He was brought up in New York, and has never been west of Philadelphia. In fact he has been very well to do all his life. But he found that it counted against him: it hurt him in politics. So he got into the way of talking about the Middle West and early days there, and sometimes he forgets that he wasn’t there.”

“I see,” I said.

Meantime Mr. Apricot was ready.

“Good-bye, good-bye,” he said very cheerily – “A delightful chat. We must have another talk over old times soon. I must tell you about my first trip over the Plains at the time when I was surveying the line of the Union Pacific. You who travel nowadays in your Pullman coaches and observation cars can have no idea——”

“Come along, uncle,” said the young man.

TOC     INDEX

–6–
The Last Man
Out of Europe

He came into the club and shook hands with me as if he hadn’t seen me for a year. In reality I had seen him only eleven months ago, and hadn’t thought of him since.

“How are you, Parkins?” I said in a guarded tone, for I saw at once that there was something special in his manner.

“Have a cig?” he said as he sat down on the edge of an armchair, dangling his little boot.

Any young man who calls a cigarette a “cig” I despise. “No, thanks,” I said.

“Try one,” he went on, “they’re Hungarian. They’re some I managed to bring through with me out of the war zone.”

As he said “war zone,” his face twisted up into a sort of scowl of self-importance.

I looked at Parkins more closely and I noticed that he had on some sort of foolish little coat, short in the back, and the kind of bow-tie that they wear in the Hungarian bands of the Sixth Avenue restaurants.

Then I knew what the trouble was. He was the last man out of Europe, that is to say, the latest last man. There had been about fourteen others in the club that same afternoon. In fact they were sitting all over it in Italian suits and Viennese overcoats, striking German matches on the soles of Dutch boots. These were the “war zone” men and they had just got out “in the clothes they stood up in.” Naturally they hated to change.

So I knew all that this young man, Parkins, was going to say, and all about his adventures before he began.

“Yes,” he said, “we were caught right in the war zone. By Jove, I never want to go through again what I went through.”

With that, he sank back into the chair in the pose of a man musing in silence over the recollection of days of horror.

I let him muse. In fact I determined to let him muse till he burst before I would ask him what he had been through. I knew it, anyway.

Presently he decided to go on talking.

“We were at Izzl,” he said, “in the Carpathians, Loo Jones and I. We’d just made a walking tour from Izzl to Fryzzl and back again.”

“Why did you come back?” I asked.

“Back where?”

“Back to Izzl,” I explained, “after you’d once got to Fryzzl. It seems unnecessary, but, never mind, go on.”

“That was in July,” he continued. “There wasn’t a sign of war, not a sign. We heard that Russia was beginning to mobilize,” (at this word be blew a puff from his cigarette and then repeated “beginning to mobilize”) “but we thought nothing of it.”

“Of course not,” I said.

“Then we heard that Hungary was calling out the Honveds, but we still thought nothing of it.”

“Certainly not,” I said.

“And then we heard—”

“Yes, I know,” I said, “you heard that Italy was calling out the Trombonari, and that Germany was calling in all the Landesgeschutzshaft.”

He looked at me.

“How did you know that?” he said.

“We heard it over here,” I answered.

“Well,” he went on, “next thing we knew we heard that the Russians were at Fryzzl.”

“Great Heavens!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, at Fryzzl, not a hundred miles away. The very place we’d been at only two weeks before.”

“Think of it!” I said. “If you’d been where you were two weeks after you were there, or if the Russians had been a hundred miles away from where they were, or even if Fryzzl had been a hundred miles nearer to Izzl—”

We both shuddered.

“It was a close call,” said Parkins. “However, I said to Loo Jones, ‘Loo, it’s time to clear out.’ And then, I tell you, our trouble began. First of all we couldn’t get any money. We went to the bank at Izzl and tried to get them to give us American dollars for Hungarian paper money; we had nothing else.”

“And wouldn’t they?”

“Absolutely refused. They said they hadn’t any.”

“By George,” I exclaimed. “Isn’t war dreadful? What on earth did you do?”

“Took a chance,” said Parkins. “Went across to the railway station to buy our tickets with the Hungarian money.”

“Did you get them?” I said.

“Yes,” assented Parkins. “They said they’d sell us tickets. But they questioned us mighty closely; asked where we wanted to go to, what class we meant to travel by, how much luggage we had to register and so on. I tell you the fellow looked at us mighty closely.”

“Were you in those clothes?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Parkins, “but I guess he suspected we weren’t Hungarians. You see, we couldn’t either of us speak Hungarian. In fact we spoke nothing but English.”

“That would give him a clue,” I said.

“However,” he went on, “he was civil enough in a way. We asked when was the next train to the sea coast, and he said there wasn’t any.”

“No trains?” I repeated.

“Not to the coast. The man said the reason was because there wasn’t any railway to the coast. But he offered to sell us tickets to Vienna. We asked when the train would go and he said there wouldn’t be one for two hours. So there we were waiting on that wretched little platform – no place to sit down, no shade, unless one went into the waiting room itself – for two mortal hours. And even then the train was an hour and a half late!”

“An hour and a half late!” I repeated.

“Yep!” said Parkins, “that’s what things were like over there. So when we got on board the train we asked a man when it was due to get to Vienna, and he said he hadn’t the faintest idea!”

“Good heavens!”

“Not the faintest idea. He told us to ask the conductor or one of the porters. No, sir, I’ll never forget that journey through to Vienna – nine mortal hours! Nothing to eat, not a bite, except just in the middle of the day when they managed to hitch on a dining-car for a while. And they warned everybody that the dining-car was only on for an hour and a half. Commandeered, I guess after that,” added Parkins, puffing his cigarette.

“Well,” he continued, “we got to Vienna at last. I’ll never forget the scene there, station full of people, trains coming and going, men, even women, buying tickets, big piles of luggage being shoved on trucks. It gave one a great idea of the reality of things.”

“It must have,” I said.

“Poor old Loo Jones was getting pretty well used up with it all. However, we determined to see it through somehow.”

“What did you do next?”

“Tried again to get money: couldn’t – they changed our Hungarian paper into Italian gold, but they refused to give us American money.”

“Hoarding it?” I hinted.

“Exactly,” said Parkins, “hoarding it all for the war. Well anyhow we got on a train for Italy and there our troubles began all over again: train stopped at the frontier – officials (fellows in Italian uniforms) went all through it, opening hand baggage——”

“Not hand baggage!” I gasped.

“Yes, sir, even the hand baggage. Opened it all, or a lot of it anyway, and scribbled chalk marks over it. Yes, and worse than that – I saw them take two fellows and sling them clear off the train – they slung them right out on to the platform.”

“What for?” I asked.

“Heaven knows,” said Parkins – “they said they had no tickets. In war time you know, when they’re mobilizing, they won’t let a soul ride on a train without a ticket.”

“Infernal tyranny,” I murmured.

“Isn’t it? However, we got to Genoa at last, only to find that not a single one of our trunks had come with us!”

“Confiscated?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Parkins, “the head baggage man (he wears a uniform, you know, in Italy just like a soldier) said it was because we’d forgotten to check them in Vienna. However there we were waiting for twenty-four hours with nothing but our valises.”

“Right at the station?” I asked.

“No, at a hotel. We got the trunks later. They telegraphed to Vienna for them and managed to get them through somehow – in a baggage car, I believe.”

“And after that, I suppose, you had no more trouble.”

“Trouble,” said Parkins, “I should say we had. Couldn’t get a steamer! They said there was none sailing out of Genoa for New York for three days! All canceled, I guess, or else rigged up as cruisers.”

“What on earth did you do?”

“Stuck it out as best we could: stayed right there in the hotel. Poor old Jones was pretty well collapsed! Couldn’t do anything but sleep and eat, and sit on the piazza of the hotel.”

“But you got your steamer at last?” I asked.

“Yes,” he admitted, “we got it. But I never want to go through another voyage like that again, no sir!”

“What was wrong with it?” I asked, “bad weather?”

“No, calm, but a peculiar calm, glassy, with little ripples on the water – uncanny sort of feeling.”

“What was wrong with the voyage?”

“Oh, just the feeling of it – everything under strict rule you know – no lights anywhere except just the electric lights – smoking-room closed tight at eleven o’clock – decks all washed down every night – officers up on the bridge all day looking out over the sea – no, sir, I want no more of it. Poor old Loo Jones, I guess he’s quite used up: he can’t speak of it at all: just sits and broods, in fact I doubt . . .”

—

At this moment Parkins’s conversation was interrupted by the entry of two newcomers into the room. One of them had on a little Hungarian suit like the one Parkins wore, and was talking loudly as they came in.

“Yes,” he was saying, “we were caught there fair and square right in the war zone. We were at Izzl in the Carpathians, poor old Parkins and I——”

We looked round.

It was Loo Jones, describing his escape from Europe.

TOC     INDEX

–7–
The War Mania
of Mr. Jinks
and Mr. Blinks

They were sitting face to face at a lunch table at the club so near to me that I couldn’t avoid hearing what they said. In any case they are both stout men with gurgling voices which carry.

“What Kitchener ought to do,” – Jinks was saying in a loud voice.

So I knew at once that he had the prevailing hallucination. He thought he was commanding armies in Europe.

After which I watched him show with three bits of bread and two olives and a dessert knife the way in which the German army could be destroyed.

Blinks looked at Jinks’ diagram with a stern impassive face, modeled on the Sunday supplement photogravures of Lord Kitchener.

“Your flank would be too much exposed,” he said, pointing to Jinks’ bread. He spoke with the hard taciturnity of a Joffre.

“My reserves cover it,” said Jinks, moving two pepper pots to the support of the bread.

“Mind you,” Jinks went on, “I don’t say Kitchener will do this: I say this is what he ought to do: it’s exactly the tactics of Kuropatkin outside of Mukden and it’s precisely the same turning movement that Grant used before Richmond.”

Blinks nodded gravely. Anybody who has seen the Grand Duke Nicholoevitch quietly accepting the advice of General Ruski under heavy artillery fire, will realize Blinks’ manner to a nicety.

And, oddly enough, neither of them, I am certain, has ever had any larger ideas about the history of the Civil War than what can be got from reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin and seeing Gillette play Secret Service. But this is part of the mania. Jinks and Blinks had suddenly developed the hallucination that they knew the history of all wars by a sort of instinct.

They rose soon after that, dusted off their waistcoats with their napkins and waddled heavily towards the door. I could hear them as they went talking eagerly of the need of keeping the troops in hard training. They were almost brutal in their severity. As they passed out of the door – one at a time to avoid crowding – they were still talking about it. Jinks was saying that our whole generation is overfed and soft. If he had his way he would take every man in the United States up to forty-seven years of age (Jinks is forty-eight) and train him to a shadow. Blinks went further. He said they should be trained hard up to fifty. He is fifty-one.

After that I used to notice Jinks and Blinks always together in the club, and always carrying on the European War.

I never knew which side they were on. They seemed to be on both. One day they commanded huge armies of Russians, and there was one week when Blinks and Jinks at the head of vast levies of Cossacks threatened to overrun the whole of Western Europe. It was dreadful to watch them burning churches and monasteries and to see Jinks throw whole convents full of white robed nuns into the flames like so much waste paper.

For a time I feared they would obliterate civilization itself. Then suddenly Blinks decided that Jinks’ Cossacks were no good, not properly trained. He converted himself on the spot into a Prussian Field Marshal, declared himself organised to a pitch of organisation of which Jinks could form no idea, and swept Jinks’ army off the earth, without using any men at all, by sheer organisation.

In this way they moved to and fro all winter over the map of Europe, carrying death and destruction everywhere and reveling in it.

But I think I liked best the wild excitement of their naval battles.

Jinks generally fancied himself a submarine and Blinks acted the part of a first-class battleship. Jinks would pop his periscope out of the water, take a look at Blinks merely for the fraction of a second, and then, like a flash, would dive under water again and start firing his torpedoes. He explained that he carried six.

But he was never quick enough for Blinks. One glimpse of his periscope miles and miles away was enough. Blinks landed him a contact shell in the side, sunk him with all hands, and then lined his yards with men and cheered. I have known Blinks sink Jinks at two miles, six miles – and once – in the club billiard room just after the battle of the Falkland Islands – he got him fair and square at ten nautical miles.

Jinks of course claimed that he was not sunk. He had dived. He was two hundred feet under water quietly smiling at Blinks through his periscope. In fact the number of things that Jinks has learned to do through his periscope passes imagination.

Whenever I see him looking across at Blinks with his eyes half closed and with a baffling, quizzical expression in them, I know that he is looking at him through his periscope. Now is the time for Blinks to watch out. If he relaxes his vigilance for a moment he’ll be torpedoed as he sits, and sent flying, whiskey and soda and all, through the roof of the club, while Jinks dives into the basement.

Indeed it has come about of late, I don’t know just how, that Jinks has more or less got command of the sea. A sort of tacit understanding has been reached that Blinks, whichever army he happens at the moment to command, is invincible on land. But Jinks, whether as a submarine or a battleship, controls the sea. No doubt this grew up in the natural evolution of their conversation. It makes things easier for both. Jinks even asks Blinks how many men there are in an army division, and what a sotnia of Cossacks is and what the Army Service Corps means. And Jinks in return has become a recognized expert in torpedoes and has taken to wearing a blue serge suit and referring to Lord Beresford as Charley.

But what I noticed chiefly about the war mania of Jinks and Blinks was their splendid indifference to slaughter. They had gone into the war with a grim resolution to fight it out to a finish. If Blinks thought to terrify Jinks by threatening to burn London, he little knew his man. “All right,” said Jinks, taking a fresh light for his cigar, “burn it! By doing so, you destroy, let us say, two million of my women and children? Very good. Am I injured by that? No. You merely stimulate me to recruiting.”

There was something awful in the grimness of the struggle as carried on by Blinks and Jinks.

The rights of neutrals and non-combatants, Red Cross nurses, and regimental clergymen they laughed to scorn. As for moving-picture men and newspaper correspondents, Jinks and Blinks hanged them on every tree in Belgium and Poland.

With combatants in this frame of mind the war I suppose might have lasted forever.

But it came to an end accidentally – fortuitously, as all great wars are apt to. And by accident also, I happened to see the end of it.

It was late one evening. Jinks and Blinks were coming down the steps of the club, and as they came they were speaking with some vehemence on their favourite topic.

“I tell you,” Jinks was saying, “war is a great thing. We needed it, Blinks. We were all getting too soft, too scared of suffering and pain. We wilt at a bayonet charge, we shudder at the thought of wounds. Bah!” he continued, “what does it matter if a few hundred thousands of human beings are cut to pieces. We need to get back again to the old Viking standard, the old pagan ideas of suffering——”

And as he spoke he got it.

The steps of the club were slippery with the evening’s rain – not so slippery as the frozen lakes of East Prussia or the hills where Jinks and Blinks had been campaigning all winter, but slippery enough for a stout man whose nation has neglected his training. As Jinks waved his stick in the air to illustrate the glory of a bayonet charge, he slipped and fell sideways on the stone steps. His shin bone smacked against the edge of the stone in a way that was pretty well up to the old Viking standard of such things. Blinks with the shock of the collision fell also – backwards on the top step, his head striking first. He lay, to all appearance, as dead as the most insignificant casualty in Servia.

I watched the waiters carrying them into the club, with that new field ambulance attitude towards pain which is getting so popular. They had evidently acquired precisely the old pagan attitude that Blinks and Jinks desired.

And the evening after that I saw Blinks and Jinks, both more or less bandaged, sitting in a corner of the club beneath a rubber tree, making peace.

Jinks was moving out of Montenegro and Blinks was foregoing all claims to Polish Prussia; Jinks was offering Alsace-Lorraine to Blinks, and Blinks in a fit of chivalrous enthusiasm was refusing to take it. They were disbanding troops, blowing up fortresses, sinking their warships and offering indemnities which they both refused to take. Then as they talked, Jinks leaned forward and said something to Blinks in a low voice – a final proposal of terms evidently.

Blinks nodded, and Jinks turned and beckoned to a waiter, with the words—

“One Scotch whiskey and soda, and one stein of Würtemburger Bier——”

And when I heard this, I knew that the war was over.

TOC     INDEX

–8–
The Ground Floor

I hadn’t seen Ellesworth since our college days, twenty years before, at the time when he used to borrow two dollars and a half from the professor of Public Finance to tide him over the week end.

Then quite suddenly he turned up at the club one day and had afternoon tea with me.

His big clean shaven face had lost nothing of its impressiveness, and his spectacles had the same glittering magnetism as in the days when he used to get the college bursar to accept his note of hand for his fees.

And he was still talking European politics just as he used to in the days of our earlier acquaintance.

“Mark my words,” he said across the little tea-table, with one of the most piercing glances I have ever seen, “the whole Balkan situation was only a beginning. We are on the eve of a great pan-Slavonic upheaval.” And then he added, in a very quiet, casual tone: “By the way, could you let me have twenty-five dollars till tomorrow?”

“A pan-Slavonic movement!” I ejaculated. “Do you really think it possible? No, I couldn’t.”

“You must remember,” Ellesworth went on, “Russia means to reach out and take all she can get;” and he added, “how about fifteen till Friday?”

“She may reach for it,” I said, “but I doubt if she’ll get anything. I’m sorry. I haven’t got it.”

“You’re forgetting the Bulgarian element,” he continued, his animation just as eager as before. “The Slavs never forget what they owe to one another.”

Here Ellesworth drank a sip of tea and then said quietly, “Could you make it ten till Saturday at twelve?”

I looked at him more closely. I noticed now his frayed cuffs and the dinginess of his over-brushed clothes. Not even the magnetism of his spectacles could conceal it. Perhaps I had been forgetting something, whether the Bulgarian element or not.

I compromised at ten dollars till Saturday.

“The Slav,” said Ellesworth, as he pocketed the money, “is peculiar. He never forgets.”

“What are you doing now?” I asked him. “Are you still in insurance?” I had a vague recollection of him as employed in that business.

“No,” he answered. “I gave it up. I didn’t like the outlook. It was too narrow. The atmosphere cramped me. I want,” he said, “a bigger horizon.”

“Quite so,” I answered quietly. I had known men before who had lost their jobs. It is generally the cramping of the atmosphere that does it. Some of them can use up a tremendous lot of horizon.

“At present,” Ellesworth went on, “I am in finance. I’m promoting companies.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. I had seen companies promoted before.

“Just now,” continued Ellesworth, “I’m working on a thing that I think will be rather a big thing. I shouldn’t want it talked about outside, but it’s a matter of taking hold of the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks – practically amalgamating them – and perhaps combining with them the entire herring output, and the whole of the sardine catch of the Mediterranean. If it goes through,” he added, “I shall be in a position to let you in on the ground floor.”

I knew the ground floor of old. I have already many friends sitting on it; and others who have fallen through it into the basement.

I said, “thank you,” and he left me.

“That was Ellesworth, wasn’t it?” said a friend of mine who was near me. “Poor devil. I knew him slightly – always full of some new and wild idea of making money. He was talking to me the other day of the possibility of cornering all the huckleberry crop and making refined sugar. Isn’t it amazing what fool ideas fellows like him are always putting up to business men?”

We both laughed.

After that I didn’t see Ellesworth for some weeks.

Then I met him in the club again. How he paid his fees there I do not know.

This time he was seated among a litter of foreign newspapers with a cup of tea and a ten-cent package of cigarettes beside him.

“Have one of these cigarettes,” he said. “I get them specially. They are milder than what we have in the club here.”

They certainly were.

“Note what I say,” Ellesworth went on. “The French Republic is going to gain from now on a stability that it never had.” He seemed greatly excited about it. But his voice changed to a quiet tone as he added, “Could you, without inconvenience, let me have five dollars?”

So I knew that the cod-fish and the sardines were still unamalgamated.

“What about the fisheries thing?” I asked. “Did it go through?”

“The fisheries? No, I gave it up. I refused to go forward with it. The New York people concerned were too shy, too timid to tackle it. I finally had to put it to them very straight that they must either stop shilly-shallying and declare themselves, or the whole business was off.”

“Did they declare themselves?” I questioned.

“They did,” said Ellesworth, “but I don’t regret it. I’m working now on a much bigger thing – something with greater possibilities in it. When the right moment comes I’ll let you in on the ground floor.”

I thanked him and we parted.

The next time I saw Ellesworth he told me at once that he regarded Albania as unable to stand by itself. So I gave him five dollars on the spot and left him.

A few days after that he called me up on the telephone to tell me that the whole of Asia Minor would have to be redistributed. The redistribution cost me five dollars more.

Then I met him on the street, and he said that Persia was disintegrating, and took from me a dollar and a half.

When I passed him next in the street he was very busy amalgamating Chinese tramways. It appeared that there was a ground floor in China, but I kept off it.

Each time I saw Ellesworth he looked a little shabbier than the last. Then one day he called me up on the telephone, and made an appointment.

His manner when I joined him was full of importance.

“I want you at once,” he said in a commanding tone, “to write me your cheque for a hundred dollars.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I am now able,” said Ellesworth, “to put you in on the ground floor of one of the biggest things in years.”

“Thanks,” I said, “the ground floor is no place for me.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” said Ellesworth. “This is a big thing. It’s an idea I’ve been working on for some time – making refined sugar from the huckleberry crop. It’s a certainty. I can get you shares now at five dollars. They’ll go to five hundred when we put them on the market – and I can run you in for a block of stock for promotion services as well. All you have to do is to give me right now a hundred dollars – cash or your cheque – and I can arrange the whole thing for you.”

I smiled.

“My dear Ellesworth,” I said, “I hope you won’t mind if I give you a little bit of good advice. Why not drop all this idea of quick money? There’s nothing in it. The business world has grown too shrewd for it. Take an ordinary decent job and stick to it. Let me use my influence,” I added, “to try and get you into something with a steady salary, and with your brains you’re bound to get on in time.”

Ellesworth looked pained. A “steady job” sounded to him like a “ground floor” to me.

After that I saw nothing of him for weeks. But I didn’t forget him. I looked about and secured for him a job as a canvassing agent for a book firm at a salary of five dollars a week, and a commission of one-tenth of one per cent.

I was waiting to tell him of his good luck, when I chanced to see him at the club again.

But he looked transformed.

He had on a long frock coat that reached nearly to his knees. He was leading a little procession of very heavy men in morning coats, upstairs towards the private luncheon rooms. They moved like a funeral, puffing as they went. I had seen company directors before and I knew what they were at sight.

“It’s a small club and rather inconvenient,” Ellesworth was saying, “and the horizon of some of its members rather narrow,” here he nodded to me as he passed – “but I can give you a fairly decent lunch.”

I watched them as they disappeared upstairs.

“That’s Ellesworth, isn’t it?” said a man near me. It was the same man who had asked about him before.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Giving a lunch to his directors, I suppose,” said my friend; “lucky dog.”

“His directors?” I asked.

“Yes, hadn’t you heard? He’s just cleaned up half a million or more – some new scheme for making refined sugar out of huckleberries. Isn’t it amazing what shrewd ideas these big business men get hold of? They say they’re unloading the stock at five hundred dollars. It only cost them about five to organize. If only one could get on to one of these things early enough, eh?”

I assented sadly.

And the next time I am offered a chance on the ground floor I am going to take it, even if it’s only the barley floor of a brewery.

It appears that there is such a place after all.

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–9–
The Hallucination
of Mr. Butt

It is the hallucination of Mr. Butt’s life that he lives to do good. At whatever cost of time or trouble to himself, he does it. Whether people appear to desire it or not, he insists on helping them along.

His time, his company and his advice are at the service not only of those who seek them but of those who, in the mere appearances of things, are not asking for them.

You may see the beaming face of Mr. Butt appear at the door of all those of his friends who are stricken with the minor troubles of life. Whenever Mr. Butt learns that any of his friends are moving house, buying furniture, selling furniture, looking for a maid, dismissing a maid, seeking a chauffeur, suing a plumber or buying a piano – he is at their side in a moment.

So when I met him one night in the cloak room of the club putting on his raincoat and his galoshes with a peculiar beaming look on his face, I knew that he was up to some sort of benevolence.

“Come upstairs,” I said, “and play billiards.” I saw from his general appearance that it was a perfectly safe offer.

“My dear fellow,” said Mr. Butt, “I only wish I could. I wish I had the time. I am sure it would cheer you up immensely if I could. But I’m just going out.”

“Where are you off to?” I asked, for I knew he wanted me to say it.

“I’m going out to see the Everleigh-Joneses – you know them? no? – just come to the city, you know, moving into their new house, out on Seldom Avenue.”

“But,” I said, “that’s away out in the suburbs, is it not, a mile or so beyond the car tracks?”

“Something like that,” answered Mr. Butt.

“And it’s going on for ten o’clock and it’s starting to rain—”

“Pooh, pooh,” said Mr. Butt, cheerfully, adjusting his galoshes. “I never mind the rain – does one good. As to their house. I’ve not been there yet but I can easily find it. I’ve a very simple system for finding a house at night by merely knocking at the doors in the neighbourhood till I get it.”

“Isn’t it rather late to go there?” I protested.

“My dear fellow,” said Mr. Butt warmly, “I don’t mind that a bit. The way I look at it is, here are these two young people, only married a few weeks, just moving into their new house, everything probably upside down, no one there but themselves, no one to cheer them up,” – he was wriggling into his raincoat as he spoke and working himself into a frenzy of benevolence – “good gracious, I only learned at dinner time that they had come to town, or I’d have been out there days ago – days ago——”

And with that Mr. Butt went bursting forth into the rain, his face shining with good will under the street lamps.

The next day I saw him again at the club at lunch time.

“Well,” I asked, “did you find the Joneses?”

“I did,” said Mr. Butt, “and by George I was glad that I’d gone – quite a lot of trouble to find the house (though I didn’t mind that; I expected it) – had to knock at twenty houses at least to get it – very dark and wet out there – no street lights yet – however I simply pounded at the doors until some one showed a light – at every house I called out the same things, ‘Do you know where the Everleigh Joneses live?’ They didn’t. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘go back to bed. Don’t bother to come down.’

“But I got to the right spot at last. I found the house all dark. Jones put his head out of an upper window. ‘Hullo,’ I called out; ‘it’s Butt.’ ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he said, ‘we’ve gone to bed.’ ‘My dear boy,’ I called back, ‘don’t apologize at all. Throw me down the key and I’ll wait while you dress. I don’t mind a bit.’

“Just think of it,” continued Mr. Butt, “those two poor souls going to bed at half past ten, through sheer dullness! By George, I was glad I’d come. ‘Now then,’ I said to myself, ‘let’s cheer them up a little, let’s make things a little brighter here.’

“Well, down they came and we sat there on furniture cases and things and had a chat. Mrs. Jones wanted to make me some coffee. ‘My dear girl,’ I said (I knew them both when they were children) ‘I absolutely refuse. Let me make it.’ They protested. I insisted. I went at it – kitchen all upset – had to open at least twenty tins to get the coffee. However, I made it at last. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘drink it.’ They said they had some an hour or so ago. ‘Nonsense,’ I said, ‘drink it.’ Well, we sat and chatted away till midnight. They were dull at first and I had to do all the talking. But I set myself to it. I can talk, you know, when I try. Presently about midnight they seemed to brighten up a little. Jones looked at his watch. ‘By Jove,’ he said, in an animated way, ‘it’s after midnight.’ I think he was pleased at the way the evening was going; after that we chatted away more comfortably. Every little while Jones would say, ‘By Jove, it’s half past twelve,’ or ‘it’s one o’clock,’ and so on.

“I took care, of course, not to stay too late. But when I left them I promised that I’d come back today to help straighten things up. They protested, but I insisted.”

That same day Mr. Butt went out to the suburbs and put the Joneses’ furniture to rights.

“I worked all afternoon,” he told me afterwards – “hard at it with my coat off – got the pictures up first – they’d been trying to put them up by themselves in the morning. I had to take down every one of them – not a single one right – ‘Down they come,’ I said, and went at it with a will.”

A few days later Mr. Butt gave me a further report. “Yes,” he said, “the furniture is all unpacked and straightened out, but I don’t like it. There’s a lot of it I don’t quite like. I half feel like advising Jones to sell it and get some more. But I don’t want to do that till I’m quite certain about it.”

After that Mr. Butt seemed much occupied and I didn’t see him at the club for some time.

“How about the Everleigh-Joneses?” I asked. “Are they comfortable in their new house?”

Mr. Butt shook his head. “It won’t do,” he said. “I was afraid of it from the first. I’m moving Jones in nearer to town. I’ve been out all morning looking for an apartment; when I get the right one I shall move him. I like an apartment far better than a house.”

So the Joneses in due course of time were moved. After that Mr. Butt was very busy selecting a piano, and advising them on wallpaper and woodwork.

They were hardly settled in their new home when fresh trouble came to them.

“Have you heard about Everleigh-Jones?” said Mr. Butt one day with an anxious face.

“No,” I answered.

“He’s ill – some sort of fever – poor chap – been ill three days, and they never told me or sent for me – just like their grit – meant to fight it out alone. I’m going out there at once.”

From day to day I had reports from Mr. Butt of the progress of Jones’s illness.

“I sit with him every day,” he said. “Poor chap – he was very bad yesterday for a while – mind wandered – quite delirious – I could hear him from the next room – seemed to think some one was hunting him – ‘Is that damn old fool gone,’ I heard him say.

“I went in and soothed him. ‘There is no one here, my dear boy,’ I said, ‘no one, only Butt.’ He turned over and groaned. Mrs. Jones begged me to leave him. ‘You look quite used up,’ she said. ‘Go out into the open air.’ ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ I said, ‘what does it matter about me?’”

Eventually, thanks no doubt to Mr. Butt’s assiduous care, Everleigh-Jones got well.

“Yes,” said Mr. Butt to me a few weeks later, “Jones is all right again now, but his illness has been a long hard pull. I haven’t had an evening to myself since it began. But I’m paid, sir, now, more than paid for anything I’ve done – the gratitude of those two people – it’s unbelievable – you ought to see it. Why do you know that dear little woman is so worried for fear that my strength has been overtaxed that she wants me to take a complete rest and go on a long trip somewhere – suggested first that I should go south. ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ I said laughing, ‘that’s the one place I will not go. Heat is the one thing I can’t stand.’ She wasn’t nonplussed for a moment. ‘Then go north,’ she said. ‘Go up to Canada, or better still go to Labrador,’ – and in a minute that kind little woman was hunting up railway maps to see how far north I could get by rail. ‘After that,’ she said, ‘you can go on snowshoes.’ She’s found that there’s a steamer to Ungava every spring and she wants me to run up there on one steamer and come back on the next.”

“It must be very gratifying,” I said.

“Oh, it is, it is,” said Mr. Butt warmly. “It’s well worth anything I do. It more than repays me. I’m alone in the world and my friends are all I have. I can’t tell you how it goes to my heart when I think of all my friends, here in the club and in the town, always glad to see me, always protesting against my little kindnesses and yet never quite satisfied about anything unless they can get my advice and hear what I have to say.

“Take Jones for instance,” he continued – “do you know, really now as a fact – the hall porter assures me of it – every time Everleigh-Jones enters the club here the first thing he does is to sing out, ‘Is Mr. Butt in the club?’ It warms me to think of it.” Mr. Butt paused, one would have said there were tears in his eyes. But if so the kindly beam of his spectacles shone through them like the sun through April rain. He left me and passed into the cloak room.

He had just left the hall when a stranger entered, a narrow, meek man with a hunted face. He came in with a furtive step and looked about him apprehensively.

“Is Mr. Butt in the club?” he whispered to the hall porter.

“Yes, sir, he’s just gone into the cloak room, sir, shall I—”

But the man had turned and made a dive for the front door and had vanished.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“That’s a new member, sir, Mr. Everleigh-Jones,” said the hall porter.

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Ram Spudd
the New World Singer

Is He Divinely Inspired? Or Is He Not? At Any Rate We Discovered Him.  [1]

The discovery of a new poet is always a joy to the cultivated world. It is therefore with the greatest pleasure that we are able to announce that we ourselves, acting quite independently and without aid from any of the English reviews of the day, have discovered one. In the person of Mr. Ram Spudd, of whose work we give specimens below, we feel that we reveal to our readers a genius of the first order. Unlike one of the most recently discovered English poets who is a Bengalee, and another who is a full-blooded Yak, Mr. Spudd is, we believe, a Navajo Indian. We believe this from the character of his verse. Mr. Spudd himself we have not seen. But when he forwarded his poems to our office and offered with characteristic modesty to sell us his entire works for seventy-five cents, we felt in closing with his offer that we were dealing not only with a poet, but with one of nature’s gentlemen.

Mr. Spudd, we understand, has had no education. Other newly discovered poets have had, apparently, some. Mr. Spudd has had, evidently, none. We lay stress on this point. Without it we claim it is impossible to understand his work.

What we particularly like about Ram Spudd, and we do not say this because we discovered him but because we believe it and must say it, is that he belongs not to one school but to all of them. As a nature poet we doubt very much if he has his equal; as a psychologist, we are sure he has not. As a clear lucid thinker he is undoubtedly in the first rank; while as a mystic he is a long way in front of it. The specimens of Mr. Spudd’s verse which we append herewith were selected, we are happy to assure our readers, purely at random from his work. We first blindfolded ourselves and then, standing with our feet in warm water and having one hand tied behind our back, we groped among the papers on our desk before us and selected for our purpose whatever specimens first came to hand.

As we have said, or did we say it, it is perhaps as a nature poet that Ram Spudd excels. Others of our modern school have carried the observation of natural objects to a high degree of very nice precision, but with Mr. Spudd the observation of nature becomes an almost scientific process. Nothing escapes him. The green of the grass he detects as in an instant. The sky is no sooner blue than he remarks it with unerring certainty. Every bird note, every bee call, is familiar to his trained ear. Perhaps we cannot do better than quote the opening lines of a singularly beautiful sample of Ram Spudd’s genius which seems to us the last word in nature poetry. It is called, with characteristic daintiness—

Spring Thaw in the Ahuntsic Woods, Near Paspebiac, Passamoquoddy County

(We would like to say that, to our ears at least, there is a music in this title like the sound of falling water, or of chopped ice. But we must not interrupt ourselves. We now begin. Listen.)

The thermometer is standing this morning at thirty-three decimal one.

As a consequence it is freezing in the shade, but it is thawing in the sun.

There is a certain amount of snow on the ground, but of course not too much.

The air is what you would call humid, but not disagreeable to the touch.

Where I am standing I find myself practically surrounded by trees,

It is simply astonishing the number of the different varieties one sees.

I’ve grown so wise I can tell each different tree by seeing it glisten,

But if that test fails I simply put my ear to the tree and listen,

And, well, I suppose it is only a silly fancy of mine perhaps,

But do you know I’m getting to tell different trees by the sound of their saps.

After I have noticed all the trees, and named those I know in words,

I stand quite still and look all round to see if there are any birds,

And yesterday, close where I was standing, sitting in some brush on the snow,

I saw what I was practically absolutely certain was an early crow.

I sneaked up ever so close and was nearly beside it, when say!

It turned and took one look at me, and flew away.

But we should not wish our readers to think that Ram Spudd is always and only the contemplative poet of the softer aspects of nature. Oh, by no means. There are times when waves of passion sweep over him in such prodigious volume as to roll him to and fro like a pebble in the surf. Gusts of emotion blow over him with such violence as to hurl him pro and con with inconceivable fury. In such moods, if it were not for the relief offered by writing verse we really do not know what would happen to him. His verse written under the impulse of such emotions marks him as one of the greatest masters of passion, wild and yet restrained, objectionable and yet printable, that have appeared on this side of the Atlantic. We append herewith a portion, or half portion, of his little gem entitled

You

You!

With your warm, full, rich, red, ripe lips,

And your beautifully manicured finger-tips!

You!

With your heaving, panting, rapidly expanding and contracting chest,

Lying against my perfectly ordinary shirt-front and dinner-jacket vest.

It is too much

Your touch

As such.

It and

Your hand,

Can you not understand?

Last night an ostrich feather from your fragrant hair

Unnoticed fell.

I guard it

Well.

Yestere’en

From your tiara I have slid,

Unseen,

A single diamond,

And I keep it

Hid.

Last night you left inside the vestibule upon the sill

A quarter dollar,

And I have it

Still.

But even those who know Ram Spudd as the poet of nature or of passion still only know a part of his genius. Some of his highest flights rise from an entirely different inspiration, and deal with the public affairs of the nation. They are in every sense comparable to the best work of the poets laureate of England dealing with similar themes. As soon as we had seen Ram Spudd’s work of this kind, we cried, that is we said to our stenographer, “What a pity that in this republic we have no laureateship. Here is a man who might truly fill it.” Of the poem of this kind we should wish to quote, if our limits of space did not prevent it, Mr. Spudd’s exquisite

Ode on the Reduction
of the United States Tariff

It is a matter of the very gravest concern to at least nine-tenths of the business interests in the United States,

Whether an all-round reduction of the present tariff either on an ad valorem or a specific basis

Could be effected without a serious disturbance of the general industrial situation of the country.

But, no, we must not quote any more. No we really mustn’t. Yet we cannot refrain from inserting a reference to the latest of these laureate poems of Ram Spudd. It appears to us to be a matchless specimen of its class, and to settle once and for all the vexed question (though we ourselves never vexed it) of whether true poetry can deal with national occasions as they arise. It is entitled:

The Banker’s Euthanasia: Or,
The Federal Reserve Currency Act
of 1914,
and, though we do not propose to reproduce it here, our distinct feeling is that it will take its rank beside Mr. Spudd’s Elegy on the Interstate Commerce Act, and his Thoughts on the Proposal of a Uniform Pure Food Law.

But our space does not allow us to present Ram Spudd in what is after all his greatest aspect, that of a profound psychologist, a questioner of the very meaning of life itself. His poem Death and Gloom, from which we must refrain from quoting at large, contains such striking passages as the following:

Why do I breathe, or do I?

What am I for, and whither do I go?

What skills it if I live, and if I die,

What boots it?

Any one knowing Ram Spudd as we do will realize that these questions, especially the last, are practically unanswerable.

[1]  Mr. Spudd was discovered by the author for the New York Life. He is already recognized as superior to Tennyson and second only, as a writer of imagination, to the Sultan of Turkey.

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Aristocratic Anecdotes

Little Stories of Great People

I have been much struck lately by the many excellent little anecdotes of celebrated people that have appeared in recent memoirs and found their way thence into the columns of the daily press. There is something about them so deliciously pointed, their humour is so exquisite, that I think we ought to have more of them. To this end I am trying to circulate on my own account a few anecdotes which seem somehow to have been overlooked.

Here, for example, is an excellent thing which comes, if I remember rightly, from the vivacious Memoir of Lady Ranelagh de Chit Chat.

ANECDOTE OF
THE DUKE OF STRATHYTHAN

Lady Ranelagh writes: “The Duke of Strathythan (I am writing of course of the seventeenth Duke, not of his present Grace) was, as everybody knows, famous for his hospitality. It was not perhaps generally known that the Duke was as witty as he was hospitable. I recall a most amusing incident that happened the last time but two that I was staying at Strathythan Towers. As we sat down to lunch (we were a very small and intimate party, there being only forty-three of us) the Duke, who was at the head of the table, looked up from the roast of beef that he was carving, and running his eye about the guests was heard to murmur, ‘I’m afraid there isn’t enough beef to go round.’

“There was nothing to do, of course, but to roar with laughter and the incident passed off with perfect savoir faire.”

Here is another story which I think has not had all the publicity that it ought to. I found it in the book Shot, Shell and Shrapnell or Sixty Years as a War Correspondent, recently written by Mr. Maxim Catling whose exploits are familiar to all readers.

ANECDOTE OF
LORD KITCHENER

“I was standing,” writes Mr. Maxim, “immediately between Lord Kitchener and Lord Wolsley (with Lord Roberts a little to the rear of us), and we were laughing and chatting as we always did when the enemy were about to open fire on us. Suddenly we found ourselves the object of the most terrific hail of bullets. For a few moments the air was black with them. As they went past I could not refrain from exchanging a quiet smile with Lord Kitchener, and another with Lord Wolsley. Indeed I have never, except perhaps on twenty or thirty occasions, found myself exposed to such an awful fusillade.

“Kitchener, who habitually uses an eye-glass (among his friends), watched the bullets go singing by, and then, with that inimitable sangfroid which he reserves for his intimates, said,

“‘I’m afraid if we stay here we may get hit.’

“We all moved away laughing heartily.

“To add to the joke, Lord Roberts’ aide-de-camp was shot in the pit of the stomach as we went.”

The next anecdote which I reproduce may be already too well known to my readers. The career of Baron Snorch filled so large a page in the history of European diplomacy that the publication of his recent memoirs was awaited with profound interest by half the chancelleries of Europe. (Even the other half were half excited over them.) The tangled skein in which the politics of Europe are enveloped was perhaps never better illustrated than in this fascinating volume. Even at the risk of repeating what is already familiar, I offer the following for what it is worth – or even less.

NEW LIGHT
ON THE LIFE OF CAVOUR

“I have always regarded Count Cavour,” writes the Baron, “as one of the most impenetrable diplomatists whom it has been my lot to meet. I distinctly recall an incident in connection with the famous Congress of Paris of 1856 which rises before my mind as vividly as if it were yesterday. I was seated in one of the large salons of the Elysée Palace (I often used to sit there) playing vingt-et-un together with Count Cavour, the Duc de Magenta, the Marquese di Casa Mombasa, the Conte di Piccolo Pochito and others whose names I do not recollect. The stakes had been, as usual, very high, and there was a large pile of gold on the table. No one of us, however, paid any attention to it, so absorbed were we all in the thought of the momentous crises that were impending. At intervals the Emperor Napoleon III passed in and out of the room, and paused to say a word or two, with well-feigned éloignement, to the players, who replied with such dégagement as they could.

“While the play was at its height a servant appeared with a telegram on a silver tray. He handed it to Count Cavour. The Count paused in his play, opened the telegram, read it and then with the most inconceivable nonchalance, put it in his pocket. We stared at him in amazement for a moment, and then the Duc, with the infinite ease of a trained diplomat, quietly resumed his play.

“Two days afterward, meeting Count Cavour at a reception of the Empress Eugenie, I was able, unobserved, to whisper in his ear, ‘What was in the telegram?’ ‘Nothing of any consequence,’ he answered. From that day to this I have never known what it contained. My readers,” concludes Baron Snorch, “may believe this or not as they like, but I give them my word that it is true.

“Probably they will not believe it.”

I cannot resist appending to these anecdotes a charming little story from that well-known book, Sorrows of a Queen. The writer, Lady de Weary, was an English gentlewoman who was for many years Mistress of the Robes at one of the best known German courts. Her affection for her royal mistress is evident on every page of her memoirs.

TENDERNESS OF A QUEEN

Lady de W. writes:

“My dear mistress, the late Queen of Saxe-Covia-Slitz-in-Mein, was of a most tender and sympathetic disposition. The goodness of her heart broke forth on all occasions. I well remember how one day, on seeing a cabman in the Poodel Platz kicking his horse in the stomach, she stopped in her walk and said, ‘Oh, poor horse! if he goes on kicking it like that he’ll hurt it.’”

I may say in conclusion that I think if people would only take a little more pains to resuscitate anecdotes of this sort, there might be a lot more of them found.

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Education Made Agreeable

—or—
The Diversions of a Professor

A few days ago during a pause in one of my college lectures (my class being asleep) I sat reading Draper’s Intellectual Development of Europe. Quite suddenly I came upon the following sentence:

“Eratosthenes cast everything he wished to teach into poetry. By this means he made it attractive, and he was able to spread his system all over Asia Minor.”

This came to me with a shock of an intellectual discovery. I saw at once how I could spread my system, or parts of it, all over the United States and Canada. To make education attractive! There it is! To call in the help of poetry, of music, of grand opera, if need be, to aid in the teaching of the dry subjects of the college class room.

I set to work at once on the project and already I have enough results to revolutionize education.

In the first place I have compounded a blend of modern poetry and mathematics, which retains all the romance of the latter and loses none of the dry accuracy of the former. Here is an example:

The poem of

LORD ULLIN’S DAUGHTER
expressed as

A PROBLEM IN TRIGONOMETRY

Introduction. A party of three persons, a Scotch nobleman, a young lady and an elderly boatman stand on the banks of a river (R), which, for private reasons, they desire to cross. Their only means of transport is a boat, of which the boatman, if squared, is able to row at a rate proportional to the square of the distance. The boat, however, has a leak (S), through which a quantity of water passes sufficient to sink it after traversing an indeterminate distance (D). Given the square of the boatman and the mean situation of all concerned, to find whether the boat will pass the river safely or sink.

A chieftain to the Highlands bound

Cried “Boatman do not tarry!

And I’ll give you a silver pound

To row me o’er the ferry.”

Before them raged the angry tide

X^2 + Y from side to side.

Outspake the hardy Highland wight,

“I’ll go, my chief, I’m ready;

It is not for your silver bright,

But for your winsome lady.”

And yet he seemed to manifest

A certain hesitation;

His head was sunk upon his breast

In puzzled calculation.

“Suppose the river X + Y

And call the distance Q

Then dare we thus the gods defy

I think we dare, don’t you?

Our floating power expressed in words

Is X + 47/3”

“Oh, haste thee, haste,” the lady cries,

“Though tempests round us gather

I’ll face the raging of the skies

But please cut out the Algebra.”

The boat has left the stormy shore (S)

A stormy C before her

C_1 C_2 C_3 C_4

The tempest gathers o’er her

The thunder rolls, the lightning smites ’em

And the rain falls ad infinitum.

In vain the aged boatman strains,

His heaving sides reveal his pains;

The angry water gains apace

Both of his sides and half his base,

Till, as he sits, he seems to lose

The square of his hypotenuse.

The boat advanced to X + 2,

Lord Ullin reached the fixed point Q—

Then the boat sank from human eye,

OY, OY^2, OGY.

But this is only a sample of what can be done. I have realized that all our technical books are written and presented in too dry a fashion. They don’t make the most of themselves. Very often the situation implied is intensely sensational, and if set out after the fashion of an up-to-date newspaper, would be wonderfully effective.

Here, for example, you have Euclid writing in a perfectly prosaic way all in small type such an item as the following:

“A perpendicular is let fall on a line BC so as to bisect it at the point C etc., etc.,” just as if it were the most ordinary occurrence in the world. Every newspaper man will see at once that it ought to be set up thus:

AWFUL CATASTROPHE
PERPENDICULAR FALLS HEADLONG
ON A GIVEN POINT

The Line at C said to be completely bisected
President of the Line makes Statement
etc., etc., etc.

But I am not contenting myself with merely describing my system. I am putting it to the test. I am preparing a new and very special edition of my friend Professor Daniel Murray’s work on the Calculus. This is a book little known to the general public. I suppose one may say without exaggeration that outside of the class room it is hardly read at all.

Yet I venture to say that when my new edition is out it will be found on the tables of every cultivated home, and will be among the best sellers of the year. All that is needed is to give to this really monumental book the same chance that is given to every other work of fiction in the modern market.

First of all I wrap it in what is called technically a jacket. This is of white enameled paper, and on it is a picture of a girl, a very pretty girl, in a summer dress and sunbonnet sitting swinging on a bough of a cherry tree. Across the cover in big black letters are the words:

THE CALCULUS
and beneath them the legend “the most daring book of the day.” This, you will observe, is perfectly true. The reviewers of the mathematical journals when this book first came out agreed that “Professor Murray’s views on the Calculus were the most daring yet published.” They said, too, that they hoped that the professor’s unsound theories of infinitesimal rectitude would not remain unchallenged. Yet the public somehow missed it all, and one of the most profitable scandals in the publishing trade was missed for the lack of a little business enterprise.

My new edition will give this book its first real chance.

I admit that the inside has to be altered – but not very much. The real basis of interest is there. The theories in the book are just as interesting as those raised in the modern novel. All that is needed is to adopt the device, familiar in novels, of clothing the theories in personal form and putting the propositions advanced into the mouths of the characters, instead of leaving them as unsupported statements of the author. Take for example Dr. Murray’s beginning. It is very good – any one will admit it – fascinatingly clever, but it lacks heart.

It runs:

If two magnitudes, one of which is determined by a straight line and the other by a parabola approach one another, the rectangle included by the revolution of each will be equal to the sum of a series of indeterminate rectangles.

Now this is – quite frankly – dull. The situation is there; the idea is good, and, whether one agrees or not, is at least as brilliantly original as even the best of our recent novels. But I find it necessary to alter the presentation of the plot a little bit. As I re-edit it the opening of the Calculus runs thus:

On a bright morning in June along a path gay with the opening efflorescence of the hibiscus and entangled here and there with the wild blossoms of the convolvulus – two magnitudes might have been seen approaching one another. The one magnitude who held a tennis-racket in his hand, carried himself with a beautiful erectness and moved with a firmness such as would have led Professor Murray to exclaim in despair – Let it be granted that A. B. (for such was our hero’s name) is a straight line. The other magnitude, which drew near with a step at once elusive and fascinating, revealed as she walked a figure so exquisite in its every curve as to call from her geometrical acquaintances the ecstatic exclamation, “Let it be granted that M is a parabola.”

The beautiful magnitude of whom we have last spoken, bore on her arm as she walked, a tiny dog over which her fair head was bent in endearing caresses; indeed such was her attention to the dog Vi (his full name was Velocity but he was called Vi for short) that her wayward footsteps carried her not in a straight line but in a direction so constantly changing as to lead that acute observer, Professor Murray, to the conclusion that her path could only be described by the amount of attraction ascribable to Vi.

Guided thus along their respective paths, the two magnitudes presently met with such suddenness that they almost intersected.

“I beg your pardon,” said the first magnitude very rigidly.

“You ought to indeed,” said the second rather sulkily, “you’ve knocked Vi right out of my arms.”

She looked round despairingly for the little dog which seemed to have disappeared in the long grass.

“Won’t you please pick him up?” she pleaded.

“Not exactly in my line, you know,” answered the other magnitude, “but I tell you what I’ll do, if you’ll stand still, perfectly still where you are, and let me take hold of your hand, I’ll describe a circle!”

“Oh, aren’t you clever!” cried the girl, clapping her hands. “What a lovely idea! You describe a circle all around me, and then we’ll look at every weeny bit of it and we’ll be sure to find Vi—”

She reached out her hand to the other magnitude who clasped it with an assumed intensity sufficient to retain it.

At this moment a third magnitude broke on the scene: a huge oblong, angular figure, very difficult to describe, came revolving towards them.

“M,” it shouted, “Emily, what are you doing?”

“My goodness,” said the second magnitude in alarm, “it’s M A M A.”

I may say that the second installment of Dr. Murray’s fascinating romance will appear in the next number of the Illuminated Bookworm, the great adult-juvenile vehicle of the newer thought in which these theories of education are expounded further.

TOC     INDEX

An Every-Day Experience

He came across to me in the semi-silence room of the club.

“I had a rather queer hand at bridge last night,” he said.

“Had you?” I answered, and picked up a newspaper.

“Yes. It would have interested you, I think,” he went on.

“Would it?” I said, and moved to another chair.

“It was like this,” he continued, following me: “I held the king of hearts——”

“Half a minute,” I said; “I want to go and see what time it is.” I went out and looked at the clock in the hall. I came back.

“And the queen and the ten——” he was saying.

“Excuse me just a second; I want to ring for a messenger.”

I did so. The waiter came and went.

“And the nine and two small ones,” he went on.

“Two small what?” I asked.

“Two small hearts,” he said. “I don’t remember which. Anyway, I remember very well indeed that I had the king and the queen and the jack, the nine, and two little ones.”

“Half a second,” I said, “I want to mail a letter.”

When I came back to him, he was still murmuring:

“My partner held the ace of clubs and the queen. The jack was out, but I didn’t know where the king was——”

“You didn’t?” I said in contempt.

“No,” he repeated in surprise, and went on murmuring:

“Diamonds had gone round once, and spades twice, and so I suspected that my partner was leading from weakness——”

“I can well believe it,” I said – “sheer weakness.”

“Well,” he said, “on the sixth round the lead came to me. Now, what should I have done? Finessed for the ace, or led straight into my opponent——”

“You want my advice,” I said, “and you shall have it, openly and fairly. In such a case as you describe, where a man has led out at me repeatedly and with provocation, as I gather from what you say, though I myself do not play bridge, I should lead my whole hand at him. I repeat, I do not play bridge. But in the circumstances, I should think it the only thing to do.”

TOC     INDEX

Truthful Oratory

—or—
What Our Speakers Ought to Say

I

Truthful Speech Giving the Real Thoughts of a Distinguished Guest at the Fiftieth Anniversary Banquet of a Society

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen: If there is one thing I abominate more than another, it is turning out on a cold night like this to eat a huge dinner of twelve courses and know that I have to make a speech on top of it. Gentlemen, I just feel stuffed. That’s the plain truth of it. By the time we had finished that fish, I could have gone home satisfied. Honestly I could. That’s as much as I usually eat. And by the time I had finished the rest of the food, I felt simply waterlogged, and I do still. More than that. The knowledge that I had to make a speech congratulating this society of yours on its fiftieth anniversary haunted and racked me all through the meal. I am not, in plain truth, the ready and brilliant speaker you take me for. That is a pure myth. If you could see the desperate home scene that goes on in my family when I am working up a speech, your minds would be at rest on that point.

I’ll go further and be very frank with you. How this society has lived for fifty years, I don’t know. If all your dinners are like this, Heaven help you. I’ve only the vaguest idea of what this society is, anyway, and what it does. I tried to get a constitution this afternoon but failed. I am sure from some of the faces that I recognise around this table that there must be good business reasons of some sort for belonging to this society. There’s money in it – mark my words – for some of you or you wouldn’t be here. Of course I quite understand that the President and the officials seated here beside me come merely for the self-importance of it. That, gentlemen, is about their size. I realized that from their talk during the banquet. I don’t want to speak bitterly, but the truth is they are small men and it flatters them to sit here with two or three blue ribbons pinned on their coats. But as for me, I’m done with it. It will be fifty years, please heaven, before this event comes round again. I hope, I earnestly hope, that I shall be safely under the ground.

II

The Speech that Ought to Be Made by a State Governor After Visiting the Fall Exposition of an Agricultural Society

Well, gentlemen, this Annual Fall Fair of the Skedink County Agricultural Association has come round again. I don’t mind telling you straight out that of all the disagreeable jobs that fall to me as Governor of this State, my visit to your Fall Fair is about the toughest.

I want to tell you, gentlemen, right here and now, that I don’t know anything about agriculture and I don’t want to. My parents were rich enough to bring me up in the city in a rational way. I didn’t have to do chores in order to go to the high school as some of those present have boasted that they did. My only wonder is that they ever got there at all. They show no traces of it.

This afternoon, gentlemen, you took me all round your live-stock exhibit. I walked past, and through, nearly a quarter of a mile of hogs. What was it that they were called – Tamworths – Berkshires? I don’t remember. But all I can say, gentlemen, is – phew! Just that. Some of you will understand readily enough. That word sums up my whole idea of your agricultural show and I’m done with it.

No, let me correct myself. There was just one feature of your agricultural exposition that met my warm approval. You were good enough to take me through the section of your exposition called your Midway Pleasance. Let me tell you, sirs, that there was more real merit in that than all the rest of the show put together. You apologized, if I remember rightly, for taking me into the large tent of the Syrian Dancing Girls. Oh, believe me, gentlemen, you needn’t have. Syria is a country which commands my profoundest admiration. Some day I mean to spend a vacation there. And, believe me, gentlemen, when I do go – and I say this with all the emphasis of which I am capable – I should not wish to be accompanied by such a set of flatheads as the officials of your Agricultural Society.

And now, gentlemen, as I have just received a fake telegram, by arrangement, calling me back to the capital of the State, I must leave this banquet at once. One word in conclusion: if I had known as fully as I do now how it feels to drink half a bucket of sweet cider, I should certainly never have come.

III

Truthful Speech of a District Politician to a Ladies’ Suffrage Society

Ladies: My own earnest, heartfelt conviction is that you are a pack of cats. I use the word “cats” advisedly, and I mean every letter of it. I want to go on record before this gathering as being strongly and unalterably opposed to Woman Suffrage until you get it. After that I favour it. My reasons for opposing the suffrage are of a kind that you couldn’t understand. But all men – except the few that I see at this meeting – understand them by instinct.

As you may, however, succeed as a result of the fuss that you are making – in getting votes, I have thought it best to come. Also – I am free to confess – I wanted to see what you looked like.

On this last head I am disappointed. Personally I like women a good deal fatter than most of you are, and better looking. As I look around this gathering I see one or two of you that are not so bad, but on the whole not many. But my own strong personal predilection is and remains in favour of a woman who can cook, mend clothes, talk when I want her to, and give me the kind of admiration to which I am accustomed.

Let me, however, say in conclusion that I am altogether in sympathy with your movement to this extent. If you ever do get votes – and the indications are that you will (blast you) – I want your votes, and I want all of them.

TOC     INDEX

Our Literary Bureau  [2]

NOVELS READ TO ORDER
FIRST AID FOR THE BUSY MILLIONAIRE

NO BRAINS NEEDED

NO TASTE REQUIRED

NOTHING BUT MONEY

SEND IT TO US

We have lately been struck – of course not dangerously – by a new idea. A recent number of a well-known magazine contains an account of an American multimillionaire who, on account of the pressure of his brain power and the rush of his business, found it impossible to read the fiction of the day for himself. He therefore caused his secretaries to look through any new and likely novel and make a rapid report on its contents, indicating for his personal perusal the specially interesting parts.

Realizing the possibilities coiled up in this plan, we have opened a special agency or bureau for doing work of this sort. Any over-busy multimillionaire, or superman, who becomes our client may send us novels, essays, or books of any kind, and will receive a report explaining the plot and pointing out such parts as he may with propriety read. If he can once find time to send us a postcard, or a postal cablegram, night or day, we undertake to assume all the further effort of reading. Our terms for ordinary fiction are one dollar per chapter; for works of travel, 10 cents per mile; and for political or other essays, two cents per page, or ten dollars per idea, and for theological and controversial work, seven dollars and fifty cents per cubic yard extracted. Our clients are assured of prompt and immediate attention.

Through the kindness of the Editor of the Century we are enabled to insert here a sample of our work. It was done to the order of a gentleman of means engaged in silver mining in Colorado, who wrote us that he was anxious to get “a holt” on modern fiction, but that he had no time actually to read it. On our assuring him that this was now unnecessary, he caused to be sent to us the monthly parts of a serial story, on which we duly reported as follows:

JANUARY INSTALLMENT

Theodolite Gulch,
The Dip, Canon County,
Colorado.

Dear Sir:

We beg to inform you that the scene of the opening chapter of the Fortunes of Barbara Plynlimmon is laid in Wales. The scene is laid, however, very carelessly and hurriedly and we expect that it will shortly be removed. We cannot, therefore, recommend it to your perusal. As there is a very fine passage describing the Cambrian Hills by moonlight, we enclose herewith a condensed table showing the mean altitude of the moon for the month of December in the latitude of Wales. The character of Miss Plynlimmon we find to be developed in conversation with her grandmother, which we think you had better not read. Nor are we prepared to endorse your reading the speeches of the Welsh peasantry which we find in this chapter, but we forward herewith in place of them a short glossary of Welsh synonyms which may aid you in this connection.

FEBRUARY INSTALLMENT

Dear Sir:

We regret to state that we find nothing in the second chapter of the Fortunes of Barbara Plynlimmon which need be reported to you at length. We think it well, however, to apprise you of the arrival of a young Oxford student in the neighbourhood of Miss Plynlimmon’s cottage, who is apparently a young man of means and refinement. We enclose a list of the principal Oxford Colleges.

We may state that from the conversation and manner of this young gentleman there is no ground for any apprehension on your part. But if need arises we will report by cable to you instantly.

The young gentleman in question meets Miss Plynlimmon at sunrise on the slopes of Snowdon. As the description of the meeting is very fine we send you a recent photograph of the sun.

MARCH INSTALLMENT

Dear Sir:

Our surmise was right. The scene of the story that we are digesting for you is changed. Miss Plynlimmon has gone to London. You will be gratified to learn that she has fallen heir to a fortune of £100,000, which we are happy to compute for you at $486,666 and 66 cents less exchange. On Miss Plynlimmon’s arrival at Charing Cross Station, she is overwhelmed with that strange feeling of isolation felt in the surging crowds of a modern city. We therefore enclose a timetable showing the arrival and departure of all trains at Charing Cross.

APRIL INSTALLMENT

Dear Sir:

We beg to bring to your notice the fact that Miss Barbara Plynlimmon has by an arrangement made through her trustees become the inmate, on a pecuniary footing, in the household of a family of title. We are happy to inform you that her first appearance at dinner in evening dress was most gratifying: we can safely recommend you to read in this connection lines 4 and 5 and the first half of line 6 on page 100 of the book as enclosed. We regret to say that the Marquis of Slush and his eldest son Viscount Fitz-busé (courtesy title) are both addicted to drink. They have been drinking throughout the chapter. We are pleased to state that apparently the second son, Lord Radnor of Slush, who is away from home is not so addicted. We send you under separate cover a bottle of Radnor water.

MAY INSTALLMENT

Dear Sir:

We regret to state that the affairs of Miss Barbara Plynlimmon are in a very unsatisfactory position. We enclose three pages of the novel with the urgent request that you will read them at once. The old Marquis of Slush has made approaches towards Miss Plynlimmon of such a scandalous nature that we think it best to ask you to read them in full. You will note also that young Viscount Slush who is tipsy through whole of pages 121-125, 128-133, and part of page 140, has designs upon her fortune. We are sorry to see also that the Marchioness of Busé under the guise of friendship has insured Miss Plynlimmon’s life and means to do away with her. The sister of the Marchioness, the Lady Dowager, also wishes to do away with her. The second housemaid who is tempted by her jewelery is also planning to do away with her. We feel that if this goes on she will be done away with.

JUNE INSTALLMENT

Dear Sir:

We beg to advise you that Viscount Fitz-busé, inflamed by the beauty and innocence of Miss Plynlimmon, has gone so far as to lay his finger on her (read page 170, lines 6-7). She resisted his approaches. At the height of the struggle a young man, attired in the costume of a Welsh tourist, but wearing the stamp of an Oxford student, and yet carrying himself with the unmistakable hauteur (we knew it at once) of an aristocrat, burst, or bust, into the room. With one blow he felled Fitz-busé to the floor; with another he clasped the girl to his heart.

“Barbara!” he exclaimed.

“Radnor,” she murmured.

You will be pleased to learn that this is the second son of the Marquis, Viscount Radnor, just returned from a reading tour in Wales.

P.S. We do not know what he read, so we enclose a file of Welsh newspapers to date.

JULY INSTALLMENT

We regret to inform you that the Marquis of Slush has disinherited his son. We grieve to state that Viscount Radnor has sworn that he will never ask for Miss Plynlimmon’s hand till he has a fortune equal to her own. Meantime, we are sorry to say, he proposes to work.

AUGUST INSTALLMENT

The Viscount is seeking employment.

SEPTEMBER INSTALLMENT

The Viscount is looking for work.

OCTOBER INSTALLMENT

The Viscount is hunting for a job.

NOVEMBER INSTALLMENT

We are most happy to inform you that Miss Plynlimmon has saved the situation. Determined to be worthy of the generous love of Viscount Radnor, she has arranged to convey her entire fortune to the old family lawyer who acts as her trustee. She will thus become as poor as the Viscount and they can marry. The scene with the old lawyer who breaks into tears on receiving the fortune, swearing to hold and cherish it as his own is very touching. Meantime, as the Viscount is hunting for a job, we enclose a list of advertisements under the heading Help Wanted – Males.

DECEMBER INSTALLMENT

You will be very gratified to learn that the fortunes of Miss Barbara Plynlimmon have come to a most pleasing termination. Her marriage with the Viscount Radnor was celebrated very quietly on page 231. (We enclose a list of the principal churches in London.) No one was present except the old family lawyer, who was moved to tears at the sight of the bright, trusting bride, and the clergyman who wept at the sight of the cheque given him by the Viscount. After the ceremony the old trustee took Lord and Lady Radnor to a small wedding breakfast at an hotel (we enclose a list). During the breakfast a sudden faintness (for which we had been watching for ten pages) overcame him. He sank back in his chair, gasping. Lord and Lady Radnor rushed to him and sought in vain to tighten his necktie. He expired under their care, having just time to indicate in his pocket a will leaving them his entire wealth.

This had hardly happened when a messenger brought news to the Viscount that his brother, Lord Fitz-busé had been killed in the hunting field, and that he (meaning him, himself) had now succeeded to the title. Lord and Lady Fitz-busé had hardly time to reach the town house of the family when they learned that owing to the sudden death of the old Marquis (also, we believe, in the hunting field), they had become the Marquis and the Marchioness of Slush.

The Marquis and the Marchioness of Slush are still living in their ancestral home in London. Their lives are an example to all their tenantry in Piccadilly, the Strand and elsewhere.

CONCLUDING NOTE

Dear Mr. Gulch:

We beg to acknowledge with many thanks your cheque for one thousand dollars.

We regret to learn that you have not been able to find time to read our digest of the serial story placed with us at your order. But we note with pleasure that you propose to have the “essential points” of our digest “boiled down” by one of the business experts of your office.

Awaiting your commands,

We remain, etc., etc.

[2]  This literary bureau was started by the author in the New York Century. It leaped into such immediate prominence that it had to be closed at once.

TOC     INDEX

Speeding Up Business

We were sitting at our editorial desk in our inner room, quietly writing up our week’s poetry, when a stranger looked in upon us.

He came in with a burst – like the entry of the hero of western drama coming in out of a snowstorm. His manner was all excitement. “Sit down,” we said, in our grave, courteous way. “Sit down!” he exclaimed, “certainly not! Are you aware of the amount of time and energy that are being wasted in American business by the practice of perpetually sitting down and standing up again? Do you realize that every time you sit down and stand up you make a dead lift of” – he looked at us – “two hundred and fifty pounds? Did you ever reflect that every time you sit down you have to get up again?” “Never,” we said quietly, “we never thought of it.” “You didn’t!” he sneered. “No, you’d rather go on lifting 250 pounds through two feet – an average of 500 foot-pounds, practically 62 kilowatts of wasted power. Do you know that by merely hitching a pulley to the back of your neck you could generate enough power to light your whole office?”

We hung our heads. Simple as the thing was, we had never thought of it. “Very good,” said the Stranger. “Now, all American business men are like you. They don’t think – do you understand me? They don’t think.”

We realized the truth of it at once. We had never thought. Perhaps we didn’t even know how.

“Now, I tell you,” continued our visitor, speaking rapidly and with a light of wild enthusiasm in his face, “I’m out for a new campaign – efficiency in business – speeding things up – better organization.”

“But surely,” we said, musingly, “we have seen something about this lately in the papers?” “Seen it, sir,” he exclaimed, “I should say so. It’s everywhere. It’s a new movement. It’s in the air. Has it never struck you how a thing like this can be seen in the air?”

Here again we were at fault. In all our lives we had never seen anything in the air. We had never even looked there. “Now,” continued the Stranger, “I want your paper to help. I want you to join in. I want you to give publicity.”

“Assuredly,” we said, with our old-fashioned politeness. “Anything which concerns the welfare, the progress, if one may so phrase it——”

“Stop,” said the visitor. “You talk too much. You’re prosy. Don’t talk. Listen to me. Try and fix your mind on what I am about to say.”

We fixed it. The Stranger’s manner became somewhat calmer. “I am heading,” he said, “the new American efficiency movement. I have sent our circulars to fifty thousand representative firms, explaining my methods. I am receiving ten thousand answers a day” – here he dragged a bundle of letters out of his pocket – “from Maine, from New Hampshire, from Vermont,” —— “Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut,” we murmured.

“Exactly,” he said; “from every State in the Union – from the Philippines, from Porto Rico, and last week I had one from Canada.” “Marvelous,” we said; “and may one ask what your new methods are?”

“You may,” he answered. “It’s a proper question. It’s a typical business question, fair, plain, clean, and even admitting of an answer. The great art of answering questions,” he continued, “is to answer at once without loss of time, friction or delay in moving from place to place. I’ll answer it.”

“Do,” we said.

“I will,” said the Stranger. “My method is first: to stimulate business to the highest point by infusing into it everywhere the spirit of generous rivalry, of wholesome competition; by inviting each and every worker to outdo each and every other.”

“And can they do it?” we asked, puzzled and yet fascinated. “Can they all do it?”

“They do, and they can,” said the Stranger. “The proof of it is that they are doing it. Listen. Here is an answer to my circular No. 6, Efficiency and Recompense, that came in this morning. It is from a steel firm. Listen.” The Stranger picked out a letter and read it.

Dear Sir:

Our firm is a Steel Corporation. We roll rails. As soon as we read your circular on the Stimulus of Competition we saw that there were big things in it. At once we sent one of our chief managers to the rolling mill. He carried a paper bag in his hand. “Now boys,” he said, “every man who rolls a rail gets a gum-drop.” The effect was magical. The good fellows felt a new stimulus. They now roll out rails like dough. Work is a joy to them. Every Saturday night the man who has rolled most gets a blue ribbon; the man who has rolled the next most, a green ribbon; the next most a yellow ribbon, and so on through the spectroscope. The man who rolls least gets only a red ribbon. It is a real pleasure to see the brave fellows clamouring for their ribbons. Our output, after defraying the entire cost of the ribbons and the gum-drops, has increased forty per cent. We intend to carry the scheme further by allowing all the men who get a hundred blue ribbons first, to exchange them for the Grand Efficiency Prize of the firm – a pink ribbon. This the winner will be entitled to wear whenever and wherever he sees fit to wear it.

The stranger paused for breath.

“Marvelous,” we said. “There is no doubt the stimulus of keen competition——”

“Shut up,” he said impatiently. “Let me explain it further. Competition is only part of it. An item just as big that makes for efficiency is to take account of the little things. It’s the little things that are never thought of.”

Here was another wonder! We realized that we had never thought of them. “Take an example,” the Stranger continued. “I went into a hotel the other day. What did I see? Bell-boys being summoned upstairs every minute, and flying up in the elevators. Yes – and every time they went up they had to come down again. I went up to the manager. I said, ‘I can understand that when your guests ring for the bell-boys they have to go up. But why should they come down? Why not have them go up and never come down?’ He caught the idea at once. That hotel is transformed. I have a letter from the manager stating that they find it fifty per cent cheaper to hire new bell-boys instead of waiting for the old ones to come down.”

“These results,” we said, “are certainly Marvelous. You are most assuredly to be congratulated on——”

“You talk too much,” said the Stranger. “Don’t do it. Learn to listen. If a young man comes to me for advice in business – and they do in hundreds, lots of them – almost in tears over their inefficiency – I’d say, ‘Young man, never talk, listen; answer, but don’t speak.’ But even all this is only part of the method. Another side of it is technique.”

“Technique?” we said, pleased but puzzled.

“Yes, the proper use of machine devices. Take the building trade. I’ve revolutionized it. Till now all the bricks even for a high building were carried up to the mason in hods. Madness! Think of the waste of it. By my method instead of carrying the bricks to the mason we take the mason to the brick – lower him on a wire rope, give him a brick, and up he goes again. As soon as he wants another brick he calls down, ‘I want a brick,’ and down he comes like lightning.”

“This,” we said, “is little short of—”

“Cut it out. Even that is not all. Another thing bigger than any is organization. Half the business in this country is not organized. As soon as I sent out my circular, No. 4, HAVE YOU ORGANIZED YOUR BUSINESS! I got answers in thousands! Heart-broken, many of them. They had never thought of it! Here, for example, is a letter written by a plain man, a gardener, just an ordinary man, a plain man—”

“Yes,” we said, “quite so.”

“Well, here is what he writes:

“Dear Sir:

“As soon as I got your circular I read it all through from end to end, and I saw that all my failure in the past had come from my not being organized. I sat and thought a long while and I decided that I would organize myself. I went right in to the house and I said to my wife, ‘Jane, I’m going to organize myself.’ She said, ‘Oh, John!’ – and not another word, but you should have seen the look on her face. So the next morning I got up early and began to organize myself. It was hard at first but I stuck to it. There were times when I felt as if I couldn’t do it. It seemed too hard. But bit by bit I did it and now, thank God, I am organized. I wish all men like me could know the pleasure I feel in being organized.”

“Touching, isn’t it?” said the Stranger. “But I get lots of letters like that. Here’s another, also from a man, a plain man, working on his own farm. Hear what he says:

“Dear Sir:

“As soon as I saw your circular on HOW TO SPEED UP THE EMPLOYEE I felt that it was a big thing. I don’t have any hired help here to work with me, but only father. He cuts the wood and does odd chores about the place. So I realized that the best I could do was to try to speed up father. I started in to speed him up last Tuesday, and I wish you could see him. Before this he couldn’t split a cord of wood without cutting a slice off his boots. Now he does it in half the time.”

“But there,” the Stranger said, getting impatient even with his own reading, “I needn’t read it all. It is the same thing all along the line. I’ve got the Method introduced into the Department Stores. Before this every customer who came in wasted time trying to find the counters. Now we install a patent springboard, with a mechanism like a catapult. As soon as a customer comes in an attendant puts him on the board, blindfolds him, and says, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘Glove counter.’ ‘Oh, all right.’ He’s fired at it through the air. No time lost. Same with the railways. They’re installing the Method, too. Every engineer who breaks the record from New York to Buffalo gets a glass of milk. When he gets a hundred glasses he can exchange them for a glass of beer. So with the doctors. On the new method, instead of giving a patient one pill a day for fourteen days they give him fourteen pills in one day. Doctors, lawyers, everybody – in time, sir,” said the Stranger, in tones of rising excitement, “you’ll see even the plumbers—”

But just at this moment the door opened. A sturdy-looking man in blue entered. The Stranger’s voice was hushed at once. The excitement died out of his face. His manner all of a sudden was meekness itself.

“I was just coming,” he said.

“That’s right, sir,” said the man; “better come along and not take up the gentleman’s time.”

“Good-bye, then,” said the Stranger, with meek affability, and he went out.

The man in blue lingered behind for a moment.

“A sad case, sir,” he said, and he tapped his forehead.

“You mean—” I asked.

“Exactly. Cracked, sir. Quite cracked; but harmless. I’m engaged to look after him, but he gave me the slip downstairs.”

“He is under delusions?” we inquired.

“Yes, sir. He’s got it into his head that business in this country has all gone to pieces – thinks it must be reorganized. He writes letters about it all day and sends them to the papers with imaginary names. You may have seen some of them. Good day, sir.”

We looked at our watch. We had lost just half an hour over the new efficiency. We turned back with a sigh to our old-fashioned task.

TOC     INDEX

Who Is Also Who.
A New Pocket Dictionary

A Companion Volume
to Who’s Who

Note by the Editor: I do not quarrel with the contents of such valuable compendiums as “Who’s Who,” “Men and Women of the Time,” etc., etc. But they leave out the really Representative People. The names that they include are so well known as to need no commentary, while those that they exclude are the very people one most wishes to read about. My new book is not arranged alphabetically, that order having given great offence in certain social circles.

Smith, J. Everyman: born Kenoka Springs; educ. Kenoka Springs; present residence, The Springs, Kenoka; address, Kenoka Springs Post-Office; after leaving school threw himself (Oct. 1881) into college study; thrown out of it (April 1882); decided to follow the law; followed it (1882); was left behind (1883); decided (1884) to abandon it; abandoned it; resolved (1885) to turn his energies to finance; turned them (1886); kept them turned (1887); unturned them (1888); was offered position (1889) as sole custodian of Mechanics’ Institute, Kenoka Springs; decided (same date) to accept it; accepted it; is there now; will be till he dies.

Flintlock, J. Percussion: aged 87; war veteran and pensioner; born, blank; educated, blank; at outbreak of Civil War sprang to arms; both sides; sprang Union first; entered beef contract department of army of U. S.; fought at Chicago, Omaha, and leading (beef) centres of operation during the thickest of the (beef) conflict; was under Hancock, Burnside, Meade, and Grant; fought with all of them; mentioned (very strongly) by all of them; entered Confederate Service (1864); attached (very much) to rum department of quarter-master’s staff; mentioned in this connection (very warmly) in despatches of General Lee; mustered out, away out, of army; lost from sight, 1865-1895; placed on pension list with rank of general, 1895; has stayed on, 1895-1915; obtained (on 6th Avenue) war medals and service clasps; publications – “My Campaigns under Grant,” “Battles I have Saved,” “Feeding an Army,” “Stuffing the Public,” etc., etc.; recreations, telling war stories; favourite amusement, showing war medals.

Crook, W. Underhand: born, dash; parents, double dash; educated at technical school; on graduation turned his attention to the problem of mechanical timelocks and patent safes; entered Sing-Sing, 1890; resident there, 1890-1893; Auburn, 1894, three months; various state institutions, 1895-1898; worked at profession, 1898-1899; Sing-Sing, 1900; professional work, 1901; Sing-Sing, 1902; profession, 1903, Sing-Sing; profession, Sing-Sing, etc., etc.; life appointment, 1908; general favourite, musical, has never killed anybody.

Gloomie, Dreary O’Leary: Scotch dialect comedian and humorists; well known in Scotland; has standing offer from Duke of Sutherland to put foot on estate.

Muck, O. Absolute: novelist; of low German extraction; born Rotterdam; educated Muckendorf; escaped to America; long unrecognized; leaped into prominence by writing “The Social Gas-Pipe,” a powerful indictment of modern society, written in revenge for not being invited to dinner; other works – “The Sewerage of the Sea-Side,” an arraignment of Newport society, reflecting on some of his best friends; “Vice and Super-Vice,” a telling denunciation of the New York police, written after they had arrested him; “White Ravens,” an indictment of the clergy; “Black Crooks,” an indictment of the publishers, etc., etc.; has arraigned and indicted nearly everybody.

Whyner, Egbert Ethelwind: poet, at age of sixteen wrote a quatrain, “The Banquet of Nebuchadnezzar,” and at once left school; followed it up in less than two years by a poem in six lines “America”; rested a year and then produced “Babylon, A Vision of Civilization,” three lines; has written also “Herod, a Tragedy,” four lines; “Revolt of Woman,” two lines, and “The Day of Judgement,” one line. Recreation, writing poetry.

Adult, Hon. Underdone: address The Shrubbery, Hopton-under-Hyde, Rotherham-near-Pottersby, Potts, Hants, Hops, England (or words to that effect); organizer of the Boys’ League of Pathfinders, Chief Commissioner of the Infant Crusaders, Grand Master of the Young Imbeciles; Major-General of the Girl Rangers, Chief of Staff of the Matron Mountain Climbers, etc.

Zfwinski, X. Z.: Polish pianist; plays all night; address 4,570 West 457 Street, Westside, Chicago West.

TOC     INDEX

Passionate Paragraphs

(An extract from a recent (very recent) novel, illustrating the new beauties of language and ideas that are being rapidly developed by the twentieth century press.)

His voice as he turned towards her was taut as a tie-line.

“You don’t love me!” he hoarsed, thick with agony. She had angled into a seat and sat sensing-rather-than-seeing him.

For a time she silenced. Then presently as he still stood and enveloped her—

“Don’t!” she thinned, her voice fining to a thread.

“Answer me,” he gloomed, still gazing into-and-through her.

She half-heard half-didn’t-hear him.

Night was falling about them as they sat thus beside the river. A molten afterglow of iridescent saffron shot with incandescent carmine lit up the waters of the Hudson till they glowed like electrified uranium.

For a while they both sat silent – looming.

“It had to be,” she glumped.

“Why, why?” he barked. “Why should it have had to have been or (more hopefully) even be to be? Surely you don’t mean because of money?”

She shuddered into herself.

The thing seemed to sting her (it hadn’t really).

“Money!” she almost-but-not-quite-moaned. “You might have spared me that!”

He sank down and grassed.

—

And after they had sat thus for another half-hour grassing and growling and angling and sensing one another, it turned out that all that he was trying to say was to ask if she would marry him.

And of course she said yes.

TOC     INDEX

Weejee the Pet Dog

An Idyll of the Summer

We were sitting on the verandah of the Sopley’s summer cottage.

“How lovely it is here,” I said to my host and hostess, “and how still.”

It was at this moment that Weejee, the pet dog, took a sharp nip at the end of my tennis trousers.

“Weejee!!” exclaimed his mistress with great emphasis, “bad dog! how dare you, sir! bad dog!”

“I hope he hasn’t hurt you,” said my host.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I answered cheerfully. “He hardly scratched me.”

“You know I don’t think he means anything by it,” said Mrs. Sopley.

“Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t,” I answered.

Weejee was coming nearer to me again as I spoke.

“Weejee!!” cried my hostess, “naughty dog, bad!”

“Funny thing about that dog,” said Sopley, “the way he knows people. It’s a sort of instinct. He knew right away that you were a stranger – now, yesterday, when the butcher came, there was a new driver on the cart and Weejee knew it right away – grabbed the man by the leg at once – wouldn’t let go. I called out to the man that it was all right or he might have done Weejee some harm.”

At this moment Weejee took the second nip at my other trouser leg. There was a short gur-r-r and a slight mix-up.

“Weejee! Weejee!” called Mrs. Sopley. “How dare you, sir! You’re just a bad dog!! Go and lie down, sir. I’m so sorry. I think, you know, it’s your white trousers. For some reason Weejee simply hates white trousers. I do hope he hasn’t torn them.”

“Oh, no,” I said; “it’s nothing – only a slight tear.”

“Here, Weege, Weege,” said Sopley, anxious to make a diversion and picking up a little chip of wood – “chase it, fetch it out!” and he made the motions of throwing it into the lake.

“Don’t throw it too far, Charles,” said his wife. “He doesn’t swim awfully well,” she continued, turning to me, “and I’m always afraid he might get out of his depth. Last week he was ever so nearly drowned. Mr. Van Toy was in swimming, and he had on a dark blue suit (dark blue seems simply to infuriate Weejee) and Weejee just dashed in after him. He don’t mean anything, you know, it was only the suit made him angry – he really likes Mr. Van Toy – but just for a minute we were quite alarmed. If Mr. Van Toy hadn’t carried Weejee in I think he might have been drowned.

“By jove!” I said in a tone to indicate how appalled I was.

“Let me throw the stick, Charles,” continued Mrs. Sopley. “Now, Weejee, look Weejee – here, good dog – look! look now (sometimes Weejee simply won’t do what one wants), here, Weejee; now, good dog!”

Weejee had his tail sideways between his legs and was moving towards me again.

“Hold on,” said Sopley in a stern tone, “let me throw him in.”

“Do be careful, Charles,” said his wife.

Sopley picked Weejee up by the collar and carried him to the edge of the water – it was about six inches deep – and threw him in – with much the same force as, let us say, a pen is thrown into ink or a brush dipped into a pot of varnish.

“That’s enough; that’s quite enough, Charles,” exclaimed Mrs. Sopley. “I think he’d better not swim. The water in the evening is always a little cold. Good dog, good doggie, good Weejee!”

Meantime “good Weejee” had come out of the water and was moving again towards me.

“He goes straight to you,” said my hostess. “I think he must have taken a fancy to you.”

He had.

To prove it, Weejee gave himself a rotary whirl like a twirled mop.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Sopley. “I am. He’s wetted you. Weejee, lie down, down, sir, good dog, bad dog, lie down!”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve another white suit in my valise.”

“But you must be wet through,” said Mrs. Sopley. “Perhaps we’d better go in. It’s getting late, anyway, isn’t it?” And then she added to her husband, “I don’t think Weejee ought to sit out here now that he’s wet.”

So we went in.

“I think you’ll find everything you need,” said Sopley, as he showed me to my room, “and, by the way, don’t mind if Weejee comes into your room at night. We like to let him run all over the house and he often sleeps on this bed.”

“All right,” I said cheerfully, “I’ll look after him.”

That night Weejee came.

And when it was far on in the dead of night – so that even the lake and the trees were hushed in sleep, I took Weejee out and – but there is no need to give the details of it.

And the Sopleys are still wondering where Weejee has gone to, and waiting for him to come back, because he is so clever at finding his way.

But from where Weejee is, no one finds his way back.

TOC     INDEX

Sidelights
on the Supermen

An Interview
with General Bernhardi.

He came into my room in that modest, Prussian way that he has, clicking his heels together, his head very erect, his neck tightly gripped in his forty-two centimeter collar. He had on a Pickelhaube, or Prussian helmet, which he removed with a sweeping gesture and laid on the sofa.

So I knew at once that it was General Bernhardi.

In spite of his age he looked – I am bound to admit it – a fine figure of a man. There was a splendid fullness about his chest and shoulders, and a suggestion of rugged power all over him. I had not heard him on the stairs. He seemed to appear suddenly beside me.

“How did you get past the janitor?” I asked. For it was late at night, and my room at college is three flights up the stairs.

“The janitor,” he answered carelessly, “I killed him.”

I gave a gasp.

“His resistance,” the general went on, “was very slight. Apparently in this country your janitors are unarmed.”

“You killed him?” I asked.

“We Prussians,” said Bernhardi, “when we wish an immediate access anywhere, always kill the janitor. It is quicker: and it makes for efficiency. It impresses them with a sense of our Furchtbarkeit. You have no word for that in English, I believe?”

“Not outside of a livery stable,” I answered.

There was a pause. I was thinking of the janitor. It seemed in a sort of way – I admit that I have a sentimental streak in me – a deplorable thing.

“Sit down,” I said presently.

“Thank you,” answered the General, but remained standing.

“All right,” I said, “do it.”

“Thank you,” he repeated, without moving.

“I forgot,” I said. “Perhaps you can’t sit down.”

“Not very well,” he answered; “in fact, we Prussian officers” – here he drew himself up higher still – “never sit down. Our uniforms do not permit of it. This inspires us with a kind of Rastlosigkeit.” Here his eyes glittered.

“It must,” I said.

“In fact, with an Unsittlichkeit – an Unverschamtheit – with an Ein-fur-alle-mal-un-dur-chaus—”

“Exactly,” I said, for I saw that he was getting excited, “but pray tell me, General, to what do I owe the honour of this visit?”

The General’s manner changed at once.

“Highly learned, and high-well-born-professor,” he said, “I come to you as to a fellow author, known and honoured not merely in England, for that is nothing, but in Germany herself, and in Turkey, the very home of Culture.”

I knew that it was mere flattery. I knew that in this same way Lord Haldane had been so captivated as to come out of the Emperor’s presence unable to say anything but “Sittlichkeit” for weeks; that good old John Burns had been betrayed by a single dinner at Potsdam, and that the Sultan of Turkey had been told that his Answers to Ultimatums were the wittiest things written since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Yet I was pleased in spite of myself.

“What!” I exclaimed, “they know my works of humour in Germany?”

“Do they know them?” said the General. “Ach! Himmel! How they laugh. That work of yours (I think I see it on the shelf behind you), The Elements of Political Science, how the Kaiser has laughed over it! And the Crown Prince! It nearly killed him!”

“I will send him the new edition,” I said. “But tell me, General, what is it that you want of me?”

“It is about my own book,” he answered. “You have read it?”

I pointed to a copy of Germany and the Next War, in its glaring yellow cover – the very hue of Furchtbarkeit – lying on the table.

“You have read it? You have really read it?” asked the General with great animation.

“No,” I said, “I won’t go so far as to say that. But I have tried to read it. And I talk about it as if I had read it.”

The General’s face fell.

“You are as the others,” he said, “They buy the book, they lay it on the table, they talk of it at dinner – they say ‘Bernhardi has prophesied this, Bernhardi foresaw that,’ but read it – nevermore.”

“Still,” I said, “you get the royalties.”

“They are cut off. The perfidious British Government will not allow the treacherous publisher to pay them. But that is not my complaint.”

“What is the matter, then?” I asked.

“My book is misunderstood. You English readers have failed to grasp its intention. It is not meant as a book of strategy. It is what you call a work of humour. The book is to laugh. It is one big joke.”

“You don’t say so!” I said in astonishment.

“Assuredly,” answered the General. “Here” – and with this he laid hold of the copy of the book before me and began rapidly turning over the leaves – “let me set it out asunder for you, the humour of it. Listen, though, to this, where I speak of Germany’s historical mission on page 73 – ‘No nation on the face of the globe is so able to grasp and appropriate all the elements of culture as Germany is?’ What do you say to that? Is it not a joke? Ach, Himmel, how our officers have laughed over that in Belgium! With their booted feet on the mantelpiece as they read and with bottles of appropriated champagne beside them as they laugh.”

“You are right, General,” I said, “you will forgive my not laughing out loud, but you are a great humorists.”

“Am I not? And listen further still, how I deal with the theme of the German character – ‘Moral obligations such as no nation had ever yet made the standard of conduct, are laid down by the German philosophers.’”

“Good,” I said, “gloriously funny; read me some more.”

“This, then, you will like – here I deal with the permissible rules of war. It is on page 236 that I am reading it. I wrote this chiefly to make laugh our naval men and our Zeppelin crews – ‘A surprise attack, in order to be justified, must be made only on the armed forces of the state and not on its peaceful inhabitants. Otherwise the attack becomes a treacherous crime.’ Eh, what?”

Here the General broke into roars of laughter.

“Wonderful,” I said. “Your book ought to sell well in Scarborough and in Yarmouth. Read some more.”

“I should like to read you what I say about neutrality, and how England is certain to violate our strategical right by an attack on Belgium and about the sharp measures that ought to be taken against neutral ships laden with contraband – the passages are in Chapters VII and VIII, but for the moment I fail to lay the thumb on them.”

“Give me the book, General,” I said. “Now that I understand what you meant by it, I think I can show you also some very funny passages in it. These things, for example, that you say about Canada and the colonies – yes, here it is, page 148 – ‘In the event of war the loosely-joined British Empire will break into pieces, and the colonies will consult their own interests,’ – excellently funny – and this again – ‘Canada will not permanently retain any trace of the English spirit,’ – and this too – ‘the Colonies can be completely ignored so far as the European theatre of war is concerned,’ – and here again – ‘Egypt and South Africa will at once revolt and break away from the empire,’ – really, General, your ideas of the British Colonies are superbly funny. Mark Twain wasn’t a circumstance on you.”

“Not at all,” said Bernhardi, and his voice reverted to his habitual Prussian severity, “these are not jokes. They are facts. It is only through the folly of the Canadians in not reading my book that they are not more widely known. Even as it is they are exactly the views of your great leader Heinrich Bauratze——”

“Who?” I said.

“Heinrich Bauratze, your great Canadian leader——”

“Leader of what?”

“That I do not know,” said Bernhardi. “Our intelligence office has not yet heard what he leads. But as soon as he leads anything we shall know it. Meantime we can see from his speeches that he has read my book. Ach! if only your other leaders in Canada – Sir Robert Laurier, Sir Osler Sifton, Sir Williams Borden – you smile, you do not realize that in Germany we have exact information of everything: all that happens, we know it.”

Meantime I had been looking over the leaves of the book.

“Here at least,” I said, “is some splendidly humorous stuff – this about the navy. ‘The completion of the Kiel Canal,’ you write in Chapter XII, ‘is of great importance as it will enable our largest battleships to appear unexpectedly in the Baltic and in the North Sea!’ Appear unexpectedly! If they only would! How exquisitely absurd——”

“Sir!” said the General. “That is not to laugh. You err yourself. That is Furchtbarkeit. I did not say the book is all humour. That would be false art. Part of it is humour and part is Furchtbarkeit. That passage is specially designed to frighten Admiral Jellicoe. And he won’t read it! Potztausand, he won’t read it!” – repeated the general, his eyes flashing and his clenched fist striking in the air – “What sort of combatants are these of the British Navy who refuse to read our war-books? The Kaiser’s Heligoland speech! They never read a word of it. The Furchtbarkeit-Proklamation of August – they never looked at it. The Reichstags-Rede with the printed picture of the Kaiser shaking hands with everybody – they used it to wrap up sandwiches! What are they, then, Jellicoe and his men? They sit there in their ships and they read nothing! How can we get at them if they refuse to read? How can we frighten them away if they haven’t culture enough to get frightened. Beim Himmel,” shouted the General in great excitement——

But what more he said can never be known. For at this second a sudden catastrophe happened.

In his frenzy of excitement the General struck with his fist at the table, missed it, lost his balance and fell over sideways right on the point of his Pickelhaube which he had laid on the sofa. There was a sudden sound as of the ripping of cloth and the bursting of pneumatic cushions and to my amazement the General collapsed on the sofa, his uniform suddenly punctured in a dozen places.

“Schnapps,” he cried, “fetch brandy.”

“Great Heavens! General,” I said, “what has happened?”

“My uniform!” he moaned, “it has burst! Give me Schnapps!”

He seemed to shrink visibly in size. His magnificent chest was gone. He was shriveling into a tattered heap. He appeared as he lay there, a very allegory and illustration of Prussian Furchtbarkeit with the wind going out of it.

“Fetch Schnapps,” – he moaned.

“There are no Schnapps here,” I said, “this is McGill University.”

“Then call the janitor,” he said.

“You killed him,” I said.

“I didn’t. I was lying. I gave him a look that should have killed him, but I don’t think it did. Rouse yourself from your chair, and call him——”

“I will,” I said, and started up from my seat.

But as I did so, the form of General Bernhardi, which I could have sworn had been lying in a tattered heap on the sofa on the other side of the room, seemed suddenly to vanish from my eyes.

There was nothing before me but the empty room with the fire burned low in the grate, and in front of me an open copy of Bernhardi’s book.

I must – like many another reader – have fallen asleep over it.

TOC     INDEX

The Survival of the Fittest

A bell tinkled over the door of the little drug store as I entered it; which seemed strange in a lighted street of a great city.

But the little store itself, dim even in the centre and dark in the corners was gloomy enough for a country crossroads.

“I have to have the bell,” said the man behind the counter, reading my thought, “I’m alone here just now.”

“A toothbrush?” he said in answer to my question. “Yes, I guess I’ve got some somewhere round here.” He was stooping under and behind his counter and his voice came up from below. “I’ve got some somewhere—” And then as if talking to himself he murmured from behind a pile of cardboard boxes, “I saw some Tuesday.”

Had I gone across the street to the brilliant premises of the Cut Rate Pharmaceutical where they burn electric light by the meterfull I should no sooner have said “toothbrush,” than one of the ten clerks in white hospital jackets would have poured a glittering assortment over the counter – prophylactic, lactic and every other sort.

But I had turned in, I don’t know why, to the little store across the way.

“Here, I guess these must be toothbrushes,” he said, reappearing at the level of the counter with a flat box in his hand. They must have been presumably, or have once been – at some time long ago.

“They’re toothbrushes all right,” he said, and started looking over them with an owner’s interest.

“What is the price of them?” I asked.

“Well,” the man said musingly, “I don’t – jest – know. I guess it’s written on them likely,” and he began to look at the handles.

Over at the Pharmaceutical across the way the words “what price?” would have precipitated a ready avalanche of figures.

“This one seems to be seventy-five cents,” he said and handed me one.

“Is it a good toothbrush?” I asked.

“It ought to be,” he said, “you’d think, at that price.”

He had no shop talk, no patter whatever.

Then he looked at the brush again, more closely.

“I don’t believe it is seventy-five,” he muttered, “I think it must be fifteen, don’t you?”

I took it from his hand and looked and said – for it is well to take an occasional step towards the Kingdom of Heaven – that I was certain it was seventy-five.

“Well,” said the man, “perhaps it is, my sight is not so good now. I’ve had too much to do here and the work’s been using me up some.”

I noticed now as he said this how frail he looked as he bent over his counter wrapping up the toothbrush.

“I’ve no sealing wax,” he said, “or not handy.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I answered, “just put it in the paper.”

Over the way of course the toothbrush would have been done up almost instantaneously, in white enamel paper, sealed at the end and stamped with a label, as fast as the money paid for it went rattling along an automatic carrier to a cashier.

“You’ve been very busy, eh?” I asked.

“Well, not so much with customers,” he said, “but with fixing up the place,” – here he glanced about him. Heaven only knows what he had fixed. There were no visible signs of it.

“You see I’ve only been in here a couple of months. It was a pretty tough looking place when I came to it. But I’ve been getting things fixed. First thing I did I put those two carboys in the window with the lights behind them. They show up fine, don’t they?”

“Fine!” I repeated; so fine indeed that the dim yellow light in them reached three or four feet from the jar. But for the streaming light from the great store across the street, the windows of the little shop would have been invisible.

“It’s a good location here,” he said. Any one could have told him that it was the worst location within two miles.

“I’ll get it going presently,” he went on. “Of course it’s uphill just at first. Being such a good location the rent is high. The first two weeks I was here I was losing five dollars a day. But I got those lights in the window and got the stock overhauled a little to make it attractive and last month I reckon I was only losing three dollars a day.”

“That’s better,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he went on, and there was a clear glint of purpose in his eye that contrasted with his sunken cheeks. “I’ll get it going. This last two weeks I’m not losing more than say two and a half a day or something like that? The custom is bound to come. You get a place fixed up and made attractive like this and people are sure to come sooner or later.”

What it was that was fixed up, and wherein lay the attractiveness I do not know. It could not be seen with the outward eye. Perhaps after two months’ work of piling dusty boxes now this way, now that, and putting little candles behind the yellow carboys to try the effect, some inward vision came that lighted the place up with an attractiveness wanting even in the glass and marble glitter of the Pharmacy across the way.

“Yes, sir,” continued the man, “I mean to stay with it. I’ll get things into shape here, fix it up a little more and soon I’ll have it,” – here his face radiated with a vision of hope – “so that I won’t lose a single cent.”

I looked at him in surprise. So humble an ambition it had never been my lot to encounter.

“All that bothers me,” he went on, “is my health. It’s a nice business, the drug business: I like it, but it takes it out of you. You’ve got to be alert and keen all the time; thinking out plans to please the custom when it comes. Often I don’t sleep well nights for the rush of it.”

I looked about the little shop, as gloomy and sleepful as the mausoleum of an eastern king, and wondered by what alchemy of the mind the little druggist found it a very vortex of activity.

“But I can fix my health,” he returned – “I may have to get some one in here and go away for a spell. Perhaps I’ll do it. The doctor was saying he thought I might take a spell off and think out a few more wrinkles while I’m away.”

At the word “doctor” I looked at him more warmly, and I saw then what was plain enough to see but for the dim light of the little place – the thin flush on the cheek, the hopeful mind, the contrast of the will to live and the need to die, God’s little irony on man, it was all there plain enough to read. The “spell” for which the little druggist was going is that which is written in letters of sorrow over the sunlit desolation of Arizona and the mountains of Colorado.

—

A month went by before I passed that way again. I looked across at the little store and I read the story in its drawn blinds and the padlock on its door.

The little druggist had gone away for a spell. And they told me, on enquiry, that his journey had been no further than to the cemetery behind the town where he lies now, musing, if he still can, on the law of the survival of the fittest in this well-adjusted world.

And they say that the shock of the addition of his whole business to the great Pharmacy across the way scarcely disturbed a soda siphon.

TOC     INDEX

The First Newspaper

A Sort of Allegory

“How likes it you, Master Brenton?” said the brawny journeyman, spreading out the news sheet on a smooth oaken table where it lay under the light of a leaded window.

“A Marvelous fair sheet,” murmured Brenton Caxton, seventh of the name, “let me but adjust my glasses and peruse it further lest haply there be still aught in it that smacks of error.”

“It needs not,” said the journeyman, “’tis the fourth time already from the press.”

“Nay, nay,” answered Master Brenton softly, as he adjusted his great horn-rimmed spectacles and bent his head over the broad damp news sheet before him. “Let us grudge no care in this. The venture is a new one and, meseems, a very parlous thing withal. ’Tis a venture that may easily fail and carry down our fortunes with it, but at least let it not be said that it failed for want of brains in the doing.”

“Fail quotha!” said a third man, who had not yet spoken, old, tall and sour of visage and wearing a printer’s leather apron. He had moved over from the further side of the room where a little group of apprentices stood beside the wooden presses that occupied the corner, and he was looking over the shoulder of Master Brenton Caxton.

“How can it do aught else? ’Tis a mad folly. Mark you, Master Brenton and Master Nick, I have said it from the first and let the blame be none of mine. ’Tis a mad thing you do here. See then,” he went on, turning and waving his hand, “this vast room, these great presses, yonder benches and tools, all new, yonder vats of ink straight out of Flanders, how think you you can recover the cost of all this out of yonder poor sheets? Five and forty years have I followed this mystery of printing, ever since thy grandfather’s day, Master Brenton, and never have I seen the like. What needed this great chamber when your grandfather and father were content with but a garret place, and yonder presses that can turn off four score copies in the compass of a single hour – ’Tis mad folly, I say.”

The moment was an interesting one. The speakers were in a great room with a tall ceiling traversed by blackened beams. From the street below there came dimly through the closed casements the sound of rumbling traffic and the street cries of the London of the seventeenth century. Two vast presses of such colossal size that their wooden levers would tax the strength of the stoutest apprentice, were ranged against the further wall. About the room, spread out on oaken chairs and wooden benches, were flat boxes filled with leaden type, freshly molten, and a great pile of paper, larger than a man could lift, stood in a corner.

The first English newspaper in history was going to press. Those who in later ages – editors, printers, and workers – have participated in the same scene, can form some idea of the hopes and fears, the doubts and the difficulties, with which the first newspaper was ushered into the world.

Master Brenton Caxton turned upon the last speaker the undisturbed look of the eye that sees far across the present into the years to come.

“Nay, Edward,” he said, “you have laboured over much in the past and see not into the future. You think this chamber too great for our purpose? I tell you the time will come when not this room alone but three or four such will be needed for our task. Already I have it in my mind that I will divide even this room into portions, with walls shrewdly placed through its length and breadth, so that each that worketh shall sit as it were in his own chamber and there shall stand one at the door and whosoever cometh, to whatever part of our task his business appertains, he shall forthwith be brought to the room of him that hath charge of it. Cometh he with a madrigal or other light poesy that he would set out on the press, he shall find one that has charge of such matters and can discern their true value. Or, cometh he with news of aught that happens in the realm, so shall he be brought instant to the room of him that recordeth such events. Or, if so be, he would write a discourse on what seemeth him some wise conceit touching the public concerns, he shall find to his hand a convenient desk with ink and quills and all that he needeth to set it straightway on paper; thus shall there be a great abundance of written matter to our hand so that not many days shall elapse after one of our news sheets goes abroad before there be matter enough to fill another.”

“Days!” said the aged printer, “think you you can fill one of these news sheets in a few days! Where indeed if you search the whole realm will you find talk enough in a single week to fill out this great sheet half an ell wide!”

“Ay, days indeed!” broke in Master Nicholas, the younger journeyman. “Master Brenton speaks truth, or less than truth. For not days indeed, but in the compass of a single day, I warrant you, shall we find the matter withal.” Master Nicholas spoke with the same enthusiasm as his chief, but with less of the dreamer in his voice and eye, and with more swift eagerness of the practical man.

“Fill it, indeed,” he went on. “Why, Gad Zooks! man! who knoweth what happenings there are and what not till one essays the gathering of them! And should it chance that there is nothing of greater import, no boar hunt of his Majesty to record, nor the news of some great entertainment by one of the Lords of the Court, then will we put in lesser matter, aye whatever comes to hand, the talk of his Majesty’s burgesses in the Parliament or any such things.”

“Hear him!” sneered the printer, “the talk of his Majesty’s burgesses in Westminster, forsooth! And what clerk or learned person would care to read of such? Or think you that His Majesty’s Chamberlain would long bear that such idle chatter should be bruited abroad. If you can find no worthier thing for this our news sheet than the talk of the Burgesses, then shall it fail indeed. Had it been the speech of the King’s great barons and the bishops ’twere different. But dost fancy that the great barons would allow that their weighty discourses be reduced to common speech so that even the vulgar may read it and haply here and there fathom their very thought itself – and the bishops, the great prelates, to submit their ideas to the vulgar hand of a common printer, framing them into mere sentences! ’Tis unthinkable that they would sanction it!”

“Aye,” murmured Caxton in his dreaming voice, “the time shall come, Master Edward, when they will not only sanction it but seek it.”

“Look you,” broke in Master Nick, “let us have done with this talk? Whether there be enough happenings or not enough,” – and here he spoke with a kindling eye and looked about him at the little group of apprentices and printers, who had drawn near to listen, “if there be not enough, then will I make things happen. What is easier than to tell of happenings forth of the realm of which no man can know – some talk of the Grand Turk and the war that he makes, or some happenings in the New Land found by Master Columbus. Aye,” he went on, warming to his words and not knowing that he embodied in himself the first birth on earth of the telegraphic editor – “and why not. One day we write it out on our sheet ‘The Grand Turk maketh disastrous war on the Bulgars of the North and hath burnt divers of their villages.’ And that hath no sooner gone forth than we print another sheet saying, ‘It would seem that the villages be not burnt but only scorched, nor doth it appear that the Turk burnt them but that the Bulgars burnt divers villages of the Turk and are sitting now in his mosque in the city of Hadrian.’ Then shall all men run to and fro and read the sheet and question and ask, ‘Is it thus?’ And, ‘Is it thus?’ and by very uncertainty of circumstances, they shall demand the more curiously to see the news sheet and read it.”

“Nay, nay, Master Nick,” said Brenton, firmly, “that will I never allow. Let us make it to ourselves a maxim that all that shall be said in this news sheet, or ‘news paper,’ as my conceit would fain call it, for be it not made of paper (here a merry laugh of the apprentices greeted the quaint fancy of the Master), shall be of ascertained verity and fact indisputable. Should the Grand Turk make war and should the rumour of it come to these isles, then will we say ‘The Turk maketh war,’ and should the Turk be at peace, then we will say ‘The Turk it doth appear is now at peace.’ And should no news come, then shall we say ‘In good sooth we know not whether the Turk destroyeth the Bulgars or whether he doth not, for while some hold that he harasseth them sorely, others have it that he harasseth them not, whereby we are sore put to it to know whether there be war or peace, nor do we desire to vex the patience of those who read by any further discourse on the matter, other than to say that we ourselves are in doubt what be and what be not truth, nor will we any further speak of it other than this.’”

Those about Caxton listened with awe to this speech. They did not – they could not know – that this was the birth of the Leading Article, but there was something in the strangely fascinating way in which their chief enlarged upon his own ignorance that foreshowed to the meanest intelligence the possibilities of the future.

Nicholas shook his head.

“’Tis a poor plan, Master Brenton,” he said, “the folk wish news, give them the news. The more thou givest them, the better pleased they are and thus doth the news sheet move from hand to hand till it may be said (if I too may coin a phrase) to increase vastly its ‘circulation’——”

“In sooth,” said Master Brenton, looking at Nicholas with a quiet expression that was not exempt from a certain slyness, “there I do hold thou art in the wrong, even as a matter of craft or policie. For it seems to me that if our paper speaketh first this and then that but hath no fixed certainty of truth, sooner or later will all its talk seem vain, and no man will heed it. But if it speak always the truth, then sooner or later shall all come to believe it and say of any happening, ‘It standeth written in the paper, therefore it is so.’ And here I charge you all that have any part in this new venture,” continued Master Brenton, looking about the room at the listening faces and speaking with great seriousness, “let us lay it to our hearts that our maxim shall be truth and truth alone. Let no man set his hand to aught that shall go upon our presses save only that which is assured truth. In this way shall our venture ever be pleasing to the Most High, and I do verily believe,” – and here Caxton’s voice sank lower as if he were thinking aloud – “in the long run, it will be mighty good for our circulation.”

The speaker paused. Then turning to the broad sheet before him, he began to scan its columns with his eye. The others stood watching him as he read.

“What is this, Master Edward,” he queried presently, “here I see in this first induct, or column, as one names it, the word King fairly and truly spelled. Lower down it standeth Kyng, and yet further in the second induct Kynge, and in the last induct where there is talk of His Majesty’s marvelous skill in the French game of palm or tennis, lo the word stands Quhyngge! How sayeth thou?”

“Wouldst have it written always in but one and the same way?” asked the printer in astonishment.

“Aye, truly,” said Caxton.

“With never any choice, or variation to suit the fancy of him who reads so that he who likes it written King may see it so, and yet also he who would prefer it written in a freer style, or Quhyngge, may also find it so and thus both be pleased.”

“That will I never have!” said Master Brenton firmly, “dost not remember, friend, the old tale in the fabula of Aesopus of him who would please all men. Here will I make another maxim for our newspaper. All men we cannot please, for in pleasing one belike we run counter to another. Let us set our hand to write always without fear. Let us seek favour with none. Always in our news sheet we will seek to speak dutifully and with all reverence of the King his Majesty: let us also speak with all respect and commendation of His Majesty’s great prelates and nobles, for are they not the exalted of the land? Also I would have it that we say nothing harsh against our wealthy merchants and burgesses, for hath not the Lord prospered them in their substances. Yea, friends, let us speak ever well of the King, the clergy, the nobility and of all persons of wealth and substantial holdings. But beyond this” – here Brenton Coxton’s eye flashed – “let us speak with utter fearlessness of all men. So shall we be, if I may borrow a mighty good word from Tacitus his Annals, of a complete independence, hanging on to no man. In fact our venture shall be an independent newspaper.”

The listeners felt an instinctive awe at the words, and again a strange prescience of the future made itself felt in every mind. Here for the first time in history was being laid down that fine, fearless creed that has made the independent press what it is.

Meantime Caxton continued to glance his eye over the news sheet, murmuring his comments on what he saw – “Ah! vastly fine, Master Nicholas – this of the sailing of His Majesty’s ships for Spain – and this, too, of the Doge of Venice, his death, ’tis brave reading and maketh a fair discourse. Here also this likes me, ’tis shrewdly devised,” and here he placed his finger on a particular spot on the news sheet – “here in speaking of the strange mishap of my Lord Arundel, thou useth a great S for strange, and setteth it in a line all by itself whereby the mind of him that reads is suddenly awakened, alarmed as it were by a bell in the night. ’Tis good. ’Tis well. But mark you, friend Nicholas, try it not too often, nor use your great letters too easily. In the case of my Lord Arundel, it is seemly, but for a mishap to a lesser person, let it stand in a more modest fashion.”

There was a pause. Then suddenly Caxton looked up again.

“What manner of tale is this! What strange thing is here! In faith, Master Nicholas, whence hast thou so marvelous a thing! The whole world must know of it. Harken ye all to this!

“‘Let all men that be troubled of aches, spavins, rheums, boils, maladies of the spleen or humours of the blood, come forthwith to the sign of the Red Lantern in East Cheap. There shall they find one that hath a marvelous remedy for all such ailments, brought with great dangers and perils of the journey from a far distant land. This wonderous balm shall straightway make the sick to be well and the lame to walk. Rubbed on the eye it restoreth sight and applied to the ear it reviveth the hearing. ’Tis the sole invention of Doctor Gustavus Friedman, sometime of Göttingen and brought by him hitherwards out of the sheer pity of his heart for them that be afflicted, nor shall any other fee be asked for it save only such a light and tender charge as shall defray the cost of Doctor Friedman his coming and going.’”

Caxton paused and gazed at Master Nicholas in wonder. “Whence hadst thou this?”

Master Nicholas smiled.

“I had it of a chapman, or travelling doctor, who was most urgent that we set it forth straightway on the press.”

“And is it true?” asked Caxton; “thou hast it of a full surety of knowledge?”

Nicholas laughed lightly.

“True or false, I know not,” he said, “but the fellow was so curious that we should print it that he gave me two golden laurels and a new sovereign on the sole understanding that we should set it forth in print.”

There was deep silence for a moment.

“He payeth to have it printed!” said Caxton, deeply impressed.

“Aye,” said Master Nicholas, “he payeth and will pay more. The fellow hath other balms equally potent. All of these he would admonish, or shall I say advert, the public.”

“So,” said Caxton, thoughtfully, “he wishes to make, if I may borrow a phrase of Albertus Magnus, an advertisement of his goods.”

“Even so,” said Nicholas.

“I see,” said the Master, “he payeth us. We advert the goods. Forthwith all men buy them. Then hath he more money. He payeth us again. We advert the goods more and still he payeth us. That would seem to me, friend Nick, a mighty good busyness for us.”

“So it is,” rejoined Nicholas, “and after him others will come to advert other wares until belike a large part of our news sheet – who knows? the whole of it, perhaps, shall be made up in the merry guise of advertisements.”

Caxton sat silent in deep thought.

“But Master Caxton” – cried the voice of a young apprentice, a mere child, as he seemed, with fair hair and blue eyes filled with the native candour of unsullied youth – “is this tale true!”

“What sayest thou, Warwick?” said the master printer, almost sternly.

“Good master, is the tale of the wonderous balm true?”

“Boy,” said Caxton, “Master Nicholas, hath even said, we know not if it is true.”

“But didst thou not charge us,” pleaded the boy, “that all that went under our hand into the press should be truth and truth alone?”

“I did,” said Caxton thoughtfully, “but I spoke perhaps somewhat in overhaste. I see that we must here distinguish. Whether this is true or not we cannot tell. But it is paid for, and that lifts it, as who should say, out of the domain of truth. The very fact that it is paid for giveth it, as it were, a new form of merit, a verity altogether its own.”

“Ay, ay,” said Nicholas, with a twinkle in his shrewd eyes, “entirely its own.”

“Indeed so,” said Caxton, “and here let us make to ourselves another and a final maxim of guidance. All things that any man will pay for, these we will print, whether true or not, for that doth not concern us. But if one cometh here with any strange tale of a remedy or aught else and wishes us to make advertisement of it and hath no money to pay for it, then shall he be cast forth out of this officina, or office, if I may call it so, neck and crop into the street. Nay, I will have me one of great strength ever at the door ready for such castings.”

A murmur of approval went round the group.

Caxton would have spoken further but at the moment the sound of a bell was heard booming in the street without.

“’Tis the Great Bell,” said Caxton, “ringing out the hour of noon. Quick, all of you to your task. Lay me the forms on the press and speed me the work. We start here a great adventure. Mark well the maxims I have given you, and God speed our task.”

And in another hour or so, the prentice boys of the master printer were calling in the streets the sale of the first English newspaper.

TOC     INDEX

In the Good Time
After the War

(An extract from a London newspaper of 1916)

HOUSE OF COMMONS REPORT

The Prime Minister in rising said that he thought the time had now come when the House might properly turn its attention again to domestic affairs. The foreign world was so tranquil that there was really nothing of importance which need be brought to the attention of the House. Members, however, would, perhaps, be glad to learn incidentally that a new and more comfortable cage had been supplied for the ex-German Emperor, and that the ex-Crown Prince was now showing distinct signs of intelligence, and was even able to eat quite quietly out of his keeper’s hand. Members would be gratified to know that at last the Hohenzollern family were able to abstain from snapping at the hand that fed them. But he would now turn to the subject of Home Rule.

Here the House was seen to yawn noticeably, and a general lack of interest was visible, especially among the Nationalist and Ulster members. A number of members were seen to rise as if about to move to the refreshment-room. Mr. John Redmond and Sir Edward Carson were seen walking arm in arm towards the door.

The Prime Minister. “Will the members kindly keep their seats? We are about to hold a discussion on Home Rule. Members will surely recall that this form of discussion was one of our favourite exercises only a year or so ago. I trust that members have not lost interest in the subject.” (General laughter among the members, and cries of “Cut it out!” “What is it”?)

The Prime Minister (with some asperity). “Members are well aware what Home Rule meant. It was a plan – or rather it was a scheme – that is to say, it was an act of parliament, or I should say a bill, in fact, Mr. Speaker, I don’t mind confessing that, not having my papers with me, I am unable to inform the House just what Home Rule was. I think, perhaps, the Ex-Minister of Munitions has a copy of last year’s bill.”

Mr. Lloyd George rising, with evident signs of boredom. “The House will excuse me. I am tired. I have been out all day aeroplaning with Mr. Churchill and Mr. Bonar Law, with a view to inspect the new national training camp. I had the Home Rule Bill with me along with the Welsh Disestablishment Bill and the Land Bill, and I am afraid that I lost the whole bally lot of them; dropped them into the sea or something. I hope the Speaker will overlook the term ‘bally.’ It may not be parliamentary.”

Mr. Speaker (laughing). “Tut, tut, never mind a little thing like that. I am sure that after all that we have gone through together, the House is quite agreed that a little thing like parliamentary procedure doesn’t matter.”

Mr. Lloyd George (humbly). “Still I am sorry for the term. I’d like to withdraw it. I separate or distinguish in any degree the men of Ulster from the men of Tipperary, and the heart of Belfast from the heart of Dublin.” (Loud cheers.)

Mr. Redmond (springing forward). “And I’ll say this: Not I, nor any man of Ireland, Dublin, Belfast, or Connaught will ever set our hands or names to any bill that shall separate Ireland in any degree from the rest of the Empire. Work out, if you like, a new scheme of government. If the financial clauses are intricate, get one of your treasury clerks to solve them. If there’s trouble in arranging your excise on your customs, settle it in any way you please. But it is too late now to separate England and Ireland. We’ve held the flag of the Empire in our hand. We mean to hold it in our grasp forever. We have seen its colours tinged a brighter red with the best of Ireland’s blood, and that proud stain shall stay forever as the symbol of the unity of Irish and the English people.”

(Loud cheers ring through the House; several members rise in great excitement, all shouting and speaking together.) There is heard the voice of Mr. Angus McCluskey, Member for the Hebrides, calling – “And ye’ll no forget Scotland, me lad, when you talk of unity! Do you mind the Forty-Second, and the London Scottish in the trenches of the Aisne? Wha carried the flag of the Empire then? Unity, ma friends, ye’ll never break it. It may involve a wee bit sacrifice for Scotland financially speaking. I’ll no say no to a reveesion of the monetairy terms, if ye suggest it – but for unita – Scotland and the Empire, now and forever!”

A great number of members have risen in their seats. Mr. Open Ap Owen Glendower is calling: “Aye and Wales! never forget Wales.” Mr. Trevelyan Trendinning of Cornwall has started singing “And shall Trelawney Die?” – while the deep booming of “Rule Britannia” from five hundred throats ascends to the very rafters of the House.

The Speaker laughing and calling for order, while two of the more elderly clerks are beating with the mace on the table – “Gentlemen, gentlemen, I have a proposal to make. I have just learned that there is at the Alhambra in Leicester Square, a real fine moving picture show of the entrance of the Allies into Berlin. Let’s all go to it. We can leave a committee of the three youngest members to stay behind and draw up a new government for Ireland. Even they can’t go wrong now as to what we want.”

Loud Cheers as the House empties, singing “It was a Long Way to Tipperary, but the way lay through Berlin.”

TOC     INDEX

Further Foolishness

Sketches and Satires
on the Follies of the Day

(1916)

~

Preface

Peace, War, and Politics

Germany from Within Out
Abdul Aziz Has His
In Merry Mexico
Over the Grape Juice
The White House from Without In

Movies & Motors, Men & Women

Madeline of the Movies
The Call of the Carbureter
The Two Sexes, in Fives or Sixes
The Grass Bachelor’s Guide.
Every Man and His Friends.
More than Twice Told Tales
A Study in Still Life: My Tailor

Follies in Fiction

Stories Shorter Still
The Snoopopaths
Foreign Fiction in Imported Instalments

Timid Thoughts on Timely Topics

Are the Rich Happy?

Humour as I See It

Preface

Many years ago when I was a boy at school, we had over our class an ancient and spectacled schoolmaster who was as kind at heart as he was ferocious in appearance and whose memory has suggested to me the title of this book.

It was his practice, on any outburst of gayety in the class room, to chase us to our seats with a bamboo cane and to shout at us in defiance—

Now, then, any further foolishness?

I find by experience that there are quite a number of indulgent readers who are good enough to adopt the same expectant attitude towards me now.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

McGill University

Montreal

Nov. 1, 1916

Peace, War, and Politics

Germany from Within Out

The adventure which I here narrate resulted out of a strange psychological experience of a kind that (outside of Germany) would pass the bounds of comprehension.

To begin with, I had fallen asleep.

Of the reason for my falling asleep I have no doubt. I had remained awake nearly the whole of the preceding night, absorbed in the perusal of a number of recent magazine articles and books dealing with Germany as seen from within. I had read from cover to cover that charming book, just written by Lady de Washaway, under the title Ten Years as a Toady, or The Per-Hapsburgs as I Didn’t Know Them. Her account of the life of the Imperial Family of Austria – simple, unaffected, home-like: her picture of the good old Emperor, dining quietly off a cold potato and sitting after dinner playing softly to himself on the flute, while his attendants gently withdrew one by one from his presence: her description of merry, boisterous, large-hearted Prince Stefan Karl, who kept the whole court in a perpetual roar all the time by asking such riddles as “When is a sailor not a sailor?” (the answer being, of course, when he is a German Prince) – in fact, the whole book had thrilled me to the verge of spiritual exhaustion.

From Lady de Washaway’s work I turned to peruse Hugo von Halbwitz’s admirable book, Easy Marks, or How the German Government Borrows Its Funds; and after that I had read Karl von Wiggleround’s Despatches, and Barnstuff’s Confidential Letters to Crimminals.

As a consequence I fell asleep as if poisoned.

But the amazing thing is that, wherever it was or was not that I fell asleep, I woke up to find myself in Germany.

I cannot offer any explanation as to how this came about. I merely state the fact.

There I was seated on the grassy bank of a country road.

I knew it was Germany at once. There was no mistaking it. The whole landscape had an orderliness, a method about it that is, alas! never seen in British countries. The trees stood in neat lines, with the name of each nailed to it on a board. The birds sat in regular rows, four to a branch, and sang in harmony, very simply, but with the true German feeling.

There were two peasants working beside the road. One was picking up fallen leaves, and putting them into neat packets of fifty. The other was cutting off the tops of the late thistles that still stood unwithered in the chill winter air, and arranging them according to size and colour. In Germany nothing is lost; nothing is wasted. It is perhaps not generally known that from the top of the thistle the Germans obtain picrate of ammonia, the most deadly explosive known to modern chemistry, while from the bulb below, butter, crude rubber and sweet cider are extracted in large quantities.

The two peasants paused in their work a moment as they saw me glance towards them, and each, with the simple gentility of the German workingman, quietly stood on his head until I had finished looking at him.

I felt quite certain, of course, that it must only be a matter of a short time before I would inevitably be arrested.

I felt doubly certain of it when I saw a motor speeding towards me with a stout man, in military uniform and a Prussian helmet, seated behind the chauffeur.

The motor stopped, but to my surprise, the military man, whom I perceived to be wearing the uniform of a general, jumped out and advanced towards me with a genial cry of:

“Well! Herr Professor!”

I looked at him again——

“Why, Fritz!” I cried.

“You recognise me?” he said.

“Certainly,” I answered, “you used to be one of the six German waiters at McCluskey’s restaurant in Toronto.”

The General laughed.

“You really took us for waiters!” he said. “Well, well. My dear professor! How odd! We were all generals in the German army. My own name is not Fritz Schmidt, as you knew it, but Count Boob von Boobenstein. The Boobs of Boobenstein,” he added proudly, “are connected with the Hohenzollerns. When I am commanded to dine with the Emperor, I have the hereditary right to eat anything that he leaves.”

“But I don’t understand!” I said. “Why were you in Toronto?”

“Perfectly simple. Special military service. We were there to make a report. Each day we kept a record of the velocity and direction of the wind, the humidity of the air, the distance across King street and the height of the C. P. R. Building. All this we wired to Germany every day.”

“For what purpose?” I asked.

“Pardon me!” said the General, and then, turning the subject with exquisite tact: “Do you remember Max?” he said.

“Do you mean the tall melancholy-looking waiter, who used to eat the spare oysters and drink up what was left in the glasses, behind the screen?”

“Ha!” exclaimed my friend. “But why did he drink them? Why? Do you know that that man – his real name is not Max but Ernst Niedelfein – is one of the greatest chemists in Germany? Do you realize that he was making a report to our War Office on the percentage of alcohol obtainable in Toronto after closing time?”

“And Karl?” I asked.

“Karl was a topographist in the service of his High Serenity the King Regnant of Bavaria” – here my friend saluted himself with both hands and blinked his eyes four times – “He made maps of all the breweries of Canada. We know now to a bottle how many German soldiers could be used in invading Canada without danger of death from drought.”

“How many was it?” I asked.

Boobenstein shook his head.

“Very disappointing,” he said. “In fact your country is not yet ripe for German occupation. Our experts say that the invasion of Canada is an impossibility unless we use Milwaukee as a base——”

“But step into my motor,” said the Count, interrupting himself, “and come along with me. Stop, you are cold. This morning air is very keen. Take this,” he added, picking off the fur cap from the chauffeur’s head; “it will be better than that hat you are wearing – or, here, wait a moment——”

As he spoke the Count unwound a woollen muffler from the chauffeur’s neck, and placed it round mine.

“Now then,” he added, “this sheepskin coat——”

“My dear Count,” I protested.

“Not a bit, not a bit,” he cried, as he pulled off the chauffeur’s coat and shoved me into it. His face beamed with true German generosity.

“Now,” he said, as we settled back into the motor and started along the road, “I am entirely at your service. Try one of these cigars! Got it alight? Right! You notice, no doubt, the exquisite flavour. It is a Tannhäuser. Our chemists are making these cigars now out of the refuse of the tanneries and glue factories.”

I sighed involuntarily. Imagine trying to “blockade” a people who could make cigars out of refuse; imagine trying to get near them at all!

“Strong, aren’t they,” said von Boobenstein, blowing a big puff of smoke. “In fact, it is these cigars that have given rise to the legend (a pure fiction, I need hardly say) that our armies are using asphyxiating gas. The truth is they are merely smoking German-made tobacco in their trenches.”

“But come now,” he continued, “your meeting with me is most fortunate. Let me explain. I am at present on the Intelligence Branch of the General Staff. My particular employment is dealing with foreign visitors – the branch of our service called, for short, the Eingewanderte-Fremden-Verfüllungs-Bureau. How would you call that?”

“It sounds,” I said, “like the Bureau for Stuffing Up Incidental Foreigners.”

“Precisely,” said the Count, “though your language lacks the music of ours. It is my business to escort visitors round Germany and help them with their despatches. I took the Ford party through – in a closed cattle-car, with the lights out. They were greatly impressed. They said that though they saw nothing, they got an excellent idea of the atmosphere of Germany. It was I who introduced Lady de Washaway to the Court of Franz Joseph. I write the despatches from Karl von Wiggleround, and send the necessary material to Ambassador von Barnstuff. In fact I can take you everywhere, show you everything, and” – here my companion’s military manner suddenly seemed to change into something obsequiously and strangely familiar – “it won’t cost you a cent – not a cent, unless you care——”

I understood.

I handed him ten cents.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. Then with an abrupt change back to his military manner:

“Now, then, what would you like to see? The army? The breweries? The Royal court? Berlin? What shall it be? My time is limited, but I shall be delighted to put myself at your service for the rest of the day.”

“I think,” I said, “I should like more than anything to see Berlin, if it is possible.”

“Possible?” answered my companion. “Nothing easier.”

The motor flew ahead and in a few moments later we were making our arrangements with a local station master for a special train to Berlin.

I got here my first glimpse of the wonderful perfection of the German railway system.

“I am afraid,” said the station master, with deep apologies, “that I must ask you to wait half an hour. I am moving a quarter of a million troops from the east to the west front, and this always holds up the traffic for fifteen or twenty minutes.”

I stood on the platform watching the troop trains go by and admiring the marvellous ingenuity of the German system.

As each train went past at full speed, a postal train (Feld-Post-Eisenbahn-Zug) moved on the other track in the opposite direction, from which a shower of letters were thrown in to the soldiers through the window. Immediately after the postal train, a soup train (Soup-Zug) was drawn along, from the windows of which soup was squirted out of a hose.

Following this there came at full speed a beer train (Bier-Zug) from which beer bombs were exploded in all directions.

I watched till all had passed.

“Now,” said the station master, “your train is ready. Here you are.”

Away we sped through meadows and fields, hills and valleys, forests and plains.

And nowhere – I am forced, like all other travellers, to admit it – did we see any signs of the existence of war. Everything was quiet, orderly, usual. We saw peasants digging – in an orderly way – for acorns in the frozen ground. We saw little groups of soldiers drilling in the open squares of villages – in their quiet German fashion – each man chained by the leg to the man next to him; here and there great Zeppelins sailed overhead dropping bombs, for practice, on the less important towns; at times in the village squares we saw clusters of haggard women (quite quiet and orderly) waving little red flags and calling: “Bread, Bread!”

But nowhere any signs of war. Certainly not.

We reached Berlin just at nightfall. I had expected to find it changed. To my surprise it appeared just as usual. The streets were brilliantly lighted. Music burst in waves from the restaurants. From the theatre-signs I saw, to my surprise, that they were playing Hamlet, East Lynne and Potash and Perlmutter. Everywhere were brightness, gaiety and light-heartedness.

Here and there a merry-looking fellow with a brush and a pail of paste and a roll of papers over his arm would swab up a casualty list of two or three thousand names, amid roads of good-natured laughter.

What perplexed me most was the sight of thousands upon thousands of men, not in uniform, but in ordinary civilian dress.

“Boobenstein,” I said, as we walked down the Linden Avenue, “I don’t understand it.”

“The men?” he answered. “It’s a perfectly simple matter. I see you don’t understand our army statistics. At the beginning of the war we had an army of three million. Very good. Of these, one million were in the reserve. We called them to the colours, that made four million. Then of these all who wished were allowed to volunteer for special services. Half a million did so. That made four and a half million. In the first year of the war we suffered two million casualties, but of these seventy-five per cent., or one and a half million, returned later on to the colours, bringing our grand total up to six million. This six million we use on each of six fronts, giving a grand total of thirty-six million.”

“I see,” I said. “In fact, I have seen these figures before. In other words, your men are inexhaustible.”

“Precisely,” said the Count, “and mark you, behind these we still have the Landsturm, made up of men between fifty-five and sixty, and the Landslide, reputed to be the most terrible of all the German levies, made up by withdrawing the men from the breweries. That is the last final act of national fury. But come,” he said, “you must be hungry. Is it not so?”

“I am,” I admitted, “but I had hesitated to acknowledge it. I feared that the food supply——”

Von Boobenstein broke into hearty laughter——

“Food supply!” he roared. “My dear fellow, you must have been reading the English newspapers! Food supply! My dear professor! Have you not heard? We have got over that difficulty entirely and forever. But come, here is a restaurant. In with you and eat to your heart’s content.”

We entered the restaurant. It was filled to overflowing with a laughing crowd of diners and merry-makers. Thick clouds of blue cigar-smoke filled the air. Waiters ran to and fro with tall steins of foaming beer, and great bundles of bread tickets, soup tickets, meat cards and butter coupons.

These were handed around to the guests, who sat quietly chewing the corners of them as they sipped their beer.

“Now then,” said my host, looking over the printed menu in front of him, “what shall it be? What do you say to a ham certificate with a cabbage ticket on the side? Or how would you like lobster-coupon with a receipt for asparagus?”

“Yes,” I answered, “or perhaps as our journey has made me hungry, one of these beef certificates with an affidavit for Yorkshire pudding.”

“Done!” said Boobenstein.

A few moments later we were comfortably drinking our tall glasses of beer and smoking Tannhäuser cigars, with an appetising pile of coloured tickets and certificates in front of us.

“Admit,” said von Boobenstein, good naturedly, “that we have overcome the food difficulty forever.”

“You have,” I said.

“It was a pure matter of science and efficiency,” he went on. “It has long been observed that if one sat down in a restaurant and drank beer and smoked cigars (especially such a brand as these Tannhäusers) during the time it took for the food to be brought (by a German waiter), all appetite was gone. It remained for the German scientists to organise this into system. Have you finished? Or would you like to take another look at your beef certificate?”

We rose. Von Boobenstein paid the bill by writing I.O.U. on the back of one of the cards – not forgetting the waiter, for whom he wrote on a piece of paper, “God bless you” – and we left.

“Count,” I said, as we took our seat on a bench in the Sieges-Allee, or Allee of Victory, and listened to the music of a military band, and watched the crowd, “I begin to see that Germany is unconquerable.”

“Absolutely so,” he answered.

“In the first place, your men are inexhaustible. If we kill one class, you call out another; and anyway one-half of those we kill get well again, and the net result is that you have more than ever.”

“Precisely,” said the Count.

“As to food,” I continued, “you are absolutely invulnerable. What with acorns, thistles, tanbark, glue, tickets, coupons, and certificates, you can go on forever.”

“We can,” he said.

“Then for money, you use I. O. U.’s. Anybody with a leadpencil can command all the funds he wants. Moreover, your soldiers at the front are getting dug in deeper and deeper: last spring they were fifty feet under ground: by 1918 they will be nearly 200 feet down. Short of mining for them, we shall never get them out.”

“Never,” said Von Boobenstein with great firmness.

“But there is one thing that I don’t quite understand. Your navy, your ships. There, surely, we have you: sooner or later that whole proud fleet in the Kiel Canal will come out under fire of our guns and be sunk to the bottom of the sea. There, at least, we conquer.”

Von Boobenstein broke into loud laughter.

“The fleet!” he roared, and his voice was almost hysterical and overstrung, as if high living on lobster-coupons and over-smoking of Tannhäusers was undermining his nerves. “The fleet! Is it possible you do not know? Why all Germany knows it. Capture our fleet! Ha! Ha! It now lies fifty miles inland. We have filled in the canal – pushed in the banks. The canal is solid land again, and the fleet is high and dry. The ships are boarded over and painted to look like German inns and breweries. Prinz Adelbert is disguised as a brewer; Admiral von Tirpitz is made up as a head waiter; Prince Heinrich is a bartender; the sailors are dressed up as chambermaids. And some day when Jellicoe and his men are coaxed ashore, they will drop in to drink a glass of beer, and then – pouf! we will explode them all with a single torpedo! Such is the naval strategy of our scientists! Are we not a nation of sailors?”

Von Boobenstein’s manner had grown still wilder and more hysterical. There was a queer glitter in his eyes.

I thought it better to soothe him.

“I see,” I said, “the Allies are beaten. One might as well spin a coin for heads or tails to see whether we abandon England now or wait till you come and take it.”

As I spoke, I took from my pocket an English sovereign that I carry as a lucky-piece, and prepared to spin it in the air.

Von Boobenstein, as he saw it, broke into a sort of hoarse shriek.

“Gold! gold!” he cried. “Give it to me!”

“What?” I exclaimed.

“A piece of gold,” he panted. “Give it to me, give it to me, quick. I know a place where we can buy bread with it. Real bread – not tickets – food – give me the gold – gold – for bread – we can get bread. I am starving – gold – bread.”

And as he spoke his hoarse voice seemed to grow louder and louder in my ears – the sounds of the street were hushed – a sudden darkness fell – and a wind swept among the trees of the Allee of Victory – moaning – and a thousand, a myriad voices seemed to my ear to take up the cry—

“Gold! Bread! We are starving.”

Then I woke up.

TOC     INDEX

Abdul Aziz Has His

An Adventure in the Yildiz Kiosk

“Come, come, Abdul,” I said, putting my hand, not unkindly, on his shoulder. “Tell me all about it.”

But he only broke out into renewed sobbing.

“There, there,” I continued, soothingly. “Don’t cry, Abdul. Look! Here’s a lovely narghileh for you to smoke, with a gold mouth-piece. See! Wouldn’t you like a little latakia, eh? And here’s a little toy Armenian – look! See his head come off – snick! There, it’s on again, snick! now it’s off! look, Abdul!”

But still he sobbed.

His fez had fallen over his ears and his face was all smudged with tears.

It seemed impossible to stop him.

I looked about in vain from the little alcove of the hall of the Yildiz Kiosk where we were sitting on a Persian bench under a lemon tree. There was no one in sight. I hardly knew what to do.

In the Yildiz Kiosk – I think that was the name of the place – I scarcely as yet knew my way about. In fact, I had only been in it a few hours. I had come there – as I should have explained in commencing – in order to try to pick up information as to the exact condition of things in Turkey. For this purpose I had assumed the character and disguise of an English governess. I had long since remarked that an English governess is able to go anywhere, see everything, penetrate the interior of any royal palace and move to and fro as she pleases without hindrance and without insult. No barrier can stop her. Every royal court, however splendid or however exclusive, is glad to get her. She dines with the King or the Emperor as a matter of course. All state secrets are freely confided to her and all military plans are submitted to her judgment. Then after a three weeks’ residence, she leaves the court and writes a book of disclosures.

This was now my plan.

And up to the moment of which I speak, it had worked perfectly.

I had found my way through Turkey to the royal capital without difficulty. The poke bonnet, the spectacles and the long black dress which I had assumed had proved an ample protection. None of the rude Turkish soldiers among whom I had passed had offered to lay a hand on me. This tribute I am compelled to pay to the splendid morality of the Turks. They wouldn’t touch me.

Access to the Yildiz Kiosk and to the Sultan had proved equally easy. I had merely to obtain an interview with Codfish Pasha, the Secretary of War, whom I found a charming man of great intelligence, a master of three or four languages (as he himself informed me), and able to count up to seventeen.

“You wish,” he said, “to be appointed as English, or rather Canadian governess to the Sultan?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“And your object?”

“I propose to write a book of disclosures.”

“Excellent,” said Codfish.

An hour later I found myself, as I have said, in a flagstoned hall of the Yildiz Kiosk, with the task of amusing and entertaining the Sultan.

Of the difficulty of this task I had formed no conception. Here I was at the outset, with the unhappy Abdul bent and broken with sobs which I found no power to check or control.

Naturally, therefore, I found myself at a loss. The little man as he sat on his cushions, in his queer costume and his long slippers; with his fez fallen over his lemon-coloured face, presented such a pathetic object that I could not find the heart to be stern with him.

“Come, now, Abdul,” I said, “be good!”

He paused a moment in his crying—

“Why do you call me Abdul?” he asked. “That isn’t my name.”

“Isn’t it?” I said. “I thought all you Sultans were called Abdul. Isn’t the Sultan’s name always Abdul?”

“Mine isn’t,” he whimpered, “but it doesn’t matter,” and his face began to crinkle up with renewed weeping. “Call me anything you like. It doesn’t matter. Anyway I’d rather be called Abdul than be called a W-W-War Lord and a G-G-General when they won’t let me have any say at all——”

And with that the little Sultan burst into unrestrained crying.

“Abdul,” I said firmly, “if you don’t stop crying, I’ll go and fetch one of the Bashi Bazooks to take you away.”

The little Sultan found his voice again. “There aren’t any Bub-Bub-Bashi Bazooks left,” he sobbed.

“None left?” I exclaimed. “Where are they gone?”

“They’ve t-t-taken them all aw-w-way——”

“Who have?”

“The G-G-G-Germans,” sobbed Abdul. “And they’ve sent them all to P-P-P-Poland.”

“Come, come, Abdul,” I said, straightening him up a little as he sat. “Brace up! Be a Turk! Be a Mohammedan! Don’t act like a Christian.”

This seemed to touch his pride. He made a great effort to be calm. I could hear him muttering to himself, “Allah, Illallah, Mohammed rasoul Allah!” He said this over a good many times, while I took advantage of the pause to get his fez a little straighter and wipe his face.

“How many times have I said it?” he asked presently.

“Twenty.”

“Twenty? That ought to be enough, shouldn’t it?” said the Sultan, regaining himself a little. “Isn’t prayer helpful, eh? Give me a smoke?”

I filled his narghileh for him, and he began to suck blue smoke out of it with a certain contentment, while the rose water bubbled in the bowl below.

“Now, Abdul,” I said, as I straightened up his cushions and made him a little more comfortable, “what is it? What is the matter?”

“Why,” he answered, “they’ve all g-g-gone——”

“Now, don’t cry! Tell me properly.”

“They’ve all gone b-b-back on me! Boo! Hoo!”

“Who have? Who’ve gone back on you?”

“Why, everybody. The English and the French and everybody——”

“What do you mean?” I asked with increasing interest. “Tell me exactly what you mean. Whatever you say I will hold sacred, of course.”

I saw my way already to a volume of interesting disclosures.

“They used to treat me so differently,” Abdul went on, and his sobbing ceased as he continued – “They used to call me the Bully Boy of the Bosphorus. They said I was the Guardian of the Golden Gate. They used to let me kill all the Armenians I liked and nobody was allowed to collect debts from me and every now and then they used to send me the nicest ultimatums – Oh! you don’t know,” he broke off, “how nice it used to be here in the Yildiz in the old days! We used all to sit round here, in this very hall, me and the diplomats – and play games, such as ‘Ultimatum, ultimatum, who’s got the ultimatum?’ – Oh, say, it was so nice and peaceful! And we used to have big dinners and conferences, especially after the military manoeuvres and the autumn massacres – me and the diplomats, all with stars and orders, and me in my white fez with a copper tassel – and hold discussions about how to reform Macedonia.”

“But you spoilt it all, Abdul,” I protested.

“I didn’t, I didn’t!” he exclaimed almost angrily.

“I’d have gone on for ever. It was all so nice. They used to present me – the diplomats did – with what they called their Minimum, and then we (I mean Codfish Pasha and me) had to draft in return our Maximum – see? – and then we all had to get together again and frame a status quo.”

“But that couldn’t go on for ever,” I urged.

“Why not?” said Abdul. “It was a great system. We invented it, but everybody was beginning to copy it. In fact, we were leading the world, before all this trouble came. Didn’t you have anything of our system in your country – what do you call it – in Canada?”

“Yes,” I admitted; “now that I come to think of it, we were getting into it. But the war has changed it all——”

“Exactly,” said Abdul. “There you are! All changed! The good old days gone forever!”

“But surely,” I said, “you still have friends – the Bulgarians.”

The Sultan’s little black eyes flashed with anger as he withdrew his pipe for a moment from his mouth.

“The low scoundrels!” he said between his teeth. “The traitors!”

“Why, they’re your Allies!”

“Yes, Allah destroy them! They are. They’ve come over to our side. After centuries of fighting they refuse to play fair any longer. They’re on our side! Who ever heard of such a thing? Bah! But, of course,” he added more quietly, “we shall massacre them just the same. We shall insist, in the terms of peace, on retaining our rights of massacre. But then, no doubt, all the nations will.”

“But you have the Germans——” I began.

“Hush, hush,” said Abdul, laying his hand on my arm. “Some one might hear.”

“You have the Germans,” I repeated.

“The Germans,” said Abdul, and his voice sounded in a queer sing-song like that of a child repeating a lesson, “The Germans are my noble friends, the Germans are my powerful allies, the Kaiser is my good brother, the Reichstag is my foster sister: I love the Germans: I hate the English: I love the Kaiser: the Kaiser loves me——”

“Stop, stop, Abdul,” I said, “who taught you all that?”

Abdul looked cautiously around.

“They did,” he said in a whisper. “There’s a lot more of it. Would you like me to recite some more? Or, no, no, what’s the good? I’ve no heart for reciting any longer.” And at this Abdul fell to weeping again.

“But Abdul,” I said, “I don’t understand. Why are you so distressed just now? All this has been going on for over two years. Why are you so worried just now?”

“Oh,” exclaimed the little Sultan in surprise, “you haven’t heard! I see – you’ve only just arrived. Why, today is the last day. After today it is all over.”

“Last day for what?” I asked.

“For intervention. For the intervention of the United States. The only thing that can save us. It was to have come today, by the end of this full moon – our astrologers had predicted it – Smith Pasha, Minister under Heaven of the United States, had promised, if it came, to send it to us at the earliest moment. How do they send it, do you know, in a box, or in a paper?”

“Stop,” I said as my ear caught the sound of footsteps. “There’s some one coming now.”

The sound of slippered feet was distinctly heard on the stones in the outer corridor.

Abdul listened intently a moment.

“I know his slippers,” he said.

“Who is it?”

“It is my chief secretary, Toomuch Koffi. Yes, here he comes.”

As the Sultan spoke the doors swung open and there entered an aged Turk, in a flowing gown and coloured turban, with a melancholy yellow face, and a long white beard that swept to his girdle.

“Who do you say he is?” I whispered to Abdul.

“My chief secretary,” he whispered back. “Toomuch Koffi.”

“He looks like it,” I murmured.

Meantime, Toomuch Koffi had advanced across the broad flagstones of the hall where we were sitting. With hands lifted he salaamed four times – east, west, north, and south.

“What does that mean?” I whispered.

“It means,” said the Sultan, with visible agitation, “that he has a communication of the greatest importance and urgency, which will not brook a moment’s delay.”

“Well, then, why doesn’t he get a move on?” I whispered.

“Hush,” said Abdul.

Toomuch Koffi now straightened himself from his last salaam and spoke.

“Allah is great!” he said.

“And Mohammed is his prophet,” rejoined the Sultan.

“Allah protect you! And make your face shine,” said Toomuch.

“Allah lengthen your beard,” said the Sultan, and he added aside to me in English, which Toomuch Koffi evidently did not understand, “I’m all eagerness to know what it is – it’s something big, for sure” – the little man was quite quivering with excitement, as he spoke. “Do you know what I think it is? I think it must be the American Intervention. The United States is going to intervene. Eh? What? Don’t you think so?”

“Then hurry him up,” I urged.

“I can’t,” said Abdul. “It is impossible in Turkey to do business like that. He must have some coffee first and then he must pray and then there must be an interchange of presents.”

I groaned, for I was getting as impatient as Abdul himself.

“Do you not do public business like that in Canada?” the Sultan continued.

“We used to. But we have got over it,” I said.

Meantime a slippered attendant had entered and placed a cushion for the secretary, and in front of it a little Persian stool on which he put a quaint cup filled with coffee black as ink.

A similar cup was placed before the Sultan.

“Drink!” said Abdul.

“Not first, until the lips of the Commander of the Faithful——”

“He means ‘after you,’” I said. “Hurry up, Abdul.”

Abdul took a sip. “Allah is good,” he said.

“And all things are of Allah,” rejoined Toomuch.

Abdul unpinned a glittering jewel from his robe and threw it to the feet of Toomuch. “Take this poor bauble,” he said.

Toomuch Koffi in return took from his wrist a solid bangle of beaten gold. “Accept this mean gift from your humble servant,” he said.

“Right!” said Abdul, speaking in a changed voice as the ceremonies ended. “Now, then, Toomuch, what is it? Hurry up. Be quick. What is the matter?”

Toomuch rose to his feet, lifted his hands high in the air with the palms facing the Sultan.

“One is without,” he said.

“Without what?” I asked eagerly of the Sultan.

“Without – outside. Don’t you understand Turkish? What you call in English – A gentleman to see me.”

“And did he make all that fuss and delay over that?” I asked in disgust. “Why with us in Canada, at one of the public departments at Ottawa, all that one would have to do would be simply to send in a card, get it certified, then simply wait in an anteroom, simply read a newspaper, send in another card, wait a little, then simply send in a third card, and then simply——”

“Pshaw!” said Abdul, “the cards might be poisoned. Our system is best. Speak on, Toomuch. Who is without? Is it perchance a messenger from Smith Pasha, Minister under Heaven of the United States?”

“Alas, no!” said Toomuch. “It is HE. It is THE LARGE ONE!”

As he spoke he rolled his eyes upward with a gesture of despair.

“HE!” cried Abdul, and a look of terror convulsed his face. “The Large One! Shut him out! Call the Chief Eunuch and the Major Domo of the Harem! Let him not in!”

“Alas,” said Toomuch. “He threw them out of the window. Lo! he is here; he enters.”

As the Secretary spoke a double door at the end of the hall swung noisily open, at the blow of an imperious fist, and with a rattle of arms and accoutrements a man of gigantic stature, wearing full military uniform and a spiked helmet, strode into the room.

As he entered, an attendant who accompanied him, also in a uniform and a spiked helmet, called in a loud strident voice that resounded to the arches of the hall.

“His High Excellenz Feld Marechal von der Doppelbauch, Spezial Representant of His Majestät William II, Deutscher Kaiser and King of England!”

Abdul collapsed into a little heap. His fez fell over his face. Toomuch Koffi had slunk into a corner.

Von der Doppelbauch strode noisily forward and came to a stand in front of Abdul with a click and rattle after the Prussian fashion.

“Majestät,” he said in a deep, thunderous voice, “I greet you. I bow low before you. Salaam! I kiss the floor at your feet.”

But in reality he did nothing of the sort. He stood to the full height of his six feet six and glowered about him.

“Salaam!” said Abdul, in a feeble voice.

“But who is this?” added the Field Marshal, looking angrily at me. My costume, or rather my disguise, for, as I have said, I was wearing a poke bonnet with a plain black dress, seemed to puzzle him.

“My new governess,” said Abdul. “She came this morning. She is a professor——”

“Bah!” said the Field Marshal, “a woman a professor! Bah!”

“No, no,” said Abdul in protest, and it seemed decent of the little creature to stick up for me – “She’s all right, she is interesting and knows a great deal. She’s from Canada!”

“What!” exclaimed Von der Doppelbauch. “From Canada! But stop! It seems to me that Canada is a country that we are at war with. Let me think, Canada? I must look at my list” – he pulled out a little set of tablets as he spoke – “let me see – Britain, Great Britain, British North America, British Guiana, British Nigeria – ha! of course, under K – Kandahar, Korfu – no, I don’t seem to see it – Fritz!” he called to the aide de camp who had announced him – “telegraph at once to the Topographical Staff at Berlin and find out if we are at war with Canada. If we are” – he pointed at me – “throw her into the Bosphorus. If we are not, treat her with every consideration, with every distinguished consideration. But see that she doesn’t get away. Keep her tight, till we are at war with Canada, as no doubt we shall be, wherever it is, and then throw her into the Bosphorus.”

The aide clicked his heels and withdrew.

“And now, your majesty,” continued the Field Marshal, turning abruptly to the Sultan, “I bring you good news.”

“More good news,” groaned Abdul miserably, winding his clasped fingers to and fro. “Alas! good news again!”

“First,” said Von der Doppelbauch, “the Kaiser has raised you to the order of the Black Duck. Here is your feather.”

“Another feather,” moaned Abdul. “Here, Toomuch, take it and put it among the feathers!”

“Secondly,” went on the Field Marshal, checking off his items as he spoke, “your contribution, your personal contribution to His Majesty’s Twenty-third Imperial Loan is accepted.”

“I didn’t make any!” sobbed Abdul.

“No difference,” said Von der Doppelbauch. “It is accepted anyway. The telegram has just arrived accepting all your money. My assistants are packing it up outside.”

Abdul collapsed still further into his cushions.

“Third, and this will rejoice your Majesty’s heart: Your troops are again victorious!”

“Victorious!” moaned Abdul. “Victorious again! I knew they would be! I suppose they are all dead as usual?”

“They are,” said the Marshal. “Their souls,” he added reverently, with a military salute, “are in Heaven!”

“No, no,” gasped Abdul, “not in Heaven! Don’t say that! Not in Heaven! Say that they are in Nishvâna, our Turkish paradise?”

“I am sorry,” said the Field Marshal gravely. “This is a Christian war. The Kaiser has insisted on their going to Heaven.”

The Sultan bowed his head. “Ishmillah!” he murmured. “It is the will of Allah.”

“But they did not die without glory,” went on the Field Marshal. “Their victory was complete. Set it out to yourself,” and here his eyes glittered with soldierly passion – “There stood your troops – ten thousand! In front of them the Russians – a hundred thousand. What did your men do? Did they pause? No, they charged!”

“They charged!” cried the Sultan in misery. “Don’t say that! Have they charged again! Just Allah!” he added, turning to Toomuch. “They have charged again! And we must pay, we shall have to pay – we always do when they charge. Alas, alas, they have charged again. Everything is charged!”

“But how nobly,” rejoined the Prussian. “Imagine it to yourself! Here, beside this stool, let us say, were your men. There, across the cushion, were the Russians. All the ground between was mined. We knew it. Our soldiers knew it. Even our staff knew it. Even Prinz Rattelwitz Halfstuff, our commander, knew it. But your soldiers did not. What did our Prinz do? The Prinz called for volunteers to charge over the ground. There was a great shout – from our men, our German regiments. He called again. There was another shout. He called still again. There was a third shout. Think of it! And again Prinz Halfstuff called and again they shouted.”

“Who shouted?” asked the Sultan gloomily.

“Our men, our Germans.”

“Did my Turks shout?” asked Abdul.

“They did not. They were too busy tightening their belts and fixing their bayonets. But our generous fellows shouted for them. Then Prinz Halfstuff called out ‘The place of honour is for our Turkish brothers. Let them charge!’ And all our men shouted again.”

“And they charged?”

“They did – and were all gloriously blown up. A magnificent victory. The blowing up of the mines blocked all the ground, checked the Russians and enabled our men – by a pre-arranged rush – to advance backwards – taking up a new strategic——”

“Yes, yes,” said Abdul, “I know – I have read of it, alas! only too often. And they are dead! Toomuch,” he added quietly, drawing a little pouch from his girdle, “take this pouch of rubies and give them to the wives of the dead general of our division – one to each. He had, I think, but seventeen. His walk was quiet. Allah give him peace.”

“Stop,” said Von der Doppelbauch. “I will take the rubies. I myself will charge myself with the task and will myself see that I do it myself. Give me them.”

“Be it so, Toomuch,” assented the Sultan humbly. “Give them to him.”

“And now,” continued the Field Marshal, “there is yet one other thing further still more.” He drew a roll of paper from his pocket. “Toomuch,” he said, “bring me yonder little table, with ink, quills and sand. I have here a manifesto for His Majesty to sign.”

“No, no,” cried Abdul in renewed alarm. “Not another manifesto. Not that! I signed one only last week.”

“This is a new one,” said the Field Marshal, as he lifted the table that Toomuch had brought, into place in front of the Sultan, and spread out the papers on it. “This is a better one. This is the best one yet.”

“What does it say?” said Abdul, peering at it miserably. “I can’t read it. It’s not in Turkish.”

“It is your last word of proud defiance to all your enemies,” said the Marshal.

“No, no,” whined Abdul. “Not defiance; they might not understand.”

“Here you declare,” went on the Field Marshal, with his big finger on the text, “your irrevocable purpose. You swear that rather than submit you will hurl yourself into the Bosphorus.”

“Where does it say that?” screamed Abdul.

“Here beside my thumb.”

“I can’t do it, I can’t do it,” moaned the little Sultan.

“More than that further,” went on the Prussian, quite undisturbed, “you state hereby your fixed resolve, rather than give in, to cast yourself from the highest pinnacle of the topmost minaret of this palace.”

“Oh, not the highest; don’t make it the highest,” moaned Abdul.

“Your purpose is fixed. Nothing can alter it. Unless the Allied Powers withdraw from their advance on Constantinople you swear that within one hour you will fill your mouth with mud and burn yourself alive.”

“Just Allah!” cried the Sultan, “does it say all that?”

“All that,” said Von der Doppelbauch. “All that within an hour. It is a splendid defiance. The Kaiser himself has seen it and admired it. ‘These,’ he said, ‘are the words of a man!’”

“Did he say that?” said Abdul, evidently flattered. “And is he too about to hurl himself off his minaret?”

“For the moment, no,” replied Von der Doppelbauch, sternly.

“Well, well,” said Abdul, and to my surprise he began picking up the pen and making ready. “I suppose if I must sign it, I must” – then he marked the paper and sprinkled it with sand. “For one hour? Well, well,” he murmured. “Von der Doppelbauch Pasha,” he added with dignity, “you are permitted to withdraw. Commend me to your Imperial Master, my brother. Tell him that when I am gone, he may have Constantinople, provided only” – and a certain slyness appeared in the Sultan’s eye, “that he can get it. Farewell.”

The Field Marshal, majestic as ever, gathered up the manifesto, clicked his heels together and withdrew.

As the door closed behind him, I had expected the little Sultan to fall into hopeless collapse.

Not at all. On the contrary, a look of peculiar cheerfulness spread over his features.

He refilled his narghileh and began quietly smoking at it.

“Toomuch,” he said, quite cheerfully, “I see there is no hope.”

“Alas!” said the secretary.

“I have now,” went on the Sultan, “apparently but sixty minutes in front of me. I had hoped that the intervention of the United States might have saved me. It has not. Instead of it, I meet my fate. Well, well, it is Kismet. I bow to it.”

He smoked away quite cheerfully.

Presently he paused.

“Toomuch,” he said, “kindly go and fetch me a sharp knife, double-edged if possible, but sharp, and a stout bowstring.”

Up to this time I had remained a mere spectator of what had happened. But now I feared that I was on the brink of witnessing an awful tragedy.

“Good Heavens, Abdul!” I said, “what are you going to do?”

“Do? Why kill myself, of course,” the Sultan answered, pausing for a moment in an interval of his cheerful smoking. “What else should I do? What else is there to do? I shall first stab myself in the stomach and then throttle myself with the bowstring. In half an hour I shall be in paradise. Toomuch, summon hither from the inner harem Fatima and Falloola; they shall sit beside me and sing to me at the last hour, for I love them well, and later they too shall voyage with me to paradise. See to it that they are both thrown a little later into the Bosphorus, for my heart yearns towards the two of them,” and he added thoughtfully, “especially perhaps towards Fatima, but I have never quite made up my mind.”

The Sultan sat back with a little gurgle of contentment, the rose water bubbling soothingly in the bowl of his pipe.

Then he turned to his secretary again.

“Toomuch,” he said, “you will at the same time send a bowstring to Codfish Pasha, my Chief of War – it is our sign, you know,” he added in explanation to me – “it gives Codfish leave to kill himself. And, Toomuch, send a bowstring also to Beefhash Pasha, my Vizier – good fellow, he will expect it, and to Macpherson Effendi, my financial adviser. Let them all have bowstrings.”

“Stop, stop,” I pleaded. “I don’t understand.”

“Why surely,” said the little man, in evident astonishment. “It is plain enough. What would you do in Canada? When your ministers – as I think you call them – fail and no longer enjoy your support – do you not send them bowstrings?”

“Never,” I said. “They go out of office, but——”

“And they do not disembowel themselves on their retirement? Have they not that privilege?”

“Never!” I said. “What an idea!”

“The ways of the infidel,” said the little Sultan, calmly resuming his pipe, “are beyond the compass of the true intelligence of the Faithful. Yet I thought it was so even as here. I had read in your newspapers that after your last election your ministers were buried alive – buried under a landslide, was it not? We thought it – here in Turkey – a noble fate for them.”

“They crawled out,” I said.

“Ishmillah!” ejaculated Abdul. “But go, Toomuch. And listen – thou also – for, in spite of all, thou hast served me well – shalt have a bowstring.”

“O master, master!” cried Toomuch, falling on his knees in gratitude and clutching the sole of Abdul’s slipper. “It is too kind.”

“Nay, nay,” said the Sultan. “Thou hast deserved it. And I will go further. This stranger, too, my governess, this professor, bring also for the professor a bowstring, and a two-bladed knife! All Canada shall rejoice to hear of it. The students shall leap up like young lambs at the honour that will be done. Bring the knife, Toomuch; bring the knife!”

“Abdul,” I said, “Abdul, this is too much. I refuse. I am not fit. The honour is too great.”

“Not so,” said Abdul. “I am still Sultan. I insist upon it. For, listen, I have long penetrated your disguise and your kind design. I saw it from the first. You knew all and came to die with me. It was kindly meant. But you shall die no common death; yours shall be the honour of the double knife – let it be extra sharp, Toomuch – and the bowstring.”

“Abdul,” I urged, “it cannot be. You forget. I have an appointment to be thrown into the Bosphorus.”

“The death of a dog! Never!” cried Abdul. “My will is still law. Toomuch, kill him on the spot. Hit him with the stool, throw the coffee at him——”

But at this moment there were heard loud cries and shouting, as in tones of great gladness, in the outer hall of the palace. Doors swinging to and fro and the sound of many running feet. One heard above all the call – “It has come! It has come!”

The Sultan looked up quickly.

“Toomuch,” he said eagerly and anxiously, “quick, see what it is. Hurry! hurry! Haste! Do not stay on ceremony. Drink a cup of coffee, give me five cents – fifty cents, anything – and take leave and see what it is.”

But before Toomuch could reply, a turbaned attendant had already burst in through the door unannounced and thrown himself at Abdul’s feet.

“Master! Master!” he cried. “It is here. It has come.” As he spoke he held out in one hand a huge envelope, heavy with seals. I could detect in great letters stamped across it the words, WASHINGTON and OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF STATE.

Abdul seized and opened the envelope with trembling hands.

“It is it!” he cried – “It is sent by Smith Pasha, Minister under the Peace of Heaven of the United States. It is the Intervention. I am saved.”

Then there was silence among us, breathless and anxious.

Abdul glanced down the missive, reading it in silence to himself.

“Oh noble,” he murmured, “oh generous! It is too much. Too splendid a lot!”

“What does it say?”

“Look,” said the Sultan. “The United States has used its good offices. It has intervened! All is settled. My fate is secure.”

“Yes, yes,” I said, “but what is it?”

“Is it believable?” exclaimed Abdul. “It appears that none of the belligerents cared about me at all. None had designs upon me. The war was not made, as we understood, Toomuch, as an attempt to seize my person. All they wanted was Constantinople. Not me at all!”

“Powerful Allah!” murmured Toomuch. “Why was it not so said?”

“For me,” said the Sultan, still consulting the letter, “great honours are prepared! I am to leave Constantinople – that is the sole condition. It shall then belong to whoever can get it. Nothing could be fairer. It always has. I am to have a safe conduct – is it not noble? – to the United States. No one is to attempt to poison me – is it not generosity itself? – neither on land – nor even – mark this especially, Toomuch – on board ship. Nor is any one to throw me overboard or otherwise transport me to paradise.”

“It passes belief!” murmured Toomuch Koffi. “Allah is indeed good.”

“In the United States itself,” went on Abdul, “or, I should say, themselves, Toomuch, for are they not innumerable? I am to have a position of the highest trust, power and responsibility.”

“Is it really possible?” I said, greatly surprised.

“It is so written,” said the Sultan. “I am to be placed at the head – as the sole head or sovereign of – how is it written? – a Turkish Bath Establishment in New York. There I am to enjoy the same freedom and to exercise just as much – it is so written – exactly as much political power as I do here. Is it not glorious?”

“Allah! Illallah!” cried the secretary.

“You, Toomuch, shall come with me, for there is a post of great importance placed at my disposal – so it is written – under the title of Rubber Down. Toomuch, let our preparations be made at once. Notify Fatima and Falloola. Those two alone shall go. For it is a Christian country and I bow to its prejudices. Two, I understand, is the limit. But we must leave at once.”

The Sultan paused a moment and then looked at me.

“And our good friend here,” he added, “we must leave to get out of this Yildiz Kiosk by whatsoever magic means he came into it.”

Which I did.

And I am assured, by those who know, that the intervention was made good and that Abdul and Toomuch may be seen to this day, or to any other day, moving to and fro in their slippers and turbans in their Turkish Bath Emporium at the corner of Broadway and——

But stop; that would be saying too much: especially as Fatima and Falloola occupy the upstairs.

And it is said that Abdul has developed a very special talent for heating up the temperature for his Christian customers.

Moreover it is the general opinion that whether or not the Kaiser and such people will get their deserts, Abdul Aziz has his.

TOC     INDEX

In Merry Mexico

I stood upon the platform of the little deserted railway station of the frontier and looked around at the wide prospect. “So this,” I said to myself, “is Mexico!”

About me was the great plain rolling away to the Sierras in the background. The railroad track traversed it in a thin line. There were no trees – only here and there a clump of cactus or chapparal, a tuft of dog-grass or a few patches of dogwood. At intervals in the distance one could see a hacienda standing in majestic solitude in a cup of the hills. In the blue sky floated little banderillos of white cloud, while a graceful hidalgo appeared poised on a crag on one leg with folded wings, or floated lazily in the sky on one wing with folded legs.

There was a drowsy buzzing of cicadas half asleep in the cactus cups, and, from some hidden depth of the hills far in the distance, the tinkling of a mule bell.

I had seen it all so often in moving pictures that I recognised the scene at once.

“So this is Mexico?” I repeated.

The station building beside of me was little more than a wooden shack. Its door was closed. There was a sort of ticket wicket opening at the side, but it too was closed.

But as I spoke thus aloud, the wicket opened. There appeared in it the head and shoulders of a little wizened man, swarthy and with bright eyes and pearly teeth.

He wore a black velvet suit with yellow facings, and a tall straw hat running to a point. I seemed to have seen him a hundred times in comic opera.

“Can you tell me when the next train——” I began.

The little man made a gesture of Spanish politeness.

“Welcome to Mexico!” he said.

“Could you tell me——” I continued.

“Welcome to our sunny Mexico!” he repeated – “our beautiful, glorious Mexico. Her heart throbs at the sight of you.”

“Would you mind——” I began again.

“Our beautiful Mexico, torn and distracted as she is, greets you. In the name of the de facto government, thrice welcome. Su casa!” he added with a graceful gesture indicating the interior of his little shack. “Come in and smoke cigarettes and sleep. Su casa! You are capable of Spanish, is it not?”

“No,” I said, “it is not. But I wanted to know when the next train for the interior——”

“Ah!” he rejoined more briskly. “You address me as a servant of the de facto government. Momentino! One moment!”

He shut the wicket and was gone a long time. I thought he had fallen asleep.

But he reappeared. He had a bundle of what looked like railway time tables, very ancient and worn, in his hand.

“Did you say,” he questioned, “the interior or the exterior?”

“The interior, please.”

“Ah, good, excellent – for the interior—” the little Mexican retreated into his shack and I could hear him murmuring – “for the interior, excellent—” as he moved to and fro.

Presently he reappeared, a look of deep sorrow on his face. “Alas!” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “I am desolado. It has gone! The next train has gone!”

“Gone! When?”

“Alas! Who can tell? Yesterday, last month? But it has gone.”

“And when will there be another one?” I asked.

“Ha!” he said, resuming a brisk official manner. “I understand. Having missed the next, you propose to take another one. Excellent! What business enterprise you foreigners have! You miss your train! What do you do? Do you abandon your journey? No. Do you sit down – do you weep? No. Do you lose time? You do not.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but when is there another train?”

“That must depend,” said the little official, and as he spoke he emerged from his house and stood beside me on the platform fumbling among his railway guides. “The first question is, do you propose to take a de facto train or a de jure train?”

“When do they go?” I asked.

“There is a de jure train,” continued the station master, peering into his papers, “at two p.m. – very good train – sleepers and diners – one at four, a through train – sleepers, observation car, dining car, corridor compartments – that also is a de jure train——”

“But what is the difference between the de jure and the de facto?”

“It’s a distinction we generally make in Mexico: the de jure trains are those that ought to go; that is, in theory, they go. The de facto trains are those that actually do go. It is a distinction clearly established in our correspondence with Huedro Huilson.”

“Do you mean Woodrow Wilson?”

“Yes, Huedro Huilson, president – de jure – of the United States.”

“Oh,” I said. “Now I understand. And when will there be a de facto train?”

“At any moment you like,” said the little official with a bow.

“But I don’t see——”

“Pardon me – I have one here behind the shed on that side track – excuse me – one moment and I will bring it.”

He disappeared and I presently saw him energetically pushing out from behind the shed a little railroad lorry or hand truck.

“Now then,” he said as he shoved his little car on to the main track, “this is the train. Seat yourself. I, myself, will take you.”

“And how much shall I pay? What is the fare to the interior?” I questioned.

The little man waved the idea aside with a polite gesture.

“The fare,” he said, “let us not speak of it. Let us forget it. How much money have you?”

“I have here,” I said, taking out a roll of bills, “fifty dollars——”

“And that is all you have?”

“Yes.”

“Then let that be the fare! Why should I ask more? Were I an American, I might; but in our Mexico, no. What you have we take; beyond that we ask nothing. Let us forget it. Good! And, now, would you prefer to travel first, second, or third class?”

“First class, please,” I said.

“Very good. Let it be so.” Here the little man took from his pocket a red label marked FIRST CLASS and tied it on the edge of the hand car. “It is more comfortable,” he said. “Now seat yourself, seize hold of these two handles in front of you. Move them back and forward, thus. Beyond that you need do nothing. The working of the car, other than the mere shoving of the handles, shall be my task. Consider yourself, in fact, señor, as my guest.”

We took our places. I applied myself, as directed, to the handles and the little car moved forward across the plain.

“A glorious prospect,” I said, as I gazed at the broad panorama.

“Magnifico! Is it not?” said my companion. “Alas! my poor Mexico. She wants nothing but water to make her the most fertile country of the globe! Water and soil, those only, and she would excel all others. Give her but water, soil, light, heat, capital and labour, and what could she not be! And what do we see: distraction, revolution, destruction – pardon me, will you please stop the car a moment? I wish to tear up a little of the track behind us.”

I did as directed. My companion descended and with a little bar that he took from beneath the car, unloosed a few of the rails of the light track and laid them beside the road.

“It is our custom,” he explained, as he climbed on board again. “We Mexicans, when we move to and fro, always tear up the track behind us. But what was I saying? Ah, yes – destruction, desolation, alas, our Mexico!”

He looked sadly up at the sky.

“You speak,” I said, “like a patriot. May I ask your name?”

“My name is Raymon,” he answered, with a bow, “Raymon Domenico y Miraflores de las Gracias.”

“And may I call you simply Raymon?”

“I shall be delirious with pleasure if you will do so,” he answered, “and dare I ask you, in return, your business in our beautiful country?”

The car, as we were speaking, had entered upon a long and gentle down grade across the plain, so that it ran without great effort on my part.

“Certainly,” I said. “I’m going into the interior to see General Villa!”

At the shock of the name, Raymon nearly fell off the car.

“Villa! General Francesco Villa! It is not possible!”

The little man was shivering with evident fear.

“See him! See Villa! Not possible. Let me show you a picture of him instead? But approach him – it is not possible! He shoots everybody at sight!”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I have a written safe conduct that protects me.”

“From whom?”

“Here,” I said, “look at them – I have two.”

Raymon took the documents I gave him and read aloud.

“‘The bearer is on an important mission connected with American rights in Mexico. If any one shoots him he will be held to a strict accountability. W. W.’ Ah! Excellent! He will be compelled to send in an itemised account. Excellent! And this other, let me see. ‘If anybody interferes with the bearer, I will knock his face in. T. R.’ Admirable! This is, if anything, better than the other for use in our country. It appeals to our quick Mexican natures. It is, as we say, simpatico. It touches us.”

“It is meant to,” I said.

“And may I ask,” said Raymon, “the nature of your business with Villa?”

“We are old friends,” I answered. “I used to know him years ago when he kept a Mexican cigar store in Buffalo. It occurred to me that I might be able to help the cause of peaceful intervention. I have already had a certain experience in Turkey. I am commissioned to make General Villa an offer.”

“I see,” said Raymon. “In that case, if we are to find Villa let us make all haste forward. And first we must direct ourselves yonder” – he pointed in a vague way towards the mountains, “where we must presently leave our car and go on foot, to the camp of General Carranza.”

“Carranza!” I exclaimed. “But he is fighting Villa!”

“Exactly. It is possible – not certain – but possible, that he knows where Villa is. In our Mexico when two of our generalistas are fighting in the mountains, they keep coming across one another. It is hard to avoid it.”

“Good,” I said. “Let us go forward.”

—

It was two days later that we reached Carranza’s camp in the mountains.

We found him just at dusk seated at a little table beneath a tree.

His followers were all about, picketing their horses and lighting fires.

The General, buried in a book before him, noticed neither the movements of his own men nor our approach.

I must say that I was surprised beyond measure at his appearance.

The popular idea of General Carranza as a rude bandit chief is entirely erroneous.

I saw before me a quiet, scholarly-looking man, bearing every mark of culture and refinement. His head was bowed over the book in front of him, which I noticed with astonishment and admiration was Todhunter’s Algebra. Close at his hand I observed a work on Decimal Fractions, while, from time to time, I saw the General lift his eyes and glance keenly at a multiplication table that hung on a bough beside him.

“You must wait a few moments,” said an aide de camp, who stood beside us. “The General is at work on a simultaneous equation!”

“Is it possible?” I said in astonishment.

The aide de camp smiled. “Soldiering today, my dear Señor,” he said, “is an exact science. On this equation will depend our entire food supply for the next week.”

“When will he get it done?” I asked anxiously.

“Simultaneously,” said the aide de camp.

The General looked up at this moment and saw us.

“Well?” he asked.

“Your Excellency,” said the aide de camp, “there is a stranger here on a visit of investigation to Mexico.”

“Shoot him!” said the General, and turned quickly to his work.

The aide de camp saluted.

“When?” he asked.

“As soon as he likes,” said the General.

“You are fortunate, indeed,” said the aide de camp in a tone of animation, as he led me away, still accompanied by Raymon. “You might have been kept waiting round for days. Let us get ready at once. You would like to be shot, would you not, smoking a cigarette, and standing beside your grave? Luckily, we have one ready. Now if you will wait a moment, I will bring the photographer and his machine. There is still light enough, I think. What would you like it called? The Fate of a Spy? That’s good, isn’t it? Our syndicate can always work up that into a two-reel film. All the rest of it – the camp, the mountains, the general, the funeral and so on – we can do tomorrow without you.”

He was all eagerness as he spoke.

“One moment,” I interrupted; “I am sure there is some mistake. I only wished to present certain papers and get a safe conduct from the General to go and see Villa.”

The aide de camp stopped abruptly.

“Ah!” he said. “You are not here for a picture. A thousand pardons. Give me your papers – one moment – I will return to the General and explain.”

He vanished, and Raymon and I waited in the growing dusk.

“No doubt the General supposed,” explained Raymon, as he lighted a cigarette, “that you were here for las machinas, the moving pictures.”

In a few minutes the aide de camp returned.

“Come,” he said, “the General will see you now.”

We returned to where we had left Carranza.

The General rose to meet me with outstretched hand and with a gesture of simple cordiality.

“You must pardon my error,” he said.

“Not at all,” I said.

“It appears you do not desire to be shot.”

“Not at present.”

“Later, perhaps,” said the General. “On your return, no doubt, provided,” he added with grave courtesy that sat well on him, “that you do return. My aide de camp shall make a note of it. But at present you wish to be guided to Francesco Villa?”

“If it is possible.”

“Quite easy. He is at present near here, in fact much nearer than he has any right to be.” The General frowned. “We found this spot first. The light is excellent and the mountains, as you have seen, are wonderful for our pictures. This is, by every rule of decency, our scenery. Villa has no right to it. This is our revolution” – the General spoke with rising animation – “not his. When you see the fellow, tell him from me – or tell his manager – that he must either move his revolution further away – or, by Heaven, I’ll – I’ll use force against him. But stop,” he checked himself. “You wish to see Villa. Good. You have only to follow the straight track over the mountain there. He is just beyond, at the little village in the hollow, El Corazon de las Quertas.”

The General shook hands and seated himself again at his work. The interview was at an end. We withdrew.

—

The next morning we followed without difficulty the path indicated. A few hours’ walk over the mountain pass brought us to a little straggling village of adobe houses, sleeping drowsily in the sun.

There were but few signs of life in its one street – a mule here and there tethered in the sun – and one or two Mexicans drowsily smoking in the shade.

One building only, evidently newly made, and of lumber, had a decidedly American appearance. Its doorway bore the sign GENERAL OFFICES OF THE COMPANY, and under it the notice KEEP OUT, while on one of its windows was painted GENERAL MANAGER and below it the legend NO ADMISSION, and on the other – SECRETARY’S OFFICE: GO AWAY.

We therefore entered at once.

“General Francesco Villa?” said a clerk, evidently American. “Yes, he’s here all right. At least, this is the office.”

“And where is the General?” I asked.

The clerk turned to an assistant at a desk in a corner of the room.

“Where’s Frank working this morning?” he asked.

“Over down in the gulch,” said the other, turning round for a moment. “There’s an attack of American cavalry this morning.”

“Oh, yes, I forgot,” said the chief clerk. “I thought it was the Indian Massacre, but I guess that’s for tomorrow. Go straight to the end of the street and turn left about a half a mile and you’ll find the boys down there.”

We thanked him and withdrew.

We passed across the open plaza, and went down a narrow side road, bordered here and there with adobe houses, and so out into the open country. Here the hills rose again and the road that we followed wound sharply round a turn into a deep gorge, bordered with rocks and sage brush. We had no sooner turned the curve of the road than we came upon a scene of great activity. Men in Mexican costume were running to and fro apparently arranging a sort of barricade at the side of the road. Others seemed to be climbing the rocks on the further side of the gorge, as if seeking points of advantage. I noticed that all were armed with rifles and machetes and presented a formidable appearance. Of Villa himself I could see nothing. But there was a grim reality about the glittering knives, the rifles and the maxim guns that I saw concealed in the sage brush beside the road.

“What is it?” I asked of a man who was standing idle, watching the scene from the same side of the road as ourselves.

“Attack of American cavalry,” he said nonchalantly.

“Here!” I gasped.

“Yep, in about ten minutes: soon as they are ready.”

“Where’s Villa?”

“It’s him they’re attacking. They chase him here, see! This is an ambush. Villa rounds on them right here, and they fight to a finish!”

“Great Heavens!” I exclaimed. “How do you know that?”

“Know it? Why because I seen it. Ain’t they been trying it out for three days? Why, I’d be in it myself only I’m off work – got a sore toe yesterday – horse stepped on it.”

All this was, of course, quite unintelligible to me.

“But it’s right here where they’re going to fight?” I asked.

“Sure,” said the American, as he moved carelessly aside, “as soon as the boss gets it all ready.”

I now noticed for the first time a heavy-looking man in an American tweed suit and a white plug hat, moving to and fro and calling out directions with an air of authority.

“Here!” he shouted, “what in h——l are you doing with that machine gun? You’ve got it clean out of focus. Here, José, come in closer – that’s right – steady there now, and don’t forget, at the second whistle you and Pete are dead. Here, you, Pete, how in thunder do you think you can die there? You’re all out of the picture and hidden by that there sage bush. That’s no place to die. And, boys, remember one thing, now, die slow. Ed” – he turned and called apparently to some one invisible behind the rocks – “when them two boys is killed, turn her round on them, slew her round good and get them centre focus. Now then, are you all set? Ready?”

At this moment the speaker turned and saw Raymon and myself. “Here, youse,” he shouted, “get further back; you’re in the picture. Or, say, no, stay right where you are. You,” he said, pointing to me, “stay right where you are and I’ll give you a dollar to just hold that horror; you understand; just keep on registering it. Don’t do another thing; just register that face.”

His words were meaningless to me. I had never known before that it was possible to make money by merely registering my face.

“No, no,” cried out Raymon, “my friend here is not wanting work. He has a message, a message of great importance for General Villa.”

“Well,” called back the boss, “he’ll have to wait. We can’t stop now. All ready, boys? One – two – now!”

And with that he put a whistle to his lips and blew a long shrill blast.

Then in a moment the whole scene was transformed. Rifle shots rang out from every crag and bush that bordered the gully.

A wild scamper of horses’ hoofs was heard and in a moment there came tearing down the road a whole troop of mounted Mexicans, evidently in flight, for they turned and fired from their saddles as they rode. The horses that carried them were wild with excitement and flecked with foam. The Mexican cavalry men shouted and veiled, brandishing their machetes and firing their revolvers. Here and there a horse and rider fell to the ground in a great whirl of sand and dust. In the thick of the press, a leader of ferocious aspect, mounted upon a gigantic black horse, waved his sombrero about his head.

“Villa – it is Villa!” cried Raymon, tense with excitement; “is he not magnifico? But look! Look – the Americanos! They are coming!”

It was a glorious sight to see them as they rode madly on the heels of the Mexicans – a whole company of American cavalry, their horses shoulder to shoulder, the men bent low in their saddles, their carbines gripped in their hands. They rode in squadrons and in line, not like the shouting, confused mass of the Mexicans – but steady, disciplined, irresistible.

On the right flank in front a grey-haired officer steadied the charging line. The excitement of it was maddening.

“Go it,” I shouted in uncontrollable emotion. “Your Mexicans are licked, Raymon, they’re no good!”

“But look!” said Raymon; “see – the ambush, the ambuscada!”

For as they reached the centre of the gorge in front of us the Mexicans suddenly checked their horses, bringing them plunging on their haunches in the dust, and then swung round upon their pursuers, while from every crag and bush at the side of the gorge the concealed riflemen sprang into view – and the sputtering of the machine guns swept the advancing column with a volley.

We could see the American line checked as with the buffet of a great wave, men and horses rolling in the road. Through the smoke one saw the grey-haired leader – dismounted, his uniform torn, his hat gone, but still brandishing his sword and calling his orders to his men, his face as one caught in a flash of sunlight, steady and fearless. His words I could not hear, but one saw the American cavalry, still unbroken, dismount, throw themselves behind their horses, and fire with steady aim into the mass of the Mexicans. We could see the Mexicans in front of where we stood falling thick and fast, in little huddled bundles of colour, kicking the sand. The man Pete had gone down right in the foreground and was breathing out his soul before our eyes.

“Well done,” I shouted. “Go to it, boys! You can lick ’em yet! Hurrah for the United States. Look, Raymon, look! They’ve shot down the crew of the machine guns. See, see – the Mexicans are turning to run – at ’em, boys! – they’re waving the American flag! There it is in all the thick of the smoke! Hark! There’s the bugle call to mount again! They’re going to charge again! Here they come!”

As the American cavalry came tearing forward, the Mexicans leaped from their places with gestures of mingled rage and terror as if about to break and run.

The battle, had it continued, could have but one end.

But at this moment we heard from the town behind us the long sustained note of a steam whistle blowing the hour of noon.

In an instant the firing ceased.

The battle stopped. The Mexicans picked themselves up off the ground and began brushing off the dust from their black velvet jackets. The American cavalry reined in their horses. Dead Pete came to life. General Villa and the American leader and a number of others strolled over towards the boss, who stood beside the fence vociferating his comments.

“That won’t do!” he was shouting. “That won’t do! Where in blazes was that infernal Sister of Mercy? Miss Jenkinson!” and he called to a tall girl, whom I now noticed for the first time among the crowd, wearing a sort of khaki costume and a short skirt and carrying a water bottle in a strap. “You never got into the picture at all. I want you right in there among the horses, under their feet.”

“Land sakes!” said the Sister of Mercy. “You ain’t no right to ask me to go in there among them horses and be trampled.”

“Ain’t you paid to be trampled?” said the manager angrily. Then as he caught sight of Villa he broke off and said: “Frank, you boys done fine. It’s going to be a good act, all right. But it ain’t just got the right amount of ginger in it yet. We’ll try her over once again, anyway.”

“Now, boys,” he continued, calling out to the crowd with a voice like a megaphone, “this afternoon at three-thirty—— Hospital scene. I only want the wounded, the doctors and the Sisters of Mercy. All the rest of youse is free till ten tomorrow – for the Indian Massacre. Everybody up for that.”

—

It was an hour or two later that I had my interview with Villa in a back room of the little posada, or inn, of the town. The General had removed his ferocious wig of straight black hair, and substituted a check suit for his war-like costume. He had washed the darker part of the paint off his face – in fact, he looked once again the same Frank Villa that I used to know when he kept his Mexican cigar store in Buffalo.

“Well, Frank,” I said, “I’m afraid I came down here under a misunderstanding.”

“Looks like it,” said the General, as he rolled a cigarette.

“And you wouldn’t care to go back even for the offer that I am commissioned to make – your old job back again, and half the profits on a new cigar to be called the Francesco Villa?”

The General shook his head.

“It sounds good, all right,” he said, “but this moving-picture business is better.”

“I see,” I said, “I hadn’t understood. I thought there really was a revolution here in Mexico.”

“No,” said Villa, shaking his head, “been no revolution down here for years – not since Diaz. The picture companies came in and took the whole thing over; they made us a fair offer – so much a reel straight out, and a royalty, and let us divide up the territory as we liked. The first film we done was the bombardment of Vera Cruz – say, that was a dandy – did you see it?”

“No,” I said.

“They had us all in that,” he continued. “I done an American Marine. Lots of people think it all real when they see it.”

“Why,” I said, “nearly everybody does. Even the President——”

“Oh, I guess he knows,” said Villa, “but, you see, there’s tons of money in it and it’s good for business, and he’s too decent a man to give it away. Say, I heard the boys saying there’s a war in Europe. I wonder what company got that up, eh? But I don’t believe it’ll draw. There ain’t the scenery for it that we have in Mexico.”

“Alas!” murmured Raymon. “Our beautiful Mexico. To what is she fallen! Needing only water, air, light and soil to make her——”

“Come on, Raymon,” I said, “let’s go home.”

TOC     INDEX

Over the Grape Juice

—or—
The Peace Makers

CHARACTERS

Mr. W. Jennings Bryan

Mr. Norman Angell

Dr. David Starr Jordan

A Lady Pacifist

A Philanthropist

A Negro President

An Eminent Divine

The Man on the Street

The General Public

And many others

“War,” said the Negro President of Haiti, “is a sad spectacle. It shames our polite civilisation.”

As he spoke he looked about him at the assembled company around the huge dinner table, glittering with cut glass and white linen, and brilliant with hot-house flowers.

“A sad spectacle,” he repeated, rolling his big eyes in his black and yellow face that was melancholy with the broken pathos of the African race.

The occasion was a notable one. It was the banquet of the Peace Makers’ Conference of 1917, and the company gathered about the board was as notable as it was numerous.

At the head of the table the genial Mr. Jennings Bryan presided as host, his broad countenance beaming with amiability, and a tall flagon of grape juice standing beside his hand. A little further down the table one saw the benevolent head and placid physiognomy of Mr. Norman Angell, bowed forward as if in deep calculation. Within earshot of Mr. Bryan, but not listening to him, one recognised without the slightest difficulty the great ichthyologist, Dr. David Starr Jordan, director in chief of the World’s Peace Foundation, while the bland features of a gentleman from China, and the presence of a yellow delegate from the Mosquito Coast, gave ample evidence that the company had been gathered together without reference to colour, race, religion, education, or other prejudices whatsoever.

But it would be out of the question to indicate by name the whole of the notable assemblage. Indeed, certain of the guests, while carrying in their faces and attitudes something strangely and elusively familiar, seemed in a sense to be nameless, and to represent rather types and abstractions than actual personalities. Such was the case, for instance, with a female member of the company, seated in a place of honour near the host, whose demure garb and gentle countenance seemed to indicate her as a Lady Pacifist, but denied all further identification. The mild, ecclesiastical features of a second guest, so entirely Christian in its expression as to be almost devoid of expression altogether, marked him at once as An Eminent Divine, but while puzzlingly suggestive of an actual and well-known person, seemed to elude exact recognition. His accent, when he presently spoke, stamped him as British and his garb was that of the Established Church. Another guest appeared to answer to the general designation of Capitalist or Philanthropist, and seemed from his prehensible grasp upon his knife and fork to typify the Money Power. In front of this guest, doubtless with a view of indicating his extreme wealth and the consideration in which he stood, was placed a floral decoration representing a broken bank, with the figure of a ruined depositor entwined among the debris.

Of these nameless guests, two individuals alone, from the very insignificance of their appearance, from their plain dress, unsuited to the occasion, and from the puzzled expression of their faces, seemed out of harmony with the galaxy of distinction which surrounded them. They seemed to speak only to one another, and even that somewhat after the fashion of an appreciative chorus to what the rest of the company were saying; while the manner in which they rubbed their hands together and hung upon the words of the other speakers in humble expectancy seemed to imply that they were present in the hope of gathering rather than shedding light. To these two humble and obsequious guests no attention whatever was paid, though it was understood, by those who knew, that their names were The General Public and The Man on the Street.

“A sad spectacle,” said the Negro President, and he sighed as he spoke. “One wonders if our civilisation, if our moral standards themselves, are slipping from us.” Then, half in reverie, or as if overcome by the melancholy of his own thought, he lifted a spoon from the table and slid it gently into the bosom of his faded uniform.

“Put back that spoon!” called The Lady Pacifist sharply.

“Pardon!” said the Negro President humbly, as he put it back. The humiliation of generations of servitude was in his voice.

“Come, come,” exclaimed Mr. Jennings Bryan cheerfully, “try a little more of the grape juice?”

“Does it intoxicate?” asked the President.

“Never,” answered Mr. Bryan. “Rest assured of that. I can guarantee it. The grape is picked in the dark. It is then carried, still in the dark, to the testing room. There every particle of alcohol is removed. Try it.”

“Thank you,” said the President. “I am no longer thirsty.”

“Will anybody have some more of the grape juice?” asked Mr. Bryan, running his eye along the ranks of the guests.

No one spoke.

“Will anybody have some more ground peanuts?”

No one moved.

“Or does anybody want any more of the shredded tan bark? No? Or will somebody have another spoonful of sunflower seeds?”

There was still no sign of assent.

“Very well, then,” said Mr. Bryan, “the banquet, as such, is over, and we now come to the more serious part of our business. I need hardly tell you that we are here for a serious purpose. We are here to do good. That I know is enough to enlist the ardent sympathy of everybody present.”

There was a murmur of assent.

“Personally,” said The Lady Pacifist, “I do nothing else.”

“Neither do I,” said the guest who has been designated The Philanthropist, “whether I am producing oil, or making steel, or building motor cars.”

“Does he build motor cars?” whispered the humble person called The Man on the Street to his fellow, The General Public.

“All great philanthropists do things like that,” answered his friend. “They do it as a social service, so as to benefit humanity; any money they make is just an accident. They don’t really care about it a bit. Listen to him. He’s going to say so.”

“Indeed, our business itself,” The Philanthropist continued, while his face lighted up with unselfish enthusiasm, “our business itself——”

“Hush, hush!” said Mr. Bryan gently. “We know——”

“Our business itself,” persisted The Philanthropist, “is one great piece of philanthropy.”

Tears gathered in his eyes.

“Come, come,” said Mr. Bryan firmly, “we must get to business. Our friend here,” he continued, turning to the company at large and indicating the Negro President on his right, “has come to us in great distress. His beautiful island of Haiti is and has been for many years overwhelmed in civil war. Now he learns that not only Haiti, but also Europe is engulfed in conflict. He has heard that we are making proposals for ending the war – indeed, I may say are about to declare that the war in Europe must stop – I think I am right, am I not, my friends?”

There was a general chorus of assent.

“Naturally then,” continued Mr. Bryan, “our friend the President of Haiti, who is overwhelmed with grief at what has been happening in his island, has come to us for help. That is correct, is it not?”

“That’s it, gentleman,” said the Negro President, in a voice of some emotion, wiping the sleeve of his faded uniform across his eyes. “The situation is quite beyond my control. In fact,” he added, shaking his head pathetically as he relapsed into more natural speech, “dis hyah chile, gen’l’n, is clean done beat with it. Dey ain’t doin’ nuffin’ on the island but shootin’, burnin’, and killin’ somethin’ awful. Lawd a mussy! it’s just like a real civilized country, all right, now. Down in our island we coloured people is feeling just as bad as youse did when all them poor white folks was murdered on the Lusitania!”

But the Negro President had no sooner used the words, “murdered on the Lusitania,” than a chorus of dissent and disapproval broke out all down the table.

“My dear sir, my dear sir,” protested Mr. Bryan, “pray moderate your language a little, if you please. Murdered? Oh, dear, dear me, how can we hope to advance the cause of peace if you insist on using such terms?”

“Ain’t it that? Wasn’t it murder?” asked the President, perplexed.

“We are all agreed here,” said The Lady Pacifist, “that it is far better to call it an incident. We speak of the ‘Lusitania Incident,’” she added didactically, “just as one speaks of the Arabic Incident, and the Cavell Incident, and other episodes of the sort. It makes it so much easier to forget.”

“True, quite true,” murmured The Eminent Divine, “and then one must remember that there are always two sides to everything. There are two sides to murder. We must not let ourselves forget that there is always the murderer’s point of view to consider.”

But by this time the Negro President was obviously confused and out of his depth. The conversation had reached a plane of civilisation which was beyond his reach.

The genial Mr. Bryan saw fit to come to his rescue.

“Never mind,” said Mr. Bryan soothingly. “Our friends here will soon settle all your difficulties for you. I’m going to ask them, one after the other, to advise you. They will tell you the various means that they are about to apply to stop the war in Europe, and you may select any that you like for your use in Haiti. We charge you nothing for it, except of course your fair share of the price of this grape juice and the shredded nuts.”

The President nodded.

“I am going to ask our friend on my right” – and here Mr. Bryan indicated The Lady Pacifist – “to speak first.”

There was a movement of general expectancy and the two obsequious guests at the foot of the table, of whom mention has been made, were seen to nudge one another and whisper, “Isn’t this splendid?”

“You are not asking me to speak first merely because I am a woman?” asked The Lady Pacifist.

“Oh no,” said Mr. Bryan, with charming tact.

“Very good,” said the lady, adjusting her glasses. “As for stopping the war, I warn you, as I have warned the whole world, that it may be too late. They should have called me in sooner. That was the mistake. If they had sent for me at once and had put my picture in the papers both in England and Germany with the inscription ‘The True Woman of Today,’ I doubt if any of the men who looked at it would have felt that it was worth while to fight. But, as things are, the only advice I can give is this. Everybody is wrong (except me). The Germans are a very naughty people. But the Belgians are worse. It was very, very wicked of the Germans to bombard the houses of the Belgians. But how naughty of the Belgians to go and sit in their houses while they were bombarded. It is to that that I attribute – with my infallible sense of justice – the dreadful loss of life. So you see the only conclusion that I can reach is that everybody is very naughty and that the only remedy would be to appoint me a committee – me and a few others, though the others don’t really matter – to make a proper settlement. I hope I make myself clear.”

The Negro President shook his head and looked mystified.

“Us coloured folks,” he said, “wouldn’t quite understand that. We done got the idea that sometimes there’s such a thing as a quarrel that is right and just.” The President’s melancholy face lit up with animation and his voice rose to the sonorous vibration of the negro preacher. “We learn that out of the Bible, we coloured folks – we learn to smite the ungodly——”

“Pray, pray,” said Mr. Bryan soothingly, “don’t introduce religion, let me beg of you. That would be fatal. We peace-makers are all agreed that there must be no question of religion raised.”

“Exactly so,” murmured The Eminent Divine, “my own feelings exactly. The name of – of – the Deity should never be brought in. It inflames people. Only a few weeks ago I was pained and grieved to the heart to hear a woman in one of our London streets raving that the German Emperor was a murderer – her child had been killed that night by a bomb from a Zeppelin – she had its body in a cloth hugged to her breast as she talked – Thank Heaven, they keep these things out of the newspapers – and she was calling down God’s vengeance on the Emperor. Most deplorable! Poor creature, unable, I suppose, to realize the Emperor’s exalted situation, his splendid lineage, the wonderful talent with which he can draw pictures of the apostles with one hand while he writes an appeal to his Mohammedan comrades with the other. I dined with him once,” he added, in modest afterthought.

“I dined with him, too,” said Dr. Jordan. “I shall never forget the impression he made. As he entered the room accompanied by his staff, the Emperor looked straight at me and said to one of his aides, ‘Who is this?’ ‘This is Dr. Jordan,’ said the officer. The Emperor put out his hand. ‘So this is Dr. Jordan,’ he said. I never witnessed such an exhibition of brain power in my life. He had seized my name in a moment and held it for three seconds with all the tenaciousness of a Hohenzollern.”

“But may I,” continued the Director of the World’s Peace, “add a word to what has been said to make it still clearer to our friend? I will try to make it as simple as one of my lectures in Ichthyology. I know of nothing simpler than that.”

Everybody murmured assent. The Negro President put his hand to his ear.

“Theology?” he said.

“Ichthyology,” said Dr. Jordan. “It is better. But just listen to this. War is waste. It destroys the tissues. It is exhausting and fatiguing and may in extreme cases lead to death.”

The learned gentleman sat back in his seat and took a refreshing drink of rain water from a glass beside him, while a murmur of applause ran round the table. It was known and recognised that the speaker had done more than any living man to establish the fact that war is dangerous, that gunpowder, if heated, explodes, that fire burns, that fish swim, and other great truths without which the work of the peace endowment would appear futile.

“And now,” said Mr. Bryan, looking about him with the air of a successful toastmaster, “I am going to ask our friend here to give us his views.”

Renewed applause bore witness to the popularity of The Philanthropist, whom Mr. Bryan had indicated with a wave of his hand.

The Philanthropist cleared his throat.

“In our business——” he began.

Mr. Bryan plucked him gently by the sleeve. “Never mind your business just now,” he whispered.

The Philanthropist bowed in assent and continued: “I will come at once to the subject. My own feeling is that the true way to end war is to try to spread abroad in all directions goodwill and brotherly love.”

“Hear, hear!” cried the assembled company.

“And the great way to inspire brotherly love all round is to keep on getting richer and richer till you have so much money that every one loves you. Money, gentlemen, is a glorious thing.”

At this point Mr. Norman Angell, who had remained silent hitherto, raised his head from his chest and murmured drowsily:

“Money, money, there isn’t anything but money. Money is the only thing there is. Money and property, property and money. If you destroy it, it is gone; if you smash it, it isn’t there. All the rest is a great illus——”

And with this he dozed off again into silence.

“Our poor Angell is asleep again,” said The Lady Pacifist.

Mr. Bryan shook his head. “He’s been that way ever since the war began – sleeps all the time, and keeps muttering that there isn’t any war, that people only imagine it, in fact that it is all an illusion. But I fear we are interrupting you,” he added, turning to The Philanthropist.

“I was just saying,” continued that gentleman, “that you can do anything with money. You can stop a war with it if you have enough of it, in ten minutes. I don’t care what kind of war it is, or what the people are fighting for, whether they are fighting for conquest or fighting for their homes and their children, I can stop it, stop it absolutely by my grip on money, without firing a shot or incurring the slightest personal danger.”

The Philanthropist spoke with the greatest emphasis, reaching out his hand and clutching his fingers in the air.

“Yes, gentlemen,” he went on, “I am speaking here not of theories but of facts. This is what I am doing and what I mean to do. You’ve no idea how amenable people are, especially poor people, struggling people, those with ties and responsibilities, to the grip of money. I went the other day to a man I know, the head of a bank, where I keep a little money – just a fraction of what I make, gentlemen, a mere nothing to me but everything to this man because he is still not rich and is only fighting his way up. ‘Now,’ I said to him, ‘you are English, are you not?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ he answered. ‘And I understand you mean to help along the loan to England with all the power of your bank.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I mean it and I’ll do it.’ ‘Then I’ll tell you what,’ I said, ‘you lend one penny, or help to lend one penny, to the people of England or the people of France, and I’ll break you, I’ll grind you into poverty – you and your wife and children and all that belongs to you.’”

The Philanthropist had spoken with so great an intensity that there was a deep stillness over the assembled company. The Negro President had straightened up in his seat, and as he looked at the speaker there was something in his erect back and his stern face and the set of his faded uniform that somehow turned him, African though he was, into a soldier.

“Sir,” he said, with his eye riveted on the speaker’s face, “what happened to that banker man?”

“The fool!” said The Philanthropist, “he wouldn’t hear – he defied me – he said that there wasn’t money enough in all my business to buy the soul of a single Englishman. I had his directors turn him from his bank that day, and he’s enlisted, the scoundrel, and is gone to the war. But his wife and family are left behind: they shall learn what the grip of the money power is – learn it in misery and poverty.”

“My good sir,” said the Negro President slowly and impressively, “do you know why your plan of stopping war wouldn’t work in Haiti?”

“No,” said The Philanthropist.

“Because our black people there would kill you. Whichever side they were on, whatever they thought of the war – they would take a man like you and lead you out into the town square, and stand you up against the side of an adobe house, and they’d shoot you. Come down to Haiti, if you doubt my words, and try it.”

“Thank you,” said The Philanthropist, resuming his customary manner of undisturbed gentleness, “I don’t think I will. I don’t think somehow that I could do business in Haiti.”

The passage at arms between the Negro President and The Philanthropist had thrown a certain confusion into the hitherto agreeable gathering. Even The Eminent Divine was seen to be slowly shaking his head from side to side, an extreme mark of excitement which he never permitted himself except under stress of passion. The two humble guests at the foot of the table were visibly perturbed. “Say, I don’t like that about the banker,” squeaked one of them. “That ain’t right, eh, what? I don’t like it.”

Mr. Bryan was aware that the meeting was in danger of serious disorder. He rapped loudly on the table for attention. When he had at last obtained silence, he spoke.

“I have kept my own views to the last,” he said, “because I cannot but feel that they possess a peculiar importance. There is, my dear friends, every prospect that within a measurable distance of time I shall be able to put them into practice. I am glad to be able to announce to you the practical certainty that four years from now I shall be President of the United States.”

At this announcement the entire company broke into spontaneous and heartfelt applause. It had long been felt by all present that Mr. Bryan was certain to be President of the United States if only he ran for the office often enough, but that the glad moment had actually arrived seemed almost too good for belief.

“Yes, my friends,” continued the genial host, “I have just had a communication from my dear friend Wilson, in which he tells me that he, himself, will never contest the office again. The Presidency, he says, interfered too much with his private life. In fact, I am authorised to state in confidence that his wife forbids him to run.”

“But, my dear Jennings,” interposed Dr. Jordan thoughtfully, “what about Mr. Hughes and Colonel Roosevelt?”

“In that quarter my certainty in the matter is absolute. I have calculated it out mathematically that I am bound to obtain, in view of my known principles, the entire German vote – which carries with it all the great breweries of the country – the whole Austrian vote, all the Hungarians of the sugar refineries, the Turks – in fact, my friends, I am positive that either Mr. Hughes or Colonel Roosevelt, if he dares to run, will carry nothing but the American vote!”

Loud applause greeted this announcement.

“And now let me explain my plan, which I believe is shared by a great number of sane, and other, pacifists in the country. All the great nations of the world will be invited to form a single international force consisting of a fleet so powerful and so well equipped that no single nation will dare to bid it defiance.”

Mr. Bryan looked about him with a glance of something like triumph. The whole company, and especially the Negro President, were now evidently interested. “Say,” whispered The General Public to his companion, “this sounds like the real thing? Eh, what? Isn’t he a peach of a thinker?”

“What flag will your fleet fly?” asked the Negro President.

“The flags of all nations,” said Mr. Bryan.

“Where will you get your sailors?”

“From all the nations,” said Mr. Bryan, “but the uniform will be all the same, a plain white blouse with blue insertions, and white duck trousers with the word PEACE stamped across the back of them in big letters. This will help to impress the sailors with the almost sacred character of their functions.”

“But what will the fleet’s functions be?” asked the President.

“Whenever a quarrel arises,” explained Mr. Bryan, “it will be submitted to a Board. Who will be on this Board, in addition to myself, I cannot as yet say. But it’s of no consequence. Whenever a case is submitted to the Board it will think it over for three years. It will then announce its decision – if any. After that, if any one nation refuses to submit, its ports will be bombarded by the Peace Fleet.”

Rapturous expressions of approval greeted Mr. Bryan’s explanation.

“But I don’t understand,” said the Negro President, turning his puzzled face to Mr. Bryan. “Would some of these ships be British ships?”

“Oh, certainly. In view of the dominant size of the British Navy about one-quarter of all the ships would be British ships.”

“And the sailors British sailors?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Bryan, “except that they would be wearing international breeches – a most important point.”

“And if the Board, made up of all sorts of people, were to give a decision against England, then these ships – British ships with British sailors – would be sent to bombard England itself.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Bryan. “Isn’t it beautifully simple? And to guarantee its working properly,” he continued, “just in case we have to use the fleet against England, we’re going to ask Admiral Jellicoe himself to take command.”

The Negro President slowly shook his head.

“Marse Bryan,” he said, “you notice what I say. I know Marse Jellicoe. I done seen him lots of times when he was just a lieutenant, down in the harbor of Port au Prince. If youse folks put up this proposition to Marse Jellicoe, he’ll just tell the whole lot of you to go plumb to——”

But the close of the sentence was lost by a sudden interruption. A servant entered with a folded telegram in his hand.

“For me?” said Mr. Bryan, with a winning smile.

“For the President of Haiti, sir,” said the man.

The President took the telegram and opened it clumsily with his finger and thumb amid a general silence. Then he took from his pocket and adjusted a huge pair of spectacles with a horn rim and began to read:

“Well, I ’clare to goodness!” he said.

“Who is it from?” said Mr. Bryan. “Is it anything about me?”

The Negro President shook his head. “It’s from Haiti,” he said, “from my military secretary.”

“Read it, read it,” cried the company.

“Come back home right away,” read out the Negro President, word by word. “Everything is all right again. Joint British and American Naval Squadron came into harbour yesterday, landed fifty bluejackets and one midshipman. Perfect order. Banks open. Bars open. Mule cars all running again. Things fine. Going to have big dance at your palace. Come right back.”

The Negro President paused.

“Gentlemen,” he said, in a voice of great and deep relief. “This lets me out. I guess I won’t stay for the rest of the discussion. I’ll start for Haiti. I reckon there’s something in this Armed Force business after all.”

TOC     INDEX

The White House
from Without In

Being Extracts from the Diary of a President of the United States.

Monday. Rose early. Swept out the White House. Cooked breakfast. Prayers. Sat in the garden reading my book on Congressional Government. What a wonderful thing it is! Why doesn’t Congress live up to it? Certainly a lovely morning. Sat for some time thinking how beautiful the world is. I defy any one to make a better. Afterwards determined to utter this defiance publicly and fearlessly. Shall put in list of fearless defiances for July speeches. Shall probably use it in Oklahoma.

9.30 a.m. Bad news. British ship Torpid torpedoed by a torpedo. Tense atmosphere all over Washington. Retreated instantly to the pigeonhouse and shut the door. I must think. At all costs. And no one shall hurry me.

10 a.m. Have thought. Came out of pigeonhouse. It is all right. I wonder I didn’t think of it sooner. The point is perfectly simple. If Admiral Tirpitz torpedoed the Torpid with a torpedo, where’s the torpedo Admiral Tirpitz torped? In other words, how do they know it’s a torpedo? The idea seems absolutely overwhelming. Wrote notes at once to England and to Germany.

11 a.m. Gave out my idea to the Ass Press. Tense feeling at Washington vanished instantly and utterly. Feeling now loose. In fact everything splendid. Money became easy at once. Marks rose. Exports jumped. Gold reserve swelled.

3 p.m. Slightly bad news. Appears there is trouble in the Island of Piccolo Domingo. Looked it up on map. Is one of the smaller West Indies. We don’t own it. I imagine Roosevelt must have overlooked it. An American has been in trouble there: was refused a drink after closing time and burnt down saloon. Is now in jail. Shall send at once our latest battleship – The Woodrow – new design, both ends alike, escorted by double-ended coal barges The Wilson, The President, The Professor and The Thinker. Shall take firm stand on American rights. Piccolo Domingo must either surrender the American alive, or give him to us dead.

Tuesday. A lovely day. Rose early. Put flowers in all the vases. Laid a wreath of early japonica beside my egg-cup on the breakfast table. Cabinet to morning prayers and breakfast. Prayed for better guidance.

9 a.m. Trouble, bad trouble. First of all Roosevelt has an interview in the morning papers in which he asks why I don’t treat Germany as I treat Piccolo Domingo. Now, what a fool question! Can’t he see why? Roosevelt never could reason. Bryan also has an interview: wants to know why I don’t treat Piccolo Domingo as I treat Germany? Doesn’t he know why?

Result: strained feeling in Washington. Morning mail bad.

10 a.m. British Admiralty communication. To the pigeonhouse at once. They offer to send piece of torpedo, fragment of ship and selected portions of dead American citizens.

Have come out of pigeonhouse. Have cabled back: How do they know it is a torpedo, how do they know it is a fragment, how do they know he was an American, who said he was dead?

My answer has helped. Feeling in Washington easier at once. General buoyancy. Loans and discounts doubled.

As I expected – a note from Germany. Chancellor very explicit. Says not only did they not torpedo the Torpid, but that on the day (whenever it was) that the steamer was torpedoed they had no submarines at sea, no torpedoes in their submarines, and nothing really explosive in their torpedoes. Offers, very kindly, to fill in the date of his sworn statement as soon as we furnish accurate date of incident. Adds that his own theory is that the Torpid was sunk by somebody throwing rocks at it from the shore. Wish, somehow, that he had not added this argument.

More bad news: Further trouble in Mexico. Appears General Villa is not dead. He has again crossed the border, shot up a saloon and retreated to the mountains of Huahuapax-tapetl. Have issued instructions to have the place looked up on the map and send the whole army to it, but without in any way violating the neutrality of Mexico.

Late cables from England. Two more ships torpedoed. American passenger lost. Name of Roosevelt. Christian name not Theodore but William. Cabled expression of regret.

Wednesday. Rose sad at heart. Did not work in garden. Tried to weed a little grass along the paths but simply couldn’t. This is a cruel job. How was it that Roosevelt grew stout on it? His nature must be different from mine. What a miserable nature he must have.

Received delegations. From Kansas, on the prospect of the corn crop: they said the number of hogs in Kansas will double. Congratulated them. From Idaho, on the blight on the root crop: they say there will soon not be a hog left in Idaho. Expressed my sorrow. From Michigan: beet sugar growers urging a higher percentage of sugar in beets. Took firm ground: said I stand where I stood and I stood where I stand. They went away dazzled, delighted.

Mail and Telegrams. British Admiralty. Torpid Incident. Send further samples. Fragment of valise, parts of cow-hide trunk (dead passenger’s luggage) which, they say, could not have been made except in Nevada.

Cabled that the incident is closed and that I stand where I stood and that I am what I am. Situation in Washington relieved at once. General feeling that I shall not make war.

Second Cable from England. The Two New Cases. Claim both ships torpedoed. Offer proofs. Situation very grave. Feeling in Washington very tense. Roosevelt out with a signed statement, What Will the President Do? Surely he knows what I will do.

Cables from Germany. Chancellor now positive as to Torpid. Sworn evidence that she was sunk by some one throwing a rock. Sample of rock to follow. Communication also from Germany regarding the New Cases. Draws attention to fact that all of the crews who were not drowned were saved. An important point. Assures this government that everything ascertainable will be ascertained, but that pending juridical verification any imperial exemplification must be held categorically allegorical. How well these Germans write!

Thursday. A dull morning. Up early and read Congressional Government. Breakfast. Prayers. We prayed for the United States, for the citizens, for the Congress (both houses, especially the Senate), and for the Cabinet. Is there any one else?

Trouble. Accident to naval flotilla en route to Piccolo Domingo. The new battleship The Woodrow has broken down. Fault in structure. Tried to go with both ends first. Appeared impossible. Went sideways a little and is sinking. Wireless from the barges The Wilson, The Thinker and others. They are standing by. They wire that they will continue to stand by. Why on earth do they do that? Shall cable to them to act.

Feeling in Washington gloomy.

Friday. Rose early and tried to sweep out the White House. Had little heart for it. The dust gathers in the corners. How did Roosevelt manage to keep it so clean? An idea! I must get a vacuum cleaner! But where can I get a vacuum? Took my head in my hands and thought: problem solved. Can get the vacuum all right.

Good news. Villa dead again. Feeling in Washington relieved.

Trouble. Ship torpedoed. News just came from the French Government. Full rigged ship, The Ping-Yan, sailing out of Ping Pong, French Cochin China, and cleared for Hoo-Ra, Indo-Arabia. No American citizens on board, but one American citizen with ticket left behind on wharf at Ping Pong. Claims damages. Complicated case. Feeling in Washington much disturbed. Sterling exchange fell and wouldn’t get up. French Admiralty urge treaty of 1778. German Chancellor admits torpedoing ship but denies that it was full rigged. Captain of submarine drew picture of ship as it sank. His picture unlike any known ship of French navy.

Saturday. A day of trouble. Villa came to life and crossed the border. Our army looking for him in Mexico: inquiry by wire – “Are they authorised to come back?” General Carranza asks leave to invade Canada. Piccolo Domingo expedition has failed. The Woodrow is still sinking. The President and The Thinker cable that they are still standing by and will continue to stand where they have stood. British Admiralty sending shipload of fragments. German Admiralty sending shipload of affidavits. Feeling in Washington depressed to the lowest depths. Sterling sinking. Marks falling. Exports dwindling.

An idea: Is this job worth while? I wonder if Billy Sunday would take it?

Spent the evening watering the crocuses. Whoever is here a year from now is welcome to them. They tell me that Hughes hates crocuses. Watered them very carefully.

Sunday. Good news! Just heard from Princeton University. I am to come back, and everything will be forgiven and forgotten.

TOC     INDEX

Movies & Motors,
Men & Women

Madeline of the Movies

A Photoplay Done Back into the Words

(Explanatory Note: In writing this I ought to explain that I am a tottering old man of forty-six. I was born too soon to understand moving pictures. They go too fast. I can’t keep up. In my young days we used a magic lantern. It showed Robinson Crusoe in six scenes. It took all evening to show them. When it was done the hall was filled with black smoke and the audience quite unstrung with excitement. What I set down here represents my thoughts as I sit in front of a moving picture photoplay and interpret it as best I can.)

Flick, flick, flick . . . I guess it must be going to begin now, but it’s queer the people don’t stop talking: how can they expect to hear the pictures if they go on talking?

Now it’s off. Passed by the Board of ——. Ah, this looks interesting – passed by the board of – wait till I adjust my spectacles and read what it——

It’s gone. Never mind, here’s something else, let me see – CAST OF CHARACTERS – Oh, yes – let’s see who they are – Madeline Meadowlark, a young something – Edward Dangerfield, a – a what? Ah, yes, a roo – at least, it’s spelt r-o-u-e, that must be roo all right – But wait till I see what that is that’s written across the top – Madeline Meadowlark, or, Alone in a Great City. I see, that’s the title of it. I wonder which of the characters is alone. I guess not Madeline: she’d hardly be alone in a place like that. I imagine it’s more likely Edward Dangerous the Roo. A roo would probably be alone a great deal, I should think. Let’s see what the other characters are – John Holdfast, a something; Farmer Meadowlark, Mrs. Meadowlark, his something——

Pshaw, I missed the others, but never mind; flick, flick, it’s beginning – What’s this? A bedroom, eh! Looks like a girl’s bedroom – pretty poor sort of place. I wish the picture would keep still a minute – in Robinson Crusoe it all stayed still and one could sit and look at it, the blue sea and the green palm trees and the black footprints in the yellow sand – but this blamed thing keeps rippling and flickering all the time – Ha! there’s the girl herself – come into her bedroom. My! I hope she doesn’t start to undress in it – that would be fearfully uncomfortable with all these people here. No, she’s not undressing – she’s gone and opened the cupboard. What’s that she’s doing – taking out a milk jug and a glass – empty, eh? I guess it must be, because she seemed to hold it upside down. Now she’s picked up a sugar bowl – empty, too, eh? – and a cake tin, and that’s empty – What on earth does she take them all out for if they’re empty? Why can’t she speak? I think – hullo – who’s this coming in? Pretty hard looking sort of woman – what’s she got in her hand? – some sort of paper, I guess – she looks like a landlady, I shouldn’t wonder if . . .

Flick, flick! Say! Look there on the screen:

You Owe Me Three Weeks’ Rent.

Oh, I catch on! That’s what the landlady says, eh? Say! that’s a mighty smart way to indicate it, isn’t it? I was on to that in a minute – flick, flick – hullo, the landlady’s vanished – what’s the girl doing now – say, she’s praying! Look at her face! Doesn’t she look religious, eh?

Flick, flick!

Oh, look, they’ve put her face, all by itself, on the screen. My! what a big face she’s got when you see it like that.

She’s in her room again – she’s taking off her jacket – by Gee! She is going to bed! Here, stop the machine; it doesn’t seem—— Flick, flick!

Well, look at that! She’s in bed, all in one flick, and fast asleep! Something must have broken in the machine and missed out a chunk. There! she’s asleep all right – looks as if she was dreaming. Now it’s sort of fading. I wonder how they make it do that? I guess they turn the wick of the lamp down low: that was the way in Robinson Crusoe—— Flick, flick!

Hullo! where on earth is this – farmhouse, I guess – must be away upstate somewhere – who on earth are these people? Old man – white whiskers – old lady at a spinning-wheel – see it go, eh? Just like real! And a young man – that must be John Holdfast – and a girl with her hand in his. Why! Say! it’s the girl, the same girl, Madeline – only what’s she doing away off here at this farm – how did she get clean back from the bedroom to this farm? Flick, flick! What’s this.

No, John, I Cannot Marry You. I Must Devote My Life to My Music.

Who says that? What music? Here, stop——

It’s all gone. What’s this new place? Flick, flick, looks like a street. Say! see the street-car coming along – well! say! isn’t that great? A street-car! And here’s Madeline. How on earth did she get back from the old farm all in a second? Got her street things on – that must be music under her arm – I wonder where – hullo – who’s this man in a silk hat and swell coat? Gee! he’s well dressed. See him roll his eyes at Madeline! He’s lifting his hat – I guess he must be Edward Something, the Roo – only a roo could dress as well as he does – he’s going to speak to her——

Sir, I Do Not Know You. Let Me Pass

Oh, I see! The Roo mistook her; he thought she was somebody that he knew! And she wasn’t! I catch on! It gets easy to understand these pictures once you’re on.

Flick, flick—— Oh, say, stop! I missed a piece – where is she? Outside a street door – she’s pausing a moment outside – that was lucky her pausing like that – it just gave me time to read EMPLOYMENT BUREAU on the door. Gee! I read it quick.

Flick, flick! Where is it now? – oh, I see, she’s gone in – she’s in there – this must be the Bureau, eh? There’s Madeline going up to a desk.

No, We Have Told You Before We Have Nothing . . .

Pshaw! I read too slow – she’s on the street again. Flick, flick!

No, she isn’t – she’s back in her room – cupboard still empty – no milk – no sugar—— Flick, flick!

Kneeling down to pray – my! but she’s religious – flick, flick – now she’s on the street – got a letter in her hand – what’s the address—— Flick, flick!

Gee! They’ve put it right on the screen! The whole letter!

Flick, flick – here’s Madeline again on the street with the letter still in her hand – she’s gone to a letter box with it – why doesn’t she post it? What’s stopping her?

I Cannot Tell Them of My Failure.
It Would Break Their . . .

Break their what? They slide these things along altogether too quick – anyway, she won’t post it – I see – she’s torn it up—— Flick, flick!

Where is it now? Another street – seems like evening – that’s a restaurant, I guess – say, it looks a swell place – see the people getting out of the motor and going in – and another lot right after them – there’s Madeline – she’s stopped outside the window – she’s looking in – it’s starting to snow! Hullo! here’s a man coming along! Why, it’s the Roo; he’s stopping to talk to her, and pointing in at the restaurant—— Flick, flick!

Let Me Take You in Here to Dinner.

Oh, I see! The Roo says that! My! I’m getting on to the scheme of these things – the Roo is going to buy her some dinner! That’s decent of him. He must have heard about her being hungry up in her room – say, I’m glad he came along. Look, there’s a waiter come out to the door to show them in – what! she won’t go! Say! I don’t understand! Didn’t it say he offered to take her in? Flick, flick!

I Would Rather Die than Eat It.

Gee! Why’s that? What are all the audience applauding for? I must have missed something! Flick, flick!

Oh, blazes! I’m getting lost! Where is she now? Back in her room – flick, flick – praying – flick, flick! She’s out on the street! – flick, flick! – in the employment bureau – flick, flick! – out of it – flick – darn the thing! It changes too much – where is it all? What is it all——? Flick, flick!

Now it’s back at the old farm – I understand that all right, anyway! Same kitchen – same old man – same old woman – she’s crying – who’s this? – man in a sort of uniform – oh, I see, rural postal delivery – oh, yes, he brings them their letters – I see——

No, Mr. Meadowlark, I Am Sorry, I Have Still No Letter for You . . .

Flick! It’s gone! Flick, flick – it’s Madeline’s room again – what’s she doing? – writing a letter? – no, she’s quit writing – she’s tearing it up——

I Cannot Write. It Would Break Their . . .

Flick – missed it again! Break their something or other—— Flick, flick!

Now it’s the farm again – oh, yes, that’s the young man John Holdfast – he’s got a valise in his hand – he must be going away – they’re shaking hands with him – he’s saying something——

I Will Find Her for You if I Have to Search all New York.

He’s off – there he goes through the gate – they’re waving good-bye – flick – it’s a railway depot – flick – it’s New York – say! That’s the Grand Central Depot! See the people buying tickets! My! isn’t it life-like? – and there’s John – he’s got here all right – I hope he finds her room——

The picture’s changed – where is it now? Oh, yes, I see – Madeline and the Roo – outside a street entrance to some place – he’s trying to get her to come in – what’s that on the door? Oh, yes, DANCE HALL—— Flick, flick!

Well, say, that must be the inside of the dance hall – they’re dancing – see, look, look, there’s one of the girls going to get up and dance on the table.

Flick! Darn it! – they’ve cut it off – it’s outside again – it’s Madeline and the Roo – she’s saying something to him – my! doesn’t she look proud——?

I Will Die Rather than Dance.

Isn’t she splendid! Hear the audience applaud! Flick – it’s changed – it’s Madeline’s room again – that’s the landlady – doesn’t she look hard, eh? What’s this—— Flick!

If You Cannot Pay You Must Leave Tonight.

Flick, flick – it’s Madeline – she’s out in the street – it’s snowing – she’s sat down on a doorstep – say, see her face, isn’t it pathetic? There! they’ve put her face all by itself on the screen. See her eyes move! Flick, flick!

Who’s this? Where is it? Oh, yes, I get it – it’s John – at a police station – he’s questioning them – how grave they look, eh? Flick, flick!

Have You Seen a Girl in New York?

I guess that’s what he asks them, eh? Flick, flick——

No, We Have Not.

Too bad – flick – it’s changed again – it’s Madeline on the doorstep – she’s fallen asleep – oh, say, look at that man coming near to her on tiptoes, and peeking at her – why, it’s Edward, it’s the Roo – but he doesn’t waken her – what does it mean? What’s he after? Flick, flick——

Hullo – what’s this? – it’s night – what’s this huge dark thing all steel, with great ropes against the sky – it’s Brooklyn Bridge – at midnight – there’s a woman on it! It’s Madeline – see! see! She’s going to jump – stop her! Stop her! Flick, flick——

Hullo! she didn’t jump after all – there she is again on the doorstep – asleep – how could she jump over Brooklyn Bridge and still be asleep? – I don’t catch on – or, oh, yes, I do – she dreamed it – I see now, that’s a great scheme, eh? – shows her dream——

The picture’s changed – what’s this place – a saloon, I guess – yes, there’s the bartender, mixing drinks – men talking at little tables – aren’t they a tough-looking lot? – see, that one’s got a revolver – why, it’s Edward the Roo – talking with two men – he’s giving them money – what’s this?——

Give Us a Hundred Apiece and We’ll Do It.

It’s in the street again – Edward and one of the two toughs – they’ve got little black masks on – they’re sneaking up to Madeline where she sleeps – they’ve got a big motor drawn up beside them – look, they’ve grabbed hold of Madeline – they’re lifting her into the motor – help! Stop! Aren’t there any police? – yes, yes, there’s a man who sees it – by Gee! It’s John, John Holdfast – grab them, John – pshaw! they’ve jumped into the motor, they’re off!

Where is it now? – oh, yes – it’s the police station again – that’s John; he’s telling them about it – he’s all out of breath – look, that head man, the big fellow, he’s giving orders——

Inspector Fordyce, Take Your Biggest Car and Ten Men. If You Overtake Them, Shoot and Shoot To Kill.

Hoorah! Isn’t it great – hurry! don’t lose a minute – see them all buckling on revolvers – get at it, boys, get at it! Don’t lose a second——

Look, look – it’s a motor – full speed down the street – look at the houses fly past – it’s the motor with the thugs – there it goes round the corner – it’s getting smaller, it’s getting smaller, but look, here comes another – my! it’s just flying – it’s full of police – there’s John in front—— Flick!

Now it’s the first motor – it’s going over a bridge – it’s heading for the country – say, isn’t that car just flying—— Flick, flick!

It’s the second motor – it’s crossing the bridge too – hurry, boys, make it go!—— Flick, flick!

Out in the country – a country road – early daylight – see the wind in the trees! Notice the branches waving? Isn’t it natural? – whiz! Biff! There goes the motor – biff! There goes the other one – right after it – hoorah!

The open road again – the first motor flying along! Hullo, what’s wrong? It’s slackened, it stops – hoorah! it’s broken down – there’s Madeline inside – there’s Edward the Roo! Say! isn’t he pale and desperate!

Hoorah! the police! the police! all ten of them in their big car – see them jumping out – see them pile into the thugs! Down with them! paste their heads off! Shoot them! Kill them! isn’t it great – isn’t it educative – that’s the Roo – Edward – with John at his throat! Choke him, John! Throttle him!

Hullo, it’s changed – they’re in the big motor – that’s the Roo with the handcuffs on him.

That’s Madeline – she’s unbound and she’s talking; say, isn’t she just real pretty when she smiles?

Yes, John, I Have Learned that I Was Wrong to Put My Art Before Your Love.

I Will Marry You as Soon as You Like.

Flick, flick!

What pretty music! Ding! Dong! Ding! Dong! Isn’t it soft and sweet! – like wedding bells. Oh, I see, the man in the orchestra’s doing it with a little triangle and a stick – it’s a little church up in the country – see all the people lined up – oh! there’s Madeline! in a long white veil – isn’t she just sweet! – and John——

Flick, flack, flick, flack.

Bulgarian Troops on the March.

What! Isn’t it over? Do they all go to Bulgaria? I don’t seem to understand. Anyway, I guess it’s all right to go now. Other people are going.

TOC     INDEX

The Call of the Carbureter

—or—
Mr. Blinks and His Friends

(“First get a motor in your own eye and then you will overlook more easily the motor in your brother’s eye.” —Somewhere in the Bible.)

“By all means let’s have a reception,” said Mrs. Blinks. “It’s the quickest and nicest way to meet our old friends again after all these years. And goodness knows this house is big enough for it” – she gave a glance, as she spoke, round the big reception room of the Blinks’ residence – “and these servants seem to understand things so perfectly it’s no trouble to us to give anything. Only don’t let’s ask a whole lot of chattering young people that we don’t know; let’s have the older people, the ones that can talk about something really worth while.”

“That’s just what I say,” answered Mr. Blinks – he was a small man with insignificance written all over him – “let me listen to people talk; that’s what I like. I’m not much on the social side myself, but I do enjoy hearing good talk. That’s what I liked so much over in England. All them – all those people that we used to meet talked so well. And in France those ladies that run saloons on Sunday afternoons——”

“Sallongs,” corrected Mrs. Blinks. “It’s sounded like it was a G.” She picked up a pencil and paper.

“Well, then,” she said, as she began to write down names, “we’ll ask Judge Ponderus——”

“Sure!” assented Mr. Blinks, rubbing his hands. “He’s a fine talker, if he’ll come!”

“They’ll all come,” said his wife, “to a house as big as this; and we’ll ask the Rev. Dr. Domb and his wife – or, no, he’s Archdeacon Domb now, I hear – and we’ll invite Bishop Sollem, so they can talk together.”

“That’ll be good,” said Mr. Blinks. “I remember years and years ago hearing them two – those two, talking about religion, all about the soul and the body. Man! It was deep. It was clean beyond me. That’s what I like to listen to.”

“And Professor Potofax from the college,” went on Mrs. Blinks. “You remember, the big stout one.”

“I know,” said her husband.

“—and his daughter, she’s musical, and Mrs. Buncomtalk, she’s a great light on woman suffrage, and Miss Scragg and Mr. Underdone – they both write poetry, so they can talk about that.”

“It’ll be a great treat to listen to them all,” said Mr. Blinks.

—

A week later, on the day of the Blinks’ reception, there was a string of motors three deep along a line of a hundred yards in front of the house.

Inside the reception rooms were filled.

Mr. Blinks, insignificant even in his own house, moved to and fro among his guests.

Archdeacon Domb and Dean Sollem were standing side by side with their heads gravely lowered as they talked over the cups of tea that they held in their hands.

Mr. Blinks edged towards them. “This’ll be something pretty good,” he murmured to himself as he got within reach of their conversation.

“What do you do about your body?” the Archdeacon was asking in his deep, solemn tones.

“Practically nothing,” said the Bishop. “A little rub of shellac now and then, but practically nothing.”

“You wash it, of course?” asked Dr. Domb.

“Only now and again, but far less than you would think. I really take very little thought for my body.”

“Ah,” said Dr. Domb, reflectively, “I went all over mine last summer with linseed oil.”

“But didn’t you find,” said the Bishop, “that it got into your pipes and choked your feed?”

“It did,” said Dr. Domb, munching a bit of toast as he spoke. “In fact, I have had a lot of trouble with my feed ever since.”

“Try flushing your pipes out with hot steam,” said the Bishop.

Mr. Blinks had listened in something like dismay. “Motor cars!” he murmured. “Who’d have thought it?”

But at this moment a genial, hearty-looking person came pushing towards him with a cheery greeting.

“I’m afraid I’m rather late, Blinks,” he said.

“Delayed in court, eh, Judge?” said Blinks as he shook hands.

“No, blew out a plug!” said the Judge. “Stalled me right up.”

“Blew out a plug!” exclaimed Dr. Domb and the Bishop, deeply interested at once.

“A cracked insulator, I think,” said the Judge.

“Possibly,” said the Archdeacon, very gravely, “the terminal nuts of your dry battery were loose.”

Mr. Blinks moved slowly away. “Dear me!” he mused, “how changed they are.”

It was a relief to him to edge his way quietly into another group of guests where he felt certain that the talk would be of quite another kind.

Professor Potofax and Miss Snagg and a number of others were evidently talking about books.

“A beautiful book,” the professor was saying. “One of the best things, to my mind at any rate, that has appeared for years. There’s a chapter on the silencing of exhaust gas which is simply marvellous.”

“Is it illustrated?” questioned one of the ladies.

“Splendidly,” said the professor. “Among other things there are sectional views of check valves and flexible roller bearings——”

“Ah, do tell me about the flexible bearings,” murmured Miss Snaggs.

—

Mr. Blinks moved on.

Wherever he went among his guests, they all seemed stricken with the same mania. He caught their conversation in little scraps.

“I ran her up to forty with the greatest ease, then threw in my high speed and got seventy out of her without any trouble.” – “No, I simply used a socket wrench, it answers perfectly.” – “Yes, a solution of calcium chloride is very good, but of course the hydrochloric acid in it has a powerful effect on the metal.”

“Dear me!” mused Mr. Blinks, “are they all mad?”

Meantime, around his wife, who stood receiving in state at one end of the room, the guests surged to and fro.

“So charmed to see you again,” exclaimed one. “You’ve been in Europe a long time, haven’t you? Oh, mostly in the south of England? Are the roads good? Last year my husband and I went all through Shakespeare’s country. It’s just delightful. They sprinkle it so thoroughly. And Stratford-on-Avon itself is just a treat. It’s all oiled, every bit of it – except the little road by Shakespeare’s house – but we didn’t go along that. Then later we went up to the Lake District: but it’s not so good: they don’t oil it.”

She floated away, to give place to another lady.

“In France every summer?” she exclaimed. “Oh, how perfectly lovely. Don’t you think the French cars simply divine? My husband thinks the French body is far better modelled than ours. He saw ever so many of them. He thought of bringing one over with him, but it costs such a lot to keep them in good order.”

“The theatres?” said another lady. “How you must have enjoyed them. I just love the theatres. Last week my husband and I were at the Palatial – it’s moving pictures – where they have that film with the motor collision running. It’s just wonderful. You see the motors going at full speed, and then smash right into one another – and all the people killed – it’s really fine.”

—

“Have they all gone insane?” said Mr. Blinks to his wife after the guests had gone.

“Dreadful, isn’t it?” she assented. “I never was so bored in my life.”

“Why! they talk of nothing else but their motor cars,” said Blinks. “We’ve got to get a car, I suppose, living at this distance from the town, but I’m hanged if I intend to go clean crazy over it like these people.”

—

And the guests as they went home talked of the Blinkses.

“I fear,” said Dr. Domb to Judge Ponderus, “that Blinks has hardly profited by his time in Europe as much as he ought to have. He seems to have observed nothing. I was asking him about the new Italian touring car that they are using so much in Rome. He said he had never noticed it. And he was there a month!”

“Is it possible?” said the Judge. “Where were his eyes?”

—

All of which showed that Mr. and Mrs. Blinks were in danger of losing their friends for ever.

But it so happened that about three weeks later Blinks came home to his residence in an obvious state of excitement. His face was flushed and he had on a silly little round cap with a glazed peak.

“Why, Clarence!” cried his wife, “whatever is the matter?”

“Matter!” he exclaimed. “There isn’t anything the matter! I bought a car this morning, that’s all. Say, it’s a beauty, a regular peach, four thousand with ten off. I ran it clean round the shed alone first time. The chauffeur says he never saw anybody get on to the hang of it so quick. Get on your hat and come right on down to the garage. I’ve got a man waiting there to teach you to run it. Hurry up!”

—

Within a week or two after that one might see the Blinkses any morning, in fact every morning, out in their car!

“Good morning, Judge!” calls Blinks gaily as he passes. “How’s that carbureter acting? – Good morning, Archdeacon, is that plug trouble of yours all right again? – Hullo! professor, let me pick you up and ride you up to the college; oh, it’s no trouble. What do you think of the bearings of this car? Aren’t they just dandy?”

—

And so Mr. Blinks has got all his friends back again.

After all, the great thing about being crazy is to be all crazy together.

TOC     INDEX

The Two Sexes,
in Fives or Sixes

A Dinner Party Study

“But, surely!” exclaimed the Hostess, looking defiantly and searchingly through the cut flowers of the centrepiece, so that her eye could intimidate in turn all the five men at the table, “one must admit that women are men’s equals in every way?”

The Lady-with-the-Bust tossed her head a little and echoed, “Oh, surely!”

The Débutante lifted her big blue eyes a little towards the ceiling, with the upward glance that stands for innocence. She said nothing, waiting for a cue as to what to appear to be.

Meantime the Chief Lady Guest, known to be in suffrage work, was pinching up her lips and getting her phrases ready, like a harpooner waiting to strike. She knew that the Hostess meant this as an opening for her.

But the Soft Lady Whom Men Like toyed with a bit of bread on the tablecloth (she had a beautiful hand) and smiled gently. The other women would have called it a simper. To the men it stood for profound intelligence.

The five men that sat amongst and between the ladies received the challenge of the Hostess’s speech and answered it each in his own way.

From the Heavy Host at the head of the table there came a kind of deep grunt, nothing more. He had heard this same talk at each of his dinners that season.

There was a similar grunt from the Heavy Business Friend of the Host, almost as broad and thick as the host himself. He knew too what was coming. He proposed to stand by his friend, man for man. He could sympathise. The Lady-with-the-Bust was his wife.

But the Half Man with the Moon Face, who was known to work side by side with women on committees and who called them “Comrades,” echoed, “Oh, surely!” with deep emphasis.

The Smooth Gentleman, there for business reasons, exclaimed with great alacrity, “Women equal! Oh, rather!”

Last of all the Interesting Man with Long Hair, known to write for the magazines – all of them – began at once, “I remember once saying to Mrs. Pankhurst——” but was overwhelmed in the general conversation before he could say what it was he remembered saying to Mrs. Pankhurst.

In other words, the dinner party, at about course number seven, had reached the inevitable moment of the discussion of the two sexes.

It had begun as dinner parties do.

Everybody had talked, gloomily, to his neighbour over the oysters on one drink of white wine; more or less brightly to two people, over the fish, on two drinks; quite brilliantly to three people on three drinks; and then the conversation had become general and the European war had been fought through three courses with champagne. Everybody had taken an extremely broad point of view. The Heavy Business Friend had declared himself absolutely impartial and had at once got wet with rage over cotton. The Chief Lady Guest had explained that she herself was half English on her mother’s side, and the Lady-with-the-Bust had told how a lady friend of hers had a cousin who had travelled in Hungary. She admitted that it was some years ago. Things might have changed since. Then the Interesting Man, having got the table where he wanted it, had said: “I remember when I was last in Sofia – by the way it is pronounced Say-ah-fee-ah – talking with Radovitch – or Radee-ah-vitch, as it should be sounded – the foreign secretary, on what the Sobranje – it is pronounced Soophrangee – would be likely to do” – and by the time he had done with the Sobranje no one dared speak of the war any more.

But the Hostess had got out of it the opening she wanted, and she said:

“At any rate, it is wonderful what women have done in the war——”

“—and are doing,” echoed the Half Man with the Moon Face.

And then it was that the Hostess had said that surely every one must admit women are equal to men and the topic of the sexes was started. All the women had been waiting for it, anyway. It is the only topic that women care about. Even men can stand it provided that fifty per cent. or more of the women present are handsome enough to justify it.

“I hardly see how, after all that has happened, any rational person could deny for a moment,” continued the hostess, looking straight at her husband and his Heavy Business Friend, “that women are equal and even superior to men. Surely our brains are just as good?” and she gave an almost bitter laugh.

“Don’t you think perhaps——” began the Smooth Gentleman.

“No, I don’t,” said the Hostess. “You’re going to say that we are inferior in things like mathematics or in logical reasoning. We are not. But, after all, the only reason why we are is because of training. Think of the thousands of years that men have been trained. Answer me that?”

“Well, might it not be—” began the Smooth Gentleman.

“I don’t think so for a moment,” said the Hostess. “I think if we’d only been trained as men have for the last two or three thousand years our brains would be just as well trained for the things they were trained for as they would have been now for the things we have been trained for and in that case wouldn’t have. Don’t you agree with me,” she said, turning to the Chief Lady Guest, whom she suddenly remembered, “that, after all, we think more clearly?”

Here the Interesting Man, who had been silent longer than an Interesting Man can, without apoplexy, began:

“I remember once saying in London to Sir Charles Doosey——”

But the Chief Lady Guest refused to be checked.

“We’ve been gathering some rather interesting statistics,” she said, speaking very firmly, syllable by syllable, “on that point at our Settlement. We have measured the heads of five hundred factory girls, making a chart of them, you know, and the feet of five hundred domestic servants——”

“And don’t you find—” began the Smooth Gentleman.

“No,” said the Chief Lady Guest, firmly, “we do not. But I was going to say that when we take our measurements and reduce them to a scale of a hundred – I think you understand me——”

“Ah, but come, now,” interrupted the Interesting Man, “there’s nothing really more deceitful than anthropometric measures. I remember once saying (in London) to Sir Robert Bittell – the Sir Robert Bittell, you know——”

Here everybody murmured, “Oh, yes,” except the Heavy Host and his Heavy Friend, who with all their sins were honest men.

“I said: Sir Robert, I want your frank opinion, your very frank opinion——”

But here there was a slight interruption. The Soft Lady accidentally dropped a bangle from her wrist on to the floor. Now all through the dinner she had hardly said anything, but she had listened for twenty minutes (from the grapefruit to the fish) while the Interesting Man had told her about his life in Honduras (it is pronounced Hondooras), and for another twenty while the Smooth Gentleman, who was a barrister, had discussed himself as a pleader. And when each of the men had begun to speak in the general conversation, she had looked deep into their faces as if hanging on to their words. So when she dropped her bangle two of the men leaped from their chairs to get it, and the other three made a sort of struggle as they sat. By the time it was recovered and replaced upon her arm (a very beautiful arm), the Interesting Man was sidetracked and the Chief Lady Guest, who had gone on talking during the bangle hunt, was heard saying,

“Entirely so. That seems to me the greatest difficulty before us. So few men are willing to deal with the question with perfect sincerity.”

She laid emphasis on the word and the Half Man with the Moon Face took his cue from it and threw a pose of almost painful sincerity.

“Why is it?” continued the Chief Lady Guest, “that men always insist on dealing with us just as if we were playthings, just so many dressed-up dolls?”

Here the débutante immediately did a doll.

“If a woman is attractive and beautiful,” the lady went on, “so much the better.” (She had no intention of letting go of the doll business entirely.) “But surely you men ought to value us as something more than mere dolls?”

She might have pursued the topic, but at this moment the Smooth Gentleman, who made a rule of standing in all round, and had broken into a side conversation with the silent host, was overheard to say something about women’s sense of humour.

The table was in a turmoil in a moment, three of the ladies speaking at once. To deny a woman’s sense of humour is the last form of social insult.

“I entirely disagree with you,” said the Chief Lady Guest, speaking very severely. “I know it from my own case, from my own sense of humour and from observation. Last week, for example, we measured no less than seventy-five factory girls——”

“Well, I’m sure,” said the Lady-with-the-Bust, “I don’t know what men mean by our not having a sense of humour. I’m sure I have. I know I went last week to a vaudeville, and I just laughed all through. Of course I can’t read Mark Twain, or anything like that, but then I don’t call that funny, do you?” – she concluded, turning to the Hostess.

But the Hostess, feeling somehow that the ground was dangerous, had already risen and in a moment more the ladies had floated out of the room and upstairs to the drawing-room, where they spread themselves about in easy chairs in billows of pretty-coloured silk.

“How charming it is!” the Chief Lady Guest began, “to find men coming so entirely to our point of view. Do you know it was so delightful tonight; I hardly heard a word of dissent or contradiction.”

Thus they talked; except the Soft Lady, who had slipped into a seat by herself with an album over her knees, and with an empty chair on either side of her. There she waited.

Meantime, down below, the men had shifted into chairs to one end of the table and the Heavy Host was shoving cigars at them, thick as ropes, and passing the port wine, with his big fist round the neck of the decanter. But for his success in life he could have had a place as a bartender anywhere.

None of them spoke till the cigars were well alight.

Then the Host said, very deliberately, taking each word at his leisure, with smoke in between:

“Of course – this – suffrage business——”

“Tommyrot!” exclaimed the Smooth Gentleman, with great alacrity, his mask entirely laid aside.

“Damn foolishness,” gurgled the Heavy Business Friend, sipping his port.

“Of course you can’t really discuss it with women,” murmured the Host.

“Oh, no,” assented all the others. Even the Half Man sipped his wine and turned traitor, there being no one to see.

“You see,” said the Host, “if my wife likes to go to meetings and be on committees, why, I don’t stop her.”

“Neither do I mine,” said the Heavy Friend. “It amuses her, so I let her do it.” His wife, the Lady-with-the-Bust, was safely out of hearing.

“I remember once,” began the Interesting Man, “saying to” – he paused a moment, for the others were looking at him – “saying to another man that if women did get the vote they’d never use it, anyway. All they like is being talked about for not getting it.”

After which, having exhausted the Woman Question, the five men turned to such bigger subjects as the fall in sterling exchange and the President’s seventeenth note to Germany.

Then presently they went upstairs. And when they reached the door of the drawing-room a keen observer, or, indeed, any kind of observer, might have seen that all five of them made an obvious advance towards the two empty seats beside the Soft Lady.

TOC     INDEX

The Grass Bachelor’s Guide

With Sincere Apologies
to the Ladies’ Periodicals

There are periods in the life of every married man when he is turned for the time being into a grass bachelor.

This happens, for instance, in the summer time when his wife is summering by the sea, and he himself is simmering in the city. It happens also in the autumn when his wife is in Virginia playing golf in order to restore her shattered nerves after the fatigues of the seaside. It occurs again in November when his wife is in the Adirondacks to get the benefit of the altitude, and later on through the winter when she is down in Florida to get the benefit of the latitude. The breaking up of the winter being, notoriously, a trying time on the system, any reasonable man is apt to consent to his wife’s going to California. In the later spring, the season of the bursting flowers and the young buds, every woman likes to be with her mother in the country. It is not fair to stop her.

It thus happens that at various times of the year a great number of men, unable to leave their business, are left to their own resources as housekeepers in their deserted houses and apartments. It is for their benefit that I have put together these hints on housekeeping for men. It may be that in composing them I owe something to the current numbers of the leading women’s magazines. If so, I need not apologise. I am sure that in these days We Men all feel that We Men and We Women are so much alike, or at least those of us who call ourselves so, that we need feel no jealousy when We Men and We Women are striving each, or both, in the same direction if in opposite ways. I hope that I make myself clear. I am sure I do.

So I feel that if We Men, who are left alone in our houses and apartments in the summertime, would only set ourselves to it, we could make life not only a little brighter for ourselves but also a little less bright for those about us.

Nothing contributes to this end so much as good housekeeping. The first thing for the housekeeper to realize is that it is impossible for him to attend to his housekeeping in the stiff and unbecoming garments of his business hours. When he begins his day he must therefore carefully consider—

What to Wear Before Dressing

The simplest and best thing will be found to be a plain sacque or kimono, cut very full so as to allow of the freest movement, and buttoned either down the front or back or both. If the sleeve is cut short at the elbow and ruffled above the bare arm, the effect is both serviceable and becoming. It will be better, especially for such work as lighting the gas range and boiling water, to girdle the kimono with a simple yet effective rope of tasselled silk, which may be drawn in or let out according to the amount of water one wishes to boil. A simple kimono of this sort can be bought almost anywhere for $2.50, or can be supplied by Messrs. Einstein & Fickelbrot (see advertising pages) for twenty-five dollars.

Having a kimono such as this, our housekeeper can either button himself into it with a button-hook (very good ones are supplied by Messrs. Einstein & Fickelbrot [see ad] at a very reasonable price or even higher), or, better still, he can summon the janitor of the apartment, who can button him up quite securely in a few minutes’ time – a quarter of an hour at the most. We Men cannot impress upon ourselves too strongly that, for efficient housekeeping, time is everything, and that much depends on quiet, effective movement from place to place, or from any one place to any number of other places. We are now ready to consider the all important question—

What to Select for Breakfast

Our housekeeper will naturally desire something that is simple and easily cooked, yet at the same time sustaining and invigorating and containing a maximum of food value with a minimum of cost. If he is wise he will realize that the food ought to contain a proper quantity of both proteids and amygdaloids, and while avoiding a nitrogenous breakfast, should see to it that he obtains sufficient of what is albuminous and exogamous to prevent his breakfast from becoming monotonous. Careful thought must therefore be given to the breakfast menu.

For the purpose of thinking, a simple but very effective costume may be devised by throwing over the kimono itself a thin lace shawl, with a fichu carried high above the waistline and terminating in a plain insertion. A bit of old lace thrown over the housekeeper’s head is at once serviceable and becoming and will help to keep the dust out of his brain while thinking what to eat for breakfast.

Very naturally our housekeeper’s first choice will be some kind of cereal. The simplest and most economical breakfast of this kind can be secured by selecting some cereal or grain food – such as oats, flax, split peas that have been carefully strained in the colander, or beans that have been fired off in a gun. Any of these cereals may be bought for ten cents a pound at a grocer’s – or obtained from Messrs. Einstein & Fickelbrot for a dollar a pound, or more. Supposing then that we have decided upon a pound of split peas as our breakfast, the next task that devolves upon our housekeeper is to—

Go Out and Buy It

Here our advice is simple but positive. Shopping should never be done over the telephone or by telegraph. The good housekeeper instead of telegraphing for his food will insist on seeing his food himself, and will eat nothing that he does not first see before eating. This is a cardinal rule. For the moment, then, the range must be turned low while our housekeeper sallies forth to devote himself to his breakfast shopping. The best costume for shopping is a simple but effective suit, cut in plain lines, either square or crosswise, and buttoned wherever there are button-holes. A simple hat of some dark material may be worn together with plain boots drawn up well over the socks and either laced or left unlaced. No harm is done if a touch of colour is added by carrying a geranium in the hand. We are now ready for the street.

Test of Effective Shopping

Here we may say at once that the crucial test is that we must know what we want, why we want it, where we want it, and what it is. Time, as We Men are only too apt to forget, is everything, and since our aim is now a pound of split peas we must, as we sally forth, think of a pound of split peas and only a pound. A cheery salutation may be exchanged with other morning shoppers as we pass along, but only exchanged. Split peas being for the moment our prime business, we must, as rapidly and unobtrusively as possible, visit those shops and only those shops where split peas are to be had.

Having found the split peas, our housekeeper’s next task is to pay for them. This he does with money that may be either carried in the hand, or, better, tucked into a simple étui, or dodu, that can be carried at the wrist or tied to the ankle. The order duly given, our housekeeper gives his address for the delivery of the peas, and then, as quietly and harmlessly as possible, returns to his apartment. His next office, and a most important one it is, is now ready to be performed. This new but necessary duty is—

Waiting for the Delivery Van

A good costume for waiting for a delivery van in, is a simple brown suit, slashed with yellow and purple, and sliced or gored from the hip to the feet. As time is everything, the housekeeper, after having put on his slashed costume for waiting for the delivery van, may set himself to the performance of a number of light household tasks, at the same time looking occasionally from the window so as to detect the arrival of the van as soon as possible after it has arrived. Among other things, he may now feed his canary by opening its mouth with a button hook and dropping in coffee beans till the little songster shows by its gratified air that it is full. A little time may be well spent among the flowers and bulbs of the apartment, clipping here a leaf and here a stem, and removing the young buds and bugs. For work among the flowers, a light pair of rather long scissors, say a foot long, can be carried at the girdle, or attached to the étui and passed over the shoulder with a looped cord so as to fall in an easy and graceful fold across the back. The moment is now approaching when we may expect—

The Arrival of the Van

The housekeeper will presently discover the van, drawn up in front of the apartment, and its driver curled up on the seat. Now is the moment of activity. Hastily throwing on a peignoir, the housekeeper descends and, receiving his parcel, re-ascends to his apartment. The whole descent and re-ascent is made quickly, quietly, and, if possible, only once.

Putting the Peas to Soak

Remember that unsoaked peas are hard, forcible, and surcharged with a nitrogenous amygdaloid that is in reality what chemical science calls putrate of lead. On the other hand, peas that are soaked become large, voluble, textile and, while extremely palatable, are none the less rich in glycerine, starch, and other lacteroids and bactifera. To contain the required elements of nutrition split peas must be soaked for two hours in fresh water and afterwards boiled for an hour and a quarter (eighty-five minutes).

It is now but the work of a moment to lift the saucepan of peas from the fire, strain them through a colander, pass them thence into a net or bag, rinse them in cold water and then spread the whole appetising mass on a platter and carry it on a fire shovel to the dining-room. As it is now about six o’clock in the evening, our housekeeper can either—

Telephone to His Club and Order a Thin Soup with a Bite of Fish, Two Lamb Chops with Asparagus, and Send Word also for a Pint of Moselle to Be Laid on Ice

Or He Can Sit Down and Eat Those D——n Peas.

We know which he will do.

TOC     INDEX

Every Man and His Friends

Mr. Grunch’s Portrait Gallery

(As edited from his private thoughts)

I

His Views on His Employer

A mean man. I say it, of course, without any prejudice, and without the slightest malice. But the man is mean. Small, I think, is the word. I am not thinking, of course, of my own salary. It is not a matter that I would care to refer to; though, as a matter of fact, one would think that after fifteen years of work an application for an increase of five hundred dollars is the kind of thing that any man ought to be glad to meet half way. Not that I bear the man any malice for it. None. If he died tomorrow, no one would regret his death as genuinely as I would: if he fell into the river and got drowned, or if he fell into a sewer and suffocated, or if he got burned to death in a gas explosion (there are a lot of things that might happen to him), I should feel genuinely sorry to see him cut off.

But what strikes me more than the man’s smallness is his incompetence. The man is absolutely no good. It’s not a thing that I would say outside: as a matter of fact I deny it every time I hear it, though every man in town knows it. How that man ever got the position he has is more than I can tell. And as for holding it, he couldn’t hold it half a day if it weren’t that the rest of us in the office do practically everything for him.

Why, I’ve seen him send out letters (I wouldn’t say this to any one outside, of course, and I wouldn’t like to have it repeated) – letters with, actually, mistakes in English. Think of it, in English! Ask his stenographer.

I often wonder why I go on working for him. There are dozens of other companies that would give anything to get me. Only the other day – it’s not ten years ago – I had an offer, or practically an offer, to go to Japan selling Bibles. I often wish now I had taken it. I believe I’d like the Japanese. They’re gentlemen, the Japanese. They wouldn’t turn a man down after slaving away for fifteen years.

I often think I’ll quit him. I say to my wife that that man had better not provoke me too far; or some day I’ll just step into his office and tell him exactly what I think of him. I’d like to. I often say it over to myself in the street car coming home.

He’d better be careful, that’s all.

II

The Minister Whose Church He Attends

A dull man. Dull is the only word I can think of that exactly describes him – dull and prosy. I don’t say that he is not a good man. He may be. I don’t say that he is not. I have never seen any sign of it, if he is. But I make it a rule never to say anything to take away a man’s character.

And his sermons! Really that sermon he gave last Sunday on Esau seemed to me the absolute limit. I wish you could have heard it. I mean to say – drivel. I said to my wife and some friends, as we walked away from the church, that a sermon like that seemed to me to come from the dregs of the human intellect. Mind you, I don’t believe in criticising a sermon. I always feel it a sacred obligation never to offer a word of criticism. When I say that the sermon was punk, I don’t say it as criticism. I merely state it as a fact. And to think that we pay that man eighteen hundred dollars a year! And he’s in debt all the time at that. What does he do with it? He can’t spend it. It’s not as if he had a large family (they’ve only four children). It’s just a case of sheer extravagance. He runs about all the time. Last year it was a trip to a Synod Meeting at New York – away four whole days: and two years before that, dashing off to a Scripture Conference at Boston, and away nearly a whole week, and his wife with him!

What I say is that if a man’s going to spend his time gadding about the country like that – here today and there tomorrow – how on earth can he attend to his parochial duties?

I’m a religious man. At least I trust I am. I believe – and more and more as I get older – in eternal punishment. I see the need of it when I look about me. As I say, I trust I am a religious man, but when it comes to subscribing fifty dollars, as they want us to, to get that man out of debt, I say “No.”

True religion, as I see it, is not connected with money.

III

His Partner at Bridge

The man is a complete ass. How a man like that has the nerve to sit down at a bridge table, I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind if the man had any idea – even the faintest idea – of how to play. But he hasn’t any. Three times I signalled to him to throw the lead into my hand and he wouldn’t: I knew that our only ghost of a chance was to let me do all the playing. But the ass couldn’t see it. He even had the supreme nerve to ask me what I meant by leading diamonds when he had signalled that he had none. I couldn’t help asking him, as politely as I could, why he had disregarded my signal for spades. He had the gall to ask in reply why I had overlooked his signal for clubs in the second hand round; the very time, mind you, when I had led a three spot as a sign to him to let me play the whole game. I couldn’t help saying to him, at the end of the evening, in a tone of such evident satire that any one but an ass would have recognised it, that I had seldom had as keen an evening at cards.

But he didn’t see it. The irony of it was lost on him. The jackass merely said – quite amiably and unconsciously – that he thought I’d play a good game presently. Me! Play a good game presently!!

I gave him a look, just one look as I went out! But I don’t think he saw it. He was talking to some one else.

IV

His Hostess at Dinner

On what principle that woman makes up her dinner parties is more than human brain can devise. Mind you, I like going out to dinner. To my mind it’s the very best form of social entertainment. But I like to find myself among people that can talk, not among a pack of numbskulls. What I like is good general conversation, about things worth talking about. But among a crowd of idiots like that what can you expect? You’d think that even society people would be interested, or pretend to be, in real things. But not a bit. I had hardly started to talk about the rate of exchange on the German mark in relation to the fall of sterling bills – a thing that you would think a whole tableful of people would be glad to listen to – when first thing I knew the whole lot of them had ceased paying any attention and were all listening to an insufferable ass of an Englishman – I forget his name. You’d hardly suppose that just because a man has been in Flanders and has his arm in a sling and has to have his food cut up by the butler, that’s any reason for having a whole tableful of people listening to him. And especially the women: they have a way of listening to a fool like that with their elbows on the table that is positively sickening.

I felt that the whole thing was out of taste and tried in vain, in one of the pauses, to give a lead to my hostess by referring to the prospect of a shipping subsidy bill going through to offset the register of alien ships. But she was too utterly dense to take it up. She never even turned her head. All through dinner that ass talked – he and that silly young actor they’re always asking there that is perpetually doing imitations of the vaudeville people. That kind of thing may be all right – for those who care for it: I frankly don’t – outside a theatre. But to my mind the idea of trying to throw people into fits of laughter at a dinner table is simply execrable taste. I cannot see the sense of people shrieking with laughter at dinner. I have, I suppose, a better sense of humour than most people. But to my mind a humorous story should be told quietly and slowly in a way to bring out the point of the humour and to make it quite clear by preparing for it with proper explanations. But with people like that I find I no sooner get well started with a story than some fool or other breaks in. I had a most amusing experience the other day – that is, about fifteen years ago – at a summer hotel in the Adirondacks, that one would think would have amused even a shallow lot of people like those, but I had no sooner started to tell it – or had hardly done more than to describe the Adirondacks in a general way – than, first thing I know, my hostess, stupid woman, had risen and all the ladies were trooping out.

As to getting in a word edgeways with the men over the cigars – perfectly impossible! They’re worse than the women. They were all buzzing round the infernal Englishman with questions about Flanders and the army at the front. I tried in vain to get their attention for a minute to give them my impressions of the Belgian peasantry (during my visit there in 1885), but my host simply turned to me for a second and said, “Have some more port?” and was back again listening to the asinine Englishman.

And when we went upstairs to the drawing-room I found myself, to my disgust, sidetracked in a corner of the room with that supreme old jackass of a professor – their uncle, I think, or something of the sort. In all my life I never met a prosier man. He bored me blue with long accounts of his visit to Servia and his impressions of the Servian peasantry in 1875.

I should have left early, but it would have been too noticeable.

The trouble with a woman like that is that she asks the wrong people to her parties.

BUT,

V

His Little Son

You haven’t seen him? Why, that’s incredible. You must have. He goes past your house every day on his way to his kindergarten. You must have seen him a thousand times. And he’s a boy you couldn’t help noticing. You’d pick that boy out among a hundred, right away. “There’s a remarkable boy,” you’d say. I notice people always turn and look at him on the street. He’s just the image of me. Everybody notices it at once.

How old? He’s twelve. Twelve and two weeks yesterday. But he’s so bright you’d think he was fifteen. And the things he says! You’d laugh! I’ve written a lot of them down in a book for fear of losing them. Some day when you come up to the house I’ll read them to you. Come some evening. Come early so that we’ll have lots of time. He said to me one day, “Dad” (he always calls me Dad), “what makes the sky blue?” Pretty thoughtful, eh, for a little fellow of twelve? He’s always asking questions like that. I wish I could remember half of them.

And I’m bringing him up right, I tell you. I got him a little savings box a while ago and have got him taught to put all his money in it, and not give any of it away, so that when he grows up he’ll be all right.

On his last birthday I put a five dollar gold piece into it for him and explained to him what five dollars meant, and what a lot you could do with it if you hung on to it. You ought to have seen him listen.

“Dad,” he says, “I guess you’re the kindest man in the world, aren’t you?”

Come up some time and see him.

TOC     INDEX

More than Twice Told Tales

—or—
Every Man His Own Hero

I

(The familiar story told about himself by the Commercial Traveller who sold goods to the man who was regarded as impossible.)

“What,” they said, “you’re getting off at Midgeville? You’re going to give the Jones Hardware Company a try, eh?” – and then they all started laughing and giving me the merry ha! ha! Well, I just got my grip packed and didn’t say a thing and when the train slowed up for Midgeville, out I slid. “Give my love to old man Jones,” one of the boys called after me, “and get yourself a couple of porous plasters and a pair of splints before you tackle him!” – and then they all gave me the ha! ha! again, out of the window as the train pulled out.

Well, I walked uptown from the station to the Jones Hardware Company. “Is Mr. Jones in the office?” I asked of one of the young fellers behind the counter. “He’s in the office,” he says, “all right, but I guess you can’t see him,” he says – and he looked at my grip. “What name shall I say?” says he. “Don’t say any name at all,” I says; “just open the door and let me in.”

Well, there was old man Jones sitting scowling over his desk, biting his pen in that way he has. He looked up when I came in. “See, here, young man,” he says, “you can’t sell me any hardware,” he says. “Mr. Jones,” I says, “I don’t want to sell you any hardware. I’m not here to sell you any hardware. I know,” I says, “as well as you do,” I says, “that I couldn’t sell any hardware if I tried to. But,” I says, “I guess it don’t do any harm to open up this sample case, and show you some hardware,” I says. “Young man,” says he, “if you start opening up that sample case in here, you’ll lose your time, that’s all” – and he turned off sort of sideways and began looking over some letters.

“That’s all right, Mr. Jones,” I says; “that’s all right. I’m here to lose my time. But I’m not going out of this room till you take a look anyway at some of this new cutlery I’m carrying.”

So open I throws my sample case right across the end of his desk. “Look at that knife,” I says, “Mr. Jones. Just look at it: clear Sheffield at three-thirty the dozen and they’re a knife that will last till you wear the haft off it.” “Oh, pshaw,” he growled, “I don’t want no knives; there’s nothing in knives——”

Well I knew he didn’t want knives, see? I knew it. But the way I opened up the sample case it showed up, just by accident so to speak, a box of those new electric burners – adjustable, you know – they’ll take heat off any size of socket you like and use it for any mortal thing in the house. I saw old Jones had his eye on them in a minute. “What’s those things you got there?” he growls, “those in the box?” “Oh,” I said, “that’s just a new line,” I said, “the boss wanted me to take along: some sort of electric rig for heating,” I said, “but I don’t think there’s anything to it. But here, now, Mr. Jones, is a spoon I’ve got on this trip – it’s the new Delphide – you can’t tell that, sir, from silver, no, sir,” I says; “I defy any man, money down, to tell that there Delphide from genuine refined silver, and they’re a spoon that’ll last——”

“Let me see one of those burners,” says old man Jones, breaking in.

Well, sir, in about two minutes more, I had one of the burners fixed on to the light socket, and old Jones, with his coat off, boiling water in a tin cup (out of the store) and timing it with his watch.

The next day I pulled into Toledo and went and joined the other boys up to the Jefferson House. “Well,” they says, “have you got that plaster on?” and started in to give me the ha! ha! again. “Oh, I don’t know,” I says; “I guess this is some plaster, isn’t it?” and I took out of my pocket an order from old man Jones for two thousand adjustable burners, at four-twenty with two off. “Some plaster, eh?” I says.

Well, sir, the boys looked sick.

Old man Jones gets all his stuff from our house now. Oh, he ain’t bad at all when you get to know him.

II

(The well known story told by the man who has once had a strange psychic experience.)

. . . What you say about presentiments reminds me of a strange experience that I had myself.

I was sitting by myself one night very late, reading. I don’t remember just what it was that I was reading. I think it was – or no, I don’t remember what it was. Well, anyway, I was sitting up late reading quietly till it got pretty late on in the night. I don’t remember just how late it was – half-past two, I think, or perhaps three – or, no, I don’t remember. But, anyway, I was sitting up by myself very late reading. As I say, it was late, and after all the noises in the street had stopped, the house somehow seemed to get awfully still and quiet. Well, all of a sudden I became aware of a sort of strange feeling – I hardly know how to describe it – I seemed to become aware of something, as if something were near me. I put down my book and looked around, but could see nothing. I started to read again, but I hadn’t read more than a page, or say a page and a half – or no, not more than a page, when again all of a sudden I felt an overwhelming sense of – something. I can’t explain just what the feeling was, but a queer sense as if there was something somewhere.

Well, I’m not of a timorous disposition naturally – at least I don’t think I am – but absolutely I felt as if I couldn’t stay in the room. I got up out of my chair and walked down the stairs, in the dark, to the dining-room. I felt all the way as if some one were following me. Do you know, I was absolutely trembling when I got into the dining-room and got the lights turned on. I walked over to the sideboard and poured myself out a drink of whiskey and soda. As you know, I never take anything as a rule – or, at any rate, only when I am sitting round talking as we are now – but I always like to keep a decanter of whiskey in the house, and a little soda, in case of my wife or one of the children being taken ill in the night.

Well, I took a drink and then I said to myself, I said, “See here, I’m going to see this thing through.” So I turned back and walked straight upstairs again to my room. I fully expected something queer was going to happen and was prepared for it. But do you know when I walked into the room again, the feeling, or presentiment, or whatever it was I had had, was absolutely gone. There was my book lying just where I had left it and the reading lamp still burning on the table, just as it had been and my chair just where I had pushed it back. But I felt nothing, absolutely nothing. I sat and waited a while, but I still felt nothing.

I went downstairs again, to put out the lights in the dining-room. I noticed, as I passed the sideboard, that I was still shaking a little. So I took a small drink of whiskey – though as a rule I never care to take more than one drink – unless when I am sitting talking as we are here.

Well, I had hardly taken it when I felt an odd sort of psychic feeling – a sort of drowsiness. I remember, in a dim way, going to bed, and then I remember nothing till I woke up next morning.

And here’s the strange part of it. I had hardly got down to the office after breakfast when I got a wire to tell me that my mother-in-law had broken her arm in Cincinnati. Strange, wasn’t it? No, not at half-past two during that night – that’s the inexplicable part of it. She had broken it at half-past eleven the morning before. But you notice it was half-past in each case. That’s the queer way these things go.

Of course, I don’t pretend to explain it. I suppose it simply means that I am telepathic – that’s all. I imagine that, if I wanted to, I could talk with the dead and all that kind of thing. But I feel somehow that I don’t want to.

Eh? Thank you, I will – though I seldom take more than – thanks, thanks, that’s plenty of soda in it.

III

(The familiar narrative in which the Successful Business Man recounts the early struggles by which he made good.)

. . . No, sir, I had no early advantages whatever. I was brought up plain and hard – try one of these cigars; they cost me fifty cents each. In fact, I practically had no schooling at all. When I left school, I didn’t know how to read, not to read good. It’s only since I’ve been in business that I’ve learned to write English, that is so as to use it right. But I’ll guarantee to say there isn’t a man in the shoe business today can write a better letter than I can. But all that I know is what I’ve learned myself. Why, I can’t do fractions even now. I don’t see that a man need. And I never learned no geography, except what I got for myself off railroad folders. I don’t believe a man needs more than that anyway. I’ve got my boy at Harvard now. His mother was set on it. But I don’t see that he learns anything, or nothing that will help him any in business. They say they learn them character and manners in the colleges, but, as I see it, a man can get all that just as well in business – is that wine all right? If not, tell me and I’ll give the head waiter hell; they charge enough for it; what you’re drinking costs me four-fifty a bottle.

But I was starting to tell you about my early start in business. I had it good and hard all right. Why when I struck New York – I was sixteen then – I had just eighty cents to my name. I lived on it for nearly a week while I was walking round hunting for a job. I used to get soup for three cents, and roast beef with potatoes, all you could eat, for eight cents, that tasted better than anything I can ever get in this damn club. It was down somewhere on Sixth Avenue, but I’ve forgotten the way to it.

Well, about the sixth day I got a job, down in a shoe factory, working on a machine. I guess you’ve never seen shoe-machinery, have you? No, you wouldn’t likely. It’s complicated. Even in those days there was thirty-five machines went to the making of a shoe, and now we use as many as fifty-four. I’d never seen the machines before, but the foreman took me on. “You look strong,” he said; “I’ll give you a try anyway.”

So I started in. I didn’t know anything. But I made good from the first day. I got four a week at the start, and after two months I got a raise to four-twenty-five.

Well, after I’d worked there about three months, I went up to the floor manager of the flat I worked on, and I said, “Say, Mr. Jones, do you want to save ten dollars a week on expenses?” “How?” says he. “Why,” I said, “that foreman I’m working under on the machine, I’ve watched him, and I can do his job; dismiss him and I’ll take over his work at half what you pay him.” “Can you do the work?” he says. “Try me out,” I said; “fire him and give me a chance.” “Well,” he said, “I like your spirit anyway; you’ve got the right sort of stuff in you.”

So he fired the foreman and I took over the job and held it down. It was hard at first, but I worked twelve hours a day, and studied up a book on factory machinery at night. Well, after I’d been on that work for about a year, I went in one day to the general manager downstairs, and I said, “Mr. Thompson, do you want to save about a hundred dollars a month on your overhead costs?” “How can I do that?” says he. “Sit down.” “Why,” I said, “you dismiss Mr. Jones and give me his place as manager of the floor, and I’ll undertake to do his work, and mine with it, at a hundred less than you’re paying now.” He turned and went into the inner office, and I could hear him talking to Mr. Evans, the managing director. “The young fellow certainly has character,” I heard him say. Then he came out and he said, “Well, we’re going to give you a try anyway: we like to help out our employés all we can, you know; and you’ve got the sort of stuff in you that we’re looking for.”

So they dismissed Jones next day and I took over his job and did it easy. It was nothing anyway. The higher up you get in business, the easier it is if you know how. I held that job two years, and I saved all my salary except twenty-five dollars a month, and I lived on that. I never spent any money anyway. I went once to see Irving do this Macbeth for twenty-five cents, and once I went to a concert and saw a man play the violin for fifteen cents in the gallery. But I don’t believe you get much out of the theatre anyway; as I see it, there’s nothing to it.

Well, after a while I went one day to Mr. Evans’ office and I said, “Mr. Evans, I want you to dismiss Mr. Thompson, the general manager.” “Why, what’s he done?” he says. “Nothing,” I said, “but I can take over his job on top of mine and you can pay me the salary you give him and save what you’re paying me now.” “Sounds good to me,” he says.

So they let Thompson go and I took his place. That, of course, is where I got my real start, because, you see, I could control the output and run the costs up and down just where I liked. I suppose you don’t know anything about costs and all that – they don’t teach that sort of thing in colleges – but even you would understand something about dividends and would see that an energetic man with lots of character and business in him, if he’s general manager can just do what he likes with the costs, especially the overhead, and the shareholders have just got to take what he gives them and be glad to. You see they can’t fire him – not when he’s got it all in his own hands – for fear it will all go to pieces.

Why would I want to run it that way for? Well, I’ll tell you. I had a notion by that time that the business was getting so big that Mr. Evans, the managing director, and most of the board had pretty well lost track of the details and didn’t understand it. There’s an awful lot, you know, in the shoe business. It’s not like ordinary things. It’s complicated. And so I’d got an idea that I would shove them clean out of it – or most of them.

So I went one night to see the president, old Guggenbaum, up at his residence. He didn’t only have this business, but he was in a lot of other things as well, and he was a mighty hard man to see. He wouldn’t let any man see him unless he knew first what he was going to say. But I went up to his residence at night, and I saw him there. I talked first with his daughter, and I said I just had to see him. I said it so she didn’t dare refuse. There’s a way in talking to women that they won’t say no.

So I showed Mr. Guggenbaum what I could do with the stock. “I can put that dividend,” I says, “clean down to zero – and they’ll none of them know why. You can buy the lot of them out at your own price, and after that I’ll put the dividend back to fifteen, or even twenty, in two years.”

“And where do you come in?” says the old man, with a sort of hard look. He had a fine business head, the old man, at least in those days.

So I explained to him where I came in. “All right,” he said; “go ahead. But I’ll put nothing in writing.” “Mr. Guggenbaum, you don’t need to,” I said; “you’re as fair and square as I am and that’s enough for me.”

His daughter let me out of the house door when I went. I guess she’d been pretty scared that she’d done wrong about letting me in. But I said to her it was all right, and after that when I wanted to see the old man I’d always ask for her and she’d see that I got in all right.

Got them squeezed out? Oh, yes, easy. There wasn’t any trouble about that. You see the old man worked up a sort of jolt in wholesale leather on one side, and I fixed up a strike of the hands on the other. We passed the dividend two quarters running, and within a year we had them all scared out and the bulk of the little stockholders, of course, trooped out after them. They always do. The old man picked up the stock when they dropped it, and one-half of it he handed over to me.

That’s what put me where I am now, do you see, with the whole control of the industry in two states and more than that now, because we have the Amalgamated Tanneries in with us, so it’s practically all one concern.

Guggenbaum? Did I squeeze him out? No, I didn’t because, you see, I didn’t have to. The way it was – well, I tell you – I used to go up to the house, see, to arrange things with him – and the way it was – why, you see, I married his daughter, see, so I didn’t exactly need to squeeze him out. He lives up with us now, but he’s pretty old and past business. In fact, I do it all for him now, and pretty well everything he has is signed over to my wife. She has no head for it, and she’s sort of timid anyway – always was – so I manage it all. Of course, if anything happens to the old man, then we get it all. I don’t think he’ll last long. I notice him each day, how weak he’s getting.

My son in the business? Well, I’d like him to be. But he don’t seem to take to it somehow – I’m afraid he takes more after his mother; or else it’s the college that’s doing it. Somehow, I don’t think the colleges bring out business character, do you?

TOC     INDEX

A Study in Still Life:

My Tailor

He always stands there – and has stood these thirty years – in the back part of his shop, his tape woven about his neck, a smile of welcome on his face, waiting to greet me.

“Something in a serge?” he says, “or perhaps in a tweed?”

There are only these two choices open to us. We have had no others for thirty years. It is too late to alter now.

“A serge, yes,” continues my tailor, “something in a dark blue, perhaps.”

He says it with all the gusto of a new idea, as if the thought of dark blue had sprung up as an inspiration – “a dark blue – Mr. Jennings” (this is his assistant), “kindly take down some of those dark blues.”

“Ah!” he exclaims, “now here is an excellent thing.” His manner as he says this is such as to suggest that by sheer good fortune and blind chance he has stumbled upon a thing among a million.

He lifts one knee and drapes the cloth over it, standing upon one leg. He knows that in this attitude it is hard to resist him. Cloth to be appreciated as cloth must be viewed over the bended knee of a tailor with one leg in the air.

My tailor can stand in this way indefinitely, on one leg in a sort of ecstasy, a kind of local paralysis.

“Would that make up well?” I ask him.

“Admirably,” he answers.

I have no real reason to doubt it. I have never seen any reason why cloth should not make up well. But I always ask the question as I know that he expects it and it pleases him. There ought to be a fair give and take in such things.

“You don’t think it at all loud?” I say. He always likes to be asked this.

“Oh, no, very quiet indeed. In fact we always recommend serge as extremely quiet.”

I have never had a wild suit in my life. But it is well to ask.

Then he measures me – round the chest, nowhere else. All the other measures were taken years ago. Even the chest measure is only done – and I know it – to please me. I do not really grow.

“A little fuller in the chest,” my tailor muses. Then he turns to his assistant. “Mr. Jennings, a little fuller in the chest – half an inch on to the chest, please.”

It is a kind fiction. Growth around the chest is flattering even to the humblest of us.

“Yes,” my tailor goes on – he uses “yes” without any special meaning, “yes, and shall we say a week from Tuesday? Mr. Jennings, a week from Tuesday, please.”

“And will you please,” I say, “send the bill to——” but my tailor waves this aside. He does not care to talk about the bill. It would only give pain to both of us to speak of it.

The bill is a matter we deal with solely by correspondence, and that only in a decorous and refined style never calculated to hurt.

I am sure from the tone of my tailor’s letters that he would never send the bill, or ask for the amount, were it not that from time to time he is himself, unfortunately, “pressed” owing to “large consignments from Europe.” But for these heavy consignments, I am sure I should never need to pay him. It is true that I have sometimes thought to observe that these consignments are apt to arrive when I pass the limit of owing for two suits and order a third. But this can only be a mere coincidence.

Yet the bill, as I say, is a thing that we never speak of. Instead of it my tailor passes to the weather. Ordinary people always begin with this topic. Tailors, I notice, end with it. It is only broached after the suit is ordered, never before.

“Pleasant weather we are having,” he says. It is never other, so I notice, with him. Perhaps the order of a suit itself is a little beam of sunshine.

Then we move together towards the front of the store on the way to the outer door.

“Nothing today, I suppose,” says my tailor, “in shirtings?”

“No, thank you.”

This is again a mere form. In thirty years I have never bought any shirtings from him. Yet he asks the question with the same winsomeness as he did thirty years ago.

“And nothing, I suppose, in collaring or in hosiery?”

This again is futile. Collars I buy elsewhere and hosiery I have never worn.

Thus we walk to the door, in friendly colloquy. Somehow if he failed to speak of shirtings and of hosiery, I should feel as if a familiar cord had broken.

At the door we part.

“Good afternoon,” he says – “a week from Tuesday – yes – good afternoon.”

—

Such is – or was – our calm unsullied intercourse, unvaried or at least broken only by consignments from Europe.

I say it was, that is until just the other day.

And then, coming to the familiar door, for my customary summer suit, I found that he was there no more. There were people in the store, unloading shelves and piling cloth and taking stock. And they told me that he was dead. It came to me with a strange shock. I had not thought it possible. He seemed – he should have been – immortal.

They said the worry of his business had helped to kill him. I could not have believed it. It always seemed so still and tranquil – weaving his tape about his neck and marking measures and holding cloth against his leg beside the sunlight of the window in the back part of the shop. Can a man die of that? Yet he had been “going behind,” they said (however that is done), for years. His wife, they told me, would be left badly off. I had never conceived him as having a wife. But it seemed that he had, and a daughter, too – at a conservatory of music – (yet he never spoke of her) – and that he himself was musical and played the flute, and was the sidesman of a church – yet he never referred to it to me. In fact, in thirty years we never spoke of religion. It was hard to connect him with the idea of it.

As I went out I seemed to hear his voice still saying, “and nothing today in shirtings?”

I was sorry I had never bought any.

There is, I am certain, a deep moral in this. But I will not try to draw it. It might appear too obvious.

TOC     INDEX

Follies in Fiction

Stories Shorter Still

(Among the latest follies in fiction is the perpetual demand for stories shorter and shorter still. The only thing to do is to meet this demand at the source and check it. Any of the stories below, if left to soak overnight in a barrel of rainwater, will swell to the dimensions of a dollar-fifty novel.)

I

AN IRREDUCIBLE DETECTIVE STORY

Hanged by a Hair
Or
A Murder Mystery Minimized

The mystery had now reached its climax. First, the man had been undoubtedly murdered. Secondly, it was absolutely certain that no conceivable person had done it.

It was therefore time to call in the great detective.

He gave one searching glance at the corpse. In a moment he whipped out a microscope.

“Ha! ha!” he said, as he picked a hair off the lapel of the dead man’s coat. “The mystery is now solved.”

He held up the hair.

“Listen,” he said, “we have only to find the man who lost this hair and the criminal is in our hands.”

The inexorable chain of logic was complete.

The detective set himself to the search.

For four days and nights he moved, unobserved, through the streets of New York scanning closely every face he passed, looking for a man who had lost a hair.

On the fifth day he discovered a man, disguised as a tourist, his head enveloped in a steamer cap that reached below his ears. The man was about to go on board the Gloritania.

The detective followed him on board.

“Arrest him!” he said, and then drawing himself to his full height, he brandished aloft the hair.

“This is his,” said the great detective. “It proves his guilt.”

“Remove his hat,” said the ship’s captain sternly.

They did so.

The man was entirely bald.

“Ha!” said the great detective, without a moment of hesitation. “He has committed not one murder but about a million.”

II

A COMPRESSED OLD ENGLISH NOVEL

Swearword the Unpronounceable

CHAPTER ONE AND ONLY

“Ods bodikins!” exclaimed Swearword the Saxon, wiping his mailed brow with his iron hand, “a fair morn withal! Methinks twert lithlier to rest me in yon glade than to foray me forth in yon fray! Twert it not?”

But there happened to be a real Anglo-Saxon standing by.

“Where in Heaven’s name,” he said in sudden passion, “did you get that line of English?”

“Churl!” said Swearword, “it is Anglo-Saxon.”

“You’re a liar!” shouted the Saxon; “it is not. It is Harvard College, Sophomore Year, Option No. 6.”

Swearword, now in like fury, threw aside his hauberk, his baldrick, and his needlework on the grass.

“Lay on!” said Swearword.

“Have at you!” cried the Saxon.

They laid on and had at one another.

Swearword was killed.

Thus luckily the whole story was cut off on the first page and ended.

III

A CONDENSED INTERMINABLE NOVEL

From the Cradle to the Grave
Or
A Thousand Pages for a Dollar

Note: (This story originally contained two hundred and fifty thousand words. But by a marvellous feat of condensation it is reduced, without the slightest loss, to a hundred and six words.)

I

Edward Endless lived during his youth
in Maine,
in New Hampshire,
in Vermont,
in Massachusetts,
in Rhode Island,
in Connecticut.

II

Then the lure of the city lured him. His fate took him to

New York, to Chicago, and to Philadelphia.

In Chicago he lived,
in a boarding house on Lasalle Avenue, then he boarded—
in a living house on Michigan Avenue.

In New York he
had a room in an eating house on Forty-first Street,
and then—
ate in a rooming house on Forty-second Street.

In Philadelphia he
used to sleep on Chestnut Street,
and then—
slept on Maple Street.

During all this time women were calling to him. He knew and came to be friends with—

Margaret Jones,

Elizabeth Smith,

Arabella Thompson,

Jane Williams,

Maud Taylor.

And he also got to know, pretty well,

Louise Quelquechose,

Antoinette Alphabette,
and Estelle Etcetera.

And during this same time Art began to call him—

Pictures began to appeal to him,

Statues beckoned to him,

Music maddened him,
and any form of Recitation or Elocution drove him beside himself.

III

Then, one day, he married Margaret Jones.

As soon as he had married her
he was disillusioned.

He now hated her.

Then he lived with Elizabeth Smith—

He had no sooner sat down with her, than—

He hated her.

Half mad, he took his things over to Arabella Thompson’s flat to live with her.

The moment she opened the door of the apartment, he loathed her.

He saw her as she was.

Driven sane with despair, he then—

(Our staff here cut the story off. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages after this. They show Edward Endless grappling in the fight for clean politics. The last hundred pages deal with religion. Edward finds it after a big fight. But no one reads these pages. There are no women in them. Our staff cut them out and merely show at the end—

Edward Purified—

Uplifted—

Transluted.

The whole story is perhaps the biggest thing ever done on this continent. Perhaps!)

TOC     INDEX

The Snoopopaths

—or—
Fifty Stories in One

This particular study in the follies of literature is not so much a story as a sort of essay. The average reader will therefore turn from it with a shudder. The condition of the average reader’s mind is such that he can take in nothing but fiction. And it must be thin fiction at that – thin as gruel. Nothing else will “sit on his stomach.”

Everything must come to the present day reader in this form. If you wish to talk to him about religion, you must dress it up as a story and label it Beth-sheba, or The Curse of David; if you want to improve the reader’s morals, you must write him a little thing in dialogue called Mrs. Potiphar Dines Out. If you wish to expostulate with him about drink you must do so through a narrative called Red Rum – short enough and easy enough for him to read it, without overstraining his mind, while he drinks cocktails.

But whatever the story is about it has got to deal – in order to be read by the average reader – with A MAN and A WOMAN. I put these words in capitals to indicate that they have got to stick out of the story with the crudity of a drawing done by a child with a burnt stick. In other words, the story has got to be snoopopathic. This is a word derived from the Greek – “snoopo” – or if there never was a Greek verb snoopo, at least there ought to have been one – and it means just what it seems to mean. Nine out of ten short stories written in America are snoopopathic.

In snoopopathic literature, in order to get its full effect, the writer generally introduces his characters simply as “the man” and “the woman.” He hates to admit that they have names. He opens out with them something after this fashion:

“The Man lifted his head. He looked about him at the gaily-bedizzled crowd that be-splotched the midnight cabaret with riotous patches of colour. He crushed his cigar against the brass of an Egyptian tray – ‘Bah!’ he murmured, ‘Is it worth it?’ Then he let his head sink again.”

You notice it? He lifted his head all the way up and let it sink all the way down, and you still don’t know who he is.

For The Woman the beginning is done like this:

“The Woman clenched her white hands till the diamonds that glittered upon her fingers were buried in the soft flesh. ‘The shame of it,’ she murmured. Then she took from the table the telegram that lay crumpled upon it and tore it into a hundred pieces. ‘He dare not!’ she muttered through her closed teeth. She looked about the hotel room with its garish furniture. ‘He has no right to follow me here,’ she gasped.”

All of which the reader has to take in without knowing who the woman is, or which hotel she is staying at, or who dare not follow her or why. But the modern reader loves to get this sort of shadowy incomplete effect. If he were told straight out that the woman’s name was Mrs. Edward Dangerfield of Brick City, Montana, and that she had left her husband three days ago and that the telegram told her that he had discovered her address and was following her, the reader would refuse to go on.

This method of introducing the characters is bad enough. But the new snoopopathic way of describing them is still worse. The Man is always detailed as if he were a horse. He is said to be “tall, well set up, with straight legs.”

Great stress is always laid on his straight legs. No magazine story is acceptable now unless The Man’s legs are absolutely straight. Why this is, I don’t know. All my friends have straight legs – and yet I never hear them make it a subject of comment or boasting. I don’t believe I have, at present, a single friend with crooked legs.

But this is not the only requirement. Not only must The Man’s legs be straight, but he must be “clean-limbed,” whatever that is; and of course he must have a “well-tubbed look about him.” How this look is acquired, and whether it can be got with an ordinary bath and water, are things on which I have no opinion.

The Man is of course “clean-shaven.” This allows him to do such necessary things as “turning his clean-shaven face towards the speaker,” “laying his clean-shaven cheek in his hand,” and so on. But every one is familiar with the face of the up-to-date clean-shaven snoopopathic man. There are pictures of him by the million on magazine covers and book jackets, looking into the eyes of The Woman – he does it from a distance of about six inches – with that snoopy earnest expression of brainlessness that he always wears. How one would enjoy seeing a man – a real one with Nevada whiskers and long boots – land him one solid kick from behind.

Then comes The Woman of the snoopopathic story. She is always “beautifully groomed” (Who these grooms are that do it, and where they can be hired, I don’t know), and she is said to be “exquisitely gowned.”

It is peculiar about The Woman that she never seems to wear a dress – always a “gown.” Why this is, I cannot tell. In the good old stories that I used to read, when I could still read for the pleasure of it, the heroines – that was what they used to be called – always wore dresses. But now there is no heroine, only a woman in a gown. I wear a gown myself – at night. It is made of flannel and reaches to my feet, and when I take my candle and go out to the balcony where I sleep, the effect of it on the whole is not bad. But as to its “revealing every line of my figure” – as The Woman’s gown is always said to – and as to its “suggesting even more than it reveals” – well, it simply does not. So when I talk of “gowns” I speak of something that I know all about.

Yet whatever The Woman does, her “gown” is said to “cling” to her. Whether in the street or in a cabaret or in the drawing-room, it “clings.” If by any happy chance she throws a lace wrap about her, then it clings; and if she lifts her gown – as she is apt to – it shows – not what I should have expected – but a jupon, and even that clings. What a jupon is I don’t know. With my gown, I never wear one. These people I have described, The Man and The Woman – The Snoopopaths – are, of course, not husband and wife, or brother and sister, or anything so simple and old-fashioned as that. She is some one else’s wife. She is The Wife of the Other Man. Just what there is, for the reader, about other men’s wives, I don’t understand. I know tons of them that I wouldn’t walk round a block for. But the reading public goes wild over them. The old-fashioned heroine was unmarried. That spoiled the whole story. You could see the end from the beginning. But with Another Man’s Wife, the way is blocked. Something has got to happen that would seem almost obvious to any one.

The writer, therefore, at once puts the two snoopos – The Man and The Woman – into a frightfully indelicate position. The more indelicate it is, the better. Sometimes she gets into his motor by accident after the theatre, or they both engage the drawing-room of a Pullman car by mistake, or else, best of all, he is brought accidentally into her room at a hotel at night. There is something about a hotel room at night, apparently, which throws the modern reader into convulsions. It is always easy to arrange a scene of this sort. For example, taking the sample beginning that I gave above, The Man – whom I left sitting at the cabaret table, above, rises unsteadily – it is the recognised way of rising in a cabaret – and, settling the reckoning with the waiter, staggers into the street. For myself I never do a reckoning with the waiter. I just pay the bill as he adds it, and take a chance on it.

As The Man staggers into the “night air,” the writer has time – just a little time, for the modern reader is impatient – to explain who he is and why he staggers. He is rich. That goes without saying. All clean-limbed men with straight legs are rich. He owns copper mines in Montana. All well-tubbed millionaires do. But he has left them, left everything, because of the Other Man’s Wife. It was that or madness – or worse. He had told himself so a thousand times. (This little touch about “worse” is used in all the stories. I don’t just understand what the “worse” means. But snoopopathic readers reach for it with great readiness.) So The Man had come to New York (the only place where stories are allowed to be laid) under an assumed name, to forget, to drive her from his mind. He had plunged into the mad round of – I never could find it myself, but it must be there, and as they all plunge into it, it must be as full of them as a sheet of Tanglefoot is of flies.

“As The Man walked home to his hotel, the cool, night air steadied him, but his brain is still filled with the fumes of the wine he had drunk.” Notice these “fumes.” It must be great to float round with them in one’s brain, where they apparently lodge. I have often tried to find them, but I never can. Again and again I have said, “Waiter, bring me a Scotch whiskey and soda with fumes.” But I can never get them.

Thus goes The Man to his hotel. Now it is in a room in this same hotel that The Woman is sitting, and in which she has crumpled up the telegram. It is to this hotel that she has come when she left her husband, a week ago. The readers know, without even being told, that she left him “to work out her own salvation” – driven, by his cold brutality, beyond the breaking point. And there is laid upon her soul, as she sits there with clenched hands, the dust and ashes of a broken marriage and a loveless life, and the knowledge, too late, of all that might have been.

And it is to this hotel that The Woman’s Husband is following her.

But The Man does not know that she is in the hotel; nor that she has left her husband; it is only accident that brings them together. And it is only by accident that he has come into her room, at night, and stands there – rooted to the threshold.

Now as a matter of fact, in real life, there is nothing at all in the simple fact of walking into the wrong room of a hotel by accident. You merely apologise and go out. I had this experience myself only a few days ago. I walked right into a lady’s room – next door to my own. But I simply said, “Oh, I beg your pardon, I thought this was No. 343.”

“No,” she said, “this is 341.”

She did not rise and “confront” me, as they always do in the snoopopathic stories. Neither did her eyes flash, nor her gown cling to her as she rose. Nor was her gown made of “rich old stuff.” No, she merely went on reading her newspaper.

“I must apologise,” I said. “I am a little short-sighted, and very often a one and a three look so alike that I can’t tell them apart. I’m afraid——”

“Not at all,” said the lady. “Good evening.”

“You see,” I added, “this room and my own being so alike, and mine being 343 and this being 341, I walked in before I realized that instead of walking into 343 I was walking into 341.”

She bowed in silence, without speaking, and I felt that it was now the part of exquisite tact to retire quietly without further explanation, or at least with only a few murmured words about the possibility of tomorrow being even colder than today. I did so, and the affair ended with complete savoir faire on both sides.

But the Snoopopaths, Man and Woman, can’t do this sort of thing, or, at any rate, the snoopopathic writer won’t let them. The opportunity is too good to miss. As soon as The Man comes into The Woman’s room – before he knows who she is, for she has her back to him – he gets into a condition dear to all snoopopathic readers.

His veins simply “surged.” His brain beat against his temples in mad pulsation. His breath “came and went in quick, short pants.” (This last might perhaps be done by one of the hotel bellboys, but otherwise it is hard to imagine.)

And The Woman – “Noiseless as his step had been she seemed to sense his presence. A wave seemed to sweep over her——” She turned and rose “fronting him full.” This doesn’t mean that he was full when she fronted him. Her gown – but we know about that already. “It was a coward’s trick,” she panted.

Now if The Man had had the kind of savoir faire that I have, he would have said: “Oh, pardon me! I see this room is 341. My own room is 343, and to me a one and a three often look so alike that I seem to have walked into 341 while looking for 343.” And he could have explained in two words that he had no idea that she was in New York, was not following her, and not proposing to interfere with her in any way. And she would have explained also in two sentences why and how she came to be there. But this wouldn’t do. Instead of it, The Man and The Woman go through the grand snoopopathic scene which is so intense that it needs what is really a new kind of language to convey it.

“Helene,” he croaked, reaching out his arms – his voice tensed with the infinity of his desire.

“Back,” she iced. And then, “Why have you come here?” she hoarsed. “What business have you here?”

“None,” he glooped, “none. I have no business.” They stood sensing one another.

“I thought you were in Philadelphia,” she said – her gown clinging to every fibre of her as she spoke.

“I was,” he wheezed.

“And you left it?” she sharped, her voice tense.

“I left it,” he said, his voice glumping as he spoke. “Need I tell you why?” He had come nearer to her. She could hear his pants as he moved.

“No, no,” she gurgled. “You left it. It is enough. I can understand” – she looked bravely up at him – “I can understand any man leaving it.” Then as he moved still nearer her, there was the sound of a sudden swift step in the corridor. The door opened and there stood before them – The Other Man, the Husband of The Woman – Edward Dangerfield.

This, of course, is the grand snoopopathic climax, when the author gets all three of them – The Man, The Woman, and The Woman’s Husband – in a hotel room at night. But notice what happens.

He stood in the opening of the doorway looking at them, a slight smile upon his lips. “Well?” he said. Then he entered the room and stood for a moment quietly looking into The Man’s face.

“So,” he said, “it was you.” He walked into the room and laid the light coat that he had been carrying over his arm upon the table. He drew a cigar case from his waistcoat pocket.

“Try one of these Havanas,” he said.

Observe the calm of it. This is what the snoopopath loves – no rage, no blustering – calmness, cynicism. He walked over towards the mantel-piece and laid his hat upon it. He set his boot upon the fender.

“It was cold this evening,” he said. He walked over to the window and gazed a moment into the dark.

“This is a nice hotel,” he said. (This scene is what the author and the reader love; they hate to let it go. They’d willingly keep the man walking up and down for hours saying “Well!”)

The Man raised his head! “Yes, it’s a good hotel,” he said. Then he let his head fall again.

This kind of thing goes on until, if possible, the reader is persuaded into thinking that there is nothing going to happen. Then:

“He turned to The Woman. ‘Go in there,’ he said, pointing to the bedroom door. Mechanically she obeyed.” This, by the way, is the first intimation that the reader has that the room in which they were sitting was not a bedroom. The two men were alone. Dangerfield walked over to the chair where he had thrown his coat.

“I bought this coat in St. Louis last fall,” he said. His voice was quiet, even passionless. Then from the pocket of the coat he took a revolver and laid it on the table. Marsden watched him without a word.

“Do you see this pistol?” said Dangerfield.

Marsden raised his head a moment and let it sink.

Of course the ignorant reader keeps wondering why he doesn’t explain. But how can he? What is there to say? He has been found out of his own room at night. The penalty for this in all the snoopopathic stories is death. It is understood that in all the New York hotels the night porters shoot a certain number of men in the corridors every night.

“When we married,” said Dangerfield, glancing at the closed door as he spoke. “I bought this and the mate to it – for her – just the same, with the monogram on the butt – see! And I said to her, ‘If things ever go wrong between you and me, there is always this way out.’”

He lifted the pistol from the table, examining its mechanism. He rose and walked across the room till he stood with his back against the door, the pistol in his hand, its barrel pointing straight at Marsden’s heart. Marsden never moved. Then as the two men faced one another thus, looking into one another’s eyes, their ears caught a sound from behind the closed door of the inner room – a sharp, hard, metallic sound as if some one in the room within had raised the hammer of a pistol – a jewelled pistol like the one in Dangerfield’s hand.

And then—

A loud report, and with a cry, the cry of a woman, one shrill despairing cry——

Or no, hang it – I can’t consent to end up a story in that fashion, with the dead woman prone across the bed, the smoking pistol, with a jewel on the hilt, still clasped in her hand – the red blood welling over the white laces of her gown – while the two men gaze down upon her cold face with horror in their eyes. Not a bit. Let’s end it like this:

“A shrill despairing cry – ‘Ed! Charlie! Come in here quick! Hurry! The steam coil has blown out a plug! You two boys quit talking and come in here, for Heaven’s sake, and fix it.’”

And, indeed, if the reader will look back he will see there is nothing in the dialogue to preclude it. He was misled, that’s all. I merely said that Mrs. Dangerfield had left her husband a few days before. So she had – to do some shopping in New York. She thought it mean of him to follow her. And I never said that Mrs. Dangerfield had any connection whatever with The Woman with whom Marsden was in love. Not at all. He knew her, of course, because he came from Brick City. But she had thought he was in Philadelphia, and naturally she was surprised to see him back in New York. That’s why she exclaimed “Back!” And as a matter of plain fact, you can’t pick up a revolver without its pointing somewhere. No one said he meant to fire it.

In fact, if the reader will glance back at the dialogue – I know he has no time to, but if he does – he will see that, being something of a snoopopath himself, he has invented the whole story.

TOC     INDEX

Foreign Fiction
in Imported Instalments

SERGE THE SUPERMAN.
A Russian Novel.

Translated, with a hand pump, out of the original Russian.

(Special Editorial Note, or, Fit of Convulsions into Which an Editor Falls in Introducing This Sort of Story to His Readers.—We need offer no apology to our readers in presenting to them a Russian novel. There is no doubt that the future in literature lies with Russia. The names of Tolstoi, of Turgansomething, and Dostoi-what-is-it are household words in America. We may say with certainty that Serge the Superman is the most distinctly Russian thing produced in years. The Russian view of life is melancholy and fatalistic. It is dark with the gloom of the great forests of the Volga, and saddened with the infinite silence of the Siberian plain. Hence the Russian speech, like the Russian thought, is direct, terse and almost crude in its elemental power. All this appears in Serge the Superman. It is the directest, tersest, crudest thing we have ever seen. We showed the manuscript to a friend of ours, a critic, a man who has a greater command of the language of criticism than perhaps any two men in New York today. He said at once, “This is big. It is a big thing, done by a big man, a man with big ideas, writing at his very biggest. The whole thing has a bigness about it that is—” and here he paused and thought a moment and added – “big.” After this he sat back in his chair and said, “big, big, big,” till we left him. We next showed the story to an English critic and he said without hesitation, or with very little, “This is really not half bad.” Last of all we read the story ourselves and we rose after its perusal – itself not an easy thing to do – and said, “Wonderful but terrible.” All through our (free) lunch that day we shuddered.)

CHAPTER I

As a child Serge lived with his father – Ivan Ivanovitch – and his mother – Katrina Katerinavitch. In the house, too, were Nitska, the serving maid, Itch, the serving man, and Yump, the cook, his wife.

The house stood on the borders of a Russian town. It was in the heart of Russia. All about it was the great plain with the river running between low banks and over it the dull sky.

Across the plain ran the post road, naked and bare. In the distance one could see a moujik driving a three-horse tarantula, or perhaps Swill, the swine-herd, herding the swine. Far away the road dipped over the horizon and was lost.

“Where does it go to?” asked Serge. But no one could tell him.

In the winter there came the great snows and the river was frozen and Serge could walk on it.

On such days Yob, the postman, would come to the door, stamping his feet with the cold as he gave the letters to Itch.

“It is a cold day,” Yob would say.

“It is God’s will,” said Itch. Then he would fetch a glass of Kwas steaming hot from the great stove, built of wood, that stood in the kitchen.

“Drink, little brother,” he would say to Yob, and Yob would answer, “Little Uncle, I drink your health,” and he would go down the road again, stamping his feet with the cold.

Then later the spring would come and all the plain was bright with flowers and Serge could pick them. Then the rain came and Serge could catch it in a cup. Then the summer came and the great heat and the storms and Serge could watch the lightning.

“What is lightning for?” he would ask of Yump, the cook, as she stood kneading the mush, or dough, to make slab, or pancake, for the morrow. Yump shook her knob, or head, with a look of perplexity on her big mugg, or face.

“It is God’s will,” she said.

Thus Serge grew up a thoughtful child.

At times he would say to his mother, “Matrinska” (little mother), “why is the sky blue?” And she couldn’t tell him.

Or at times he would say to his father, “Boob” (Russian for father), “what is three times six?” But his father didn’t know.

Each year Serge grew.

Life began to perplex the boy. He couldn’t understand it. No one could tell him anything.

Sometimes he would talk with Itch, the serving man.

“Itch,” he asked, “what is morality?” But Itch didn’t know. In his simple life he had never heard of it.

At times people came to the house – Snip, the schoolmaster, who could read and write, and Cinch, the harness maker, who made harness.

Once there came Popoff, the inspector of police, in his blue coat with fur on it. He stood in front of the fire writing down the names of all the people in the house. And when he came to Itch, Serge noticed how Itch trembled and cowered before Popoff, cringing as he brought a three-legged stool and saying, “Sit near the fire, little father; it is cold.” Popoff laughed and said, “Cold as Siberia, is it not, little brother?” Then he said, “Bare me your arm to the elbow, and let me see if our mark is on it still.” And Itch raised his sleeve to the elbow and Serge saw that there was a mark upon it burnt deep and black.

“I thought so,” said Popoff, and he laughed. But Yump, the cook, beat the fire with a stick so that the sparks flew into Popoff’s face. “You are too near the fire, little inspector,” she said. “It burns.”

All that evening Itch sat in the corner of the kitchen, and Serge saw that there were tears on his face.

“Why does he cry?” asked Serge.

“He has been in Siberia,” said Yump as she poured water into the great iron pot to make soup for the week after the next.

Serge grew more thoughtful each year.

All sorts of things, occurrences of daily life, set him thinking. One day he saw some peasants drowning a tax collector in the river. It made a deep impression on him. He couldn’t understand it. There seemed something wrong about it.

“Why did they drown him?” he asked of Yump, the cook.

“He was collecting taxes,” said Yump, and she threw a handful of cups into the cupboard.

Then one day there was great excitement in the town, and men in uniform went to and fro and all the people stood at the doors talking.

“What has happened?” asked Serge.

“It is Popoff, inspector of police,” answered Itch. “They have found him beside the river.”

“Is he dead?” questioned Serge.

Itch pointed reverently to the ground – “He is there!” he said.

All that day Serge asked questions. But no one would tell him anything. “Popoff is dead,” they said. “They have found him beside the river with his ribs driven in on his heart.”

“Why did they kill him?” asked Serge.

But no one would say.

So after this Serge was more perplexed than ever.

Every one noticed how thoughtful Serge was.

“He is a wise boy,” they said. “Some day he will be a learned man. He will read and write.”

“Defend us!” exclaimed Itch. “It is a dangerous thing.”

One day Liddoff, the priest, came to the house with a great roll of paper in his hand.

“What is it?” asked Serge.

“It is the alphabet,” said Liddoff.

“Give it to me,” said Serge with eagerness.

“Not all of it,” said Liddoff, gently. “Here is part of it,” and he tore off a piece and gave it to the boy.

“Defend us!” said Yump, the cook. “It is not a wise thing,” and she shook her head as she put a new lump of clay in the wooden stove to make it burn more brightly.

Then everybody knew that Serge was learning the alphabet, and that when he had learned it he was to go to Moscow, to the Teknik, and learn what else there was.

So the days passed and the months. Presently Ivan Ivanovitch said, “Now he is ready,” and he took down a bag of rubles that was concealed on a shelf beside the wooden stove in the kitchen and counted them out after the Russian fashion, “Ten, ten, and yet ten, and still ten, and ten,” till he could count no further.

“Protect us!” said Yump. “Now he is rich!” and she poured oil and fat mixed with sand into the bread and beat it with a stick.

“He must get ready,” they said. “He must buy clothes. Soon he will go to Moscow to the Teknik and become a wise man.”

Now it so happened that there came one day to the door a drosky, or one-horse carriage, and in it was a man and beside him was a girl. The man stopped to ask the way from Itch, who pointed down the post road over the plain. But his hand trembled and his knees shook as he showed the way. For the eyes of the man who asked the way were dark with hate and cruel with power. And he wore a uniform and there was brass upon his cap. But Serge looked only at the girl. And there was no hate in her eyes, but only a great burning, and a look that went far beyond the plain, Serge knew not where. And as Serge looked, the girl turned her face and their eyes met, and he knew that he would never forget her. And he saw in her face that she would never forget him. For that is love.

“Who is that?” he asked, as he went back again with Itch into the house.

“It is Kwartz, chief of police,” said Itch, and his knees still trembled as he spoke.

“Where is he taking her?” said Serge.

“To Moscow, to the prison,” answered Itch. “There they will hang her and she will die.”

“Who is she?” asked Serge. “What has she done?” and as he spoke he could still see the girl’s face, and the look upon it, and a great fire went sweeping through his veins.

“She is Olga Ileyitch,” answered Itch. “She made the bomb that killed Popoff, the inspector, and now they will hang her and she will die.”

“Defend us!” murmured Yump, as she heaped more clay upon the stove.

CHAPTER II

Serge went to Moscow. He entered the Teknik. He became a student. He learned geography from Stoj, the professor, astrography from Fudj, the assistant, together with giliodesy, orgastrophy and other native Russian studies.

All day he worked. His industry was unflagging. His instructors were enthusiastic. “If he goes on like this,” they said, “he will some day know something.”

“It is marvellous,” said one; “if he continues thus, he will be a professor.”

“He is too young,” said Stoj, shaking his head; “he has too much hair.”

“He sees too well,” said Fudj. “Let him wait till his eyes are weaker.”

But all day as Serge worked he thought. And his thoughts were of Olga Ileyitch, the girl that he had seen with Kwartz, inspector of police. He wondered why she had killed Popoff, the inspector. He wondered if she was dead. There seemed no justice in it.

One day he questioned his professor.

“Is the law just?” he said. “Is it right to kill?”

But Stoj shook his head, and would not answer.

“Let us go on with our orgastrophy,” he said. And he trembled so that the chalk shook in his hand.

So Serge questioned no further, but he thought more deeply still. All the way from the Teknik to the house where he lodged he was thinking. As he climbed the stair to his attic room he was still thinking.

The house in which Serge lived was the house of Madame Vasselitch. It was a tall dark house in a sombre street. There were no trees upon the street and no children played there. And opposite to the house of Madame Vasselitch was a building of stone, with windows barred, that was always silent. In it were no lights and no one went in or out.

“What is it?” Serge asked.

“It is the house of the dead,” answered Madame Vasselitch, and she shook her head and would say no more.

The husband of Madame Vasselitch was dead. No one spoke of him. In the house were only students. Most of them were wild fellows, as students are. At night they would sit about the table in the great room drinking Kwas made from sawdust fermented in syrup, or golgol, the Russian absinthe, made by dipping a gooseberry in a bucket of soda water. Then they would play cards, laying matches on the table and betting, “Ten, ten, and yet ten,” till all the matches were gone. Then they would say, “There are no more matches; let us dance,” and they would dance upon the floor, till Madame Vasselitch would come to the room, a candle in her hand, and say, “Little brothers, it is ten o’clock. Go to bed.” Then they went to bed. They were wild fellows, as all students are.

But there were two students in the house of Madame Vasselitch who were not wild. They were brothers. They lived in a long room in the basement. It was so low that it was below the street.

The brothers were pale, with long hair. They had deep-set eyes. They had but little money. Madame Vasselitch gave them food. “Eat, little sons,” she would say. “You must not die.”

The brothers worked all day. They were real students. One brother was Halfoff. He was taller than the other and stronger. The other brother was Kwitoff. He was not so tall as Halfoff and not so strong.

One day Serge went to the room of the brothers. The brothers were at work. Halfoff sat at a table. There was a book in front of him.

“What is it?” asked Serge.

“It is solid geometry,” said Halfoff, and there was a gleam in his eyes.

“Why do you study it?” said Serge.

“To free Russia,” said Halfoff.

“And what book have you?” said Serge to Kwitoff.

“Hamblin Smith’s Elementary Trigonometry,” said Kwitoff, and he quivered like a leaf.

“What does it teach?” asked Serge.

“Freedom!” said Kwitoff.

The two brothers looked at one another.

“Shall we tell him everything?” said Halfoff.

“Not yet,” said Kwitoff. “Let him learn first. Later he shall know.”

After that Serge often came to the room of the two brothers.

The two brothers gave him books. “Read them,” they said.

“What are they?” asked Serge.

“They are in English,” said Kwitoff. “They are forbidden books. They are not allowed in Russia. But in them is truth and freedom.”

“Give me one,” said Serge.

“Take this,” said Kwitoff. “Carry it under your cloak. Let no one see it.”

“What is it?” asked Serge, trembling in spite of himself.

“It is Caldwell’s Pragmatism,” said the brothers.

“Is it forbidden?” asked Serge.

The brothers looked at him.

“It is death to read it,” they said.

After that Serge came each day and got books from Halfoff and Kwitoff. At night he read them. They fired his brain. All of them were forbidden books. No one in Russia might read them. Serge read Hamblin Smith’s Algebra. He read it all through from cover to cover, feverishly. He read Murray’s Calculus. It set his brain on fire. “Can this be true?” he asked.

The books opened a new world to Serge.

The brothers often watched him as he read.

“Shall we tell him everything?” said Halfoff.

“Not yet,” said Kwitoff; “he is not ready.”

One night Serge went to the room of the two brothers. They were not working at their books. Littered about the room were blacksmith’s tools and wires, and pieces of metal lying on the floor. There was a crucible and underneath it a blue fire that burned fiercely. Beside it the brothers worked. Serge could see their faces in the light of the flame.

“Shall we tell him now?” said Kwitoff. The other brother nodded.

“Tell him now,” he said.

“Little brother,” said Kwitoff, and he rose from beside the flame and stood erect, for he was tall, “will you give your life?”

“What for?” asked Serge.

The brothers shook their heads.

“We cannot tell you that,” they said. “That would be too much. Will you join us?”

“In what?” asked Serge.

“We must not say,” said the brothers. “We can only ask are you willing to help our enterprise with all your power and with your life if need be?”

“What is your enterprise?” asked Serge.

“We must not divulge it,” they said. “Only this: Will you give your life to save another life, to save Russia?”

Serge paused. He thought of Olga Ileyitch. Only to save her life would he have given his.

“I cannot,” he answered.

“Good night, little brother,” said Kwitoff gently, and he turned back to his work.

Thus the months passed.

Serge studied without ceasing. “If there is truth,” he thought, “I shall find it.” All the time he thought of Olga Ileyitch. His face grew pale. “Justice, justice,” he thought, “what is justice and truth?”

CHAPTER III

Now when Serge had been six months in the house of Madame Vasselitch, Ivan Ivanovitch, his father, sent Itch, the serving man, and Yump, the cook, his wife, to Moscow to see how Serge fared. And Ivan first counted out rubles into a bag, “ten, and ten and still ten,” till Itch said, “It is enough. I will carry that.”

Then they made ready to go. Itch took a duck from the pond and put a fish in his pocket, together with a fragrant cheese and a bundle of sweet garlic. And Yump took oil and dough and mixed it with tar and beat it with an iron bar so as to shape it into a pudding.

So they went forth on foot, walking till they came to Moscow.

“It is a large place,” said Itch, and he looked about him at the lights and the people.

“Defend us,” said Yump. “It is no place for a woman.”

“Fear nothing,” said Itch, looking at her.

So they went on, looking for the house of Madame Vasselitch.

“How bright the lights are!” said Itch, and he stood still and looked about him. Then he pointed at a burleski, or theatre. “Let us go in there and rest,” he said.

“No,” said Yump, “let us hurry on.”

“You are tired,” said Itch. “Give me the pudding and hurry forward, so that you may sleep. I will come later, bringing the pudding and the fish.”

“I am not tired,” said Yump.

So they came at last to the house of Madame Vasselitch. And when they saw Serge they said, “How tall he is and how well grown!” But they thought, “He is pale. Ivan Ivanovitch must know.”

And Itch said, “Here are the rubles sent by Ivan Ivanovitch. Count them, little son, and see that they are right.”

“How many should there be?” said Serge.

“I know not,” said Itch; “you must count them and see.”

Then Yump said, “Here is a pudding, little son, and a fish, and a duck and a cheese and garlic.”

So that night Itch and Yump stayed in the house of Madame Vasselitch.

“You are tired,” said Itch; “you must sleep.”

“I am not tired,” said Yump. “It is only that my head aches and my face burns from the wind and the sun.”

“I will go forth,” said Itch, “and find a fisski, or drug-store, and get something for your face.”

“Stay where you are,” said Yump. And Itch stayed.

Meantime Serge had gone up stairs with the fish and the duck and the cheese and the pudding. As he went up he thought, “It is selfish to eat alone. I will give part of the fish to the others.” And when he got a little further up the steps he thought, “I will give them all of the fish.” And when he got higher still he thought, “They shall have everything.”

Then he opened the door and came into the big room where the students were playing with matches at the big table and drinking golgol out of cups. “Here is food, brothers,” he said. “Take it. I need none.”

The students took the food and they cried, “Rah, Rah,” and beat the fish against the table. But the pudding they would not take. “We have no axe,” they said. “Keep it.”

Then they poured out golgol for Serge and said, “Drink it.”

But Serge would not.

“I must work,” he said, and all the students laughed. “He wants to work!” they cried. “Rah, Rah.”

But Serge went up to his room and lighted his taper, made of string dipped in fat, and set himself to study.

“I must work,” he repeated.

So Serge sat at his books. It got later and the house grew still. The noise of the students below ceased and then everything was quiet.

Serge sat working through the night. Then presently it grew morning and the dark changed to twilight and Serge could see from his window the great building with the barred windows across the street standing out in the grey mist of the morning.

Serge had often studied thus through the night and when it was morning he would say, “It is morning,” and would go down and help Madame Vasselitch unbar the iron shutters and unchain the door, and remove the bolts from the window casement.

But on this morning as Serge looked from his window his eyes saw a figure behind the barred window opposite to him. It was the figure of a girl and she was kneeling on the floor and she was in prayer, for Serge could see that her hands were before her face. And as he looked all his blood ran warm to his head, and his limbs trembled even though he could not see the girl’s face. Then the girl rose from her knees and turned her face towards the bars, and Serge knew that it was Olga Ileyitch and that she had seen and known him.

Then he came down the stairs and Madame Vasselitch was there undoing the shutters and removing the nails from the window casing.

“What have you seen, little son?” she asked, and her voice was gentle, for the face of Serge was pale and his eyes were wide.

But Serge did not answer the question.

“What is that house?” he said; “the great building with the bars that you call the house of the dead?”

“Shall I tell you, little son,” said Madame Vasselitch, and she looked at him, still thinking. “Yes,” she said, “he shall know.”

“It is the prison of the condemned, and from there they go forth only to die. Listen, little son,” she went on, and she gripped Serge by the wrist till he could feel the bones of her fingers against his flesh. “There lay my husband, Vangorod Vasselitch, waiting for his death. Months long he was there behind the bars and no one might see him or know when he was to die. I took this tall house that I might at least be near him till the end. But to those who lie there waiting for their death it is allowed once and once only that they may look out upon the world. And this is allowed to them the day before they die. So I took this house and waited, and each day I looked forth at dawn across the street and he was not there. Then at last he came. I saw him at the window and his face was pale and set and I could see the marks of the iron on his wrists as he held them to the bars. But I could see that his spirit was unbroken. There was no power in them to break that. Then he saw me at the window, and thus across the narrow street we said good-bye. It was only a moment. ‘Sonia Vasselitch,’ he said, ‘do not forget,’ and he was gone. I have not forgotten. I have lived on here in this dark house and I have not forgotten. My sons – yes, little brother, my sons, I say – have not forgotten. Now tell me, Sergius Ivanovitch, what you have seen.”

“I have seen the woman that I love,” said Serge, “kneeling behind the bars in prayer. I have seen Olga Ileyitch.”

“Her name,” said Madame Vasselitch, and there were no tears in her eyes and her voice was calm, “her name is Olga Vasselitch. She is my daughter, and tomorrow she is to die.”

CHAPTER IV

Madame Vasselitch took Serge by the hand.

“Come,” she said, “you shall speak to my sons,” and she led him down the stairs towards the room of Halfoff and Kwitoff.

“They are my sons,” she said. “Olga is their sister. They are working to save her.”

Then she opened the door. Halfoff and Kwitoff were working as Serge had seen them before, beside the crucible with the blue flame on their faces.

They had not slept.

Madame Vasselitch spoke.

“He has seen Olga,” she said. “It is today.”

“We are too late,” said Halfoff, and he groaned.

“Courage, brother,” said Kwitoff. “She will not die till sunrise. It is twilight now. We have still an hour. Let us go to work.”

Serge looked at the brothers.

“Tell me,” he said. “I do not understand.”

Halfoff turned a moment from his work and looked at Serge.

“Brother,” he said, “will you give your life?”

“Is it for Olga?” asked Serge.

“It is for her.”

“I give it gladly,” said Serge.

“Listen then,” said Halfoff. “Our sister is condemned for the killing of Popoff, inspector of police. She is in the prison of the condemned, the house of the dead, across the street. Her cell is there beside us. There is only a wall between. Look——”

Halfoff as he spoke threw aside a curtain that hung across the end of the room. Serge looked into blackness. It was a tunnel.

“It leads to the wall of her cell,” said Halfoff. “We are close against the wall but we cannot shatter it. We are working to make a bomb. No bomb that we can make is hard enough. We can only try once. If it fails the noise would ruin us. There is no second chance. We try our bombs in the crucible. They crumble. They have no strength. We are ignorant. We are only learning. We studied it in the books, the forbidden books. It took a month to learn to set the wires to fire the bomb. The tunnel was there. We did not have to dig. It was for my father, Vangorod Vasselitch. He would not let them use it. He tapped a message through the wall, ‘Keep it for a greater need.’ Now it is his daughter that is there.”

Halfoff paused. He was panting and his chest heaved. There was perspiration on his face and his black hair was wet.

“Courage, little brother,” said Kwitoff; “she shall not die.”

“Listen,” went on Halfoff. “The bomb is made. It is there beside the crucible. It has power in it to shatter the prison. But the wires are wrong. They do not work. There is no current in them. Something is wrong. We cannot explode the bomb.”

“Courage, courage,” said Kwitoff, and his hands were busy among the wires before him. “I am working still.”

Serge looked at the brothers.

“Is that the bomb?” he said, pointing at a great ball of metal that lay beside the crucible.

“It is,” said Halfoff.

“And the little fuse that is in the side of it fires it? And the current from the wires lights the fuse?”

“Yes,” said Halfoff.

The two brothers looked at Serge, for there was a meaning in his voice and a strange look upon his face.

“If the bomb is placed against the wall and if the fuse is lighted it would explode.”

“Yes,” said Halfoff despairingly, “but how? The fuse is instantaneous. Without the wires we cannot light it. It would be death.”

Serge took the bomb in his hand. His face was pale.

“Let it be so!” he said. “I will give my life for hers.”

He lifted the bomb in his hand. “I will go through the tunnel and hold the bomb against the wall and fire it,” he said. “Halfoff, light me the candle in the flame. Be ready when the wall falls.”

“No, no,” said Halfoff, grasping Serge by the arm – “you must not die!”

“My brother,” said Kwitoff quietly, “let it be as he says. It is for Russia!”

But as Halfoff turned to light the candle in the flame there came a great knocking at the door above and the sound of many voices in the street.

All paused.

Madame Vasselitch laid her hand upon her lips.

Then there came the sound as of grounded muskets on the pavement of the street and a sharp word of command.

“Soldiers!” said Madame Vasselitch.

Kwitoff turned to his brother. “This is the end,” he said; “explode the bomb here and let us die together.”

Suddenly Madame Vasselitch gave a cry—

“It is Olga’s voice!” she said.

She ran to the door and opened it, and a glad voice was heard crying, “It is I, Olga, and I am free!”

“Free,” exclaimed the brothers.

All hastened up the stairs.

Olga was standing before them in the hall and beside her were the officers of the police and in the street were the soldiers. The students from above had crowded down the stairs and with them were Itch, the serving man, and Yump, the cook.

“I am free,” cried Olga, “liberated by the bounty of the Czar – Russia has declared war to fight for the freedom of the world and all the political prisoners are free.”

“Rah, rah!” cried the students. “War, war, war!”

“She is set free,” said the officer who stood beside Olga. “The charge of killing Popoff is withdrawn. No one will be punished for it now.”

“I never killed him,” said Olga. “I swear it,” and she raised her hand.

“You never killed him!” exclaimed Serge with joy in his heart. “You did not kill Popoff? But who did?”

“Defend us,” said Yump, the cook. “Since there is to be no punishment for it, I killed him myself.”

“You!” they cried.

“It is so,” said Yump. “I killed him beside the river. It was to defend my honour.”

“It was to defend her honour,” cried the brothers. “She has done well.”

They clasped her hand.

“You destroyed him with a bomb?” they said.

“No,” said Yump, “I sat down on him.”

“Rah, rah, rah,” said the students.

There was silence a moment. Then Kwitoff spoke.

“Friends,” he said, “the new day is coming. The dawn is breaking. The moon is rising. The stars are setting. It is the birth of freedom. See! we need it not!” – and as he spoke he grasped in his hands the bomb with its still unlighted fuse – “Russia is free. We are all brothers now. Let us cast it at our enemies. Forward! To the frontier! Live the Czar.”

TOC     INDEX

Timid Thoughts
on Timely Topics

Are the Rich Happy?

Let me admit at the outset that I write this essay without adequate material. I have never known, I have never seen, any rich people. Very often I have thought that I had found them. But it turned out that it was not so. They were not rich at all. They were quite poor. They were hard up. They were pushed for money. They didn’t know where to turn for ten thousand dollars.

In all the cases that I have examined this same error has crept in. I had often imagined, from the fact of people keeping fifteen servants, that they were rich. I had supposed that because a woman rode downtown in a limousine to buy a fifty-dollar hat, she must be well-to-do. Not at all. All these people turn out on examination to be not rich. They are cramped. They say it themselves. Pinched, I think is the word they use. When I see a glittering group of eight people in a stage box at the opera, I know that they are all pinched. The fact that they ride home in a limousine has nothing to do with it.

A friend of mine who has ten thousand dollars a year told me the other day with a sigh that he found it quite impossible to keep up with the rich. On his income he couldn’t do it. A family that I know who have twenty thousand a year have told me the same thing. They can’t keep up with the rich. There is no use in trying. A man that I respect very much who has an income of fifty thousand dollars a year from his law practice has told me with the greatest frankness that he finds it absolutely impossible to keep up with the rich. He says it is better to face the brutal fact of being poor. He says he can only give me a plain meal – what he calls a home dinner – it takes three men and two women to serve it – and he begs me to put up with it.

As far as I remember, I have never met Mr. Carnegie. But I know that if I did he would tell me that he found it quite impossible to keep up with Mr. Rockefeller. No doubt Mr. Rockefeller has the same feeling.

On the other hand there are, and there must be, rich people somewhere. I run across traces of them all the time. The janitor in the building where I work has told me that he has a rich cousin in England who is in the South Western Railway and gets ten pounds a week. He says the railway wouldn’t know what to do without him. In the same way the lady who washes at my house has a rich uncle. He lives in Winnipeg and owns his own house, clear, and has two girls at the high school.

But these are only reported cases of richness. I cannot vouch for them myself.

When I speak therefore of rich people and discuss whether they are happy, it is understood that I am merely drawing my conclusions from the people that I see and know.

My judgment is that the rich undergo cruel trials and bitter tragedies of which the poor know nothing.

In the first place I find that the rich suffer perpetually from money troubles. The poor sit snugly at home while sterling exchange falls ten points in a day. Do they care? Not a bit. An adverse balance of trade washes over the nation like a flood. Who have to mop it up? The rich. Call money rushes up to a hundred per cent, and the poor can still sit and laugh at a ten cent moving picture show and forget it.

But the rich are troubled by money all the time.

I know a man, for example – his name is Spugg – whose private bank account was overdrawn last month twenty thousand dollars. He told me so at dinner at his club, with apologies for feeling out of sorts. He said it was bothering him. He said he thought it rather unfair of his bank to have called his attention to it. I could sympathise, in a sort of way, with his feelings. My own account was overdrawn twenty cents at the time. I knew that if the bank began calling in overdrafts it might be my turn next. Spugg said he supposed he’d have to telephone his secretary in the morning to sell some bonds and cover it. It seemed an awful thing to have to do. Poor people are never driven to this sort of thing. I have known cases of their having to sell a little furniture, perhaps, but imagine having to sell the very bonds out of one’s desk. There’s a bitterness about it that the poor can never know.

With this same man, Mr. Spugg, I have often talked of the problem of wealth. He is a self-made man and he has told me again and again that the wealth he has accumulated is a mere burden to him. He says that he was much happier when he had only the plain, simple things of life. Often as I sit at dinner with him over a meal of nine courses, he tells me how much he would prefer a plain bit of boiled pork, with a little mashed turnip. He says that if he had his way he would make his dinner out of a couple of sausages, fried with a bit of bread. I forget what it is that stands in his way. I have seen Spugg put aside his glass of champagne – or his glass after he had drunk his champagne – with an expression of something like contempt. He says that he remembers a running creek at the back of his father’s farm where he used to lie at full length upon the grass and drink his fill. Champagne, he says, never tasted like that. I have suggested that he should lie on his stomach on the floor of the club and drink a saucerful of soda water. But he won’t.

I know well that my friend Spugg would be glad to be rid of his wealth altogether, if such a thing were possible. Till I understood about these things, I always imagined that wealth could be given away. It appears that it can not. It is a burden that one must carry. Wealth, if one has enough of it, becomes a form of social service. One regards it as a means of doing good to the world, of helping to brighten the lives of others, in a word, a solemn trust. Spugg has often talked with me so long and so late on this topic – the duty of brightening the lives of others – that the waiter who held blue flames for his cigarettes fell asleep against a door post, and the chauffeur outside froze to the seat of his motor.

Spugg’s wealth, I say, he regards as a solemn trust. I have often asked him why he didn’t give it, for example, to a college. But he tells me that unfortunately he is not a college man. I have called his attention to the need of further pensions for college professors; after all that Mr. Carnegie and others have done, there are still thousands and thousands of old professors of thirty-five and even forty, working away day after day and getting nothing but what they earn themselves, and with no provision beyond the age of eighty-five. But Mr. Spugg says that these men are the nation’s heroes. Their work is its own reward.

But after all, Mr. Spugg’s troubles – for he is a single man with no ties – are in a sense selfish. It is perhaps in the homes – or more properly in the residences – of the rich that the great silent tragedies are being enacted every day – tragedies of which the fortunate poor know and can know nothing.

I saw such a case only a few nights ago at the house of the Ashcroft-Fowlers, where I was dining. As we went in to dinner, Mrs. Ashcroft-Fowler said in a quiet aside to her husband, “Has Meadows spoken?” He shook his head rather gloomily and answered, “No, he has said nothing yet.” I saw them exchange a glance of quiet sympathy and mutual help, like people in trouble, who love one another.

They were old friends and my heart beat for them. All through the dinner as Meadows – he was their butler – poured out the wine with each course, I could feel that some great trouble was impending over my friends.

After Mrs. Ashcroft-Fowler had risen and left us, and we were alone over our port wine, I drew my chair near to Fowler’s and I said, “My dear Fowler, I’m an old friend and you’ll excuse me if I seem to be taking a liberty. But I can see that you and your wife are in trouble.”

“Yes,” he said very sadly and quietly, “we are.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Tell me – for it makes a thing easier if one talks about it – is it anything about Meadows?”

“Yes,” he said, “it is about Meadows.”

There was silence for a moment but I knew already what Fowler was going to say. I could feel it coming.

“Meadows,” he said presently, constraining himself to speak with as little emotion as possible, “is leaving us.”

“Poor old chap!” I said, taking his hand.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” he said. “Franklin left last winter – no fault of ours; we did everything we could – and now Meadows.”

There was almost a sob in his voice.

“He hasn’t spoken definitely as yet,” Fowler went on, “but we know there’s hardly any chance of his staying.”

“Does he give any reason?” I asked.

“Nothing specific,” said Fowler. “It’s just a sheer case of incompatibility. Meadows doesn’t like us.”

He put his hand over his face and was silent.

I left very quietly a little later, without going up to the drawing room. A few days afterwards I heard that Meadows had gone. The Ashcroft-Fowlers, I am told, are giving up in despair. They are going to take a little suite of ten rooms and four baths in the Grand Palaver Hotel, and rough it there for the winter.

Yet one must not draw a picture of the rich in colours altogether gloomy. There are cases among them of genuine, light-hearted happiness.

I have observed that this is especially the case among those of the rich who have the good fortune to get ruined, absolutely and completely ruined. They may do this on the Stock Exchange or by banking or in a dozen other ways. The business side of getting ruined is not difficult.

Once the rich are ruined, they are – as far as my observation goes – all right They can then have anything they want.

I saw this point illustrated again just recently. I was walking with a friend of mine and a motor passed bearing a neatly dressed young man, chatting gaily with a pretty woman. My friend raised his hat and gave it a jaunty and cheery swing in the air as if to wave goodwill and happiness.

“Poor old Edward Overjoy!” he said, as the motor moved out of sight.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

“Hadn’t you heard?” said my friend. “He’s ruined – absolutely cleaned out – not a cent left.”

“Dear me!” I said. “That’s awfully hard. I suppose he’ll have to sell that beautiful motor?”

My friend shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “He’ll hardly do that. I don’t think his wife would care to sell that.”

My friend was right. The Overjoys have not sold their motor. Neither have they sold their magnificent sandstone residence. They are too much attached to it, I believe, to sell it. Some people thought they would have given up their box at the opera. But it appears not. They are too musical to care to do that. Meantime it is a matter of general notoriety that the Overjoys are absolutely ruined; in fact, they haven’t a single cent. You could buy Overjoy – so I am informed – for ten dollars.

But I observe that he still wears a seal lined coat worth at least five hundred.

TOC     INDEX

Humour as I See It

It is only fair that at the back of this book I should be allowed a few pages to myself to put down some things that I really think.

Until two weeks ago I might have taken my pen in hand to write about humour with the confident air of an acknowledged professional.

But that time is past. Such claim as I had has been taken from me. In fact I stand unmasked. An English reviewer writing in a literary journal, the very name of which is enough to put contradiction to sleep, has said of my writing, “What is there, after all, in Professor Leacock’s humour but a rather ingenious mixture of hyperbole and myosis?”

The man was right. How he stumbled upon this trade secret, I do not know. But I am willing to admit, since the truth is out, that it has long been my custom in preparing an article of a humorous nature to go down to the cellar and mix up half a gallon of myosis with a pint of hyperbole. If I want to give the article a decidedly literary character, I find it well to put in about half a pint of paresis. The whole thing is amazingly simple.

But I only mention this by way of introduction and to dispel any idea that I am conceited enough to write about humour, with the professional authority of Ella Wheeler Wilcox writing about love, or Eva Tanguay talking about dancing.

All that I dare claim is that I have as much sense of humour as other people. And, oddly enough, I notice that everybody else makes this same claim. Any man will admit, if need be, that his sight is not good, or that he cannot swim, or shoots badly with a rifle, but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him a mortal affront.

“No,” said a friend of mine the other day, “I never go to Grand Opera,” and then he added with an air of pride – “You see, I have absolutely no ear for music.”

“You don’t say so!” I exclaimed.

“None!” he went on. “I can’t tell one tune from another. I don’t know Home Sweet Home from God, Save the King. I can’t tell whether a man is tuning a violin or playing a sonata.”

He seemed to get prouder and prouder over each item of his own deficiency. He ended by saying that he had a dog at his house that had a far better ear for music than he had. As soon as his wife or any visitor started to play the piano the dog always began to howl – plaintively, he said, as if it were hurt. He himself never did this.

When he had finished I made what I thought a harmless comment.

“I suppose,” I said, “that you find your sense of humour deficient in the same way: the two generally go together.”

My friend was livid with rage in a moment.

“Sense of humour!” he said. “My sense of humour! Me without a sense of humour! Why, I suppose I’ve a keener sense of humour than any man, or any two men, in this city!”

From that he turned to bitter personal attack. He said that my sense of humour seemed to have withered altogether.

He left me, still quivering with indignation.

Personally, however, I do not mind making the admission, however damaging it may be, that there are certain forms of so-called humour, or, at least, fun, which I am quite unable to appreciate. Chief among these is that ancient thing called the Practical Joke.

“You never knew McGann, did you?” a friend of mine asked me the other day. When I said “No, I had never known McGann,” he shook his head with a sigh, and said:

“Ah, you should have known McGann. He had the greatest sense of humour of any man I ever knew – always full of jokes. I remember one night at the boarding house where we were, he stretched a string across the passageway and then rang the dinner bell. One of the boarders broke his leg. We nearly died laughing.”

“Dear me!” I said. “What a humorists! Did he often do things like that?”

“Oh, yes, he was at them all the time. He used to put tar in the tomato soup, and beeswax and tin-tacks on the chairs. He was full of ideas. They seemed to come to him without any trouble.”

McGann, I understand, is dead. I am not sorry for it. Indeed I think that for most of us the time has gone by when we can see the fun of putting tacks on chairs, or thistles in beds, or live snakes in people’s boots.

To me it has always seemed that the very essence of good humour is that it must be without harm and without malice. I admit that there is in all of us a certain vein of the old original demoniacal humour or joy in the misfortune of another which sticks to us like our original sin. It ought not to be funny to see a man, especially a fat and pompous man, slip suddenly on a banana skin. But it is. When a skater on a pond who is describing graceful circles and showing off before the crowd, breaks through the ice and gets a ducking, everybody shouts with joy. To the original savage, the cream of the joke in such cases was found if the man who slipped broke his neck, or the man who went through the ice never came up again. I can imagine a group of pre-historic men standing round the ice-hole where he had disappeared and laughing till their sides split. If there had been such a thing as a pre-historic newspaper, the affair would have been headed up: “Amusing Incident. Unknown Gentleman Breaks Through Ice and Is Drowned.”

But our sense of humour under civilisation has been weakened. Much of the fun of this sort of thing has been lost on us.

Children, however, still retain a large share of this primitive sense of enjoyment.

I remember once watching two little boys making snow-balls at the side of the street and getting ready a little store of them to use. As they worked there came along an old man wearing a silk hat, and belonging by appearance to the class of “jolly old gentlemen.” When he saw the boys his gold spectacles gleamed with kindly enjoyment. He began waving his arms and calling, “Now, then, boys, free shot at me! free shot!” In his gaiety he had, without noticing it, edged himself over the sidewalk on to the street. An express cart collided with him and knocked him over on his back in a heap of snow. He lay there gasping and trying to get the snow off his face and spectacles. The boys gathered up their snow-balls and took a run towards him. “Free shot!” they yelled. “Soak him! Soak him!”

I repeat, however, that for me, as I suppose for most of us, it is a prime condition of humour that it must be without harm or malice, nor should it convey even incidentally any real picture of sorrow or suffering or death. There is a great deal in the humour of Scotland (I admit its general merit) which seems to me, not being a Scotchman, to sin in this respect. Take this familiar story (I quote it as something already known and not for the sake of telling it).

A Scotchman had a sister-in-law – his wife’s sister – with whom he could never agree. He always objected to going anywhere with her, and in spite of his wife’s entreaties always refused to do so. The wife was taken mortally ill and as she lay dying, she whispered, “John, ye’ll drive Janet with you to the funeral, will ye no?” The Scotchman, after an internal struggle, answered, “Margaret, I’ll do it for ye, but it’ll spoil my day.”

Whatever humour there may be in this is lost for me by the actual and vivid picture that it conjures up – the dying wife, the darkened room and the last whispered request.

No doubt the Scotch see things differently. That wonderful people – whom personally I cannot too much admire – always seem to me to prefer adversity to sunshine, to welcome the prospect of a pretty general damnation, and to live with grim cheerfulness within the very shadow of death. Alone among the nations they have converted the devil – under such names as Old Horny – into a familiar acquaintance not without a certain grim charm of his own. No doubt also there enters into their humour something of the original barbaric attitude towards things. For a primitive people who saw death often and at first hand, and for whom the future world was a vivid reality, that could be felt, as it were, in the midnight forest and heard in the roaring storm – for such a people it was no doubt natural to turn the flank of terror by forcing a merry and jovial acquaintance with the unseen world. Such a practice as a wake, and the merrymaking about the corpse, carry us back to the twilight of the world, with the poor savage in his bewildered misery, pretending that his dead still lived. Our funeral with its black trappings and its elaborate ceremonies is the lineal descendant of a merrymaking. Our undertaker is, by evolution, a genial master of ceremonies, keeping things lively at the death-dance. Thus have the ceremonies and the trappings of death been transformed in the course of ages till the forced gaiety is gone, and the black hearse and the gloomy mutes betoken the cold dignity of our despair.

But I fear this article is getting serious. I must apologise.

I was about to say, when I wandered from the point, that there is another form of humour which I am also quite unable to appreciate. This is that particular form of story which may be called, par excellence, the English Anecdote. It always deals with persons of rank and birth, and, except for the exalted nature of the subject itself, is, as far as I can see, absolutely pointless.

This is the kind of thing that I mean.

“His Grace the Fourth Duke of Marlborough was noted for the openhanded hospitality which reigned at Blenheim, the family seat, during his régime. One day on going in to luncheon it was discovered that there were thirty guests present, whereas the table only held covers for twenty-one. ‘Oh, well,’ said the Duke, not a whit abashed, ‘some of us will have to eat standing up.’ Everybody, of course, roared with laughter.”

My only wonder is that they didn’t kill themselves with it. A mere roar doesn’t seem enough to do justice to such a story as this.

The Duke of Wellington has been made the storm-centre of three generations of wit of this sort. In fact the typical Duke of Wellington story has been reduced to a thin skeleton such as this:

“A young subaltern once met the Duke of Wellington coming out of Westminster Abbey. ‘Good morning, your Grace,’ he said, ‘rather a wet morning.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Duke, with a very rigid bow, ‘but it was a damn sight wetter, sir, on the morning of Waterloo.’ The young subaltern, rightly rebuked, hung his head.”

Nor is it only the English who sin in regard to anecdotes.

One can indeed make the sweeping assertion that the telling of stories as a mode of amusing others, ought to be kept within strict limits. Few people realize how extremely difficult it is to tell a story so as to reproduce the real fun of it – to “get it over” as the actors say. The mere “facts” of a story seldom make it funny. It needs the right words, with every word in its proper place. Here and there, perhaps once in a hundred times a story turns up which needs no telling. The humour of it turns so completely on a sudden twist or incongruity in the dénouement of it that no narrator however clumsy can altogether fumble it.

Take, for example, this well known instance – a story which, in one form or other, everybody has heard.

“George Grossmith, the famous comedian, was once badly run down and went to consult a doctor. It happened that the doctor, though, like everybody else, he had often seen Grossmith on the stage, had never seen him without his make-up and did not know him by sight. He examined his patient, looked at his tongue, felt his pulse and tapped his lungs. Then he shook his head. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, sir,’ he said, ‘except that you’re run down from overwork and worry. You need rest and amusement. Take a night off and go and see George Grossmith at the Savoy.’

“‘Thank you,’ said the patient, ‘I am George Grossmith.’”

Let the reader please observe that I have purposely told this story all wrongly, just as wrongly as could be, and yet there is something left of it. Will the reader kindly look back to the beginning of it and see for himself just how it ought to be narrated and what obvious error has been made. If he has any particle of the artist in his make-up, he will see at once that the story ought to begin:

“One day a very haggard and nervous looking patient called at the office of a fashionable doctor, etc., etc.”

In other words, the chief point of the joke lies in keeping it concealed till the moment when the patient says, “Thank you, I am George Grossmith.” But the story is such a good one that it cannot be completely spoiled even when told wrongly. This particular anecdote has been variously told of George Grossmith, Coquelin, Joe Jefferson, John Hare, Cyril Maude, and about sixty others. And I have noticed that there is a certain type of man who, on hearing this story about Grossmith, immediately tells it all back again, putting in the name of somebody else, and goes into new fits of laughter over it, as if the change of name made it brand new.

But few people, I repeat, realize the difficulty of reproducing a humorous or comic effect in its original spirit.

“I saw Harry Lauder last night,” said Griggs, a Stock-Exchange friend of mine, as we walked up town together the other day. “He came onto the stage in kilts” (here Griggs started to chuckle) “and he had a slate under his arm” (here Griggs began to laugh quite heartily), “and he said, ‘I always like to carry a slate with me’ (of course he said it in Scotch, but I can’t do the Scotch the way he does it) ‘just in case there might be any figures I’d be wanting to put down’” (by this time Griggs was almost suffocated with laughter) – “and he took a little bit of chalk out of his pocket, and he said” (Griggs was now almost hysterical), “‘I like to carry a wee bit chalk along because I find the slate is’” (Griggs was now faint with laughter), “‘the slate is – is – not much good without the chalk.’”

Griggs had to stop, with his hand to his side and lean against a lamp post. “I can’t, of course, do the Scotch the way Harry Lauder does it,” he repeated.

Exactly. He couldn’t do the Scotch and he couldn’t do the rich mellow voice of Mr. Lauder and the face beaming with merriment, and the spectacles glittering with amusement, and he couldn’t do the slate, nor the “wee bit chalk” – in fact he couldn’t do any of it. He ought merely to have said, “Harry Lauder,” and leaned up against a post and laughed till he had got over it.

Yet in spite of everything, people insist on spoiling conversation by telling stories. I know nothing more dreadful at a dinner table than one of these amateur raconteurs – except perhaps, two of them. After about three stories have been told, there falls on the dinner table an uncomfortable silence, in which everybody is aware that everybody else is trying hard to think of another story, and is failing to find it. There is no peace in the gathering again till some man of firm and quiet mind turns to his neighbour and says – “But after all there is no doubt that whether we like it or not prohibition is coming.” Then everybody in his heart says, Thank Heaven! and the whole tableful are happy and contented again, till one of the story tellers “thinks of another,” and breaks loose.

Worst of all perhaps is the modest story teller who is haunted by the idea that one has heard his story before. He attacks you after this fashion:

“I heard a very good story the other day on the steamer going to Bermuda” – then he pauses with a certain doubt in his face – “but perhaps you’ve heard this?”

“No, no, I’ve never been to Bermuda. Go ahead.”

“Well, this is a story that they tell about a man who went down to Bermuda one winter to get cured of rheumatism – but you’ve heard this?”

“No, no.”

“Well he had rheumatism pretty bad and he went to Bermuda to get cured of it. And so when he went into the hotel he said to the clerk at the desk – but, perhaps you know this.”

“No, no, go right ahead.”

“Well, he said to the clerk I want a room that looks out over the sea – but perhaps——”

Now the sensible thing to do is to stop the narrator right at this point. Say to him quietly and firmly, “Yes, I have heard that story. I always liked it ever since it came out in Titbits in 1878, and I read it every time I see it. Go on and tell it to me and I’ll sit back with my eyes closed and enjoy it.”

No doubt the story-telling habit owes much to the fact that ordinary people, quite unconsciously, rate humour very low: I mean, they underestimate the difficulty of “making humour.” It would never occur to them that the thing is hard, meritorious and dignified. Because the result is gay and light, they think the process must be. Few people would realize that it is much harder to write one of Owen Seaman’s “funny” poems in Punch than to write one of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermons. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a greater work than Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Charles Dickens’ creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race – I say it in all seriousness – than Cardinal Newman’s Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

But the deep background that lies behind and beyond what we call humour is revealed only to the few who, by instinct or by effort, have given thought to it. The world’s humour, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilisation. One thinks here not of the mere spasmodic effects of the comic artist or the blackface expert of the vaudeville show, but of the really great humour which, once or twice in a generation at best, illuminates and elevates our literature. It is no longer dependent upon the mere trick and quibble of words, or the odd and meaningless incongruities in things that strike us as “funny.” Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of today that fade into nothingness tomorrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry quarrels of their childhood. And here, in its larger aspect, humour is blended with pathos till the two are one, and represent, as they have in every age, the mingled heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.

TOC     INDEX

Frenzied Fiction

(1918)

~

My Revelations as a Spy
Father Knickerbocker: A Fantasy
The Prophet in Our Midst
Personal Adventures in the Spirit World
The Sorrows of a Summer Guest
To Nature and Back Again
The Cave-Man as He Is

Ideal Interviews

With a European Prince
With Our Greatest Actor
With Our Greatest Scientist
With Our Typical Novelists

The New Education
The Errors of Santa Claus
Lost in New York
This Strenuous Age

The Old, Old Story of How Five Men Went Fishing

Back from the Land
The Perplexity Column
Simple Stories of Success
In Dry Toronto
Merry Christmas

My Revelations as a Spy

In many people the very name “Spy” excites a shudder of apprehension; we Spies, in fact, get quite used to being shuddered at. None of us Spies mind it at all. Whenever I enter a hotel and register myself as a Spy I am quite accustomed to see a thrill of fear run round the clerks, or clerk, behind the desk.

Us Spies or We Spies – for we call ourselves both – are thus a race apart. None know us. All fear us. Where do we live? Nowhere. Where are we? Everywhere. Frequently we don’t know ourselves where we are. The secret orders that we receive come from so high up that it is often forbidden to us even to ask where we are. A friend of mine, or at least a Fellow Spy – us Spies have no friends – one of the most brilliant men in the Hungarian Secret Service, once spent a month in New York under the impression that he was in Winnipeg. If this happened to the most brilliant, think of the others.

All, I say, fear us. Because they know and have reason to know our power. Hence, in spite of the prejudice against us, we are able to move everywhere, to lodge in the best hotels, and enter any society that we wish to penetrate.

Let me relate an incident to illustrate this: a month ago I entered one of the largest of the New York hotels which I will merely call the B. hotel without naming it: to do so might blast it. We Spies, in fact, never name a hotel. At the most we indicate it by a number known only to ourselves, such as 1, 2, or 3.

On my presenting myself at the desk the clerk informed me that he had no room vacant. I knew this of course to be a mere subterfuge; whether or not he suspected that I was a Spy I cannot say. I was muffled up, to avoid recognition, in a long overcoat with the collar turned up and reaching well above my ears, while the black beard and the moustache, that I had slipped on in entering the hotel, concealed my face. “Let me speak a moment to the manager,” I said. When he came I beckoned him aside and taking his ear in my hand I breathed two words into it. “Good heavens!” he gasped, while his face turned as pale as ashes. “Is it enough?” I asked. “Can I have a room, or must I breathe again?” “No, no,” said the manager, still trembling. Then, turning to the clerk: “Give this gentleman a room,” he said, “and give him a bath.”

What these two words are that will get a room in New York at once I must not divulge. Even now, when the veil of secrecy is being lifted, the international interests involved are too complicated to permit it. Suffice it to say that if these two had failed I know a couple of others still better.

I narrate this incident, otherwise trivial, as indicating the astounding ramifications and the ubiquity of the international spy system. A similar illustration occurs to me as I write. I was walking the other day with another man, on upper B. way between the T. Building and the W. Garden.

“Do you see that man over there?” I said, pointing from the side of the street on which we were walking on the sidewalk to the other side opposite to the side that we were on.

“The man with the straw hat?” he asked. “Yes, what of him?”

“Oh, nothing,” I answered, “except that he’s a Spy!”

“Great heavens!” exclaimed my acquaintance, leaning up against a lamp-post for support. “A Spy! How do you know that? What does it mean?”

I gave a quiet laugh – we Spies learn to laugh very quietly.

“Ha!” I said, “that is my secret, my friend. Verbum sapientius! Che sara sara! Yodel doodle doo!”

My acquaintance fell in a dead faint upon the street. I watched them take him away in an ambulance. Will the reader be surprised to learn that among the white-coated attendants who removed him I recognized no less a person than the famous Russian Spy, Poulispantzoff. What he was doing there I could not tell. No doubt his orders came from so high up that he himself did not know. I had seen him only twice before – once when we were both disguised as Zulus at Buluwayo, and once in the interior of China, at the time when Poulispantzoff made his secret entry into Thibet concealed in a tea-case. He was inside the tea-case when I saw him; so at least I was informed by the coolies who carried it. Yet I recognized him instantly. Neither he nor I, however, gave any sign of recognition other than an imperceptible movement of the outer eyelid. (We Spies learn to move the outer lid of the eye so imperceptibly that it cannot be seen.) Yet after meeting Poulispantzoff in this way I was not surprised to read in the evening papers a few hours afterward that the uncle of the young King of Siam had been assassinated. The connection between these two events I am unfortunately not at liberty to explain; the consequences to the Vatican would be too serious. I doubt if it could remain top-side up.

These, however, are but passing incidents in a life filled with danger and excitement. They would have remained unrecorded and unrevealed, like the rest of my revelations, were it not that certain recent events have to some extent removed the seal of secrecy from my lips. The death of a certain royal sovereign makes it possible for me to divulge things hitherto undivulgeable. Even now I can only tell a part, a small part, of the terrific things that I know. When more sovereigns die I can divulge more. I hope to keep on divulging at intervals for years. But I am compelled to be cautious. My relations with the Wilhelmstrasse, with Downing Street and the Quai d’Orsay, are so intimate, and my footing with the Yildiz Kiosk and the Waldorf-Astoria and Childs’ Restaurants are so delicate, that a single faux pas might prove to be a false step.

It is now seventeen years since I entered the Secret Service of the G. empire. During this time my activities have taken me into every quarter of the globe, at times even into every eighth or sixteenth of it.

It was I who first brought back word to the Imperial Chancellor of the existence of an Entente between England and France. “Is there an Entente?” he asked me, trembling with excitement, on my arrival at the Wilhelmstrasse. “Your Excellency,” I said, “there is.” He groaned. “Can you stop it?” he asked. “Don’t ask me,” I said sadly. “Where must we strike?” demanded the Chancellor. “Fetch me a map,” I said. They did so. I placed my finger on the map. “Quick, quick,” said the Chancellor, “look where his finger is.” They lifted it up. “Morocco!” they cried. I had meant it for Abyssinia but it was too late to change. That night the warship Panther sailed under sealed orders. The rest is history, or at least history and geography.

In the same way it was I who brought word to the Wilhelmstrasse of the rapprochement between England and Russia in Persia. “What did you find?” asked the Chancellor as I laid aside the Russian disguise in which I had travelled. “A Rapprochement!” I said. He groaned. “They seem to get all the best words,” he said.

I shall always feel, to my regret; that I am personally responsible for the outbreak of the present war. It may have had ulterior causes. But there is no doubt that it was precipitated by the fact that, for the first time in seventeen years, I took a six weeks’ vacation in June and July of 1914. The consequences of this careless step I ought to have foreseen. Yet I took such precautions as I could. “Do you think,” I asked, “that you can preserve the status quo for six weeks, merely six weeks, if I stop spying and take a rest?” “We’ll try,” they answered. “Remember,” I said, as I packed my things, “keep the Dardanelles closed; have the Sandjak of Novi Bazaar properly patrolled, and let the Dobrudja remain under a modus vivendi till I come back.”

Two months later, while sitting sipping my coffee at a Kurhof in the Schwarzwald, I read in the newspapers that a German army had invaded France and was fighting the French, and that the English expeditionary force had crossed the Channel. “This,” I said to myself, “means war.” As usual, I was right.

It is needless for me to recount here the life of busy activity that falls to a Spy in wartime. It was necessary for me to be here, there and everywhere, visiting all the best hotels, watering-places, summer resorts, theatres, and places of amusement. It was necessary, moreover, to act with the utmost caution and to assume an air of careless indolence in order to lull suspicion asleep. With this end in view I made a practice of never rising till ten in the morning. I breakfasted with great leisure, and contented myself with passing the morning in a quiet stroll, taking care, however, to keep my ears open. After lunch I generally feigned a light sleep, keeping my ears shut. A table d’hote dinner, followed by a visit to the theatre, brought the strenuous day to a close. Few Spies, I venture to say, worked harder than I did.

It was during the third year of the war that I received a peremptory summons from the head of the Imperial Secret Service at Berlin, Baron Fisch von Gestern. “I want to see you,” it read. Nothing more. In the life of a Spy one learns to think quickly, and to think is to act. I gathered as soon as I received the despatch that for some reason or other Fisch von Gestern was anxious to see me, having, as I instantly inferred, something to say to me. This conjecture proved correct.

The Baron rose at my entrance with military correctness and shook hands.

“Are you willing,” he inquired, “to undertake a mission to America?”

“I am,” I answered.

“Very good. How soon can you start?”

“As soon as I have paid the few bills that I owe in Berlin,” I replied.

“We can hardly wait for that,” said my chief, “and in case it might excite comment. You must start tonight!”

“Very good,” I said.

“Such,” said the Baron, “are the Kaiser’s orders. Here is an American passport and a photograph that will answer the purpose. The likeness is not great, but it is sufficient.”

“But,” I objected, abashed for a moment, “this photograph is of a man with whiskers and I am, unfortunately, clean-shaven.”

“The orders are imperative,” said Gestern, with official hauteur. “You must start tonight. You can grow whiskers this afternoon.”

“Very good,” I replied.

“And now to the business of your mission,” continued the Baron. “The United States, as you have perhaps heard, is making war against Germany.”

“I have heard so,” I replied.

“Yes,” continued Gestern. “The fact has leaked out – how, we do not know – and is being widely reported. His Imperial Majesty has decided to stop the war with the United States.”

I bowed.

“He intends to send over a secret treaty of the same nature as the one recently made with his recent Highness the recent Czar of Russia. Under this treaty Germany proposes to give to the United States the whole of equatorial Africa and in return the United States is to give to Germany the whole of China. There are other provisions, but I need not trouble you with them. Your mission relates, not to the actual treaty, but to the preparation of the ground.”

I bowed again.

“You are aware, I presume,” continued the Baron, “that in all high international dealings, at least in Europe, the ground has to be prepared. A hundred threads must be unravelled. This the Imperial Government itself cannot stoop to do. The work must be done by agents like yourself. You understand all this already, no doubt?”

I indicated my assent.

“These, then, are your instructions,” said the Baron, speaking slowly and distinctly, as if to impress his words upon my memory. “On your arrival in the United States you will follow the accredited methods that are known to be used by all the best Spies of the highest diplomacy. You have no doubt read some of the books, almost manuals of instruction, that they have written?”

“I have read many of them,” I said.

“Very well. You will enter, that is to say, enter and move everywhere in the best society. Mark specially, please, that you must not only enter it but you must move. You must, if I may put it so, get a move on.”

I bowed.

“You must mix freely with the members of the Cabinet. You must dine with them. This is a most necessary matter and one to be kept well in mind. Dine with them often in such a way as to make yourself familiar to them. Will you do this?”

“I will,” I said.

“Very good. Remember also that in order to mask your purpose you must constantly be seen with the most fashionable and most beautiful women of the American capital. Can you do this?”

“Can I?” I said.

“You must if need be” – and the Baron gave a most significant look which was not lost upon me – “carry on an intrigue with one or, better, with several of them. Are you ready for it?”

“More than ready,” I said.

“Very good. But this is only a part. You are expected also to familiarize yourself with the leaders of the great financial interests. You are to put yourself on such a footing with them as to borrow large sums of money from them. Do you object to this?”

“No,” I said frankly, “I do not.”

“Good! You will also mingle freely in Ambassadorial and foreign circles. It would be well for you to dine, at least once a week, with the British Ambassador. And now one final word” – here Gestern spoke with singular impressiveness – “as to the President of the United States.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You must mix with him on a footing of the most open-handed friendliness. Be at the White House continually. Make yourself in the fullest sense of the words the friend and adviser of the President. All this I think is clear. In fact, it is only what is done, as you know, by all the masters of international diplomacy.”

“Precisely,” I said.

“Very good. And then,” continued the Baron, “as soon as you find yourself sufficiently en rapport with everybody, or I should say,” he added in correction, for the Baron shares fully in the present German horror of imported French words, “when you find yourself sufficiently in enggeknupfterverwandtschaft with everybody, you may then proceed to advance your peace terms. And now, my dear fellow,” said the Baron, with a touch of genuine cordiality, “one word more. Are you in need of money?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought so. But you will find that you need it less and less as you go on. Meantime, good-bye, and best wishes for your mission.”

Such was, such is, in fact, the mission with which I am accredited. I regard it as by far the most important mission with which I have been accredited by the Wilhelmstrasse. Yet I am compelled to admit that up to the present it has proved unsuccessful. My attempts to carry it out have been baffled. There is something perhaps in the atmosphere of this republic which obstructs the working of high diplomacy. For over five months now I have been waiting and willing to dine with the American Cabinet. They have not invited me. For four weeks I sat each night waiting in the J. hotel in Washington with my suit on ready to be asked. They did not come near me.

Nor have I yet received an invitation from the British Embassy inviting me to an informal lunch or to midnight supper with the Ambassador. Everybody who knows anything of the inside working of the international spy system will realize that without these invitations one can do nothing. Nor has the President of the United States given any sign. I have sent ward to him, in cipher, that I am ready to dine with him on any day that may be convenient to both of us. He has made no move in the matter.

Under these circumstances an intrigue with any of the leaders of fashionable society has proved impossible. My attempts to approach them have been misunderstood – in fact, have led to my being invited to leave the J. hotel. The fact that I was compelled to leave it, owing to reasons that I cannot reveal, without paying my account, has occasioned unnecessary and dangerous comment. I connect it, in fact, with the singular attitude adopted by the B. hotel on my arrival in New York, to which I have already referred.

I have therefore been compelled to fall back on revelations and disclosures. Here again I find the American atmosphere singularly uncongenial. I have offered to reveal to the Secretary of State the entire family history of Ferdinand of Bulgaria for fifty dollars. He says it is not worth it. I have offered to the British Embassy the inside story of the Abdication of Constantine for five dollars. They say they know it, and knew it before it happened. I have offered, for little more than a nominal sum, to blacken the character of every reigning family in Germany. I am told that it is not necessary.

Meantime, as it is impossible to return to Central Europe, I expect to open either a fruit store or a peanut stand very shortly in this great metropolis. I imagine that many of my former colleagues will soon be doing the same!

TOC     INDEX

Father Knickerbocker:
A Fantasy

It happened quite recently – I think it must have been on April the second of 1917 – that I was making the long pilgrimage on a day-train from the remote place where I dwell to the city of New York. And as we drew near the city, and day darkened into night, I had fallen to reading from a quaint old copy of Washington Irving’s immortal sketches of Father Knickerbocker and of the little town where once he dwelt.

I had picked up the book I know not where. Very old it apparently was and made in England. For there was pasted across the fly-leaf of it an extract from some ancient magazine or journal of a century ago, giving what was evidently a description of the New York of that day.

From reading the book I turned – my head still filled with the vision of Father Knickerbocker and Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown – to examine the extract. I read it in a sort of half-doze, for the dark had fallen outside, and the drowsy throbbing of the running train attuned one’s mind to dreaming of the past.

“The town of New York” – so ran the extract pasted in the little book – “is pleasantly situated at the lower extremity of the Island of Manhattan. Its recent progress has been so amazing that it is now reputed, on good authority, to harbour at least twenty thousand souls. Viewed from the sea, it presents, even at the distance of half a mile, a striking appearance owing to the number and beauty of its church spires, which rise high above the roofs and foliage and give to the place its characteristically religious aspect. The extreme end of the island is heavily fortified with cannon, commanding a range of a quarter of a mile, and forbidding all access to the harbour. Behind this Battery a neat greensward affords a pleasant promenade, where the citizens are accustomed to walk with their wives every morning after church.”

“How I should like to have seen it!” I murmured to myself as I laid the book aside for a moment. “The Battery, the harbour and the citizens walking with their wives, their own wives, on the greensward.”

Then I read on:

“From the town itself a wide thoroughfare, the Albany Post Road, runs meandering northward through the fields. It is known for some distance under the name of the Broad Way, and is so wide that four moving vehicles are said to be able to pass abreast. The Broad Way, especially in the springtime when it is redolent with the scent of clover and apple-blossoms, is a favourite evening promenade for the citizens – with their wives – after church. Here they may be seen any evening strolling toward the high ground overlooking the Hudson, their wives on one arm, a spyglass under the other, in order to view what they can see. Down the Broad Way may be seen moving also droves of young lambs with their shepherds, proceeding to the market, while here and there a goat stands quietly munching beside the road and gazing at the passers-by.”

“It seems,” I muttered to myself as I read, “in some ways but little changed after all.”

“The town” – so the extract continued – “is not without its amusements. A commodious theatre presents with great success every Saturday night the plays of Shakespeare alternating with sacred concerts; the New Yorker, indeed, is celebrated throughout the provinces for his love of amusement and late hours. The theatres do not come out until long after nine o’clock, while for the gayer habitues two excellent restaurants serve fish, macaroni, prunes and other delicacies till long past ten at night. The dress of the New Yorker is correspondingly gay. In the other provinces the men wear nothing but plain suits of a rusty black, whereas in New York there are frequently seen suits of brown, snuff-colour and even of pepper-and-salt. The costumes of the New York women are equally daring, and differ notably from the quiet dress of New England.

“In fine, it is commonly said in the provinces that a New Yorker can be recognized anywhere, with his wife, by their modish costumes, their easy manners and their willingness to spend money – two, three and even five cents being paid for the smallest service.”

“Dear me,” I thought, as I paused a moment in my reading, “so they had begun it even then.”

“The whole spirit of the place” – the account continued – “has recently been admirably embodied in literary form by an American writer, Mr. Washington Irving (not to be confounded with George Washington). His creation of Father Knickerbocker is so lifelike that it may be said to embody the very spirit of New York. The accompanying woodcut – which was drawn on wood especially for this periodical – recalls at once the delightful figure of Father Knickerbocker. The New Yorkers of today are accustomed, indeed, to laugh at Mr. Irving’s fancy and to say that Knickerbocker belongs to a day long since past. Yet those who know tell us that the image of the amiable old gentleman, kindly but irascible, generous and yet frugal, loving his town and seeing little beyond it, may be held once and for all to typify the spirit of the place, without reference to any particular time or generation.”

“Father Knickerbocker!” I murmured, as I felt myself dozing off to sleep, rocked by the motion of the car. “Father Knickerbocker, how strange if he could be here again and see the great city as we know it now! How different from his day! How I should love to go round New York and show it to him as it is.”

So I mused and dozed till the very rumble of the wheels seemed to piece together in little snatches. “Father Knickerbocker – Father Knickerbocker – the Battery – the Battery – citizens walking with their wives, with their wives – their own wives” – until presently, I imagine, I must have fallen asleep altogether and knew no more till my journey was over and I found myself among the roar and bustle of the concourse of the Grand Central.

And there, lo and behold, waiting to meet me, was Father Knickerbocker himself! I know not how it happened, by what queer freak of hallucination or by what actual miracle – let those explain it who deal in such things – but there he stood before me, with an outstretched hand and a smile of greeting, Father Knickerbocker himself, the Embodied Spirit of New York.

“How strange,” I said. “I was just reading about you in a book on the train and imagining how much I should like actually to meet you and to show you round New York.”

The old man laughed in a jaunty way.

“Show me round?” he said. “Why, my dear boy, I live here.”

“I know you did long ago,” I said.

“I do still,” said Father Knickerbocker. “I’ve never left the place. I’ll show you around. But wait a bit – don’t carry that handbag. I’ll get a boy to call a porter to fetch a man to take it.”

“Oh, I can carry it,” I said. “It’s a mere nothing.”

“My dear fellow,” said Father Knickerbocker, a little testily I thought, “I’m as democratic and as plain and simple as any man in this city. But when it comes to carrying a handbag in full sight of all this crowd, why, as I said to Peter Stuyvesant about – about” – here a misty look seemed to come over the old gentleman’s face – “about two hundred years ago, I’ll be hanged if I will. It can’t be done. It’s not up to date.”

While he was saying this, Father Knickerbocker had beckoned to a group of porters.

“Take this gentleman’s handbag,” he said, “and you carry his newspapers, and you take his umbrella. Here’s a quarter for you and a quarter for you and a quarter for you. One of you go in front and lead the way to a taxi.”

“Don’t you know the way yourself?” I asked in a half-whisper.

“Of course I do, but I generally like to walk with a boy in front of me. We all do. Only the cheap people nowadays find their own way.”

Father Knickerbocker had taken my arm and was walking along in a queer, excited fashion, senile and yet with a sort of forced youthfulness in his gait and manner.

“Now then,” he said, “get into this taxi.”

“Can’t we walk?” I asked.

“Impossible,” said the old gentleman. “It’s five blocks to where we are going.”

As we took our seats I looked again at my companion; this time more closely. Father Knickerbocker he certainly was, yet somehow strangely transformed from my pictured fancy of the Sleepy Hollow days. His antique coat with its wide skirt had, it seemed, assumed a modish cut as if in imitation of the bell-shaped spring overcoat of the young man about town. His three-cornered hat was set at a rakish angle till it looked almost like an up-to-date fedora. The great stick that he used to carry had somehow changed itself into the curved walking-stick of a Broadway lounger. The solid old shoes with their wide buckles were gone. In their place he wore narrow slippers of patent leather of which he seemed inordinately proud, for he had stuck his feet up ostentatiously on the seat opposite. His eyes followed my glance toward his shoes.

“For the fox-trot,” he said. “The old ones were no good. Have a cigarette? These are Armenian, or would you prefer a Honolulan or a Nigerian? Now,” he resumed, when we had lighted our cigarettes, “what would you like to do first? Dance the tango? Hear some Hawaiian music, drink cocktails, or what?”

“Why, what I should like most of all, Father Knickerbocker—”

But he interrupted me.

“There’s a devilish fine woman! Look, the tall blonde one! Give me blondes every time!” Here he smacked his lips. “By gad, sir, the women in this town seem to get finer every century. What were you saying?”

“Why, Father Knickerbocker,” I began, but he interrupted me again.

“My dear fellow,” he said. “May I ask you not to call me Father Knickerbocker?”

“But I thought you were so old,” I said humbly.

“Old! Me old! Oh, I don’t know. Why, dash it, there are plenty of men as old as I am dancing the tango here every night. Pray call me, if you don’t mind, just Knickerbocker, or simply Knicky – most of the other boys call me Knicky. Now what’s it to be?”

“Most of all,” I said, “I should like to go to some quiet place and have a talk about the old days.”

“Right,” he said. “We’re going to just the place now – nice quiet dinner, a good quiet orchestra, Hawaiian, but quiet, and lots of women.” Here he smacked his lips again, and nudged me with his elbow. “Lots of women, bunches of them. Do you like women?”

“Why, Mr. Knickerbocker,” I said hesitatingly, “I suppose – I—”

The old man sniggered as he poked me again in the ribs.

“You bet you do, you dog!” he chuckled. “We all do. For me, I confess it, sir, I can’t sit down to dinner without plenty of women, stacks of them, all round me.”

Meantime the taxi had stopped. I was about to open the door and get out.

“Wait, wait,” said Father Knickerbocker, his hand upon my arm, as he looked out of the window. “I’ll see somebody in a minute who’ll let us out for fifty cents. None of us here ever gets in or out of anything by ourselves. It’s bad form. Ah, here he is!”

A moment later we had passed through the portals of a great restaurant, and found ourselves surrounded with all the colour and tumult of a New York dinner à la mode. A burst of wild music, pounded and thrummed out on ukuleles by a group of yellow men in Hawaiian costume, filled the room, helping to drown or perhaps only serving to accentuate the babel of talk and the clatter of dishes that arose on every side. Men in evening dress and women in all the colours of the rainbow, décolleté to a degree, were seated at little tables, blowing blue smoke into the air, and drinking green and yellow drinks from glasses with thin stems. A troupe of cabaret performers shouted and leaped on a little stage at the side of the room, unheeded by the crowd.

“Ha ha!” said Knickerbocker, as we drew in our chairs to a table. “Some place, eh? There’s a peach! Look at her! Or do you like better that lazy-looking brunette next to her?”

Mr. Knickerbocker was staring about the room, gazing at the women with open effrontery, and a senile leer upon his face. I felt ashamed of him. Yet, oddly enough, no one about us seemed in the least disturbed.

“Now, what cocktail will you have?” said my companion. “There’s a new one this week, the Fantan, fifty cents each, will you have that? Right? Two Fantans. Now to eat – what would you like?”

“May I have a slice of cold beef and a pint of ale?”

“Beef!” said Knickerbocker contemptuously. “My dear fellow, you can’t have that. Beef is only fifty cents. Do take something reasonable. Try Lobster Newburg, or no, here’s a more expensive thing – Filet Bourbon à la something. I don’t know what it is, but by gad, sir, it’s three dollars a portion anyway.”

“All right,” I said. “You order the dinner.”

Mr. Knickerbocker proceeded to do so, the head-waiter obsequiously at his side, and his long finger indicating on the menu everything that seemed most expensive and that carried the most incomprehensible name. When he had finished he turned to me again.

“Now,” he said, “let’s talk.”

“Tell me,” I said, “about the old days and the old times on Broadway.”

“Ah, yes,” he answered, “the old days – you mean ten years ago before the Winter Garden was opened. We’ve been going ahead, sir, going ahead. Why, ten years ago there was practically nothing, sir, above Times Square, and look at it now.”

I began to realize that Father Knickerbocker, old as he was, had forgotten all the earlier times with which I associated his memory. There was nothing left but the cabarets, and the Gardens, the Palm Rooms, and the ukuleles of today. Behind that his mind refused to travel.

“Don’t you remember,” I asked, “the apple orchards and the quiet groves of trees that used to line Broadway long ago?”

“Groves!” he said. “I’ll show you a grove, a coconut grove” – here he winked over his wineglass in a senile fashion – “that has apple-trees beaten from here to Honolulu.” Thus he babbled on.

All through our meal his talk continued: of cabarets and dances, or fox-trots and midnight suppers, of blondes and brunettes, “peaches” and “dreams,” and all the while his eye roved incessantly among the tables, resting on the women with a bold stare. At times he would indicate and point out for me some of what he called the “representative people” present.

“Notice that man at the second table,” he would whisper across to me. “He’s worth all the way to ten millions: made it in Government contracts; they tried to send him to the penitentiary last fall but they can’t get him – he’s too smart for them! I’ll introduce you to him presently. See the man with him? That’s his lawyer, biggest crook in America, they say; we’ll meet him after dinner.” Then he would suddenly break off and exclaim: “Egad, sir, there’s a fine bunch of them,” as another bevy of girls came trooping out upon the stage.

“I wonder,” I murmured, “if there is nothing left of him but this? Has all the fine old spirit gone? Is it all drowned out in wine and suffocated in the foul atmosphere of luxury?”

Then suddenly I looked up at my companion, and I saw to my surprise that his whole face and manner had altered. His hand was clenched tight on the edge of the table. His eyes looked before him – through and beyond the riotous crowd all about him – into vacancy, into the far past, back into memories that I thought forgotten. His face had altered. The senile, leering look was gone, and in its place the firm-set face of the Knickerbocker of a century ago.

He was speaking in a strange voice, deep and strong.

“Listen,” he said, “listen. Do you hear it – there – far out at sea – ships’ guns – listen – they’re calling for help – ships’ guns – far out at sea!” He had clasped me by the arm. “Quick, to the Battery, they’ll need every man tonight, they’ll . . .”

Then he sank back into his chair. His look changed again. The vision died out of his eyes.

“What was I saying?” he asked. “Ah, yes, this old brandy, a very special brand. They keep it for me here, a dollar a glass. They know me here,” he added in his fatuous way. “All the waiters know me. The headwaiter always knows me the minute I come into the room – keeps a chair for me. Now try this brandy and then presently we’ll move on and see what’s doing at some of the shows.”

But somehow, in spite of himself, my companion seemed to be unable to bring himself fully back into the consciousness of the scene before him. The far-away look still lingered in his eyes.

Presently he turned and spoke to me in a low, confidential tone.

“Was I talking to myself a moment ago?” he asked. “Yes? Ah, I feared I was. Do you know – I don’t mind telling it to you – lately I’ve had a strange, queer feeling that comes over me at times, as if something were happening – something, I don’t know what. I suppose,” he continued, with a false attempt at resuming his fatuous manner, “I’m going the pace a little too hard, eh! Makes one fanciful. But the fact is, at times” – he spoke gravely again – “I feel as if there were something happening, something coming.”

“Knickerbocker,” I said earnestly, “Father Knickerbocker, don’t you know that something is happening, that this very evening as we are sitting here in all this riot, the President of the United States is to come before Congress on the most solemn mission that ever—”

But my speech fell unheeded. Knickerbocker had picked up his glass again and was leering over it at a bevy of girls dancing upon the stage.

“Look at that girl,” he interrupted quickly, “the one dancing at the end. What do you think of her, eh? Some peach!”

Knickerbocker broke off suddenly. For at this moment our ears caught the sound of a noise, a distant tumult, as it were, far down the street and growing nearer. The old man had drawn himself erect in his seat, his hand to his ear, listening as he caught the sound.

“Out on the Broad Way,” he said, instinctively calling it by its ancient name as if a flood of memories were upon him. “Do you hear it? Listen – listen – what is it? I’ve heard that sound before – I’ve heard every sound on the Broad Way these two centuries back – what is it? I seem to know it!”

The sound and tumult as of running feet and of many voices crying came louder from the street. The people at the tables had turned in their seats to listen. The music of the orchestra had stopped. The waiters had thrown back the heavy curtains from the windows and the people were crowding to them to look out into the street. Knickerbocker had risen in his place, his eyes looked toward the windows, but his gaze was fixed on vacancy as with one who sees a vision passing.

“I know the sound,” he cried. “I see it all again. Look, can’t you see them? It’s Massachusetts soldiers marching South to the war – can’t you hear the beating of the drums and the shrill calling of the fife – the regiments from the North, the first to come. I saw them pass, here where we are sitting, sixty years ago—”

Knickerbocker paused a moment, his hand still extended in the air, and then with a great light upon his face he cried:

“I know it now! I know what it meant, the feeling that has haunted me – the sounds I kept hearing – the guns of the ships at sea and the voices calling in distress! I know now. It means, sir, it means—”

But as he spoke a great cry came up from the street and burst in at the doors and windows, echoing in a single word:

WAR! WAR! The message of the President is for WAR!

“War!” cried Father Knickerbocker, rising to his full height, stern and majestic and shouting in a stentorian tone that echoed through the great room. “War! War! To your places, every one of you! Be done with your idle luxury! Out with the glare of your lights! Begone you painted women and worthless men! To your places every man of you! To the Battery! Man the guns! Stand to it, every one of you for the defence of America – for our New York, New York—”

—

Then, with the sound “New York, New York” still echoing in my ears I woke up. The vision of my dream was gone. I was still on the seat of the car where I had dozed asleep, the book upon my knee. The train had arrived at the depot and the porters were calling into the doorway of the car: “New York! New York!”

All about me was the stir and hubbub of the great depot. But loud over all it was heard the call of the newsboys crying “WAR! WAR! The President’s message is for WAR! Late extra! WAR! WAR!”

And I knew that a great nation had cast aside the bonds of sloth and luxury, and was girding itself to join in the fight for the free democracy of all mankind.

TOC     INDEX

The Prophet in Our Midst

The Eminent Authority looked around at the little group of us seated about him at the club. He was telling us, or beginning to tell us, about the outcome of the war. It was a thing we wanted to know. We were listening attentively. We felt that we were “getting something.”

“I doubt very much,” he said, “whether Downing Street realizes the enormous power which the Quai d’Orsay has over the Yildiz Kiosk.”

“So do I,” I said, “what is it?”

But he hardly noticed the interruption.

“You’ve got to remember,” he went on, “that, from the point of view of the Yildiz, the Wilhelmstrasse is just a thing of yesterday.”

“Quite so,” I said.

“Of course,” he added, “the Ballplatz is quite different.”

“Altogether different,” I admitted.

“And mind you,” he said, “the Ballplatz itself can be largely moved from the Quirinal through the Vatican.”

“Why of course it can,” I agreed, with as much relief in my tone as I could put into it. After all, what simpler way of moving the Ballplatz than that?

The Eminent Authority took another sip at his tea, and looked round at us through his spectacles.

It was I who was taking on myself to do most of the answering, because it was I who had brought him there and invited the other men to meet him. “He’s coming round at five,” I had said, “do come and have a cup of tea and meet him. He knows more about the European situation and the probable solution than any other man living.” Naturally they came gladly. They wanted to know – as everybody wants to know – how the war will end. They were just ordinary plain men like myself.

I could see that they were a little mystified, perhaps disappointed. They would have liked, just as I would, to ask a few plain questions, such as, can the Italians knock the stuff out of the Austrians? Are the Rumanians getting licked or not? How many submarines has Germany got, anyway? Such questions, in fact, as we are accustomed to put up to one another every day at lunch and to answer out of the morning paper. As it was, we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

No one spoke. The silence began to be even a little uncomfortable. It was broken by my friend Rapley, who is in wholesale hardware and who has all the intellectual bravery that goes with it. He asked the Authority straight out the question that we all wanted to put.

“Just what do you mean by the Ballplatz? What is the Ballplatz?”

The Authority smiled an engaging smile.

“Precisely,” he said, “I see your drift exactly. You say what is the Ballplatz? I reply quite frankly that it is almost impossible to answer. Probably one could best define it as the driving power behind the Ausgleich.”

“I see,” said Rapley.

“Though the plain fact is that ever since the Herzegovinian embroglio the Ballplatz is little more than a counterpoise to the Wilhelmstrasse.”

“Ah!” said Rapley.

“Indeed, as everybody knows, the whole relationship of the Ballplatz with the Nevski Prospekt has emanated from the Wilhelmstrasse.”

This was a thing which personally I had not known. But I said nothing. Neither did the other men. They continued smoking, looking as innocent as they could.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” said the Authority, “when I speak of the Nevski Prospekt. I am not referring in any way to the Tsarskoe Selo.”

“No, no,” we all agreed.

“No doubt there were, as we see it plainly now, under currents in all directions from the Tsarskoe Selo.”

We all seemed to suggest by our attitude that these undercurrents were sucking at our very feet.

“But the Tsarskoe Selo,” said the Authority, “is now definitely eliminated.”

We were glad of that; we shifted our feet back into attitudes of ease.

I felt that it was time to ask a leading question.

“Do you think,” I said, “that Germany will be broken up by the war?”

“You mean Germany in what sense? Are you thinking of Preuszenthum? Are you referring to Junkerismus?”

“No,” I said, quite truthfully, “neither of them.”

“Ah,” said the Authority, “I see; you mean Germany as a Souverantat embodied in a Reichsland.”

“That’s it,” I said.

“Then it’s rather hard,” said the Eminent Authority, “to answer your question in plain terms. But I’ll try. One thing, of course, is absolutely certain, Mittel-Europa goes overboard.”

“It does, eh?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely. This is the end of Mittel-Europa. I mean to say – here we’ve had Mittel-Europa, that is, the Mittel-Europa idea, as a sort of fantasmus in front of Teutonism ever since Koniggratz.”

The Authority looked all round us in that searching way he had. We all tried to look like men seeing a fantasmus and disgusted at it.

“So you see,” he went on, “Mittel-Europa is done with.”

“I suppose it is,” I said. I didn’t know just whether to speak with regret or not. I heard Rapley murmur, “I guess so.”

“And there is not a doubt,” continued the Authority, “that when Mittel-Europa goes, Grossdeutschthum goes with it.”

“Oh, sure to,” we all murmured.

“Well, then, there you are – what is the result for Germany – why the thing’s as plain as a pikestaff – in fact you’re driven to it by the sheer logic of the situation – there is only one outcome—”

The Authority was speaking very deliberately. He even paused at this point and lighted a cigarette, while we all listened breathlessly. We felt that we had got the thing to a focus at last.

“Only one outcome – a Staatenbund.”

“Great heavens,” I said, “not a Staatenbund!”

“Undoubtedly,” said the Authority, puffing quietly at his cigarette, as if personally he wouldn’t lift a finger to stop the Staatenbund if he could, “that’s the end of it, a Staatenbund. In other words, we are back where we were before the Vienna Congress!”

At this he chuckled heartily to himself: so the rest of us laughed too: the thing was too absurd. But the Authority, who was a man of nice distinctions and genuinely anxious to instruct us, was evidently afraid that he had overstated things a little.

“Mind you,” he said, “there’ll be something left – certainly the Zollverein and either the Ausgleich or something very like it.”

All of the men gave a sort of sigh of relief. It was certainly something to have at least a sort of resemblance or appearance of the Ausgleich among us. We felt that we were getting on. One could see that a number of the men were on the brink of asking questions.

“What about Rumania,” asked Nelles – he is a banker and interested in government bonds – “is this the end of it?”

“No,” said the Authority, “it’s not the end of Rumania, but it is the end of Rumanian Irridentismus.”

That settled Nelles.

“What about the Turks?” asked Rapley.

“The Turks, or rather, I suppose it would be more proper to say, the Osmanli, as that is no doubt what you mean?” Rapley nodded. “Well, speaking personally, I should say that there’s no difficulty in a permanent settlement in that quarter. If I were drawing up the terms of a treaty of peace meant to be really lasting I should lay down three absolute bases; the rest needn’t matter” – the Authority paused a moment and then proceeded to count off the three conditions of peace on his fingers – “These would be, first, the evacuation of the Sandjak; second, an international guarantee for the Capitulations; and third, for internal matters, an arrangement along the lines of the original firman of Midhat Pasha.”

A murmur of complete satisfaction went round the group.

“I don’t say,” continued the Eminent Authority, “that there wouldn’t be other minor matters to adjust; but they would be a mere detail. You ask me, for instance, for a milice, or at least a gendarmerie, in the Albanian hinterland; very good, I grant it you at once. You retain, if you like, you abolish the Cypriotic suzerainty of the Porte – all right. These are matters of indifference.”

We all assumed a look of utter indifference.

“But what about the Dardanelles? Would you have them fixed so that ships could go through, or not?” asked Rapley.

He is a plain man, not easily put down and liking a plain answer. He got it.

“The Dardanelles,” said the Authority, “could easily be denationalized under a quadrilateral guarantee to be made a pars materia of the pactum foederis.”

“That ought to hold them,” I murmured.

The Authority felt now that he had pretty well settled the map of Europe. He rose and shook hands with us all around very cordially. We did not try to detain him. We felt that time like his was too valuable to be wasted on things like us.

“Well, I tell you,” said Rapley, as we settled back into our chairs when the Great Authority had gone, “my own opinion, boys, is that the United States and England can trim Germany and Austria any day in the week and twice on Sunday.”

After which somebody else said:

“I wonder how many of these submarines Germany has, anyway?”

And then we drifted back into the humbler kind of war talk that we have been carrying on for three years.

But later, as we walked home together, Rapley said to me:

“That fellow threw a lot of light on things in Europe, didn’t he?”

And I answered:

“Yes.”

What liars we all are!

TOC     INDEX

Personal Adventures
in the Spirit World

I do not write what follows with the expectation of convincing or converting anybody. We Spiritualists, or Spiritists – we call ourselves both, or either – never ask anybody to believe us. If they do, well and good. If not, all right. Our attitude simply is that facts are facts. There they are; believe them or not as you like. As I said the other night, in conversation with Aristotle and John Bunyan and George Washington and a few others, why should anybody believe us? Aristotle, I recollect, said that all that he wished was that everybody should know how happy he was; and Washington said that for his part, if people only knew how bright and beautiful it all was where he was, they would willingly, indeed gladly, pay the mere dollar – itself only a nominal fee – that it cost to talk to him. Bunyan, I remember, added that he himself was quite happy.

But, as I say, I never ask anybody to believe me; the more so as I was once an absolute sceptic myself. As I see it now, I was prejudiced. The mere fact that spiritual séances and the services of a medium involved the payment of money condemned the whole thing in my eyes. I did not realize, as I do now, that these medii, like anybody else, have got to live; otherwise they would die and become spirits.

Nor would I now place these disclosures before the public eyes were if not that I think that in the present crisis they will prove of value to the Allied cause.

But let me begin at the beginning. My own conversion to spiritualism came about, like that of so many others, through the more or less casual remark of a Friend.

Noticing me one day gloomy and depressed, this Friend remarked to me:

“Have you any belief in Spiritualism?”

Had it come from anyone else, I should have turned the question aside with a sneer. But it so happens that I owe a great deal of gratitude to this particular Friend. It was he who, at a time when I was so afflicted with rheumatism that I could scarcely leap five feet into the air without pain, said to me one day quite casually: “Have you ever tried pyro for your rheumatism?” One month later I could leap ten feet in the air – had I been able to – without the slightest malaise. The same man, I may add, hearing me one day exclaiming to myself: “Oh, if there were anything that would remove the stains from my clothes!” said to me very simply and quietly: “Have you ever washed them in luxo?” It was he, too, who, noticing a haggard look on my face after breakfast one morning, inquired immediately what I had been eating for breakfast; after which, with a simplicity and directness which I shall never forget, he said: “Why not eat humpo?”

Nor can I ever forget my feeling on another occasion when, hearing me exclaim aloud: “Oh, if there were only something invented for removing the proteins and amygdaloids from a carbonized diet and leaving only the pure nitrogenous life-giving elements!” seized my hand in his, and said in a voice thrilled with emotion: “There is! It has!”

The reader will understand, therefore, that a question, or query, from such a Friend was not to be put lightly aside. When he asked if I believed in Spiritualism I answered with perfect courtesy:

“To be quite frank, I do not.”

There was silence between us for a time, and then my Friend said:

“Have you ever given it a trial?”

I paused a moment, as the idea was a novel one.

“No,” I answered, “to be quite candid, I have not.”

Neither of us spoke for perhaps twenty minutes after this, when my Friend said:

“Have you anything against it?”

I thought awhile and then I said:

“Yes, I have.”

My Friend remained silent for perhaps half an hour. Then he asked:

“What?”

I meditated for some time. Then I said:

“This – it seems to me that the whole thing is done for money. How utterly unnatural it is to call up the dead – one’s great-grandfather, let us say – and pay money for talking to him.”

“Precisely,” said my Friend without a moment’s pause. “I thought so. Now suppose I could bring you into contact with the spirit world through a medium, or through different medii, without there being any question of money, other than a merely nominal fee, the money being, as it were, left out of count, and regarded as only, so to speak, nominal, something given merely pro forma and ad interim. Under these circumstances, will you try the experiment?”

I rose and took my Friend’s hand.

“My dear fellow,” I said, “I not only will, but I shall.”

From this conversation dated my connection with Spiritualism, which has since opened for me a new world.

It would be out of place for me to indicate the particular address or the particular methods employed by the agency to which my Friend introduced me. I am anxious to avoid anything approaching a commercial tinge in what I write. Moreover, their advertisement can be seen along with many others – all, I am sure, just as honourable and just as trustworthy – in the columns of any daily newspaper. As everybody knows, many methods are employed. The tapping of a table, the movement of a ouija board, or the voice of a trance medium, are only a few among the many devices by which the spirits now enter into communication with us. But in my own case the method used was not only simplicity itself, but was so framed as to carry with it the proof of its own genuineness. One had merely to speak into the receiver of a telephone, and the voice of the spirit was heard through the transmitter as in an ordinary telephone conversation.

It was only natural, after the scoffing remark that I had made, that I should begin with my great-grandfather. Nor can I ever forget the peculiar thrill that went through me when I was informed by the head of the agency that a tracer was being sent out for Great-grandfather to call him to the phone.

Great-grandfather – let me do him this justice – was prompt. He was there in three minutes. Whatever his line of business was in the spirit world – and I was never able to learn it – he must have left it immediately and hurried to the telephone. Whatever later dissatisfaction I may have had with Great-grandfather, let me state it fairly and honestly, he is at least a punctual man. Every time I called he came right away without delay. Let those who are inclined to cavil at the methods of the Spiritualists reflect how impossible it would be to secure such punctuality on anything but a basis of absolute honesty.

In my first conversation with Great-grandfather, I found myself so absurdly nervous at the thought of the vast gulf of space and time across which we were speaking that I perhaps framed my questions somewhat too crudely.

“How are you, Great-grandfather?” I asked.

His voice came back to me as distinctly as if he were in the next room:

“I am happy, very happy. Please tell everybody that I am happy.”

“Great-grandfather,” I said. “I will. I’ll see that everybody knows it. Where are you, Great-grandfather?”

“Here,” he answered, “beyond.”

“Beyond what?”

“Here on the other side.”

“Side of which?” I asked.

“Of the great vastness,” he answered. “The other end of the Illimitable.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, “that’s where you are.”

We were silent for some time. It is amazing how difficult it is to find things to talk about with one’s great-grandfather. For the life of me I could think of nothing better than:

“What sort of weather have you been having?”

“There is no weather here,” said Great-grandfather. “It’s all bright and beautiful all the time.”

“You mean bright sunshine?” I said.

“There is no sun here,” said Great-grandfather.

“Then how do you mean—” I began.

But at this moment the head of the agency tapped me on the shoulder to remind me that the two minutes’ conversation for which I had deposited, as a nominal fee, five dollars, had expired. The agency was courteous enough to inform me that for five dollars more Great-grandfather would talk another two minutes.

But I thought it preferable to stop for the moment.

Now I do not wish to say a word against my own great-grandfather. Yet in the conversations which followed on successive days I found him – how shall I put it? – unsatisfactory. He had been, when on this side – to use the term we Spiritualists prefer – a singularly able man, an English judge; so at least I have always been given to understand. But somehow Great-grandfather’s brain, on the other side, seemed to have got badly damaged. My own theory is that, living always in the bright sunshine, he had got sunstroke. But I may wrong him. Perhaps it was locomotor ataxy that he had. That he was very, very happy where he was is beyond all doubt. He said so at every conversation. But I have noticed that feeble-minded people are often happy. He said, too, that he was glad to be where he was; and on the whole I felt glad that he was too. Once or twice I thought that possibly Great-grandfather felt so happy because he had been drinking: his voice, even across the great gulf, seemed somehow to suggest it. But on being questioned he told me that where he was there was no drink and no thirst, because it was all so bright and beautiful. I asked him if he meant that it was “bone-dry” like Kansas, or whether the rich could still get it? But he didn’t answer.

Our intercourse ended in a quarrel. No doubt it was my fault. But it did seem to me that Great-grandfather, who had been one of the greatest English lawyers of his day, might have handed out an opinion.

The matter came up thus: I had had an argument – it was in the middle of last winter – with some men at my club about the legal interpretation of the Adamson Law. The dispute grew bitter.

“I’m right,” I said, “and I’ll prove it if you give me time to consult the authorities.”

“Consult your great-grandfather!” sneered one of the men.

“All right,” I said, “I will.”

I walked straight across the room to the telephone and called up the agency.

“Give me my great-grandfather,” I said. “I want him right away.”

He was there. Good, punctual old soul, I’ll say that for him. He was there.

“Great-grandfather,” I said, “I’m in a discussion here about the constitutionality of the Adamson Law, involving the power of Congress under the Constitution. Now, you remember the Constitution when they made it. Is the law all right?”

There was silence.

“How does it stand, Great-grandfather?” I said. “Will it hold water?”

Then he spoke.

“Over here,” he said, “there are no laws, no members of Congress and no Adamsons; it’s all bright and beautiful and—”

“Great-grandfather,” I said, as I hung up the receiver in disgust, “you are a Mutt!”

I never spoke to him again. Yet I feel sorry for him, feeble old soul, flitting about in the Illimitable, and always so punctual to hurry to the telephone, so happy, so feeble-witted and courteous; a better man, perhaps, take it all in all, than he was in life; lonely, too, it may be, out there in the Vastness. Yet I never called him up again. He is happy. Let him stay.

—

Indeed, my acquaintance with the spirit world might have ended at that point but for the good offices, once more, of my Friend.

“You find your great-grandfather a little slow, a little dull?” he said. “Well, then, if you want brains, power, energy, why not call up some of the spirits of the great men, some of the leading men, for instance, of your great-grandfather’s time?”

“You’ve said it!” I exclaimed. “I’ll call up Napoleon Bonaparte.”

I hurried to the agency.

“Is it possible,” I asked, “for me to call up the Emperor Napoleon and talk to him?”

Possible? Certainly. It appeared that nothing was easier. In the case of Napoleon Bonaparte the nominal fee had to be ten dollars in place of five; but it seemed to me that, if Great-grandfather cost five, Napoleon Bonaparte at ten was cheapness itself.

“Will it take long to get him?” I asked anxiously.

“We’ll send out a tracer for him right away,” they said.

Like Great-grandfather, Napoleon was punctual. That I will say for him. If in any way I think less of Napoleon Bonaparte now than I did, let me at least admit that a more punctual, obliging, willing man I never talked with.

He came in two minutes.

“He’s on the line now,” they said.

I took up the receiver, trembling.

“Hello!” I called. “Est-ce que c’est l’Empereur Napoleon a qui j’ai l’honneur de parler?”

“How’s that?” said Napoleon.

“Je demande si je suis en communication avec l’Empereur Napoleon—”

“Oh,” said Napoleon, “that’s all right; speak English.”

“What!” I said in surprise. “You know English? I always thought you couldn’t speak a word of it.”

He was silent for a minute. Then he said:

“I picked it up over here. It’s all right. Go right ahead.”

“Well,” I continued, “I’ve always admired you so much, your wonderful brain and genius, that I felt I wanted to speak to you and ask you how you are.”

“Happy,” said Napoleon, “very happy.”

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s fine! And how is it out there? All bright and beautiful, eh?”

“Very beautiful,” said the Emperor.

“And just where are you?” I continued. “Somewhere out in the Unspeakable, I suppose, eh?”

“Yes,” he answered, “out here beyond.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Pretty happy, eh?”

“Very happy,” said Napoleon. “Tell everybody how happy I am.”

“I know,” I answered. “I’ll tell them all. But just now I’ve a particular thing to ask. We’ve got a big war on, pretty well the whole world in it, and I thought perhaps a few pointers from a man like you—”

But at this point the attendant touched me on the shoulder. “Your time is up,” he said.

I was about to offer to pay at once for two minutes more when a better idea struck me. Talk with Napoleon? I’d do better than that. I’d call a whole War Council of great spirits, lay the war crisis before them and get the biggest brains that the world ever produced to work on how to win the war.

Who should I have? Let me see! Napoleon himself, of course. I’d bring him back. And for the sea business, the submarine problem, I’d have Nelson. George Washington, naturally, for the American end; for politics, say, good old Ben Franklin, the wisest old head that ever walked on American legs, and witty too; yes, Franklin certainly, if only for his wit to keep the council from getting gloomy; Lincoln – honest old Abe – him certainly I must have. Those and perhaps a few others.

I reckoned that a consultation at ten dollars apiece with spirits of that class was cheap to the verge of the ludicrous. Their advice ought to be worth millions – yes, billions – to the cause.

The agency got them for me without trouble. There is no doubt they are a punctual crowd, over there beyond in the Unthinkable.

I gathered them all in and talked to them, all and severally, the payment, a merely nominal matter, being made, pro forma, in advance.

I have in front of me in my rough notes the result of their advice. When properly drafted it will be, I feel sure, one of the most important state documents produced in the war.

In the personal sense – I have to admit it – I found them just a trifle disappointing. Franklin, poor fellow, has apparently lost his wit. The spirit of Lincoln seemed to me to have none of that homely wisdom that he used to have. And it appears that we were quite mistaken in thinking Disraeli a brilliant man; it is clear to me now that he was dull – just about as dull as Great-grandfather, I should say. Washington, too, is not at all the kind of man we thought him.

Still, these are only personal impressions. They detract nothing from the extraordinary value of the advice given, which seems to me to settle once and for ever any lingering doubt about the value of communications with the Other Side.

My draft of their advice runs in part as follows:

The Spirit of Nelson, on being questioned on the submarine problem, holds that if all the men on the submarines were where he is everything would be bright and happy. This seems to me an invaluable hint. There is nothing needed now except to put them there.

The advice of the Spirit of Napoleon about the campaign on land seemed to me, if possible, of lower value than that of Nelson on the campaign at sea. It is hardly conceivable that Napoleon has forgotten where the Marne is. But it may have changed since his day. At any rate, he says that, if ever the Russians cross the Marne, all is over. Coming from such a master-strategist, this ought to be attended to.

Franklin, on being asked whether the United States had done right in going into the war, said “Yes”; asked whether the country could with honour have stayed out, he said “No.” There is guidance here for thinking men of all ranks.

Lincoln is very happy where he is. So, too, I was amazed to find, is Disraeli. In fact, it was most gratifying to learn that all of the great spirits consulted are very happy, and want everybody to know how happy they are. Where they are, I may say, it is all bright and beautiful.

Fear of trespassing on their time prevented me from questioning each of them up to the full limit of the period contracted for.

I understand that I have still to my credit at the agency five minutes’ talk with Napoleon, available at any time, and similarly five minutes each with Franklin and Washington, to say nothing of ten minutes’ unexpired time with Great-grandfather.

All of these opportunities I am willing to dispose of at a reduced rate to anyone still sceptical of the reality of the spirit world.

TOC     INDEX

The Sorrows
of a Summer Guest

Let me admit, as I start to write, that the whole thing is my own fault. I should never have come. I knew better. I have known better for years. I have known that it is sheer madness to go and pay visits in other people’s houses.

Yet in a moment of insanity I have let myself in for it and here I am. There is no hope, no outlet now till the first of September when my visit is to terminate. Either that or death. I do not greatly care which.

I write this, where no human eye can see me, down by the pond – they call it the lake – at the foot of Beverly-Jones’s estate. It is six o’clock in the morning. No one is up. For a brief hour or so there is peace. But presently Miss Larkspur – the jolly English girl who arrived last week – will throw open her casement window and call across the lawn, “Hullo everybody! What a ripping morning!” And young Poppleson will call back in a Swiss yodel from somewhere in the shrubbery, and Beverly-Jones will appear on the piazza with big towels round his neck and shout, “Who’s coming for an early dip?” And so the day’s fun and jollity – heaven help me – will begin again.

Presently they will all come trooping in to breakfast, in coloured blazers and fancy blouses, laughing and grabbing at the food with mimic rudeness and bursts of hilarity. And to think that I might have been breakfasting at my club with the morning paper propped against the coffee-pot, in a silent room in the quiet of the city.

I repeat that it is my own fault that I am here.

For many years it had been a principle of my life to visit nobody. I had long since learned that visiting only brings misery. If I got a card or telegram that said, “Won’t you run up to the Adirondacks and spend the week-end with us?” I sent back word: “No, not unless the Adirondacks can run faster than I can,” or words to that effect. If the owner of a country house wrote to me: “Our man will meet you with a trap any afternoon that you care to name,” I answered, in spirit at least: “No, he won’t, not unless he has a bear-trap or one of those traps in which they catch wild antelope.” If any fashionable lady friend wrote to me in the peculiar jargon that they use: “Can you give us from July the twelfth at half-after-three till the fourteenth at four?” I replied: “Madam, take the whole month, take a year, but leave me in peace.”

Such at least was the spirit of my answers to invitations. In practice I used to find it sufficient to send a telegram that read: “Crushed with work impossible to get away,” and then stroll back into the reading-room of the club and fall asleep again.

But my coming here was my own fault. It resulted from one of those unhappy moments of expansiveness such as occur, I imagine, to everybody – moments when one appears to be something quite different from what one really is, when one feels oneself a thorough good fellow, sociable, merry, appreciative, and finds the people around one the same. Such moods are known to all of us. Some people say that it is the super-self asserting itself. Others say it is from drinking. But let it pass. That at any rate was the kind of mood that I was in when I met Beverly-Jones and when he asked me here.

It was in the afternoon, at the club. As I recall it, we were drinking cocktails and I was thinking what a bright, genial fellow Beverly-Jones was, and how completely I had mistaken him. For myself – I admit it – I am a brighter, better man after drinking two cocktails than at any other time – quicker, kindlier, more genial. And higher, morally. I had been telling stories in that inimitable way that one has after two cocktails. In reality, I only know four stories, and a fifth that I don’t quite remember, but in moments of expansiveness they feel like a fund or flow.

It was under such circumstances that I sat with Beverly-Jones. And it was in shaking hands at leaving that he said: “I do wish, old chap, that you could run up to our summer place and give us the whole of August!” and I answered, as I shook him warmly by the hand: “My dear fellow, I’d simply love to!” “By gad, then it’s a go!” he said. “You must come up for August, and wake us all up!”

Wake them up! Ye gods! Me wake them up!

One hour later I was repenting of my folly, and wishing, when I thought of the two cocktails, that the prohibition wave could be hurried up so as to leave us all high and dry – bone-dry, silent and unsociable.

Then I clung to the hope that Beverly-Jones would forget. But no. In due time his wife wrote to me. They were looking forward so much, she said, to my visit; they felt – she repeated her husband’s ominous phrase – that I should wake them all up!

What sort of alarm-clock did they take me for, anyway!

Ah, well! They know better now. It was only yesterday afternoon that Beverly-Jones found me standing here in the gloom of some cedar-trees beside the edge of the pond and took me back so quietly to the house that I realized he thought I meant to drown myself. So I did.

I could have stood it better – my coming here, I mean – if they hadn’t come down to the station in a body to meet me in one of those long vehicles with seats down the sides: silly-looking men in coloured blazers and girls with no hats, all making a hullabaloo of welcome. “We are quite a small party,” Mrs. Beverly-Jones had written. Small! Great heavens, what would they call a large one? And even those at the station turned out to be only half of them. There were just as many more all lined up on the piazza of the house as we drove up, all waving a fool welcome with tennis rackets and golf clubs.

Small party, indeed! Why, after six days there are still some of the idiots whose names I haven’t got straight! That fool with the fluffy moustache, which is he? And that jackass that made the salad at the picnic yesterday, is he the brother of the woman with the guitar, or who?

But what I mean is, there is something in that sort of noisy welcome that puts me to the bad at the start. It always does. A group of strangers all laughing together, and with a set of catchwords and jokes all their own, always throws me into a fit of sadness, deeper than words. I had thought, when Mrs. Beverly-Jones said a small party, she really meant small. I had had a mental picture of a few sad people, greeting me very quietly and gently, and of myself, quiet, too, but cheerful – somehow lifting them up, with no great effort, by my mere presence.

Somehow from the very first I could feel that Beverly-Jones was disappointed in me. He said nothing. But I knew it. On that first afternoon, between my arrival and dinner, he took me about his place, to show it to me. I wish that at some proper time I had learned just what it is that you say when a man shows you about his place. I never knew before how deficient I am in it. I am all right to be shown an iron-and-steel plant, or a soda-water factory, or anything really wonderful, but being shown a house and grounds and trees, things that I have seen all my life, leaves me absolutely silent.

“These big gates,” said Beverly-Jones, “we only put up this year.”

“Oh,” I said. That was all. Why shouldn’t they put them up this year? I didn’t care if they’d put them up this year or a thousand years ago.

“We had quite a struggle,” he continued, “before we finally decided on sandstone.

“You did, eh?” I said. There seemed nothing more to say; I didn’t know what sort of struggle he meant, or who fought who; and personally sandstone or soapstone or any other stone is all the same to me.

“This lawn,” said Beverly-Jones, “we laid down the first year we were here.” I answered nothing. He looked me right in the face as he said it and I looked straight back at him, but I saw no reason to challenge his statement. “The geraniums along the border,” he went on, “are rather an experiment. They’re Dutch.”

I looked fixedly at the geraniums but never said a word. They were Dutch; all right, why not? They were an experiment. Very good; let them be so. I know nothing in particular to say about a Dutch experiment.

I could feel that Beverly-Jones grew depressed as he showed me round. I was sorry for him, but unable to help. I realized that there were certain sections of my education that had been neglected. How to be shown things and make appropriate comments seems to be an art in itself. I don’t possess it. It is not likely now, as I look at this pond, that I ever shall.

Yet how simple a thing it seems when done by others. I saw the difference at once the very next day, the second day of my visit, when Beverly-Jones took round young Poppleton, the man that I mentioned above who will presently give a Swiss yodel from a clump of laurel bushes to indicate that the day’s fun has begun.

Poppleton I had known before slightly. I used to see him at the club. In club surroundings he always struck me as an ineffable young ass, loud and talkative and perpetually breaking the silence rules. Yet I have to admit that in his summer flannels and with a straw hat on he can do things that I can’t.

“These big gates,” began Beverly-Jones as he showed Poppleton round the place with me trailing beside them, “we only put up this year.”

Poppleton, who has a summer place of his own, looked at the gates very critically.

“Now, do you know what I’d have done with those gates, if they were mine?” he said.

“No,” said Beverly-Jones.

“I’d have set them two feet wider apart; they’re too narrow, old chap, too narrow.” Poppleton shook his head sadly at the gates.

“We had quite a struggle,” said Beverly-Jones, “before we finally decided on sandstone.”

I realized that he had one and the same line of talk that he always used. I resented it. No wonder it was easy for him. “Great mistake,” said Poppleton. “Too soft. Look at this” – here he picked up a big stone and began pounding at the gate-post – “see how easily it chips! Smashes right off. Look at that, the whole corner knocks right off, see!”

Beverly-Jones entered no protest. I began to see that there is a sort of understanding, a kind of freemasonry, among men who have summer places. One shows his things; the other runs them down, and smashes them. This makes the whole thing easy at once. Beverly-Jones showed his lawn.

“Your turf is all wrong, old boy,” said Poppleton. “Look! it has no body to it. See, I can kick holes in it with my heel. Look at that, and that! If I had on stronger boots I could kick this lawn all to pieces.”

“These geraniums along the border,” said Beverly-Jones, “are rather an experiment. They’re Dutch.”

“But my dear fellow,” said Poppleton, “you’ve got them set in wrongly. They ought to slope from the sun you know, never to it. Wait a bit” – here he picked up a spade that was lying where a gardener had been working – “I’ll throw a few out. Notice how easily they come up. Ah, that fellow broke! They’re apt to. There, I won’t bother to reset them, but tell your man to slope them over from the sun. That’s the idea.”

Beverly-Jones showed his new boat-house next and Poppleton knocked a hole in the side with a hammer to show that the lumber was too thin.

“If that were my boat-house,” he said, “I’d rip the outside clean off it and use shingle and stucco.”

It was, I noticed, Poppleton’s plan first to imagine Beverly-Jones’s things his own, and then to smash them, and then give them back smashed to Beverly-Jones. This seemed to please them both. Apparently it is a well-understood method of entertaining a guest and being entertained. Beverly-Jones and Poppleton, after an hour or so of it, were delighted with one another.

Yet somehow, when I tried it myself, it failed to work.

“Do you know what I would do with that cedar summer-house if it was mine?” I asked my host the next day.

“No,” he said.

“I’d knock the thing down and burn it,” I answered.

But I think I must have said it too fiercely. Beverly-Jones looked hurt and said nothing.

Not that these people are not doing all they can for me. I know that. I admit it. If I should meet my end here and if – to put the thing straight out – my lifeless body is found floating on the surface of this pond, I should like there to be documentary evidence of that much. They are trying their best. “This is Liberty Hall,” Mrs. Beverly-Jones said to me on the first day of my visit. “We want you to feel that you are to do absolutely as you like!”

Absolutely as I like! How little they know me. I should like to have answered: “Madam, I have now reached a time of life when human society at breakfast is impossible to me; when any conversation prior to eleven a.m. must be considered out of the question; when I prefer to eat my meals in quiet, or with such mild hilarity as can be got from a comic paper; when I can no longer wear nankeen pants and a coloured blazer without a sense of personal indignity; when I can no longer leap and play in the water like a young fish; when I do not yodel, cannot sing and, to my regret; dance even worse than I did when young; and when the mood of mirth and hilarity comes to me only as a rare visitant – shall we say at a burlesque performance – and never as a daily part of my existence. Madam, I am unfit to be a summer guest. If this is Liberty Hall indeed, let me, oh, let me go!”

Such is the speech that I would make if it were possible. As it is, I can only rehearse it to myself.

Indeed, the more I analyse it the more impossible it seems, for a man of my temperament at any rate, to be a summer guest. These people, and, I imagine, all other summer people, seem to be trying to live in a perpetual joke. Everything, all day, has to be taken in a mood of uproarious fun.

However, I can speak of it all now in quiet retrospect and without bitterness. It will soon be over now. Indeed, the reason why I have come down at this early hour to this quiet water is that things have reached a crisis. The situation has become extreme and I must end it.

It happened last night. Beverly-Jones took me aside while the others were dancing the fox-trot to the victrola on the piazza.

“We’re planning to have some rather good fun tomorrow night,” he said, “something that will be a good deal more in your line than a lot of it, I’m afraid, has been up here. In fact, my wife says that this will be the very thing for you.”

“Oh,” I said.

“We’re going to get all the people from the other houses over and the girls” – this term Beverly-Jones uses to mean his wife and her friends – “are going to get up a sort of entertainment with charades and things, all impromptu, more or less, of course—”

“Oh,” I said. I saw already what was coming.

“And they want you to act as a sort of master-of-ceremonies, to make up the gags and introduce the different stunts and all that. I was telling the girls about that afternoon at the club, when you were simply killing us all with those funny stories of yours, and they’re all wild over it.”

“Wild?” I repeated.

“Yes, quite wild over it. They say it will be the hit of the summer.”

Beverly-Jones shook hands with great warmth as we parted for the night. I knew that he was thinking that my character was about to be triumphantly vindicated, and that he was glad for my sake.

Last night I did not sleep. I remained awake all night thinking of the “entertainment.” In my whole life I have done nothing in public except once when I presented a walking-stick to the vice-president of our club on the occasion of his taking a trip to Europe. Even for that I used to rehearse to myself far into the night sentences that began: “This walking-stick, gentleman, means far more than a mere walking-stick.”

And now they expect me to come out as a merry master-of-ceremonies before an assembled crowd of summer guests.

But never mind. It is nearly over now. I have come down to this quiet water in the early morning to throw myself in. They will find me floating here among the lilies. Some few will understand. I can see it written, as it will be, in the newspapers.

“What makes the sad fatality doubly poignant is that the unhappy victim had just entered upon a holiday visit that was to have been prolonged throughout the whole month. Needless to say, he was regarded as the life and soul of the pleasant party of holiday makers that had gathered at the delightful country home of Mr. and Mrs. Beverly-Jones. Indeed, on the very day of the tragedy, he was to have taken a leading part in staging a merry performance of charades and parlour entertainments – a thing for which his genial talents and overflowing high spirits rendered him specially fit.”

When they read that, those who know me best will understand how and why I died. “He had still over three weeks to stay there,” they will say. “He was to act as the stage manager of charades.” They will shake their heads. They will understand.

But what is this? I raise my eyes from the paper and I see Beverly-Jones hurriedly approaching from the house. He is hastily dressed, with flannel trousers and a dressing-gown. His face looks grave. Something has happened. Thank God, something has happened. Some accident! Some tragedy! Something to prevent the charades!

—

I write these few lines on a fast train that is carrying me back to New York, a cool, comfortable train, with a deserted club-car where I can sit in a leather arm-chair, with my feet up on another, smoking, silent, and at peace.

Villages, farms and summer places are flying by. Let them fly. I, too, am flying – back to the rest and quiet of the city.

“Old man,” Beverly-Jones said, as he laid his hand on mine very kindly – he is a decent fellow, after all, is Jones – “they’re calling you by long-distance from New York.”

“What is it?” I asked, or tried to gasp.

“It’s bad news, old chap; fire in your office last evening. I’m afraid a lot of your private papers were burned. Robinson – that’s your senior clerk, isn’t it? – seems to have been on the spot trying to save things. He’s badly singed about the face and hands. I’m afraid you must go at once.”

“Yes, yes,” I said, “at once.”

“I know. I’ve told the man to get the trap ready right away. You’ve just time to catch the seven-ten. Come along.”

“Right,” I said. I kept my face as well as I could, trying to hide my exultation. The office burnt! Fine! Robinson’s singed! Glorious! I hurriedly packed my things and whispered to Beverly-Jones farewell messages for the sleeping household. I never felt so jolly and facetious in my life. I could feel that Beverly-Jones was admiring the spirit and pluck with which I took my misfortune. Later on he would tell them all about it.

The trap ready! Hurrah! Good-bye, old man! Hurrah! All right. I’ll telegraph . . . Right you are, good-bye . . . Hip, hip, hurrah! . . . Here we are! Train right on time. . . . Just these two bags, porter, and there’s a dollar for you. What merry, merry fellows these darky porters are, anyway!

And so here I am in the train, safe bound for home and the summer quiet of my club.

Well done for Robinson! I was afraid that it had missed fire, or that my message to him had gone wrong. It was on the second day of my visit that I sent word to him to invent an accident – something, anything – to call me back. I thought the message had failed. I had lost hope. But it is all right now, though he certainly pitched the note pretty high.

Of course I can’t let the Beverly-Joneses know that it was a put-up job. I must set fire to the office as soon as I get back. But it’s worth it. And I’ll have to singe Robinson about the face and hands. But it’s worth that too!

TOC     INDEX

To Nature
and Back Again

It was probably owing to the fact that my place of lodgment in New York overlooked the waving trees of Central Park that I was consumed, all the summer through, with a great longing for the woods. To me, as a lover of Nature, the waving of a tree conveys thoughts which are never conveyed to me except by seeing a tree wave.

This longing grew upon me. I became restless with it. In the daytime I dreamed over my work. At night my sleep was broken and restless. At times I would even wander forth, at night into the park, and there, deep in the night shadow of the trees, imagine myself alone in the recesses of the dark woods remote from the toil and fret of our distracted civilization.

This increasing feeling culminated in the resolve which becomes the subject of this narrative. The thought came to me suddenly one night. I woke from my sleep with a plan fully matured in my mind. It was this: I would, for one month, cast off all the travail and cares of civilized life and become again the wild man of the woods that Nature made me. My plan was to go to the edge of the great woods, somewhere in New England, divest myself of my clothes – except only my union suit – crawl into the woods, stay there a month and then crawl out again. To a trained woodsman and crawler like myself the thing was simplicity itself. For food I knew that I could rely on berries, roots, shoots, mosses, mushrooms, fungi, bungi – in fact the whole of Nature’s ample storehouse; for my drink, the running brook and the quiet pool; and for my companions the twittering chipmunk, the chickadee, the chocktaw, the choo-choo, the chow-chow, and the hundred and one inhabitants of the forgotten glade and the tangled thicket.

Fortunately for me, my resolve came to me upon the last day in August. The month of September was my vacation. My time was my own. I was free to go.

On my rising in the morning my preparations were soon made; or, rather, there were practically no preparations to make. I had but to supply myself with a camera, my one necessity in the woods, and to say good-bye to my friends. Even this last ordeal I wished to make as brief as possible. I had no wish to arouse their anxiety over the dangerous, perhaps foolhardy, project that I had in mind. I wished, as far as possible, to say good-bye in such a way as to allay the very natural fears which my undertaking would excite in the minds of my friends.

From myself, although trained in the craft of the woods, I could not conceal the danger that I incurred. Yet the danger was almost forgotten in the extraordinary and novel interest that attached to the experiment. Would it prove possible for a man, unaided by our civilized arts and industries, to maintain himself naked – except for his union suit – in the heart of the woods? Could he do it, or could he not? And if he couldn’t what then?

But this last thought I put from me. Time alone could answer the question.

As in duty bound, I went first to the place of business where I am employed, to shake hands and say good-bye to my employer.

“I am going,” I said, “to spend a month naked alone in the woods.”

He looked up from his desk with genial kindliness.

“That’s right,” he said, “get a good rest.”

“My plan is,” I added, “to live on berries and funguses.”

“Fine,” he answered. “Well, have a good time, old man – good-bye.”

Then I dropped in casually upon one of my friends.

“Well,” I said, “I’m off to New England to spend a month naked.”

“Nantucket,” he said, “or Newport?”

“No,” I answered, speaking as lightly as I could. “I’m going into the woods and stay there naked for a month.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I see. Well, good-bye, old chap – see you when you get back.”

After that I called upon two or three other men to say a brief word of farewell. I could not help feeling slightly nettled, I must confess, at the very casual way in which they seemed to take my announcement. “Oh, yes,” they said, “naked in the woods, eh? Well, ta-ta till you get back.”

Here was a man about to risk his life – for there was no denying the fact – in a great sociological experiment, yet they received the announcement with absolute unconcern. It offered one more assurance, had I needed it, of the degenerate state of the civilization upon which I was turning my back.

On my way to the train I happened to run into a newspaper reporter with whom I have some acquaintance.

“I’m just off,” I said, “to New England to spend a month naked – at least naked all but my union suit – in the woods; no doubt you’ll like a few details about it for your paper.”

“Thanks, old man,” he said, “we’ve pretty well given up running that nature stuff. We couldn’t do anything with it – unless, of course, anything happens to you. Then we’d be glad to give you some space.”

Several of my friends had at least the decency to see me off on the train. One, and one alone accompanied me on the long night-ride to New England in order that he might bring back my clothes, my watch, and other possessions from the point where I should enter the woods, together with such few messages of farewell as I might scribble at the last moment.

It was early morning when we arrived at the wayside station where we were to alight. From here we walked to the edge of the woods. Arrived at this point we halted. I took off my clothes, with the exception of my union suit. Then, taking a pot of brown stain from my valise, I proceeded to dye my face and hands and my union suit itself a deep butternut brown.

“What’s that for?” asked my friend.

“For protection,” I answered. “Don’t you know that all animals are protected by their peculiar markings that render them invisible? The caterpillar looks like the leaf it eats from; the scales of the fish counterfeit the glistening water of the brook; the bear and the ’possum are coloured like the tree-trunks on which they climb. There!” I added, as I concluded my task. “I am now invisible.”

“Gee!” said my friend.

I handed him back the valise and the empty paint-pot, dropped to my hands and knees – my camera slung about my neck – and proceeded to crawl into the bush. My friend stood watching me.

“Why don’t you stand up and walk?” I heard him call.

I turned half round and growled at him. Then I plunged deeper into the bush, growling as I went.

After ten minutes’ active crawling I found myself in the heart of the forest. It reached all about me on every side for hundreds of miles. All around me was the unbroken stillness of the woods. Not a sound reached my ear save the twittering of a squirrel, or squirl, in the branches high above my head or the far-distant call of a loon hovering over some woodland lake.

I judged that I had reached a spot suitable for my habitation.

My first care was to make a fire. Difficult though it might appear to the degenerate dweller of the city to do this, to the trained woodsman, such as I had now become, it is nothing. I selected a dry stick, rubbed it vigorously against my hind leg, and in a few moments it broke into a generous blaze. Half an hour later I was sitting beside a glowing fire of twigs discussing with great gusto an appetizing mess of boiled grass and fungi cooked in a hollow stone.

I ate my fill, not pausing till I was full, careless, as the natural man ever is, of the morrow. Then, stretched out upon the pine-needles at the foot of a great tree, I lay in drowsy contentment listening to the song of the birds, the hum of the myriad insects and the strident note of the squirrel high above me. At times I would give utterance to the soft answering call, known to every woodsman, that is part of the freemasonry of animal speech. As I lay thus, I would not have exchanged places with the pale dweller in the city for all the wealth in the world. Here I lay remote from the world, happy, full of grass, listening to the crooning of the birds.

But the mood of inaction and reflection cannot last, even with the lover of Nature. It was time to be up and doing. Much lay before me to be done before the setting of the sun should bring with it, as I fully expected it would, darkness. Before night fell I must build a house, make myself a suit of clothes, lay in a store of nuts, and in short prepare myself for the oncoming of winter, which, in the bush, may come on at any time in the summer.

I rose briskly from the ground to my hands and knees and set myself to the building of my house. The method that I intended to follow here was merely that which Nature has long since taught to the beaver and which, moreover, is known and practised by the gauchos of the pampas, by the googoos of Rhodesia and by many other tribes. I had but to select a suitable growth of trees and gnaw them down with my teeth, taking care so to gnaw them that each should fall into the place appointed for it in the building. The sides, once erected in this fashion, another row of trees, properly situated, is gnawed down to fall crosswise as the roof.

I set myself briskly to work and in half an hour had already the satisfaction of seeing my habitation rising into shape. I was still gnawing with unabated energy when I was interrupted by a low growling in the underbrush. With animal caution I shrank behind a tree, growling in return. I could see something moving in the bushes, evidently an animal of large size. From its snarl I judged it to be a bear. I could hear it moving nearer to me. It was about to attack me. A savage joy thrilled through me at the thought, while my union suit bristled with rage from head to foot as I emitted growl after growl of defiance. I bared my teeth to the gums, snarling, and lashed my flank with my hind foot. Eagerly I watched for the onrush of the bear. In savage combat who strikes first wins. It was my idea, as soon as the bear should appear, to bite off its front legs one after the other. This initial advantage once gained, I had no doubt of ultimate victory.

The brushes parted. I caught a glimpse of a long brown body and a hairy head. Then the creature reared up, breasting itself against a log, full in front of me. Great heavens! It was not a bear at all. It was a man.

He was dressed, as I was, in a union suit, and his face and hands, like mine, were stained a butternut brown. His hair was long and matted and two weeks’ stubble of beard was on his face.

For a minute we both glared at one another, still growling. Then the man rose up to a standing position with a muttered exclamation of disgust.

“Ah, cut it out,” he said. “Let’s talk English.”

He walked over towards me and sat down upon a log in an attitude that seemed to convey the same disgust as the expression of his features. Then he looked round about him.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Building a house,” I answered.

“I know,” he said with a nod. “What are you here for?”

“Why,” I explained, “my plan is this: I want to see whether a man can come out here in the woods, naked, with no aid but that of his own hands and his own ingenuity and—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” interrupted the disconsolate man. “Earn himself a livelihood in the wilderness, live as the cave-man lived, carefree and far from the curse of civilization!”

“That’s it. That was my idea,” I said, my enthusiasm rekindling as I spoke. “That’s what I’m doing; my food is to be the rude grass and the roots that Nature furnishes for her children, and for my drink—”

“Yes, yes,” he interrupted again with impatience, “for your drink the running rill, for your bed the sweet couch of hemlock, and for your canopy the open sky lit with the soft stars in the deep-purple vault of the dewy night. I know.”

“Great heavens, man!” I exclaimed. “That’s my idea exactly. In fact, those are my very phrases. How could you have guessed it?”

He made a gesture with his hand to indicate weariness and disillusionment.

“Pshaw!” he said. “I know it because I’ve been doing it. I’ve been here a fortnight now on this open-air, life-in-the-woods game. Well, I’m sick of it! This last lets me out.”

“What last?” I asked.

“Why, meeting you. Do you realize that you are the nineteenth man that I’ve met in the last three days running about naked in the woods? They’re all doing it. The woods are full of them.”

“You don’t say so!” I gasped.

“Fact. Wherever you go in the bush you find naked men all working out this same blasted old experiment. Why, when you get a little farther in you’ll see signs up: NAKED MEN NOT ALLOWED IN THIS BUSH, and NAKED MEN KEEP OFF, and GENTLEMEN WHO ARE NAKED WILL KINDLY KEEP TO THE HIGH ROAD, and a lot of things like that. You must have come in at a wrong place or you’d have noticed the little shanties that they have now at the edge of the New England bush with signs up: UNION SUITS BOUGHT AND SOLD, CAMERAS FOR SALE OR TO RENT, HIGHEST PRICE FOR CAST-OFF CLOTHING, and all that sort of thing.”

“No,” I said. “I saw nothing.”

“Well, you look when you go back. As for me, I’m done with it. The thing’s worked out. I’m going back to the city to see whether I can’t, right there in the heart of the city, earn myself a livelihood with my unaided hands and brains. That’s the real problem; no more bumming on the animals for me. This bush business is too easy. Well, good-bye; I’m off.”

“But stop a minute,” I said. “How is it that, if what you say is true, I haven’t seen or heard anybody in the bush, and I’ve been here since the middle of the morning?”

“Nonsense,” the man answered. “They were probably all round you but you didn’t recognize them.”

“No, no, it’s not possible. I lay here dreaming beneath a tree and there wasn’t a sound, except the twittering of a squirrel and, far away, the cry of a lake-loon, nothing else.”

“Exactly, the twittering of a squirrel! That was some feller up the tree twittering to beat the band to let on that he was a squirrel, and no doubt some other feller calling out like a loon over near the lake. I suppose you gave them the answering cry?”

“I did,” I said. “I gave that low guttural note which—”

“Precisely – which is the universal greeting in the freemasonry of animal speech. I see you’ve got it all down pat. Well, good-bye again. I’m off. Oh, don’t bother to growl, please. I’m sick of that line of stuff.”

“Good-bye,” I said.

He slid through the bushes and disappeared. I sat where I was, musing, my work interrupted, a mood of bitter disillusionment heavy upon me. So I sat, it may have been for hours.

In the far distance I could hear the faint cry of a bittern in some lonely marsh.

“Now, who the deuce is making that noise?” I muttered. “Some silly fool, I suppose, trying to think he’s a waterfowl. Cut it out!”

Long I lay, my dream of the woods shattered, wondering what to do.

Then suddenly there came to my ear the loud sound of voices, human voices, strident and eager, with nothing of the animal growl in them.

“He’s in there. I seen him!” I heard some one call.

Rapidly I dived sideways into the underbrush, my animal instinct strong upon me again, growling as I went. Instinctively I knew that it was I that they were after. All the animal joy of being hunted came over me. My union suit stood up on end with mingled fear and rage.

As fast as I could I retreated into the wood. Yet somehow, as I moved, the wood, instead of growing denser, seemed to thin out. I crouched low, still growling and endeavouring to bury myself in the thicket. I was filled with a wild sense of exhilaration such as any lover of the wild life would feel at the knowledge that he is being chased, that some one is after him, that some one is perhaps just a few feet behind him, waiting to stick a pitchfork into him as he runs. There is no ecstasy like this.

Then I realized that my pursuers had closed in on me. I was surrounded on all sides.

The woods had somehow grown thin. They were like the mere shrubbery of a park – it might be of Central Park itself. I could hear among the deeper tones of men the shrill voices of boys. “There he is,” one cried, “going through them bushes! Look at him humping himself!” “What is it, what’s the sport?” another called. “Some crazy guy loose in the park in his underclothes and the cops after him.”

—

Then they closed in on me. I recognized the blue suits of the police force and their short clubs. In a few minutes I was dragged out of the shrubbery and stood in the open park in my pyjamas, wide awake, shivering in the chilly air of early morning.

Fortunately for me, it was decided at the police-court that sleep-walking is not an offence against the law. I was dismissed with a caution.

My vacation is still before me, and I still propose to spend it naked. But I shall do so at Atlantic City.

TOC     INDEX

The Cave-Man as He Is

I think it likely that few people besides myself have ever actually seen and spoken with a “cave-man.”

Yet everybody nowadays knows all about the cave-man. The fifteen-cent magazines and the new fiction have made him a familiar figure. A few years ago, it is true, nobody had ever heard of him. But lately, for some reason or other, there has been a run on the cave-man. No up-to-date story is complete without one or two references to him. The hero, when the heroine slights him, is said to “feel for a moment the wild, primordial desire of the cave-man, the longing to seize her, to drag her with him, to carry her away, to make her his.” When he takes her in his arms it is recorded that “all the elemental passion of the cave-man surges through him.” When he fights, on her behalf against a dray-man or a gun-man or an ice-man or any other compound that makes up a modern villain, he is said to “feel all the fierce fighting joy of the cave-man.” If they kick him in the ribs, he likes it. If they beat him over the head, he never feels it; because he is, for the moment, a cave-man. And the cave-man is, and is known to be, quite above sensation.

The heroine, too, shares the same point of view. “Take me,” she murmurs as she falls into the hero’s embrace, “be my cave-man.” As she says it there is, so the writer assures us, something of the fierce light of the cave-woman in her eyes, the primordial woman to be wooed and won only by force.

So, like everybody else, I had, till I saw him, a great idea of the cave-man. I had a clear mental picture of him – huge, brawny, muscular, a wolfskin thrown about him and a great war-club in his hand. I knew him as without fear with nerves untouched by our effete civilization, fighting, as the beasts fight, to the death, killing without pity and suffering without a moan.

It was a picture that I could not but admire.

I liked, too – I am free to confess it – his peculiar way with women. His system was, as I understood it, to take them by the neck and bring them along with him. That was his fierce, primordial way of “wooing” them. And they liked it. So at least we are informed by a thousand credible authorities. They liked it. And the modern woman, so we are told, would still like it if only one dared to try it on. There’s the trouble; if one only dared!

I see lots of them – I’ll be frank about it – that I should like to grab, to sling over my shoulder and carry away with me; or, what is the same thing, allowing for modern conditions, have an express man carry them. I notice them at Atlantic City, I see them in Fifth Avenue – yes, everywhere.

But would they come? That’s the deuce of it. Would they come right along, like the cave-woman, merely biting off my ear as they came, or are they degenerate enough to bring an action against me, indicting the express company as a party of the second part?

Doubts such as these prevent me from taking active measures. But they leave me, as they leave many another man, preoccupied and fascinated with the cave-man.

One may imagine, then, my extraordinary interest in him when I actually met him in the flesh. Yet the thing came about quite simply, indeed more by accident than by design, an adventure open to all.

It so happened that I spent my vacation in Kentucky – the region, as everybody knows, of the great caves. They extend – it is a matter of common knowledge – for hundreds of miles; in some places dark and sunless tunnels, the black silence broken only by the dripping of the water from the roof; in other places great vaults like subterranean temples, with vast stone arches sweeping to the dome, and with deep, still water of unfathomed depth as the floor; and here and there again they are lighted from above through rifts in the surface of the earth, and are dry and sand strewn – fit for human habitation.

In such caves as these – so has the obstinate legend run for centuries – there still dwell cave-men, the dwindling remnant of their race. And here it was that I came across him.

I had penetrated into the caves far beyond my guides. I carried a revolver and had with me an electric lantern, but the increasing sunlight in the cave as I went on had rendered the latter needless.

There he sat, a huge figure, clad in a great wolfskin. Besides him lay a great club. Across his knee was a spear round which he was binding sinews that tightened under his muscular hand. His head was bent over his task. His matted hair had fallen over his eyes. He did not see me till I was close beside him on the sanded floor of the cave. I gave a slight cough.

“Excuse me!” I said.

The Cave-man gave a startled jump.

“My goodness,” he said, “you startled me!”

I could see that he was quite trembling.

“You came along so suddenly,” he said, “it gave me the jumps.” Then he muttered, more to himself than to me, “Too much of this darned cave-water! I must quit drinking it.”

I sat down near to the Caveman on a stone, taking care to place my revolver carefully behind it. I don’t mind admitting that a loaded revolver, especially as I get older, makes me nervous. I was afraid that he might start fooling with it. One can’t be too careful.

As a way of opening conversation I picked up the Cave-man’s club.

“Say,” I said, “that’s a great club you have, eh? By gee! it’s heavy!”

“Look out!” said the Cave-man with a certain agitation in his voice as he reached out and took the club from me. “Don’t fool with that club! It’s loaded! You know you could easily drop the club on your toes, or on mine. A man can’t be too careful with a loaded club.”

He rose as he said this and carried the club to the other side of the cave, where he leant it against the wall. Now that he stood up and I could examine him he no longer looked so big. In fact he was not big at all. The effect of size must have come, I think, from the great wolfskin that he wore. I have noticed the same thing in Grand Opera. I noticed, too, for the first time that the cave we were in seemed fitted up, in a rude sort of way, like a dwelling-room.

“This is a nice place you’ve got,” I said.

“Dandy, isn’t it?” he said, as he cast his eyes around. “She fixed it up. She’s got great taste. See that mud sideboard? That’s the real thing, A-one mud! None of your cheap rock about that. We fetched that mud for two miles to make that. And look at that wicker bucket. Isn’t it great? Hardly leaks at all except through the sides, and perhaps a little through the bottom. She wove that. She’s a humdinger at weaving.”

He was moving about as he spoke, showing me all his little belongings. He reminded me for all the world of a man in a Harlem flat, showing a visitor how convenient it all is. Somehow, too, the Cave-man had lost all appearance of size. He looked, in fact, quite little, and when he had pushed his long hair back from his forehead he seemed to wear that same, worried, apologetic look that we all have. To a higher being, if there is such, our little faces one and all appear, no doubt, pathetic.

I knew that he must be speaking about his wife.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“My wife?” he said. “Oh, she’s gone out somewhere through the caves with the kid. You didn’t meet our kid as you came along, did you? No? Well, he’s the greatest boy you even saw. He was only two this nineteenth of August. And you should hear him say ‘Pop’ and ‘Mom’ just as if he was grown up. He is really, I think, about the brightest boy I’ve ever known – I mean quite apart from being his father, and speaking of him as if he were anyone else’s boy. You didn’t meet them?”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

“Oh, well,” the Cave-man went on, “there are lots of ways and passages through. I guess they went in another direction. The wife generally likes to take a stroll round in the morning and see some of the neighbours. But, say,” he interrupted, “I guess I’m forgetting my manners. Let me get you a drink of cave-water. Here, take it in this stone mug! There you are, say when! Where do we get it? Oh, we find it in parts of the cave where it filters through the soil above. Alcoholic? Oh, yes, about fifteen per cent, I think. Some say it soaks all through the soil of this State. Sit down and be comfortable, and, say if you hear the woman coming just slip your mug behind that stone out of sight. Do you mind? Now, try one of these elm-root cigars. Oh, pick a good one – there are lots of them!”

We seated ourselves in some comfort on the soft sand, our backs against the boulders, sipping cave-water and smoking elm-root cigars. It seemed altogether as if one were back in civilization, talking to a genial host.

“Yes,” said the Cave-man, and he spoke, as it were, in a large and patronizing way. “I generally let my wife trot about as she likes in the daytime. She and the other women nowadays are getting up all these different movements, and the way I look at it is that if it amuses her to run around and talk and attend meetings, why let her do it. Of course,” he continued, assuming a look of great firmness, “if I liked to put my foot down—”

“Exactly, exactly,” I said. “It’s the same way with us!”

“Is it now!” he questioned with interest. “I had imagined that it was all different Outside. You’re from the Outside, aren’t you? I guessed you must be from the skins you wear.”

“Have you never been Outside?” I asked.

“No fear!” said the Cave-man. “Not for mine! Down here in the caves, clean underground and mostly in the dark, it’s all right. It’s nice and safe.” He gave a sort of shudder. “Gee! You fellows out there must have your nerve to go walking around like that on the outside rim of everything, where the stars might fall on you or a thousand things happen to you. But then you Outside Men have got a natural elemental fearlessness about you that we Cave-men have lost. I tell you, I was pretty scared when I looked up and saw you standing there.”

“Had you never seen any Outside Men?” I asked.

“Why, yes,” he answered, “but never close. The most I’ve done is to go out to the edges of the cave sometimes and look out and see them, Outside Men and Women, in the distance. But of course, in one way or another, we Cave-men know all about them. And the thing we envy most in you Outside Men is the way you treat your women! By gee! You take no nonsense from them – you fellows are the real primordial, primitive men. We’ve lost it somehow.”

“Why, my dear fellow—” I began.

But the Cave-man, who had sat suddenly upright, interrupted.

“Quick! quick!” he said. “Hide that infernal mug! She’s coming. Don’t you hear!”

As he spoke I caught the sound of a woman’s voice somewhere in the outer passages of the cave.

“Now, Willie,” she was saying, speaking evidently to the Cave-child, “you come right along back with me, and if I ever catch you getting in such a mess as that again I’ll never take you anywhere, so there!”

Her voice had grown louder. She entered the cave as she spoke – a big-boned woman in a suit of skins leading by the hand a pathetic little mite in a rabbit-skin, with blue eyes and a slobbered face.

But as I was sitting the Cave-woman evidently couldn’t see me; for she turned at once to speak to her husband, unconscious of my presence.

“Well, of all the idle creatures!” she exclaimed. “Loafing here in the sand” – she gave a sniff – “and smoking—”

“My dear,” began the Cave-man.

“Don’t you my-dear me!” she answered. “Look at this place! Nothing tidied up yet and the day half through! Did you put the alligator on to boil?”

“I was just going to say—” began the Cave-man.

“Going to say! Yes, I don’t doubt you were going to say. You’d go on saying all day if I’d let you. What I’m asking you is, is the alligator on to boil for dinner or is it not – My gracious!” She broke off all of a sudden, as she caught sight of me. “Why didn’t you say there was company? Land sakes! And you sit there and never say there was a gentleman here!”

She had hustled across the cave and was busily arranging her hair with a pool of water as a mirror.

“Gracious!” she said, “I’m a perfect fright! You must excuse me,” she added, looking round toward me, “for being in this state. I’d just slipped on this old fur blouse and run around to a neighbour’s and I’d no idea that he was going to bring in company. Just like him! I’m afraid we’ve nothing but a plain alligator stew to offer you, but I’m sure if you’ll stay to dinner—”

She was hustling about already, good primitive housewife that she was, making the stone-plates rattle on the mud table.

“Why, really—” I began. But I was interrupted by a sudden exclamation from both the Cave-man and the Cave-woman together:

“Willie! where’s Willie!”

“Gracious!” cried the woman. “He’s wandered out alone – oh, hurry, look for him! Something might get him! He may have fallen in the water! Oh, hurry!”

They were off in a moment, shouting into the dark passages of the outer cave: “Willie! Willie!” There was agonized anxiety in their voices.

And then in a moment, as it seemed, they were back again, with Willie in their arms, blubbering, his rabbit-skin all wet.

“Goodness gracious!” said the Cave-woman. “He’d fallen right in, the poor little man. Hurry, dear, and get something dry to wrap him in! Goodness, what a fright! Quick, darling, give me something to rub him with.”

Anxiously the Cave-parents moved about beside the child, all quarrel vanished.

“But surely,” I said, as they calmed down a little, “just there where Willie fell in, beside the passage that I came through, there is only three inches of water.”

“So there is,” they said, both together, “but just suppose it had been three feet!”

Later on, when Willie was restored, they both renewed their invitation to me to stay to dinner.

“Didn’t you say,” said the Cave-man, “that you wanted to make some notes on the difference between Cave-people and the people of your world of today?”

“I thank you,” I answered, “I have already all the notes I want!”

TOC     INDEX

Ideal Interviews

–1–
With a European Prince

With Any European Prince,
Travelling in America

On receiving our card, the Prince, to our great surprise and pleasure, sent down a most cordial message that he would be delighted to see us at once. This thrilled us.

“Take us,” we said to the elevator boy, “to the apartments of the Prince.” We were pleased to see him stagger and lean against his wheel to get his breath back.

In a few moments we found ourselves crossing the threshold of the Prince’s apartments. The Prince, who is a charming young man of from twenty-six to twenty-seven, came across the floor to meet us with an extended hand and a simple gesture of welcome. We have seldom seen anyone come across the floor more simply.

The Prince, who is travelling incognito as the Count of Flim Flam, was wearing, when we saw him, the plain morning dress of a gentleman of leisure. We learned that a little earlier he had appeared at breakfast in the costume of a Unitarian clergyman, under the incognito of the Bishop of Bongee; while later on he appeared at lunch, as a delicate compliment to our city, in the costume of a Columbia professor of Yiddish.

The Prince greeted us with the greatest cordiality, seated himself, without the slightest affectation, and motioned to us, with indescribable bonhomie, his permission to remain standing.

“Well,” said the Prince, “what is it?”

We need hardly say that the Prince, who is a consummate master of ten languages, speaks English quite as fluently as he does Chinese. Indeed, for a moment, we could scarcely tell which he was talking.

“What are your impressions of the United States?” we asked as we took out our notebook.

“I am afraid,” answered the Prince, with the delightful smile which is characteristic of him, and which we noticed again and again during the interview, “that I must scarcely tell you that.”

We realized immediately that we were in the presence not only of a soldier but of one of the most consummate diplomats of the present day.

“May we ask then,” we resumed, correcting our obvious blunder, “what are your impressions, Prince, of the Atlantic Ocean?”

“Ah,” said the Prince, with that peculiar thoughtfulness which is so noticeable in him and which we observed not once but several times, “the Atlantic!”

Volumes could not have expressed his thought better.

“Did you,” we asked, “see any ice during your passage across?”

“Ah,” said the Prince, “ice! Let me think.”

We did so.

“Ice,” repeated the Prince thoughtfully.

We realized that we were in the presence not only of a soldier, a linguist and a diplomat, but of a trained scientist accustomed to exact research.

“Ice!” repeated the Prince. “Did I see any ice? No.”

Nothing could have been more decisive, more final than the clear, simple brevity of the Prince’s “No.” He had seen no ice. He knew he had seen no ice. He said he had seen no ice. Nothing could have been more straightforward, more direct. We felt assured from that moment that the Prince had not seen any ice.

—

The exquisite good taste with which the Prince had answered our question served to put us entirely at our ease, and we presently found ourselves chatting with His Highness with the greatest freedom and without the slightest gene or mauvaise honte, or, in fact, malvoisie of any kind.

We realized, indeed, that we were in the presence not only of a trained soldier, a linguist and a diplomat, but also of a conversationalist of the highest order.

His Highness, who has an exquisite sense of humour – indeed, it broke out again and again during our talk with him – expressed himself as both amused and perplexed over our American money.

“It is very difficult,” he said, “with us it is so simple; six and a half gröner are equal to one and a third gross-gröner or the quarter part of our Rigsdaler. Here it is so complicated.”

We ventured to show the Prince a fifty-cent piece and to explain its value by putting two quarters beside it.

“I see,” said the Prince, whose mathematical ability is quite exceptional, “two twenty-five-cent pieces are equal to one fifty-cent piece. I must try to remember that. Meantime,” he added, with a gesture of royal condescension, putting the money in his pocket, “I will keep your coins as instructors;” – we murmured our thanks – “and now explain to me, please, your five-dollar gold piece and your ten-dollar eagle.”

We felt it proper, however, to shift the subject, and asked the Prince a few questions in regard to his views on American politics. We soon found that His Highness, although this is his first visit to this continent, is a keen student of our institutions and our political life. Indeed, His Altitude showed by his answers to our questions that he is as well informed about our politics as we are ourselves. On being asked what he viewed as the uppermost tendency in our political life of today, the Prince replied thoughtfully that he didn’t know. To our inquiry as to whether in his opinion democracy was moving forward or backward, the Prince, after a moment of reflection, answered that he had no idea. On our asking which of the generals of our Civil War was regarded in Europe as the greatest strategist, His Highness answered without hesitation, “George Washington.”

Before closing our interview the Prince, who, like his illustrious father, is an enthusiastic sportsman, completely turned the tables on us by inquiring eagerly about the prospects for large game in America.

We told him something – as much as we could recollect – of woodchuck hunting in our own section of the country. The Prince was interested at once. His eye lighted up, and the peculiar air of fatigue, or languor, which we had thought to remark on his face during our interview, passed entirely off his features. He asked us a number of questions, quickly and without pausing, with the air, in fact, of a man accustomed to command and not to listen. How was the woodchuck hunted? From horseback or from an elephant? Or from an armoured car, or turret? How many beaters did one use to beat up the woodchuck? What bearers was it necessary to carry with one? How great a danger must one face of having one’s beaters killed? What percentage of risk must one be prepared to incur of accidentally shooting one’s own beaters? What did a bearer cost? and so on.

All these questions we answered as best we could, the Prince apparently seizing the gist, or essential part of our answer, before we had said it.

In concluding the discussion we ventured to ask His Highness for his autograph. The Prince, who has perhaps a more exquisite sense of humour than any other sovereign of Europe, declared with a laugh that he had no pen. Still roaring over this inimitable drollery, we begged the Prince to honour us by using our own fountain-pen.

“Is there any ink in it?” asked the Prince – which threw us into a renewed paroxysm of laughter.

The Prince took the pen and very kindly autographed for us seven photographs of himself. He offered us more, but we felt that seven was about all we could use. We were still suffocated with laughter over the Prince’s wit; His Highness was still signing photographs when an equerry appeared and whispered in the Prince’s ear. His Highness, with the consummate tact to be learned only at a court, turned quietly without a word and left the room.

We never, in all our experience, remember seeing a prince – or a mere man for the matter of that – leave a room with greater suavity, discretion, or aplomb. It was a revelation of breeding, of race, of long slavery to caste. And yet, with it all, it seemed to have a touch of finality about it – a hint that the entire proceeding was deliberate, planned, not to be altered by circumstance. He did not come back.

—

We understand that he appeared later in the morning at a civic reception in the costume of an Alpine Jaeger, and attended the matinée in the dress of a lieutenant of police.

Meantime he has our pen. If he turns up in any costume that we can spot at sight, we shall ask him for it.

TOC     INDEX

–2–
With Our Greatest Actor

That Is to Say, with Any One
of Our Sixteen Greatest Actors

It was within the privacy of his own library that we obtained – need we say with infinite difficulty – our interview with the Great Actor. He was sitting in a deep arm-chair, so buried in his own thoughts that he was oblivious of our approach. On his knee before him lay a cabinet photograph of himself. His eyes seemed to be peering into it, as if seeking to fathom its unfathomable mystery. We had time to note that a beautiful carbon photogravure of himself stood on a table at his elbow, while a magnificent half-tone pastel of himself was suspended on a string from the ceiling. It was only when we had seated ourself in a chair and taken out our notebook that the Great Actor looked up.

“An interview?” he said, and we noted with pain the weariness in his tone. “Another interview!”

We bowed.

“Publicity!” he murmured rather to himself than to us. “Publicity! Why must one always be forced into publicity?”

It was not our intention, we explained apologetically, to publish or to print a single word—

“Eh, what?” exclaimed the Great Actor. “Not print it? Not publish it? Then what in—”

Not, we explained, without his consent.

“Ah,” he murmured wearily, “my consent. Yes, yes, I must give it. The world demands it. Print, publish anything you like. I am indifferent to praise, careless of fame. Posterity will judge me. But,” he added more briskly, “let me see a proof of it in time to make any changes I might care to.”

We bowed our assent.

“And now,” we began, “may we be permitted to ask a few questions about your art? And first, in which branch of the drama do you consider that your genius chiefly lies, in tragedy or in comedy?”

“In both,” said the Great Actor.

“You excel then,” we continued, “in neither the one nor the other?”

“Not at all,” he answered, “I excel in each of them.”

“Excuse us,” we said, “we haven’t made our meaning quite clear. What we meant to say is, stated very simply, that you do not consider yourself better in either of them than in the other?”

“Not at all,” said the Actor, as he put out his arm with that splendid gesture that we have known and admired for years, at the same time throwing back his leonine head so that his leonine hair fell back from his leonine forehead. “Not at all. I do better in both of them. My genius demands both tragedy and comedy at the same time.”

“Ah,” we said, as a light broke in upon us, “then that, we presume, is the reason why you are about to appear in Shakespeare?”

The Great Actor frowned.

“I would rather put it,” he said, “that Shakespeare is about to appear in me.”

“Of course, of course,” we murmured, ashamed of our own stupidity.

“I appear,” went on the Great Actor, “in Hamlet. I expect to present, I may say, an entirely new Hamlet.”

“A new Hamlet!” we exclaimed, fascinated. “A new Hamlet! Is such a thing possible?”

“Entirely,” said the Great Actor, throwing his leonine head forward again. “I have devoted years of study to the part. The whole conception of the part of Hamlet has been wrong.”

We sat stunned.

“All actors hitherto,” continued the Great Actor, “or rather, I should say, all so-called actors – I mean all those who tried to act before me – have been entirely mistaken in their presentation. They have presented Hamlet as dressed in black velvet.”

“Yes, yes,” we interjected, “in black velvet, yes!”

“Very good. The thing is absurd,” continued the Great Actor, as he reached down two or three heavy volumes from the shelf beside him. “Have you ever studied the Elizabethan era?”

“The which?” we asked modestly.

“The Elizabethan era?”

We were silent.

“Or the pre-Shakespearean tragedy?”

We hung our head.

“If you had, you would know that a Hamlet in black velvet is perfectly ridiculous. In Shakespeare’s day – as I could prove in a moment if you had the intelligence to understand it – there was no such thing as black velvet. It didn’t exist.”

“And how then,” we asked, intrigued, puzzled and yet delighted, “do you present Hamlet?”

“In brown velvet,” said the Great Actor.

“Great Heavens,” we exclaimed, “this is a revolution.”

“It is. But that is only one part of my conception. The main thing will be my presentation of what I may call the psychology of Hamlet.”

“The psychology!” we said.

“Yes,” resumed the Great Actor, “the psychology. To make Hamlet understood, I want to show him as a man bowed down by a great burden. He is overwhelmed with Weltschmerz. He carries in him the whole weight of the Zeitgeist; in fact, everlasting negation lies on him—”

“You mean,” we said, trying to speak as cheerfully as we could, “that things are a little bit too much for him.”

“His will,” went on the Great Actor, disregarding our interruption, “is paralysed. He seeks to move in one direction and is hurled in another. One moment he sinks into the abyss. The next, he rises above the clouds. His feet seek the ground, but find only the air—”

“Wonderful,” we said, “but will you not need a good deal of machinery?”

“Machinery!” exclaimed the Great Actor, with a leonine laugh. “The machinery of thought, the mechanism of power, of magnetism—”

“Ah,” we said, “electricity.”

“Not at all,” said the Great Actor. “You fail to understand. It is all done by my rendering. Take, for example, the famous soliloquy on death. You know it?”

“‘To be or not to be,’” we began.

“Stop,” said the Great Actor. “Now observe. It is a soliloquy. Precisely. That is the key to it. It is something that Hamlet says to himself. Not a word of it, in my interpretation, is actually spoken. All is done in absolute, unbroken silence.”

“How on earth,” we began, “can you do that?”

“Entirely and solely with my face.”

Good heavens! Was it possible? We looked again, this time very closely, at the Great Actor’s face. We realized with a thrill that it might be done.

“I come before the audience so,” he went on, “and soliloquize – thus – follow my face, please—”

As the Great Actor spoke, he threw himself into a characteristic pose with folded arms, while gust after gust of emotion, of expression, of alternate hope, doubt and despair, swept – we might say chased themselves across his features.

“Wonderful!” we gasped.

“Shakespeare’s lines,” said the Great Actor, as his face subsided to its habitual calm, “are not necessary; not, at least, with my acting. The lines, indeed, are mere stage directions, nothing more. I leave them out. This happens again and again in the play. Take, for instance, the familiar scene where Hamlet holds the skull in his hand: Shakespeare here suggests the words ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well – ’”

“Yes, yes!” we interrupted, in spite of ourself, “‘a fellow of infinite jest – ’”

“Your intonation is awful,” said the Actor. “But listen. In my interpretation I use no words at all. I merely carry the skull quietly in my hand, very slowly, across the stage. There I lean against a pillar at the side, with the skull in the palm of my hand, and look at it in silence.”

“Wonderful!” we said.

“I then cross over to the right of the stage, very impressively, and seat myself on a plain wooden bench, and remain for some time, looking at the skull.”

“Marvellous!”

“I then pass to the back of the stage and lie down on my stomach, still holding the skull before my eyes. After holding this posture for some time, I crawl slowly forward, portraying by the movement of my legs and stomach the whole sad history of Yorick. Finally I turn my back on the audience, still holding the skull, and convey through the spasmodic movements of my back Hamlet’s passionate grief at the loss of his friend.”

“Why!” we exclaimed, beside ourself with excitement, “this is not merely a revolution, it is a revelation.”

“Call it both,” said the Great Actor.

“The meaning of it is,” we went on, “that you practically don’t need Shakespeare at all.”

“Exactly, I do not. I could do better without him. Shakespeare cramps me. What I really mean to convey is not Shakespeare, but something greater, larger – how shall I express it – bigger.” The Great Actor paused and we waited, our pencil poised in the air. Then he murmured, as his eyes lifted in an expression of something like rapture. “In fact – ME.”

He remained thus, motionless, without moving. We slipped gently to our hands and knees and crawled quietly to the door, and so down the stairs, our notebook in our teeth.

TOC     INDEX

–3–
With Our Greatest Scientist

As Seen in Any
of our College Laboratories

It was among the retorts and test-tubes of his physical laboratory that we were privileged to interview the Great Scientist. His back was towards us when we entered. With characteristic modesty he kept it so for some time after our entry. Even when he turned round and saw us his face did not react off us as we should have expected.

He seemed to look at us, if such a thing were possible, without seeing us, or, at least, without wishing to see us.

We handed him our card.

He took it, read it, dropped it in a bowlful of sulphuric acid and then, with a quiet gesture of satisfaction, turned again to his work.

We sat for some time behind him. “This, then,” we thought to ourselves (we always think to ourselves when we are left alone), “is the man, or rather is the back of the man, who has done more” (here we consulted the notes given us by our editor), “to revolutionize our conception of atomic dynamics than the back of any other man.”

Presently the Great Scientist turned towards us with a sigh that seemed to our ears to have a note of weariness in it. Something, we felt, must be making him tired.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

“Professor,” we answered, “we have called upon you in response to an overwhelming demand on the part of the public—”

The Great Scientist nodded.

“To learn something of your new researches and discoveries in” (here we consulted a minute card which we carried in our pocket) “in radio-active-emanations which are already becoming” (we consulted our card again) “a household word—”

The Professor raised his hand as if to check us.

“I would rather say,” he murmured, “helio-radio-active—”

“So would we,” we admitted, “much rather—”

“After all,” said the Great Scientist, “helium shares in the most intimate degree the properties of radium. So, too, for the matter of that,” he added in afterthought, “do thorium, and borium!”

“Even borium!” we exclaimed, delighted, and writing rapidly in our notebook. Already we saw ourselves writing up as our headline Borium Shares Properties of Thorium.

“Just what is it,” said the Great Scientist, “that you want to know?”

“Professor,” we answered, “what our journal wants is a plain and simple explanation, so clear that even our readers can understand it, of the new scientific discoveries in radium. We understand that you possess, more than any other man, the gift of clear and lucid thought—”

The Professor nodded.

“And that you are able to express yourself with greater simplicity than any two men now lecturing.”

The Professor nodded again.

“Now, then,” we said, spreading our notes on our knee, “go at it. Tell us, and, through us, tell a quarter of a million anxious readers just what all these new discoveries are about.”

“The whole thing,” said the Professor, warming up to his work as he perceived from the motions of our face and ears our intelligent interest, “is simplicity itself. I can give it to you in a word—”

“That’s it,” we said. “Give it to us that way.”

“It amounts, if one may boil it down into a phrase—”

“Boil it, boil it,” we interrupted.

“Amounts, if one takes the mere gist of it—”

“Take it,” we said, “take it.”

“Amounts to the resolution of the ultimate atom.”

“Ha!” we exclaimed.

“I must ask you first to clear your mind,” the Professor continued, “of all conception of ponderable magnitude.”

We nodded. We had already cleared our mind of this.

“In fact,” added the Professor, with what we thought a quiet note of warning in his voice, “I need hardly tell you that what we are dealing with must be regarded as altogether ultramicroscopic.”

We hastened to assure the Professor that, in accordance with the high standards of honour represented by our journal, we should of course regard anything that he might say as ultramicroscopic and treat it accordingly.

“You say, then,” we continued, “that the essence of the problem is the resolution of the atom. Do you think you can give us any idea of what the atom is?”

The Professor looked at us searchingly.

We looked back at him, openly and frankly. The moment was critical for our interview. Could he do it? Were we the kind of person that he could give it to? Could we get it if he did?

“I think I can,” he said. “Let us begin with the assumption that the atom is an infinitesimal magnitude. Very good. Let us grant, then, that though it is imponderable and indivisible it must have a spacial content? You grant me this?”

“We do,” we said, “we do more than this, we give it to you.”

“Very well. If spacial, it must have dimension: if dimension – form. Let us assume ex hypothesi the form to be that of a spheroid and see where it leads us.”

The Professor was now intensely interested. He walked to and fro in his laboratory. His features worked with excitement. We worked ours, too, as sympathetically as we could.

“There is no other possible method in inductive science,” he added, “than to embrace some hypothesis, the most attractive that one can find, and remain with it—”

We nodded. Even in our own humble life after our day’s work we had found this true.

“Now,” said the Professor, planting himself squarely in front of us, “assuming a spherical form, and a spacial content, assuming the dynamic forces that are familiar to us and assuming – the thing is bold, I admit—”

We looked as bold as we could.

“Assuming that the ions, or nuclei of the atom – I know no better word—”

“Neither do we,” we said.

“That the nuclei move under the energy of such forces, what have we got?”

“Ha!” we said.

“What have we got? Why, the simplest matter conceivable. The forces inside our atom – itself, mind you, the function of a circle – mark that—”

We did.

“Becomes merely a function of pi!”

The Great Scientist paused with a laugh of triumph.

“A function of pi!” we repeated in delight.

“Precisely. Our conception of ultimate matter is reduced to that of an oblate spheroid described by the revolution of an ellipse on its own minor axis!”

“Good heavens!” we said. “Merely that.”

“Nothing else. And in that case any further calculation becomes a mere matter of the extraction of a root.”

“How simple,” we murmured.

“Is it not,” said the Professor. “In fact, I am accustomed, in talking to my class, to give them a very clear idea, by simply taking as our root F – F being any finite constant—”

He looked at us sharply. We nodded.

“And raising F to the log of infinity. I find they apprehend it very readily.”

“Do they?” we murmured. Ourselves we felt as if the Log of Infinity carried us to ground higher than what we commonly care to tread on.

“Of course,” said the Professor, “the Log of Infinity is an Unknown.”

“Of course,” we said very gravely. We felt ourselves here in the presence of something that demanded our reverence.

“But still,” continued the Professor almost jauntily, “we can handle the Unknown just as easily as anything else.”

This puzzled us. We kept silent. We thought it wiser to move on to more general ground. In any case, our notes were now nearly complete.

“These discoveries, then,” we said, “are absolutely revolutionary.”

“They are,” said the Professor.

“You have now, as we understand, got the atom – how shall we put it? – got it where you want it.”

“Not exactly,” said the Professor with a sad smile.

“What do you mean?” we asked.

“Unfortunately our analysis, perfect though it is, stops short. We have no synthesis.”

The Professor spoke as in deep sorrow.

“No synthesis,” we moaned. We felt it was a cruel blow. But in any case our notes were now elaborate enough. We felt that our readers could do without a synthesis. We rose to go.

“Synthetic dynamics,” said the Professor, taking us by the coat, “is only beginning—”

“In that case—” we murmured, disengaging his hand.

“But, wait, wait,” he pleaded “wait for another fifty years—”

“We will,” we said very earnestly. “But meantime as our paper goes to press this afternoon we must go now. In fifty years we will come back.”

“Oh, I see, I see,” said the Professor, “you are writing all this for a newspaper. I see.”

“Yes,” we said, “we mentioned that at the beginning.”

“Ah,” said the Professor, “did you? Very possibly. Yes.”

“We propose,” we said, “to feature the article for next Saturday.”

“Will it be long?” he asked.

“About two columns,” we answered.

“And how much,” said the Professor in a hesitating way, “do I have to pay you to put it in?”

“How much which?” we asked.

“How much do I have to pay?”

“Why, Professor—” we began quickly. Then we checked ourselves. After all was it right to undeceive him, this quiet, absorbed man of science with his ideals, his atoms and his emanations. No, a hundred times no. Let him pay a hundred times.

“It will cost you,” we said very firmly, “ten dollars.”

The Professor began groping among his apparatus. We knew that he was looking for his purse.

“We should like also very much,” we said, “to insert your picture along with the article—”

“Would that cost much?” he asked.

“No, that is only five dollars.”

The Professor had meantime found his purse.

“Would it be all right,” he began, “that is, would you mind if I pay you the money now? I am apt to forget.”

“Quite all right,” we answered. We said good-bye very gently and passed out. We felt somehow as if we had touched a higher life. “Such,” we murmured, as we looked about the ancient campus, “are the men of science: are there, perhaps, any others of them round this morning that we might interview?”

TOC     INDEX

–4–
With Our Typical Novelists

Edwin and Ethelinda Afterthought –
Husband and Wife –
In their Delightful Home Life.

It was at their beautiful country place on the Woonagansett that we had the pleasure of interviewing the Afterthoughts. At their own cordial invitation, we had walked over from the nearest railway station, a distance of some fourteen miles. Indeed, as soon as they heard of our intention they invited us to walk. “We are so sorry not to bring you in the motor,” they wrote, “but the roads are so frightfully dusty that we might get dust on our chauffeur.” This little touch of thoughtfulness is the keynote of their character.

The house itself is a delightful old mansion giving on a wide garden, which gives in turn on a broad terrace giving on the river.

The Eminent Novelist met us at the gate. We had expected to find the author of Angela Rivers and The Garden of Desire a pale aesthetic type (we have a way of expecting the wrong thing in our interviews). We could not resist a shock of surprise (indeed we seldom do) at finding him a burly out-of-door man weighing, as he himself told us, a hundred stone in his stockinged feet (we think he said stone).

He shook hands cordially.

“Come and see my pigs,” he said.

“We wanted to ask you,” we began, as we went down the walk, “something about your books.”

“Let’s look at the pigs first,” he said. “Are you anything of a pig man?”

We are always anxious in our interviews to be all things to all men. But we were compelled to admit that we were not much of a pig man.

“Ah,” said the Great Novelist, “perhaps you are more of a dog man?”

“Not altogether a dog man,” we answered.

“Anything of a bee man?” he asked.

“Something,” we said (we were once stung by a bee).

“Ah,” he said, “you shall have a go at the beehives, then, right away?”

We assured him that we were willing to postpone a go at the beehives till later.

“Come along, then, to the styes,” said the Great Novelist, and he added, “Perhaps you’re not much of a breeder.”

We blushed. We thought of the five little faces around the table for which we provide food by writing our interviews.

“No,” we said, “we were not much of a breeder.”

“Now then,” said the Great Novelist as we reached our goal, “how do you like this stye?”

“Very much indeed,” we said.

“I’ve put in a new tile draining – my own plan. You notice how sweet it keeps the stye.”

We had not noticed this.

“I am afraid,” said the Novelist, “that the pigs are all asleep inside.”

We begged him on no account to waken them. He offered to open the little door at the side and let us crawl in. We insisted that we could not think of intruding.

“What we would like,” we said, “is to hear something of your methods of work in novel writing.” We said this with very peculiar conviction. Quite apart from the immediate purposes of our interview, we have always been most anxious to know by what process novels are written. If we could get to know this, we would write one ourselves.

“Come and see my bulls first,” said the Novelist. “I’ve got a couple of young bulls here in the paddock that will interest you.”

We felt sure that they would.

He led us to a little green fence. Inside it were two ferocious looking animals, eating grain. They rolled their eyes upwards at us as they ate.

“How do those strike you?” he asked.

We assured him that they struck us as our beau ideal of bulls.

“Like to walk in beside them?” said the Novelist, opening a little gate.

We drew back. Was it fair to disturb these bulls?

The Great Novelist noticed our hesitation.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “They’re not likely to harm you. I send my hired man right in beside them every morning, without the slightest hesitation.”

We looked at the Eminent Novelist with admiration. We realized that like so many of our writers, actors, and even our thinkers, of today, he was an open-air man in every sense of the word.

But we shook our heads.

Bulls, we explained, were not a department of research for which we were equipped. What we wanted, we said, was to learn something of his methods of work.

“My methods of work?” he answered, as we turned up the path again. “Well, really, I hardly know that I have any.”

“What is your plan or method,” we asked, getting out our notebook and pencil, “of laying the beginning of a new novel?”

“My usual plan,” said the Novelist, “is to come out here and sit in the stye till I get my characters.”

“Does it take long?” we questioned.

“Not very. I generally find that a quiet half-hour spent among the hogs will give me at least my leading character.”

“And what do you do next?”

“Oh, after that I generally light a pipe and go and sit among the beehives looking for an incident.”

“Do you get it?” we asked.

“Invariably. After that I make a few notes, then go off for a ten mile tramp with my esquimaux dogs, and get back in time to have a go through the cattle sheds and take a romp with the young bulls.”

We sighed. We couldn’t help it. Novel writing seemed further away than ever.

“Have you also a goat on the premises?” we asked.

“Oh, certainly. A ripping old fellow – come along and see him.”

We shook our heads. No doubt our disappointment showed in our face. It often does. We felt that it was altogether right and wholesome that our great novels of today should be written in this fashion with the help of goats, dogs, hogs and young bulls. But we felt, too, that it was not for us.

We permitted ourselves one further question.

“At what time,” we said, “do you rise in the morning?”

“Oh anywhere between four and five,” said the Novelist.

“Ah, and do you generally take a cold dip as soon as you are up – even in winter?”

“I do.”

“You prefer, no doubt,” we said, with a dejection that we could not conceal, “to have water with a good coat of ice over it?”

“Oh, certainly!”

We said no more. We have long understood the reasons for our own failure in life, but it was painful to receive a renewed corroboration of it. This ice question has stood in our way for forty-seven years.

The Great Novelist seemed to note our dejection.

“Come to the house,” he said, “my wife will give you a cup of tea.”

In a few moments we had forgotten all our troubles in the presence of one of the most charming chatelaines it has been our lot to meet.

We sat on a low stool immediately beside Ethelinda Afterthought, who presided in her own gracious fashion over the tea-urn.

“So you want to know something of my methods of work?” she said, as she poured hot tea over our leg.

“We do,” we answered, taking out our little book and recovering something of our enthusiasm. We do not mind hot tea being poured over us if people treat us as a human being.

“Can you indicate,” we continued, “what method you follow in beginning one of your novels?”

“I always begin,” said Ethelinda Afterthought, “with a study.”

“A study?” we queried.

“Yes. I mean a study of actual facts. Take, for example, my Leaves from the Life of a Steam Laundrywoman – more tea?”

“No, no,” we said.

“Well, to make that book I first worked two years in a laundry.”

“Two years!” we exclaimed. “And why?”

“To get the atmosphere.”

“The steam?” we questioned.

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Afterthought, “I did that separately. I took a course in steam at a technical school.”

“Is it possible?” we said, our heart beginning to sing again. “Was all that necessary?”

“I don’t see how one could do it otherwise. The story opens, as no doubt you remember – tea? – in the boiler room of the laundry.”

“Yes,” we said, moving our leg – “no, thank you.”

“So you see the only possible point d’appui was to begin with a description of the inside of the boiler.”

We nodded.

“A masterly thing,” we said.

“My wife,” interrupted the Great Novelist, who was sitting with the head of a huge Danish hound in his lap, sharing his buttered toast with the dog while he adjusted a set of trout flies, “is a great worker.”

“Do you always work on that method?” we asked.

“Always,” she answered. “For Frederica of the Factory I spent six months in a knitting mill. For Marguerite of the Mud Flats I made special studies for months and months.”

“Of what sort?” we asked.

“In mud. Learning to model it. You see for a story of that sort the first thing needed is a thorough knowledge of mud – all kinds of it.”

“And what are you doing next?” we inquired.

“My next book,” said the Lady Novelist, “is to be a study – tea? – of the pickle industry – perfectly new ground.”

“A fascinating field,” we murmured.

“And quite new. Several of our writers have done the slaughter-house, and in England a good deal has been done in jam. But so far no one has done pickles. I should like, if I could,” added Ethelinda Afterthought, with the graceful modesty that is characteristic of her, “to make it the first of a series of pickle novels, showing, don’t you know, the whole pickle district, and perhaps following a family of pickle workers for four or five generations.”

“Four or five!” we said enthusiastically. “Make it ten! And have you any plan for work beyond that?”

“Oh, yes indeed,” laughed the Lady Novelist. “I am always planning ahead. What I want to do after that is a study of the inside of a penitentiary.”

“Of the inside?” we said, with a shudder.

“Yes. To do it, of course, I shall go to jail for two or three years!”

“But how can you get in?” we asked, thrilled at the quiet determination of the frail woman before us.

“I shall demand it as a right,” she answered quietly. “I shall go to the authorities, at the head of a band of enthusiastic women, and demand that I shall be sent to jail. Surely after the work I have done, that much is coming to me.”

“It certainly is,” we said warmly.

We rose to go.

Both the novelists shook hands with us with great cordiality. Mr. Afterthought walked as far as the front door with us and showed us a short cut past the beehives that could take us directly through the bull pasture to the main road.

We walked away in the gathering darkness of evening very quietly. We made up our mind as we went that novel writing is not for us. We must reach the penitentiary in some other way.

But we thought it well to set down our interview as a guide to others.

TOC     INDEX

The New Education

“So you’re going back to college in a fortnight,” I said to the Bright Young Thing on the veranda of the summer hotel. “Aren’t you sorry?”

“In a way I am,” she said, “but in another sense I’m glad to go back. One can’t loaf all the time.”

She looked up from her rocking-chair over her Red Cross knitting with great earnestness.

How full of purpose these modern students are, I thought to myself. In my time we used to go back to college as to a treadmill.

“I know that,” I said, “but what I mean is that college, after all, is a pretty hard grind. Things like mathematics and Greek are no joke, are they? In my day, as I remember it, we used to think spherical trigonometry about the hardest stuff of the lot.”

She looked dubious.

“I didn’t elect mathematics,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, “I see. So you don’t have to take it. And what have you elected?”

“For this coming half semester – that’s six weeks, you know – I’ve elected Social Endeavour.”

“Ah,” I said, “that’s since my day, what is it?”

“Oh, it’s awfully interesting. It’s the study of conditions.”

“What kind of conditions?” I asked.

“All conditions. Perhaps I can’t explain it properly. But I have the prospectus of it indoors if you’d like to see it. We take up Society.”

“And what do you do with it?”

“Analyse it,” she said.

“But it must mean reading a tremendous lot of books.”

“No,” she answered. “We don’t use books in this course. It’s all Laboratory Work.”

“Now I am mystified,” I said. “What do you mean by Laboratory Work?”

“Well,” answered the girl student with a thoughtful look upon her face, “you see, we are supposed to break society up into its elements.”

“In six weeks?”

“Some of the girls do it in six weeks. Some put in a whole semester and take twelve weeks at it.”

“So as to break up pretty thoroughly?” I said.

“Yes,” she assented. “But most of the girls think six weeks is enough.”

“That ought to pulverize it pretty completely. But how do you go at it?”

“Well,” the girl said, “it’s all done with Laboratory Work. We take, for instance, department stores. I think that is the first thing we do, we take up the department store.”

“And what do you do with it?”

“We study it as a Social Germ.”

“Ah,” I said, “as a Social Germ.”

“Yes,” said the girl, delighted to see that I was beginning to understand, “as a Germ. All the work is done in the concrete. The class goes down with the professor to the department store itself—”

“And then—”

“Then they walk all through it, observing.”

“But have none of them ever been in a departmental store before?”

“Oh, of course, but, you see, we go as Observers.”

“Ah, now, I understand. You mean you don’t buy anything and so you are able to watch everything?”

“No,” she said, “it’s not that. We do buy things. That’s part of it. Most of the girls like to buy little knick-knacks, and anyway it gives them a good chance to do their shopping while they’re there. But while they are there they are observing. Then afterwards they make charts.”

“Charts of what?” I asked.

“Charts of the employes; they’re used to show the brain movement involved.”

“Do you find much?”

“Well,” she said hesitatingly, “the idea is to reduce all the employes to a Curve.”

“To a Curve?” I exclaimed, “an In or an Out.”

“No, no, not exactly that. Didn’t you use Curves when you were at college?”

“Never,” I said.

“Oh, well, nowadays nearly everything, you know, is done into a Curve. We put them on the board.”

“And what is this particular Curve of the employe used for?” I asked.

“Why,” said the student, “the idea is that from the Curve we can get the Norm of the employe.”

“Get his Norm?” I asked.

“Yes, get the Norm. That stands for the Root Form of the employe as a social factor.”

“And what can you do with that?”

“Oh, when we have that we can tell what the employe would do under any and every circumstance. At least that’s the idea – though I’m really only quoting,” she added, breaking off in a diffident way, “from what Miss Thinker, the professor of Social Endeavour, says. She’s really fine. She’s making a general chart of the female employes of one of the biggest stores to show what percentage in case of fire would jump out of the window and what percentage would run to the fire escape.”

“It’s a wonderful course,” I said. “We had nothing like it when I went to college. And does it only take in departmental stores?”

“No,” said the girl, “the laboratory work includes for this semester ice-cream parlours as well.”

“What do you do with them?”

“We take them up as Social Cells, Nuclei, I think the professor calls them.”

“And how do you go at them?” I asked.

“Why, the girls go to them in little laboratory groups and study them.”

“They eat ice-cream in them?”

“They have to,” she said, “to make it concrete. But while they are doing it they are considering the ice-cream parlour merely as a section of social protoplasm.”

“Does the professor go?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, she heads each group. Professor Thinker never spares herself from work.”

“Dear me,” I said, “you must be kept very busy. And is Social Endeavour all that you are going to do?”

“No,” she answered, “I’m electing a half-course in Nature Work as well.”

“Nature Work? Well! Well! That, I suppose, means cramming up a lot of biology and zoology, does it not?”

“No,” said the girl, “it’s not exactly done with books. I believe it is all done by Field Work.”

“Field Work?”

“Yes. Field Work four times a week and an Excursion every Saturday.”

“And what do you do in the Field Work?”

“The girls,” she answered, “go out in groups anywhere out of doors, and make a Nature Study of anything they see.”

“How do they do that?” I asked.

“Why, they look at it. Suppose, for example, they come to a stream or a pond or anything—”

“Yes—”

“Well, they look at it.”

“Had they never done that before?” I asked.

“Ah, but they look at it as a Nature Unit. Each girl must take forty units in the course. I think we only do one unit each day we go out.”

“It must,” I said, “be pretty fatiguing work, and what about the Excursion?”

“That’s every Saturday. We go out with Miss Stalk, the professor of Ambulation.”

“And where do you go?”

“Oh, anywhere. One day we go perhaps for a trip on a steamer and another Saturday somewhere in motors, and so on.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Field Work. The aim of the course – I’m afraid I’m quoting Miss Stalk but I don’t mind, she’s really fine – is to break nature into its elements—”

“I see—”

“So as to view it as the external structure of Society and make deductions from it.”

“Have you made any?” I asked.

“Oh, no” – she laughed – “I’m only starting the work this term. But, of course, I shall have to. Each girl makes at least one deduction at the end of the course. Some of the seniors make two or three. But you have to make one.”

“It’s a great course,” I said. “No wonder you are going to be busy; and, as you say, how much better than loafing round here doing nothing.”

“Isn’t it?” said the girl student with enthusiasm in her eyes. “It gives one such a sense of purpose, such a feeling of doing something.”

“It must,” I answered.

“Oh, goodness,” she exclaimed, “there’s the lunch bell. I must skip and get ready.”

She was just vanishing from my side when the Burly Male Student, who was also staying in the hotel, came puffing up after his five-mile run. He was getting himself into trim for enlistment, so he told me. He noted the retreating form of the college girl as he sat down.

“I’ve just been talking to her,” I said, “about her college work. She seems to be studying a queer lot of stuff – Social Endeavour and all that!”

“Awful piffle,” said the young man. “But the girls naturally run to all that sort of rot, you know.”

“Now, your work,” I went on, “is no doubt very different. I mean what you were taking before the war came along. I suppose you fellows have an awful dose of mathematics and philology and so on just as I did in my college days?”

Something like a blush came across the face of the handsome youth.

“Well, no,” he said, “I didn’t co-opt mathematics. At our college, you know, we co-opt two majors and two minors.”

“I see,” I said, “and what were you co-opting?”

“I co-opted Turkish, Music, and Religion,” he answered.

“Oh, yes,” I said with a sort of reverential respect, “fitting yourself for a position of choir-master in a Turkish cathedral, no doubt.”

“No, no,” he said, “I’m going into insurance; but, you see, those subjects fitted in better than anything else.”

“Fitted in?”

“Yes. Turkish comes at nine, music at ten and religion at eleven. So they make a good combination; they leave a man free to—”

“To develop his mind,” I said. “We used to find in my college days that lectures interfered with it badly. But now, Turkish, that must be an interesting language, eh?”

“Search me!” said the student. “All you have to do is answer the roll and go out. Forty roll-calls give you one Turkish unit – but, say, I must get on, I’ve got to change. So long.”

I could not help reflecting, as the young man left me, on the great changes that have come over our college education. It was a relief to me later in the day to talk with a quiet, sombre man, himself a graduate student in philosophy, on this topic. He agreed with me that the old strenuous studies seem to be very largely abandoned.

I looked at the sombre man with respect.

“Now your work,” I said, “is very different from what these young people are doing – hard, solid, definite effort. What a relief it must be to you to get a brief vacation up here. I couldn’t help thinking today, as I watched you moving round doing nothing, how fine it must feel for you to come up here after your hard work and put in a month of out-and-out loafing.”

“Loafing!” he said indignantly. “I’m not loafing. I’m putting in a half summer course in Introspection. That’s why I’m here. I get credit for two majors for my time here.”

“Ah,” I said, as gently as I could, “you get credit here.”

He left me. I am still pondering over our new education. Meantime I think I shall enter my little boy’s name on the books of Tuskegee College where the education is still old-fashioned.

TOC     INDEX

The Errors
of Santa Claus

It was Christmas Eve.

The Browns, who lived in the adjoining house, had been dining with the Joneses.

Brown and Jones were sitting over wine and walnuts at the table. The others had gone upstairs.

“What are you giving to your boy for Christmas?” asked Brown.

“A train,” said Jones, “new kind of thing – automatic.”

“Let’s have a look at it,” said Brown.

Jones fetched a parcel from the sideboard and began unwrapping it.

“Ingenious thing, isn’t it?” he said. “Goes on its own rails. Queer how kids love to play with trains, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” assented Brown. “How are the rails fixed?”

“Wait, I’ll show you,” said Jones. “Just help me to shove these dinner things aside and roll back the cloth. There! See! You lay the rails like that and fasten them at the ends, so—”

“Oh, yes, I catch on, makes a grade, doesn’t it? Just the thing to amuse a child, isn’t it? I got Willy a toy airplane.”

“I know, they’re great. I got Edwin one on his birthday. But I thought I’d get him a train this time. I told him Santa Claus was going to bring him something altogether new this time. Edwin, of course, believes in Santa Claus absolutely. Say, look at this locomotive, would you? It has a spring coiled up inside the fire box.”

“Wind her up,” said Brown with great interest. “Let’s see her go.”

“All right,” said Jones. “Just pile up two or three plates or something to lean the end of the rails on. There, notice the way it buzzes before it starts. Isn’t that a great thing for a kid, eh?”

“Yes,” said Brown. “And say, see this little string to pull the whistle! By Gad, it toots, eh? Just like real?”

“Now then, Brown,” Jones went on, “you hitch on those cars and I’ll start her. I’ll be engineer, eh!”

—

Half an hour later Brown and Jones were still playing trains on the dining-room table.

But their wives upstairs in the drawing-room hardly noticed their absence. They were too much interested.

“Oh, I think it’s perfectly sweet,” said Mrs. Brown. “Just the loveliest doll I’ve seen in years. I must get one like it for Ulvina. Won’t Clarisse be perfectly enchanted?”

“Yes,” answered Mrs. Jones, “and then she’ll have all the fun of arranging the dresses. Children love that so much. Look, there are three little dresses with the doll, aren’t they cute? All cut out and ready to stitch together.”

“Oh, how perfectly lovely!” exclaimed Mrs. Brown. “I think the mauve one would suit the doll best, don’t you, with such golden hair? Only don’t you think it would make it much nicer to turn back the collar, so, and to put a little band – so?”

“What a good idea!” said Mrs. Jones. “Do let’s try it. Just wait, I’ll get a needle in a minute. I’ll tell Clarisse that Santa Claus sewed it himself. The child believes in Santa Claus absolutely.”

—

And half an hour later Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Brown were so busy stitching dolls’ clothes that they could not hear the roaring of the little train up and down the dining table, and had no idea what the four children were doing.

Nor did the children miss their mothers.

“Dandy, aren’t they?” Edwin Jones was saying to little Willie Brown, as they sat in Edwin’s bedroom. “A hundred in a box, with cork tips, and see, an amber mouthpiece that fits into a little case at the side. Good present for Dad, eh?”

“Fine!” said Willie appreciatively. “I’m giving Father cigars.”

“I know, I thought of cigars too. Men always like cigars and cigarettes. You can’t go wrong on them. Say, would you like to try one or two of these cigarettes? We can take them from the bottom. You’ll like them, they’re Russian – away ahead of Egyptian.”

“Thanks,” answered Willie. “I’d like one immensely. I only started smoking last spring – on my twelfth birthday. I think a feller’s a fool to begin smoking cigarettes too soon, don’t you? It stunts him. I waited till I was twelve.”

“Me too,” said Edwin, as they lighted their cigarettes. “In fact, I wouldn’t buy them now if it weren’t for Dad. I simply had to give him something from Santa Claus. He believes in Santa Claus absolutely, you know.”

—

And, while this was going on, Clarisse was showing little Ulvina the absolutely lovely little bridge set that she got for her mother.

“Aren’t these markers perfectly charming?” said Ulvina. “And don’t you love this little Dutch design – or is it Flemish, darling?”

“Dutch,” said Clarisse. “Isn’t it quaint? And aren’t these the dearest little things, for putting the money in when you play. I needn’t have got them with it – they’d have sold the rest separately – but I think it’s too utterly slow playing without money, don’t you?”

“Oh, abominable,” shuddered Ulvina. “But your mamma never plays for money, does she?”

“Mamma! Oh, gracious, no. Mamma’s far too slow for that. But I shall tell her that Santa Claus insisted on putting in the little money boxes.”

“I suppose she believes in Santa Claus, just as my mamma does.”

“Oh, absolutely,” said Clarisse, and added, “What if we play a little game! With a double dummy, the French way, or Norwegian Skat, if you like. That only needs two.”

“All right,” agreed Ulvina, and in a few minutes they were deep in a game of cards with a little pile of pocket money beside them.

—

About half an hour later, all the members of the two families were again in the drawing-room. But of course nobody said anything about the presents. In any case they were all too busy looking at the beautiful big Bible, with maps in it, that the Joneses had brought to give to Grandfather. They all agreed that, with the help of it, Grandfather could hunt up any place in Palestine in a moment, day or night.

But upstairs, away upstairs in a sitting-room of his own Grandfather Jones was looking with an affectionate eye at the presents that stood beside him. There was a beautiful whisky decanter, with silver filigree outside (and whiskey inside) for Jones, and for the little boy a big nickel-plated Jew’s harp.

—

Later on, far in the night, the person, or the influence, or whatever it is called Santa Claus, took all the presents and placed them in the people’s stockings.

And, being blind as he always has been, he gave the wrong things to the wrong people – in fact, he gave them just as indicated above.

But the next day, in the course of Christmas morning, the situation straightened itself out, just as it always does.

Indeed, by ten o’clock, Brown and Jones were playing with the train, and Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Jones were making dolls’ clothes, and the boys were smoking cigarettes, and Clarisse and Ulvina were playing cards for their pocket-money.

And upstairs – away up – Grandfather was drinking whisky and playing the Jew’s harp.

And so Christmas, just as it always does, turned out all right after all.

TOC     INDEX

Lost in New York

A Visitor’s Soliloquy

Well! Well!

Whatever has been happening to this place, to New York? Changed? Changed since I was here in ’86? Well, I should say so.

The hack-driver of the old days that I used to find waiting for me at the station curb, with that impossible horse of his – the hack-driver with his bulbous red face, and the nice smell of rye whisky all ’round him for yards – gone, so it seems, for ever.

And in place of him this – what is it they call it? – taxi, with a clean-shaven cut-throat steering it. “Get in,” he says, Just that. He doesn’t offer to help me or lift my satchel. All right, young man, I’m crawling in.

That’s the machine that marks it, eh? I suppose they have them rigged up so they can punch up anything they like. I thought so – he hits it up to fifty cents before we start. But I saw him do it. Well, I can stand for it this time. I’ll not be caught in one of these again.

The hotel? All right, I’m getting out. My hotel? But what is it they have done to it? They must have added ten stories to it. It reaches to the sky. But I’ll not try to look to the top of it. Not with this satchel in my hand: no, sir! I’ll wait till I’m safe inside. In there I’ll feel all right. They’ll know me in there. They’ll remember right away my visit in the fall of ’86. They won’t easily have forgotten that big dinner I gave – nine people at a dollar fifty a plate, with the cigars extra. The clerk will remember me, all right.

Know me? Not they. The clerk know me! How could he? For it seems now there isn’t any clerk, or not as there used to be. They have subdivided him somehow into five or six. There is a man behind a desk, a majestic sort of man, waving his hand. It would be sheer madness to claim acquaintance with him. There is another with a great book, adjusting cards in it; and another, behind glass labelled “Cashier,” and busy as a bank; there are two with mail and telegrams. They are all too busy to know me.

Shall I sneak up near to them, keeping my satchel in my hand? I wonder, do they see me? Can they see me, a mere thing like me? I am within ten feet of them, but I am certain that they cannot see me. I am, and I feel it, absolutely invisible.

Ha! One has seen me. He turns to me, or rather he rounds upon me, with the words “Well, sir?” That, and nothing else, sharp and hard. There is none of the ancient kindly pretence of knowing my name, no reaching out a welcome hand and calling me Mr. Er – Er – till he has read my name upside down while I am writing it and can address me as a familiar friend. No friendly questioning about the crops in my part of the country. The crops, forsooth! What do these young men know about crops?

A room? Had I any reservation? Any which? Any reservation. Oh, I see, had I written down from home to say that I was coming? No, I had not because the truth is I came at very short notice. I didn’t know till a week before that my brother-in-law – He is not listening. He has moved away. I will stand and wait till he comes back. I am intruding here; I had no right to disturb these people like this.

Oh, I can have a room at eleven o’clock. When it is which? – is vacated. Oh, yes, I see, when the man in it gets up and goes away. I didn’t for the minute catch on to what the word – He has stopped listening.

Never mind, I can wait. From eight to eleven is only three hours, anyway. I will move about here and look at things. If I keep moving they will notice me less. Ha! books and news papers and magazines – what a stack of them! Like a regular book-store. I will stand here and take a look at some of them. Eh! what’s that? Did I want to buy anything? Well, no, I hadn’t exactly – I was just – Oh, I see, they’re on sale. All right, yes, give me this one – fifty cents – all right – and this and these others. That’s all right, miss, I’m not stingy. They always say of me up in our town that when I – She has stopped listening.

Never mind. I will walk up and down again with the magazines under my arm. That will make people think I live here. Better still if I could put the magazines in my satchel. But how? There is no way to set it down and undo the straps. I wonder if I could dare put it for a minute on that table, the polished one – ? Or no, they wouldn’t likely allow a man to put a bag there.

Well, I can wait. Anyway, it’s eight o’clock and soon, surely, breakfast will be ready. As soon as I hear the gong I can go in there. I wonder if I could find out first where the dining-room is. It used always to be marked across the door, but I don’t seem to see it. Darn it, I’ll ask that man in uniform. If I’m here prepared to spend my good money to get breakfast I guess I’m not scared to ask a simple question of a man in uniform. Or no, I’ll not ask him. I’ll try this one – or no, he’s busy. I’ll ask this other boy. Say, would you mind, if you please, telling me, please, which way the dining-room – Eh, what? Do I want which? The grill room or the palm room? Why, I tell you, young man, I just wanted to get some breakfast if it’s – what? Do I want what? I didn’t quite get that – à la carte? No, thanks – and, what’s that? table de what? in the palm room? No, I just wanted – but it doesn’t matter. I’ll wait ’round here and look about till I hear the gong. Don’t worry about me.

What’s that? What’s that boy shouting out – that boy with the tray? A call for Mr. Something or Other – say, must be something happened pretty serious! A call for Mr. – why, that’s for me! Hullo! Here I am! Here, it’s Me! Here I am – wanted at the desk? all right, I’m coming, I’m hurrying. I guess something’s wrong at home, eh! Here I am. That’s my name. I’m ready.

Oh, a room. You’ve got a room for me. All right. The fifteenth floor! Good heavens! Away up there! Never mind, I’ll take it. Can’t give me a bath? That’s all right. I had one.

Elevator over this way? All right, I’ll come along. Thanks, I can carry it. But I don’t see any elevator? Oh, this door in the wall? Well! I’m hanged. This the elevator! It certainly has changed. The elevator that I remember had a rope in the middle of it, and you pulled the rope up as you went, wheezing and clanking all the way to the fifth floor. But this looks a queer sort of machine. How do you do – Oh, I beg your pardon. I was in the road of the door, I guess. Excuse me, I’m afraid I got in the way of your elbow. It’s all right, you didn’t hurt – or, not bad.

Gee whiz! It goes fast. Are you sure you can stop it? Better be careful, young man. There was an elevator once in our town that – fifteenth floor? All right.

This room, eh! Great Scott, it’s high up. Say, better not go too near that window, boy. That would be a hell of a drop if a feller fell out. You needn’t wait. Oh, I see. I beg your pardon. I suppose a quarter is enough, eh?

Well, it’s a relief to be alone. But say, this is high up! And what a noise! What is it they’re doing out there, away out in the air, with all that clatter – building a steel building, I guess. Well, those fellers have their nerve, all right. I’ll sit further back from the window.

It’s lonely up here. In the old days I could have rung a bell and had a drink sent up to the room; but away up here on the fifteenth floor! Oh, no, they’d never send a drink clean up to the fifteenth floor. Of course, in the old days, I could have put on my canvas slippers and walked down to the bar and had a drink and talked to the bartender.

But of course they wouldn’t have a bar in a place like this. I’d like to go down and see, but I don’t know that I’d care to ask, anyway. No, I guess I’ll just sit and wait. Some one will come for me, I guess, after a while.

If I were back right now in our town, I could walk into Ed Clancey’s restaurant and have ham and eggs, or steak and eggs, or anything, for thirty-five cents.

Our town up home is a peach of a little town, anyway.

Say, I just feel as if I’d like to take my satchel and jump clean out of that window. It would be a good rebuke to them.

But, pshaw! what would they care?

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This Strenuous Age

Something is happening, I regret to find, to the world in which we used to live. The poor old thing is being “speeded up.” There is “efficiency” in the air. Offices open at eight o’clock. Millionaires lunch on a baked apple. Bankers eat practically nothing. A college president has declared that there are more foot pounds of energy in a glass of peptonized milk than in – something else, I forget what. All this is very fine. Yet somehow I feel out of it.

My friends are failing me. They won’t sit up after midnight. They have taken to sleeping out of doors, on porches and pergolas. Some, I understand, merely roost on plain wooden bars. They rise early. They take deep breathing. They bathe in ice water. They are no good.

This change I am sure, is excellent. It is, I am certain, just as it ought to be. I am merely saying, quietly and humbly, that I am not in it. I am being left behind. Take, for example, the case of alcohol. That, at least, is what it is called now. There were days when we called it Bourbon whisky and Tom Gin, and when the very name of it breathed romance. That time is past.

The poor stuff is now called alcohol, and none so low that he has a good word for it. Quite right, I am certain. I don’t defend it. Alcohol, they are saying today, if taken in sufficient quantities, tears all the outer coating off the diaphragm. It leaves the epigastric tissue, so I am informed, a useless wreck.

This I don’t deny. It gets, they tell me, into the brain. I don’t dispute it. It turns the prosencephalon into mere punk. I know it. I’ve felt it doing it. They tell me – and I believe it – that after even one glass of alcohol, or shall we say Scotch whisky and soda, a man’s working power is lowered by twenty per cent. This is a dreadful thing. After three glasses, so it is held, his capacity for sustained rigid thought is cut in two. And after about six glasses the man’s working power is reduced by at least a hundred per cent. He merely sits there – in his arm-chair, at his club let us say – with all power, even all desire to work gone out of him, not thinking rigidly, not sustaining his thought, a mere shapeless chunk of geniality, half hidden in the blue smoke of his cigar.

—

Very dreadful, not a doubt. Alcohol is doomed; it is going it is gone. Yet when I think of a hot Scotch on a winter evening, or a Tom Collins on a summer morning, or a gin Rickey beside a tennis-court, or a stein of beer on a bench beside a bowling-green – I wish somehow that we could prohibit the use of alcohol and merely drink beer and whisky and gin as we used to. But these things, it appears, interfere with work. They have got to go.

But turn to the broader and simpler question of WORK itself. In my time one hated it. It was viewed as the natural enemy of man. Now the world has fallen in love with it. My friends, I find, take their deep breathing and their porch sleeping because it makes them work better. They go for a week’s vacation in Virginia not for its own sake, but because they say they can work better when they get back. I know a man who wears very loose boots because he can work better in them: and another who wears only soft shirts because he can work better in a soft shirt. There are plenty of men now who would wear dog-harness if they thought they could work more in it. I know another man who walks away out into the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country – he wouldn’t recognize a bumble bee if he saw it – but he claims that if he walks on Sunday his head is as clear as a bell for work on Monday.

Against work itself, I say nothing. But I sometimes wonder if I stand alone in this thing. Am I the only person left who hates it?

Nor is work all. Take food. I admit, here and now, that the lunch I like best – I mean for an ordinary plain lunch, not a party – is a beef steak about one foot square and two inches thick. Can I work on it? No, I can’t, but I can work in spite of it. That is as much as one used to ask, twenty-five years ago.

Yet now I find that all my friends boast ostentatiously about the meagre lunch they eat. One tells me that he finds a glass of milk and a prune is quite as much as he cares to take. Another says that a dry biscuit and a glass of water is all that his brain will stand. One lunches on the white of an egg. Another eats merely the yolk. I have only two friends left who can eat a whole egg at a time.

I understand that the fear of these men is that if they eat more than an egg or a biscuit they will feel heavy after lunch. Why they object to feeling heavy, I do not know. Personally, I enjoy it. I like nothing better than to sit round after a heavy lunch with half a dozen heavy friends, smoking heavy cigars. I am well aware that that is wicked. I merely confess the fact. I do not palliate it.

—

Nor is food all, nor drink, nor work, nor open air. There has spread abroad along with the so-called physical efficiency a perfect passion for information. Somehow if a man’s stomach is empty and his head clear as a bell, and if he won’t drink and won’t smoke, he reaches out for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers all though, instead of only reading the headings. He clamours for articles filled with statistics about illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of battleships in the Japanese navy.

I know quite a lot of men who have actually bought the new Encyclopaedia Britannica. What is more, they read the thing. They sit in their apartments at night with a glass of water at their elbow reading the encyclopaedia. They say that it is literally filled with facts. Other men spend their time reading the Statistical Abstract of the United States (they say the figures in it are great) and the Acts of Congress, and the list of Presidents since Washington (or was it Washington?).

—

Spending their evenings thus, and topping it off with a cold baked apple, and sleeping out in the snow, they go to work in the morning, so they tell me, with a positive sense of exhilaration. I have no doubt that they do. But, for me, I confess that once and for all I am out of it. I am left behind.

Add to it all such rising dangers as total prohibition, and the female franchise, the daylight saving, and eugenic marriage, together with proportional representation, the initiative and the referendum, and the duty of the citizen to take an intelligent interest in politics – and I admit that I shall not be sorry to go away from here.

—

But before I do go, I have one hope. I understand that down in Hayti things are very different. Bull fights, cock fights, dog fights, are openly permitted. Business never begins till eleven in the morning. Everybody sleeps after lunch, and the bars remain open all night. Marriage is but a casual relation. In fact, the general condition of morality, so they tell me, is lower in Hayti than it has been anywhere since the time of Nero. Me for Hayti.

TOC     INDEX

The Old, Old Story
of How Five Men
Went Fishing

This is a plain account of a fishing party. It is not a story. There is no plot. Nothing happens in it and nobody is hurt. The only point of this narrative is its peculiar truth. It not only tells what happened to us – the five people concerned in it – but what has happened and is happening to all the other fishing parties that at the season of the year, from Halifax to Idaho, go gliding out on the unruffled surface of our Canadian and American lakes in the still cool of early summer morning.

We decided to go in the early morning because there is a popular belief that the early morning is the right time for bass fishing. The bass is said to bite in the early morning. Perhaps it does. In fact the thing is almost capable of scientific proof. The bass does not bite between eight and twelve. It does not bite between twelve and six in the afternoon. Nor does it bite between six o’clock and midnight. All these things are known facts. The inference is that the bass bites furiously at about daybreak.

At any rate our party were unanimous about starting early. “Better make an early start,” said the Colonel, when the idea of the party was suggested. “Oh, yes,” said George Popley, the bank manager, “we want to get right out on the shoal while the fish are biting.”

When he said this all our eyes glistened. Everybody’s do. There’s a thrill in the words. To “get right out on the shoal at daybreak when the fish are biting,” is an idea that goes to any man’s brain.

If you listen to the men talking in a Pullman car, or an hotel corridor, or, better still, at the little tables in a first-class bar, you will not listen long before you hear one say: “Well, we got out early, just after sunrise, right on the shoal.” And presently, even if you can’t hear him, you will see him reach out his two hands and hold them about two feet apart for the other man to admire. He is measuring the fish. No, not the fish they caught; this was the big one that they lost. But they had him right up to the top of the water. Oh, yes, he was up to the top of the water all right. The number of huge fish that have been heaved up to the top of the water in our lakes is almost incredible. Or at least it used to be when we still had bar rooms and little tables for serving that vile stuff Scotch whisky and such foul things as gin Rickeys and John Collinses. It makes one sick to think of it, doesn’t it? But there was good fishing in the bars, all the winter.

—

But, as I say, we decided to go early in the morning. Charlie Jones, the railroad man, said that he remembered how when he was a boy, up in Wisconsin, they used to get out at five in the morning – not get up at five but be on the shoal at five. It appears that there is a shoal somewhere in Wisconsin where the bass lie in thousands. Kernin, the lawyer, said that when he was a boy – this was on Lake Rosseau – they used to get out at four. It seems there is a shoal in Lake Rosseau where you can haul up the bass as fast as you can drop your line. The shoal is hard to find – very hard. Kernin can find it, but it is doubtful – so I gather – if any other living man can. The Wisconsin shoal, too, is very difficult to find. Once you find it, you are all right; but it’s hard to find. Charlie Jones can find it. If you were in Wisconsin right now he’d take you straight to it, but probably no other person now alive could reach that shoal. In the same way Colonel Morse knows of a shoal in Lake Simcoe where he used to fish years and years ago and which, I understand, he can still find.

I have mentioned that Kernin is a lawyer, and Jones a railroad man and Popley a banker. But I needn’t have. Any reader would take it for granted. In any fishing party there is always a lawyer. You can tell him at sight. He is the one of the party that has a landing net and a steel rod in sections with a wheel that is used to wind the fish to the top of the water.

And there is always a banker. You can tell him by his good clothes. Popley, in the bank, wears his banking suit. When he goes fishing he wears his fishing suit. It is much the better of the two, because his banking suit has ink marks on it, and his fishing suit has no fish marks on it.

As for the railroad man – quite so, the reader knows it as well as I do – you can tell him because he carries a pole that he cut in the bush himself, with a ten-cent line wrapped round the end of it. Jones says he can catch as many fish with this kind of line as Kernin can with his patent rod and wheel. So he can too. Just the same number.

But Kernin says that with his patent apparatus if you get a fish on you can play him. Jones says to Hades with playing him: give him a fish on his line and he’ll haul him in all right. Kernin says he’d lose him. But Jones says he wouldn’t. In fact he guarantees to haul the fish in. Kernin says that more than once – in Lake Rosseau – he has played a fish for over half an hour. I forget now why he stopped; I think the fish quit playing.

I have heard Kernin and Jones argue this question of their two rods, as to which rod can best pull in the fish, for half an hour. Others may have heard the same question debated. I know no way by which it could be settled.

Our arrangement to go fishing was made at the little golf club of our summer town on the veranda where we sit in the evening. Oh, it’s just a little place, nothing pretentious: the links are not much good for golf; in fact we don’t play much golf there, so far as golf goes, and of course, we don’t serve meals at the club, it’s not like that – and no, we’ve nothing to drink there because of prohibition. But we go and sit there. It is a good place to sit, and, after all, what else can you do in the present state of the law?

So it was there that we arranged the party.

The thing somehow seemed to fall into the mood of each of us. Jones said he had been hoping that some of the boys would get up a fishing party. It was apparently the one kind of pleasure that he really cared for. For myself I was delighted to get in with a crowd of regular fishermen like these four, especially as I hadn’t been out fishing for nearly ten years, though fishing is a thing I am passionately fond of. I know no pleasure in life like the sensation of getting a four-pound bass on the hook and hauling him up to the top of the water, to weigh him. But, as I say, I hadn’t been out for ten years. Oh, yes, I live right beside the water every summer, and yes, certainly – I am saying so – I am passionately fond of fishing, but still somehow I hadn’t been out. Every fisherman knows just how that happens. The years have a way of slipping by. Yet I must say I was surprised to find that so keen a sport as Jones hadn’t been out – so it presently appeared – for eight years. I had imagined he practically lived on the water. And Colonel Morse and Kernin, I was amazed to find, hadn’t been out for twelve years, not since the day – so it came out in conversation – when they went out together in Lake Rosseau and Kernin landed a perfect monster, a regular corker, five pounds and a half, they said; or no, I don’t think he landed him. No, I remember, he didn’t land him. He caught him – and he could have landed him, he should have landed him – but he didn’t land him. That was it. Yes, I remember Kernin and Morse had a slight discussion about it – oh, perfectly amicable – as to whether Morse had fumbled with the net or whether Kernin – the whole argument was perfectly friendly – had made an ass of himself by not “striking” soon enough. Of course the whole thing was so long ago that both of them could look back on it without any bitterness or ill nature. In fact it amused them. Kernin said it was the most laughable thing he ever saw in his life to see poor old Jack – that’s Morse’s name – shoving away with the landing net wrong side up. And Morse said he’d never forget seeing poor old Kernin yanking his line first this way and then that and not knowing where to try to haul it. It made him laugh to look back at it.

—

They might have gone on laughing for quite a time, but Charlie Jones interrupted by saying that in his opinion a landing net is a piece of darned foolishness. Here Popley agrees with him. Kernin objects that if you don’t use a net you’ll lose your fish at the side of the boat. Jones says no: give him a hook well through the fish and a stout line in his hand and that fish has got to come in. Popley says so too. He says let him have his hook fast through the fish’s head with a short stout line, and put him (Popley) at the other end of that line and that fish will come in. It’s got to. Otherwise Popley will know why. That’s the alternative. Either the fish must come in or Popley must know why. There’s no escape from the logic of it.

But perhaps some of my readers have heard the thing discussed before.

So, as I say, we decided to go the next morning and to make an early start. All of the boys were at one about that. When I say “boys,” I use the word, as it is used in fishing, to mean people from say forty-five to sixty-five. There is something about fishing that keeps men young. If a fellow gets out for a good morning’s fishing, forgetting all business worries, once in a while – say, once in ten years – it keeps him fresh.

We agreed to go in a launch, a large launch – to be exact, the largest in the town. We could have gone in row boats, but a row boat is a poor thing to fish from. Kernin said that in a row boat it is impossible properly to “play” your fish. The side of the boat is so low that the fish is apt to leap over the side into the boat when half “played.” Popley said that there is no comfort in a row boat. In a launch a man can reach out his feet and take it easy. Charlie Jones said that in a launch a man could rest his back against something, and Morse said that in a launch a man could rest his neck. Young inexperienced boys, in the small sense of the word, never think of these things. So they go out and after a few hours their necks get tired; whereas a group of expert fishers in a launch can rest their backs and necks and even fall asleep during the pauses when the fish stop biting.

Anyway all the “boys” agreed that the great advantage of a launch would be that we could get a man to take us. By that means the man could see to getting the worms, and the man would be sure to have spare lines, and the man could come along to our different places – we were all beside the water – and pick us up. In fact the more we thought about the advantage of having a “man” to take us the better we liked it. As a boy gets old he likes to have a man around to do the work.

Anyway Frank Rolls, the man we decided to get, not only has the biggest launch in town but what is more Frank knows the lake. We called him up at his boat-house over the phone and said we’d give him five dollars to take us out first thing in the morning provided that he knew the shoal. He said he knew it.

—

I don’t know, to be quite candid about it, who mentioned whisky first. In these days everybody has to be a little careful. I imagine we had all been thinking whisky for some time before anybody said it. But there is a sort of convention that when men go fishing they must have whisky. Each man makes the pretence that one thing he needs at six o’clock in the morning is cold raw whisky. It is spoken of in terms of affection. One man says the first thing you need if you’re going fishing is a good “snort” of whisky; another says that a good “snifter” is the very thing; and the others agree that no man can fish properly without “a horn,” or a “bracer” or an “eye-opener.” Each man really decides that he himself won’t take any. But he feels that, in a collective sense, the “boys” need it.

So it was with us. The Colonel said he’d bring along “a bottle of booze.” Popley said, no, let him bring it; Kernin said let him; and Charlie Jones said no, he’d bring it. It turned out that the Colonel had some very good Scotch at his house that he’d like to bring; oddly enough Popley had some good Scotch in his house too; and, queer though it is, each of the boys had Scotch in his house. When the discussion closed we knew that each of the five of us was intending to bring a bottle of whisky. Each of the five of us expected the other to drink one and a quarter bottles in the course of the morning.

I suppose we must have talked on that veranda till long after one in the morning. It was probably nearer two than one when we broke up. But we agreed that that made no difference. Popley said that for him three hours’ sleep, the right kind of sleep, was far more refreshing than ten. Kernin said that a lawyer learns to snatch his sleep when he can, and Jones said that in railroad work a man pretty well cuts out sleep.

So we had no alarms whatever about not being ready by five. Our plan was simplicity itself. Men like ourselves in responsible positions learn to organize things easily. In fact Popley says it is that faculty that has put us where we are. So the plan simply was that Frank Rolls should come along at five o’clock and blow his whistle in front of our places, and at that signal each man would come down to his wharf with his rod and kit and so we’d be off to the shoal without a moment’s delay.

The weather we ruled out. It was decided that even if it rained that made no difference. Kernin said that fish bite better in the rain. And everybody agreed that man with a couple of snorts in him need have no fear of a little rain water.

So we parted, all keen on the enterprise. Nor do I think even now that there was anything faulty or imperfect in that party as we planned it.

—

I heard Frank Rolls blowing his infernal whistle opposite my summer cottage at some ghastly hour in the morning. Even without getting out of bed, I could see from the window that it was no day for fishing. No, not raining exactly. I don’t mean that, but one of those peculiar days – I don’t mean wind – there was no wind, but a sort of feeling in the air that showed anybody who understands bass fishing that it was a perfectly rotten day for going out. The fish, I seemed to know it, wouldn’t bite.

When I was still fretting over the annoyance of the disappointment I heard Frank Rolls blowing his whistle in front of the other cottages. I counted thirty whistles altogether. Then I fell into a light doze – not exactly sleep, but a sort of doze – I can find no other word for it. It was clear to me that the other “boys” had thrown the thing over. There was no use in my trying to go out alone. I stayed where I was, my doze lasting till ten o’clock.

When I walked up town later in the morning I couldn’t help being struck by the signs in the butcher’s shops and the restaurants, FISH, FRESH FISH, FRESH LAKE FISH.

Where in blazes do they get those fish anyway?

TOC     INDEX

Back from the Land

I have just come back now with the closing in of autumn – to the city. I have hung up my hoe in my study; my spade is put away behind the piano. I have with me seven pounds of Paris Green that I had over. Anybody who wants it may have it. I didn’t like to bury it for fear of its poisoning the ground. I didn’t like to throw it away for fear of its destroying cattle. I was afraid to leave it in my summer place for fear that it might poison the tramps who generally break in in November. I have it with me now. I move it from room to room, as I hate to turn my back upon it. Anybody who wants it, I repeat, can have it.

I should like also to give away, either to the Red Cross or to anything else, ten packets of radish seed (the early curled variety, I think), fifteen packets of cucumber seed (the long succulent variety, I believe it says), and twenty packets of onion seed (the Yellow Danvers, distinguished, I understand, for its edible flavour and its nutritious properties). It is not likely that I shall ever, on this side of the grave, plant onion seed again. All these things I have with me. My vegetables are to come after me by freight. They are booked from Simcoe County to Montreal; at present they are, I believe, passing through Schenectady. But they will arrive later all right. They were seen going through Detroit last week, moving west. It is the first time that I ever sent anything by freight anywhere. I never understood before the wonderful organization of the railroads. But they tell me that there is a bad congestion of freight down South this month. If my vegetables get tangled up in that there is no telling when they will arrive.

In other words, I am one of the legion of men – quiet, determined, resolute men – who went out last spring to plant the land, and who are now back.

With me – and I am sure that I speak for all the others as well – it was not a question of mere pleasure; it was no love of gardening for its own sake that inspired us. It was a plain national duty. What we said to ourselves was: “This war has got to stop. The men in the trenches thus far have failed to stop it. Now let us try. The whole thing,” we argued, “is a plain matter of food production.”

“If we raise enough food the Germans are bound to starve. Very good. Let us kill them.”

I suppose there was never a more grimly determined set of men went out from the cities than those who went out last May, as I did, to conquer the food problem. I don’t mean to say that each and every one of us actually left the city. But we all “went forth” in the metaphorical sense. Some of the men cultivated back gardens; others took vacant lots; some went out into the suburbs; and others, like myself, went right out into the country.

We are now back. Each of us has with him his Paris Green, his hoe and the rest of his radish seed.

—

The time has, therefore, come for a plain, clear statement of our experience. We have, as everybody knows, failed. We have been beaten hack all along the line. Our potatoes are buried in a jungle of autumn burdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery spike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about it from top to bottom.

I look back with a sigh of regret at those bright, early days in April when we were all buying hoes, and talking soil and waiting for the snow to be off the ground. The street cars, as we went up and down to our offices, were a busy babel of garden talk. There was a sort of farmer-like geniality in the air. One spoke freely to strangers. Every man with a hoe was a friend. Men chewed straws in their offices, and kept looking out of windows to pretend to themselves that they were afraid it might blow up rain. “Got your tomatoes in?” one man would ask another as they went up in the elevator. “Yes, I got mine in yesterday,” the other would answer, “But I’m just a little afraid that this east wind may blow up a little frost. What we need now is growing weather.” And the two men would drift off together from the elevator door along the corridor, their heads together in friendly colloquy.

I have always regarded a lawyer as a man without a soul. There is one who lives next door to me to whom I have not spoken in five years. Yet when I saw him one day last spring heading for the suburbs in a pair of old trousers with a hoe in one hand and a box of celery plants in the other I felt that I loved the man. I used to think that stock-brokers were mere sordid calculating machines. Now that I have seen whole firms of them busy at the hoe, wearing old trousers that reached to their armpits and were tied about the waist with a polka dot necktie, I know that they are men. I know that there are warm hearts beating behind those trousers.

Old trousers, I say. Where on earth did they all come from in such a sudden fashion last spring? Everybody had them. Who would suspect that a man drawing a salary of ten thousand a year was keeping in reserve a pair of pepper-and-salt breeches, four sizes too large for him, just in case a war should break out against Germany! Talk of German mobilization! I doubt whether the organizing power was all on their side after all. At any rate it is estimated that fifty thousand pairs of old trousers were mobilized in Montreal in one week.

But perhaps it was not a case of mobilization, or deliberate preparedness. It was rather an illustration of the primitive instinct that is in all of us and that will out in “war time.” Any man worth the name would wear old breeches all the time if the world would let him. Any man will wind a polka dot tie round his waist in preference to wearing patent braces. The makers of the ties know this. That is why they make the tie four feet long. And in the same way if any manufacturer of hats will put on the market an old fedora, with a limp rim and a mark where the ribbon used to be but is not – a hat guaranteed to be six years old, well weathered, well rained on, and certified to have been walked over by a herd of cattle – that man will make and deserve a fortune.

These at least were the fashions of last May. Alas, where are they now? The men that wore them have relapsed again into tailor-made tweeds. They have put on hard new hats. They are shining their boots again. They are shaving again, not merely on Saturday night, but every day. They are sinking back into civilization.

—

Yet those were bright times and I cannot forbear to linger on them. Nor the least pleasant feature was our rediscovery of the morning. My neighbour on the right was always up at five. My neighbour on the left was out and about by four. With the earliest light of day, little columns of smoke rose along our street from the kitchen ranges where our wives were making coffee for us before the servants got up. By six o’clock the street was alive and busy with friendly salutations. The milkman seemed a late comer, a poor, sluggish fellow who failed to appreciate the early hours of the day. A man, we found, might live through quite a little Iliad of adventure before going to his nine o’clock office.

“How will you possibly get time to put in a garden?” I asked of one of my neighbours during this glad period of early spring before I left for the country. “Time!” he exclaimed. “Why, my dear fellow, I don’t have to be down at the warehouse till eight-thirty.”

Later in the summer I saw the wreck of his garden, choked with weeds. “Your garden,” I said, “is in poor shape.” “Garden!” he said indignantly. “How on earth can I find time for a garden? Do you realize that I have to be down at the warehouse at eight-thirty?”

—

When I look back to our bright beginnings our failure seems hard indeed to understand. It is only when I survey the whole garden movement in melancholy retrospect that I am able to see some of the reasons for it.

The principal one, I think, is the question of the season. It appears that the right time to begin gardening is last year. For many things it is well to begin the year before last. For good results one must begin even sooner. Here, for example, are the directions, as I interpret them, for growing asparagus. Having secured a suitable piece of ground, preferably a deep friable loam rich in nitrogen, go out three years ago and plough or dig deeply. Remain a year inactive, thinking. Two years ago pulverize the soil thoroughly. Wait a year. As soon as last year comes set out the young shoots. Then spend a quiet winter doing nothing. The asparagus will then be ready to work at this year.

This is the rock on which we were wrecked. Few of us were men of sufficient means to spend several years in quiet thought waiting to begin gardening. Yet that is, it seems, the only way to begin. Asparagus demands a preparation of four years. To fit oneself to grow strawberries requires three years. Even for such humble things as peas, beans, and lettuce the instructions inevitably read, “plough the soil deeply in the preceeding autumn.” This sets up a dilemma. Which is the preceeding autumn? If a man begins gardening in the spring he is too late for last autumn and too early for this. On the other hand if he begins in the autumn he is again too late; he has missed this summer’s crop. It is, therefore, ridiculous to begin in the autumn and impossible to begin in the spring.

This was our first difficulty. But the second arose from the question of the soil itself. All the books and instructions insist that the selection of the soil is the most important part of gardening. No doubt it is. But, if a man has already selected his own backyard before he opens the book, what remedy is there? All the books lay stress on the need of “a deep, friable loam full of nitrogen.” This I have never seen. My own plot of land I found on examination to contain nothing but earth. I could see no trace of nitrogen. I do not deny the existence of loam. There may be such a thing. But I am admitting now in all humility of mind that I don’t know what loam is. Last spring my fellow gardeners and I all talked freely of the desirability of “a loam.” My own opinion is that none of them had any clearer ideas about it than I had. Speaking from experience, I should say that the only soils are earth, mud and dirt. There are no others.

But I leave out the soil. In any case we were mostly forced to disregard it. Perhaps a more fruitful source of failure even than the lack of loam was the attempt to apply calculation and mathematics to gardening. Thus, if one cabbage will grow in one square foot of ground, how many cabbages will grow in ten square feet of ground? Ten? Not at all. The answer is one. You will find as a matter of practical experience that however many cabbages you plant in a garden plot there will be only one that will really grow. This you will presently come to speak of as the cabbage. Beside it all the others (till the caterpillars finally finish their existence) will look but poor, lean things. But the cabbage will be a source of pride and an object of display to visitors; in fact it would ultimately have grown to be a real cabbage, such as you buy for ten cents at any market, were it not that you inevitably cut it and eat it when it is still only half-grown.

This always happens to the one cabbage that is of decent size, and to the one tomato that shows signs of turning red (it is really a feeble green-pink), and to the only melon that might have lived to ripen. They get eaten. No one but a practised professional gardener can live and sleep beside a melon three-quarters ripe and a cabbage two-thirds grown without going out and tearing it off the stem.

Even at that it is not a bad plan to eat the stuff while you can. The most peculiar thing about gardening is that all of a sudden everything is too old to eat. Radishes change over night from delicate young shoots not large enough to put on the table into huge plants seven feet high with a root like an Irish shillelagh. If you take your eyes off a lettuce bed for a week the lettuces, not ready to eat when you last looked at them, have changed into a tall jungle of hollyhocks. Green peas are only really green for about two hours. Before that they are young peas; after that they are old peas. Cucumbers are the worst case of all. They change overnight, from delicate little bulbs obviously too slight and dainty to pick, to old cases of yellow leather filled with seeds.

If I were ever to garden again, a thing which is out of the bounds of possibility, I should wait until a certain day and hour when all the plants were ripe, and then go out with a gun and shoot them all dead, so that they could grow no more.

—

But calculation, I repeat, is the bane of gardening. I knew, among our group of food producers, a party of young engineers, college men, who took an empty farm north of the city as the scene of their summer operations. They took their coats off and applied college methods. They ran out, first, a base line AB, and measured off from it lateral spurs MN, OP, QR, and so on. From these they took side angles with a theodolite so as to get the edges of each of the separate plots of their land absolutely correct. I saw them working at it all through one Saturday afternoon in May. They talked as they did it of the peculiar ignorance of the so-called practical farmer. He never – so they agreed – uses his head. He never – I think I have their phrase correct – stops to think. In laying out his ground for use, it never occurs to him to try to get the maximum result from a given space. If a farmer would only realize that the contents of a circle represent the maximum of space enclosable in a given perimeter, and that a circle is merely a function of its own radius, what a lot of time he would save.

These young men that I speak of laid out their field engineer-fashion with little white posts at even distances. They made a blueprint of the whole thing as they planted it. Every corner of it was charted out. The yield was calculated to a nicety. They had allowed for the fact that some of the stuff might fail to grow by introducing what they called “a coefficient of error.” By means of this and by reducing the variation of autumn prices to a mathematical curve, those men not only knew already in the middle of May the exact yield of their farm to within half a bushel (they allowed, they said, a variation of half a bushel per fifty acres), but they knew beforehand within a few cents the market value that they would receive. The figures, as I remember them, were simply amazing. It seemed incredible that fifty acres could produce so much. Yet there were the plain facts in front of one, calculated out. The thing amounted practically to a revolution in farming. At least it ought to have. And it would have if those young men had come again to hoe their field. But it turned out, most unfortunately, that they were busy. To their great regret they were too busy to come. They had been working under a free-and-easy arrangement. Each man was to give what time he could every Saturday. It was left to every man’s honour to do what he could. There was no compulsion. Each man trusted the others to be there. In fact the thing was not only an experiment in food production, it was also a new departure in social co-operation. The first Saturday that those young men worked there were, so I have been told, seventy-five of them driving in white stakes and running lines. The next Saturday there were fifteen of them planting potatoes. The rest were busy. The week after that there was one man hoeing weeds. After that silence fell upon the deserted garden, broken only by the cry of the chick-a-dee and the choo-choo feeding on the waving heads of the thistles.

—

But I have indicated only two or three of the ways of failing at food production. There are ever so many more. What amazes me, in returning to the city, is to find the enormous quantities of produce of all sorts offered for sale in the markets. It is an odd thing that last spring, by a queer oversight, we never thought, any of us, of this process of increasing the supply. If every patriotic man would simply take a large basket and go to the market every day and buy all that he could carry away there need be no further fear of a food famine.

And, meantime, my own vegetables are on their way. They are in a soap box with bars across the top, coming by freight. They weigh forty-six pounds, including the box. They represent the result of four months’ arduous toil in sun, wind, and storm. Yet it is pleasant to think that I shall be able to feed with them some poor family of refugees during the rigour of the winter. Either that or give them to the hens. I certainly won’t eat the rotten things myself.

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The Perplexity Column

As Done by
the Jaded Journalist

Instantaneous Answers To All Questions

(All questions written out legibly with the name and address of the sender and accompanied by one dollar, answered immediately and without charge.)

Harvard Student asks:

Can you tell me the date at which, or on which, Oliver Cromwell’s father died?

Answer: No, I can’t.

Student of Mathematics asks:

Will you kindly settle a matter involving a wager between myself and a friend? A. bet B. that a pedestrian in walking downhill over a given space and alternately stepping with either foot, covers more ground than a man coasting over the same road on a bicycle. Which of us wins?

Answer: I don’t understand the question, and I don’t know which of you is A.

Chess-player asks:

Is the Knight’s gambit recognized now as a permissible opening in chess?

Answer: I don’t play chess.

Reuben Boob asks:

For some time past I have been calling upon a young lady friend at her house evenings and going out with her to friends’ nights. I should like to know if it would be all right to ask to take her alone with me to the theatre?

Answer: Certainly not. This column is very strict about these things. Not alone. Not for a moment. It is better taste to bring your father with you.

Auction asks:

In playing bridge please tell me whether the third or the second player ought to discard from weakness on a long suit when trumps have been twice round and the lead is with dummy.

Answer: Certainly.

Lady of Society asks:

Can you tell me whether the widow of a marquis is entitled to go in to dinner before the eldest daughter of an earl?

Answer: Ha! ha! This is a thing we know – something that we do know. You put your foot in it when you asked us that. We have lived this sort of thing too long ever to make any error. The widow of a marquis, whom you should by rights call a marchioness dowager (but we overlook it – you meant no harm) is entitled (in any hotel that we know or frequent) to go in to dinner whenever, and as often, as she likes. On a dining-car the rule is the other way.

Vassar Girl asks:

What is the date of the birth of Caracalla?

Answer: I couldn’t say.

Lexicographer asks:

Can you tell me the proper way to spell “dog”?

Answer: Certainly. “Dog” should be spelt, properly and precisely, “dog.” When it is used in the sense to mean not “a dog” or “one dog” but two or more dogs – in other words what we grammarians are accustomed to call the plural – it is proper to add to it the diphthong, s, pronounced with a hiss like z in soup.

But for all these questions of spelling your best plan is to buy a copy of Our Standard Dictionary, published in ten volumes, by this newspaper, at forty dollars.

Ignoramus asks:

Can you tell me how to spell “cat”?

Answer: Didn’t you hear what we just said about how to spell “dog”? Buy the Dictionary.

Careworn Mother asks:

I am most anxious to find out the relation of the earth’s diameter to its circumference. Can you, or any of your readers, assist me in it?

Answer: The earth’s circumference is estimated to be three decimal one four one five nine of its diameter, a fixed relation indicated by the Greek letter pi. If you like we will tell you what pi is. Shall we?

“Brink of Suicide” writes:

Can you, will you, tell me what is the Sanjak of Novi Bazar?

Answer. The Sanjak of Novi Bazar is bounded on the north by its northern frontier, cold and cheerless, and covered during the winter with deep snow. The east of the Sanjak occupies a more easterly position. Here the sun rises – at first slowly, but gathering speed as it goes. After having traversed the entire width of the whole Sanjak, the magnificent orb, slowly and regretfully, sinks into the west. On the south, where the soil is more fertile and where the land begins to be worth occupying, the Sanjak is, or will be, bounded by the British Empire.

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Simple Stories of Success

—or—
How to Succeed in Life

Let me begin with a sort of parable. Many years ago when I was on the staff of a great public school, we engaged a new swimming master.

He was the most successful man in that capacity that we had had for years.

Then one day it was discovered that he couldn’t swim.

He was standing at the edge of the swimming tank explaining the breast stroke to the boys in the water.

He lost his balance and fell in. He was drowned.

Or no, he wasn’t drowned, I remember – he was rescued by some of the pupils whom he had taught to swim.

After he was resuscitated by the boys – it was one of the things he had taught them – the school dismissed him.

Then some of the boys who were sorry for him taught him how to swim, and he got a new job as a swimming master in another place.

But this time he was an utter failure. He swam well, but they said he couldn’t teach.

So his friends looked about to get him a new job. This was just at the time when the bicycle craze came in. They soon found the man a position as an instructor in bicycle riding. As he had never been on a bicycle in his life, he made an admirable teacher. He stood fast on the ground and said, “Now then, all you need is confidence.”

Then one day he got afraid that he might be found out. So he went out to a quiet place and got on a bicycle, at the top of a slope, to learn to ride it. The bicycle ran away with him. But for the skill and daring of one of his pupils, who saw him and rode after him, he would have been killed.

This story, as the reader sees, is endless. Suffice it to say that the man I speak of is now in an aviation school teaching people to fly. They say he is one of the best aviators that ever walked.

—

According to all the legends and story books, the principal factor in success is perseverance. Personally, I think there is nothing in it. If anything, the truth lies the other way.

There is an old motto that runs, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” This is nonsense. It ought to read, “If at first you don’t succeed, quit, quit, at once.”

If you can’t do a thing, more or less, the first time you try, you will never do it. Try something else while there is yet time.

Let me illustrate this with a story.

I remember, long years ago, at a little school that I attended in the country, we had a schoolmaster, who used perpetually to write on the blackboard, in a copperplate hand, the motto that I have just quoted:

“If at first you don’t succeed,

Try, try, again.”

He wore plain clothes and had a hard, determined face. He was studying for some sort of preliminary medical examination, and was saving money for a medical course. Every now and then he went away to the city and tried the examination: and he always failed. Each time he came back, he would write up on the blackboard:

Try, try, again.”

And always he looked grimmer and more determined than before. The strange thing was that, with all his industry and determination, he would break out every now and then into drunkenness, and lie round the tavern at the crossroads, and the school would be shut for two days. Then he came back, more fiercely resolute than ever. Even children could see that the man’s life was a fight. It was like the battle between Good and Evil in Milton’s epics.

Well, after he had tried it four times, the schoolmaster at last passed the examination; and he went away to the city in a suit of store clothes, with eight hundred dollars that he had saved up, to study medicine. Now it happened that he had a brother who was not a bit like himself, but was a sort of ne’er-do-well, always hard-up and sponging on other people, and never working.

And when the schoolmaster came to the city and his brother knew that he had eight hundred dollars, he came to him and got him drinking and persuaded him to hand over the eight hundred dollars and to let him put it into the Louisiana State lottery. In those days the Louisiana Lottery had not yet been forbidden the use of the mails, and you could buy a ticket for anything from one dollar up. The Grand Prize was two hundred thousand dollars, and the Seconds were a hundred thousand each.

So the brother persuaded the schoolmaster to put the money in. He said he had a system for buying only the tickets with prime numbers, that won’t divide by anything, and that it must win. He said it was a mathematical certainty, and he figured it out with the schoolmaster in the back room of a saloon, with a box of dominoes on the table to show the plan of it. He told the schoolmaster that he himself would only take ten per cent of what they made, as a commission for showing the system, and the schoolmaster could have the rest.

So, in a mad moment, the schoolmaster handed over his roll of money, and that was the last he ever saw of it.

The next morning when he was up he was fierce with rage and remorse for what he had done. He could not go back to the school, and he had no money to go forward. So he stayed where he was in the little hotel where he had got drunk, and went on drinking. He looked so fierce and unkempt that in the hotel they were afraid of him, and the bartenders watched him out of the corners of their eyes wondering what he would do; because they knew that there was only one end possible, and they waited for it to come. And presently it came. One of the bartenders went up to the schoolmaster’s room to bring up a letter, and he found him lying on the bed with his face grey as ashes, and his eyes looking up at the ceiling. He was stone dead. Life had beaten him.

And the strange thing was that the letter that the bartender carried up that morning was from the management of the Louisiana Lottery. It contained a draft on New York, signed by the treasurer of the State of Louisiana, for two hundred thousand dollars. The schoolmaster had won the Grand Prize.

The above story, I am afraid, is a little gloomy. I put it down merely for the moral it contained, and I became so absorbed in telling it that I almost forgot what the moral was that it was meant to convey. But I think the idea is that if the schoolmaster had long before abandoned the study of medicine, for which he was not fitted, and gone in, let us say, for playing the banjo, he might have become end-man in a minstrel show. Yes, that was it.

—

Let me pass on to other elements in success.

I suppose that anybody will admit that the peculiar quality that is called initiative – the ability to act promptly on one’s own judgement – is a factor of the highest importance.

I have seen this illustrated two or three times in a very striking fashion.

I knew, in Toronto – it is long years ago – a singularly bright young man whose name was Robinson. He had had some training in the iron and steel business, and when I knew him was on the look out for an opening.

I met him one day in a great hurry, with a valise in his hand.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Over to England,” he said. “There is a firm in Liverpool that have advertised that they want an agent here, and I’m going over to apply for the job.”

“Can’t you do it by letter?” I asked.

“That’s just it,” said Robinson, with a chuckle, “all the other men will apply by letter. I’ll go right over myself and get there as soon or sooner than the letters. I’ll be the man on the spot, and I’ll get the job.”

He was quite right. He went over to Liverpool, and was back in a fortnight with English clothes and a big salary.

But I cannot recommend his story to my friends. In fact, it should not be told too freely. It is apt to be dangerous.

I remember once telling this story of Robinson to a young man called Tomlinson who was out of a job. Tomlinson had a head two sizes too big, and a face like a bun. He had lost three jobs in a bank and two in a broker’s office, but he knew his work, and on paper he looked a good man.

I told him about Robinson, to encourage him, and the story made a great impression.

“Say, that was a great scheme, eh?” he kept repeating. He had no command of words, and always said the same thing over and over.

A few days later I met Tomlinson in the street with a valise in his hand.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m off to Mexico,” he answered. “They’re advertising for a Canadian teller for a bank in Tuscapulco. I’ve sent my credentials down, and I’m going to follow them right up in person. In a thing like this, the personal element is everything.”

So Tomlinson went down to Mexico and he travelled by sea to Mexico City, and then with a mule train to Tuscapulco. But the mails, with his credentials, went by land and got there two days ahead of him.

When Tomlinson got to Tuscapulco he went into the bank and he spoke to the junior manager and told him what he came for. “I’m awfully sorry,” the junior manager said, “I’m afraid that this post has just been filled.” Then he went into an inner room to talk with the manager. “The tellership that you wanted a Canadian for,” he asked, “didn’t you say that you have a man already?”

“Yes,” said the manager, “a brilliant young fellow from Toronto; his name is Tomlinson, I have his credentials here – a first-class man. I’ve wired him to come right along, at our expense, and we’ll keep the job open for him ten days.”

“There’s a young man outside,” said the junior, “who wants to apply for the job.”

“Outside?” exclaimed the manager. “How did he get here?”

“Came in on the mule train this morning: says he can do the work and wants the job.”

“What’s he like?” asked the manager.

The junior shook his head.

“Pretty dusty looking customer,” he said. “Shifty looking.”

“Same old story,” murmured the manager. “It’s odd how these fellows drift down here, isn’t it? Up to something crooked at home, I suppose. Understands the working of a bank, eh? I guess he understands it a little too well for my taste. No, no,” he continued, tapping the papers that lay on the table, “now that we’ve got a first-class man like Tomlinson, let’s hang on to him. We can easily wait ten days, and the cost of the journey is nothing to the bank as compared with getting a man of Tomlinson’s stamp. And, by the way, you might telephone to the Chief of Police and get him to see to it that this loafer gets out of town straight off.”

So the Chief of Police shut up Tomlinson in the calaboose and then sent him down to Mexico City under a guard. By the time the police were done with him he was dead broke, and it took him four months to get back to Toronto; when he got there, the place in Mexico had been filled long ago.

—

But I can imagine that some of my readers might suggest that I have hitherto been dealing only with success in a very limited way, and that more interest would lie in discussing how the really great fortunes are made.

Everybody feels an instinctive interest in knowing how our great captains of industry, our financiers and railroad magnates made their money.

Here the explanation is really a very simple one. There is, in fact, only one way to amass a huge fortune in business or railway management. One must begin at the bottom. One must mount the ladder from the lowest rung. But this lowest rung is everything. Any man who can stand upon it with his foot well poised, his head erect, his arms braced and his eye directed upward, will inevitably mount to the top.

But after all – I say this as a kind of afterthought in conclusion – why bother with success at all? I have observed that the successful people get very little real enjoyment out of life. In fact the contrary is true. If I had to choose – with an eye to having a really pleasant life – between success and ruin, I should prefer ruin every time. I have several friends who are completely ruined – some two or three times – in a large way of course; and I find that if I want to get a really good dinner, where the champagne is just as it ought to be, and where hospitality is unhindered by mean thoughts of expense, I can get it best at the house of a ruined man.

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In Dry Toronto

A Local Study
of a Universal Topic

Note: Our readers – our numerous readers – who live in Equatorial Africa, may read this under the title “In Dry Timbuctoo”; those who live in Central America will kindly call it “In Dry Tehauntepec.”

It may have been, for aught I know, the change from a wet to a dry atmosphere. I am told that, biologically, such things profoundly affect the human system.

At any rate I found it impossible that night – I was on the train from Montreal to Toronto – to fall asleep.

A peculiar wakefulness seemed to have seized upon me, which appeared, moreover, to afflict the other passengers as well. In the darkness of the car I could distinctly hear them groaning at intervals.

“Are they ill?” I asked, through the curtains, of the porter as he passed.

“No, sir,” he said, “they’re not ill. Those is the Toronto passengers.”

“All in this car?” I asked.

“All except that gen’lman you may have heard singing in the smoking compartment. He’s booked through to Chicago.”

But, as is usual in such cases, sleep came at last with unusual heaviness. I seemed obliterated from the world till, all of a sudden, I found myself, as it were, up and dressed and seated in the observation car at the back of the train, awaiting my arrival.

“Is this Toronto?” I asked of the Pullman conductor, as I peered through the window of the car.

The conductor rubbed the pane with his finger and looked out.

“I think so,” he said.

“Do we stop here?” I asked.

“I think we do this morning,” he answered. “I think I heard the conductor say that they have a lot of milk cans to put off here this morning. I’ll just go and find out, sir.”

“Stop here!” broke in an irascible-looking gentleman in a grey tweed suit who was sitting in the next chair to mine. “Do they stop here? I should say they did indeed. Don’t you know,” he added, turning to the Pullman conductor, “that any train is compelled to stop here. There’s a by-law, a municipal by-law of the City of Toronto, compelling every train to stop?”

“I didn’t know it,” said the conductor humbly.

“Do you mean to say,” continued the irascible gentleman, “that you have never read the by-laws of the City of Toronto?”

“No, sir,” said the conductor.

“The ignorance of these fellows,” said the man in grey tweed, swinging his chair round again towards me. “We ought to have a by-law to compel them to read the by-laws. I must start an agitation for it at once.” Here he took out a little red notebook and wrote something in it, murmuring, “We need a new agitation anyway.”

Presently he shut the book up with a snap. I noticed that there was a sort of peculiar alacrity in everything he did.

“You, sir,” he said, “have, of course, read our municipal by-laws?”

“Oh, yes,” I answered. “Splendid, aren’t they? They read like a romance.”

“You are most flattering to our city,” said the irascible gentleman with a bow. “Yet you, sir, I take it, are not from Toronto.”

“No,” I answered, as humbly as I could. “I’m from Montreal.”

“Ah!” said the gentleman, as he sat back and took a thorough look at me. “From Montreal? Are you drunk?”

“No,” I replied. “I don’t think so.”

“But you are suffering for a drink,” said my new acquaintance eagerly. “You need it, eh? You feel already a kind of craving, eh what?”

“No,” I answered. “The fact is it’s rather early in the morning—”

“Quite so,” broke in the irascible gentleman, “but I understand that in Montreal all the saloons are open at seven, and even at that hour are crowded, sir, crowded.”

I shook my head.

“I think that has been exaggerated,” I said. “In fact, we always try to avoid crowding and jostling as far as possible. It is generally understood, as a matter of politeness, that the first place in the line is given to the clergy, the Board of Trade, and the heads of the universities.”

“Is it conceivable!” said the gentleman in grey. “One moment, please, till I make a note. ‘All clergy – I think you said all, did you not? – drunk at seven in the morning.’ Deplorable! But here we are at the Union Station – commodious, is it not? Justly admired, in fact, all over the known world. Observe,” he continued as we alighted from the train and made our way into the station, “the upstairs and the downstairs, connected by flights of stairs; quite unique and most convenient: if you don’t meet your friends downstairs all you have to do is to look upstairs. If they are not there, you simply come down again. But stop, you are going to walk up the street? I’ll go with you.”

At the outer door of the station – just as I had remembered it – stood a group of hotel bus-men and porters.

But how changed!

They were like men blasted by a great sorrow. One, with his back turned, was leaning against a post, his head buried on his arm.

“Prince George Hotel,” he groaned at intervals. “Prince George Hotel.”

Another was bending over a little handrail, his head sunk, his arms almost trailing to the ground.

“King Edward,” he sobbed, “King Edward.”

A third, seated on a stool, looked feebly up, with tears visible in his eyes.

“Walker House,” he moaned. “First-class accommodation for—” then he broke down and cried.

“Take this handbag,” I said to one of the men, “to the Prince George.”

The man ceased his groaning for a moment and turned to me with something like passion.

“Why do you come to us?” he protested. “Why not go to one of the others. Go to him,” he added, as he stirred with his foot a miserable being who lay huddled on the ground and murmured at intervals, “Queen’s! Queen’s Hotel.”

But my new friend, who stood at my elbow, came to my rescue.

“Take his bags,” he said, “you’ve got to. You know the by-law. Take it or I’ll call a policeman. You know me. My name’s Narrowpath. I’m on the council.”

The man touched his hat and took the bag with a murmured apology.

“Come along,” said my companion, whom I now perceived to be a person of dignity and civic importance. “I’ll walk up with you, and show you the city as we go.”

We had hardly got well upon the street before I realized the enormous change that total prohibition had effected. Everywhere were the bright smiling faces of working people, laughing and singing at their tasks, and, early though it was, cracking jokes and asking one another riddles as they worked.

I noticed one man, evidently a city employe, in a rough white suit, busily cleaning the street with a broom and singing to himself: “How does the little busy bee improve the shining hour.” Another employe, who was handling a little hose, was singing, “Little drops of water, little grains of sand, Tra, la, la, la, la la, Prohibition’s grand.”

“Why do they sing?” I asked. “Are they crazy?”

“Sing?” said Mr Narrowpath. “They can’t help it. They haven’t had a drink of whisky for four months.”

A coal cart went by with a driver, no longer grimy and smudged, but neatly dressed with a high white collar and a white silk tie.

My companion pointed at him as he passed.

“Hasn’t had a glass of beer for four months,” he said.

“Notice the difference. That man’s work is now a pleasure to him. He used to spend all his evenings sitting round in the back parlours of the saloons beside the stove. Now what do you think he does?”

“I have no idea.”

“Loads up his cart with coal and goes for a drive – out in the country. Ah, sir, you who live still under the curse of the whisky traffic little know what a pleasure work itself becomes when drink and all that goes with it is eliminated. Do you see that man, on the other side of the street, with the tool bag?”

“Yes,” I said, “a plumber, is he not?”

“Exactly, a plumber. Used to drink heavily – couldn’t keep a job more than a week. Now, you can’t drag him from his work. Came to my house to fix a pipe under the kitchen sink – wouldn’t quit at six o’clock. Got in under the sink and begged to be allowed to stay – said he hated to go home. We had to drag him out with a rope. But here we are at your hotel.”

We entered.

But how changed the place seemed.

Our feet echoed on the flagstones of the deserted rotunda.

At the office desk sat a clerk, silent and melancholy, reading the Bible. He put a marker in the book and closed it, murmuring “Leviticus Two.”

Then he turned to us.

“Can I have a room,” I asked, “on the first floor?”

A tear welled up into the clerk’s eye.

“You can have the whole first floor,” he said, and he added, with a half sob, “and the second, too, if you like.”

I could not help contrasting his manner with what it was in the old days, when the mere mention of a room used to throw him into a fit of passion, and when he used to tell me that I could have a cot on the roof till Tuesday, and after that, perhaps, a bed in the stable.

Things had changed indeed.

“Can I get breakfast in the grill room?” I inquired of the melancholy clerk.

He shook his head sadly.

“There is no grill room,” he answered. “What would you like?”

“Oh, some sort of eggs,” I said, “and—”

The clerk reached down below his desk and handed me a hard-boiled egg with the shell off.

“Here’s your egg,” he said. “And there’s ice water there at the end of the desk.”

He sat back in his chair and went on reading.

“You don’t understand,” said Mr Narrowpath, who still stood at my elbow. “All that elaborate grill room breakfast business was just a mere relic of the drinking days – sheer waste of time and loss of efficiency. Go on and eat your egg. Eaten it? Now, don’t you feel efficient? What more do you want? Comfort, you say? My dear sir! more men have been ruined by comfort – Great heavens, comfort! The most dangerous, deadly drug that ever undermined the human race. But, here, drink your water. Now you’re ready to go and do your business, if you have any.”

“But,” I protested, “it’s still only half-past seven in the morning – no offices will be open—”

“Open!” exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. “Why! they all open at daybreak now.”

I had, it is true, a certain amount of business before me, though of no very intricate or elaborate kind – a few simple arrangements with the head of a publishing house such as it falls to my lot to make every now and then. Yet in the old and unregenerate days it used to take all day to do it: the wicked thing that we used to call a comfortable breakfast in the hotel grill room somehow carried one on to about ten o’clock in the morning. Breakfast brought with it the need of a cigar for digestion’s sake and with that, for very restfulness, a certain perusal of the Toronto Globe, properly corrected and rectified by a look through the Toronto Mail. After that it had been my practice to stroll along to my publishers’ office at about eleven-thirty, transact my business, over a cigar, with the genial gentleman at the head of it, and then accept his invitation to lunch, with the feeling that a man who has put in a hard and strenuous morning’s work is entitled to a few hours of relaxation.

I am inclined to think that in those reprehensible bygone times, many other people did their business in this same way.

“I don’t think,” I said to Mr. Narrowpath musingly, “that my publisher will be up as early as this. He’s a comfortable sort of man.”

“Nonsense!” said Mr. Narrowpath. “Not at work at half-past seven! In Toronto! The thing’s absurd. Where is the office? Richmond Street? Come along, I’ll go with you. I’ve always a great liking for attending to other people’s business.”

“I see you have,” I said.

“It’s our way here,” said Mr. Narrowpath with a wave of his hand. “Every man’s business, as we see it, is everybody else’s business. Come along, you’ll be surprised how quickly your business will be done.”

Mr. Narrowpath was right.

My publishers’ office, as we entered it, seemed a changed place. Activity and efficiency were stamped all over it. My good friend the publisher was not only there, but there with his coat off, inordinately busy, bawling orders – evidently meant for a printing room – through a speaking tube. “Yes,” he was shouting, “put WHISKY in black letter capitals, old English, double size, set it up to look attractive, with the legend MADE IN TORONTO in long clear type underneath—”

“Excuse me,” he said, as he broke off for a moment. “We’ve a lot of stuff going through the press this morning – a big distillery catalogue that we are rushing through. We’re doing all we can, Mr. Narrowpath,” he continued, speaking with the deference due to a member of the City Council, “to boom Toronto as a Whisky Centre.”

“Quite right, quite right!” said my companion, rubbing his hands.

“And now, professor,” added the publisher, speaking with rapidity, “your contract is all here – only needs signing. I won’t keep you more than a moment – write your name here. Miss Sniggins will you please witness this so help you God how’s everything in Montreal good morning.”

“Pretty quick, wasn’t it?” said Mr. Narrowpath, as we stood in the street again.

“Wonderful!” I said, feeling almost dazed. “Why, I shall be able to catch the morning train back again to Montreal—”

“Precisely. Just what everybody finds. Business done in no time. Men who used to spend whole days here clear out now in fifteen minutes. I knew a man whose business efficiency has so increased under our new regime that he says he wouldn’t spend more than five minutes in Toronto if he were paid to.”

“But what is this?” I asked as we were brought to a pause in our walk at a street crossing by a great block of vehicles. “What are all these drays? Surely, those look like barrels of whisky!”

“So they are,” said Mr. Narrowpath proudly. “Export whisky. Fine sight, isn’t it? Must be what? – twenty – twenty-five – loads of it. This place, sir, mark my words, is going to prove, with its new energy and enterprise, one of the greatest seats of the distillery business, in fact, the whisky capital of the North—”

“But I thought,” I interrupted, much puzzled, “that whisky was prohibited here since last September?”

“Export whisky – export, my dear sir,” corrected Mr. Narrowpath. “We don’t interfere, we have never, so far as I know, proposed to interfere with any man’s right to make and export whisky. That, sir, is a plain matter of business; morality doesn’t enter into it.”

“I see,” I answered. “But will you please tell me what is the meaning of this other crowd of drays coming in the opposite direction? Surely, those are beer barrels, are they not?”

“In a sense they are,” admitted Mr. Narrowpath. “That is, they are import beer. It comes in from some other province. It was, I imagine, made in this city (our breweries, sir, are second to none), but the sin of selling it” – here Mr. Narrowpath raised his hat from his head and stood for a moment in a reverential attitude – “rests on the heads of others.”

The press of vehicles had now thinned out and we moved on, my guide still explaining in some detail the distinction between business principles and moral principles, between whisky as a curse and whisky as a source of profit, which I found myself unable to comprehend.

At length I ventured to interrupt.

“Yet it seems almost a pity,” I said, “that with all this beer and whisky around an unregenerate sinner like myself should be prohibited from getting a drink.”

“A drink!” exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. “Well, I should say so. Come right in here. You can have anything you want.”

We stepped through a street door into a large, long room.

“Why,” I exclaimed in surprise, “this is a bar!”

“Nonsense!” said my friend. “The bar in this province is forbidden. We’ve done with the foul thing for ever. This is an Import Shipping Company’s Delivery Office.”

“But this long counter—”

“It’s not a counter, it’s a desk.”

“And that bartender in his white jacket—”

“Tut! Tut! He’s not a bartender. He’s an Import Goods Delivery Clerk.”

“What’ll you have, gentlemen,” said the Import Clerk, polishing a glass as he spoke.

“Two whisky and sodas,” said my friend, “long ones.”

The Import Clerk mixed the drinks and set them on the desk.

I was about to take one, but he interrupted.

“One minute, sir,” he said.

Then he took up a desk telephone that stood beside him and I heard him calling up Montreal. “Hullo, Montreal! Is that Montreal? Well, say, I’ve just received an offer here for two whisky and sodas at sixty cents, shall I close with it? All right, gentlemen, Montreal has effected the sale. There you are.”

“Dreadful, isn’t it?” said Mr. Narrowpath. “The sunken, depraved condition of your City of Montreal; actually selling whisky. Deplorable!” and with that he buried his face in the bubbles of the whisky and soda.

“Mr. Narrowpath,” I said, “would you mind telling me something? I fear I am a little confused, after what I have seen here, as to what your new legislation has been. You have not then, I understand, prohibited the making of whisky?”

“Oh, no, we see no harm in that.”

“Nor the sale of it?”

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Narrowpath, “not if sold properly.”

“Nor the drinking of it?”

“Oh, no, that least of all. We attach no harm whatever, under our law, to the mere drinking of whisky.”

“Would you tell me then,” I asked, “since you have not forbidden the making, nor the selling, nor the buying, nor the drinking of whisky, just what it is that you have prohibited? What is the difference between Montreal and Toronto?”

Mr. Narrowpath put down his glass on the “desk” in front of him. He gazed at me with open-mouthed astonishment.

“Toronto?” he gasped. “Montreal and Toronto! The difference between Montreal and Toronto! My dear sir – Toronto – Toronto—”

I stood waiting for him to explain. But as I did so I seemed to become aware that a voice, not Mr. Narrowpath’s but a voice close at my ear, was repeating “Toronto – Toronto – Toronto—”

I sat up with a start – still in my berth in the Pullman car – with the voice of the porter calling through the curtains “Toronto! Toronto!”

So! It had only been a dream. I pulled up the blind and looked out of the window and there was the good old city, with the bright sun sparkling on its church spires and on the bay spread out at its feet. It looked quite unchanged: just the same pleasant old place, as cheerful, as self-conceited, as kindly, as hospitable, as quarrelsome, as wholesome, as moral and as loyal and as disagreeable as it always was.

“Porter,” I said, “is it true that there is prohibition here now?”

The porter shook his head.

“I ain’t heard of it,” he said.

TOC     INDEX

Merry Christmas

“My Dear Young Friend,” said Father Time, as he laid his hand gently upon my shoulder, “you are entirely wrong.”

Then I looked up over my shoulder from the table at which I was sitting and I saw him.

But I had known, or felt, for at least the last half-hour that he was standing somewhere near me.

You have had, I do not doubt, good reader, more than once that strange uncanny feeling that there is some one unseen standing beside you, in a darkened room, let us say, with a dying fire, when the night has grown late, and the October wind sounds low outside, and when, through the thin curtain that we call Reality, the Unseen World starts for a moment clear upon our dreaming sense.

You have had it? Yes, I know you have. Never mind telling me about it. Stop. I don’t want to hear about that strange presentiment you had the night your Aunt Eliza broke her leg. Don’t let’s bother with your experience. I want to tell mine.

“You are quite mistaken, my dear young friend,” repeated Father Time, “quite wrong.”

“Young friend?” I said, my mind, as one’s mind is apt to in such a case, running to an unimportant detail. “Why do you call me young?”

“Your pardon,” he answered gently – he had a gentle way with him, had Father Time. “The fault is in my failing eyes. I took you at first sight for something under a hundred.”

“Under a hundred?” I expostulated. “Well, I should think so!”

“Your pardon again,” said Time, “the fault is in my failing memory. I forgot. You seldom pass that nowadays, do you? Your life is very short of late.”

I heard him breathe a wistful hollow sigh. Very ancient and dim he seemed as he stood beside me. But I did not turn to look upon him. I had no need to. I knew his form, in the inner and clearer sight of things, as well as every human being knows by innate instinct, the Unseen face and form of Father Time.

I could hear him murmuring beside me, “Short – short, your life is short”; till the sound of it seemed to mingle with the measured ticking of a clock somewhere in the silent house.

Then I remembered what he had said.

“How do you know that I am wrong?” I asked. “And how can you tell what I was thinking?”

“You said it out loud,” answered Father Time. “But it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. You said that Christmas was all played out and done with.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “that’s what I said.”

“And what makes you think that?” he questioned, stooping, so it seemed to me, still further over my shoulder.

“Why,” I answered, “the trouble is this. I’ve been sitting here for hours, sitting till goodness only knows how far into the night, trying to think out something to write for a Christmas story. And it won’t go. It can’t be done – not in these awful days.”

“A Christmas Story?”

“Yes. You see, Father Time,” I explained, glad with a foolish little vanity of my trade to be able to tell him something that I thought enlightening, “all the Christmas stuff – stories and jokes and pictures – is all done, you know, in October.”

I thought it would have surprised him, but I was mistaken.

“Dear me,” he said, “not till October! What a rush! How well I remember in Ancient Egypt – as I think you call it – seeing them getting out their Christmas things, all cut in hieroglyphics, always two or three years ahead.”

“Two or three years!” I exclaimed.

“Pooh,” said Time, “that was nothing. Why in Babylon they used to get their Christmas jokes ready – all baked in clay – a whole Solar eclipse ahead of Christmas. They said, I think, that the public preferred them so.”

“Egypt?” I said. “Babylon? But surely, Father Time, there was no Christmas in those days. I thought—”

“My dear boy,” he interrupted gravely, “don’t you know that there has always been Christmas?”

I was silent. Father Time had moved across the room and stood beside the fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece. The little wreaths of smoke from the fading fire seemed to mingle with his shadowy outline.

“Well,” he said presently, “what is it that is wrong with Christmas?”

“Why,” I answered, “all the romance, the joy, the beauty of it has gone, crushed and killed by the greed of commerce and the horrors of war. I am not, as you thought I was, a hundred years old, but I can conjure up, as anybody can, a picture of Christmas in the good old days of a hundred years ago: the quaint old-fashioned houses, standing deep among the evergreens, with the light twinkling from the windows on the snow; the warmth and comfort within; the great fire roaring on the hearth; the merry guests grouped about its blaze and the little children with their eyes dancing in the Christmas fire-light, waiting for Father Christmas in his fine mummery of red and white and cotton wool to hand the presents from the yule-tide tree. I can see it,” I added, “as if it were yesterday.”

“It was but yesterday,” said Father Time, and his voice seemed to soften with the memory of bygone years. “I remember it well.”

“Ah,” I continued, “that was Christmas indeed. Give me back such days as those, with the old good cheer, the old stage coaches and the gabled inns and the warm red wine, the snapdragon and the Christmas-tree, and I’ll believe again in Christmas, yes, in Father Christmas himself.”

“Believe in him?” said Time quietly. “You may well do that. He happens to be standing outside in the street at this moment.”

“Outside?” I exclaimed. “Why don’t he come in?”

“He’s afraid to,” said Father Time. “He’s frightened and he daren’t come in unless you ask him. May I call him in?”

I signified assent, and Father Time went to the window for a moment and beckoned into the darkened street. Then I heard footsteps, clumsy and hesitant they seemed, upon the stairs. And in a moment a figure stood framed in the doorway – the figure of Father Christmas. He stood shuffling his feet, a timid, apologetic look upon his face.

How changed he was!

I had known in my mind’s eye, from childhood up, the face and form of Father Christmas as well as that of Old Time himself. Everybody knows, or once knew him – a jolly little rounded man, with a great muffler wound about him, a packet of toys upon his back and with such merry, twinkling eyes and rosy cheeks as are only given by the touch of the driving snow and the rude fun of the North Wind. Why, there was once a time, not yet so long ago, when the very sound of his sleigh-bells sent the blood running warm to the heart.

But now how changed.

All draggled with the mud and rain he stood, as if no house had sheltered him these three years past. His old red jersey was tattered in a dozen places, his muffler frayed and ravelled.

The bundle of toys that he dragged with him in a net seemed wet and worn till the cardboard boxes gaped asunder. There were boxes among them, I vow, that he must have been carrying these three past years.

But most of all I noted the change that had come over the face of Father Christmas. The old brave look of cheery confidence was gone. The smile that had beamed responsive to the laughing eyes of countless children around unnumbered Christmas-trees was there no more. And in the place of it there showed a look of timid apology, of apprehensiveness, as of one who has asked in vain the warmth and shelter of a human home – such a look as the harsh cruelty of this world has stamped upon the faces of its outcasts.

So stood Father Christmas shuffling upon the threshold, fumbling his poor tattered hat in his hand.

“Shall I come in?” he said, his eyes appealingly on Father Time.

“Come,” said Time. He turned to speak to me, “Your room is dark. Turn up the lights. He’s used to light, bright light and plenty of it. The dark has frightened him these three years past.”

I turned up the lights and the bright glare revealed all the more cruelly the tattered figure before us.

Father Christmas advanced a timid step across the floor. Then he paused, as if in sudden fear.

“Is this floor mined?” he said.

“No, no,” said Time soothingly. And to me he added in a murmured whisper, “He’s afraid. He was blown up in a mine in No Man’s Land between the trenches at Christmas-time in 1914. It broke his nerve.”

“May I put my toys on that machine gun?” asked Father Christmas timidly. “It will help to keep them dry.”

“It is not a machine gun,” said Time gently. “See, it is only a pile of books upon the sofa.” And to me he whispered, “They turned a machine gun on him in the streets of Warsaw. He thinks he sees them everywhere since then.”

“It’s all right, Father Christmas,” I said, speaking as cheerily as I could, while I rose and stirred the fire into a blaze. “There are no machine guns here and there are no mines. This is but the house of a poor writer.”

“Ah,” said Father Christmas, lowering his tattered hat still further and attempting something of a humble bow, “a writer? Are you Hans Andersen, perhaps?”

“Not quite,” I answered.

“But a great writer, I do not doubt,” said the old man, with a humble courtesy that he had learned, it well may be, centuries ago in the yule-tide season of his northern home. “The world owes much to its great books. I carry some of the greatest with me always. I have them here—”

He began fumbling among the limp and tattered packages that he carried. “Look! The House that Jack Built – a marvellous, deep thing, sir – and this, The Babes in the Wood. Will you take it, sir? A poor present, but a present still – not so long ago I gave them in thousands every Christmas-time. None seem to want them now.”

He looked appealingly towards Father Time, as the weak may look towards the strong, for help and guidance.

“None want them now,” he repeated, and I could see the tears start in his eyes. “Why is it so? Has the world forgotten its sympathy with the lost children wandering in the wood?”

“All the world,” I heard Time murmur with a sigh, “is wandering in the wood.” But out loud he spoke to Father Christmas in cheery admonition, “Tut, tut, good Christmas,” he said, “you must cheer up. Here, sit in this chair the biggest one; so – beside the fire. Let us stir it to a blaze; more wood, that’s better. And listen, good old Friend, to the wind outside – almost a Christmas wind, is it not? Merry and boisterous enough, for all the evil times it stirs among.”

Old Christmas seated himself beside the fire, his hands outstretched towards the flames. Something of his old-time cheeriness seemed to flicker across his features as he warmed himself at the blaze.

“That’s better,” he murmured. “I was cold, sir, cold, chilled to the bone. Of old I never felt it so; no matter what the wind, the world seemed warm about me. Why is it not so now?”

“You see,” said Time, speaking low in a whisper for my ear alone, “how sunk and broken he is? Will you not help?”

“Gladly,” I answered, “if I can.”

“All can,” said Father Time, “every one of us.”

Meantime Christmas had turned towards me a questioning eye, in which, however, there seemed to revive some little gleam of merriment.

“Have you, perhaps,” he asked half timidly, “schnapps?”

“Schnapps?” I repeated.

“Ay, schnapps. A glass of it to drink your health might warm my heart again, I think.”

“Ah,” I said, “something to drink?”

“His one failing,” whispered Time, “if it is one. Forgive it him. He was used to it for centuries. Give it him if you have it.”

“I keep a little in the house,” I said reluctantly perhaps, “in case of illness.”

“Tut, tut,” said Father Time, as something as near as could be to a smile passed over his shadowy face. “In case of illness! They used to say that in ancient Babylon. Here, let me pour it for him. Drink, Father Christmas, drink!”

Marvellous it was to see the old man smack his lips as he drank his glass of liquor neat after the fashion of old Norway.

Marvellous, too, to see the way in which, with the warmth of the fire and the generous glow of the spirits, his face changed and brightened till the old-time cheerfulness beamed again upon it.

He looked about him, as it were, with a new and growing interest.

“A pleasant room,” he said. “And what better, sir, than the wind without and a brave fire within!”

Then his eye fell upon the mantelpiece, where lay among the litter of books and pipes a little toy horse.

“Ah,” said Father Christmas almost gayly, “children in the house!”

“One,” I answered, “the sweetest boy in all the world.”

“I’ll be bound he is!” said Father Christmas and he broke now into a merry laugh that did one’s heart good to hear. “They all are! Lord bless me! The number that I have seen, and each and every one – and quite right too – the sweetest child in all the world. And how old, do you say? Two and a half all but two months except a week? The very sweetest age of all, I’ll bet you say, eh, what? They all do!”

And the old man broke again into such a jolly chuckling of laughter that his snow-white locks shook upon his head.

“But stop a bit,” he added. “This horse is broken. Tut, tut, a hind leg nearly off. This won’t do!”

He had the toy in his lap in a moment, mending it. It was wonderful to see, for all his age, how deft his fingers were.

“Time,” he said, and it was amusing to note that his voice had assumed almost an authoritative tone, “reach me that piece of string. That’s right. Here, hold your finger across the knot. There! Now, then, a bit of beeswax. What? No beeswax? Tut, tut, how ill-supplied your houses are today. How can you mend toys, sir, without beeswax? Still, it will stand up now.”

I tried to murmur by best thanks.

But Father Christmas waved my gratitude aside.

“Nonsense,” he said, “that’s nothing. That’s my life. Perhaps the little boy would like a book too. I have them here in the packet. Here, sir, Jack and the Bean Stalk, most profound thing. I read it to myself often still. How damp it is! Pray, sir, will you let me dry my books before your fire?”

“Only too willingly,” I said. “How wet and torn they are!”

Father Christmas had risen from his chair and was fumbling among his tattered packages, taking from them his children’s books, all limp and draggled from the rain and wind.

“All wet and torn!” he murmured, and his voice sank again into sadness. “I have carried them these three years past. Look! These were for little children in Belgium and in Serbia. Can I get them to them, think you?”

Time gently shook his head.

“But presently, perhaps,” said Father Christmas, “if I dry and mend them. Look, some of them were inscribed already! This one, see you, was written ‘With father’s love.’ Why has it never come to him? Is it rain or tears upon the page?”

He stood bowed over his little books, his hands trembling as he turned the pages. Then he looked up, the old fear upon his face again.

“That sound!” he said. “Listen! It is guns – I hear them.”

“No, no,” I said, “it is nothing. Only a car passing in the street below.”

“Listen,” he said. “Hear that again – voices crying!”

“No, no,” I answered, “not voices, only the night wind among the trees.”

“My children’s voices!” he exclaimed. “I hear them everywhere – they come to me in every wind – and I see them as I wander in the night and storm – my children – torn and dying in the trenches – beaten into the ground – I hear them crying from the hospitals – each one to me, still as I knew him once, a little child. Time, Time,” he cried, reaching out his arms in appeal, “give me back my children!”

“They do not die in vain,” Time murmured gently.

But Christmas only moaned in answer:

“Give me back my children!”

Then he sank down upon his pile of books and toys, his head buried in his arms.

“You see,” said Time, “his heart is breaking, and will you not help him if you can?”

“Only too gladly,” I replied. “But what is there to do?”

“This,” said Father Time, “listen.”

He stood before me grave and solemn, a shadowy figure but half seen though he was close beside me. The fire-light had died down, and through the curtained windows there came already the first dim brightening of dawn.

“The world that once you knew,” said Father Time, “seems broken and destroyed about you. You must not let them know – the children. The cruelty and the horror and the hate that racks the world today – keep it from them. Some day he will know” – here Time pointed to the prostrate form of Father Christmas – “that his children, that once were, have not died in vain: that from their sacrifice shall come a nobler, better world for all to live in, a world where countless happy children shall hold bright their memory for ever. But for the children of Today, save and spare them all you can from the evil hate and horror of the war. Later they will know and understand. Not yet. Give them back their Merry Christmas and its kind thoughts, and its Christmas charity, till later on there shall be with it again Peace upon Earth Good Will towards Men.”

His voice ceased. It seemed to vanish, as it were, in the sighing of the wind.

I looked up. Father Time and Christmas had vanished from the room. The fire was low and the day was breaking visibly outside.

“Let us begin,” I murmured. “I will mend this broken horse.”

TOC     INDEX

The Hohenzollerns
in America
and Other Impossibilities

(1919)

~

The Hohenzollerns in America
With the Bolsheviks in Berlin
Afternoon Tea with the Sultan

Echoes of the War

The Boy Who Came Back
The War Sacrifices of Mr. Spugg
If Germany Had Won
War And Peace at the Galaxy Club
The War News as I Remember It
Some Just Complaints About the War
Some Startling Side Effects of the War

Other Impossibilities

The Art of Conversation
Heroes and Heroines
The Discovery of America
Politics from Within
The Lost Illusions of Mr. Sims
Fetching the Doctor

The Hohenzollerns
in America

PREFACE

The proper punishment for the Hohenzollerns, and the Hapsburgs, and the Mecklenburgs, and the Muckendorfs, and all such puppets and princelings, is that they should be made to work; and not made to work in the glittering and glorious sense, as generals and chiefs of staff, and legislators, and land-barons, but in the plain and humble part of labourers looking for a job; that they should carry a hod and wield a trowel and swing a pick and, at the day’s end, be glad of a humble supper and a night’s rest; that they should work, in short, as millions of poor emigrants out of Germany have worked for generations past; that there should be about them none of the prestige of fallen grandeur; that, if it were possible, by some trick of magic, or change of circumstance, the world should know them only as labouring men, with the dignity and divinity of kingship departed out of them; that, as such, they should stand or fall, live or starve, as best they might by the work of their own hands and brains. Could this be done, the world would have a better idea of the thin stuff out of which autocratic kingship is fashioned.

It is a favourite fancy of mine to imagine this transformation actually brought about; and to picture the Hohenzollerns as an immigrant family departing for America, their trunks and boxes on their backs, their bundles in their hands.

The fragments of a diary that here follow present the details of such a picture. It is written, or imagined to be written, by the (former) Princess Frederica of Hohenzollern. I do not find her name in the Almanach de Gotha. Perhaps she does not exist. But from the text below she is to be presumed to be one of the innumerable nieces of the German Emperor.

CHAPTER I

On Board the S.S. America.
Wednesday

At last our embarkation is over, and we are at sea. I am so glad it is done. It was dreadful to see poor Uncle William and Uncle Henry and Cousin Willie and Cousin Ferdinand of Bulgaria, coming up the gang-plank into the steerage, with their boxes on their backs. They looked so different in their rough clothes. Uncle William is wearing an old blue shirt and a red handkerchief round his neck, and his hair looks thin and unkempt, and his moustache draggled and his face unshaved. His eyes seem watery and wandering, and his little withered arm so pathetic. Is it possible he was always really like that?

At the top of the gang-plank he stood still a minute, his box still on his back, and said, “This then is the pathway to Saint Helena.” I heard an officer down on the dock call up, “Now then, my man, move on there smartly, please.” And I saw some young roughs pointing at Uncle and laughing and saying, “Look at the old guy with the red handkerchief. Is he batty, eh?”

The forward deck of the steamer, the steerage deck, which is the only place that we are allowed to go, was crowded with people, all poor and with their trunks and boxes and paper bags all round them. When Uncle set down his box, there was soon quite a little crowd around him, so that I could hardly see him. But I could hear them laughing, and I knew that they were “taking a rise out of him,” as they call it – just as they did in the emigration sheds on shore. I heard Uncle say, “Let wine be brought: I am faint;” and some one else said, “Yes, let it,” and there arose a big shout of laughter.

Cousin Willie had sneaked away with his box down to the lower deck. I thought it mean of him not to stay with his father. I never noticed till now what a sneaking face Cousin Willie has. In his uniform, as Crown Prince, it was different. But in his shabby clothes, among these rough people, he seems so changed. He walks with a mean stoop, and his eyes look about in such a furtive way, never still. I saw one of the ship’s officers watching him, very closely and sternly.

Cousin Karl of Austria, and Cousin Ruprecht of Bavaria, are not here. We thought they were to come on this ship, but they are not here. We could hardly believe that the ship would sail without them.

I managed to get Uncle William out of the crowd and down below. He was glad to get off the deck. He seemed afraid to look at the sea, and when we got into the big cabin, he clutched at the cover of the port and said, “Shut it, help me shut it, shut out the sound of the sea;” and then for a little time he sat on one of the bunks all hunched up, and muttering, “Don’t let me hear the sea, don’t let me hear it.” His eyes looked so queer and fixed, that I thought he must be in a sort of fit, or seizure. But Uncle Henry and Cousin Willie and Cousin Ferdinand came into the cabin and he got better again.

Cousin Ferdinand has got hold of a queer long overcoat with the sleeves turned up, and a little round hat, and looks exactly like a Jew. He says he traded one of our empty boxes for the coat and hat. I never noticed before how queer and thick Cousin Ferdinand’s speech is, and how much he gesticulates with his hands when he talks. I am sure that when I visited at Sofia nobody ever noticed it. And he called Uncle William and Uncle Henry “Mister,” and said that on the deck he had met two “fine gentlemen,” (that’s what he called them), who are in the clothing trade in New York. It was with them he traded for the coat.

Cousin Ferdinand, who is very clever at figures, is going to look after all our money, because the American money is too difficult for Uncle William and Cousin Willie to understand. We have only a little money, but Cousin Ferdinand said that we would put it all together and make it a pool. But when Uncle Henry laughed, and turned his pockets out and had no money at all, Cousin Ferdinand said that it would not be a pool. He said he would make it “on shares” and explained it, but I couldn’t understand what it meant.

While he was talking I saw Cousin Willie slip one of the pieces of money out of the pile into his pocket: at least I think I saw it; but he did it so quickly that I was not sure, and didn’t like to say anything.

Then a bell rang and we went to eat in a big saloon, all crowded with common people, and very stuffy. The food was wretched, and I could not eat. I suppose Uncle was famished from the long waiting and the bad food in the emigrant shed. It was dreadful to see the hungry way that he ate the greasy stew they gave us, with his head down almost in his plate and his moustache all unkempt. “This ragout is admirable,” he said. “Let the chef be informed that I said it.”

Cousin Ferdinand didn’t sit with us. He sat beside his two new friends and they had their heads all close together and talked with great excitement. I never knew before that Cousin Ferdinand talked Yiddish. I remember him at Sofia, on horseback addressing his army, and I don’t think he talked to his troops in Yiddish. He was telling them, I remember, how sorry he was that he couldn’t accompany them to the front. But for “business in Sofia,” he said, he would like to be in the very front trenches, the foremost of all. It was thought very brave of him.

When we got up from supper, the ship was heaving and rolling quite a bit. A young man, a steward, told us that we were now out of the harbor and in the open sea. Uncle William told him to convey his compliments to the captain on his proper navigation of the channel. The young man looked very closely at Uncle and said, “Sure, I’ll tell him right away,” but he said it kindly. Then he said to me, when Uncle couldn’t hear, “Your pa ain’t quite right, is he, Miss Hohen?” I didn’t know what he meant, but, of course, I said that Uncle William was only my uncle. Hohen is, I should explain, the name by which we are known now. The young man said that he wasn’t really a steward, only just for the trip. He said that, because I had a strange feeling that I had met him before, and asked him if I hadn’t seen him at one of the courts. But he said he had never been “up before one” in his life. He said he lives in New York, and drives an ice-wagon and is an ice-man. He said he was glad to have the pleasure of our acquaintance. He is, I think, the first ice-man I have ever met. He reminds me very much of the Romanoffs, the Grand Dukes of the younger branch, I mean. But he says he is not connected with them, so far as he knows. He said his name is Peters. We have no Almanach de Gotha here on board the steamer, so I cannot look up his name.

S.S. America.
Thursday

We had a dreadful experience last night. In the middle of the night Uncle Henry came and called me and said that Uncle William was ill. So I put on an old shawl and went with him. The ship was pitching and heaving with a dreadful straining and creaking noise. A dim light burned in the cabin, and outside there was a great roaring of the wind and the wild sound of the sea surging against the ship.

Uncle William was half sitting up in his rough bunk, with the tattered grey blankets over him, one hand was clutched on the side of the bed and there was a great horror in his eyes. “The sea, the sea,” he kept saying, “don’t let me hear it. It’s their voices. Listen! They’re beating at the sides of the ship. Keep them from me, keep them out!”

He was quiet for a minute, until there came another great rush of the sea against the sides of the ship, and a roar of water against the port. Then he broke out, almost screaming – “Henry, brother Henry, keep them back! Don’t let them drag me down. I never willed it. I never wanted it. Their death is not at my door. It was necessity. Henry! Brother Henry! Tell them not to drag me below the sea!”

Like that he raved for perhaps an hour and we tried to quiet him. Cousin Willie had slipped away, I don’t know where. Cousin Ferdinand was in his bunk with his back turned.

“Do I slip tonight, at all,” he kept growling “or do I not? Say, mister, do I get any slip at all?”

But no one minded him.

Then daylight came and Uncle fell asleep. His face looked drawn and grey and the cords stood out on his withered hand, which was clutched against his shirt.

So he slept. It seemed so strange. There was no court physician, no bulletins to reassure the world that he was sleeping quietly.

Later in the morning I saw the ship’s doctor and the captain, all in uniform, with gold braid, walking on their inspection round.

“You had some trouble here last night,” I heard the captain say.

“No, nothing,” the doctor answered, “only one of the steerage passengers delirious in the night.”

Later in the morning the storm had gone down and the sea was calm as glass, and Uncle Henry and I got Uncle William up on deck. Mr. Peters, the steward that I think I spoke about before, got us a steamer chair from the first class that had been thrown away – quite good except for one leg – and Uncle William sat in it with his face away from the sea. He seemed much shaken and looked grey and tired, but he talked quite quietly and rationally about our going to America, and how we must all work, because work is man’s lot. He himself, he says, will take up the presidency of Harvard University in New York, and Uncle Henry, who, of course, was our own Grand Admiral and is a sailor, will enter as Admiral of the navy of one of the states, probably, Uncle says, the navy of Missouri, or else that of Colorado.

It was pleasant to hear Uncle William talk in this way, just as quietly and rationally as at Berlin, and with the same grasp of political things. He only got excited once, and that was when he was telling Uncle Henry that it was his particular wish that Uncle should go to the captain and offer to take over the navigation of the vessel. Uncle Henry is a splendid sailor, and in all our cruises in the Baltic he used to work out all the navigation of the vessel, except, of course, the arithmetic – which was beneath him.

Uncle Henry laughed (he is always so good natured) and said that he had had enough of being Admiral to last him all his life. But when Uncle William insisted, he said he would see what he could do.

S.S. America.
Friday

All yesterday and today the sea was quite calm, and we could sit on deck. I was glad because, in the cabin where I am, there are three other women, and it is below the water-line, and is very close and horrid. So when it is rough, I can only sit in the alley-way with my knitting. There the light is very dim and the air bad. But I do not complain. It is woman’s lot. Uncle William and Cousin Willie have both told me this – that it is woman’s lot to bear and to suffer; and they said it with such complete resignation that I feel I ought to imitate their attitude.

Cousin Ferdinand, too, is very brave about the dirt and the discomfort of being on board the ship. He doesn’t seem to mind the dirt at all, and his new friends (Mr. Sheehan and Mr. Mosenhammer) seem to bear it so well, too. Uncle Henry goes and washes his hands and face at one of the ship’s pumps before every meal, with a great noise and splashing, but Cousin Ferdinand says, “For me the pump, no.” He says that nothing like that matters now, and that his only regret is that he did not fall at the head of his troops, as he would have done if he had not been detained by business.

I caught sight of Cousin Karl of Austria! So it seems he is on the ship after all. He was up on the promenade deck where the first class passengers are, and of which you can just see one end from down here in the steerage. Cousin Karl had on a waiter’s suit and was bringing something to drink to two men who were in steamer chairs on the deck. I don’t know whether he saw me or not, but if he did he didn’t give any sign of recognizing me. One of the men gave Cousin Karl a piece of money and I was sure it was he, from the peculiar, cringing way in which he bowed. It was just the manner that he used to have at Vienna with his cousin, Franz Ferdinand, and with dear old Uncle Franz Joseph.

We always thought, we girls I mean, that it was Cousin Karl who had Cousin Franz Ferdinand blown up at Serajevo. I remember once we dared Cousin Zita, Karl’s wife, to ask Uncle William if it really was Karl. But Uncle William spoke very gravely, and said that it was not a thing for us to discuss, and that if Karl did it, it was an “act of State,” and no doubt very painful to Cousin Karl to have to do.

Zita asked Uncle if Karl poisoned dear old Uncle Franz Joseph, because some of Karl’s best and most intimate friends said that he did. But Uncle said very positively, “No,” that dear old Uncle Franz Joseph had not needed any poison, but had died, very naturally, under the hands of Uncle William’s own physician, who was feeling his wind-pipe at the time.

Of course, all these things seem very far away now. But seeing Cousin Karl on the upper deck, reminded me of all the harmless gossip and tattle that used to go on among us girls in the old days.

Friday afternoon

I saw Cousin Willie on the deck this afternoon. I had not seen him all day yesterday as he seems to keep out of sight. His eyes looked bloodshot and I was sure that he had been drinking.

I asked him where he had been in the storm while Uncle William was ill. He gave a queer sort of leering chuckle and said, “Over there,” and pointed backwards with his thumb towards the first class part of the ship. Then he said, “Come here a minute,” and he led me round a corner to where no one could see, and showed me a gold brooch and two diamond rings. He told me not to tell the others, and then he tried to squeeze my hand and to pull me towards him, in such a horrid way, but I broke away and went back. Since then I have been trying to think how he could have got the brooch and the rings. But I cannot think.

S.S. America.
Saturday

Today when I went up on deck, the first thing I saw was Uncle Henry. I hardly recognized him. He had on an old blue sailor’s jersey, and was cleaning up a brass rail with a rag. I asked him why he was dressed like that and Uncle Henry laughed and said he had become an admiral. I couldn’t think what he meant, as I never guess things with a double meaning, so he explained that he has got work as a sailor for the voyage across. I thought he looked very nice in his sailor’s jersey, much nicer than in the coat with gold facings, when he was our High Admiral. He reminded me very much of those big fair-haired Norwegian sailors that we used to see when we went on the Meteor to Flekkefyord and Gildeskaale. I am sure that he will be of great service to this English captain, in helping to work the ship across.

When Cousin Ferdinand came up on deck with his two friends, Mr. Mosenhammer and Mr. Sheehan, he was very much interested in Uncle Henry’s having got work. He made an arrangement right away that he would borrow Uncle Henry’s wages, and that Mr. Sheehan would advance them, and he would then add it to our capital, and then he would take it and keep it. Uncle Henry is to get what is called, in the new money, one seventy-five a day, and to get it for four days, and Cousin Ferdinand says that comes to four dollars and a quarter. Cousin Ferdinand is very quick with figures. He says that he will have to take out a small commission for managing the money for Uncle Henry, and that later on he will tell Uncle Henry how much will be left after taking it out. Uncle Henry said all right and went on with his brass work. It is strange how his clothes seem to change him. He looks now just like a rough, common sailor.

S.S. America.
Tuesday

Today our voyage is to end. I am so glad. When we came on deck Mr. Peters told me that we were in sight of land. He told me the names of the places, but they were hard and difficult to remember, like Long Island and Sandy Hook; not a bit like our dear old simple German names.

So we were all told to put our things together and get ready to land. I got, out of one of our boxes, an old frock coat for Uncle William. It is frayed at the ends of the sleeves and it shines a little, but I had stitched it here and there and it looked quite nice. He put it on with a pair of grey trousers that are quite good, and not very much bagged, and I had knitted for him a red necktie that he wears over his blue shirt with a collar, called a celluloid collar, that American gentlemen wear.

The sea is so calm that Uncle doesn’t mind being on deck now, and he even came close to the bulwarks, which he wouldn’t do all the way across. He stood there in quite an attitude with his imperfect hand folded into his coat. He looked something, but not quite, as he used to look on the deck of the Meteor in the Baltic.

Presently he said, “Henry, your arm!” and walked up and down with Uncle Henry. I could see that the other passengers were quite impressed with the way Uncle looked, and it pleased him. I heard some rough young loafers saying, “Catch on to the old Dutch, will you? Eh, what?”

Uncle Henry is going ashore just as he is, in his blue jersey. But Cousin Ferdinand has put on a bright red tie that Mr. Mosenhammer has loaned to him for three hours.

Cousin Willie only came on deck at the very last minute, and he seemed anxious to slink behind the other passengers and to keep out of sight. I think it must have something to do with the brooch that he showed me, and the rings. His eyes looked very red and bloodshot and his face more crooked and furtive than ever. I am sure that he had been drinking again.

I have written the last lines of this diary sitting on the deck. We have just passed a huge statue that rises out of the water, the name of which they mentioned but I can’t remember, as it was not anything I ever heard of before.

Just think – in a little while we shall land in America!

CHAPTER II

City New York.
2nd Avenue

We came off the steamer late yesterday afternoon and came across the city to a pension on Second Avenue where we are now. Only here they don’t call it a pension but a boarding house. Cousin Ferdinand and Cousin Willie drove across in the cart with our boxes, and Uncle William and Uncle Henry and I came on a street car. It cost us fifteen cents. A cent is four and one-sixth pfennigs. We tried to reckon what it came to, but we couldn’t; but Uncle Henry thinks it could be done.

This house is a tall house in a mean street, crowded and noisy with carts and street-sellers. I think it would be better to have all the boarding houses stand far back from the street with elm trees and fountains and lawns where peacocks could walk up and down. I am sure it would be much better.

We have taken a room for Uncle William and Uncle Henry on the third floor at the back and a small room in the front for me of the kind called a hall bedroom, which I don’t ever remember seeing before. There were none at Sans Souci and none, I think, at any of the palaces. Cousin Willie has a room at the top of the house, and Cousin Ferdinand in the basement.

The landlady of this house is very stout and reminds me very much of the Grand Duchess of Sondersburg-Augustenburg: her manner when she showed us the rooms was very like that of the Grand Duchess; only perhaps a little firmer and more authoritative. But it appears that they are probably not related, as the landlady’s name is Mrs. O’Halloran, which is, I think, Scotch.

When we arrived it was already time for dinner so we went downstairs to it at once. The dining-room was underground in the basement. It was very crowded and stuffy, and there was a great clatter of dishes and a heavy smell of food. Most of the people were already seated, but there was an empty place at the head of one of the tables and Uncle William moved straight towards that. Uncle was wearing, as I said, his frock coat and his celluloid collar and he walked into the room with quite an air, in something of the way that he used to come into the great hall of the Neues Palais at Potsdam, only that in these clothes it looked different. As Uncle entered the room he waved his hand and said, “Let no one rise!” I remember that when Uncle said this at the big naval dinner at Kiel it made a great sensation as an example of his ready tact. He realized that if they had once risen there would have been great difficulty in their order of procedure for sitting down again. He was afraid that the same difficulty might have been felt here in the boarding house. But I don’t think it would, and I don’t think that they were going to stand up, anyway. They just went on eating. I noticed one cheap-looking young man watching Uncle with a sort of half smile as he moved towards his seat. I heard him say to his neighbour, “Some scout, eh?”

The food was so plain and so greasy that I could hardly eat it. But I have noticed that it is a strange thing about Uncle that he doesn’t seem to know what he eats at all. He takes all this poor stuff that they put before him to be the same delicacies that we had at the Neues Palais and Sans Souci. “Is this a pheasant?” he asked when the servant maid passed him his dish of meat. I heard the mean young man whisper, “I guess not.” Presently some hash was brought in and Uncle said, “Ha! A Salmi! Ha! excellent!” I could see that Mrs. O’Halloran, the landlady, who sat at the other end of the table, was greatly pleased.

I was surprised to find – because it is so hard to get used to the change of things in our new life – that all the people went on talking just the same after Uncle sat down. At the palace at Potsdam nobody ever spoke at dinner unless Uncle William first addressed him, and then he was supposed to give a sort of bow and answer as briefly as possible so as not to interrupt the flow of Uncle William’s conversation. Generally Uncle talked and all the rest listened. His conversation was agreed by everybody to be wonderful. Princes, admirals, bishops, artists, scholars and everybody united in declaring that Uncle William showed a range of knowledge and a brilliance of language that was little short of marvellous. So naturally it was a little disappointing at first to find that these people just went on talking to one another and didn’t listen to Uncle William at all, or merely looked at him in an inquisitive sort of way and whispered remarks to one another. But presently, I don’t just know how, Uncle began to get the attention of the table and one after the other the people stopped talking to listen to him. I was very glad of this because Uncle was talking about America and I was sure that it would interest them, as what he said was very much the same as the wonderful speech that he made to the American residents of Berlin at the time when the first exchange professor was sent over to the University. I remember that all the Americans who heard it said that Uncle told them things about their own country that they had never known, or even suspected, before. So I was glad when I heard Uncle explaining to these people the wonderful possibilities of their country. He talked of the great plains of Connecticut and the huge seaports of Pittsburg and Colorado Springs, and the tobacco forests of Idaho till one could just see it all. He said that the Mississippi, which is a great river here as large as the Weser, should be dammed back and held while a war of extermination was carried on against the Indians on the other side of it with a view to Christianizing them. The people listened, their faces flushed with eating and with the close air. Here and there some of them laughed or nudged one another and said, “Get on to this, will you?” But I remember that when Uncle William made this speech in Berlin the Turkish ambassador said after it that he now knew so much about America that he wanted to die, and that the Shah of Persia wrote a letter to Uncle, all in his own writing, except the longest words, and said that he had ordered Uncle’s speech on America to be printed and read aloud by all the schoolmasters in Persia under penalty of decapitation. Nearly all of them read it.

Wednesday

This morning we had a great disappointment. It had been pretty well arranged on board the ship that Uncle would take over the presidency of Harvard University. Uncle Henry and Cousin Ferdinand and Cousin Willie had all consented to it, and we looked upon it as done. Now it seems there is a mistake. First of all Harvard University is not in New York, as we had always thought in Germany that it was. I remember that when Uncle Henry came home from his great tour in America, in which he studied American institutions so profoundly, and made his report he said that Harvard University was in New York. Uncle had this information filed away in our Secret Service Department.

But it seems that it is somewhere else. The University here is called Columbia, so Uncle decided that he would be president of that. In the old days all the great men of learning used to assure Uncle that if fate had not made him an emperor he would have been better fitted than any living man to be the head of a great university. Uncle admitted this himself, though he resented being compared only to the living ones.

So it was a great disappointment today when they refused to give him the presidency. I went with him to the college, but I cannot quite understand what happened or why they won’t give it to him. We walked all the way up and I carried a handbag filled with Uncle’s degrees and diplomas from Oxford and all over the world. All the way up Uncle talked about the majesty and the freedom of learning and what he would do to the college when he was made president, and how all the professors should sit up and obey him. At times he got so excited that he would stop on the street and wave his hands and gesticulate so that people turned and looked at him. At Potsdam we never realized that Uncle was excited all the time, and, in any case, with his uniform on and his sabre clattering as he walked, it all seemed different. But here in the street, in his faded frock coat and knitted tie, and with his face flushed and his eyes rambling, people seemed to mistake it and thought that his mind was not quite right.

So I think he made a wrong impression when we went into the offices of the college. Uncle was still quite excited from his talking. “Let the trustees be brought,” he said in a peremptory way to the two young men in black frock coats, secretaries of some sort, I suppose, who received us. Then he turned to me. “Princess,” he said, “my diplomas!” He began pulling them out of the bag and throwing them on the table in a wild sort of way. The other people waiting in the room were all staring at him. Then the young men took Uncle by the arm and led him into an inner room and I went out into the corridor and waited. Presently one of the young men came out and told me not to wait, as Uncle had been sent home in a cab. He was very civil and showed me where to go to get the elevated railroad. But while I was waiting I had overheard some of the people talking about Uncle. One said, “That’s that same old German that was on board our ship last week in the steerage – has megalomania or something of the sort, they say, and thinks he’s the former Emperor. I saw the Kaiser once at a review in Berlin – not much resemblance, is there?”

CHAPTER III

For weeks and weeks I have written nothing in my diary because it has been so discouraging. After Uncle William’s offer to take over the presidency of Columbia University had been refused, he debated with Uncle Henry and with Cousin Ferdinand of Bulgaria (who is not living in our boarding house now but who comes over quite often in the evenings) whether he would accept the presidency of Harvard. Cousin Ferdinand looked up the salary in a book and told him not to take it. Cousin Ferdinand has little books with all the salaries of people in America and he says that these books are fine and much better than the Almanach de Gotha which we used to use in Europe to hunt people up. He says that if he ever goes back to be King of Bulgaria again he is going to introduce books like these. Cousin Ferdinand is getting very full of American ideas and he says that what you want to know about a man is not his line of descent but his line of credit. And he says that the whole King business in Europe has been mismanaged. He says that there should have been millions in it. I forgot to say in my diary sooner that Cousin Ferdinand’s two friends, Mr. Mosenhammer and Mr. Sheehan, took him into their clothing business at once as a sort of partner. The reason was that they found that he could wear clothes; the effect on the customers when they see Cousin Ferdinand walking up and down in front of the store is wonderful. Of course all kings can wear clothes and in the old days in the Potsdam palace we thought nothing of it. But Cousin Ferdinand says that the kings should have known enough to stop trying to be soldiers and to put themselves at the head of the export clothing trade. He wishes, he says, that he had some of his Bulgarian generals here now in their blue coats trimmed with black fur; he says that with a little alteration, which he showed us how to do, he could have sent them out “on the road,” wherever that is, and have made the biggest boom in gentlemen’s winter fur trimmings that the trade ever saw.

Cousin Ferdinand, when he comes over in the evenings now, is always beautifully dressed and I can notice that Mrs. O’Halloran, the landlady, is much impressed with him. I am glad of this because we have not yet been able to pay her any money and I was afraid she might say something about it. But what is stranger is that now that Cousin Ferdinand has good clothes, Uncle William and Uncle Henry seem much impressed too. Uncle Henry looks so plain and common in his sailor’s jersey, and Uncle William in his old frock coat looks faded and shabby and his face always vacant and wondering. So now when Cousin Ferdinand comes in they stand up and get a chair for him and listen to his advice on everything.

So, as I said, Cousin Ferdinand looked up the salary of the President of Harvard in a book and he was strongly against Uncle William’s taking the position. But Uncle William says this kind of position is the nearest thing in this country to what he had in Germany. He thinks that he could do for Harvard what he did for Germany. He has written out on a big sheet of paper all the things that he calls the Chief Needs of America, because he is always busy like this and never still. I forget the whole list, especially as he changes it every day according to the way that people treat Uncle William on the street, but the things that he always puts first are Culture, Religion, and Light. These he says he can supply, and he thought that the presidency of Harvard would be the best place to do it from. In the end he accepted the position against Cousin Ferdinand’s advice, or at least I mean he said that he would be willing to take it and he told Uncle Henry to pack up all his degrees and diplomas and to send them to Harvard and say that he was coming.

So it was dreadfully disappointing when all the diplomas came back again by the next post. There was a letter with them but I didn’t see it, as Uncle William tore it into fragments and stamped on it. He said he was done with American universities for ever: I have never seen him so furious: he named over on his fingers all the American professors that he had fed at Berlin, one meal each and sometimes even two – Uncle has a wonderful memory for things like that – and yet this was their gratitude. He walked up and down his room and talked so wildly and incoherently that if I had not known and been told so often by our greatest authorities in Germany how beautifully balanced Uncle William’s brain is, I should have feared that he was wandering.

But presently he quieted down and said with deep earnestness that the American universities must now go to ruin in their own way. He was done with them. He said he would go into a cloister and spend his life in quiet adoration, provided that he could find anything to adore, which, he said, in his station was very doubtful. But half an hour later he was quite cheerful again – it is wonderful how quickly Uncle William’s brain recovers itself – and said that a cloister was too quiet and that he would take a position as Governor of a State; there are a great many of these in this country and Uncle spent days and days writing letters to them and when the answers came in – though some never answered at all – Uncle William got into the same state of fury as about the Presidency of Harvard. So, naturally, each day seemed more disappointing than the last, especially with the trouble that we have been having with Cousin Willie, of which I have not spoken yet, and I was getting quite disheartened until last evening, when everything seemed to change.

We all knew, of course, that Uncle William is the greatest artist in the world, but no one liked to suggest that he should sell his pictures for money, a thing that no prince was ever capable of doing. Yet I could not but feel glad when Uncle decided yesterday that he would stoop to make his living by art. It cost him a great struggle to make this decision, but he talked it over very fully last night with Uncle Henry, after Uncle Henry came home from work, and the resolution is taken.

Of course, Uncle always had a wonderful genius for painting. I remember how much his pictures used to be admired at the court at Berlin. I have seen some of the best painters stand absolutely entranced – they said so themselves – in front of Uncle’s canvasses. I remember one of the greatest of our artists saying one day to Uncle in the Potsdam Gallery, “Now, which of these two pictures is yours and which is Michel Angelo’s: I never can tell you two apart.” Uncle gave him the order of the Red Swan. Another painter once said that if Uncle’s genius had been developed he would have been the greatest painter of modern times. Uncle William, I remember, was dreadfully angry. He said it was developed.

So it seemed only natural that Uncle should turn to Art to make our living. But he hesitated because there is some doubt whether a person of noble birth can sell anything for money. But Uncle says Tintoretto the great Italian artist had two quarterings of nobility, and Velasquez had two and a half.

Luckily we have with us among our things Uncle’s easel and his paints that he used in Berlin. He had always to have special things because he doesn’t use little brushes and tubes of colour as ordinary artists do, but had a big brush and his paint in a tin can, so that he can work more quickly. Fortunately we have with us three of Uncle’s pictures rolled up in the bottom of our boxes. He is going to sell these first and after that he says that he will paint one or two every day. One of the three canvasses that we have is an allegorical picture called “Progress” in which. Progress is seen coming out of a cloud in the background with Uncle William standing in the foreground. Another is called “Modern Science” and in this Science is seen crouched in the dark in the background and Uncle William standing in the light in the foreground. The other is called “Midnight in the Black Forest.” Uncle William did it in five minutes with a pot of black paint. They say it is impressionistic.

So all the evening Uncle William and Uncle Henry talked about the new plan. It is wonderful how Uncle William enters into a thing. He got me to fetch him his old blue blouse, which was with the painting things, and he put it on over his clothes and walked up and down the room with a long paint-brush in his hand. “We painters, my dear Henry,” he said; “must not be proud. America needs Art. Very good. She shall have it.”

I could see, of course, that Uncle William did not like the idea of selling pictures for money. But he is going to make that side of it less objectionable by painting a picture, a very large picture, for nothing and giving it to the big Metropolitan Art Gallery which, is here. Uncle has already partly thought it out. It is to be called the “Spirit of America” and in it the Spirit of America will be seen doubled up in the background: Uncle has not yet fully thought out the foreground, but he says he has an idea.

In any case he is going to refuse to take anything more than a modest price for his pictures. Beyond that, he says, not one pfennig.

So this morning Uncle rolled up his three canvasses under his arm and has gone away to sell them.

I am very glad, as we have but little money, indeed hardly any except Uncle Henry’s wages. And I have been so worried, too, and surprised since we came here about Cousin Willie. He hardly is with the rest of us at all. He is out all night and sleeps in the day time, and often I am sure that he has been drinking. One morning when he came back to the house at about breakfast time he showed me quite a handful of money, but wouldn’t say where he got it. He said there was lots more where it came from. I asked him to give me some to pay Mrs. O’Halloran, but he only laughed in his leering way and said that he needed it all. At another time when I went up to Cousin Willie’s room one day when he was out, I saw quite a lot of silver things hidden in a corner of the cupboard. They looked like goblets and silver dinner things, and there was a revolver and a sheath-knife hidden with them. I began to think that he must have stolen all these things, though it seemed impossible for a prince. I have spoken to Uncle William several times about Cousin Willie, but he gets impatient and does not seem to care. Uncle never desires very much to talk of people other than himself. I think it fatigues his mind. In any case, he says that he has done for Willie already all that he could. He says he had him confined to a fortress three times and that four times he refused to have him in his sight for a month, and that twice he banished him to a country estate for six weeks. His duty, he says, is done. I said that I was afraid that Cousin Willie had been stealing and told him about the silver things hidden in the cupboard. But Uncle got very serious and read me a very severe lecture. No prince, he said, ever stole. His son, he explained, might very well be collecting souvenirs as memorials of his residence in America: all the Hohenzollerns collected souvenirs: some of our most beautiful art things at Potsdam and Sans Souci were souvenirs collected by our ancestors in France fifty years ago. Uncle said that if the Great War had turned out as it should and if his soldiers had not betrayed him by getting killed, we should have had more souvenirs than ever. After that he dismissed the subject from his mind. Uncle William can dismiss things from his mind more quickly than anybody I ever knew.

The Same Day. Later

I was so surprised this afternoon, when I happened to go down to the door, to see Mr. Peters, the ice gentleman that was on the ship, with his ice cart delivering ice into the basement. I knew that he delivered ice in this part of the city because he said so, and I think he had mentioned this street, and two or three times I thought I had seen him from the window. But it did seem surprising to happen to go down to the door (I forget what I went for) at the moment that he was there. He looked very fine in his big rough suit of overalls. It is not quite like a military uniform, but I think it looks better. Mr. Peters knew me at once. “Good afternoon, Miss Hohen,” he said (that is the name, as I think I said, that we have here), “how are all the folks?”

So we talked for quite a little time, and I told him about Uncle trying to get work and how hard it was and how at last he had got work, or at least had gone out to get it, as a painter. Mr. Peters said that that was fine. He said that painters do well here: he has a lot of friends who are painters and they get all the way from sixty to seventy-five cents an hour. It seems so odd to think of them being paid by the hour. I don’t think the court artists at home were paid like that. It will be very nice if Uncle William can mingle with Mr. Peters’s artist friends. Mr. Peters asked if he might take me out some Sunday, and I said that I would ask Uncle William and Uncle Henry and Cousin Ferdinand and Cousin Willie and if they all consented to come I would go. I hope it was not a forward thing to do.

I forgot when I was talking of work to say that Uncle Henry got work the very second day that we were here. He works down at the docks where the ships are. I think he supervises the incoming and outgoing of the American navy. It is called being a stevedore, and no doubt his being an Admiral helped him to get it. He hopes to get a certificate presently to be a Barge Master, which will put him in charge of the canals. But there is a very difficult examination to go through and Uncle Henry is working for it at night out of a book. He has to take up Vulgar Fractions which, of course, none of our High Seas Command were asked to learn. But Uncle Henry is stooping to them.

So now, I think, everything will go well.

CHAPTER IV

Uncle’s art has failed. It was only yesterday that I was writing in my memoirs of how cheerful and glad I felt to think that Uncle William was going to be able to make his living by art, and now everything is changed again. All the time that Uncle was out on his visit to the picture dealers, I was making plans and thinking what we would do with the money when it came in, so it is very disappointing to have it all come to nothing. I don’t know just what happened because Uncle William never gives any details of things. His mind moves too rapidly for that. But he came home with his pictures still under his arm in a perfect fury and raged up and down his room, using very dreadful language.

But after a little while when he grew calmer he explained to me that the Americans are merely swineheads and that art, especially art such as his, is wasted on them. Uncle says that he has no wish to speak harshly of the Americans, but they are pig-dogs. He bears them no ill-will, he says, for what they have done and his heart is free of any spirit of vengeance, but he wishes he had his heel on their necks for about half a minute. He said this with such a strange dreadful snarl that for the moment his face seemed quite changed. But presently when he recovered himself he got quite cheerful again, and said that it was perhaps unseemly in him, as the guest of the American people, to say anything against them. It is strange how Uncle always refers to himself as the guest of the American people. Living in this poor place, in these cheap surroundings, it seems so odd. Often at our meals in the noisy dining-room down in the basement, in the speeches that he makes to the boarders, he talks of himself as the guest of America and he says, “What does America ask in return? Nothing.” I can see that Mrs. O’Halloran, the landlady, doesn’t like this, because we have not paid her anything for quite a long time, and she has spoken to me about it in the corridor several times.

But when Uncle William makes speeches in the dining-room I think the whole room becomes transformed for him into the banquet room of a palace, and the cheap bracket lamps against the wall turn into a blaze of light and the boarders are all courtiers, and he becomes more and more grandiloquent. He waves his hand towards Uncle Henry and refers to him as “my brother the Admiral,” and to me as “the Princess at my side.” Some of the people, the meaner ones, begin to laugh and to whisper, and others look uncomfortable and sorry. And it is always on these occasions that Uncle William refers to himself as America’s guest, and refers to the Americans as the hospitable nation who have taken him to their heart. I think that when Uncle says this he really believes it; Uncle can believe practically anything if he says it himself.

So, as I say, when he came home yesterday, after failing to sell his pictures, he was at first furious and then he fell into his other mood and he said that, as the guest of a great people, he had found out at last the return he could make to them. He said that he would organise a School of Art, and as soon as he had got the idea he was carried away with it at once and seized a pencil and paper and began making plans for the school and drawing up a list of the instructors needed. He asked first who could be Principal, or President, of the School, and decided that he would have to be that himself as he knew of no one but himself who had the peculiar power of organisation needed for it. All the technical instructors, he said, must be absolutely the best, each one a master in his own line. So he wrote down at the top of his list, Instructor in Oils, and reflected a little, with his head in his hand, as to who could do that. Presently he sighed and said that as far as he knew there was no one; he’d have to do that himself. Then he wrote down Instructor in Water Colour, and as soon as he had written it he said right off that he would have to take that over too; there was no one else that he could trust it to. Then he said, “Now, let me see, Perspective, Freehand, and Crayon Work. I need three men: three men of the first class. Can I get them? I doubt it. Let me think what can be done.”

He walked up and down the room a little with his hands behind his back and his head sunk in thought while he murmured, “Three men? Three men? But Ha! why three? Why not, if sufficiently gifted, one man?”

But just when he was saying this there was a knock at the door and Mrs. O’Halloran came in. I knew at once what she had come for, because she had been threatening to do it, and so I felt dreadfully nervous when she began to say that our bill at the house had gone unpaid too long and that we must pay her at once what we owed her. It took some time before Uncle William understood what she was talking about, but when he did he became dreadfully frigid and polite. He said, “Let me understand clearly, madame, just what it is that you wish to say: do I apprehend that you are saying that my account here for our maintenance is now due and payable?” Mrs. O’Halloran said yes, she was. And Uncle said, “Let me endeavour to grasp your meaning exactly: am I correct in thinking that you mean I owe you money?” Mrs. O’Halloran said that was what she meant. Uncle said, “Let me try to apprehend just as accurately as possible what it is that you are trying to tell me: is my surmise correct that you are implying that it is time that I settled up my bill?”

Mrs. O’Halloran said, “Yes,” but I could see that by this time she was getting quite flustered because there was something so dreadfully chilling in Uncle’s manner: his tone in a way was courtesy itself, but there was something in it calculated to make Mrs. O’Halloran feel that she had committed a dreadful breach in what she had done. Uncle William told me afterwards that to mention money to a prince is not a permissible thing, and that no true Hohenzollern has ever allowed the word “bill” to be said in his presence, and that for this reason he had tried, out of courtesy, to give the woman every chance to withdraw her words and had only administered a reprimand to her when she failed to do so. Certainly it was a dreadful rebuke that he gave her. He told her that he must insist on this topic being dismissed and never raised again: that he could allow no such discussion: the subject was one, he said, that he must absolutely refuse to entertain: he did not wish, he said, to speak with undue severity, but he had better make it plain that if there were any renewal of this discussion he should feel it impossible to remain in the house.

While Uncle William was saying all this Mrs. O’Halloran was getting more and more confused and angry, and when Uncle finally opened the door for her with cold dignity, she backed out of it and found herself outside the room without seeming to know what she was doing. Presently I could hear her down in the scullery below, rattling dishes and saying that she was just as good as anybody.

But Uncle William seemed to be wonderfully calmed and elevated after this scene, and said, “Princess, bring me my flute.” I brought it to him and he sat by the window and leaned his head out over the back lane and played our dear old German melodies, till somebody threw a boot at him. The people about here are not musical. But meantime Uncle William had forgotten all about the School of Art, and he said no more about it.

Next Day

Today a dreadful thing has happened. The police have come into the house and have taken Cousin Willie away. He is now in a place called The Tombs, and Mr. Peters says that he will be sent to the great prison at Sing-Sing. He is be tried for robbery and for stabbing with intent to kill.

It was very dreadful when they came to take him. I was so glad that Uncle William was not here to see it all. But it was in the morning and he had gone out to see a steamship company about being president of it, and I was tidying up our rooms, because Mrs. O’Halloran won’t tidy them up any more or let the coloured servant tidy them up until we pay her more money. She said that to me, but I think she is afraid to say it to Uncle William. So I mean to do the work now while Uncle is out and not let him know.

This morning, in the middle of the morning, while I was working, all of a sudden I heard the street door open and slam and some one rushing up the stairway: and then Cousin Willie broke into the room, all panting and excited, and his face grey with fright and gasping out, “Hide me, hide me!” He ran from room to room, whining and hysterical, and his breath coming in a sort of sob, but he seemed incapable of deciding what to do. I would have hidden him if I could, but at the very next moment I heard the policemen coming in below, and the voice of the landlady. Then they came upstairs, big strong-looking men in blue, any one of whom could have choked Cousin Willie with one hand. Cousin Willie ran to and fro like a cornered rat, and two of the men seized him and then I think he must have been beside himself with fear for I saw his teeth bite into the man’s hand that held him, and one of the policemen struck him hard with his wooden club across the head and he fell limp to the floor. They dragged him down the stairway like that and I followed them down, but there was nothing that I could do. I saw them lift Cousin Willie into a closed black wagon that stood at the street door with quite a little crowd of people gathered about it already, all excited and leering as if it were a show. And then they drove away with him and I came in and went upstairs and sat down in Uncle’s room but I could not work any more.

A little later on Mr. Peters came to the house – I don’t know why, because it was not for the ice as he had his other clothes on – and he came upstairs and sat down and told me about what had happened. It seemed a strange thing to receive him upstairs in Uncle’s bedroom like that, but I was so upset that I did not think about it at the time. Mr. Peters had been on our street with his ice wagon when the police came, though I did not see him. But he saw me, he said, standing at the door. And I think he must have gone home and changed his things and come back again, but I did not ask him.

He told me that Cousin Willie had stabbed a man, or at least a boy, that was in charge of a jewelry shop, and that the boy might die. Cousin Willie, Mr. Peters says, has been stealing jewelry nearly ever since we came here and the police have been watching him but he did not know this and so he had grown quite foolhardy, and this morning in broad daylight he went into some sort of jewelry or pawn shop where there was only a boy watching the shop, and the boy was a cripple. Cousin Willie had planned to hide the things under his coat and to sneak out but the boy saw what he was doing and cried out, and when Cousin Willie tried to break out of the shop he hobbled to the door and threw himself in the way. And then it was that Cousin Willie stabbed him with his sheath-knife – the one that I had seen in his room – and ran. But already there was a great outcry and the people followed on his tracks and shouted to the police, and so they easily ran him down.

All of this Mr. Peters told me, but he couldn’t stay very long and had to go again. He says he is going to see what can be done for Cousin Willie but I am afraid that he doesn’t feel very sorry for him; but after Mr. Peters had gone I could not help going on thinking about it all and it seemed to me as if Cousin Willie had not altogether had a fair chance in life. Common people are brought up in fear of prison and punishment and they learn to do what they should. But Cousin Willie was brought up as a prince and was above imprisonment and things like that. And in any case he seemed, when the big men seized hold of him, such a paltry and miserable thing.

Later on in the day Uncle William came home and I had to tell him all about Cousin Willie. I had feared that he would be dreadfully upset, but he was much less disturbed than I had thought. Indeed it is quite wonderful the way in which Uncle can detach his mind from things.

I told him that Mr. Peters had said that Cousin Willie must go to Sing-Sing, and Uncle said, “Ha! a fortress?” So I told him that I thought it was. After that he asked if Cousin Willie was in his uniform at the time, and when I said that he was not, Uncle said “That may make it more difficult.” Of course Cousin Willie has no uniform here in America and doesn’t wear any, but I notice that Uncle William begins to mix up our old life with our life here and seems sometimes quite confused and wandering; at least other people would think him so. He went on talking quite a long time about what had happened and he said that there is an almost exact precedent for the “incident” (that’s what he calls it) in the Zabern Case. I don’t remember much about that, as it was years ago, before the war, but Uncle William said that it was a similar case of an officer finding himself compelled to pass his sword once through a cripple (only once, Uncle says) in order to clear himself a way on the sidewalk. Uncle quoted a good many other precedents for passing swords through civilians, but he says that this is the best one.

In the evening Cousin Ferdinand and Uncle Henry came over. Uncle Henry seemed very gloomy and depressed about what had happened and said very little, but Cousin Ferdinand was very much excited and angry. He said what is the good of all his honesty and his industry if he is to be disgraced like this: he asked of what use is his uprightness and business integrity if he is to have a first cousin in Sing-Sing. He said that if it was known that he had a cousin there it would damage him with his best trade to an incalculable extent. But later on he quieted down and said that perhaps with a certain part of his trade it would work the other way. Uncle Ferdinand has grown to be much interested in what is called here “advertising,” – a thing that he says all kings ought to study – and he decided, after he had got over his first indignation, that Cousin Willie being in Sing-Sing would be a very good advertisement for him. It might bring him, he said, quite a lot of new business; especially if it was known that he refused to help Cousin Willie in any way or to have anything more to do with any of the rest of us, and not to give us any money. He said that this was a point of view which people could respect and admire.

So before he went home he said that we must not expect to see or hear from him any more, unless, of course, things should in some way brighten up, in which case he would come back.

CHAPTER V

It is a long time – nearly three months – since I have added anything to my memoirs. The truth is I find it very hard to write memoirs here. For one thing nobody else seems to do it. Mrs. O’Halloran tells me that she never thinks of writing memoirs at all. At the Potsdam palace it was different. We all wrote memoirs. Eugenia of Pless did, and Cecilia did, and I did, and all of us. We all had our memoir books with little silver padlocks and keys. We were brought up to do it because it helped us to realize how important everything was that we did and how important all the people about us were. It was wonderful to realize that in the old life one met every day great world figures like Prince Rasselwitz-Windischkopf, the Grand Falconer of Reuss, and the Grand Duke of Schlitzin-Mein, and Field Marshall Topoff, General-in-Chief of the army of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. There are no such figures as these in America.

But another reason for not writing has been that things have been going so badly with us. Uncle William still has no work and he seems to be getting older and more broken and stranger in his talk every day. He is very shabby now in spite of all I can do with my needle, but he becomes more grandiloquent and consequential all the time. Some of the mean looking young men at this boarding house have christened him “The Emperor” – which seems a strange thing for them to have picked upon, and they draw him out in his talk, and when they meet him they make mock salutes to him which Uncle returns with very great dignity. Quite a lot of the people on the nearby streets have taken it up and when they see Uncle come along they make him military salutes. Uncle gets quite pleased and flushed as he goes along the street and answers the salutes with a sort of military bow.

He is quite happy when he is out of doors explaining to me with his stick the plans he has for rebuilding New York and turning the Hudson River to make it run the other way. But when he comes in he falls into the most dreadful depression and sometimes at night I hear him walking up and down in his room far into the night. Two or three times he has had the same dreadful kind of seizures that he had on board the ship when we came over, and this is always when there is a great wind blowing from the ocean and a storm raging out at sea.

Of course as Uncle has not any work or any position, we are getting poorer and poorer. Cousin Willie has been sent to the fortress at Sing-Sing and Cousin Ferdinand of Bulgaria refuses to know us any more, though, from what we hear, he is getting on wonderfully well in the clothing business and is very soon to open a big new store of which he is to be the general manager. Cousin Karl is now the Third Assistant Head-Waiter at the King George Hotel, and in the sphere in which he moves it is impossible for him to acknowledge any relationship with us. I don’t know what we should do but that Uncle Henry manages to give us enough of his wages to pay for our board and lodging. Uncle Henry has passed his Naval Examination and is now appointed to a quite high command. It is called a Barge Master. They refused to accept his certificate of a German Admiral, so he had to study very hard, but at last he got his qualification and is now in charge of long voyages on the canals.

I am very glad that Uncle Henry’s command turned out to be on canals instead of on the high seas, as it makes it so much more German. Of course Uncle Henry had splendid experience in the Kiel Canal all through the four years of the war, and it is bound to come in. So he goes away now on quite long voyages, often of two or three weeks at a time, and for all this time he is in chief charge of his barge and has to work out all the navigation. Sometimes Uncle Henry takes bricks and sometimes sand. He says it is a great responsibility to feel oneself answerable for the safety of a whole barge-full of bricks or sand. It is quite different from what he did in the German navy, because there it was only a question of the sailors and for most of the time, as I have heard Uncle William and Uncle Henry say, we had plenty of them, but here with bricks and sand it is different. Uncle Henry says that if his barge was wrecked he would lose his job. This makes it a very different thing from being a royal admiral.

But Uncle William all through the last three months has failed first at one thing and then at another. After all his plans for selling pictures had come to nothing he decided, very reluctantly, that he would go into business. He only reached this decision after a great deal of anxious thought because, of course, business is a degradation. It involves taking money for doing things and this, Uncle William says, no prince can consent to do. But at last, after deep thought, Uncle said, “The die is cast,” and sat down and wrote a letter offering to take over the presidency of the United States Steel Corporation. We spent two or three anxious days waiting for the answer. Uncle was very firm and kept repeating, “I have set my hand to it, and I will do it,” but I was certain that he was sorry about it and it was a great relief when the answer came at last – it took days and days, evidently, for them to decide about it – in which the corporation said that they would “worry along” as they were. Uncle explained to me what “worrying along” meant and he said that he admired their spirit. But that ended all talk of his going into business and I am sure that we were both glad.

After that Uncle William decided that it was necessary for me to marry in a way to restore our fortunes and he decided to offer me to a State Governor. He asked me if I had any choice of States, and I said no. Of course I should not have wished to marry a state governor, but I knew my duty towards Uncle William and I said nothing. So Uncle got a map of the United States and he decided to marry me to the Governor of Texas. He told me that I could have two weeks to arrange my supply of household linen and my trousseau to take to Texas, and he wrote at once to the Governor. He showed me what he wrote and it was a very formal letter. I think that Uncle’s mind gets more and more confused as to where he is and what he is and he wrote in quite the old strain and I noticed that he signed himself, “Your brother, William.” Perhaps it was on that account that we had no answer to the letter. Uncle seemed to forget all about it very soon and I was glad that it was so, and that I had escaped going to the court of Texas.

All this time Mr. Peters has been very kind. He comes to the house with his ice every day and sometimes when Uncle Henry is here he comes in with him and smokes in the evenings. One day he brought a beautiful bunch of chrysanthemums for Uncle William, and another day a lovely nosegay of violets for Uncle Henry. And one Sunday he took us out for a beautiful drive with one of his ice-horses in a carriage called a buggy, with three seats. Uncle William sat with Mr. Peters in the front seat, and Uncle Henry and Cousin Ferdinand (it was the last time he came to see us) sat behind them and there was a little seat at the back in which I sat. It was a lovely drive and Uncle William pointed out to Mr. Peters all the things of interest, and Cousin Ferdinand smoked big cigars and told Uncle Henry all about the clothing trade, and I listened to them all and enjoyed it very much indeed. But I was afraid afterwards that it was a very bold and unconventional thing to do, and perhaps Mr. Peters felt that he had asked too much because he did not invite me to drive again.

But he is always very kind and thoughtful.

One Sunday afternoon he came to see us, thinking by mistake that Uncle William and Uncle Henry were there, but they weren’t, and his manner seemed so strange and constrained that I was certain that there was something that he was trying to say and it made me dreadfully nervous and confused. And at last quite suddenly he said that there was something that he wanted to ask me if I wouldn’t think it a liberty. My breath stopped and I couldn’t speak, and then he went on to ask if he might lend us twenty-five dollars. He got very red in the face when he said it and he began counting out the money on the sofa, and somehow I hadn’t expected that it was money and began to cry. But I told Mr. Peters that of course we couldn’t think of taking any money, and I begged him to pick it up again and then I began to try to tell him about how hard it was to get along and to ask him to get work for Uncle William, but I started to cry again. Mr. Peters came over to my chair and took hold of the arm of it and told me not to cry. Somehow his touch on the arm of the chair thrilled all through me and though I knew that it was wrong I let him keep it there and even let him stroke the upholstery and I don’t know just what would have happened but at that very minute Uncle William came in. He was most courteous to Mr. Peters and expressed his apologies for having been out and said that it must have been extremely depressing for Mr. Peters to find that he was not at home, and he thanked him for putting himself to the inconvenience of waiting. And a little while after that Mr. Peters left.

The Next Day

Mr. Peters came back this morning and said that he had got work for Uncle William. So I was delighted. He said that Uncle will make a first class “street man,” and that he has arranged for a line of goods for him and that he has a “territory” that Uncle can occupy. He showed me a flat cardboard box filled with lead pencils and shoe-strings and little badges and buttons with inscriptions on them, and he says these are what is called a “line,” and that Uncle can take out this line and do splendidly. I don’t quite understand yet who makes the appointment to be a street man or what influence it takes or what it means to have a territory, but Mr. Peters explained that there is a man who is retiring from being a street man and that Uncle can take his place and can have both sides of the Bowery, which sounds very pretty indeed.

At first I didn’t understand – because Mr. Peters hesitated a good deal in telling me about it – that if Uncle gets this appointment, it will mean that he will sell things in the street. But as soon as I understood this I felt that Uncle William would scorn to do anything like this, as the degradation would be the same as being President of the Steel Corporation. So I was much surprised to find that when Uncle came in he didn’t look at it that way at all. He looked at the box of badges and buttons and things, and he said at once, “Ha! Orders of Distinction! An excellent idea.” He picked up a silly little white button with the motto “Welcome to New York,” and he said “Admirable! That shall be the first class.” And there was a little lead spoon with “Souvenir of the Bowery” that he made the second class. He started arranging and rearranging all the things in the box, just as he used to arrange the orders and decorations at the Palace. Only those were real things such as the Order of the Red Feather, and The Insignia of the Black Duck, and these were only poor tin baubles. But I could see that Uncle no longer knows the difference, and as his fingers fumbled among these silly things he was quite trembling and eager to begin, like a child waiting for tomorrow.

CHAPTER VI

It is a year or nearly a year since I wrote in my memoirs, and I only add to them now because things have happened which mean that I shall never write any more.

Mr. Peters and I were married last autumn. He asked me if I would marry him the day that he held the arm of my chair in the boarding house where we used to live. At first I never thought that Uncle William would permit it, because of the hopeless difference of birth. But it turned out that there was no difficulty at all. Uncle’s mind was always so wonderful that he could find a way out of anything provided that he wanted to. So he conferred on Mr. Peters an Order that raised him right up in birth so that he came level with me. Uncle said that he could have lifted him higher still if need be but that as I was only, in our old life, of a younger branch of the family, it was not necessary to lift Mr. Peters to the very top. He takes precedence, Uncle said, just below Uncle Henry of Prussia and just above an Archbishop.

It is so pleasant to think – now that poor Uncle William is gone – that my marriage was with his full consent.

But even after Uncle William had given his formal consent, I didn’t want to get married till I could leave him safely. Only he got along so well in his “territory” of the Bowery from the very start that he was soon quite all right. He used to go out every morning with his trayful of badges and pencils and shoe-strings and he was a success at once. All the people got to know him by sight and they would say when they saw him, “Here comes the Emperor,” or “Here comes Old Dutch,” and very often there would be quite a little crowd round him buying his things. Uncle regarded himself always as conferring a great dignity on any one that he sold a badge to, but he was very capricious and he had certain buttons and badges that he would only part with as a very special favour and honour. Uncle got on so fast that presently Cousin Ferdinand decided that it would be all right to know him again and so he came over and made a reconciliation and took away Uncle’s money – it was all in small coins – in a bag to invest for him.

So when everything was all right with Uncle William, Mr. Peters and I were married and it was on our wedding morning that Uncle conferred the Order on my husband which made me very proud. That was a year ago, and since then we have lived in a very fine place of our own with four rooms, all to ourselves, and a gallery at the back. I have cooked all the meals and done all the work of our apartment, except just at the time when our little boy was born. We both think he is a very wonderful child. At first I wanted to call him after the Hohenzollerns and to name him William Frederick Charles Mary Augustus Francis Felix, but somehow it seemed out of place and so we have called him simply Joe Peters. I think it sounds better. Uncle William drew up an act of abnegation of Joe, whereby he gives up all claim to a reversion of the throne of Prussia, Brunswick and Waldeck. I was sorry for this at first but Uncle said that all the Hohenzollerns had done it and had made just as great a sacrifice as Joe has in doing it. But my husband says that under the constitution of the United States, Joe can be President, which I think I will like better.

It was one day last week that Uncle William met with the accident that caused his death. He had walked far away from his “territory” up to where the Great Park is, because in this lovely spring weather he liked to wander about. And he came to where there was a great crowd of people gathered to see the unveiling of a new monument. It is called the Lusitania Monument and it is put up in memory of the people that were lost when one of our war boats fought the English cruiser Lusitania. There were a lot of soldiers lining the streets and regiments of cavalry riding between. And it seems that when Uncle William saw the crowd and the soldiers he was drawn nearer and nearer by a sort of curiosity, and when he saw the great white veil drawn away from the monument, and read the word “Lusitania” that is carved in large letters across the base, he screamed out in a sudden fear, and dashed among the horses of the cavalry and was ridden down.

They carried him to the hospital, but he never spoke again, and died on the next day but one. My husband would not let me go to see him, as he was not conscious and it could do no good, but after Uncle William was dead they let me see him in his coffin.

Lying there he seemed such a pitiful and ghastly lump of clay that it seemed strange that he could, in his old life, have vexed the world as he did.

I had thought that when Uncle William died there would have been long accounts of him in the papers; at least I couldn’t help thinking so, by a sort of confusion of mind, as it is hard to get used to things as they are and to remember that our other life is unknown here and that we are known only as ourselves.

But though I looked in all the papers I could find nothing except one little notice, which I cut out of an evening paper and which I put in here as a conclusion to my memoirs.

THE “EMPEROR” DEAD

Unique Character of the East Side
Passes Away

A unique and interesting character, a familiar figure of the East Side of the City, has been lost from our streets with the death of William Hohen last Thursday in the Pauper Hospital, to which he had been brought as the result of injuries sustained in a street accident at the Lusitania celebration. Hohen, who was about sixty-five years of age, was an immigrant out of Germany after the troubles of the Great War. He had been for a year or more a street pedler on the Bowery, where he sold souvenir buttons and various little trinkets. The old man appears to have been the victim of a harmless hallucination whereby he thought himself a person of Royal distinction and in his fancy converted the box of wares that he carried into Orders of Chivalry and decorations of Knighthood. The effect of this strange fancy was heightened by an attempt at military bearing which, comic though it was in so old and ragged a figure, was not without a touch of pathos. Some fancied resemblance to the former Kaiser had earned for Hohen the designation of the “Emperor” of which he appeared inordinately proud. But those who knew Hohen by sight assure us that the resemblance to the former ruler of Germany, who with all his faults made a splendid and imposing appearance, was of a purely superficial character. It would, alas! have been well for the world if the lot of William Hohenzollern had fallen on the lines of the simple and pathetic “Emperor” of the Bowery.

TOC     INDEX

With the Bolsheviks
in Berlin

Two years ago as my readers will remember – but of course they don’t – I made a secret visit to Germany during the height of the war. It was obviously quite impossible at that time to disclose the means whereby I made my way across the frontier. I therefore adopted the familiar literary device of professing to have been transported to Germany in a dream. In that state I was supposed to be conducted about the country by my friend Count Boob von Boobenstein, whom I had known years before as a waiter in Toronto, to see GERMANY FROM WITHIN, and to report upon it in the Allied press.

What I wrote attracted some attention. So the German Government – feeling, perhaps, that the prestige of their own spy system was at stake – published a white paper – or a green paper – I forget which – in denial of all my adventures and disclosures. In this they proved (1) that all entry into Germany by dreams had been expressly forbidden of the High General Command; (2) that astral bodies were prohibited and (3) that nobody else but the Kaiser was allowed to have visions. They claimed therefore (1) that my article was a fabrication and (2) that for all they knew it was humorous. There the matter ended until it can be taken up at the General Peace Table.

But as soon as I heard that the People’s Revolution had taken place in Berlin I determined to make a second visit.

This time I had no difficulty about the frontier whatever. I simply put on the costume of a British admiral and walked in.

“Three Cheers for the British Navy!” said the first official whom I met. He threw his hat in the air and the peasants standing about raised a cheer. It was my first view of the marvellous adaptability of this great people. I noticed that many of them were wearing little buttons with pictures of Jellicoe and Beatty.

At my own request I was conducted at once to the nearest railway station.

“So your Excellency wishes to go to Berlin?” said the stationmaster.

“Yes,” I replied, “I want to see something of the people’s revolution.”

The stationmaster looked at his watch.

“That Revolution is over,” he said.

“Too bad!” I exclaimed.

“Not at all. A much better one is in progress, quite the best Revolution that we have had. It is called – Johann, hand me that proclamation of yesterday – the Workmen and Soldiers Revolution.”

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“The basis of it,” said the stationmaster, “or what we Germans call the Fundamental Ground Foundation, is universal love. They hanged all the leaders of the Old Revolution yesterday.”

“When can I get a train?” I inquired.

“Your Excellency shall have a special train at once, Sir,” he continued with a sudden burst of feeling, while a tear swelled in his eye. “The sight of your uniform calls forth all our gratitude. My three sons enlisted in our German Navy. For four years they have been at Kiel, comfortably fed, playing dominos. They are now at home all safe and happy. Had your brave navy relaxed its vigilance for a moment those boys might have had to go out on the sea, a thing they had never done. Please God,” concluded the good old man, removing his hat a moment, “no German sailor now will ever have to go to sea.”

I pass over my journey to Berlin. Interesting and varied as were the scenes through which I passed they gave me but little light upon the true situation of the country: indeed I may say without exaggeration that they gave me as little – or even more so – as the press reports of our talented newspaper correspondents. The food situation seemed particularly perplexing. A well-to-do merchant from Bremen who travelled for some distance in my train assured me that there was plenty of food in Germany, except of course for the poor. Distress, he said, was confined entirely to these. Similarly a Prussian gentleman who looked very like a soldier, but who assured me with some heat that he was a commercial traveller, told me the same thing: There were no cases of starvation, he said, except among the very poor.

The aspect of the people too, at the stations and in the towns we passed, puzzled me. There were no uniforms, no soldiers. But I was amazed at the number of commercial travellers, Lutheran ministers, photographers, and so forth, and the odd resemblance they presented, in spite of their innocent costumes, to the arrogant and ubiquitous military officers whom I had observed on my former visit.

But I was too anxious to reach Berlin to pay much attention to the details of my journey.

Even when I at last reached the capital, I arrived as I had feared, too late.

“Your Excellency,” said a courteous official at the railway station, to whom my naval uniform acted as a sufficient passport. “The Revolution of which you speak is over. Its leaders were arrested yesterday. But you shall not be disappointed. There is a better one. It is called the Comrades’ Revolution of the Bolsheviks. The chief Executive was installed yesterday.”

“Would it be possible for me to see him?” I asked.

“Nothing simpler, Excellency,” he continued as a tear rose in his eye. “My four sons—”

“I know,” I said; “your four sons are in the German Navy. It is enough. Can you take me to the Leader?”

“I can and will,” said the official. “He is sitting now in the Free Palace of all the German People, once usurped by the Hohenzollern Tyrant. The doors are guarded by machine guns. But I can take you direct from here through a back way. Come.”

We passed out from the station, across a street and through a maze of little stairways, and passages into the heart of the great building that had been the offices of the Imperial Government.

“Enter this room. Do not knock,” said my guide. “Good bye.”

In another moment I found myself face to face with the chief comrade of the Bolsheviks.

He gave a sudden start as he looked at me, but instantly collected himself.

He was sitting with his big boots up on the mahogany desk, a cigar at an edgeways angle in his mouth. His hair under his sheepskin cap was shaggy, and his beard stubbly and unshaven. His dress was slovenly and there was a big knife in his belt. A revolver lay on the desk beside him. I had never seen a Bolshevik before but I knew at sight that he must be one.

“You say you were here in Berlin once before?” he questioned, and he added before I had time to answer: “When you speak don’t call me ‘Excellency’ or ‘Sereneness’ or anything of that sort; just call me ‘brother’ or ‘comrade.’ This is the era of freedom. You’re as good as I am, or nearly.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t be so damn polite,” he snarled. “No good comrade ever says ‘thank you.’ So you were here in Berlin before?”

“Yes,” I answered, “I was here writing up Germany from Within in the middle of the war.”

“The war, the war!” he murmured, in a sort of wail or whine. “Take notice, comrade, that I weep when I speak of it. If you write anything about me be sure to say that I cried when the war was mentioned. We Germans have been so misjudged. When I think of the devastation of France and Belgium I weep.”

He drew a greasy, red handkerchief from his pocket and began to sob. “To think of the loss of all those English merchant ships!”

“Oh, you needn’t worry,” I said, “it’s all going to be paid for.”

“Oh I hope so, I do hope so,” said the Bolshevik chief. “What a regret it is to us Germans to think that unfortunately we are not able to help pay for it; but you English – you are so generous – how much we have admired your noble hearts – so kind, so generous to the vanquished. . . .”

His voice had subsided into a sort of whine.

But at this moment there was a loud knocking at the door. The Bolshevik hastily wiped the tears from his face and put away his handkerchief.

“How do I look?” he asked anxiously. “Not humane, I hope? Not soft?”

“Oh, no,” I said, “quite tough.”

“That’s good,” he answered. “That’s good. But am I tough enough?”

He hastily shoved his hands through his hair.

“Quick,” he said, “hand me that piece of chewing tobacco. Now then. Come in!”

The door swung open.

A man in a costume much like the leader’s swaggered into the room. He had a bundle of papers in his hands, and seemed to be some sort of military secretary.

“Ha! comrade!” he said, with easy familiarity. “Here are the death warrants!”

“Death warrants!” said the Bolshevik. “Of the leaders of the late Revolution? Excellent! And a good bundle of them! One moment while I sign them.”

He began rapidly signing the warrants, one after the other.

“Comrade,” said the secretary in a surly tone, “you are not chewing tobacco!”

“Yes I am, yes I am,” said the leader, “or, at least, I was just going to.”

He bit a huge piece out of his plug, with what seemed to me an evident distaste, and began to chew furiously.

“It is well,” said the other. “Remember, comrade, that you are watched. It was reported last night to the Executive Committee of the Circle of the Brothers that you chewed no tobacco all day yesterday. Be warned, comrade. This is a free and independent republic. We will stand for no aristocratic nonsense. But whom have you here?” he added, breaking off in his speech, as if he noticed me for the first time. “What dog is this?”

“Hush,” said the leader, “he is a representative of the foreign press, a newspaper reporter.”

“Your pardon,” said the secretary. “I took you by your dress for a prince. A representative of the great and enlightened press of the Allies, I presume. How deeply we admire in Germany the press of England! Let me kiss you.”

“Oh, don’t trouble,” I said, “it’s not worth while.”

“Say, at least, when you write to your paper, that I offered to kiss you, will you not?”

Meantime, the leader had finished signing the papers. The secretary took them and swung on his heels with something between a military bow and a drunken swagger. “Remember, comrade,” he said in a threatening tone as he passed out, “you are watched.”

The Bolshevik leader looked after him with something of a shudder.

“Excuse me a moment,” he said, “while I go and get rid of this tobacco.”

He got up from his chair and walked away towards the door of an inner room. As he did so, there struck me something strangely familiar in his gait and figure. Conceal it as he might, there was still the stiff wooden movement of a Prussian general beneath his assumed swagger. The poise of his head still seemed to suggest the pointed helmet of the Prussian. I could without effort imagine a military cloak about his shoulders instead of his Bolshevik sheepskin.

Then, all in a moment, as he re-entered the room, I recalled exactly who he was.

“My friend,” I said, reaching out my hand, “pardon me for not knowing you at once. I recognize you now. . . .”

“Hush,” said the Bolshevik. “Don’t speak! I never saw you in my life.”

“Nonsense,” I said, “I knew you years ago in Canada when you were disguised as a waiter. And you it was who conducted me through Germany two years ago when I made my war visit. You are no more a Bolshevik than I am. You are General Count Boob von Boobenstein.”

The general sank down in his chair, his face pale beneath its plaster of rouge.

“Hush!” he said. “If they learn it, it is death.”

“My dear Boob,” I said, “not a word shall pass my lips.”

The general grasped my hand. “The true spirit,” he said, “the true English comradeship; how deeply we admire it in Germany!”

“I am sure you do,” I answered. “But tell me, what is the meaning of all this? Why are you a Bolshevik?”

“We all are,” said the count, dropping his assumed rough voice, and speaking in a tone of quiet melancholy. “It’s the only thing to be. But come,” he added, getting up from his chair, “I took you once through Berlin in war time. Let me take you out again and show you Berlin under the Bolsheviks.”

“I shall be only too happy,” I said.

“I shall leave my pistols and knives here,” said Boobenstein, “and if you will excuse me I shall change my costume a little. To appear as I am would excite too much enthusiasm. I shall walk out with you in the simple costume of a gentleman. It’s a risky thing to do in Berlin, but I’ll chance it.”

The count retired, and presently returned dressed in the quiet bell-shaped purple coat, the simple scarlet tie, the pea-green hat and the white spats that mark the German gentleman all the world over.

“Bless me, Count,” I said, “you look just like Bernstorff.”

“Hush,” said the count. “Don’t mention him. He’s here in Berlin.”

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“He’s a Bolshevik; one of our leaders; he’s just been elected president of the Scavengers Union. They say he’s the very man for it. But come along, and, by the way, when we get into the street talk English and only English. There’s getting to be a prejudice here against German.”

We passed out of the door and through the spacious corridors and down the stairways of the great building. All about were little groups of ferocious looking men, dressed like stage Russians, all chewing tobacco and redolent of alcohol.

“Who are all these people?” I said to the count in a low voice.

“Bolsheviks,” he whispered. “At least they aren’t really. You see that group in the corner?”

“The ones with the long knives,” I said.

“Yes. They are, or at least they were, the orchestra of the Berlin Opera. They are now the Bolshevik Music Commission. They are here this morning to see about getting their second violinist hanged.”

“Why not the first?” I asked.

“They had him hanged yesterday. Both cases are quite clear. The men undoubtedly favoured the war: one, at least, of them openly spoke in disparagement of President Wilson. But come along. Let me show you our new city.”

We stepped out upon the great square which faced the building. How completely it was changed from the Berlin that I had known! My attention was at once arrested by the new and glaring signboards at the shops and hotels, and the streamers with mottos suspended across the streets. I realized as I read them the marvellous adaptability of the German people and their magnanimity towards their enemies. Conspicuous in huge lettering was HOTEL PRESIDENT WILSON, and close beside it CABARET QUEEN MARY: ENGLISH DANCING. The square itself, which I remembered as the Kaiserplatz, was now renamed on huge signboards GRAND SQUARE OF THE BRITISH NAVY. Not far off one noticed the RESTAURANT MARSHAL FOCH, side by side with the ROOSEVELT SALOON and the BEER GARDEN GEORGE V.

But the change in the appearance and costume of the men who crowded the streets was even more notable. The uniforms and the pointed helmets of two years ago had vanished utterly. The men that one saw retained indeed their German stoutness, their flabby faces, and their big spectacles. But they were now dressed for the most part in the costume of the Russian Monjik, while some of them appeared in American wideawakes and Kentucky frock coats, or in English stove-pipe hats and morning coats. A few of the stouter were in Highland costume.

“You are amazed,” said Boobenstein as we stood a moment looking at the motley crowd.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“One moment,” said the count. “I will first summon a taxi. It will be more convenient to talk as we ride.”

He whistled and there presently came lumbering to our side an ancient and decrepit vehicle which would have excited my laughter but for the seriousness of the count’s face. The top of the conveyance had evidently long since been tom off leaving, only the frame: the copper fastenings had been removed: the tires were gone: the doors were altogether missing.

“Our new 1919 model,” said the count. “Observe the absence of the old-fashioned rubber tires, still used by the less progressive peoples. Our chemists found that riding on rubber was bad for the eye-sight. Note, too, the time saved by not having any doors.”

“Admirable,” I said.

We seated ourselves in the crazy conveyance, the count whispered to the chauffeur an address which my ear failed to catch and we started off at a lumbering pace along the street.

“And now tell me, Boobenstein,” I said, “what does it all mean, the foreign signs and the strange costumes?”

“My dear sir,” he replied, “it is merely a further proof of our German adaptability. Having failed to conquer the world by war we now propose to conquer it by the arts of peace: Those people, for example, that you see in Scotch costumes are members of our Highland Mission about to start for Scotland to carry to the Scotch the good news that the war is a thing of the past, that the German people forgive all wrongs and are prepared to offer a line of manufactured goods as per catalogue sample.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

“Is it not?” said Von Boobenstein. “We call it the From Germany Out movement. It is being organised in great detail by our Step from Under Committee. They claim that already four million German voters are pledged to forget the war and to forgive the Allies. All that we now ask is to be able to put our hands upon the villains who made this war, no matter how humble their station may be, and execute them after a fair trial or possibly before.”

The count spoke with great sincerity and earnestness. “But come along,” he added. “I want to drive you about the city and show you a few of the leading features of our new national reconstruction. We can talk as we go”.

“But Von Boobenstein,” I said, “you speak of the people who made the war; surely you were all in favour of it?”

“In favour of it! We were all against it.”

“But the Kaiser,” I protested.

“The Kaiser, my poor master! How he worked to prevent the war! Day and night; even before anybody else had heard of it. ‘Boob,’ he said to me one day with tears in his eyes, ‘this war must be stopped,’ ‘Which war, your Serenity,’ I asked. ‘The war that is coming next month,’ he answered, ‘I look to you, Count Boobenstein,’ he continued, ‘to bear witness that I am doing my utmost to stop it a month before the English Government has heard of it.’”

While we were thus speaking our taxi had taken us out of the roar and hubbub of the main thoroughfare into the quiet of a side street. It now drew up at the door of an unpretentious dwelling in the window of which I observed a large printed card with the legend

REVEREND MR. TIBBITS

Private Tuition, English,
Navigation, and other Branches

We entered and were shown by a servant into a little front room where a venerable looking gentleman, evidently a Lutheran minister, was seated in a corner at a writing table. He turned on our entering and at the sight of the uniform which I wore jumped to his feet with a vigorous and unexpected oath.

“It is all right, Admiral,” said Count Von Boobenstein. “My friend is not really a sailor.”

“Ah!” said the other. “You must excuse me. The sight of that uniform always gives me the jumps.”

He came forward to shake hands and as the light fell upon him I recognized the grand old seaman, perhaps the greatest sailor that Germany has ever produced or ever will, Admiral Von Tirpitz.

“My dear Admiral!” I said, warmly. “I thought you were out of the country. Our papers said that you had gone to Switzerland for a rest.”

“No,” said the Admiral. “I regret to say that I find it impossible to get away.”

“Your Allied press,” interjected the count, “has greatly maligned our German patriots by reporting that they have left the country. Where better could they trust themselves than in the bosom of their own people? You noticed the cabman of our taxi? He was the former chancellor Von Hertling. You saw that stout woman with the apple cart at the street corner? Frau Bertha Krupp Von Bohlen. All are here, helping to make the new Germany. But come, Admiral, our visitor here is much interested in our plans for the restoration of the Fatherland. I thought that you might care to show him your designs for the new German Navy.”

“A new navy!” I exclaimed, while my voice showed the astonishment and admiration that I felt. Here was this gallant old seaman, having just lost an entire navy, setting vigorously to work to make another. “But how can Germany possibly find the money in her present state for the building of new ships?”

“There are not going to be any ships,” said the great admiral. “That was our chief mistake in the past in insisting on having ships in the navy. Ships, as the war has shown us, are quite unnecessary to the German plan; they are not part of what I may call the German idea. The new navy will be built inland and elevated on piles and will consist—”

But at this moment a great noise of shouting and sudden tumult could be heard as if from the street.

“Some one is coming,” said the admiral hastily. “Reach me my Bible.”

“No, no,” said the count, seizing me by the arm. “The sound comes from the Great Square. There is trouble. We must hasten back at once.”

He dragged me from the house.

We perceived at once, as soon as we came into the main street again, from the excited demeanour of the crowd and from the anxious faces of people running to and fro that something of great moment must be happening.

Everybody was asking of the passer-by, “What is loose? What is it?” Ramshackle taxis, similar to the one in which we had driven, forced their way as best they could through the crowded thoroughfare, moving evidently in the direction of the government buildings.

“Hurry, hurry!” said Von Boobenstein, clutching me by the arm, “or we shall be too late. It is as I feared.”

“What is it?” I said; “what’s the matter?”

“Fool that I was,” said the count, “to leave the building. I should have known. And in this costume I am helpless.”

We made our way as best we could through the crowd of people, who all seemed moving in the same direction, the count, evidently a prey to the gravest anxiety, talking as if to himself and imprecating his own carelessness.

We turned the corner of a street and reached the edge of the great square. It was filled with a vast concourse of people. At the very moment in which we reached it a great burst of cheering rose from the crowd. We could see over the heads of the people that a man had appeared on the balcony of the Government Building, holding a paper in his hand. His appearance was evidently a signal for the outburst of cheers, accompanied by the waving of handkerchiefs. The man raised his hand in a gesture of authority. German training is deep. Silence fell instantly upon the assembled populace. We had time in the momentary pause to examine, as closely as the distance permitted, the figure upon the balcony. The man was dressed in the blue overall suit of a workingman. He was bare-headed. His features, so far as we could tell, were those of a man well up in years, but his frame was rugged and powerful. Then he began to speak.

“Friends and comrades!” he called out in a great voice that resounded through the square. “I have to announce that a New Revolution has been completed.”

A wild cheer woke from the people.

“The Bolsheviks’ Republic is overthrown. The Bolsheviks are aristocrats. Let them die.”

“Thank Heaven for this costume!” I heard Count Boobenstein murmur at my side. Then he seized his pea-green hat and waved it in the air, shouting: “Down with the Bolsheviks!”

All about us the cry was taken up.

One saw everywhere in the crowd men pulling off their sheepskin coats and tramping them under foot with the shout, “Down with Bolshevism!” To my surprise I observed that most of the men had on blue overalls beneath their Russian costumes. In a few moments the crowd seemed transformed into a vast mass of mechanics.

The speaker raised his hand again. “We have not yet decided what the new Government will be”—

A great cheer from the people.

“Nor do we propose to state who will be the leaders of it.”

Renewed cheers.

“But this much we can say. It is to be a free, universal, Pan-German Government of love.”

Cheers.

“Meantime, be warned. Whoever speaks against it will be shot: anybody who dares to lift a finger will be hanged. A proclamation of Brotherhood will be posted all over the city. If anybody dares to touch it, or to discuss it, or to look at or to be seen reading it, he will be hanged to a lamp post.”

Loud applause greeted this part of the speech while the faces of the people, to my great astonishment, seemed filled with genuine relief and beamed with unmistakable enthusiasm.

“And now,” continued the speaker, “I command you, you dogs, to disperse quietly and go home. Move quickly, swine that you are, or we shall open fire upon you with machine guns.”

With a last outburst of cheering the crowd broke and dispersed, like a vast theatre audience. On all sides were expressions of joy and satisfaction. “Excellent, wunderschön!” “He calls us dogs! That’s splendid. Swine! Did you hear him say ‘Swine’? This is true German Government again at last.”

Then just for a moment the burly figure reappeared on the balcony.

“A last word!” he called to the departing crowd. “I omitted to say that all but one of the leaders of the late government are already caught. As soon as we can lay our thumb on the Chief Executive rest assured that he will be hanged.”

“Hurrah!” shouted Boobenstein, waving his hat in the air. Then in a whisper to me: “Let us go,” he said, “while the going is still good.”

We hastened as quickly and unobtrusively as we could through the dispersing multitude, turned into a side street, and on a sign from the count entered a small cabaret or drinking shop, newly named, as its sign showed, THE GLORY OF THE BRITISH COLONIES CAFÉ.

The count with a deep sigh of relief ordered wine.

“You recognized him, of course?” he said.

“Who?” I asked. “You mean the big workingman that spoke? Who is he?”

“So you didn’t recognize him?” said the count. “Well, well, but of course all the rest did. Workingman! It is Field Marshal Hindenburg. It means of course that the same old crowd are back again. That was Ludendorf standing below. I saw it all at once. Perhaps it is the only way. But as for me I shall not go back: I am too deeply compromised: it would be death.”

Boobenstein remained for a time in deep thought, his fingers beating a tattoo on the little table. Then he spoke.

“Do you remember,” he said, “the old times of long ago when you first knew me?”

“Very well, indeed,” I answered. “You were one of the German waiters, or rather, one of the German officers disguised as waiters at McConkey’s Restaurant in Toronto.”

“I was,” said the count. “I carried the beer on a little tray and opened oysters behind a screen. It was a wunderschön life. Do you think, my good friend, you could get me that job again?”

“Boobenstein,” I exclaimed, “I can get you reinstated at once. It will be some small return for your kindness to me in Germany.”

“Good,” said the count. “Let us sail at once for Canada.”

“One thing, however,” I said. “You may not know that since you left there are no longer beer waiters in Toronto because there is no beer. All is forbidden.”

“Let me understand myself,” said the count in astonishment. “No beer!”

“None whatever.”

“Wine, then?”

“Absolutely not. All drinking, except of water, is forbidden.”

The count rose and stood erect. His figure seemed to regain all its old-time Prussian rigidity. He extended his hand.

“My friend,” he said. “I bid you farewell.”

“Where are you going to?” I asked.

“My choice is made,” said Von Boobenstein. “There are worse things than death. I am about to surrender myself to the German authorities.”

TOC     INDEX

Afternoon Tea
with the Sultan

A Study of Reconstruction
in Turkey

On the very day following the events related in the last chapter, I was surprised and delighted to receive a telegram which read “Come on to Constantinople and write us up too.” From the signature I saw that the message was from my old friend Abdul Aziz the Sultan.

I had visited him – as of course my readers will instantly recollect – during the height of the war, and the circumstances of my departure had been such that I should have scarcely ventured to repeat my visit without this express invitation. But on receipt of it, I set out at once by rail for Constantinople.

I was delighted to find that under the new order of things in going from Berlin to Constantinople it was no longer necessary to travel through the barbarous and brutal populations of Germany, Austria and Hungary. The way now runs, though I believe the actual railroad is the same, through the Thuringian Republic, Czecho-Slovakia and Magyaria. It was a source of deep satisfaction to see the scowling and hostile countenances of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians replaced by the cheerful and honest faces of the Thuringians, the Czecho-Slovaks and the Magyarians. Moreover I was assured on all sides that if these faces are not perfectly satisfactory, they will be altered in any way required.

It was very pleasant, too, to find myself once again in the flagstoned halls of the Yildiz Kiosk, the Sultan’s palace. My little friend Abdul Aziz rose at once from his cushioned divan under a lemon tree and came shuffling in his big slippers to meet me, a smile of welcome on his face. He seemed, to my surprise, radiant with happiness. The disasters attributed by the allied press to his unhappy country appeared to sit lightly on the little man.

“How is everything going in Turkey?” I asked as we sat down side by side on the cushions.

“Splendid,” said Abdul. “I suppose you’ve heard that we’re bankrupt?”

“Bankrupt!” I exclaimed.

“Yes,” continued the Sultan, rubbing his hands together with positive enjoyment, “we can’t pay a cent: isn’t it great? Have some champagne?”

He clapped his hands together and a turbaned attendant appeared with wine on a tray which he served into long-necked glasses.

“I’d rather have tea,” I said.

“No, no, don’t take tea,” he protested. “We’ve practically cut out afternoon tea here. It’s part of our Turkish thrift movement. We’re taking champagne instead. Tell me, have you a Thrift Movement like that, where you come from – Canada, I think it is, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I answered, “we have one just like that.”

“This war finance is glorious stuff, isn’t it?” continued the Sultan. “How much do you think we owe?”

“I haven’t an idea,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” said Abdul. He touched a bell and at the sound of it there came shuffling into the room my venerable old acquaintance Toomuch Koffi, the Royal Secretary. But to my surprise he no longer wore his patriarchal beard, his flowing robe and his girdle. He was clean shaven and close cropped and dressed in a short jacket like an American bell boy.

“You remember Toomuch, I think,” said Abdul. “I’ve reconstructed him a little, as you see.”

“The Peace of Allah be upon thine head,” said Toomuch Koffi to the Sultan, commencing a deep salaam. “What wish sits behind thy forehead that thou shouldst ring the bell for this humble creature of clay to come into the sunlight of thy presence? Tell me, O Lord, if perchance——”

“Here, here,” interrupted the Sultan impatiently, “cut all that stuff out, please. That ancient courtesy business won’t do, not if this country is to reconstruct itself and come abreast of the great modern democracies. Say to me simply ‘What’s the trouble?’”

Toomuch bowed, and Abdul continued. “Look in your tablets and see how much our public debt amounts to in American dollars.”

The secretary drew forth his tablets and bowed his head a moment in some perplexity over the figures that were scribbled on them. “Multiplication,” I heard him murmur, “is an act of the grace of heaven; let me invoke a blessing on five, the perfect number, whereby the Pound Turkish is distributed into the American dollar.”

He remained for a few moments with his eyes turned, as if in supplication, towards the vaulted ceiling.

“Have you got it?” asked Abdul.

“Yes.”

“And what do we owe, adding it all together?”

“Forty billion dollars,” said Toomuch.

“Isn’t that wonderful!” exclaimed Abdul, with delight radiating over his countenance. “Who would have thought that before the war! Forty billion dollars! Aren’t we the financiers! Aren’t we the bulwark of monetary power! Can you touch that in Canada?”

“No,” I said, “we can’t. We don’t owe two billion yet.”

“Oh, never mind, never mind,” said the little man in a consoling tone. “You are only a young country yet. You’ll do better later on. And in any case I am sure you are just as proud of your one billion as we are of our forty.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “we certainly are.”

“Come, come, that’s something anyway. You’re on the right track, and you must not be discouraged if you’re not up to the Turkish standard yet. You must remember, as I told you before, that Turkey leads the world in all ideas of government and finance. Take the present situation. Here we are, bankrupt – pass me the champagne, Toomuch, and sit down with us – the very first nation of the lot. It’s a great feather in the cap of our financiers. It gives us a splendid start for the new era of reconstruction that we are beginning on. As you perhaps have heard we are all hugely busy about it. You notice by books and papers, do you not?” the Sultan added very proudly, waving his hand towards a great pile of blue books, pamphlets and documents that were heaped upon the floor beside him.

“Why! I never knew before that you ever read anything!” I exclaimed in amazement.

“Never did. But everything’s changed now, isn’t it, Toomuch? I sit and work here for hours every morning. It’s become a delight to me. After all,” said Abdul, lighting a big cigar and sticking up his feet on his pile of papers with an air of the deepest comfort, “what is there like work? So stimulating, so satisfying. I sit here working away, just like this, most of the day. There’s nothing like it.”

“What are you working at?” I asked.

“Reconstruction,” said the little man, puffing a big cloud from his cigar, “reconstruction.”

“What kind of reconstruction?”

“All kinds – financial, industrial, political, social. It’s great stuff. By the way,” he continued with great animation, “would you like to be my Minister of Labour? No? Well, I’m sorry. I half hoped you would. We’re having no luck with them. The last one was thrown into the Bosphorous on Monday. Here’s the report on it – no, that’s the one on the shooting of the Minister of Religion – ah! here it is – Report on the Drowning of the Minister of Labour. Let me read you a bit of this: I call this one of the best reports, of its kind, that have come in.”

“No, no,” I said, “don’t bother to read it. Just tell me who did it and why.”

“Workingmen,” said the Sultan, very cheerfully, “a delegation. They withheld their reasons.”

“So you are having labour troubles here too?” I asked.

“Labour troubles!” exclaimed the little Sultan rolling up his eyes. “I should say so. The whole of Turkey is bubbling with labour unrest like the rosewater in a narghile. Look at your tablets, Toomuch, and tell me what new strikes there have been this morning.”

The aged Secretary fumbled with his notes and began to murmur – “Truly will I try with the aid of Allah—”

“Now, now,” said Abdul, warningly, “that won’t do. Say simply ‘Sure.’ Now tell me.”

The Secretary looked at a little list and read: “The strikes of today comprise – the wigmakers, the dog fanciers, the conjurers, the snake charmers, and the soothsayers.”

“You hear that,” said Abdul proudly. “That represents some of the most skilled labour in Turkey.”

“I suppose it does,” I said, “but tell me, Abdul – what about the really necessary trades, the coal miners, the steel workers, the textile operatives, the farmers, and the railway people. Are they working?”

The little Sultan threw himself back on his cushions in a paroxysm of laughter, in which even his ancient Secretary was feign to join.

“My dear sir, my dear sir!” he laughed, “don’t make me die of laughter. Working! those people working! Surely you don’t think we are so behind hand in Turkey as all that! All those workers stopped absolutely months ago. It is doubtful if they’ll ever work again. There’s a strong movement in Turkey to abolish all necessary work altogether.”

“But who then,” I asked, “is working?”

“Look on the tablets, Toomuch, and see.”

The aged Secretary bowed, turned over the leaves of his “tablets,” which I now perceived on a closer view to be merely an American ten cent memorandum book. Then he read:

“The following, O all highest, still work – the beggars, the poets, the missionaries, the Salvation Army, and the instructors of the Youths of Light in the American Presbyterian College.”

“But, dear me, Abdul,” I exclaimed, “surely this situation is desperate? What can your nation subsist on in such a situation?”

“Pooh, pooh,” said the Sultan. “The interest on our debt alone is two billion a year. Everybody in Turkey, great or small, holds bonds to some extent. At the worst they can all live fairly well on the interest. This is finance, is it not, Toomuch Koffi?”

“The very best and latest,” said the aged man with a profound salaam.

“But what steps are you taking,” I asked, “to remedy your labour troubles?”

“We are appointing commissions,” said Abdul. “We appoint one for each new labour problem. How many yesterday, Toomuch?”

“Forty-three,” answered the secretary.

“That’s below our average, is it not?” said Abdul a little anxiously. “Try to keep it up to fifty if you can.”

“And these commissions, what do they do?”

“They make Reports,” said Abdul, beginning to yawn as if the continued brain exercise of conversation were fatiguing his intellect, “excellent reports. We have had some that are said to be perfect models of the very best Turkish.”

“And what do they recommend?”

“I don’t know,” said the Sultan. “We don’t read them for that. We like to read them simply as Turkish.”

“But what,” I urged, “do you do with them? What steps do you take?”

“We send them all,” replied the little man, puffing at his pipe and growing obviously drowsy as he spoke, “to Woodrow Wilson. He can deal with them. He is the great conciliator of the world. Let him have – how do you say it in English, it is a Turkish phrase – let him have his stomach full of conciliation.”

Abdul dozed on his cushions for a moment. Then he reopened his eyes. “Is there anything else you want to know,” he asked, “before I retire to the Inner Harem?”

“Just one thing,” I said, “if you don’t mind. How do you stand internationally? Are you coming into the New League of Nations?”

The Sultan shook his head.

“No,” he said, “we’re not coming in. We are starting a new league of our own.”

“And who are in it?”

“Ourselves, and the Armenians – and let me see – the Irish, are they not, Toomuch – and the Bulgarians – are there any others, Toomuch?”

“There is talk,” said the Secretary “of the Yugo-Hebrovians and the Scaroovians—”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” said Abdul, testily. “They wrote to us. They seem all right. Haven’t you got a lot of people in your league that you never heard of?”

“I see,” I said, “and what is the scheme that your league is formed on?”

“Very simple,” said the Sultan. “Each member of the league gives its word to all the other members. Then they all take an oath together. Then they all sign it. That is absolutely binding.”

He rolled back on his cushions in an evident state of boredom and weariness.

“But surely,” I protested, “you don’t think that a league of that sort can keep the peace?”

“Peace!” exclaimed Abdul waking into sudden astonishment. “Peace! I should think not! Our league is for war. Every member gives its word that at the first convenient opportunity it will knock the stuff out of any of the others that it can.”

The little Sultan again subsided. Then he rose, with some difficulty, from his cushions.

“Toomuch,” he said, “take our inquisitive friend out into the town; take him to the Bosphorous; take him to the island where the dogs are; take him anywhere.” He paused to whisper a few instructions into the ear of the Secretary. “You understand” he said, “well, take him. As for me,” – he gave a great yawn as he shuffled away, “I am about to withdraw into my Inner Harem. Goodbye. I regret that I cannot invite you in.”

“So do I,” I said. “Goodbye.”

TOC     INDEX

Echoes of the War

The Boy Who Came Back

The war is over. The soldiers are coming home. On all sides we are assured that the problem of the returned soldier is the gravest of our national concerns.

So I may say it without fear of contradiction – since everybody else has seen it – that, up to the present time, the returned soldier is a disappointment. He is not turning out as he ought. According to all the professors of psychology he was to come back bloodthirsty and brutalized, soaked in militarism and talking only of slaughter. In fact, a widespread movement had sprung up, warmly supported by the business men of the cities, to put him on the land. It was thought that central Nevada or northern Idaho would do nicely for him. At the same time an agitation had been started among the farmers, with the slogan “Back to the city,” the idea being that farm life was so rough that it was not fair to ask the returned soldier to share it.

All these anticipations turn out to be quite groundless.

The first returned soldier of whom I had direct knowledge was my nephew Tom. When he came back, after two years in the trenches, we asked him to dine with us. “Now, remember,” I said to my wife, “Tom will be a very different being from what he was when he went away. He left us as little more than a school boy, only in his first year at college; in fact, a mere child. You remember how he used to bore us with baseball talk and that sort of thing. And how shy he was! You recall his awful fear of Professor Razzler, who used to teach him mathematics. All that, of course, will be changed now. Tom will have come back a man. We must ask the old professor to meet him. It will amuse Tom to see him again. Just think of the things he must have seen! But we must be a little careful at dinner not to let him horrify the other people with brutal details of the war.”

Tom came. I had expected him to arrive in uniform with his pocket full of bombs. Instead of this he wore ordinary evening dress with a dinner jacket. I realized as I helped him to take off his overcoat in the hall that he was very proud of his dinner jacket. He had never had one before. He said he wished the “boys” could see him in it. I asked him why he had put off his lieutenant’s uniform so quickly. He explained that he was entitled not to wear it as soon as he had his discharge papers signed; some of the fellows, he said, kicked them off as soon as they left the ship, but the rule was, he told me, that you had to wear the thing till your papers were signed.

Then his eye caught a glimpse sideways of Professor Razzler standing on the hearth rug in the drawing room. “Say,” he said, “is that the professor?” I could see that Tom was scared. All the signs of physical fear were written on his face. When I tried to lead him into the drawing room I realized that he was as shy as ever. Three of the women began talking to him all at once. Tom answered, yes or no – with his eyes down. I liked the way he stood, though, so unconsciously erect and steady. The other men who came in afterwards, with easy greetings and noisy talk, somehow seemed loud-voiced and self-assertive.

Tom, to my surprise, refused a cocktail. It seems, as he explained, that he “got into the way of taking nothing over there.” I noticed that my friend Quiller, who is a war correspondent, or, I should say, a war editorial writer, took three cocktails and talked all the more brilliantly for it through the opening courses of the dinner, about the story of the smashing of the Hindenburg line. He decided, after his second Burgundy, that it had been simply a case of sticking it out. I say “Burgundy” because we had substituted Burgundy, the sparkling kind, for champagne at our dinners as one of our little war economies.

Tom had nothing to say about the Hindenburg line. In fact, for the first half of the dinner he hardly spoke. I think he was worried about his left hand. There is a deep furrow across the back of it where a piece of shrapnel went through and there are two fingers that will hardly move at all. I could see that he was ashamed of its clumsiness and afraid that someone might notice it. So he kept silent. Professor Razzler did indeed ask him straight across the table what he thought about the final breaking of the Hindenburg line. But he asked it with that same fierce look from under his bushy eyebrows with which he used to ask Tom to define the path of a tangent, and Tom was rattled at once. He answered something about being afraid that he was not well posted, owing to there being so little chance over there to read the papers.

After that Professor Razzler and Mr. Quiller discussed for us, most energetically, the strategy of the Lorraine sector (Tom served there six months, but he never said so) and high explosives and the possibilities of aërial bombs. (Tom was “buried” by an aërial bomb but, of course, he didn’t break in and mention it.)

But we did get him talking of the war at last, towards the end of the dinner; or rather, the girl sitting next to him did, and presently the rest of us found ourselves listening. The strange thing was that the girl was a mere slip of a thing, hardly as old as Tom himself. In fact, my wife was almost afraid she might be too young to ask to dinner: girls of that age, my wife tells me, have hardly sense enough to talk to men, and fail to interest them. This is a proposition which I think it better not to dispute.

But at any rate we presently realized that Tom was talking about his war experiences and the other talk about the table was gradually hushed into listening.

This, as nearly as I can set it down, is what he told us: That the French fellows picked up baseball in a way that is absolutely amazing; they were not much good, it seems, at the bat, at any rate not at first, but at running bases they were perfect marvels; some of the French made good pitchers, too; Tom knew a poilu who had lost his right arm who could pitch as good a ball with his left as any man on the American side; at the port where Tom first landed and where they trained for a month they had a dandy ball ground, a regular peach, a former parade ground of the French barracks. On being asked which port it was, Tom said he couldn’t remember; he thought it was either Boulogne or Bordeaux or Brest – at any rate, it was one of those places on the English channel. The ball ground they had behind the trenches was not so good; it was too much cut up by long range shells. But the ball ground at the base hospital (where Tom was sent for his second wound) was an A1 ground. The French doctors, it appears, were perfectly rotten at baseball, not a bit like the soldiers. Tom wonders that they kept them. Tom says that baseball had been tried among the German prisoners, but they are perfect dubs. He doubts whether the Germans will ever be able to play ball. They lack the national spirit. On the other hand, Tom thinks that the English will play a great game when they really get into it. He had two weeks leave in London and went to see the game that King George was at, and says that the King, if they will let him, will make the greatest rooter of the whole bunch.

Such was Tom’s war talk.

It grieved me to note that as the men sat smoking their cigars and drinking liqueur whiskey (we have cut out port at our house till the final peace is signed) Tom seemed to have subsided into being only a boy again, a first-year college boy among his seniors. They spoke to him in quite a patronising way, and even asked him two or three direct questions about fighting in the trenches, and wounds and the dead men in No Man’s Land and the other horrors that the civilian mind hankers to hear about. Perhaps they thought, from the boy’s talk, that he had seen nothing. If so, they were mistaken. For about three minutes, not more, Tom gave them what was coming to them. He told them, for example, why he trained his “fellows” to drive the bayonet through the stomach and not through the head, that the bayonet driven through the face or skull sticks and – but there is no need to recite it here. Any of the boys like Tom can tell it all to you, only they don’t want to and don’t care to.

They’ve got past it.

But I noticed that as the boy talked – quietly and reluctantly enough – the older men fell silent and looked into his face with the realisation that behind his simple talk and quiet manner lay an inward vision of grim and awful realities that no words could picture.

I think that they were glad when we joined the ladies again and when Tom talked of the amateur vaudeville show that his company had got up behind the trenches.

Later on, when the other guests were telephoning for their motors and calling up taxis, Tom said he’d walk to his hotel; it was only a mile and the light rain that was falling would do him, he said, no harm at all. So he trudged off, refusing a lift.

Oh, no, I don’t think we need to worry about the returned soldier. Only let him return, that’s all. When he does, he’s a better man than we are, Gunga Dinn.

TOC     INDEX

The War Sacrifices
of Mr. Spugg

Although we had been members of the same club for years, I only knew Mr. Spugg by sight until one afternoon when I heard him saying that he intended to send his chauffeur to the war.

It was said quite quietly – no bombast or boasting about it. Mr. Spugg was standing among a little group of listening members of the club and when he said that he had decided to send his chauffeur, he spoke with a kind of simple earnestness, a determination that marks the character of the man.

“Yes,” he said, “we need all the man power we can command. This thing has come to a showdown and we’ve got to recognise it. I told Henry that it’s a showdown and that he’s to get ready and start right away.”

“Well, Spugg,” said one of the members, “you’re certainly setting us a fine example.”

“What else can a man do?” said Mr. Spugg.

“When does your chauffeur leave?” asked another man.

“Right away. I want him in the firing line just as quick as I can get him there.”

“It’s a fine thing you’re doing, Spugg,” said a third member, “but do you realize that your chauffeur may be killed?”

“I must take my chance on that,” answered Mr. Spugg, firmly. “I’ve thought this thing out and made up my mind: If my chauffeur is killed, I mean to pay for him – full and adequate compensation. The loss must fall on me, not on him. Or, say Henry comes back mutilated – say he loses a leg – say he loses two legs—”

Here Mr. Spugg looked about him at his listeners, with a look that meant that even three legs wouldn’t be too much for him.

“Whatever Henry loses I pay for. The loss shall fall on me, every cent of it.”

“Spugg,” said a quiet looking, neatly dressed man whom I knew to be the president of an insurance company and who reached out and shook the speaker by the hand, “this is a fine thing you’re doing, a big thing. But we mustn’t let you do it alone. Let our company take a hand in it. We’re making a special rate now on chauffeurs, footmen, and house-servants sent to the war, quite below the rate that actuarial figures justify. It is our little war contribution,” he added modestly. “We like to feel that we’re doing our bit, too. We had a chauffeur killed last week. We paid for him right off without demur – waived all question of who killed him. I never signed a check (as I took occasion to say in a little note I wrote to his people) with greater pleasure.”

“What do you do if Henry’s mutilated?” asked Mr. Spugg, turning his quiet eyes on the insurance man and facing the brutal facts of things without flinching. “What do you pay? Suppose I lose the use of Henry’s legs, what then?”

“It’s all right,” said his friend. “Leave it to us. Whatever he loses, we make it good.”

“All right,” said Spugg, “send me round a policy. I’m going to see Henry clear through on this.”

It was at this point that at my own urgent request I was introduced to Mr. Spugg, so that I might add my congratulations to those of the others. I told him that I felt, as all the other members of the club did, that he was doing a big thing, and he answered again, in his modest way, that he didn’t see what else a man could do.

“My son Alfred and I,” he said, “talked it over last night and we agreed that we can run the car ourselves, or make a shot at it anyway. After all, it’s war time.”

“What branch of the service are you putting your chauffeur in?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” he answered. “I think I’ll send him up in the air. It’s dangerous, of course, but it’s no time to think about that.”

So, in due time, Mr. Spugg’s chauffeur, Henry, went overseas. He was reported first as in England. Next he was right at the front, at the very firing itself. We knew then – everybody in the club knew that Mr. Spugg’s chauffeur might be killed at any moment. But great as the strain must have been, Spugg went up and down to his office and in and out of the club without a tremor. The situation gave him a new importance in our eyes, something tense.

“This seems to be a terrific business,” I said to him one day at lunch, “this new German drive.”

“My chauffeur,” said Mr. Spugg, “was right in the middle of it.”

“He was, eh?”

“Yes,” he continued, “one shell burst in the air so near him it almost broke his wings.”

Mr. Spugg told this with no false boasting or bravado, eating his celery as he spoke of it. Here was a man who had nearly had his chauffeur’s wings blown off and yet he never moved a muscle. I began to realize the kind of resolute stuff that the man was made of.

A few days later bad news came to the club.

“Have you heard the bad news about Spugg?” someone asked.

“No, what?”

“His chauffeur’s been gassed.”

“How is he taking it?”

“Fine. He’s sending off his gardener to take the chauffeur’s place.”

So that was Mr. Spugg’s answer to the Germans.

We lunched together that day.

“Yes,” he said, “Henry’s gassed. How it happened I don’t know. He must have come down out of the air. I told him I wanted him in the air. But let it pass. It’s done now.”

“And you’re sending your gardener?”

“I am,” said Spugg. “He’s gone already. I called him in from the garden yesterday. I said, ‘William, Henry’s been gassed. Our first duty is to keep up our man power at the front. You must leave tonight.’”

“What are you putting William into?” I asked.

“Infantry. He’ll do best in the trenches – digs well and is a very fair shot. Anyway I want him to see all the fighting that’s going. If the Germans want give and take in this business they can have it. They’ll soon see who can stand it best. I told William when he left. I said, ‘William, we’ve got to show these fellows that man for man we’re a match for them.’ That’s the way I look at it, man for man.”

I watched Mr. Spugg’s massive face as he went on with his meal. Not a nerve of it moved. If he felt any fear, at least he showed no trace of it.

After that I got war news from him at intervals, in little scraps, as I happened to meet him. “The war looks bad,” I said to him one day as I chanced upon him getting into his motor. “This submarine business is pretty serious.”

“It is,” he said, “William was torpedoed yesterday.”

Then he got into his car and drove away, as quietly as if nothing had happened.

A little later that day I heard him talking about it in the club. “Yes,” he was saying, “a submarine. It torpedoed William – my gardener. I have both a chauffeur and a gardener at the war. William was picked up on a raft. He’s in pretty bad shape. My son Alfred had a cable from him that he’s coming home. We’ve both telegraphed him to stick it out.”

The news was the chief topic in the club that day. “Spugg’s gardener has been torpedoed,” they said, “but Spugg refuses to have him quit and come home.” “Well done, Spugg,” said everybody.

After that we had news from time to time about both William and Henry.

“Henry’s out of the hospital,” said Spugg. “I hope to have him back in France in a few days. William’s in bad shape still. I had a London surgeon go and look at him. I told him not to mind the expense but to get William fixed up right away. It seems that one arm is more or less paralysed. I’ve wired back to him not to hesitate. They say William’s blood is still too thin for the operation. I’ve cabled to them to take some of Henry’s. I hate to do it, but this is no time to stick at anything.”

A little later William and Henry were reported both back in France. This was at the very moment of the great offensive. But Spugg went about his daily business unmoved. Then came the worst news of all. “William and Henry,” he said to me, “are both missing. I don’t know where the devil they are.”

“Missing!” I repeated.

“Both of them. The Germans have caught them both. I suppose I shan’t have either of them back now till the war is all over.”

He gave a slight sigh – the only sign of complaint that ever I had heard come from him.

But the next day we learned what was Spugg’s answer to the German’s capture of William and Henry.

“Have you heard what Spugg is doing?” the members of the club asked one another.

“What?”

“He’s sending over Meadows, his own man!”

There was no need to comment on it. The cool courage of the thing spoke for itself. Meadows – Spugg’s own man – his house valet, without whom he never travelled twenty miles!

“What else was there to do?” said Mr. Spugg when I asked him if it was true that Meadows was going. “I take no credit for sending Meadows, nor, for the matter of that, for anything that Meadows may do over there. It was a simple matter of duty. My son and I had him into the dining room last night after dinner. ‘Meadows,’ we said, ‘Henry and William are caught. Our man power at the front has got to be kept up. There’s no one left but ourselves and you. There’s no way out of it. You’ll have to go.’”

“But how,” I protested, “can you get along with Meadows, your valet, gone? You’ll be lost!”

“We must do the best we can. We’ve talked it all over. My son will help me dress and I will help him. We can manage, no doubt.”

So Meadows went.

After this Mr. Spugg, dressed as best he could manage it, and taking turns with his son in driving his own motor, was a pathetic but uncomplaining object.

Meadows meantime was reported as with the heavy artillery, doing well. “I hope nothing happens to Meadows,” Spugg kept saying. “If it does, we’re stuck. We can’t go ourselves. We’re too busy. We’ve talked it over and we’ve both decided that it’s impossible to get away from the office – not with business as brisk as it is now. We’re busier than we’ve been in ten years and can’t get off for a day. We may try to take a month off for the Adirondacks a little later but as for Europe, it’s out of the question.”

Meantime, one little bit of consolation came to help Mr. Spugg to bear the burden of the war. I found him in the lounge room of the club one afternoon among a group of men, exhibiting two medals that were being passed from hand to hand.

“Sent to me by the French government,” he explained proudly. “They’re for William and Henry. The motto means, ‘For Conspicuous Courage’” (Mr. Spugg drew himself up with legitimate pride). “I shall keep one and let Alfred keep the other till they come back.” Then he added, as an afterthought, “They may never come back.”

From that day on, Mr. Spugg, with his French medal on his watch chain, was the most conspicuous figure in the club. He was pointed out as having done more than any other one man in the institution to keep the flag flying. But presently the limit of Mr. Spugg’s efforts and sacrifices was reached. Even patriotism such as his must have some bounds.

On entering the club one afternoon I could hear his voice bawling vociferously in one of the telephone cabinets in the hall. “Hello, Washington,” he was shouting. “Is that Washington? Long Distance, I want Washington.”

Fifteen minutes later he came up to the sitting room, still flushed with indignation and excitement.

“That’s the limit,” he said, “the absolute limit!”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“They drafted my son Alfred,” he answered. “Just imagine it! When we’re so busy in the office that we’re getting down there at half past eight in the morning! Drafted Alfred! ‘Great Caesar,’ I said to them! ‘Look here! You’ve had my chauffeur and he’s gassed, and you’ve had my gardener and he’s torpedoed and they’re both prisoners, and last month I sent you my own man! That,’ I said, ‘is about the limit.’”

“What did they say,” I asked.

“Oh, it’s all right. They’ve fixed it all up and they’ve apologized as well. Alfred won’t go, of course, but it makes one realize that you can carry a thing too far. Why, they’d be taking me next!”

“Oh, surely not!” I said.

TOC     INDEX

If Germany Had Won

Sometimes, in the past, we have grown a little impatient with our North American civilisation, with its strident clamour, its noisy elections, its extremes of liberty, its occasional corruption and the faults that we now see were the necessary accompaniments of its merits. But let us set beside it a picture such as this, taken from the New York Imperial Gazette of 1925 – or from any paper of the same period, such as would have been published if Germany had won.

—

General Boob of Boobenstiff, Imperial Governor of New York, will attend divine (Imperial) service on Sunday morning next at the church of St. John the (Imperial) Divine. The subway cars will be stopped while the General is praying. All subway passengers are enjoined (befohlen), during the thus-to-be-ordered period of cessation, to remain in a reverential attitude. Those in the seats will keep the head bowed. Those holding to the straps will elevate one leg, keeping the knee in the air.

On Monday evening General Boob von Boobenstiff, Imperial Governor of New York, will be graciously pleased to attend a performance at the (Imperial) Winter Garden on Upper (Imperial) Broadway. It is ordered that on the entrance of His Excellency the audience will spontaneously rise and break into three successive enthusiastic cheers. Mr. Al Jolson will remain kneeling on the stage till the Gubernatorial All Highest has seated itself. Mr. Jolson will then, by special (Imperial) permission, be allowed to make four jokes in German to be taken from a list supplied by the Imperial Censor of Humour. The Governor, accompanied by his military staff, will then leave, and the performance will close.

—

It is ordered that, on Tuesday afternoon, as a sign of thankfulness for the blessings of the German peace, the business men of New York shall walk in procession from the Battery to the Bronx. They will then be inspected by Governor Boobenstiff. If the Governor is delayed in arriving at the hereafter-to-be-indicated point of general put-yourself-there, the procession will walk back to the Battery and back again, continuing so, pro and con, till the arrival of the Governor.

The approaching visit of His Royal and Imperial Solemnity the Prince Apparent of Bavaria shall be heralded in the (Imperial) City of New York with general rejoicing. The city shall be spontaneously decorated with flags. Smiles of cordial welcome shall appear on every face. Animated crowds of eager citizens shall move to and fro and shouts of welcome shall, by order of the Chief of Police, break from the lips.

Among those who are expected to be in the Imperial city to welcome his Royal Solemnity will be the Hereditary Grand Duke of Schlitzin-Mein (formerly Milwaukee), the Prince Margrave of Wisconsin and the Hereditary Chief Constable of Nevada.

—

We are delighted to be able to chronicle that on the morning of the 14th there was born at the Imperial Residence of His Simplicity the Hereditary Governor of the Provinz (formerly State) of New York, in the (Imperial) city of Albany a tenth son to the illustrious Prince and Princess who rule over us with such fatherly care. The boy was christened yesterday at the (Imperial) Lutheran Church and is to bear the name Frederick Wilhelm Amelia Mary Johan Heinrich Ruprecht. The whole city of Albany is thrown into the wildest rejoicing. The legislature has voted an addition of $400,000 per annum to the civil list for the maintenance of the young prince. Joy suffuses every home. This being the tenth son born to their Highnesses in ten years it is felt that the future of the dynasty is more or less secured. Even the humblest home is filled with the reflected joy that streams out from the Residency. Their Royal Highnesses appeared yesterday on the balcony amid the wild huzzoos of the people transported with joy. His Simplicity the Prince wore the full dress uniform of an Imperial Jaeger of the Adirondacks, and Her Royal Highness was attired as a Colonel of Artillery. It is impossible to express the jubilation of the moment.

—

We regret to report that owing to the jostling (possibly accidental, but none the less actual) of an Imperial officer – Field-Lieutenant Schmidt – at the entrance to Brooklyn Bridge, the bridge is declared closed to the public until further notice. We are proud to state the Field Lieutenant at once cut down his cowardly assailant with his sabre. It has pleased His Unspeakable Loftiness, the German Emperor, to cable his congratulations to the Lieutenant, who will receive The Order of the Dead Dog for the noble way in which he has maintained the traditions of his uniform.

—

A striking feature of the now-taking-place Art Exhibition at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (formerly Metropolitan Gallery) in the Thiergarten (formerly Central Park) is offered by the absolutely marvellous paintings exhibited by the Princess Marie Paul Cecilie Hohenzollern-Stickitintothem, a cousin of Our Noble Governor. The paintings which the Princess has been preciously pleased to paint and has even stooped to exhibit to the filled-with-wonder eye of the public have been immediately awarded the first prize in each class. While it would be invidious even to suggest that any one of Her High Incipiency’s pictures is better than any other, our feeling is that especially the picture Night on the Hudson River is of so rare a quality both of technique and of inspiration that it supersedes the bounds of the hitherto-thought-to-be-possible art in America. The Princess’s conception of night, black as a pall and yet luminous as a polished stove pipe, is only equalled by her feeling towards the Hudson, which lies extended in soporific superficiality beneath the sable covering of darkness in which Her Highness has been pleased to overwhelm it. Throughout the day an eager-to-see crowd of spectators were beaten back from the picture by the police with clubs.

—

We are permitted officially to confirm the already gladly-from-mouth-to-mouth-whispered news of an approaching marriage between Prince Heinrich of Texas and the Princess Amelia Victoria Louisa, Hereditary Heir Consumptive of the Imperial Provinz of Maine. The marriage, so it is whispered, although performed in accordance with the wishes of the Emperor as expressed by cable, is in every way a love match. What lends a touch of romance to the betrothal of the Royal Younglings is that the Prince had never even seen the Princess Amelia until the day when the legislature of the Provinz of Maine voted her a marriage portion of half a million dollars. Immediately on this news a secret visit was arranged, the Prince journeying to Bangor incognito as the Count of Flim-Flam in the costume of an officer of the Imperial Scavengers. On receipt of the Emperor’s telegram the happy pair fell in love with one another at once. What makes the approaching union particularly auspicious for the whole country is that it brings with it the union of Maine and Texas, henceforth to form a single grateful provinz. The Royal Pair, it is understood, will live alternately in each province a month at a time and the legislature, the executive officials, the courts of law and the tax collectors will follow them to and fro.

We cannot but contrast this happy issue with the turbulence and disorder in which our country lived before the Great War of Liberation.

—

We are delighted to learn from our despatches from Boston that the Hohenzollern Institute (formerly Harvard University) is to be opened next autumn. By express permission of the Imperial Government, classes in English will be permitted for half an hour each day.

By the clemency of the Emperor the sentences of W. H. Taft, and W. Wilson have been commuted from the sentence of fifty years imprisonment to imprisonment for life. We hope, in a special supplement, to be able to add the full list of sentences, executions, imprisonments, fines, and attainders that have been promulgated in honour of the birthday of our Imperial Sovereign.

TOC     INDEX

War And Peace
at the Galaxy Club

The Great Peace Kermesse at the Galaxy Club, to which I have the honour to belong, held with a view to wipe out the Peace Deficit of the Club, has just ended. For three weeks our club house has been a blaze of illumination. We have had four orchestras in attendance. There have been suppers and dances every night. Our members have not spared themselves.

The Kermesse is now over. We have time, as our lady members are saying, to turn round.

For the moment we are sitting listening, amid bursts of applause, to our treasurer’s statement. As we hear it we realize that this Peace Kermesse has proved the culmination and crown of four winters’ war work.

But I must explain from the beginning.

Our efforts began with the very opening of the war. We felt that a rich organisation like ours ought to do something for the relief of the Belgians. At the same time we felt that our members would rather receive something in the way of entertainment for their money than give it straight out of their pockets.

We therefore decided first to hold a public lecture in the club, and engaged the services of Professor Dry to lecture on the causes of the war.

In view of the circumstances, Professor Dry very kindly reduced his lecture fee, which (he assured us) is generally two hundred and fifty dollars, to two hundred and forty.

The lecture was most interesting. Professor Dry traced the causes of the War backwards through the Middle Ages. He showed that it represented the conflict of the brachiocephalic culture of the Wendic races with the dolichocephalic culture of the Alpine stock. At the time when the lights went out he had got it back to the eighth century before Christ.

Unfortunately the night, being extremely wet, was unfavourable. Few of our members care to turn out to lectures in wet weather. The treasurer was compelled to announce to the Committee a net deficit of two hundred dollars. Some of the ladies of the Committee moved that the entire deficit be sent to the Belgians, but were overruled by the interference of the men.

But the error was seen to have been in the choice of the lecturer. Our members were no longer interested in the causes of the war. The topic was too old. We therefore held another public lecture in the club, on the topic What Will Come After the War. It was given by a very talented gentleman, a Mr. Guess, a most interesting speaker, who reduced his fee (as the thing was a war charity) by one-half, leaving it at three hundred dollars. Unhappily the weather was against us. It was too fine. Our members scarcely care to listen to lectures in fine weather. And it turned out that our members are not interested in what will come after the war. The topic is too new. Our receipts of fifty dollars left us with a net deficit of two hundred and fifty. Our treasurer therefore proposed that we should carry both deficits forward and open a Special Patriotic Entertainment Account showing a net total deficit of four hundred and fifty dollars.

In the opinion of the committee our mistake had been in engaging outside talent. It was felt that the cost of this was prohibitive. It was better to invite the services of the members of the club themselves. A great number of the ladies expressed their willingness to take part in any kind of war work that took the form of public entertainment.

Accordingly we presented a play. It was given in the ball room of the club house, a stage being specially put up for us by a firm of contractors. The firm (as a matter of patriotism) did the whole thing for us at cost, merely charging us with the labour, the material, the time, the thought and the anxiety that they gave to the job, but for nothing else. In fact, the whole staging, including fights, plumbing and decorations was merely a matter of five hundred dollars. The plumbers very considerately made no charge for their time, but only for their work.

It was felt that it would be better to have a new play than an old. We selected a brilliant little modern drawing-room comedy never yet presented. The owner of the copyright, a theatrical firm, let us use it for a merely nominal fee of two hundred dollars, including the sole right to play the piece forever. There being only twenty-eight characters in it, it was felt to be more suitable than a more ambitious thing. The tickets were placed at one dollar, no one being admitted free except the performers themselves, and the members who very kindly acted as scene shifters, curtain lifters, ushers, door-keepers, programme sellers, and the general committee of management. All the performers, at their own suggestion, supplied their own costumes, charging nothing to the club except the material and the cost of dressmaking. Beyond this there was no expense except for the fee, very reasonable, of Mr. Skip, the professional coach who trained the performers, and who asked us, in view of the circumstances, less than half of what he would have been willing to accept.

The proceeds were to be divided between the Belgian Fund and the Red Cross, giving fifty per cent to each. A motion in amendment from the ladies’ financial committee to give fifty per cent to the Belgian Fund and sixty per cent to the Red Cross was voted down.

Unfortunately it turned out that the idea of a play was a mistake in judgment. Our members, it seemed, did not care to go to see a play except in a theatre. A great number of them, however, very kindly turned out to help in shifting the scenery and in acting as ushers.

Our treasurer announced, as the result of the play, a net deficit of twelve hundred dollars. He moved, with general applause, that it be carried forward.

The total deficit having now reached over sixteen hundred dollars, there was a general feeling that a very special effort must be made to remove it. It was decided to hold Weekly Patriotic Dances in the club ball room, every Saturday evening. No charge was made for admission to the dances, but a War Supper was served at one dollar a head.

Unfortunately the dances, as first planned, proved again an error. It appeared that though our members are passionately fond of dancing, few if any of them cared to eat at night. The plan was therefore changed. The supper was served first, and was free, and for the dancing after supper a charge was made of one dollar, per person. This again was an error. It seems that after our members have had supper they prefer to go home and sleep. After one winter of dancing the treasurer announced a total Patriotic Relief Deficit of five thousand dollars, to be carried forward to next year. This sum duly appeared in the annual balance sheet of the club. The members, especially the ladies, were glad to think that we were at least doing something for the war.

At this point some of our larger men, themselves financial experts, took hold. They said that our entertainments had been on too small a scale. They told us that we had been “undermined by overhead expenses.” The word “overhead” was soon on everybody’s lips. We were told that if we could “distribute our overhead” it would disappear. It was therefore planned to hold a great War Kermesse with a view to spreading out the overhead so thin that it would vanish.

But it was at this very moment that the Armistice burst upon us in a perfectly unexpected fashion. Everyone of our members was, undoubtedly, delighted that the war was over but there was a very general feeling that it would have been better if we could have had a rather longer notice of what was coming. It seemed, as many of our members said, such a leap in the dark to rush into peace all at once. It was said indeed by our best business men that in financial circles they had been fully aware that there was a danger of peace for some time and had taken steps to discount the peace risk.

But for the club itself the thing came with a perfect crash. The whole preparation of the great Kermesse was well under way when the news broke upon us. For a time the members were aghast. It looked like ruin. But presently it was suggested that it might still be possible to save the club by turning the whole affair into a Peace Kermesse and devoting the proceeds to some suitable form of relief. Luckily it was discovered that there was still a lot of starvation in Russia, and fortunately it turned out that in spite of the armistice the Turks were still killing the Armenians.

So it was decided to hold the Kermesse and give all the profits realized by it to the Victims of the Peace. Everybody set to work again with a will. The Kermesse indeed had to be postponed for a few months to make room for the changes needed, but it has now been held and, in a certain sense, it has been the wildest kind of success. The club, as I said, has been a blaze of light for three weeks. We have had four orchestras in attendance every evening. There have been booths draped with the flags of all the Allies, except some that we were not sure about, in every corridor of the club. There have been dinner parties and dances every evening. The members, especially the ladies, have not spared themselves. Many of them have spent practically all their time at the Kermesse, not getting home until two in the morning.

And yet somehow one has felt that underneath the surface it was not a success. The spirit seemed gone out of it. The members themselves confessed in confidence that in spite of all they could do their hearts were not in it. Peace had somehow taken away all the old glad sense of enjoyment. As to spending money at the Kermesse all the members admitted frankly that they had no heart for it. This was especially the case when the rumour got abroad that the Armenians were a poor lot and that some of the Turks were quite gentlemanly fellows. It was said, too, that if the Russians did starve it would do them a lot of good.

So it was known even before we went to hear the financial report that there would be no question of profits on the Kermesse going to the Armenians or the Russians.

And tonight the treasurer has been reading out to a general meeting the financial results as nearly as they can be computed.

He has put the Net Patriotic Deficit, as nearly as he can estimate it, at fifteen thousand dollars, though he has stated, with applause from the ladies, that the Gross Deficit is bigger still.

The Ladies Financial Committee has just carried a motion that the whole of the deficit, both net and gross, be now forwarded to the Red Cross Society (sixty per cent), the Belgian Relief Fund (fifty per cent), and the remainder invested in the War Loan.

But there is a very general feeling among the male members that the club will have to go into liquidation. Peace has ruined us. Not a single member, so far as I am aware, is prepared to protest against the peace, or is anything but delighted to think that the war is over. At the same time we do feel that if we could have had a longer notice, six months for instance, we could have braced ourselves better to stand up against it and meet the blow when it fell.

I think, too, that our feeling is shared outside.

TOC     INDEX

The War News
as I Remember It

Everybody, I think, should make some little contribution towards keeping alive the memories of the great war. In the larger and heroic sense this is already being done. But some of the minor things are apt to be neglected. When the record of the war has been rewritten into real history, we shall be in danger of forgetting what WAR NEWS was like and the peculiar kind of thrill that accompanied its perusal.

Hence in order to preserve it for all time I embalm some little samples of it, selected of course absolutely at random – as such things always are – in the pages of this book.

Let me begin with:

I

THE CABLE NEWS FROM RUSSIA

This was the great breakfast-table feature for at least three years. Towards the end of the war some people began to complain of it. They said that they questioned whether it was accurate. Here for example is one fortnight of it.

Petrograd, April 14. Word has reached here that the Germans have captured enormous quantities of grain on the Ukrainian border.

April 15. The Germans have captured no grain on the Ukrainian border. The country is swept bare.

April 16. Everybody in Petrograd is starving.

April 17. There is no lack of food in Petrograd.

April 18. The death of General Korniloff is credibly reported this morning.

April 19. It is credibly reported this morning that General Korniloff is alive.

April 20. It is credibly reported that General Korniloff is hovering between life and death.

April 21. The Bolsheviki are overthrown.

April 22. The Bolsheviki got up again.

April 23. The Czar died last night.

April 24. The Czar did not die last night.

April 25. General Kaleidescope and his Cossacks are moving north.

April 26. General Kaleidescope and his Cossacks are moving south.

April 27. General Kaleidescope and his Cossacks are moving east.

April 28. General Kaleidescope and his Cossacks are moving west.

April 29. It is reported that the Cossacks under General Kaleidescope have revolted. They demand the Maximum. General Kaleidescope hasn’t got it.

April 30. The National Pan-Russian Constituent Universal Duma which met this morning at ten-thirty, was dissolved at twenty-five minutes to eleven.

My own conclusion, reached with deep regret, is that the Russians are not yet fit for the blessings of the Magna Charta and the Oklahama Constitution of 1907. They ought to remain for some years yet under the Interstate Commerce Commission.

II

SAMPLE OF SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE

New York (through London via Holland and coming out at Madrid). Mr. O. Howe Lurid, our special correspondent, writing from “Somewhere near Somewhere” and describing the terrific operations of which he has just been an eyewitness, says:

“From the crest where I stood, the whole landscape about me was illuminated with the fierce glare of the bursting shells, while the ground on which I stood quivered with the thunderous detonation of the artillery.

“Nothing in the imagination of a Dante could have equalled the lurid and pyrogriffic grandeur of the scene. Streams of fire rose into the sky, falling in bifurcated crystallations in all directions. Disregarding all personal danger, I opened one eye and looked at it.

“I found myself now to be the very centre of the awful conflict. While not stating that the whole bombardment was directed at me personally, I am pretty sure that it was.”

I admit that there was a time, at the very beginning of the war, when I liked this kind of thing served up with my bacon and eggs every morning, in the days when a man could eat bacon and eggs without being labelled a pro-German. Later on I came to prefer the simple statements as to the same scene and event, given out by Sir Douglas Haig and General Pershing – after this fashion:

“Last night at ten-thirty p.m. our men noticed signs of a light bombardment apparently coming from the German lines.”

III

THE TECHNICAL WAR DESPATCHES

The best of these, as I remember them, used to come from the Italian front and were done after this fashion:

“Tintino, near Trombono. Friday, April 3. The Germans, as I foresaw last month they would, have crossed the Piave in considerable force. Their position, as I said it would be, is now very strong. The mountains bordering the valley run – just as I foresaw they would – from northwest to southeast. The country in front is, as I anticipated, flat. Venice is, as I assured my readers it would be, about thirty miles distant from the Piave, which falls, as I expected it would, into the Adriatic.”

IV

THE WAR PROPHECIES

Startling Prophecy in Paris. All Paris is wildly excited over the extraordinary prophecy of Madame Cleo de Clichy that the war will be over in four weeks. Madame Cleo, who is now as widely known as a diseuse, a liseuse, a friseuse and a clairvoyante, leaped into sudden prominence last November by her startling announcement that the seven letters in the Kaiser’s name W i l h e l m represented the seven great beasts of the apocalypse; in the next month she electrified all Paris by her disclosure that the four letters of the word C z a r – by substituting the figure 1 for C, 9 for Z, 1 for A, and 7 for R – produce the date 1917, and indicated a revolution in Russia. The salon of Madame Cleo is besieged by eager crowds night and day. She may prophesy again at any minute.

—

Startling Forecast. A Russian peasant, living in Semipalatinsk, has foretold that the war will end in August. The wildest excitement prevails not only in Semipalatinsk but in the whole of it.

—

Extraordinary Prophecy. Rumbumbabad, India. April 1. The whole neighbourhood has been thrown into a turmoil by the prophecy of Ram Slim, a Yogi of this district, who has foretold that the war will be at an end in September. People are pouring into Rumbumbabad in ox-carts from all directions. Business in Rumbumbabad is at a standstill.

—

Excitement in Midgeville, Ohio. William Bessemer Jones, a retired farmer of Cuyahoga, Ohio, has foretold that the war will end in October. People are flocking into Midgeville in lumber wagons from all parts of the country. Jones, who bases his prophecy on the Bible, had hitherto been thought to be half-witted. This is now recognised to have been a wrong estimate of his powers. Business in Midgeville is at a standstill.

—

Dog’s Foot. Wyoming. April 1. An Indian of the Cheyenne tribe has foretold that the war will end in December. Business among the Indians is at a standstill.

V

DIPLOMATIC REVELATIONS

These were sent out in assortments, and labelled Vienna, via London, through Stockholm. After reading them with feverish eagerness for nearly four years, I decided that they somehow lack definiteness. Here is the way they ran:

“Special Correspondence. I learn from a very high authority, whose name I am not at liberty to mention, (speaking to me at a place which I am not allowed to indicate and in a language which I am forbidden to use) – that Austria-Hungary is about to take a diplomatic step of the highest importance. What this step is, I am forbidden to say. But the consequences of it – which unfortunately I am pledged not to disclose – will be such as to effect results which I am not free to enumerate.”

VI

A NEW GERMAN PEACE FORMULA

Dr. Hertling, the Imperial Chancellor, speaking through his hat in the Reichstag, said that he wished to state in the clearest language of which he was capable that the German peace plan would not only provide the fullest self determination of all ethnographic categories, but would predicate the political self consciousness (politisches Selbstbewusztsein) of each geographical and entomological unit, subject only to the necessary rectilinear guarantees for the seismographic action of the German empire. The entire Reichstag, especially the professorial section of it, broke into unrestrained applause. It is felt that the new formula is the equivalent of a German Magna Carta – or as near to it as they can get.

VII

THE FINANCIAL NEWS

The war finance, as I remember it, always supplied items of the most absorbing interest. I do not mean to say that I was an authority on finance or held any official position in regard to it. But I watched it. I followed it in the newspapers. When the war began I knew nothing about it. But I picked up a little bit here and a little bit there until presently I felt that I had a grasp on it not easily shaken off.

It was a simple matter, anyway. Take the case of the rouble. It rose and it fell. But the reason was always perfectly obvious. The Russian news ran, as I got it in my newspapers, like this:

“M. Touchusoff, the new financial secretary of the Soviet, has declared that Russia will repay her utmost liabilities. Roubles rose.”

“M. Touchusoff, the late financial secretary of the Soviet, was thrown into the Neva last evening. Roubles fell.”

“M. Gorky, speaking in London last night, said that Russia was a great country. Roubles rose.”

“A Dutch correspondent, who has just beat his way out of Russia, reports that nothing will induce him to go back. Roubles fell.”

“Mr. Arthur Balfour, speaking in the House of Commons last night, paid a glowing tribute to the memory of Peter the Great. Roubles rose.”

“The local Bolsheviki of New York City at the Pan-Russian Congress held in Murphy’s Rooms, Fourth Avenue, voted unanimously in favour of a Free Russia. Roubles never budged.”

With these examples in view, anybody, I think, could grasp the central principles of Russian finance. All that one needed to know was what M. Touchusoff and such people were going to say, and who would be thrown into the Neva, and the rise and fall of the rouble could be foreseen to a kopeck. In speculation by shrewd people with proper judgment as to when to buy and when to sell the rouble, large fortunes could be made, or even lost, in a day.

But after all the Russian finance was simple. That of our German enemies was much more complicated and yet infinitely more successful. That at least I gathered from the little news items in regard to German finance that used to reach us in cables that were headed Via Timbuctoo and ran thus:

“The fourth Imperial War Loan of four billion marks, to be known as the Kaiser’s War Loan, was oversubscribed today in five minutes. Investors thronged the banks, with tears in their eyes, bringing with them everything that they had. The bank managers, themselves stained with tears, took everything that was offered. Each investor received a button proudly displayed by the too-happy-for-words out-of-the-bank-hustling recipient.”

TOC     INDEX

Some Just Complaints
About the War

No patriotic man would have cared to lift up his voice against the Government in war time. Personally, I should not want to give utterance even now to anything in the way of criticism. But the complaints which were presented below came to me, unsought and unsolicited, and represented such a variety of sources and such just and unselfish points of view that I think it proper, for the sake of history, to offer them to the public.

I give them, just as they reached me, without modifications of any sort.

The just complaint of Mr. Threadier, my tailor, as expressed while measuring me for my Win-the-War autumn suit.

“Complaint, sir? Oh, no, we have no complaint to make in our line of business, none whatever (forty-two, Mr. Jephson). It would hardly become us to complain (side pockets, Mr. Jephson). But we think, perhaps, it is rather a mistake for the Government (thirty-three on the leg) to encourage the idea of economy in dress. Our attitude is that the well dressed man (a little fuller in the chest? Yes, a little fuller in the chest, please, Mr. Jephson) is better able to serve his country than the man who goes about in an old suit. The motto of our trade is Thrift with Taste. It was made up in our spring convention of five hundred members, in a four day sitting. We feel it to be (twenty-eight) very appropriate. Our feeling is that a gentleman wearing one of our thrift worsteds under one of our Win-the-War light overcoats (Mr. Jephson, please show that new Win-the-War overcoating) is really helping to keep things going. We like to reflect, sir (nothing in shirtings, today?) that we’re doing our bit, too, in presenting to the enemy an undisturbed nation of well dressed men. Nothing else, sir? The week after next? Ah! If we can, sir! but we’re greatly rushed with our new and patriotic Thrift orders. Good morning, sir.”

The just complaint of Madame Pavalucini, the celebrated contralto. As interviewed incidentally in the palm-room of The Slitz Hotel, over a cup of tea (one dollar), French Win-the-War pastry (one fifty) and Help-the-Navy cigarettes (fifty).

“I would not want to creetecize ze gouvermen’ ah! non! That would be what you call a skonk treeck, hein?” (Madame Pavalucini comes from Missouri, and dares not talk any other kind of English than this, while on tour, with any strangers listening.) “But, I ask myself, ees it not just a leetle wrong to discourage and tax ze poor artistes? We are doing our beet, hein? We seeng, we recite! I seeng so many beautiful sings to ze soldiers; sings about love, and youth, and passion, and spring and kisses. And the men are carried off their feet. They rise. They rush to the war. I have seen them, in my patriotic concerts where I accept nothing but my expenses and my fee and give all that is beyond to the war. Only last night one arose, right in the front rank – the fauteuils d’orchestre, I do not know how you call them in English. ‘Let me out of zis,’ he scream, ‘me for the war! Me for the trenches!’ Was it not magnifique – what you call splendide, hein?

“And then ze gouvermen, come and tell me I must pay zem ten thousan’ dollars, when I make only seexty thousan’ dollars at ze opera! Anozzer skonk treeck, hein?”

The just complaint of Mr. Grunch, income tax payer, as imparted to me over his own port wine, after dinner.

“No, I shouldn’t want to complain: I mean, in any way that would reach the outside – reach it, that is, in connection with my name. Though I think that the thing ought to be said by somebody. I think you might say it. (Let me pour you out another glass of this Conquistador: yes, it’s the old ’87: but I suppose we’ll never get any more of it on this side: they say that the rich Spaniards are making so much money they’re buying up every cask of it and it will never be exported again. Just another illustration of the way that the war hits everybody alike.) But, as I was saying, I think if you were to raise a complaint about the income tax, you’d find the whole country – I mean all the men with incomes – behind you. I don’t suppose they’d want you to mention their names. But they’d be behind you, see? They’d all be there. (Will you try one of these Googoolias? They’re the very best, but I guess we’ll never see them again. They say the rich Cubans are buying them up. So the war hits us there, too.) As I see it, the income tax is the greatest mistake the government ever made. It hits the wrong man. It falls on the man with an income and lets the other man escape. The way I look at it, and the way all the men that will be behind you look at it, is that if a man sticks tight to it and goes on earning all the income he can, he’s doing his bit, in his own way, to win the war. All we ask is to be let alone (don’t put that in your notes as from me, but you can say it), let us alone to go on quietly piling up income till we get the Germans licked. But if you start to take away our income, you discourage us, you knock all the patriotism out of us. To my mind, a man’s income and his patriotism are the same thing. But, of course, don’t say that I said that.”

The just complaint of my barber, as expressed in the pauses of his operations.

“I’m not saying nothing against the Government (any facial massage this morning?). I guess they know their own business, or they’d ought to, anyway. But I kick at all this talk against the barber business in war time (will I singe them ends a bit?). The papers are full of it, all the time. I don’t see much else in them. Last week I saw where a feller said that all the barber shops ought to be closed up (bay rum?) till the war was over. Say, I’d like to have him right here in this chair with a razor at his throat, the way I have you! As I see it, the barber business is the most necessary business in the whole war. A man’ll get along without everything else, just about, but he can’t get along without a shave, can he? – or not without losing all the pep and self-respect that keeps him going. They say them fellers over in France has to shave every morning by military order: if they didn’t the Germans would have ’em beat. I say the barber is doing his bit as much as any man. I was to Washington four months last winter, and I done all the work of three senators and two congressmen (will I clip that neck?) and I done the work of a United States Admiral every Saturday night. If that ain’t war work, show me what is. But I don’t kick, I just go along. If a man appreciates what I do, and likes to pay a little extra for it, why so much the better, but if he’s low enough to get out of this chair you’re in and walk off without giving a cent more than he has to, why let him go. But, sometimes, when I get thinking about all this outcry about barber’s work in war time, I feel like following the man to the door and slitting his throat for him. . . . Thank you, sir; thank you, sir. Good morning. Next!”

The just complaint of Mr. Singlestone; – formerly Mr. Einstein, Theatre Proprietor.

“I would be the last man, the very last, to say one word against the Government. I think they are doing fine. I think the boys in the trenches are doing fine. I think the nation is doing fine. But, if there’s just one thing where they’re wrong, it’s in the matter of the theatres. I think it would be much better for the Government not to attempt to cut down or regulate theatres in any way. The theatre is the people’s recreation. It builds them up. It’s all part of a great machine to win the war. I like to stand in the box office and see the money come in and feel that the theatre is doing its bit. But, mind you, I think the President is doing fine. So, all I say is, I think the theatres ought to be allowed to do fine, too.”

The just complaint of Mr. Silas Heck, farmer, as interviewed by me, incognito, at the counter of the Gold Dollar Saloon.

“Yes, sir, I say the Government’s in the wrong, and I don’t care who hears me. (Say, is that feller in the slick overcoat listening? Let’s move along a little further.) They’re right to carry on the war for all the nation is worth. That’s sound and I’m with ’em. But they ought not to take the farmer offen his farm. There I’m agin them. The farmer is the one man necessary for the country. They say they want bacon for the Allies. Well, the way I look at it is, if you want bacon, you need hogs. And if there are no men left in the country like me, what’ll you do for hogs!

“Thanks, was you paying for that? I guess we won’t have another, eh? Two of them things might be bad for a feller.”

—

So, when I used to listen to the complaints of this sort that rose on every side, I was glad that I was not President of the United States.

At the same time I do think that the Government makes a mistake in taxing the profits of the poor book writers under the absurd name of income. But let that go. The Kaiser would probably treat us worse.

TOC     INDEX

Some Startling
Side Effects of the War

“There is no doubt,” said Mr. Taft recently, “that the war is destined to effect the most profound uplift and changes, not only in our political outlook, but upon our culture, our thought and, most of all, upon our literature.”

I am not absolutely certain that Mr. Taft really said this. He may not have said “uplift.” But I seem to have heard something about uplift, somewhere. At any rate, there is no doubt of the fact that our literature has moved – up or down. Yes, the war is not only destined to affect our literature, but it has already done so. The change in outlook, in literary style, in mode of expression, even in the words themselves is already here.

Anybody can see it for himself by turning over the pages of our fashionable novels or by looking at the columns of our great American and English newspapers and periodicals.

But stop – let me show what I mean by examples. I have them here in front of me. Take, for example, the London Spectator. Everybody recognised in it a model of literary dignity and decorum. Even those who read it least, admitted this most willingly; in fact, perhaps all the more so. In its pages today one finds an equal dignity of thought, yet, somehow, the wording seems to have undergone an alteration. One cannot say just where the change comes in. It is what the French call a je ne sais quoi, a something insaisissable, a sort of nuance, not amounting of course to a lueur, but still – how shall one put it – something.

The example that is given below was taken almost word for word (indeed some of the words actually were so) from the very latest copy of The Spectator.

EDITORIAL FROM THE
LONDON “SPECTATOR”

Showing the Stimulating Effect
of the War on Its Literary Style

“There is no doubt that our boys, and the Americans, are going some on the western front. We have no hesitation in saying that last week’s scrap was a cinch for the boys. It is credibly reported by our correspondent at The Hague that the German Emperor, the Crown Prince and a number of other guys were eye witnesses of the fight. If so, they got the surprise of their young lives. While we should not wish to show anything less than the chivalrous consideration for a beaten enemy which has been a tradition of our nation, we feel it is but just to say that for once the dirty pups got what was coming to them. We are glad to learn from official quarters that His Majesty King George has been graciously pleased to telegraph to General Pershing, ‘Soak it to ’em – and then some.’

“Meantime the situation from the point of view both of terrain and of tactics remains altogether in our favour. The deep salient driven into the German lines near Soissons threatens to break up their communications and force a withdrawal on a wide front. We cannot make the position clearer to our English readers than by saying that our new lines occupy, as it were, the form of a baseball diamond, with Soissons at second base and with our headquarters at the home plate and our artillery support at third. Our readers will at once grasp the fact that, with our advance pivoted on the pitcher’s box and with adequate cover at short, the thing is a lead-pipe cinch – in fact, we have them lashed to the mast.

“Meantime the mood of the hour should be one, not of undue confidence or boastfulness, but of quiet resolution and deep thankfulness. As the Archbishop of Canterbury so feelingly put it in his sermon in Westminster Abbey last Sunday, ‘Now that we have them by the neck let us go on, in deep and steadfast purpose, till we have twisted the gizzard out of them.’

“The Archbishop’s noble words should, and will, re-echo in every English home.”

Critical people may be inclined to doubt the propriety, or even the propinquity, of some of the literary changes due to the war. But there can be no doubt of the excellent effect of one of them, namely, the increasing knowledge and use among us of the pleasant language of France. It is no exaggeration to say that, before the war, few people in the United States, even among the coloured population, spoke French with ease. In fact, in some cases the discomfort was so obvious as to be almost painful. This is now entirely altered. Thanks to our military guidebooks, and to the general feeling of the day, our citizens are setting themselves to acquire the language of our gallant ally. And the signs are that they will do it. One hears every day in metropolitan society such remarks as, “Have you read, ‘Soo le foo?’” “Oh, you mean that book by Haingri Barbooze? No, I have not read it yet, but I have read ‘Mong Swassant Quinz’ – you know, by that other man.”

This is hopeful indeed. Nor need we wonder that our best magazines are reflecting the same tendency.

Here for instance are the opening sentences of a very typical serial now running in one of our best periodicals: for all I know the rest of the sentences may be like them. At any rate, any magazine reader will recognize them at once:

BONNE MÈRE PITOU

A Conte of Old Normandy

Bonne Mère Pitou sat spinning beside the porte of the humble chaumière in which she dwelt. From time to time her eyes looked up and down the gran’ route that passed her door.

“Il ne vient pas,” she murmured (he does not come).

She rose wearily and went dedans. Presently she came out again, dehors. “Il ne vient toujours pas,” she sighed (he still does not come).

About her in the tall trees of the allée the percherons twittered while the soft roucoulement of the bees murmured drowsily in the tall calice of the chou-fleur.

“Il n’est pas venu,” she said (perfect tense, third singular, he is not, or has not, come).

Can we blame him if he didn’t? No doubt he was still studying his active verb before tackling Mère Pitou.

But there! Let it pass. In any case it is not only the magazines, but the novels themselves, that are being transformed by the war. Witness this:

BY ONE OF OUR
MOST POPULAR NOVELISTS

“It was in the summer house, at the foot of the old garden, that the awaited declaration came. Edwin kneeled at Angelina’s feet. At last they were alone! The successful barrage of conversation which he had put up at breakfast had compelled her mother to remain in her trenches, and had driven her father to the shelter of his dug-out. Her younger brother he had camouflaged with the present of a new fishing rod, thus inducing him to retire to the river. The communications with the servants had been cut. Of the strict neutrality of the gardener he was already assured. Edwin felt that the moment had come for going over the top. Yet being an able strategist, he was anxious not to attempt to advance on too wide a front.

“Angelina!” he exclaimed, raising himself to one knee with his hands outstretched toward her.

The girl started as at the sound of an air bomb; for a moment she elevated her eyes and looked him full in the tangent, then she lowered them again but continued to observe him through her mental periscope.

“Angelina,” he repeated, “I have a declaration to make.”

“As from what date?” she questioned quietly.

Edwin drew his watch from his pocket.

“As from this morning, at ten-forty-six,” he said. Then, emboldened by her passive attitude, he continued with rising passion in his tone.

“Ever since I first met you I have felt that I could not live without you. I am a changed man. My calibre is altered. I feel ten centimeters wider in the mouth than I did six weeks ago. I feel that my path is altered. I have a new range and an angle of elevation such as I never experienced before. I have hidden my love as best I could till now. I have worn a moral gas-mask before your family. I can do so no longer. Angelina, will you be mine, forming with me a single unit, drawing our rations from the same field kitchen and occupying the same divisional headquarters?”

The girl seemed to hesitate. She raised her eyes to his.

“We know one another so little,” she murmured.

Edwin felt that his offensive was failing. He therefore hastened to bring up his means of support.

“I have an ample income of my own,” he pleaded.

Angelina raised her eyes again. It was evident that she was about to surrender. But at this moment her mother’s voice was heard calling, “Angelina, Angelina, my dear, where are you?”

The barrage had broken down.

“Quick,” said the girl, “mobilize yourself. Pick up that tennis racket and let us hurry to the court and dig ourselves in.”

“But my declaration,” urged Edwin eagerly.

“Accepted,” she said, “as from eleven-two this morning.”

TOC     INDEX

Other Impossibilities

The Art of Conversation

HOW TO INTRODUCE
TWO PEOPLE TO ONE ANOTHER

Nothing is more important in introducing two people to each other than to employ a fitting form of words. The more usually recognized forms are easily learned and committed to memory and may be utilized as occasion requires. I pass over such rudimentary formulas as “Ed, shake hands with Jim Taylor,” or, “Boys, this is Pete, the new hand; Pete, get hold of the end of that cant-hook.” In fact, we are speaking only of polite society as graced by the fair sex, the only kind that we need care about.

The Third Avenue Procedure

A very neat and convenient form is that in vogue in Third Avenue circles, New York, as, for instance, at a fifty-cents-a-head dance (ladies free) in the hall of the Royal Knights of Benevolence.

“Miss Summerside, meet Mr. O’Hara,” after which Miss Summerside says very distinctly, “Mr. O’Hara,” and Mr. O’Hara says with equal clearness “Miss Summerside.” In this circle a mark of exquisite breeding is found in the request to have the name repeated. “I don’t quite catch the name!” says Mr. O’Hara critically; then he catches it and repeats it – “Miss Summerside.”

“Catching the name” is a necessary part of this social encounter. If not caught the first time it must be put over again. The peculiar merit of this introduction is that it lets Miss Summerside understand clearly that Mr. O’Hara never heard of her before. That helps to keep her in her place.

In superior circles, however, introduction becomes more elaborate, more flattering, more unctuous. It reaches its acme in what everyone recognizes at once as

The Clerical Method

This is what would be instinctively used in Anglican circles – as, for example, by the Episcopal Bishop of Boof in introducing a Canon of the Church to one of the “lady workers” of the congregation (meaning a lady too rich to work) who is expected to endow a crib in the Diocesan Home for Episcopal Cripples. A certain quantity of soul has to be infused into this introduction. Anybody who has ever heard it can fill in the proper accentuation, which must be very rich and deep.

“Oh, Mrs. Putitover, may I introduce my very dear old friend, Canon Cutitout? The Canon, Mrs. Putitover, is one of my dearest friends. Mrs. Putitover, my dear Canon, is quite one of our most enthusiastic workers.”

After which outburst of soul the Bishop is able to add, “Will you excuse me, I’m afraid I simply must run.”

Personally, I have never known or met a Bishop in society in any other situation than just about to run. Where they run to, I do not know. But I think I understand what they run from.

The Lounge Room of the Club

Equally high in the social scale but done quite differently is the Club Introduction. It is done by a club man who, for the life of him, can’t remember the names of either of the two club men whom he is introducing, and who each, for the life of him, can’t think of the name of the man they are being introduced by. It runs—

“Oh, I say, I beg your pardon – I thought, of course, you two fellows knew one another perfectly well – let me introduce – urr – wurr——”

Later on, after three whiskey-and-sodas, each of the three finds out the names of the other two, surreptitiously from the hall porter. But it makes no difference. They forget them again anyway.

Now let us move up higher, in fact, very high. Let us approach the real thing.

Introduction to H. E.
the Viceroy of India,
K.C.B., K.C.S.I., S.O.S.

The most exalted form of introduction is seen in the presentation of Mr. Tomkins, American tourist, to H. E. the Viceroy of India. An aide-de-camp in uniform at the foot of a grand staircase shouts, “Mr. Tomkins!” An aide-de-camp at the top (one minute later) calls “Mr. Thompson”; another aide, four feet further on, calls “Mr. Torps.”

Then a military secretary, standing close to His Excellency, takes Mr. Tomkins by the neck and bends him down toward the floor and says very clearly and distinctly, “Mr. Torpentine.” Then he throws him out by the neck into the crowd beyond and calls for another. The thing is done. Mr. Tomkins wipes the perspiration from his hair with his handkerchief and goes back at full speed to the Hoogli Hotel, Calcutta, eager for stationery to write at once to Ohio and say that he knows the Viceroy.

The Office Introduction,
One-sided

This introduction comes into our office, slipping past whoever keeps the door with a packet of books under its arm. It says—

“Ledd me introduze myself. The book proposition vidge I am introduzing is one vidge ve are now pudding on the market . . .”

Then, of two things, one—

Either a crash of glass is heard as the speaker is hurled through the skylight, or he walks out twenty minutes later, bowing profusely as he goes, and leaving us gazing in remorse at a signed document entitling us to receive the “Masterpieces of American Poetry” in sixty volumes.

On the Stage

Everything on the stage is done far better than in real life. This is true of introductions. There is a warmth, a soul, in the stage introduction not known in the chilly atmosphere of everyday society. Let me quote as an example of a stage introduction the formula used, in the best melodramatic art, in the kitchen-living-room (stove right centre) of the New England farm.

“Neighbour Jephson’s son, this is my little gal, as good and sweet a little gal, as mindful of her old father, as you’ll find in all New England. Neighbour Jephson’s son, she’s been my all in all to me, this little gal, since I laid her mother in the ground five Christmases ago—” The speaker is slightly overcome and leans against a cardboard clock for strength: he recovers and goes on – “Hope, this is Neighbour Jephson’s son, new back from over the seas, as fine a lad, gal, if he’s like the folk that went before him, as ever followed the sea. Hope, your hand. My boy, your hand. See to his comfort, Hope, while I go and read the Good Book a spell in the barnyard.”

The Indian Formula

Many people, tired of the empty phrases of society, look back wistfully to the simple direct speech of savage life. Such persons will find useful the usual form of introduction (the shorter form) prevalent among our North American Indians (at least as gathered from the best literary model):

“Friends and comrades who are worthy,

See and look with all your eyesight,

Listen with your sense of hearing,

Gather with your apprehension—

Bow your heads, O trees, and hearken.

Hush thy rustling, corn, and listen;

Turn thine ear and give attention;

Ripples of the running water,

Pause a moment in your channels—

Here I bring you – Hiawatha.”

The last line of this can be changed to suit the particular case. It can just as easily read, at the end, “Here is Henry Edward Eastwood,” or, “Here is Hal McGiverin, Junior,” or anything else. All names fit the sense. That, in fact, was the wonderful art of Longfellow – the sense being independent of the words.

The Platform Introduction

Here is a form of introduction cruelly familiar to those who know it. It is used by the sour-looking villain facetiously called in newspaper reports the “genial chairman” of the meeting. While he is saying it the victim in his little chair on the platform is a target for the eyes of a thousand people who are wondering why he wears odd socks.

“The next speaker, ladies and gentlemen, is one who needs no introduction to this gathering. His name” (here the chairman consults a little card) “is one that has become a household word. His achievements in” (here the chairman looks at his card again, studies it, turns it upside down and adds) “in many directions are familiar to all of you.” There is a feeble attempt at applause and the chairman then lifts his hand and says in a plain business-like tone – “Will those of the audience who are leaving kindly step as lightly as possible.” He is about to sit down, but then adds as a pleasant afterthought for the speaker to brood over – “I may say, while I am on my feet, that next week our society is to have a real treat in hearing – et cetera and so forth—”

II

HOW TO OPEN A CONVERSATION

After the ceremony of introduction is completed the next thing to consider is the proper way to open a conversation. The beginning of conversation is really the hardest part. It is the social equivalent to “going over the top.” It may best be studied in the setting and surroundings of the Evening Reception, where people stand upright and agonise, balancing a dish of ice-cream. Here conversation reaches its highest pitch of social importance. One must talk or die. Something may be done to stave it off a little by vigorous eating. But the food at such affairs is limited. There comes a point when it is absolutely necessary to say something.

The beginning, as I say, is the hardest problem. Other communities solve it better than we do.

The Chinese System

In China conversation, between strangers after introduction, is always opened by the question, “And how old are you?” This strikes me as singularly apt and sensible. Here is the one thing that is common ground between any two people, high or low, rich or poor – how far are you on your pilgrimage in life?

The Penetentiary Method

Compare with the Chinese method the grim, but very significant formula that is employed (I believe it is a literal fact) in the exercise yards of the American penitentiaries. “What have you brought?” asks the San Quentin or Sing Sing convict of the new arrival, meaning, “And how long is your sentence?” There is the same human touch about this, the same common ground of interest, as in the Chinese formula.

Polite Society

But in our polite society we have as yet found no better method than beginning with a sort of medical diagnosis – “How do you do?” This admits of no answer. Convention forbids us to reply in detail that we are feeling if anything slightly lower than last week, but that though our temperature has risen from ninety-one-fifty to ninety-one-seventy-five, our respiration is still normal.

Still worse is the weather as an opening topic. For it either begins and ends as abruptly as the medical diagnosis, or it leads the two talkers on into a long and miserable discussion of the weather of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, of last month, of last year and the last fifty years.

Let one beware, however, of a conversation that begins too easily.

The Mutual Friends’ Opening

This can be seen at any evening reception, as when the hostess introduces two people who are supposed to have some special link to unite them at once with an instantaneous snap, as when, for instance, they both come from the same town.

“Let me introduce Mr. Sedley,” said the hostess. “I think you and Mr. Sedley are from the same town, Miss Smiles. Miss Smiles, Mr. Sedley.”

Off they go at a gallop. “I’m so delighted to meet you,” says Mr. Sedley. “It’s good to hear from anybody who comes from our little town.” (If he’s a rollicking humorist, Mr. Sedley calls it his little old “burg.”)

“Oh, yes,” answers Miss Smiles. “I’m from Winnipeg too. I was so anxious to meet you to ask if you knew the McGowans. They’re my greatest friends at home.”

“The – who?” asks Mr. Sedley.

“The McGowans – on Selkirk Avenue.”

“No-o, I don’t think I do. I know the Prices on Selkirk Avenue. Of course you know them.”

“The Prices? No, I don’t believe I do – I don’t think I ever heard of the Prices. You don’t mean the Pearsons? I know them very well.”

“No, I don’t know the Pearsons. The Prices live just near the reservoir.”

“No, then I’m sure I don’t know them. The Pearsons live close to the college.”

“Close to the College? Is it near the William Kennedys?”

“I don’t think I know the William Kennedys.”

This is the way the conversation goes on for ten minutes. Both Mr. Sedley and Miss Smiles are getting desperate. Their faces are fixed. Their sentences are reduced to—

“Do you know the Petersons?”

“No. Do you know the Applebys?”

“No. Do you know the Willie Johnsons?”

“No.”

Then at last comes a rift in the clouds. One of them happens to mention Beverley Dixon. The other is able to cry exultingly—

“Beverley Dixon? Oh, yes, rather. At least, I don’t know him, but I used often to hear the Applebys speak of him.”

And the other exclaims with equal delight—

“I don’t know him very well either, but I used to hear the Willie Johnsons talk about him all the time.”

They are saved.

Half an hour after they are still standing there talking of Beverly Dixon.

The Etiquette Book

Personally I have suffered so much from inability to begin a conversation that not long ago I took the extreme step of buying a book on the subject. I regret to say that I got but little light or help from it. It was written by the Comtesse de Z———. According to the preface the Comtesse had “moved in the highest circles of all the European capitals.” If so, let her go on moving there. I for one, after trying her book, shall never stop her. This is how the Comtesse solves the problem of opening a conversation:

“In commencing a conversation, the greatest care should be devoted to the selection of a topic, good taste demanding that one should sedulously avoid any subject of which one’s vis-a-vis may be in ignorance. Nor are the mere words alone to be considered. In the art of conversation much depends upon manner. The true conversationalist must, in opening, invest himself with an atmosphere of interest and solicitude. He must, as we say in French, be prepared to payer les rais de la conversation. In short, he must ‘give himself an air.’”

There! Go and do it if you can. I admit that I can’t. I have no idea what the French phrase above means, but I know that personally I cannot “invest myself with an atmosphere of interest.” I might manage about two per cent on five hundred dollars. But what is that in these days of plutocracy?

At any rate I tried the Comtesse’s directions at a reception last week, on being introduced to an unknown lady. And they failed. I cut out nearly all the last part, and confined myself merely to the proposed selection of a topic, endeavouring to pick it with as much care as if I were selecting a golf club out of a bag. Naturally I had to confine myself to the few topics that I know about, and on which I can be quite interesting if I get started.

“Do you know any mathematics?” I asked.

“No,” said the lady.

This was too bad. I could have shown her some good puzzles about the squares of the prime numbers up to forty-one.

I paused and gave myself more air.

“How are you,” I asked, “on hydrostatics?”

“I beg your pardon,” she said. Evidently she was ignorant again.

“Have you ever studied the principles of aerial navigation?” I asked.

“No,” she answered.

I was pausing again and trying to invest myself with an air of further interest, when another man was introduced to her, quite evidently, from his appearance, a vapid jackass without one tenth of the brain calibre that I have.

“Oh, how do you do?” he said. “I say, I’ve just heard that Harvard beat Princeton this afternoon. Great, isn’t it?”

In two minutes they were talking like old friends. How do these silly asses do it?

When Dressed Hogs are Dull

An equally unsuccessful type of conversation, often overheard at receptions, is where one of the two parties to it is too surly, too stupid, or too self-important and too rich to talk, and the other labours in vain.

The surly one is, let us say, a middle-aged, thick-set man of the type that anybody recognizes under the name Money Hog. This kind of person, as viewed standing in his dress suit, mannerless and stupid, too rich to have to talk and too dull to know how to, always recalls to my mind the head-line of the market reports in the newspapers, “Dressed Hogs are Dull.”

The other party to the conversation is a winsome and agreeable woman, trying her best to do her social duty.

But, tenez, as the Comtesse of Z——— would say, I can exactly illustrate the position and attitude of the two of them from a recollection of my childhood. I remember that in one of my nursery books of forty years ago there was a picture entitled “The Lady in Love with A Swine.” A willowy lady in a shimmering gown leaned over the rail of a tessellated pig-sty, in which an impossibly clean hog stood in an attitude of ill-mannered immobility. With the picture was the rhyming legend,

There was a Lady in love with a swine,

“Honey,” said she, “will you be mine?

I’ll build you a silver sty

And in it you shall lie.”

“Honk!” said He.

There was something, as I recall it, in the sweet willingness of the Lady that was singularly appealing, and contrasted with the dull mannerless passivity of the swine.

In each of the little stanzas that followed, the pretty advances of the Lady were rebuffed by a surly and monosyllabic “honk” from the hog.

Here is the social counterpart of the scene in the picture-book. Mr. Grunt, capitalist, is standing in his tessellated sty – the tessellated sty being represented by the hardwood floor of a fashionable drawing-room. His face is just the same as the face of the pig in the picture-book. The willowy lady, in the same shimmering clothes and with the same pretty expression of eagerness, is beside him.

“Oh, Mr. Grunt,” she is saying, “how interesting it must be to be in your place and feel such tremendous power. Our hostess was just telling me that you own practically all the shoemaking machinery factories – it is shoe-making machinery, isn’t it? – east of Pennsylvania.”

“Honk!” says Mr. Grunt.

“Shoe-making machinery,” goes on the willowy lady (she really knows nothing and cares less about it) “must be absolutely fascinating, is it not?”

“Honk!” says Mr. Grunt.

“But still you must find it sometimes a dreadful strain, do you not? I mean, so much brain work, and that sort of thing.”

“Honk!” says Mr. Grunt.

“I should love so much to see one of your factories. They must be so interesting.”

“Honk!” says Mr. Grunt. Then he turns and moves away sideways. Into his little piggy eyes has come a fear that the lady is going to ask him to subscribe to something, or wants a block of his common stock, or his name on a board of directors. So he leaves her. Yet if he had known it she is probably as rich as he is, or richer, and hasn’t the faintest interest in his factories, and never intends to go near one. Only she is fit to move and converse in polite society and Mr. Grunt is not.

TOC     INDEX

Heroes and Heroines

“What are you reading?” I asked the other day of a blue-eyed boy of ten curled up among the sofa cushions.

He held out the book for me to see.

“Dauntless Ned among the Cannibals,” he answered.

“Is it exciting?” I enquired.

“Not very,” said the child in a matter-of-fact tone. “But it’s not bad.”

I took the book from him and read aloud at the opened page.

“In a compact mass the gigantic savages rushed upon our hero, shrieking with rage and brandishing their huge clubs. Ned stood his ground fearlessly, his back to a banana tree. With a sweep of his cutlass he severed the head of the leading savage from his body, while with a back stroke of his dirk he stabbed another to the heart. But resistance against such odds was vain. By sheer weight of numbers, Ned was borne to the ground. His arms were then pinioned with stout ropes made of the fibres of the boobooda tree. With shrieks of exultation the savages dragged our hero to an opening in the woods where a huge fire was burning, over which was suspended an enormous caldron of bubbling oil. ‘Boil him, boil him,’ yelled the savages, now wrought to the point of frenzy.”

“That seems fairly exciting, isn’t it?” I said.

“Oh, he won’t get boiled,” said the little boy. “He’s the hero.”

So I knew that the child has already taken his first steps in the disillusionment of fiction.

Of course he was quite right as to Ned. This wonderful youth, the hero with whom we all begin an acquaintance with books, passes unhurt through a thousand perils. Cannibals, Apache Indians, war, battles, shipwrecks, leave him quite unscathed. At the most Ned gets a flesh wound which is healed, in exactly one paragraph, by that wonderful drug called a “simple.”

But the most amazing thing about this particular hero, the boy Ned, is the way in which he turns up in all the great battles and leading events of the world.

It was Ned, for example, who at the critical moment at Gettysburg turned in his saddle to General Meade and said quietly, “General, the day is ours.” “If it is,” answered Meade, as he folded his field glass, “you alone, Ned, have saved it.”

In the same way Ned was present at the crossing of the Delaware with Washington. Thus:

“‘What do you see, Ned?’ said Washington, as they peered from the leading boat into the driving snow.

“‘Ice,’ said Ned. ‘My boy,’ said the Great American General, and a tear froze upon his face as he spoke, ‘you have saved us all.’”

Here is Ned at Runningmede when King John with his pen in hand was about to sign the Magna Carta.

“For a moment the King paused irresolute, the uplifted quill in his hand, while his crafty, furtive eyes indicated that he might yet break his plighted faith with the assembled barons.

“Ned laid his mailed hand upon the parchment.

“‘Sign it,’ he said sternly, ‘or take the consequences.’

“The King signed.

“‘Ned,’ said the Baron de Bohun, as he removed his iron vizor from his bronze face, ‘thou hast this day saved all England.’”

In the stories of our boyhood in which Ned figured, there was no such thing as a heroine, or practically none. At best she was brought in as an afterthought. It was announced on page three hundred and one that at the close of Ned’s desperate adventures in the West Indies he married the beautiful daughter of Don Diego, the Spanish governor of Portobello; or else, at the end of the great war with Napoleon, that he married a beautiful and accomplished French girl whose parents had perished in the Revolution.

Ned generally married away from home. In fact his marriages were intended to cement the nations, torn asunder by Ned’s military career. But sometimes he returned to his native town, all sunburned, scarred and bronzed from battle (the bronzing effect of being in battle is always noted): he had changed from a boy to a man: that is, from a boy of fifteen to a man of sixteen. In such a case Ned marries in his own home town. It is done after this fashion:

“But who is this who advances smiling to greet him as he crosses the familiar threshold of the dear old house? Can this tall, beautiful girl be Gwendoline, the child-playmate of his boyhood?”

Well, can it? I ask it of every experienced reader – can it or can it not?

—

Ned had his day, in the boyhood of each of us. We presently passed him by. I am speaking, of course, of those of us who are of maturer years and can look back upon thirty or forty years of fiction reading. “Ned,” flourishes still, I understand, among the children of today. But now he flies in airplanes, and dives in submarines, and gives his invaluable military advice to General Joffre and General Pershing.

But with the oncoming of adolescent years something softer was needed than Ned with his howling cannibals and his fusillade of revolver shots.

So the “Ned” of the Adventure Books was supplanted by the Romantic Heroine of the Victorian Age and the Long-winded Immaculate who accompanied her as the Hero.

I do not know when these two first opened their twin career. Whether Fenimore Cooper or Walter Scott began them, I cannot say. But they had an undisputed run on two continents for half a century.

This Heroine was a sylph. Her chiefest charm lay in her physical feebleness. She was generally presented to us in some such words as these:

“Let us now introduce to our readers the fair Madeline of Rokewood. Slender and graceful and of a form so fragile that her frame scarce fitted to fulfil its bodily functions . . . she appeared rather as one of those ethereal beings of the air who might visit for a brief moment this terrestrial scene, than one of its earthly inhabitants. Her large, wondering eyes looked upon the beholder in childlike innocence.”

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? One might suspect there was something wrong with the girl’s brain.

But listen to this:

“The mind of Madeline, elegantly formed by the devoted labours of the venerable Abbé, her tutor, was of a degree of culture rarely found in one so young. Though scarce eighteen summers had flown over her head at the time when we introduce her to our readers, she was intimately conversant with the French, Italian, Spanish, and Provençal tongues. The abundant pages of history, both ancient and modern, sacred and profane, had been opened for her by her devoted instructor. In music she played with exquisite grace and accuracy upon both the spinet and the harpsichord, while her voice, though lacking something in compass, was sweet and melodious to a degree.”

From such a list of accomplishments it is clear that Madeline could have matriculated, even at the Harvard Law School, with five minutes preparation. Is it any wonder that there was a wild rush for Madeline? In fact, right after the opening description of the Heroine, there follows an ominous sentence such as this:

“It was this exquisite being whose person Lord Rip de Viperous, a man whose reputation had shamed even the most licentious court of the age, and had led to his banishment from the presence of the king, had sworn to get within his power.”

Personally I don’t blame Lord Rip a particle; it must have been very rough on him to have been banished from the presence of the king – enough to inflame a man to do anything.

With two such characters in the story, the scene was set and the plot and adventures followed as a matter of course. Lord Rip de Viperous pursued the Heroine. But at every step he is frustrated. He decoys Madeline to a ruined tower at midnight, her innocence being such and the gaps left in her education by the Abbé being so wide, that she is unaware of the danger of ruined towers after ten thirty p.m. In fact, “tempted by the exquisite clarity and fulness of the moon, which magnificent orb at this season spread its widest effulgence over all nature, she accepts the invitation of her would-be-betrayer to gather upon the battlements of the ruined keep the strawberries which grew there in wild profusion.”

But at the critical moment, Lord de Viperous is balked. At the very instant when he is about to seize her in his arms, Madeline turns upon him and says in such icy tones, “Titled villain that you are, unhand me,” that the man is “cowed.” He slinks down the ruined stairway “cowed.” And at every later turn, at each renewed attempt, Madeline “cows” him in like fashion.

Moreover while Lord de Viperous is being thus cowed by Madeline the Heroine, he is also being “dogged” by the Hero. This counterpart of Madeline who shared her popularity for fifty years can best be described as the Long-winded Immaculate Hero. Entirely blameless in his morals, and utterly virtuous in his conduct, he possessed at least one means of defending himself. He could make speeches. This he did on all occasions. With these speeches he “dogged” Lord de Viperous. Here is the style of them:

“‘My Lord,’ said Markham. . . .” (incidentally let it be explained that this particular brand of hero was always known by his surname and his surname was always Markham) – “‘My lord, the sentiments that you express and the demeanour which you have evinced are so greatly at variance with the title that you bear and the lineage of which you spring that no authority that you can exercise and no threats that you are able to command shall deter me from expressing that for which, however poor and inadequate my powers of speech, all these of whom and for what I am what I am, shall answer to it for the integrity of that, which, whether or not, is at least as it is. My lord, I have done. Or shall I speak more plainly still?’”

Is it to be wondered that after this harangue Lord Rip sank into a chair, a hideous convulsion upon his face, murmuring – “It is enough.”

But successful as they were as Hero and Heroine, Markham and Madeline presently passed off the scene. Where they went to, I do not know. Perhaps Markham got elected in the legislature of Massachusetts. At any rate they disappeared from fiction.

There followed in place of Madeline, the athletic sunburned heroine with the tennis racket. She was generally called Kate Middleton, or some such plain, straightforward designation. She wore strong walking boots and leather leggings. She ate beef steak. She shot with a rifle.

For a while this Boots and Beef Heroine (of the middle nineties) made a tremendous hit. She climbed crags in the Rockies. She threw steers in Colorado with a lariat. She came out strong in sea scenes and shipwrecks, and on sinking steamers, where she “cowed” the trembling stewards and “dogged” the mutinous sailors in the same fashion that Madeline used to “cow” and “dog” Lord Rip de Viperous.

With the Boots and Beef Heroine went as her running mate the out-of-doors man, whose face had been tanned and whose muscles had been hardened into tempered steel in wild rides over the Pampas of Patagonia, and who had learned every art and craft of savage life by living among the wild Hoodoos of the Himalayas. This Air-and-Grass-man, as he may be called, is generally supposed to write the story. . . . He was “I” all through. And he had an irritating modesty in speaking of his own prowess. Instead of saying straight out that he was the strongest and bravest man in the world, he implied it indirectly on every page.

Here, for example, is a typical scene in which “I” and Kate figure in a desperate adventure in the Rocky Mountains, pursued by Indians.

“We are about to descend on a single cord from the summit of a lofty crag, our sole chance of escape (and a frightfully small chance at that) from the roving band of Apaches.

“With my eye I measured the fearsome descent below us.

“‘Hold fast to the line, Miss Middleton,’ I said as I set my foot against a projecting rock. (Please note that the Air-and-Grass Hero in these stories always calls the Heroine Miss Middleton right up to the very end.)

“The noble girl seized the knotted end of the buckskin line. ‘All right, Mr. Smith,’ she said with quiet confidence.

“I braced myself for the effort. My muscles like tempered steel responded to the strain. I lowered a hundred fathoms of the line. I could already hear the voice of Kate far down the cliff.

“‘Don’t let go the line, Miss Middleton,’ I called. (Here was an excellent piece of advice.)

“The girl’s clear voice floated up to me . . . ‘All right, Mr. Smith,’ she called, ‘I won’t.’”

Of course they landed safely at the foot of the cliff, after the manner of all heroes and heroines. And here it is that Kate in her turn comes out strong, at the evening encampment, frying bacon over a blazing fire of pine branches, while the firelight illuminates her leather leggings and her rough but picturesque costume.

The circumstances might seem a little daring and improper. But the reader knows that it is all right, because the hero and heroine always call one another Miss Middleton and Mr. Smith.

Not till right at the end, when they are just getting back again to the confines of civilization, do they depart from this.

Here is the scene that happens. . . . The hero and heroine are on the platform of the wayside depot where they are to part . . . Kate to return to the luxurious home of her aunt, Mrs. van der Kyper of New York, and the Air-and-Grass Man to start for the pampas of Patagonia to hunt the hoopoo. The Air-and-Grass Man is about to say goodbye. Then . . . “‘Kate,’ I said, as I held the noble girl’s gloved hand in mine a moment. She looked me in the face with the full, frank, fearless gaze of a sister.

“‘Yes?’ she answered.

“‘Kate,’ I repeated, ‘do you know what I was thinking of when I held the line while you were half way down the cliff?’

“‘No,’ she murmured, while a flush suffused her cheek.

“‘I was thinking, Kate,’ I said, ‘that if the rope broke I should be very sorry.’

“‘Edward!’ she exclaimed.

“I clasped her in my arms.

“‘Shall I make a confession,’ said Kate, looking up timidly, half an hour later, as I tenderly unclasped the noble girl from my encircling arms, . . . ‘I was thinking the same thing too.’”

So Kate and Edward had their day and then, as Tennyson says, they “passed,” or as less cultivated people put it, “they were passed up in the air.”

As the years went by they failed to please. Kate was a great improvement upon Madeline. But she wouldn’t do. The truth was, if one may state it openly, Kate wasn’t tough enough. In fact she wasn’t tough at all. She turned out to be in reality just as proper and just as virtuous as Madeline.

So, too, with the Air-and-Grass Hero. For all of his tempered muscles and his lariat and his Winchester rifle, he was presently exposed as a fraud. He was just as Long-winded and just as Immaculate as the Victorian Hero that he displaced.

What the public really wants and has always wanted in its books is wickedness. Fiction was recognised in its infancy as being a work of the devil.

So the popular novel, despairing of real wickedness among the cannibals, and in the ruined tower at midnight, and on the open-air of the prairies, shifted its scenes again. It came indoors. It came back to the city. And it gave us the new crop of heroes and heroines and the scenes and settings with which the fiction of today has replaced the Heroes and Heroines of Yesterday. The Lure of the City is its theme. It pursues its course to the music of the ukelele, in the strident racket of the midnight cabaret. Here move the Harvard graduate in his dinner jacket, drunk at one in the morning. Here is the hard face of Big Business scowling at its desk; and here the glittering Heroine of the hour in her dress of shimmering sequins, making such tepid creatures as Madeline and Kate look like the small change out of a twenty-five cent shinplaster.

TOC     INDEX

The Discovery of America

Being Done into Moving Pictures
and Out Again

“No greater power for education,” said President Shurman the other day, “has come among us during the last forty years than the moving picture.”

I am not certain that it was President Shurman. And he may not have said it the other day. Nor do I feel absolutely sure that he referred to the last forty years. Indeed now that I come to think of it, I don’t believe it was Shurman. In fact it may have been ex-President Eliot. Or was it, perhaps, President Hadley of Yale? Or did I say it myself? Judging by the accuracy and force of the language, I think I must have. I doubt if Shurman or Hadley could have put it quite so neatly. There’s a touch about it that I recognise.

But let that pass. At any rate it is something that everybody is saying and thinking. All our educators have turned their brains towards the possibility of utilising moving pictures for the purpose of education. It is being freely said that history and geography, and even arithmetic, instead of being taught by the slow and painful process of books and memory, can be imparted through the eye.

I had no sooner heard of this idea than I became impassioned to put it into practice. I have therefore prepared, or am preparing, a film, especially designed for the elementary classes of our schools to narrate the story of the discovery of America.

This I should like the reader to sit and see with me, in the eye of his imagination. But let me first give the plain, unvarnished account of the discovery of America as I took it from one of our school histories.

“Christopher Columbus, otherwise Christoforo Colombo, the celebrated discoverer of America, was born of poor but honest parents in the Italian city of Genoa. His mother, Teresa Colombo, seems to have been a woman of great piety and intelligence. Of his father, Bartolomeo Colombo, nothing is recorded. From his earliest youth the boy Christopher developed a passion for mathematics, astronomy, geodesy, and the other sciences of the day. . . .”

But, no – stop! I am going too fast. The reader will get it better if we turn it into pictures bit by bit as we go on. Let the reader therefore imagine himself seated before the curtain in the lighted theatre. All ready? Very good. Let the music begin – Star Spangled Banner, please – flip off the lights. Now then.

DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

AUTHORIZED BY THE BOARD OF CENSORS
OF NEW YORK STATE

There we are. That gives the child the correct historical background right away. Now what goes on next? Let me see. Ah, yes, of course. We throw an announcement on the screen, thus.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS | Mr. Quinn

Here the face of Mr. Quinn (in a bowler hat) is thrown on the screen and fades out again.

We follow him up with

SPIRIT OF AMERICA | Miss E. Dickenson

Now, we are ready to begin in earnest. Let us make the scenario together. First idea to be expressed:

Christopher Columbus was the son of poor but honest parents.

This might seem difficult to a beginner, but to those of us who frequent the movies it is nothing.

The reel spins and we see – a narrow room – (it is always narrow in the movies) – to indicate straitened circumstances – cardboard furniture – high chairs with carved backs – two cardboard beams across the ceiling (all this means the Middle Ages) – a long dinner table – all the little Columbuses seated at it – Teresa Colombo cutting bread at one end of it – gives a slice to each, one slice (that means poverty in the movies) – Teresa rolls her eyes up – all the little children put their hands together and say grace (this registers honesty). The thing is done. Let us turn back to the history book and see what is to be put in next.

“. . . The father of Christopher, Bartolomeo Colombo, was a man of no especial talent of whom nothing is recorded.”

That’s easy. First we announce him on the screen:

BARTOLOMEO COLOMBO | Mr. Henderson

Then we stick him on the film on a corner of the room, leaning up against the cardboard clock and looking at the children. This attitude in the movies always indicates a secondary character of no importance. His business is to look at the others and to indicate forgetfulness of self, incompetence, unimportance, vacuity, simplicity. Note how this differs from the attitudes of important characters. If a movie character – one of importance – is plotting or scheming, he seats himself at a little round table, drums on it with his fingers, and half closes one eye. If he is being talked to, or having a letter or document or telegram read to him, he stands “facing full” and working his features up and down to indicate emotion sweeping over them. If he is being “exposed” (which is done by pointing fingers at him), he hunches up like a snake in an angle of the room with both eyes half shut and his mouth set as if he had just eaten a lemon. But if he has none of these things to express and is only in the scene as a background for the others, then he goes over and leans in an easy attitude against the tall cardboard clock.

That then is the place for Bartolomeo Colombo. To the clock with him.

Now what comes next?

“. . . The young Christopher developed at an early age a passion for study, and especially for astronomy, geometry, geodesy, and the exact science of the day.”

Quite easy. On spins the film. Young Christopher in a garret room (all movie study is done in garrets). The cardboard ceiling slopes within six inches of his head. This shows that the boy never rises from his books. He can’t. On a table in front of him is a little globe and a pair of compasses. Christopher spins the globe round. Then he makes two circles with the compasses, one after the other, very carefully. This is the recognised movie symbol for mathematical research.

So there we have Christopher – poor, honest, studious, full of circles.

Now to the book again.

“. . . The young Columbus received his education at the monastery of the Franciscan monks at Genoa. Here he spent seven years.”

Yes, but we can put that on the screen in seven seconds.

Turn on the film.

Movie Monastery – exterior, done in grey cardboard – ding, dong, ding, dong (man in the orchestra with triangle and stick) – procession of movie friars – faces more like thugs, but never mind – they are friars because they walk two and two in a procession, singing out of hymn books.

Now for the book again.

“. . . Fra Giacomo, the prior of the monastery, delighted with the boy’s progress, encourages his studies.”

Wait a minute.

FRA GIACOMO | Mr. Edward Sims

Mr. Sims’s face, clean-shaved under a round hat, fades in and out. Then the picture goes on. Movie monastery interior – young Christopher, still at a table with compasses – benevolent friar bending over him – Christopher turns the compasses and looks up with a what-do-you-know-about-that look – astonishment and delight of friar (registered by opening his eyes like a bull frog). All this shows study, progress, application. The friars are delighted with the boy.

“. . . Christopher, after seven years of study, reaches the firm conviction that the world is round.”

Picture. Christopher – with his globe – jumps up from table – passes his fingers round and round the globe – registers the joy of invention – seats himself at table and draws circles with his compasses furiously. He fades out.

“. . . Fired with his discovery Christopher sets out from the monastery.”

Stop a minute, this is a little hard. Fired. How can we show Christopher “fired.” We can’t. Perhaps he’ll be fired if the film is no good, but we must omit it just now.

“He sets out.”

One second only for this. Monastery door (double cardboard with iron across it) – Christopher leaving – carries a wallet to mean distance. Fra Giacomo blessing him – fade out.

“. . . For eighteen years Columbus vainly travelled through the world on foot offering his discovery at the courts of Europe, in vain, though asking nothing in return for it except a fleet of ships, two hundred men and provisions for two years.”

To anybody not used to scenarios this looks a large order. Eighteen years seems difficult to put on the screen. In reality this is exactly where the trained movie man sees his chance. Here he can put in anything and everything that he likes, bringing in, in a slightly mediaeval form, all his favourite movie scenes.

Thus, for example, here we have first the good old midnight cabaret supper scene – thinly disguised as the court of the King of Sardinia. To turn a cabaret into a court the movie men merely exchange their Fifth Avenue evening dress for short coats and knee breeches, heavily wadded and quilted, and wear large wigs. Quilted pants and wigs register courtiers, the courtiers of anybody – Charlemagne, Queen Elizabeth, Peter the Great, Louis Quatorze, anybody and everybody who ever had courtiers. Just as men with bare legs mean Romans, men in pea-jackets mean detectives, and young men drunk in evening dress Harvard graduates.

The ladies at the court of Sardinia wear huge paper frills round their necks. Otherwise it is the cabaret scene with the familiar little tables, and the ukaleles going like mad in one corner, and black sarsaparilla being poured foaming into the glasses.

In this scene Columbus moves up and down, twirling his little globe and looking appealingly in their faces. All laugh at him. His part is just the same as that of the poor little girl trying to sell up-state violets in the midnight cabaret.

The Court of Sardinia fades and the film shows Columbus vainly soliciting financial aid from Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Stop one minute, please.

LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT | Mr. L. Evans

This scene again is old and familiar. It is the well-known interior representing the Grinding Capitalist, or the Bitter Banker refusing aid to the boy genius who has invented a patent pearake. The only change is that Lorenzo wears a huge wig, has no telephone, and handles a large quill pen (to register Middle Ages) which he wiggles furiously up and down on a piece of parchment.

So the eighteen years, with scenes of this sort, turn out the easiest part of the whole show.

But let us to the book again.

“. . . After eighteen years Columbus, now past the prime of life, is presented at the Court of Queen Isabella of Spain.”

Just half a moment.

QUEEN ISABELLA | Miss Janet Briggs

There will be very probably at this point a slight applause from the back of the hall. Miss Briggs was here last week, or her astral body was – as Maggie of the Cattle Ranges. The impression that she made is passed on to Isabella.

“The Queen and her consort, King Ferdinand of Aragon . . .”

Stop, stick him on the film.

FERDINAND OF ARAGON | Mr. Edward Giles

(Large wig, flat velvet cap and square whiskers – same make-up as for Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Ferdinand of Bohemia, or any of the Ferdinands.)

“. . . were immediately seized with enthusiasm for the marvellous discovery of the Genoese adventurer.”

Picture. Columbus hands his globe to Isabella and his compasses to Ferdinand. They register delight and astonishment. The Queen turns the globe round and round and holds it up to Ferdinand. Both indicate with their faces, well-what-do-you-know-about-this. Ferdinand makes a circle with the compasses on a table – the courtiers, fickle creatures, crowd around. They are still dressed as in Sardinia eighteen years ago. In fact, one recognises quite a lot of them. When Ferdinand draws the circle they fall back in wild astonishment, gesticulating frantically. What they mean is, “It’s a circle, it’s a circle.”

“The King and Queen at once place three ships at the disposal of Columbus.”

On with the picture. The harbour of the port of Palos – ships bobbing up and down (it is really the oyster boats in Baltimore Bay but it looks just like Palos, or near enough). Notice Queen Isabella on the right, at the top of a flight of steps, extending her hand and looking at Columbus. Her gesture means, “Pick a ship, any ship you like, any colour.” Just as if she were saying, “Pick a card, any card you like.”

We turn again to the history.

“. . . Christopher Columbus, now arrived at the height of his desire, sets out upon his memorable voyage accompanied by a hundred companions in three caravels, the Pinta, the Niña and the Espiritu Santo.”

Ah, here we have the movie work – the real thing. Cardboard caravel tossing on black water – seen first right close to us – we are almost on board of it. Notice the movie sailors with black whiskers and bare feet (bare feet in the movies always means a sailor, and black whiskers mean Spaniards). Now we see the caravel a little way out – whoop! How she bobs up and down! They give her that jolt (it’s done with the machine itself) to mean danger. There are all three caravels – Hoop – er – oo! See them go up and down – stormy night coming all right. See the sun setting in the west, over the water? They’re heading straight for it. Good-night Columbus – take care of yourself out there in the blackness.

“During the voyage Columbus remained continually on deck. Sleeping at the prow, his face towards the new world, he saw already in his dreams the accomplishment of his hopes.”

On goes the picture. Christopher in the prow of the caravel (in the movies a prow is made by putting two little board fences together and propping up a bowsprit lengthwise over them). Columbus sits up, peers intently into the darkness, his hand to his brow – registers a look. Do I see America? No. Lies down, shuts his eyes and falls into an instantaneous movie sleep. His face fades out slowly to music, which means that he is going to dream. Then on the screen the announcement is shown:

SPIRIT OF AMERICA | Miss E. Dickenson

and here we have Miss Dickenson floating in the air above Columbus. She wears nothing except mosquito netting, but she has got on enough of it to get past the censor of the State of New York. Just enough, apparently.

Miss E. Dickenson is joined by a whole troop of Miss Dickensons all in white mosquito netting. They go through a series of beautiful evolutions, floating over the sleeping figure of Columbus. The dance they do is meant to typify, or rather to signify – as a matter of fact we needn’t worry much about what it signified. It is an allegory, done in white mosquito netting. That is generally held to be quite enough. Let us go back to the book—

“After a storm-tossed voyage of three months . . .”

Wait a bit. Turn on the picture again and toss the caravels up and down.

“. . . during which the food supply threatened to fail . . .”

Put that on the screen, please. Columbus surrounded by ten sailors, dividing up a potato.

“. . . the caravels arrived in safety at the beautiful island of San Salvador. Columbus, bearing the banner of Spain, stepped first ashore. Surrounded by a wondering crowd of savages he prostrated himself upon the beach and kissed the soil of the New World that he had discovered.”

All this is so easy that it’s too easy. It runs into pictures of itself. Anybody, accustomed to the movies, can see Columbus with his banner and the movie savages hopping up and down around him. Movie savages are gay, gladsome creatures anyway, and hopping up and down is their chief mode of expressing themselves. Add to them a sandy beach, with palm trees waving visibly in the wind (it is always windy in the movies) and the thing is done.

Just one further picture is needed to complete the film.

“Columbus who returned to Europe to lay at the feet of the Spanish sovereigns the world he had discovered, fell presently under the disfavour of the court, and died in poverty and obscurity, a victim of the ingratitude of princes.”

Last picture. Columbus dying under the poignant circumstances known only in the movies – a garret room – ceiling lower than ever – a truckle bed, narrow enough to kill him if all else failed – Teresa Colombo his aged mother alone at his bedside – she offers him medicine in a long spoon – (this shows, if nothing else would, that the man is ill) – he shakes his head – puts out his hand and rests it on the little globe – reaches feebly for his compasses – can’t manage it – rolls up his eyes and fades.

The music plays softly and the inexorable film, like the reel of life itself, spins on, announcing

At this theatre
All next week

MAGGIE MAY
and
WALTER CURRAN
in

IS IT WORTH IT

And after that I can imagine the audience dispersing, and the now educated children going off to their homes and one saying as he enters—

“Gee, I seen a great picture show at school today.”

“Yes?” says his mother, “and what was it?”

“Oh, it was all about a gink that went round the cabarets trying to sell an invention what he’d got but nobody wouldn’t look at it till at last one dame gave him three oyster boats, see? and so he and a lot of other guys loaded them up and hiked off across the ocean.”

“And where did he go to?”

“Africa. And he and the other guys had a great stand in with the niggers and he’d have sold his invention all right but one old dame got him alone in a hut and poisoned him and took it off him.”

That, I think, is about the way the film would run. When it is finished I must get President Shurman, or whoever it was, to come and see it.

TOC     INDEX

Politics from Within

To avoid all error as to the point of view, let me say in commencing that I am a Liberal Conservative, or, if you will, a Conservative Liberal with a strong dash of sympathy with the Socialist idea, a friend of Labour, and a believer in Progressive Radicalism. I do not desire office but would take a seat in the Canadian Senate at five minutes notice.

I believe there are ever so many people of exactly this way of thinking.

Let me say further than in writing of “politics” I am only dealing with the fights and shadows that flicker over the surface, and am not trying to discuss, still less to decry, the deep and vital issues that lie below.

Yet I will say that vital though the issues may be below the surface, there is more clap-trap, insincerity and humbug on the surface of politics than over any equal area on the face of any institution.

The candidate, as such, is a humbug. The voters, as voters – not as fathers, brothers or sons – are humbugs. The committees are humbugs. And the speeches to the extent of about ninety per cent are pure buncombe. But, oddly enough, out of the silly babel of talk that accompanies popular government, we get, after all, pretty good government – infinitely better than the government of an autocratic king. Between democracy and despotic kingship lies all the difference between genial humbug and black sin.

For the candidate for popular office I have nothing but sympathy and sorrow. It has been my fortune to walk round at the heels of half a dozen of them in different little Canadian towns, watching the candidate try in vain to brighten up his face at the glad sight of a party voter.

One, in particular, I remember. Nature had meant him to be a sour man, a hard man, a man with but little joy in the company of his fellows. Fate had made him a candidate for the House of Commons. So he was doing his best to belie his nature.

“Hullo, William!” he would call out as a man passed driving a horse and buggy, “got the little sorrel out for a spin, eh?”

Then he would turn to me and say in a low rasping voice—

“There goes about the biggest skunk in this whole constituency.”

A few minutes later he would wave his hand over a little hedge in friendly salutation to a man working in a garden.

“Hullo, Jasper! That’s a fine lot of corn you’ve got there.”

Jasper replied in a growl. And when we were well past the house the candidate would say between his teeth—

“That’s about the meanest whelp in the riding.”

Our conversation all down the street was of that pattern.

“Good morning, Edward! Giving the potatoes a dose of Paris green, eh?”

And in an undertone—

“I wish to Heaven he’d take a dose of it himself.”

And so on from house to house.

I counted up, from one end of the street to the other, that there were living in it seven skunks, fourteen low whelps, eight mean hounds and two dirty skinflints. And all of these merely among the Conservative voters. It made me wish to be a Liberal. Especially as the Liberal voters, by the law of the perversity of human affairs, always seemed to be the finer lot. As they were not voting for our candidate, they were able to meet him in a fair and friendly way, whereas William and Jasper and Edward and our “bunch” were always surly and hardly deigned to give more than a growl in answer to the candidate’s greeting, without even looking up at him.

But a Liberal voter would stop him in the street and shake hands and say in a frank, cordial way.

“Mr. Grouch, I’m sorry indeed that I can’t vote for you, and I’d like to be able to wish you success, but of course you know I’m on the other side and always have been and can’t change now.”

Whereupon the Candidate would say. “That’s all right, John, I don’t expect you to. I can respect a man’s convictions all right, I guess.”

So they would part excellent friends, the Candidate saying as we moved off:

“That man, John Winter, is one of the straightest men in this whole county.”

Then he would add—

“Now we’ll just go into this house for a minute. There’s a dirty pup in here that’s one of our supporters.”

My opinion of our own supporters went lower every day, and my opinion of the Liberal voters higher, till it so happened that I went one day to an old friend of mine who was working on the Liberal side. I asked him how he liked it.

“Oh, well enough!” he said, “as a sort of game. But in this constituency you’ve got all the decent voters; our voters are the lowest bunch of skunks I ever struck.”

Just then a man passed in a buggy, and looked sourly at my friend the Liberal worker.

“Hullo, John!” he called, with a manufactured hilarity, “got the little mare out for a turn, eh?”

John grunted.

“There’s one of them,” said my friend, “the lowest pup in this county, John Winter.”

—

“Come along,” said the Candidate to me one morning, “I want you to meet my committee.”

“You’ll find them,” he said confidingly, as we started down the street towards the committee rooms, “an awful bunch of mutts.”

“Too bad,” I said, “what’s wrong with them?”

“Oh, I don’t know – they’re just a pack of simps. They don’t seem to have any punch in them. The one you’ll meet first is the chairman – he’s about the worst dub of the lot; I never saw a man with so little force in my life. He’s got no magnetism, that’s what’s wrong with him – no magnetism.”

A few minutes later the Candidate was introducing me to a roomful of heavy looking Committee men. Committee men in politics, I notice, have always a heavy bovine look. They are generally in a sort of daze, or doped from smoking free cigars.

“Now I want to introduce you first,” said the Candidate, “to our chairman, Mr. Frog. Mr. Frog is our old battle horse in this constituency. And this is our campaign secretary Mr. Bughouse, and Mr. Dope, and Mr. Mudd, et cetera.”

Those may not have been their names.

It is merely what the names sounded like when one was looking into their faces.

The Candidate introduced them all as battle horses, battle axes, battle leaders, standard bearers, flag-holders, and so forth. If he had introduced them as hat-racks or cigar holders, it would have been nearer the mark.

Presently the Candidate went out and I was left with the battle-axes.

“What do you think of our chances?” I asked.

The battle-axes shook their heads with dubious looks.

“Pretty raw deal,” said the Chairman, “the Convention wishing him on us.” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the departed Candidate.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

Mr. Frog shook his head again.

“No punch,” he said.

“None at all,” agreed all the battle horses.

“I’ll tell you,” said the Campaign secretary, Mr. Bughouse, a voluble man, with wandering eyes – “the trouble is he has no magnetism, no personal magnetism.”

“I see,” I said.

“Now, you take this man, Shortis, that the Liberals have got hold of,” continued Mr. Bughouse, “he’s full of magnetism. He appeals.”

All the other Committee men nodded.

“That’s so,” they murmured, “magnetism. Our man hasn’t a darned ounce of it.”

“I met Shortis the other night in the street,” went on Mr. Bughouse, “and he said, ‘Come on up to my room in the hotel.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I can’t very well.’ ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘You’re on the other side but what does that matter?’ Well, we went up to his room, and there he had whiskey, and gin, and lager – everything. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘name your drink – what is it?’ There he was, right in his room, breaking the law without caring a darn about it. Well, you know the voters like that kind of thing. It appeals to them.”

“Well,” said another of the Committee men – I think it was the one called Mr. Dope, “I wouldn’t mind that so much. But the chief trouble about our man, to my mind, is that he can’t speak.”

“He can’t?” I exclaimed.

All the Committee shook their heads.

“Not for sour apples!” asserted Mr. Dope positively. “Now, in this riding that won’t do. Our people here are used to first class speaking, they expect it. I suppose there has been better speaking in this Constituency than anywhere else in the whole dominion. Not lately, perhaps; not in the last few elections. But I can remember, and so can some of the boys here, the election when Sir John A. spoke here, when the old Mackenzie government went out.”

He looked around at the circle. Several nodded.

“Remember it as well,” assented Mr. Mudd, “as if it were yesterday.”

“Well, sir,” continued Mr. Dope, “I’ll never forget Sir John A. speaking here in the Odd Fellows’ Hall, eh?”

The Committee men nodded and gurgled in corroboration.

“My! but he was plastered. We had him over at Pete Robinson’s hotel all afternoon, and I tell you he was plastered for fair. We all were. I remember I was so pickled myself I could hardly help Sir John up the steps of the platform. So were you, Mudd, do you remember?”

“I certainly was!” said Mr. Mudd proudly. Committee men who would scorn to drink lager beer in 1919, take a great pride, I have observed, in having been pickled in 1878.

“Yes, sir,” continued Mr. Dope, “you certainly were pickled. I remember just as well as anything, when they opened the doors and let the crowd in: all the boys had been bowling up and were pretty well soused. You never saw such a crowd. Old Dr. Greenway (boys, you remember the old Doc) was in the chair, and he was pretty well spifflocated. Well, sir, Sir John A. got up in that hall and he made the finest, most moving speech I ever listened to. Do you remember when he called old Trelawney an ash-barrel? And when he made that appeal for a union of hearts and said that the sight of McGuire (the Liberal candidate) made him sick? I tell you those were great days. You don’t get speaking like that now; and you don’t get audiences like that now either. Not the same calibre.”

All the Committee shook their heads.

“Well, anyway, boys,” said the Chairman, as he lighted a fresh cigar, “tomorrow will decide, one way or the other. We’ve certainly worked hard enough,” – here he passed the box of cigars round to the others – “I haven’t been in bed before two any night since the work started.”

“Neither have I,” said another of the workers. “I was just saying to the wife when I got up this morning that I begin to feel as if I never wanted to see the sight of a card again.”

“Well, I don’t regret the work,” said the Secretary, “so long as we carry the riding. You see,” he added in explanation to me, “we’re up against a pretty hard proposition here. This riding really is Liberal: they’ve got the majority of voters though we have once or twice swung it Conservative. But whether we can carry it with a man like Grouch is hard to say. One thing is certain, boys, if he does carry it, he doesn’t owe it to himself.”

All the battle horses agreed on this.

A little after that we dispersed.

And twenty-four hours later the vote was taken and to my intense surprise the riding was carried by Grouch the Conservative candidate.

I say, to my surprise. But apparently not to anybody else.

For it appeared this (was in conversations after the election) that Grouch was a man of extraordinary magnetism. He had, so they said, “punch.” Shortis, the Liberal, it seemed, lacked punch absolutely. Even his own supporters admitted that he had no personality whatever. Some wondered how he had the nerve to run.

But my own theory of how the election was carried is quite different.

I feel certain that all the Conservative voters despised their candidate so much that they voted Liberal. And all the Liberals voted Conservative.

That carried the riding.

Meantime Grouch left the constituency by the first train next day for Ottawa. Except for paying taxes on his house, he will not be back in the town till they dissolve parliament again.

TOC     INDEX

The Lost Illusions
of Mr. Sims

In the club to which I belong, in a quiet corner where the sunlight falls in sideways, there may be seen sitting of an afternoon my good friend of thirty years’ standing, Mr. Edward Sims. Being somewhat afflicted with gout, he generally sits with one foot up on a chair. On a brass table beside him are such things as Mr. Sims needs. But they are few. Wealthy as he is, the needs of Mr. Sims reach scarcely further than Martini cocktails and Egyptian cigarettes. Such poor comforts as these, brought by a deferential waiter, with, let us say, a folded newspaper at five o’clock, suffice for all his wants. Here sits Mr. Sims till the shadows fall in the street outside, when a limousine motor trundles up to the club and rolls him home.

And here of an afternoon Mr. Sims talks to me of his college days when he was young. The last thirty years of his life have moved in so gentle a current upon so smooth a surface that they have been without adventure. It is the stormy period of his youth that preoccupies my friend as he sits looking from the window of the club at the waving leaves in the summer time and the driving snow in the winter.

I am of that habit of mind that makes me prone to listen. And for this, perhaps, Mr. Sims selects me as the recipient of the stories of his college days. It is, it seems, the fixed belief of my good friend that when he was young he belonged at college to a particularly nefarious crowd or group that exists in his mind under the name of the “old gang.” The same association, or corporate body or whatever it should be called, is also designated by Mr. Sims, the “old crowd,” or more simply and affectionately “the boys.” In the recollection of my good friend this “old gang” were of a devilishness since lost off the earth. Work they wouldn’t. Sleep they despised. While indoors they played poker in a blue haze of tobacco smoke with beer in jugs and mugs all round them. All night they were out of doors on the sidewalk with linked arms, singing songs in chorus and jeering at the city police.

Yet in spite of life such as this, which might appear to an outsider wearing to the intellect, the “old gang” as recollected by Mr. Sims were of a mental brilliancy that eclipses everything previous or subsequent. McGregor of the Class of ’85 graduated with a gold medal in Philosophy after drinking twelve bottles of lager before sitting down to his final examination. Ned Purvis, the football half-back, went straight from the football field after a hard game with his ankle out of joint, drank half a bottle of Bourbon Rye and then wrote an examination in Greek poetry that drew tears from the President of the college.

Mr. Sims is perhaps all the more prone to talk of these early days insomuch that, since his youth, life, in the mere material sense, has used him all too kindly. At an early age, indeed at about the very time of his graduation, Mr. Sims came into money – not money in the large and frenzied sense of a speculative fortune, begetting care and breeding anxiety, but in the warm and comfortable inheritance of a family brewery, about as old and as well-established as the Constitution of the United States. In this brewery, even today, Mr. Sims, I believe, spends a certain part, though no great part, of his time. He is carried to it, I understand, in his limousine in the sunnier hours of the morning; for an hour or so each day he moves about among the warm smell of the barley and the quiet hum of the machinery murmuring among its dust.

There is, too, somewhere in the upper part of the city a huge, silent residence, where a noiseless butler adjusts Mr. Sims’s leg on a chair and serves him his dinner in isolated luxury.

But the residence, and the brewery, and with them the current of Mr. Sims’s life move of themselves.

Thus has care passed Mr. Sims by, leaving him stranded in a club chair with his heavy foot and stick beside him.

Mr. Sims is a bachelor. Nor is he likely now to marry: but this through no lack of veneration or respect for the sex. It arises, apparently, from the fact that when Mr. Sims was young, during his college days, the beauty and charm of the girls who dwelt in his college town was such as to render all later women mere feeble suggestions of what might have been. There was, as there always is, one girl in particular. I have not heard my friend speak much of her. But I gather that Kate Dashaway was the kind of girl who might have made a fit mate even for the sort of intellectual giant that flourished at Mr. Sims’s college. She was not only beautiful. All the girls remembered by Mr. Sims were that. But she was in addition “a good head” and “a good sport,” two of the highest qualities that, in Mr. Sims’s view, can crown the female sex. She had, he said, no “nonsense” about her, by which term Mr. Sims indicated religion. She drank lager beer, played tennis as well as any man in the college, and smoked cigarettes a whole generation in advance of the age.

Mr. Sims, so I gather, never proposed to her, nor came within a measurable distance of doing so. A man so prone, as is my friend, to spend his time in modest admiration of the prowess of others is apt to lag behind. Miss Dashaway remains to Mr. Sims, as all else does, a retrospect and a regret.

But the chief peculiarities of the old gang – as they exist in the mind of Mr. Sims – is the awful fate that has overwhelmed them. It is not merely that they are scattered to the four corners of the continent. That might have been expected. But, apparently, the most awful moral ruin has fallen upon them. That, at least, is the abiding belief of Mr. Sims.

“Do you ever hear anything of McGregor now?” I ask him sometimes.

“No,” he says, shaking his head quietly. “I understand he went all to the devil.”

“How was that?”

“Booze,” says Mr. Sims. There is a quiet finality about the word that ends all discussion.

“Poor old Curly!” says Mr. Sims, in speaking of another of his classmates. “I guess he’s pretty well down and out these days.”

“What’s the trouble?” I say.

Mr. Sims moves his eyes sideways as he sits. It is easier than moving his head.

“Booze,” he says.

Even apparent success in life does not save Mr. Sims’s friends.

“I see,” I said one day, “that they have just made Arthur Stewart a Chief Justice out west.”

“Poor old Artie,” murmured Mr. Sims. “He’ll have a hard time holding it down. I imagine he’s pretty well tanked up all the time these days.”

When Mr. Sims has not heard of any of his associates for a certain lapse of years, he decides to himself that they are down and out. It is a form of writing them off. There is a melancholy satisfaction in it. As the years go by Mr. Sims is coming to regard himself and a few others as the lonely survivors of a great flood. All the rest, brilliant as they once were, are presumed to be “boozed,” “tanked,” “burnt out,” “bust-up,” and otherwise consumed.

After having heard for so many years the reminiscences of my good friend about the old gang, it seemed almost incredible that one of them should step into actual living being before my eyes. Yet so it happened.

I found Mr. Sims at the club one day, about to lunch there, a thing contrary to his wont. And with him was a friend, a sallow, insignificant man in the middle fifties, with ragged, sandy hair, wearing thin.

“Shake hands with Tommy Vidal,” said Mr. Sims proudly.

If he had said, “Shake hands with Aristotle,” he couldn’t have spoken with greater pride.

This then was Tommy Vidal, the intellectual giant of whom I had heard a hundred times. Tommy had, at college, so Mr. Sims had often assured me, the brightest mind known since the age of Pericles. He took the prize in Latin poetry absolutely “without opening a book.” Latin to Tommy Vidal had been, by a kind of natural gift, born in him. In Latin he was “a whale.” Indeed in everything. He had passed his graduation examination with first class honours, “plastered.” He had to be held in his seat, so it was recorded, while he wrote.

Tommy, it seemed, had just “blown in” to town that morning. It was characteristic of Mr. Sims’s idea of the old gang that the only way in which any of them were supposed to enter a town was to “blow in.”

“When did you say you ‘blew in,’ Tommy?” he asked about half a dozen times during our lunch. In reality, the reckless, devil-may-care fellow Vidal had “blown in” to bring his second daughter to a boarding school – a thing no doubt contemplated months ahead. But Mr. Sims insisted in regarding Tommy’s movements as purely fortuitous, the sport of chance. He varied his question by asking “When do you expect to ‘blow out’ Tommy?” Tommy’s answers he forgot at once.

We sat and talked after lunch, and it pained me to notice that Tommy Vidal was restless and anxious to get away. Mr. Sims offered him cigars, thick as ropes and black as night, but he refused them. It appeared that he had long since given up smoking. It affected his eyes, he said. The deferential waiter brought brandy and curaçoa in long thin glasses. But Mr. Vidal shook his head. He hadn’t had a drink, he said, for twenty years. He found it affected his hearing. Coffee, too, he refused. It affected, so it seemed, his sense of smell. He sat beside us, ill at ease, and anxious, as I could see, to get back to his second daughter and her schoolmistresses. Mr. Sims, who is geniality itself in his heart, but has no great powers in conversation, would ask Tommy if he remembered how he acted as Antigone in the college play, and was “plastered” from the second act on. Mr. Vidal had no recollection of it, but wondered if there was any good book-store in town where he could buy his daughter an Algebra. He rose when he decently could and left us. As Mr. Sims saw it, he “blew out.”

Mr. Sims is kindliness itself in his judgments. He passed no word of censure on his departed friend. But a week or so later he mentioned to me in conversation that Tommy Vidal had “turned into a kind of stiff.” The vocabulary of Mr. Sims holds no term of deeper condemnation than the word “stiff.” To be a “stiff” is the last form of degradation.

It is strange that when a thing happens once, it forthwith happens twice or even more. For years no member of the “old gang” had come in touch with Mr. Sims. Yet the visit of Tommy Vidal was followed at no great distance of time by the “blowing in” of Ned Purvis.

“Well, well!” said Mr. Sims, as he opened one afternoon a telegram that the deferential waiter brought upon a tray. “This beats all! Old Ned Purvis wires that he’s going to blow in to town tonight at seven.”

Forthwith Mr. Sims fell to ordering dinner for the three of us in a private room, with enough of an assortment of gin cocktails and Scotch highballs to run a distillery, and enough Vichy water and imported soda for a bath. “I know old Ned!” he said as he added item after item to the list.

At seven o’clock the waiter whispered, as in deep confidence, that there was a gentleman below for Mr. Sims.

It so happened that on that evening my friend’s foot was in bad shape, and rested on a chair. At his request I went from the lounge room of the club downstairs to welcome the new arrival.

Purvis I knew all about. My friend had spoken of him a thousand times. He had played half-back on the football team – a big hulking brute of a fellow. In fact, he was, as pictured by Mr. Sims, a perfect colossus. And he played football – as did all Mr. Sims’s college chums – “plastered.” “Old Ned,” so Mr. Sims would relate, “was pretty well ‘soused’ when the game started: but we put a hose at him at half-time and got him into pretty good shape.” All men in any keen athletic contest, as remembered by Mr. Sims, were pretty well “tanked up.” For the lighter, nimbler games such as tennis, they were reported “spifflocated” and in that shape performed prodigies of agility.

“You’ll know Ned,” said Mr. Sims, “by his big shoulders.” I went downstairs.

The reception room below was empty, except for one man, a little, gentle-looking man with spectacles. He wore black clothes with a waistcoat reaching to the throat, a white tie and a collar buttoned on backwards. Ned Purvis was a clergyman! His great hulking shoulders had gone the way of all my good friend’s reminiscences.

I brought him upstairs.

For a moment, in the half light of the room, Mr. Sims was still deceived.

“Well, Ned!” he began heartily, with a struggle to rise from his chair – then he saw the collar and tie of the Rev. Mr. Purvis, and the full horror of the thing dawned upon him. Nor did the three gin cocktails, which Mr. Sims had had stationed ready for the reunion, greatly help its geniality. Yet it had been a maxim, in the recollections of Mr. Sims, that when any of the boys blew in anywhere the bringing of drinks must be instantaneous and uproarious.

Our dinner that night was very quiet.

Mr. Purvis drank only water. That, with a little salad, made his meal. He had a meeting to address that evening at eight, a meeting of women – “dear women” he called them – who had recently affiliated their society with the work that some of the dear women in Mr. Purvis’s own town were carrying on. The work, as described, boded no good for breweries. Mr. Purvis’s wife, so it seemed, was with him and would also “take the platform.”

As best we could we made conversation.

“I didn’t know that you were married,” said Mr. Sims.

“Yes,” said Mr. Purvis, “married, and with five dear boys and three dear girls.” The eight of them, he told us, were a great blessing. So, too, was his wife – a great social worker, it seemed, in the cause of women’s rights and a marvellous platform speaker in the temperance crusade.

“By the way, Mr. Sims,” said Mr. Purvis (they had called one another “Mr.” after the first five minutes), “you may remember my wife. I think perhaps you knew her in our college days. She was a Miss Dashaway.”

Mr. Sims bowed his head over his plate, as another of his lost illusions vanished into thin air.

After Mr. Purvis had gone, my friend spoke out his mind – once and once only, and more in regret than anger.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “that old Ned has turned into a SISSY.”

It was only to be expected that the visits of later friends – the “boys” who happened to “blow in” – were disappointments. Art Hamilton, who came next, and who had been one of the most brilliant men of the Class of ’86 had turned somehow into a “complete mutt.” Jake Todd, who used to write so brilliantly in the college paper, as recollected by Mr. Sims, was now the editor of a big New York daily. Good things might have been expected of him, but it transpired that he had undergone “wizening of the brain.” In fact, a number of Mr. Sims’s former friends had suffered from this cruel disease, consisting apparently of a shrinkage or contraction of the cerebellum.

Mr. Sims spoke little of his disappointments. But I knew that he thought much about them. They set him wondering. There were changes here that to the thoughtful mind called for investigation.

So I was not surprised when he informed me that it was his intention to visit “the old place” and have a look at it. The “old place,” called also the “old shop,” indicated, as I knew, Mr. Sims’s college, the original scene of the exploits of the old gang. In the thirty years since he had graduated, though separated from it only by two hundred miles, Mr. Sims had never revisited it. So is it always with the most faithful of the sons of learning. The illumination of the inner eye is better than the crude light of reality. College reunions are but for the noisy lip service of the shallow and the interested. The deeper affection glows in the absent heart.

My friend invited me to “come along.” We would, he said, “blow in” upon the place and have a look at it.

It was in the fullness of the spring time that we went, when the leaves are out on the college campus, and when Commencement draws near, and when all the college, even the students, are busy.

Mr. Sims, I noted when I joined him at the train, was dressed as for the occasion. He wore a round straw hat with a coloured ribbon, and light grey suit, and a necktie with the garish colours of the college itself. Thus dressed, he leaned as lightly as his foot allowed him upon a yellow stick, and dreamed himself again an undergraduate.

I had thought the purpose of his visit a mere curiosity bred in his disappointment. It appeared that I was wrong. On the train Mr. Sims unfolded to me that his idea in “blowing in” upon his college was one of benefaction. He had it in his mind, he said, to do something for the “old place,” no less a thing than to endow a chair. He explained to me, modestly as was his wont, the origin of his idea. The brewing business, it appeared, was rapidly reaching a stage when it would have to be wound up. The movement of prohibition would necessitate, said Mr. Sims, the closing of the plant. The prospect, in the financial sense, occasioned my friend but little excitement. I was given to understand that prohibition, in the case of Mr. Sims’s brewery, had long since been “written off” or “written up” or at least written somewhere where it didn’t matter. And the movement itself Mr. Sims does not regard as permanent. Prohibition, he says, is bound to be washed out by a “turn of the tide”; in fact, he speaks of this returning wave of moral regeneration much as Martin Luther might have spoken of the protestant Reformation. But for the time being the brewery will close. Mr. Sims had thought deeply, it seemed, about putting his surplus funds into the manufacture of commercial alcohol, itself a noble profession. For some time his mind has wavered between that and endowing a chair of philosophy. There is, and always has been, a sort of natural connection between the drinking of beer and deep quiet thought. Mr. Sims, as a brewer, felt that philosophy was the proper thing.

We left the train, walked through the little town and entered the university gates.

“Gee!” said Mr. Sims, pausing a moment and leaning on his stick, “were the gates only as big as that?”

We began to walk up the avenue.

“I thought there were more trees to it than these,” said Mr. Sims.

“Yes,” I answered. “You often said that the avenue was a quarter of a mile long.”

“So the thing used to be,” he murmured.

Then Mr. Sims looked at the campus. “A dinky looking little spot,” he said.

“Didn’t you say,” I asked, “that the Arts Building was built of white marble?”

“Always thought it was,” he answered. “Looks like rough cast from here, doesn’t it.”

“We’ll have to go in and see the President, I suppose,” continued Mr. Sims. He said it with regret. Something of his undergraduate soul had returned to his body. Although he had never seen the President (this one) in his life, and had only read of his appointment some five years before in the newspapers, Mr. Sims was afraid of him.

“Now, I tell you,” he went on. “We’ll just make a break in and then a quick get-away. Don’t let’s get anchored in there, see? If the old fellow gets talking, he’ll go on for ever. I remember the way it used to be when a fellow had to go in to see Prexy in my time. The old guy would start mooning away and quoting Latin and keep us there half the morning.”

At this moment two shabby-looking, insignificant men who had evidently come out from one of the buildings, passed us on the sidewalk.

“I wonder who those guys are,” said Mr. Sims. “Look like bums, don’t they?”

I shook my head. Some instinct told me that they were professors. But I didn’t say so.

My friend continued his instructions.

“When the President asks us to lunch,” he said, “I’ll say that we’re lunching with a friend downtown, see? Then we’ll make a break and get out. If he says he wants to introduce us to the Faculty or anything like that, then you say that we have to get the twelve-thirty to New York, see? I’m not going to say anything about a chair in philosophy today. I want to read it up first some night so as to be able to talk about it.”

To all of this I agreed.

From a janitor we inquired where to find the President.

“In the Administration Building, eh?” said Mr. Sims. “That’s a new one on me. The building on the right, eh? Thank you.”

“See the President?” said a young lady in an ante-office. “I’m not sure whether you can see him just now. Have you an appointment?”

Mr. Sims drew out a card. “Give him that,” he said. On the card he had scribbled “Graduate of 1887.”

In a few minutes we were shown into another room where there was a young man, evidently the President’s secretary, and a number of people waiting.

“Will you kindly sit down,” murmured the young man, in a consulting-room voice, “and wait? The President is engaged just now.”

We waited. Through the inner door leading to the President people went and came. Mr. Sims, speaking in whispers, continued to caution me on the quickness of our get-away.

Presently the young man touched him on the shoulder.

“The President will see you now,” he whispered.

We entered the room. The “old guy” rose to meet us, Mr. Sims’s card in his hand. But he was not old. He was at least ten years younger than either of us. He was, in fact, what Mr. Sims and I would almost have called a boy. In dress and manner he looked as spruce and busy as the salesmanager of a shoe factory.

“Delighted to see you, gentlemen,” he said, shaking hands effusively. “We are always pleased to see our old graduates, Mr. Simpson – No, I beg pardon, Mr. Sims – class of ’97, I see – No, I beg your pardon, Class of ’67, I read it wrongly—”

I heard Mr. Sims murmuring something that seemed to contain the words “a look around.”

“Yes, yes, exactly,” said the President. “A look round, you’ll find a great deal to interest you in looking about the place, I’m sure, Mr. Simpson, great changes. I’m extremely sorry I can’t offer to take you round myself,” here he snapped a gold watch open and shut, “the truth is I have to catch the twelve-thirty to New York – so sorry.”

Then he shook our hands again, very warmly.

In another moment we were outside the door. The get-away was accomplished.

We walked out of the building and towards the avenue.

As we passed the portals of the Arts Building, a noisy, rackety crowd of boys – evidently, to our eyes, schoolboys – came out, jostling and shouting. They swarmed past us, accidentally, no doubt, body-checking Mr. Sims, whose straw hat was knocked off and rolled on the sidewalk. A janitor picked it up for him as the crowd of boys passed.

“What pack of young bums are those?” asked Mr. Sims. “You oughtn’t to let young roughs like that come into the buildings. Are they here from some school or something?”

“No sir,” said the janitor. “They’re students.”

“Students?” repeated Mr. Sims. “And what are they shouting like that for?”

“There’s a notice up that their professor is ill, and so the class is cancelled, sir.”

“Class!” said Mr. Sims. “Are those a class?”

“Yes, sir,” said the janitor. “That’s the Senior Class in Philosophy.”

Mr. Sims said nothing. He seemed to limp more than his custom as we passed down the avenue.

On the way home on the train he talked much of crude alcohol and the possibilities of its commercial manufacture.

So far as I know, his only benefaction up to date has been the two dollars that he gave to a hackman to drive us away from the college.

TOC     INDEX

Fetching the Doctor

From Recollections of Childhood
in the Canadian Countryside

We lived far back in the country, such as it used to be in Canada, before the days of telephones and motor cars, with long lonely roads and snake fences buried in deep snow, and with cedar swamps where the sleighs could hardly pass two abreast. Here and there, on a winter night, one saw the light in a farm house, distant and dim.

Over it all was a great silence such as people who live in the cities can never know.

And on us, as on the other families of that lonely countryside, there sometimes fell the sudden alarm of illness, and the hurrying drive through the snow at night to fetch the doctor from the village, seven miles away.

My elder brother and I – there was a long tribe of us, as with all country families – would hitch up the horse by the light of the stable lantern, eager with haste and sick with fear, counting the time till the doctor could be there.

Then out into the driving snow, urging the horse that knew by instinct that something was amiss, and so mile after mile, till we rounded the corner into the single street of the silent village.

Late, late at night it was – eleven o’clock, perhaps – and the village dark and deep in sleep, except where the light showed red against the blinds of the “Surgery” of the doctor’s rough-cast house behind the spruce trees.

“Doctor,” we cried, as we burst in, “hurry and come. Jim’s ill—”

I can see him still as he sat there in his surgery, the burly doctor, rugged and strong for all the sixty winters that he carried. There he sat playing chess – always he seemed to be playing chess – with his son, a medical student, burly and rugged already as himself.

“Shut the door, shut the door!” he called. “Come in, boys; here, let me brush that snow off you – it’s my move Charlie, remember – now, what the devil’s the matter?”

Then we would pant out our hurried exclamations, both together.

“Bah!” he growled, “ill nothing! Mere belly ache, I guess.”

That was his term, his favourite word, for an undiagnosed disease – “belly ache.” They call it supergastral aesthesia now. In a city house, it sounds better. Yet how we hung upon the doctor’s good old Saxon term, yearning and hoping that it might be that.

But even as he growled the doctor had taken down a lantern from a hook, thrown on a huge, battered fur coat that doubled his size, and was putting medicines – a very shopful it seemed – into a leather case.

“Your horse is done up,” he said. “We’ll put my mare in. Come and give me a hand, Charlie.”

He was his own hostler and stable-man, he and his burly son. Yet how quickly and quietly he moved, the lantern swinging on his arm, as he buckled the straps. “What kind of a damn fool tug is this you’ve got?” he would say.

Then, in a moment, as it seemed, out into the wind and snow again, the great figure of the doctor almost filling the seat of the cutter, the two of us crushed in beside him, with responsibility, the unbearable burden, gone from us, and renewed comfort in our hearts.

Little is said on the way: our heads are bent against the storm: the long stride of the doctor’s mare eats up the flying road.

Then as we near the farm house and see the light in the sick-room window, fear clutches our hearts again.

“You boys unhitch,” says the doctor. “I’ll go right in.”

Presently, when we enter the house, we find that he is in the sick-room – the door closed. No word of comfort has come forth. He has sent out for hot blankets. The stoves are to be kept burning. We must sit up. We may be needed. That is all.

And there in that still room through the long night, he fights single-handed against Death. Behind him is no human help, no consultation, no wisdom of the colleges to call in; only his own unaided strength, and his own firm purpose and that strange instinct in the fight for a flickering life, that some higher power than that of colleges has planted deep within his soul.

So we watch through the night hours, in dull misery and fear, a phantom at the window pane: so must we wait till the slow morning shows dim and pale at the windows.

Then he comes out from the room. His face is furrowed with the fatigue of his long vigil. But as he speaks the tone of his voice is as that of one who has fought and conquered.

“There – he’ll do now. Give him this when he wakes.”

Then a great joy sweeps over us as the phantom flees away, and we shudder back into the warm sunshine of life, while the sound of the doctor’s retreating sleighbells makes music to our ears.

—

And once it was not so. The morning dawned and he did not come from the darkened room: only there came to our listening ears at times the sound of a sob or moan, and the doctor’s voice, firm and low, but with all hope gone from it.

And when at last he came, his face seemed old and sad as we had never seen it. He paused a moment on the threshold and we heard him say, “I have done all that I can.” Then he beckoned us into the darkened room, and, for the first time, we knew Death.

—

All that is forty years ago.

They tell me that, since then, the practice of medicine has been vastly improved. There are specialists now, I understand, for every conceivable illness and for every subdivision of it. If I fall ill, there is a whole battery of modern science to be turned upon me in a moment. There are X-rays ready to penetrate me in all directions. I may have any and every treatment – hypnotic, therapeutic or thaumaturgic – for which I am able to pay.

But, oh, my friends, when it shall come to be my lot to be ill and stricken – in the last and real sense, with the Great Fear upon me, and the Dark Phantom at the pane – then let some one go, fast and eager – though it be only in the paths of an expiring memory – fast and eager, through the driving snow to bring him to my bedside. Let me hear the sound of his hurrying sleighbells as he comes, and his strong voice without the door – and, if that may not be, then let me seem at least to feel the clasp of his firm hand to guide me without fear to the Land of Shadows, where he has gone before.

TOC     INDEX

Winsome Winnie
and Other New Nonsense Novels

(1920)

~

Winsome Winnie
John and I
The Split in the Cabinet
Who Do You Think Did It?
Broken Barriers
The Kidnapped Plumber
The Blue and the Gray
Buggam Grange

Winsome Winnie

—or—
Trial and Temptation

(Narrated after the best models of 1875)

I

Thrown on the World

“Miss Winnifred,” said the Old Lawyer, looking keenly over and through his shaggy eyebrows at the fair young creature seated before him, “you are this morning twenty-one.”

Winnifred Clair raised her deep mourning veil, lowered her eyes and folded her hands.

“This morning,” continued Mr. Bonehead, “my guardianship is at an end.”

There was a tone of something like emotion in the voice of the stern old lawyer, while for a moment his eye glistened with something like a tear which he hastened to remove with something like a handkerchief. “I have therefore sent for you,” he went on, “to render you an account of my trust.”

He heaved a sigh at her, and then, reaching out his hand, he pulled the woollen bell-rope up and down several times.

An aged clerk appeared.

“Did the bell ring?” he asked.

“I think it did,” said the Lawyer. “Be good enough, Atkinson, to fetch me the papers of the estate of the late Major Clair defunct.”

“I have them here,” said the clerk, and he laid upon the table a bundle of faded blue papers, and withdrew.

“Miss Winnifred,” resumed the Old Lawyer, “I will now proceed to give you an account of the disposition that has been made of your property. This first document refers to the sum of two thousand pounds left to you by your great uncle. It is lost.”

Winnifred bowed.

“Pray give me your best attention and I will endeavour to explain to you how I lost it.”

“Oh, sir,” cried Winnifred, “I am only a poor girl unskilled in the ways of the world, and knowing nothing but music and French; I fear that the details of business are beyond my grasp. But if it is lost, I gather that it is gone.”

“It is,” said Mr. Bonehead. “I lost it in a marginal option in an undeveloped oil company. I suppose that means nothing to you.”

“Alas,” sighed Winnifred, “nothing.”

“Very good,” resumed the Lawyer. “Here next we have a statement in regard to the thousand pounds left you under the will of your maternal grandmother. I lost it at Monte Carlo. But I need not fatigue you with the details.”

“Pray spare them,” cried the girl.

“This final item relates to the sum of fifteen hundred pounds placed in trust for you by your uncle. I lost it on a horse race. That horse,” added the Old Lawyer with rising excitement, “ought to have won. He was coming down the stretch like blue – but there, there, my dear, you must forgive me if the recollection of it still stirs me to anger. Suffice it to say the horse fell. I have kept for your inspection the score card of the race, and the betting tickets. You will find everything in order.”

“Sir,” said Winnifred, as Mr. Bonehead proceeded to fold up his papers, “I am but a poor inadequate girl, a mere child in business, but tell me, I pray, what is left to me of the money that you have managed?”

“Nothing,” said the Lawyer. “Everything is gone. And I regret to say, Miss Clair, that it is my painful duty to convey to you a further disclosure of a distressing nature. It concerns your birth.”

“Just Heaven!” cried Winnifred, with a woman’s quick intuition. “Does it concern my father?”

“It does, Miss Clair. Your father was not your father.”

“Oh, sir,” exclaimed Winnifred. “My poor mother! How she must have suffered!”

“Your mother was not your mother,” said the Old Lawyer gravely. “Nay, nay, do not question me. There is a dark secret about your birth.”

“Alas,” said Winnifred, wringing her hands, “I am, then, alone in the world and penniless.”

“You are,” said Mr. Bonehead, deeply moved. “You are, unfortunately, thrown upon the world. But, if you ever find yourself in a position where you need help and advice, do not scruple to come to me. Especially,” he added, “for advice. And meantime let me ask you in what way do you propose to earn your livelihood?”

“I have my needle,” said Winnifred.

“Let me see it,” said the Lawyer.

Winnifred showed it to him.

“I fear,” said Mr. Bonehead, shaking his head, “you will not do much with that.”

Then he rang the bell again.

“Atkinson,” he said, “take Miss Clair out and throw her on the world.”

II

A Rencounter

As Winnifred Clair passed down the stairway leading from the Lawyer’s office, a figure appeared before her in the corridor, blocking the way. It was that of a tall, aristocratic-looking man, whose features wore that peculiarly saturnine appearance seen only in the English nobility. The face, while entirely gentlemanly in its general aspect, was stamped with all the worst passions of mankind.

Had the innocent girl but known it, the face was that of Lord Wynchgate, one of the most contemptible of the greater nobility of Britain, and the figure was his too.

“Ha!” exclaimed the dissolute Aristocrat, “whom have we here? Stay, pretty one, and let me see the fair countenance that I divine behind your veil.”

“Sir,” said Winnifred, drawing herself up proudly, “let me pass, I pray.”

“Not so,” cried Wynchgate, reaching out and seizing his intended victim by the wrist, “not till I have at least seen the colour of those eyes and imprinted a kiss upon those fair lips.”

With a brutal laugh, he drew the struggling girl towards him.

In another moment the aristocratic villain would have succeeded in lifting the veil of the unhappy girl, when suddenly a ringing voice cried, “Hold! stop! desist! begone! lay to! cut it out!”

With these words a tall, athletic young man, attracted doubtless by the girl’s cries, leapt into the corridor from the street without. His figure was that, more or less, of a Greek god, while his face, although at the moment inflamed with anger, was of an entirely moral and permissible configuration.

“Save me! save me!” cried Winnifred.

“I will,” cried the Stranger, rushing towards Lord Wynchgate with uplifted cane.

But the cowardly Aristocrat did not await the onslaught of the unknown.

“You shall yet be mine!” he hissed in Winnifred’s ear, and, releasing his grasp, he rushed with a bound past the rescuer into the street.

“Oh, sir,” said Winnifred, clasping her hands and falling on her knees in gratitude. “I am only a poor inadequate girl, but if the prayers of one who can offer naught but her prayers to her benefactor can avail to the advantage of one who appears to have every conceivable advantage already, let him know that they are his.”

“Nay,” said the stranger, as he aided the blushing girl to rise, “kneel not to me, I beseech. If I have done aught to deserve the gratitude of one who, whoever she is, will remain for ever present as a bright memory in the breast of one in whose breast such memories are all too few, he is all too richly repaid. If she does that, he is blessed indeed.”

“She does. He is!” cried Winnifred, deeply moved. “Here on her knees she blesses him. And now,” she added, “we must part. Seek not to follow me. One who has aided a poor girl in the hour of need will respect her wish when she tells him that, alone and buffeted by the world, her one prayer is that he will leave her.”

“He will!” cried the Unknown. “He will. He does.”

“Leave me, yes, leave me,” exclaimed Winnifred.

“I will,” said the Unknown.

“Do, do,” sobbed the distraught girl. “Yet stay, one moment more. Let she, who has received so much from her benefactor, at least know his name.”

“He cannot! He must not!” exclaimed the Indistinguishable. “His birth is such – but enough!”

He tore his hand from the girl’s detaining clasp and rushed forth from the place.

Winnifred Clair was alone.

III

Friends in Distress

Winnifred was now in the humblest lodgings in the humblest part of London. A simple bedroom and sitting-room sufficed for her wants. Here she sat on her trunk, bravely planning for the future.

“Miss Clair,” said the Landlady, knocking at the door, “do try to eat something. You must keep up your health. See, I’ve brought you a kippered herring.”

Winnifred ate the herring, her heart filled with gratitude. With renewed strength she sallied forth on the street to resume her vain search for employment. For two weeks now Winnifred Clair had sought employment even of the humblest character. At various dress-making establishments she had offered, to no purpose, the services of her needle. They had looked at it and refused it.

In vain she had offered to various editors and publishers the use of her pen. They had examined it coldly and refused it.

She had tried fruitlessly to obtain a position of trust. The various banks and trust companies to which she had applied declined her services. In vain she had advertised in the newspapers offering to take sole charge of a little girl. No one would give her one.

Her slender stock of money which she had in her purse on leaving Mr. Bonehead’s office was almost consumed.

Each night the unhappy girl returned to her lodging exhausted with disappointment and fatigue.

Yet even in her adversity she was not altogether friendless.

Each evening, on her return home, a soft tap was heard at the door.

“Miss Clair,” said the voice of the Landlady, “I have brought you a fried egg. Eat it. You must keep up your strength.”

Then one morning a terrible temptation had risen before her.

“Miss Clair,” said the manager of an agency to which she had applied, “I am glad to be able at last to make you a definite offer of employment. Are you prepared to go upon the stage?”

The stage!

A flush of shame and indignation swept over the girl. Had it come to this? Little versed in the world as Winnifred was, she knew but too well the horror, the iniquity, the depth of degradation implied in the word.

“Yes,” continued the agent, “I have a letter here asking me to recommend a young lady of suitable refinement to play the part of Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Will you accept?”

“Sir,” said Winnifred proudly, “answer me first this question fairly. If I go upon the stage, can I, as Eliza, remain as innocent, as simple as I am now?”

“You can not,” said the manager.

“Then, sir,” said Winnifred, rising from her chair, “let me say this. Your offer is doubtless intended to be kind. Coming from the class you do, and inspired by the ideas you are, you no doubt mean well. But let a poor girl, friendless and alone, tell you that rather than accept such a degradation she will die.”

“Very good,” said the manager.

“I go forth,” cried Winnifred, “to perish.”

“All right,” said the manager.

The door closed behind her. Winnifred Clair, once more upon the street, sank down upon the steps of the building in a swoon.

But at this very juncture Providence, which always watches over the innocent and defenceless, was keeping its eye direct upon Winnifred.

At that very moment when our heroine sank fainting upon the doorstep, a handsome equipage, drawn by two superb black steeds, happened to pass along the street.

Its appearance and character proclaimed it at once to be one of those vehicles in which only the superior classes of the exclusive aristocracy are privileged to ride. Its sides were emblazoned with escutcheons, insignia and other paraphernalia. The large gilt coronet that appeared up its panelling, surmounted by a bunch of huckleberries, quartered in a field of potatoes, indicated that its possessor was, at least, of the rank of marquis. A coachman and two grooms rode in front, while two footmen, seated in the boot, or box at the rear, contrived, by the immobility of their attitude and the melancholy of their faces, to inspire the scene with an exclusive and aristocratic grandeur.

The occupants of the equipage – for we refuse to count the menials as being such – were two in number, a lady and gentleman, both of advanced years. Their snow-white hair and benign countenances indicated that they belonged to that rare class of beings to whom rank and wealth are but an incentive to nobler things. A gentle philanthropy played all over their faces, and their eyes sought eagerly in the passing scene of the humble street for new objects of benefaction.

Those acquainted with the countenances of the aristocracy would have recognized at once in the occupants of the equipage the Marquis of Muddlenut and his spouse, the Marchioness.

It was the eye of the Marchioness which first detected the form of Winnifred Clair upon the doorstep.

“Hold! pause! stop!” she cried, in lively agitation.

The horses were at once pulled in, the brakes applied to the wheels, and with the aid of a powerful lever, operated by three of the menials, the carriage was brought to a standstill.

“See! Look!” cried the Marchioness. “She has fainted. Quick, William, your flask. Let us hasten to her aid.”

In another moment the noble lady was bending over the prostrate form of Winnifred Clair, and pouring brandy between her lips.

Winnifred opened her eyes. “Where am I?” she asked feebly.

“She speaks!” cried the Marchioness. “Give her another flaskful.”

After the second flask the girl sat up.

“Tell me,” she cried, clasping her hands, “what has happened? Where am I?”

“With friends!” answered the Marchioness. “But do not essay to speak. Drink this. You must husband your strength. Meantime, let us drive you to your home.”

Winnifred was lifted tenderly by the men-servants into the aristocratic equipage. The brake was unset, the lever reversed, and the carriage thrown again into motion.

On the way Winnifred, at the solicitation of the Marchioness, related her story.

“My poor child!” exclaimed the lady, “how you must have suffered. Thank Heaven it is over now. Tomorrow we shall call for you and bring you away with us to Muddlenut Chase.”

Alas, could she but have known it, before the morrow should dawn, worse dangers still were in store for our heroine. But what these dangers were, we must reserve for another chapter.

IV

A Gambling Party
in St. James’s Close

We must now ask our readers to shift the scene – if they don’t mind doing this for us – to the apartments of the Earl of Wynchgate in St. James’s Close. The hour is nine o’clock in the evening, and the picture before us is one of revelry and dissipation so characteristic of the nobility of England. The atmosphere of the room is thick with blue Havana smoke such as is used by the nobility, while on the green baize table a litter of counters and cards, in which aces, kings, and even two spots are heaped in confusion, proclaim the reckless nature of the play.

Seated about the table are six men, dressed in the height of fashion, each with collar and white necktie and broad white shirt, their faces stamped with all, or nearly all, of the baser passions of mankind.

Lord Wynchgate – for he it was who sat at the head of the table – rose with an oath, and flung his cards upon the table.

All turned and looked at him, with an oath. “Curse it, Dogwood,” he exclaimed, with another oath, to the man who sat beside him. “Take the money. I play no more tonight. My luck is out.”

“Ha! ha!” laughed Lord Dogwood, with a third oath, “your mind is not on the cards. Who is the latest young beauty, pray, who so absorbs you? I hear a whisper in town of a certain misadventure of yours——”

“Dogwood,” said Wynchgate, clenching his fist, “have a care, man, or you shall measure the length of my sword.”

Both noblemen faced each other, their hands upon their swords.

“My lords, my lords!” pleaded a distinguished-looking man of more advanced years, who sat at one side of the table, and in whose features the habitués of diplomatic circles would have recognized the handsome lineaments of the Marquis of Frogwater, British Ambassador to Siam, “let us have no quarrelling. Come, Wynchgate, come, Dogwood,” he continued, with a mild oath, “put up your swords. It were a shame to waste time in private quarrelling. They may be needed all too soon in Cochin China, or, for the matter of that,” he added sadly, “in Cambodia or in Dutch Guinea.”

“Frogwater,” said young Lord Dogwood, with a generous flush, “I was wrong. Wynchgate, your hand.”

The two noblemen shook hands.

“My friends,” said Lord Wynchgate, “in asking you to abandon our game, I had an end in view. I ask your help in an affair of the heart.”

“Ha! excellent!” exclaimed the five noblemen. “We are with you heart and soul.”

“I propose this night,” continued Wynchgate, “with your help, to carry off a young girl, a female!”

“An abduction!” exclaimed the Ambassador somewhat sternly. “Wynchgate, I cannot countenance this.”

“Mistake me not,” said the Earl, “I intend to abduct her. But I propose nothing dishonourable. It is my firm resolve to offer her marriage.”

“Then,” said Lord Frogwater, “I am with you.”

“Gentlemen,” concluded Wynchgate, “all is ready. The coach is below. I have provided masks, pistols, and black cloaks. Follow me.”

A few moments later, a coach, with the blinds drawn, in which were six noblemen armed to the teeth, might have been seen, were it not for the darkness, approaching the humble lodging in which Winnifred Clair was sheltered.

But what it did when it got there, we must leave to another chapter.

V

The Abduction

The hour was twenty minutes to ten on the evening described in our last chapter.

Winnifred Clair was seated, still fully dressed, at the window of the bedroom, looking out over the great city.

A light tap came at the door.

“If it’s a fried egg,” called Winnifred softly, “I do not need it. I ate yesterday.”

“No,” said the voice of the Landlady. “You are wanted below.”

“I!” exclaimed Winnifred, “below!”

“You,” said the Landlady, “below. A party of gentlemen have called for you.”

“Gentlemen,” exclaimed Winnifred, putting her hand to her brow in perplexity, “for me! at this late hour! Here! This evening! In this house?”

“Yes,” repeated the Landlady, “six gentlemen. They arrived in a closed coach. They are all closely masked and heavily armed. They beg you will descend at once.”

“Just Heaven!” cried the Unhappy Girl. “Is it possible that they mean to abduct me?”

“They do,” said the Landlady. “They said so!”

“Alas!” cried Winnifred, “I am powerless. Tell them” – she hesitated – “tell them I will be down immediately. Let them not come up. Keep them below on any pretext. Show them an album. Let them look at the goldfish. Anything, but not here! I shall be ready in a moment.”

Feverishly she made herself ready. As hastily as possible she removed all traces of tears from her face. She threw about her shoulders an opera cloak, and with a light Venetian scarf half concealed the beauty of her hair and features. “Abducted!” she murmured, “and by six of them! I think she said six. Oh, the horror of it!” A touch of powder to her cheeks and a slight blackening of her eyebrows, and the courageous girl was ready.

Lord Wynchgate and his companions – for they it was, that is to say, they were it – sat below in the sitting-room looking at the albums. “Woman,” said Lord Wynchgate to the Landlady, with an oath, “let her hurry up. We have seen enough of these. We can wait no longer.”

“I am here,” cried a clear voice upon the threshold, and Winnifred stood before them. “My lords, for I divine who you are and wherefore you have come, take me, do your worst with me, but spare, oh, spare this humble companion of my sorrow.”

“Right-oh!” said Lord Dogwood, with a brutal laugh.

“Enough,” exclaimed Wynchgate, and seizing Winnifred by the waist, he dragged her forth out of the house and out upon the street.

But something in the brutal violence of his behaviour seemed to kindle for the moment a spark of manly feeling, if such there were, in the breasts of his companions.

“Wynchgate,” cried young Lord Dogwood, “my mind misgives me. I doubt if this is a gentlemanly thing to do. I’ll have no further hand in it.”

A chorus of approval from his companions endorsed his utterance. For a moment they hesitated.

“Nay,” cried Winnifred, turning to confront the masked faces that stood about her, “go forward with your fell design. I am here. I am helpless. Let no prayers stay your hand. Go to it.”

“Have done with this!” cried Wynchgate, with a brutal oath. “Shove her in the coach.”

But at the very moment the sound of hurrying footsteps was heard, and a clear, ringing, manly, well-toned, vibrating voice cried, “Hold! Stop! Desist! Have a care, titled villain, or I will strike you to the earth.”

A tall aristocratic form bounded out of the darkness.

“Gentlemen,” cried Wynchgate, releasing his hold upon the frightened girl, “we are betrayed. Save yourselves. To the coach.”

In another instant the six noblemen had leaped into the coach and disappeared down the street.

Winnifred, still half inanimate with fright, turned to her rescuer, and saw before her the form and lineaments of the Unknown Stranger, who had thus twice stood between her and disaster. Half fainting, she fell swooning into his arms.

“Dear lady,” he exclaimed, “rouse yourself. You are safe. Let me restore you to your home!”

“That voice!” cried Winnifred, resuming consciousness. “It is my benefactor.”

She would have swooned again, but the Unknown lifted her bodily up the steps of her home and leant her against the door.

“Farewell,” he said, in a voice resonant with gloom.

“Oh, sir!” cried the unhappy girl, “let one who owes so much to one who has saved her in her hour of need at least know his name.”

But the stranger, with a mournful gesture of farewell, had disappeared as rapidly as he had come.

But, as to why he had disappeared, we must ask our reader’s patience for another chapter.

VI

The Unknown

The scene is now shifted, sideways and forwards, so as to put it at Muddlenut Chase, and to make it a fortnight later than the events related in the last chapter.

Winnifred is now at the Chase as the guest of the Marquis and Marchioness. There her bruised soul finds peace.

The Chase itself was one of those typical country homes which are, or were till yesterday, the glory of England. The approach to the Chase lay through twenty miles of glorious forest, filled with fallow deer and wild bulls. The house itself, dating from the time of the Plantagenets, was surrounded by a moat covered with broad lilies and floating green scum. Magnificent peacocks sunned themselves on the terraces, while from the surrounding shrubberies there rose the soft murmur of doves, pigeons, bats, owls and partridges.

Here sat Winnifred Clair day after day upon the terrace recovering her strength, under the tender solicitude of the Marchioness.

Each day the girl urged upon her noble hostess the necessity of her departure. “Nay,” said the Marchioness, with gentle insistence, “stay where you are. Your soul is bruised. You must rest.”

“Alas,” cried Winnifred, “who am I that I should rest? Alone, despised, buffeted by fate, what right have I to your kindness?”

“Miss Clair,” replied the noble lady, “wait till you are stronger. There is something that I wish to say to you.”

Then at last, one morning when Winnifred’s temperature had fallen to ninety-eight point three, the Marchioness spoke.

“Miss Clair,” she said, in a voice which throbbed with emotion, “Winnifred, if I may so call you, Lord Muddlenut and I have formed a plan for your future. It is our dearest wish that you should marry our son.”

“Alas,” cried Winnifred, while tears rose in her eyes, “it cannot be!”

“Say not so,” cried the Marchioness. “Our son, Lord Mordaunt Muddlenut, is young, handsome, all that a girl could desire. After months of wandering he returns to us this morning. It is our dearest wish to see him married and established. We offer you his hand.”

“Indeed,” replied Winnifred, while her tears fell even more freely, “I seem to requite but ill the kindness that you show. Alas, my heart is no longer in my keeping.”

“Where is it?” cried the Marchioness.

“It is another’s. One whose very name I do not know holds it in his keeping.”

But at this moment a blithe, gladsome step was heard upon the flagstones of the terrace. A manly, ringing voice, which sent a thrill to Winnifred’s heart, cried “Mother!” and in another instant Lord Mordaunt Muddlenut, for he it was, had folded the Marchioness to his heart.

Winnifred rose, her heart beating wildly. One glance was enough. The newcomer, Lord Mordaunt, was none other than the Unknown, the Unaccountable, to whose protection she had twice owed her life.

With a wild cry Winnifred Clair leaped across the flagstones of the terrace and fled into the park.

VII

The Proposal

They stood beneath the great trees of the ancestral park, into which Lord Mordaunt had followed Winnifred at a single bound. All about them was the radiance of early June.

Lord Mordaunt knelt on one knee on the greensward, and with a touch in which respect and reverence were mingled with the deepest and manliest emotion, he took between his finger and thumb the tip of the girl’s gloved hand.

“Miss Clair,” he uttered, in a voice suffused with the deepest yearning, yet vibrating with the most profound respect, “Miss Clair – Winnifred – hear me, I implore!”

“Alas,” cried Winnifred, struggling in vain to disengage the tip of her glove from the impetuous clasp of the young nobleman, “alas, whither can I fly? I do not know my way through the wood, and there are bulls in all directions. I am not used to them! Lord Mordaunt, I implore you, let the tears of one but little skilled in the art of dissimulation——”

“Nay, Winnifred,” said the Young Earl, “fly not. Hear me out!”

“Let me fly,” begged the unhappy girl.

“You must not fly,” pleaded Mordaunt. “Let me first, here upon bended knee, convey to you the expression of a devotion, a love, as ardent and as deep as ever burned in a human heart. Winnifred, be my bride!”

“Oh, sir,” sobbed Winnifred, “if the knowledge of a gratitude, a thankfulness from one whose heart will ever treasure as its proudest memory the recollection of one who did for one all that one could have wanted done for one – if this be some poor guerdon, let it suffice. But, alas, my birth, the dark secret of my birth forbids——”

“Nay,” cried Mordaunt, leaping now to his feet, “your birth is all right. I have looked into it myself. It is as good – or nearly as good – as my own. Till I knew this, my lips were sealed by duty. While I supposed that you had a lower birth and I an upper, I was bound to silence. But come with me to the house. There is one arrived with me who will explain all.”

Hand in hand the lovers, for such they now were, returned to the Chase. There in the great hall the Marquis and the Marchioness were standing ready to greet them.

“My child!” exclaimed the noble lady, as she folded Winnifred to her heart. Then she turned to her son. “Let her know all!” she cried.

Lord Mordaunt stepped across the room to a curtain. He drew it aside, and there stepped forth Mr. Bonehead, the old lawyer who had cast Winnifred upon the world.

“Miss Clair,” said the Lawyer, advancing and taking the girl’s hand for a moment in a kindly clasp, “the time has come for me to explain all. You are not, you never were, the penniless girl that you suppose. Under the terms of your father’s will, I was called upon to act a part and to throw you upon the world. It was my client’s wish, and I followed it. I told you, quite truthfully, that I had put part of your money into options in an oil-well. Miss Clair, that well is now producing a million gallons of gasolene a month!’

“A million gallons!” cried Winnifred. “I can never use it.”

“Wait till you own a motor-car, Miss Winnifred,” said the Lawyer.

“Then I am rich!” exclaimed the bewildered girl.

“Rich beyond your dreams,” answered the Lawyer. “Miss Clair, you own in your own right about half of the State of Texas – I think it is in Texas, at any rate either Texas or Rhode Island, or one of those big states in America. More than this, I have invested your property since your father’s death so wisely that even after paying the income tax and the property tax, the inheritance tax, the dog tax and the tax on amusements, you will still have one half of one per cent to spend.”

Winnifred clasped her hands.

“I knew it all the time,” said Lord Mordaunt, drawing the girl to his embrace, “I found it out through this good man.”

“We knew it too,” said the Marchioness. “Can you forgive us, darling, our little plot for your welfare? Had we not done this Mordaunt might have had to follow you over to America and chase you all around Newport and Narragansett at a fearful expense.”

“How can I thank you enough?” cried Winnifred. Then she added eagerly, “And my birth, my descent?”

“It is all right,” interjected the Old Lawyer. “It is A 1. Your father, who died before you were born, quite a little time before, belonged to the very highest peerage of Wales. You are descended directly from Claer-ap-Claer, who murdered Owen Glendower. Your mother we are still tracing up. But we have already connected her with Floyd-ap-Floyd, who murdered Prince Llewellyn.”

“Oh, sir,” cried the grateful girl. “I only hope I may prove worthy of them!”

“One thing more,” said Lord Mordaunt, and stepping over to another curtain he drew it aside and there emerged Lord Wynchgate.

He stood before Winnifred, a manly contrition struggling upon features which, but for the evil courses of he who wore them, might have been almost presentable.

“Miss Clair,” he said, “I ask your pardon. I tried to carry you off. I never will again. But before we part let me say that my acquaintance with you has made me a better man, broader, bigger and, I hope, deeper.”

With a profound bow, Lord Wynchgate took his leave.

VIII

Wedded at Last

Lord Mordaunt and his bride were married forthwith in the parish church of Muddlenut Chase. With Winnifred’s money they have drained the moat, rebuilt the Chase, and chased the bulls out of the park. They have six children, so far, and are respected, honoured and revered in the countryside far and wide, over a radius of twenty miles in circumference.

TOC     INDEX

John and I

—or—
How I Nearly Lost My Husband

(Narrated after the approved fashion of the best Heart and Home Magazines)

It was after we had been married about two years that I began to feel that I needed more air. Every time I looked at John across the breakfast-table, I felt as if I must have more air, more space.

I seemed to feel as if I had no room to expand. I had begun to ask myself whether I had been wise in marrying John, whether John was really sufficient for my development. I felt cramped and shut in. In spite of myself the question would arise in my mind whether John really understood my nature. He had a way of reading the newspaper, propped up against the sugar-bowl, at breakfast, that somehow made me feel as if things had gone all wrong. It was bitter to realize that the time had come when John could prefer the newspaper to his wife’s society.

—

But perhaps I had better go back and tell the whole miserable story from the beginning.

I shall never forget – I suppose no woman ever does – the evening when John first spoke out his love for me. I had felt for some time past that it was there. Again and again, he seemed about to speak. But somehow his words seemed to fail him. Twice I took him into the very heart of the little wood beside Mother’s house, but it was only a small wood, and somehow he slipped out on the other side. “Oh, John,” I had said, “how lonely and still it seems in the wood with no one here but ourselves! Do you think,” I said, “that the birds have souls?” “I don’t know,” John answered, “let’s get out of this.” I was sure that his emotion was too strong for him. “I never feel a bit lonesome where you are, John,” I said, as we made our way among the underbrush. “I think we can get out down that little gully,” he answered. Then one evening in June after tea I led John down a path beside the house to a little corner behind the garden where there was a stone wall on one side and a high fence right in front of us, and thorn bushes on the other side. There was a little bench in the angle of the wall and the fence, and we sat down on it.

“Minnie,” John said, “there’s something I meant to say——”

“Oh, John,” I cried, and I flung my arms round his neck. It all came with such a flood of surprise.

“All I meant, Minn——” John went on, but I checked him.

“Oh, don’t, John, don’t say anything more,” I said. “It’s just too perfect.” Then I rose and seized him by the wrist. “Come,” I said, “come to Mother,” and I rushed him along the path.

As soon as Mother saw us come in hand in hand in this way, she guessed everything. She threw both her arms round John’s neck and fairly pinned him against the wall. John tried to speak, but Mother wouldn’t let him. “I saw it all along, John,” she said. “Don’t speak. Don’t say a word. I guessed your love for Minn from the very start. I don’t know what I shall do without her, John, but she’s yours now; take her.” Then Mother began to cry and I couldn’t help crying too. “Take him to Father,” Mother said, and we each took one of John’s wrists and took him to Father on the back verandah. As soon as John saw Father he tried to speak again – “I think I ought to say,” he began, but Mother stopped him. “Father,” she said, “he wants to take our little girl away. He loves her very dearly, Alfred,” she said, “and I think it our duty to let her go, no matter how hard it is, and oh, please Heaven, Alfred, he’ll treat her well and not misuse her, or beat her,” and she began to sob again.

Father got up and took John by the hand and shook it warmly.

“Take her, boy,” he said. “She’s all yours now, take her.”

—

So John and I were engaged, and in due time our wedding day came and we were married. I remember that for days and days before the wedding day John seemed very nervous and depressed; I think he was worrying, poor boy, as to whether he could really make me happy and whether he could fill my life as it should be filled. But I told him that he was not to worry, because I meant to be happy, and was determined just to make the best of everything.

Father stayed with John a good deal before the wedding day, and on the wedding morning he went and fetched him to the church in a closed carriage and had him there all ready when we came. It was a beautiful day in September, and the church looked just lovely. I had a beautiful gown of white organdie with tulle at the throat, and I carried a great bunch of white roses, and Father led John up the aisle after me.

I remember that Mother cried a good deal at the wedding, and told John that he had stolen her darling and that he must never misuse me or beat me. And I remember that the clergyman spoke very severely to John, and told him he hoped he realized the responsibility he was taking and that it was his duty to make me happy. A lot of our old friends were there, and they all spoke quite sharply to John, and all the women kissed me and said they hoped I would never regret what I had done, and I just kept up my spirits by sheer determination, and told them that I had made up my mind to be happy and that I was going to be so.

So presently it was all over and we were driven to the station and got the afternoon train for New York, and when we sat down in the compartment among all our bandboxes and flowers, John said, “Well, thank God, that’s over.” And I said, “Oh, John, an oath! on our wedding day, an oath!” John said, “I’m sorry, Minn, I didn’t mean——” but I said, “Don’t, John, don’t make it worse. Swear at me if you must, but don’t make it harder to bear.”

—

We spent our honeymoon in New York. At first I had thought of going somewhere to the great lonely woods, where I could have walked under the great trees and felt the silence of nature, and where John should have been my Viking and captured me with his spear, and where I should be his and his alone and no other man should share me; and John had said all right. Or else I had planned to go away somewhere to the seashore, where I could have watched the great waves dashing themselves against the rocks. I had told John that he should be my cave man, and should seize me in his arms and carry me whither he would. I felt somehow that for my development I wanted to get as close to nature as ever I could – that my mind seemed to be reaching out for a great emptiness. But I looked over all the hotel and steamship folders I could find and it seemed impossible to get good accommodation, so we came to New York. I had a great deal of shopping to do for our new house, so I could not be much with John, but I felt it was not right to neglect him, so I drove him somewhere in a taxi each morning and called for him again in the evening. One day I took him to the Metropolitan Museum, and another day I left him at the Zoo, and another day at the aquarium. John seemed very happy and quiet among the fishes.

So presently we came back home, and I spent many busy days in fixing and arranging our new house. I had the drawing-room done in blue, and the dining-room all in dark panelled wood, and a boudoir upstairs done in pink and white enamel to match my bedroom and dressing-room. There was a very nice little room in the basement next to the coal cellar that I turned into a “den” for John, so that when he wanted to smoke he could go down there and do it. John seemed to appreciate his den at once, and often would stay down there so long that I had to call to him to come up.

When I look back on those days they seem very bright and happy. But it was not very long before a change came. I began to realize that John was neglecting me. I noticed it at first in small things. I don’t know just how long it was after our marriage that John began to read the newspaper at breakfast. At first he would only pick it up and read it in little bits, and only on the front page. I tried not to be hurt at it, and would go on talking just as brightly as I could, without seeming to notice anything. But presently he went on to reading the inside part of the paper, and then one day he opened up the financial page and folded the paper right back and leant it against the sugar-bowl.

I could not but wonder whether John’s love for me was what it had been. Was it cooling? I asked myself. And what was cooling it? It hardly seemed possible, when I looked back to the wild passion with which he had proposed to me on the garden bench, that John’s love was waning. But I kept noticing different little things. One day in the spring-time I saw John getting out a lot of fishing tackle from a box and fitting it together. I asked him what he was going to do, and he said that he was going to fish. I went to my room and had a good cry. It seemed dreadful that he could neglect his wife for a few worthless fish.

So I decided to put John to the test. It had been my habit every morning after he put his coat on to go to the office to let John have one kiss, just one weeny kiss, to keep him happy all day. So this day when he was getting ready I bent my head over a big bowl of flowers and pretended not to notice. I think John must have been hurt, as I heard him steal out on tiptoe.

Well, I realized that things had come to a dreadful state, and so I sent over to Mother, and Mother came, and we had a good cry together. I made up my mind to force myself to face things and just to be as bright as ever I could. Mother and I both thought that things would be better if I tried all I could to make something out of John. I have always felt that every woman should make all that she can out of her husband. So I did my best first of all to straighten up John’s appearance. I shifted the style of collar he was wearing to a tighter kind that I liked better, and I brushed his hair straight backward instead of forward, which gave him a much more alert look. Mother said that John needed waking up, and so we did all we could to wake him up. Mother came over to stay with me a good deal, and in the evenings we generally had a little music or a game of cards.

—

About this time another difficulty began to come into my married life, which I suppose I ought to have foreseen – I mean the attentions of other gentlemen. I have always called forth a great deal of admiration in gentlemen, but I have always done my best to act like a lady and to discourage it in every possible way. I had been innocent enough to suppose that this would end with married life, and it gave me a dreadful shock to realize that such was not the case. The first one I noticed was a young man who came to the house, at an hour when John was out, for the purpose, so he said at least, of reading the gas meter. He looked at me in just the boldest way and asked me to show him the way to the cellar. I don’t know whether it was a pretext or not, but I just summoned all the courage I had and showed him to the head of the cellar stairs. I had determined that if he tried to carry me down with him I would scream for the servants, but I suppose something in my manner made him desist, and he went alone. When he came up he professed to have read the meter and he left the house quite quietly. But I thought it wiser to say nothing to John of what had happened.

There were others too. There was a young man with large brown eyes who came and said he had been sent to tune the piano. He came on three separate days, and he bent his ear over the keys in such a mournful way that I knew he must have fallen in love with me. On the last day he offered to tune my harp for a dollar extra, but I refused, and when I asked him instead to tune Mother’s mandoline he said he didn’t know how. Of course I told John nothing of all this.

Then there was Mr. McQueen, who came to the house several times to play cribbage with John. He had been desperately in love with me years before – at least I remember his taking me home from a hockey match once, and what a struggle it was for him not to come into the parlour and see Mother for a few minutes when I asked him; and, though he was married now and with three children, I felt sure when he came to play cribbage with John that it meant something. He was very discreet and honourable, and never betrayed himself for a moment, and I acted my part as if there was nothing at all behind. But one night, when he came over to play and John had had to go out, he refused to stay even for an instant. He had got his overshoes off before I told him that John was out, and asked him if he wouldn’t come into the parlour and hear Mother play the mandoline, but he just made one dive for his overshoes and was gone. I knew that he didn’t dare to trust himself.

Then presently a new trouble came. I began to suspect that John was drinking. I don’t mean for a moment that he was drunk, or that he was openly cruel to me. But at times he seemed to act so queerly, and I noticed that one night when by accident I left a bottle of raspberry vinegar on the sideboard overnight, it was all gone in the morning. Two or three times when McQueen and John were to play cribbage, John would fetch home two or three bottles of bevo with him and they would sit sipping all evening.

I think he was drinking bevo by himself, too, though I could never be sure of it. At any rate he often seemed queer and restless in the evenings, and instead of staying in his den he would wander all over the house. Once we heard him – I mean Mother and I and two lady friends who were with us that evening – quite late (after ten o’clock) apparently moving about in the pantry. “John,” I called, “is that you?” “Yes, Minn,” he answered, quietly enough, I admit. “What are you doing there?” I asked. “Looking for something to eat,” he said. “John,” I said, “you are forgetting what is due to me as your wife. You were fed at six. Go back.”

He went. But yet I felt more and more that his love must be dwindling to make him act as he did. I thought it all over wearily enough and asked myself whether I had done everything I should to hold my husband’s love. I had kept him in at nights. I had cut down his smoking. I had stopped his playing cards. What more was there that I could do?

—

So at last the conviction came to me that I must go away. I felt that I must get away somewhere and think things out. At first I thought of Palm Beach, but the season had not opened and I felt somehow that I couldn’t wait. I wanted to get away somewhere by myself and just face things as they were. So one morning I said to John, “John, I think I’d like to go off somewhere for a little time, just to be by myself, dear, and I don’t want you to ask to come with me or to follow me, but just let me go.” John said, “All right, Minn. When are you going to start?” The cold brutality of it cut me to the heart, and I went upstairs and had a good cry and looked over steamship and railroad folders. I thought of Havana for a while, because the pictures of the harbour and the castle and the queer Spanish streets looked so attractive, but then I was afraid that at Havana a woman alone by herself might be simply persecuted by attentions from gentlemen. They say the Spanish temperament is something fearful. So I decided on Bermuda instead. I felt that in a beautiful, quiet place like Bermuda I could think everything all over and face things, and it said on the folder that there were always at least two English regiments in garrison there, and the English officers, whatever their faults, always treat a woman with the deepest respect.

So I said nothing more to John, but in the next few days I got all my arrangements made and my things packed. And when the last afternoon came I sat down and wrote John a long letter, to leave on my boudoir table, telling him that I had gone to Bermuda. I told him that I wanted to be alone: I said that I couldn’t tell when I would be back – that it might be months, or it might be years, and I hoped that he would try to be as happy as he could and forget me entirely, and to send me money on the first of every month.

—

Well, it was just at that moment that one of those strange coincidences happen, little things in themselves, but which seem to alter the whole course of a person’s life. I had nearly finished the letter to John that I was to leave on the writing-desk, when just then the maid came up to my room with a telegram. It was for John, but I thought it my duty to open it and read it for him before I left. And I nearly fainted when I saw that it was from a lawyer in Bermuda – of all places – and it said that a legacy of two hundred thousand dollars had been left to John by an uncle of his who had died there, and asking for instructions about the disposition of it.

A great wave seemed to sweep over me, and all the wicked thoughts that had been in my mind – for I saw now that they were wicked – were driven clean away. I thought how completely lost poor old John would feel if all this money came to him and he didn’t have to work any more and had no one at his side to help and guide him in using it.

I tore up the wicked letter I had written, and I hurried as fast as I could to pack up a valise with John’s things (my own were packed already, as I said). Then presently John came in, and I broke the news to him as gently and as tenderly as I could about his uncle having left him the money and having died. I told him that I had found out all about the trains and the Bermuda steamer, and had everything all packed and ready for us to leave at once. John seemed a little dazed about it all, and kept saying that his uncle had taught him to play tennis when he was a little boy, and he was very grateful and thankful to me for having everything arranged, and thought it wonderful.

I had time to telephone to a few of my women friends, and they just managed to rush round for a few minutes to say good-bye. I couldn’t help crying a little when I told them about John’s uncle dying so far away with none of us near him, and I told them about the legacy, and they cried a little to hear of it all; and when I told them that John and I might not come back direct from Bermuda, but might take a run over to Europe first, they all cried some more.

We left for New York that evening, and after we had been to Bermuda and arranged about a suitable monument for John’s uncle and collected the money, we sailed for Europe.

All through the happy time that has followed, I like to think that through all our trials and difficulties affliction brought us safely together at last.

TOC     INDEX

The Split in the Cabinet

—or—
The Fate of England

(A political novel of the Days that Were)

CHAPTER I

“The fate of England hangs upon it,” murmured Sir John Elphinspoon, as he sank wearily into an armchair. For a moment, as he said “England,” the baronet’s eye glistened and his ears lifted as if in defiance, but as soon as he stopped saying it his eye lost its brilliance and his ears dropped wearily at the sides of his head.

Lady Elphinspoon looked at her husband anxiously. She could not conceal from herself that his face, as he sank into his chair, seemed somehow ten years older than it had been ten years ago.

“You are home early, John?” she queried.

“The House rose early, my dear,” said the baronet.

“For the All England Ping-Pong match?”

“No, for the Dog Show. The Prime Minister felt that the Cabinet ought to attend. He said that their presence there would help to bind the colonies to us. I understand also that he has a pup in the show himself. He took the Cabinet with him.”

“And why not you?” asked Lady Elphinspoon.

“You forget, my dear,” said the baronet, “as Foreign Secretary my presence at a Dog Show might be offensive to the Shah of Persia. Had it been a Cat Show——”

The baronet paused and shook his head in deep gloom.

“John,” said his wife, “I feel that there is something more. Did anything happen at the House?”

Sir John nodded.

“A bad business,” he said. “The Wazuchistan Boundary Bill was read this afternoon for the third time.”

No woman in England, so it was generally said, had a keener political insight than Lady Elphinspoon.

“The third time,” she repeated thoughtfully, “and how many more will it have to go?”

Sir John turned his head aside and groaned.

“You are faint,” exclaimed Lady Elphinspoon, “let me ring for tea.”

The baronet shook his head.

“An egg, John – let me beat you up an egg.”

“Yes, yes,” murmured Sir John, still abstracted, “beat it, yes, do beat it.”

Lady Elphinspoon, in spite of her elevated position as the wife of the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, held it not beneath her to perform for her husband the plainest household service. She rang for an egg. The butler broke it for her into a tall goblet filled with old sherry, and the noble lady, with her own hands, beat the stuff out of it. For the veteran politician, whose official duties rarely allowed him to eat, an egg was a sovereign remedy. Taken either in a goblet of sherry or in a mug of rum, or in half a pint of whisky, it never failed to revive his energies.

The effect of the egg was at once visible in the brightening of his eye and the lengthening of his ears.

“And now explain to me,” said his wife, “what has happened. What is this Boundary Bill?”

“We never meant it to pass,” said Sir John. “It was introduced only as a sop to public opinion. It delimits our frontier in such a way as to extend our suzerainty over the entire desert of El Skrub. The Wazoos have claimed that this is their desert. The hill tribes are restless. If we attempt to advance the Wazoos will rise. If we retire it deals a blow at our prestige.”

Lady Elphinspoon shuddered. Her long political training had taught her that nothing was so fatal to England as to be hit in the prestige.

“And on the other hand,” continued Sir John, “if we move sideways, the Ohulîs, the mortal enemies of the Wazoos, will strike us in our rear.”

“In our rear!” exclaimed Lady Elphinspoon in a tone of pain. “Oh, John, we must go forward. Take another egg.”

“We cannot,” groaned the Foreign Secretary. “There are reasons which I cannot explain even to you, Caroline, reasons of State, which absolutely prevent us from advancing into Wazuchistan. Our hands are tied. Meantime if the Wazoos rise, it is all over with us. It will split the Cabinet.”

“Split the Cabinet!” repeated Lady Elphinspoon in alarm. She well knew that next to a blow in the prestige the splitting of the Cabinet was about the worst thing that could happen to Great Britain. “Oh, John, they must be held together at all costs. Can nothing be done?”

“Everything is being done that can be. The Prime Minister has them at the Dog Show at this moment. Tonight the Chancellor is taking them to moving pictures. And tomorrow – it is a State secret, my dear, but it will be very generally known in the morning – we have seats for them all at the circus. If we can hold them together all is well, but if they split we are undone. Meantime our difficulties increase. At the very passage of the Bill itself a question was asked by one of the new labour members, a miner, my dear, a quite uneducated man——”

“Yes?” queried Lady Elphinspoon.

“He asked the Colonial Secretary” – Sir John shuddered – “to tell him where Wazuchistan is. Worse than that, my dear,” added Sir John, “he defied him to tell him where it is.”

“What did you do? Surely he has no right to information of that sort?”

“It was a close shave. Luckily the Whips saved us. They got the Secretary out of the House and rushed him to the British Museum. When he got back he said that he would answer the question a month from Friday. We got a great burst of cheers, but it was a close thing. But stop, I must speak at once with Powers. My despatch box, yes, here it is. Now where is young Powers? There is work for him to do at once.”

“Mr. Powers is in the conservatory with Angela,” said Lady Elphinspoon.

“With Angela!” exclaimed Sir John, while a slight shade of displeasure appeared upon his brow. “With Angela again! Do you think it quite proper, my dear, that Powers should be so constantly with Angela?”

“John,” said his wife, “you forget, I think, who Mr. Powers is. I am sure that Angela knows too well what is due to her rank, and to herself, to consider Mr. Powers anything more than an instructive companion. And I notice that, since Mr. Powers has been your secretary, Angela’s mind is much keener. Already the girl has a wonderful grasp on foreign policy. Only yesterday I heard her asking the Prime Minister at luncheon whether we intend to extend our Senegambian protectorate over the Fusees. He was delighted.”

“Oh, very well, very well,” said Sir John. Then he rang a bell for a manservant.

“Ask Mr. Powers,” he said, “to be good enough to attend me in the library.”

CHAPTER II

Angela Elphinspoon stood with Perriton Powers among the begonias of the conservatory. The same news which had so agitated Sir John lay heavy on both their hearts.

“Will the Wazoo rise?” asked Angela, clasping her hands before her, while her great eyes sought the young man’s face and found it. “Oh, Mr. Powers! Tell me, will they rise? It seems too dreadful to contemplate. Do you think the Wazoo will rise?”

“It is only too likely,” said Powers. They stood looking into one another’s eyes, their thoughts all on the Wazoo.

Angelina Elphinspoon, as she stood there against the background of the begonias, made a picture that a painter, or even a plumber, would have loved. Tall and typically English in her fair beauty, her features, in repose, had something of the hauteur and distinction of her mother, and when in motion they recalled her father.

Perriton Powers was even taller than Angela. The splendid frame and stern features of Sir John’s secretary made him a striking figure. Yet he was, quite frankly, sprung from the people, and made no secret of it. His father had been simply a well-to-do London surgeon, who had been knighted for some mere discoveries in science. His grandfather, so it was whispered, had been nothing more than a successful banker who had amassed a fortune simply by successful banking. Yet at Oxford young Powers had carried all before him. He had occupied a seat, a front seat, in one of the boats, had got his blue and his pink, and had taken a double final in Sanscrit and Arithmetic.

He had already travelled widely in the East, spoke Urdu and Hoodoo with facility, while as secretary to Sir John Elphinspoon, with a seat in the House in prospect, he had his foot upon the ladder of success.

“Yes,” repeated Powers thoughtfully, “they may rise. Our confidential despatches tell us that for some time they have been secretly passing round packets of yeast. The whole tribe is in a ferment.”

“But our sphere of influence is at stake,” exclaimed Angela.

“It is,” said Powers. “As a matter of fact, for over a year we have been living on a mere modus vivendi.”

“Oh, Mr. Powers,” cried Angela, “what a way to live.”

“We have tried everything,” said the secretary. “We offered the Wazoo a condominium over the desert of El Skrub. They refused it.”

“But it’s our desert,” said Angela proudly.

“It is. But what can we do? The best we can hope is that El Boob will acquiesce in the status quo.”

At that moment a manservant appeared in the doorway of the conservatory.

“Mr. Powers, sir,” he said, “Sir John desires your attendance, sir, in the library, sir.”

Powers turned to Angela, a new seriousness upon his face.

“Miss Elphinspoon,” he said, “I think I know what is coming. Will you wait for me here? I shall be back in half an hour.”

“I will wait,” said the girl. She sat down and waited among the begonias, her mind still on the Wazoo, her whole intense nature strung to the highest pitch. “Can the modus vivendi hold?” she murmured.

In half an hour Powers returned. He was wearing now his hat and light overcoat, and carried on a strap round his neck a tin box with a white painted label, “British Foreign Office. Confidential Despatches. This Side Up With Care.”

“Miss Elphinspoon,” he said, and there was a new note in his voice, “Angela, I leave England tonight——”

“Tonight!” gasped Angela.

“On a confidential mission.”

“To Wazuchistan!” exclaimed the girl.

Powers paused a moment. “To Wazuchistan,” he said, “yes. But it must not be known. I shall return in a month – or never. If I fail” – he spoke with an assumed lightness – “it is only one more grave among the hills. If I succeed, the Cabinet is saved, and with it the destiny of England.”

“Oh, Mr. Powers,” cried Angela, rising and advancing towards him, “how splendid! How noble! No reward will be too great for you.”

“My reward,” said Powers, and as he spoke he reached out and clasped both of the girl’s hands in his own, “yes, my reward. May I come and claim it here?”

For a moment he looked straight into her eyes. In the next he was gone, and Angela was alone.

“His reward!” she murmured. “What could he have meant? His reward that he is to claim. What can it be?”

But she could not divine it. She admitted to herself that she had not the faintest idea.

CHAPTER III

In the days that followed all England was thrilled to its base as the news spread that the Wazoo might rise at any moment.

“Will the Wazoos rise?” was the question upon every lip.

In London men went to their offices with a sense of gloom. At lunch they could hardly eat. A feeling of impending disaster pervaded all ranks.

Sir John as he passed to and fro to the House was freely accosted in the streets.

“Will the Wazoos rise, sir?” asked an honest labourer. “Lord help us all, sir, if they do.”

Sir John, deeply touched, dropped a shilling in the honest fellow’s hat, by accident.

At No. 10 Downing Street, women of the working class, with children in their arms, stood waiting for news.

On the Exchange all was excitement. Consols fell two points in twenty-four hours. Even raising the Bank rate and shutting the door brought only a temporary relief.

Lord Glump, the greatest financial expert in London, was reported as saying that if the Wazoos rose England would be bankrupt in forty-eight hours.

Meanwhile, to the consternation of the whole nation, the Government did nothing. The Cabinet seemed to be paralysed.

On the other hand the Press became all the more clamorous. The London Times urged that an expedition should be sent at once. Twenty-five thousand household troops, it argued, should be sent up the Euphrates or up the Ganges or up something without delay. If they were taken in flat boats, carried over the mountains on mules, and lifted across the rivers in slings, they could then be carried over the desert on jackasses. They could reach Wazuchistan in two years. Other papers counselled moderation. The Manchester Guardian recalled the fact that the Wazoos were a Christian people. Their leader, El Boob, so it was said, had accepted Christianity with childlike simplicity and had asked if there was any more of it. The Spectator claimed that the Wazoos, or more properly the Wazi, were probably the descendants of an Iranic or perhaps Urgumic stock. It suggested the award of a Rhodes Scholarship. It looked forward to the days when there would be Wazoos at Oxford. Even the presence of a single Wazoo, or, more accurately, a single Wooz, would help.

With each day the news became more ominous. It was reported in the Press that a Wazoo, inflamed apparently with ghee, or perhaps with bhong, had rushed up to the hills and refused to come down. It was said that the Shriek-el-Foozlum, the religious head of the tribe, had torn off his suspenders and sent them to Mecca.

That same day the Illustrated London News published a drawing “Wazoo Warriors Crossing a River and Shouting, Ho!” and the general consternation reached its height.

Meantime, for Sir John and his colleagues, the question of the hour became, “Could the Cabinet be held together?” Every effort was made. The news that the Cabinet had all been seen together at the circus, for a moment reassured the nation. But the rumour spread that the First Lord of the Admiralty had said that the clowns were a bum lot. The Radical Press claimed that if he thought so he ought to resign.

On the fatal Friday the question already referred to was scheduled for its answer. The friends of the Government counted on the answer to restore confidence. To the consternation of all, the expected answer was not forthcoming. The Colonial Secretary rose in his place, visibly nervous. Ministers, he said, had been asked where Wazuchistan was. They were not prepared, at the present delicate stage of negotiations, to say. More hung upon the answer than Ministers were entitled to divulge. They could only appeal to the patriotism of the nation. He could only say this, that wherever it was, and he used the word wherever with all the emphasis of which he was capable, the Government would accept the full responsibility for its being where it was.

The House adjourned in something like confusion.

Among those seated behind the grating of the Ladies’ Gallery was Lady Elphinspoon. Her quick instinct told her the truth. Driving home, she found her husband seated, crushed, in his library.

“John,” she said, falling on her knees and taking her husband’s hands in hers, “is this true? Is this the dreadful truth?”

“I see you have divined it, Caroline,” said the statesman sadly. “It is the truth. We don’t know where Wazuchistan is.”

For a moment there was silence.

“But, John, how could it have happened?”

“We thought the Colonial Office knew. We were confident that they knew. The Colonial Secretary had stated that he had been there. Later on it turned out that he meant Saskatchewan. Of course they thought we knew. And we both thought that the Exchequer must know. We understood that they had collected a hut tax for ten years.”

“And hadn’t they?”

“Not a penny. The Wazoos live in tents.”

“But, surely,” pleaded Lady Elphinspoon, “you could find out. Had you no maps?”

Sir John shook his head.

“We thought of that at once, my dear. We’ve looked all through the British Museum. Once we thought we had succeeded. But it turned out to be Wisconsin.”

“But the map in the Times? Everybody saw it.”

Again the baronet shook his head. “Lord Southcliff had it made in the office,” he said. “It appears that he always does. Otherwise the physical features might not suit him.”

“But could you not send some one to see?”

“We did. We sent Perriton Powers to find out where it was. We had a month to the good. It was barely time, just time. Powers has failed and we are lost. Tomorrow all England will guess the truth and the Government falls.”

CHAPTER IV

The crowd outside of No. 10 Downing Street that evening was so dense that all traffic was at a standstill. But within the historic room where the Cabinet were seated about the long table all was calm. Few could have guessed from the quiet demeanour of the group of statesmen that the fate of an Empire hung by a thread.

Seated at the head of the table, the Prime Minister was quietly looking over a book of butterflies, while waiting for the conference to begin. Beside him the Secretary for Ireland was fixing trout flies, while the Chancellor of the Exchequer kept his serene face bent over upon his needlework. At the Prime Minister’s right, Sir John Elphinspoon, no longer agitated, but sustained and dignified by the responsibility of his office, was playing spillikins.

The little clock on the mantel chimed eight.

The Premier closed his book of butterflies.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I fear our meeting will not be a protracted one. It seems we are hopelessly at variance. You, Sir Charles,” he continued, turning to the First Sea Lord, who was in attendance, “are still in favour of a naval expedition?”

“Send it up at once,” said Sir Charles.

“Up where?” asked the Premier.

“Up anything,” answered the Old Sea Dog, “it will get there.”

Voices of dissent were raised in undertones around the table.

“I strongly deprecate any expedition,” said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, “I favour a convention with the Shriek. Let the Shriek sign a convention recognizing the existence of a supreme being and receiving from us a million sterling in acknowledgment.”

“And where will you find the Shriek?” said the Prime Minister. “Come, come, gentlemen, I fear that we can play this comedy no longer. The truth is,” he added with characteristic nonchalance, “we don’t know where the bally place is. We can’t meet the House tomorrow. We are hopelessly split. Our existence as a Government is at an end.”

But, at that very moment, a great noise of shouting and clamour rose from the street without. The Prime Minister lifted his hand for silence. “Listen,” he said. One of the Ministers went to a window and opened it, and the cries outside became audible. “A King’s Messenger! Make way for the King’s Messenger!”

The Premier turned quietly to Sir John.

“Perriton Powers,” he said.

In another moment Perriton Powers stood before the Ministers.

Bronzed by the tropic sun, his face was recognizable only by the assured glance of his eye. An Afghan bernous was thrown back from his head and shoulders, while his commanding figure was draped in a long chibuok. A pair of pistols and a curved yasmak were in his belt.

“So you got to Wazuchistan all right,” said the Premier quietly.

“I went in by way of the Barooda,” said Powers. “For many days I was unable to cross it. The waters of the river were wild and swollen with rains. To cross it seemed certain death——”

“But at last you got over,” said the Premier, “and then——”

“I struck out over the Fahuri desert. For days and days, blinded by the sun, and almost buried in sand, I despaired.”

“But you got through it all right. And after that?”

“My first care was to disguise myself. Staining myself from head to foot with betel nut——”

“To look like a beetle,” said the Premier. “Exactly. And so you got to Wazuchistan. Where is it and what is it?”

“My lord,” said Powers, drawing himself up and speaking with emphasis, “I got to where it was thought to be. There is no such place!”

The whole Cabinet gave a start of astonishment.

“No such place!” they repeated.

“What about El Boob?” asked the Chancellor.

“There is no such person.”

“And the Shriek-el-Foozlum?”

Powers shook his head.

“But do you mean to say,” said the Premier in astonishment, “that there are no Wazoos? There you must be wrong. True we don’t just know where they are. But our despatches have shown too many signs of active trouble traced directly to the Wazoos to disbelieve in them. There are Wazoos somewhere, there – there must be.”

“The Wazoos,” said Powers, “are there. But they are Irish. So are the Ohulîs. They are both Irish.”

“But how the devil did they get out there?” questioned the Premier. “And why did they make the trouble?”

“The Irish, my lord,” interrupted the Chief Secretary for Ireland, “are everywhere, and it is their business to make trouble.”

“Some years ago,” continued Powers, “a few Irish families settled out there. The Ohulîs should be properly called the O’Hooleys. The word Wazoo is simply the Urdu for McGinnis. El Boob is the Urdu for the Arabic El Papa, the Pope. It was my knowledge of Urdu, itself an agglutinative language——”

“Precisely,” said the Premier. Then he turned to his Cabinet. “Well, gentlemen, our task is now simplified. If they are Irish, I think we know exactly what to do. I suppose,” he continued, turning to Powers, “that they want some kind of Home Rule.”

“They do,” said Powers.

“Separating, of course, the Ohulî counties from the Wazoo?”

“Yes,” said Powers.

“Precisely; the thing is simplicity itself. And what contribution will they make to the Imperial Exchequer?”

“None.”

“And will they pay their own expenses?”

“They refuse to.”

“Exactly. All this is plain sailing. Of course they must have a constabulary. Lord Edward,” continued the Premier, turning now to the Secretary of War, “how long will it take to send in a couple of hundred constabulary? I think they’ll expect it, you know. It’s their right.”

“Let me see,” said Lord Edward, calculating quickly, with military precision, “sending them over the Barooda in buckets and then over the mountains in baskets – I think in about two weeks.”

“Good,” said the Premier. “Gentlemen, we shall meet the House tomorrow. Sir John, will you meantime draft us an annexation bill? And you, young man, what you have done is really not half bad. His Majesty will see you tomorrow. I am glad that you are safe.”

“On my way home,” said Powers, with quiet modesty, “I was attacked by a lion——”

“But you beat it off,” said the Premier. “Exactly. Good night.”

CHAPTER V

It was on the following afternoon that Sir John Elphinspoon presented the Wazoo Annexation Bill to a crowded and breathless House.

Those who know the House of Commons know that it has its moods. At times it is grave, earnest, thoughtful. At other times it is swept with emotion which comes at it in waves. Or at times, again, it just seems to sit there as if it were stuffed.

But all agreed that they had never seen the House so hushed as when Sir John Elphinspoon presented his Bill for the Annexation of Wazuchistan. And when at the close of a splendid peroration he turned to pay a graceful compliment to the man who had saved the nation, and thundered forth to the delighted ears of his listeners—

Arma virumque cano Wazoo qui primus ab oris,
and then, with the words “England, England,” still on his lips, fell over backwards and was carried out on a stretcher, the House broke into wild and unrestrained applause.

CHAPTER VI

The next day Sir Perriton Powers – for the King had knighted him after breakfast – stood again in the conservatory of the house in Carlton Terrace.

“I have come for my reward,” he said. “Do I get it?”

“You do,” said Angela.

Sir Perriton clasped her in his arms.

“On my way home,” he said, “I was attacked by a lion. I tried to beat it——”

“Hush, dearest,” she whispered, “let me take you to father.”

TOC     INDEX

Who Do You Think Did It?

—or—
The Mixed-Up Murder Mystery

(Done after the very latest fashion in this sort of thing)

Note: Any reader who guesses correctly who did it is entitled (in all fairness) to a beautiful gold watch and chain.

I

He Dined with Me Last Night

The afternoon edition of the Metropolitan Planet was going to press. Five thousand copies a minute were reeling off its giant cylinders. A square acre of paper was passing through its presses every hour. In the huge Planet building, which dominated Broadway, employés, compositors, reporters, advertisers, surged to and fro. Placed in a single line (only, of course, they wouldn’t be likely to consent to it) they would have reached across Manhattan Island. Placed in two lines, they would probably have reached twice as far. Arranged in a procession they would have taken an hour in passing a saloon: easily that.

In the whole vast building all was uproar. Telephones, megaphones and gramophones were ringing throughout the building. Elevators flew up and down, stopping nowhere.

Only in one place was quiet – namely, in the room where sat the big man on whose capacious intellect the whole organization depended.

Masterman Throgton, the general manager of the Planet, was a man in middle life. There was something in his massive frame which suggested massiveness, and a certain quality in the poise of his great head which indicated a balanced intellect. His face was impenetrable and his expression imponderable.

The big chief was sitting in his swivel chair with ink all round him. Through this man’s great brain passed all the threads and filaments that held the news of a continent. Snap one, and the whole continent would stop.

At the moment when our story opens (there was no sense in opening it sooner), a written message had just been handed in.

The Chief read it. He seemed to grasp its contents in a flash.

“Good God!” he exclaimed. It was the strongest expression that this solid, self-contained, semi-detached man ever allowed himself. Anything stronger would have seemed too near to profanity. “Good God!” he repeated, “Kivas Kelly murdered! In his own home! Why, he dined with me last night! I drove him home!”

For a brief moment the big man remained plunged in thought. But with Throgton the moment of musing was short. His instinct was to act.

“You may go,” he said to the messenger. Then he seized the telephone that stood beside him (this man could telephone almost without stopping thinking) and spoke into it in quiet, measured tones, without wasting a word.

“Hullo, operator! Put me through to two, two, two, two, two. Is that two, two, two, two, two? Hullo, two, two, two, two, two; I want Transome Kent. Kent speaking? Kent, this is Throgton speaking. Kent, a murder has been committed at the Kelly residence, Riverside Drive. I want you to go and cover it. Get it all. Don’t spare expense. The Planet is behind you. Have you got car-fare? Right.”

In another moment the big chief had turned round in his swivel chair (at least forty degrees) and was reading telegraphic despatches from Jerusalem. That was the way he did things.

II

I Must Save Her Life

Within a few minutes Transome Kent had leapt into a car (a surface car) and was speeding north towards Riverside Drive with the full power of the car. As he passed uptown a newsboy was already calling, “Club Man Murdered! Another Club Man Murdered!” Carelessly throwing a cent to the boy, Kent purchased a paper and read the brief notice of the tragedy.

Kivas Kelly, a well-known club man and bon vivant, had been found dead in his residence on Riverside Drive, with every indication – or, at least, with a whole lot of indications – of murder. The unhappy club man had been found, fully dressed in his evening clothes, lying on his back on the floor of the billiard-room, with his feet stuck up on the edge of the table. A narrow black scarf, presumably his evening tie, was twisted tightly about his neck by means of a billiard cue inserted in it. There was a quiet smile upon his face. He had apparently died from strangulation. A couple of bullet-holes passed through his body, one on each side, but they went out again. His suspenders were burst at the back. His hands were folded across his chest. One of them still held a white billiard ball. There was no sign of a struggle or of any disturbance in the room. A square piece of cloth was missing from the victim’s dinner jacket.

In its editorial columns the same paper discussed the more general aspects of the murder. This, it said, was the third club man murdered in the last fortnight. While not taking an alarmist view, the paper felt that the killing of club men had got to stop. There was a limit, a reasonable limit, to everything. Why should a club man be killed? It might be asked, why should a club man live? But this was hardly to the point. They do live. After all, to be fair, what does a club man ask of society? Not much. Merely wine, women and singing. Why not let him have them? Is it fair to kill him? Does the gain to literature outweigh the social wrong? The writer estimated that at the rate of killing now going on the club men would be all destroyed in another generation. Something should be done to conserve them.

Transome Kent was not a detective. He was a reporter. After sweeping everything at Harvard in front of him, and then behind him, he had joined the staff of the Planet two months before. His rise had been phenomenal. In his first week of work he had unravelled a mystery, in his second he had unearthed a packing scandal which had poisoned the food of the entire nation for ten years, and in his third he had pitilessly exposed some of the best and most respectable people in the metropolis. Kent’s work on the Planet consisted now almost exclusively of unravelling and unearthing, and it was natural that the manager should turn to him.

The mansion was a handsome sandstone residence, standing in its own grounds. On Kent’s arrival he found that the police had already drawn a cordon around it with cords. Groups of morbid curiosity-seekers hung about it in twos and threes, some of them in fours and fives. Policemen were leaning against the fence in all directions. They wore that baffled look so common to the detective force of the metropolis. “It seems to me,” remarked one of them to the man beside him, “that there is an inexorable chain of logic about this that I am unable to follow.” “So do I,” said the other.

The Chief Inspector of the Detective Department, a large, heavy-looking man, was standing beside a gate-post. He nodded gloomily to Transome Kent.

“Are you baffled, Edwards?” asked Kent.

“Baffled again, Mr. Kent,” said the Inspector, with a sob in his voice. “I thought I could have solved this one, but I can’t.”

He passed a handkerchief across his eyes.

“Have a cigar, Chief,” said Kent, “and let me hear what the trouble is.”

The Inspector brightened. Like all policemen, he was simply crazy over cigars. “All right, Mr. Kent,” he said, “wait till I chase away the morbid curiosity-seekers.”

He threw a stick at them.

“Now, then,” continued Kent, “what about tracks, footmarks? Had you thought of them?”

“Yes, first thing. The whole lawn is covered with them, all stamped down. Look at these, for instance. These are the tracks of a man with a wooden leg” – Kent nodded – “in all probability a sailor, newly landed from Java, carrying a Singapore walking-stick, and with a tin-whistle tied round his belt.”

“Yes, I see that,” said Kent thoughtfully. “The weight of the whistle weighs him down a little on the right side.”

“Do you think, Mr. Kent, a sailor from Java with a wooden leg would commit a murder like this?” asked the Inspector eagerly. “Would he do it?”

“He would,” said the Investigator. “They generally do – as soon as they land.”

The Inspector nodded. “And look at these marks here, Mr. Kent. You recognize them, surely – those are the footsteps of a bar-keeper out of employment, waiting for the eighteenth amendment to pass away. See how deeply they sink in——”

“Yes,” said Kent, “he’d commit murder.”

“There are lots more,” continued the Inspector, “but they’re no good. The morbid curiosity-seekers were walking all over this place while we were drawing the cordon round it.”

“Stop a bit,” said Kent, pausing to think a moment. “What about thumb-prints?”

“Thumb-prints,” said the Inspector. “Don’t mention them. The house is full of them.”

“Any thumb-prints of Italians with that peculiar incurvature of the ball of the thumb that denotes a Sicilian brigand?”

“There were three of those,” said Inspector Edwards gloomily. “No, Mr. Kent, the thumb stuff is no good.”

Kent thought again.

“Inspector,” he said, “what about mysterious women? Have you seen any around?”

“Four went by this morning,” said the Inspector, “one at eleven-thirty, one at twelve-thirty, and two together at one-thirty. At least,” he added sadly, “I think they were mysterious. All women look mysterious to me.”

“I must try in another direction,” said Kent. “Let me reconstruct the whole thing. I must weave a chain of analysis. Kivas Kelly was a bachelor, was he not?”

“He was. He lived alone here.”

“Very good, I suppose he had in his employ a butler who had been with him for twenty years——”

Edwards nodded.

“I suppose you’ve arrested him?”

“At once,” said the Inspector. “We always arrest the butler, Mr. Kent. They expect it. In fact, this man, Williams, gave himself up at once.”

“And let me see,” continued the Investigator. “I presume there was a housekeeper who lived on the top floor, and who had been stone deaf for ten years?”

“Precisely.”

“She had heard nothing during the murder?”

“Not a thing. But this may have been on account of her deafness.”

“True, true,” murmured Kent. “And I suppose there was a coachman, a thoroughly reliable man, who lived with his wife at the back of the house——”

“But who had taken his wife over to see a relation on the night of the murder, and who did not return until an advanced hour. Mr. Kent, we’ve been all over that. There’s nothing in it.”

“Were there any other persons belonging to the establishment?”

“There was Mr. Kelly’s stenographer, Alice Delary, but she only came in the mornings.”

“Have you seen her?” asked Kent eagerly. “What is she like?”

“I have seen her,” said the Inspector. “She’s a looloo.”

“Ha,” said Kent, “a looloo!” The two men looked into one another’s eyes.

“Yes,” repeated Edwards thoughtfully, “a peach.”

A sudden swift flash of intuition, an inspiration, leapt into the young reporter’s brain.

This girl, this peach, at all hazards he must save her life.

III

I Must Buy
a Book on Billiards

Kent turned to the Inspector. “Take me into the house,” he said. Edwards led the way. The interior of the handsome mansion seemed undisturbed. “I see no sign of a struggle here,” said Kent.

“No,” answered the Inspector gloomily. “We can find no sign of a struggle anywhere. But, then, we never do.”

He opened for the moment the door of the stately drawing-room. “No sign of a struggle there,” he said. The closed blinds, the draped furniture, the covered piano, the muffled chandelier, showed absolutely no sign of a struggle.

“Come upstairs to the billiard-room,” said Edwards. “The body has been removed for the inquest, but nothing else is disturbed.”

They went upstairs. On the second floor was the billiard-room, with a great English table in the centre of it. But Kent had at once dashed across to the window, an exclamation on his lips. “Ha! ha!” he said, “what have we here?”

The Inspector shook his head quietly. “The window,” he said in a monotonous, almost sing-song tone, “has apparently been opened from the outside, the sash being lifted with some kind of a sharp instrument. The dust on the sill outside has been disturbed as if by a man of extraordinary agility lying on his stomach—— Don’t bother about that, Mr. Kent. It’s always there.”

“True,” said Kent. Then he cast his eyes upward, and again an involuntary exclamation broke from him. “Did you see that trap-door?” he asked.

“We did,” said Edwards. “The dust around the rim has been disturbed. The trap opens into the hollow of the roof. A man of extraordinary dexterity might open the trap with a billiard cue, throw up a fine manila rope, climb up the rope and lie there on his stomach.

“No use,” continued the Inspector. “For the matter of that, look at this huge old-fashioned fireplace. A man of extraordinary precocity could climb up the chimney. Or this dumb-waiter on a pulley, for serving drinks, leading down into the maids’ quarters. A man of extreme indelicacy might ride up and down in it.”

“Stop a minute,” said Kent. “What is the meaning of that hat?”

A light gossamer hat, gay with flowers, hung on a peg at the side of the room.

“We thought of that,” said Edwards, “and we have left it there. Whoever comes for that hat has had a hand in the mystery. We think——”

But Transome Kent was no longer listening. He had seized the edge of the billiard table.

“Look, look!” he cried eagerly. “The clue to the mystery! The positions of the billiard balls! The white ball in the very centre of the table, and the red just standing on the verge of the end pocket! What does it mean, Edwards, what does it mean?”

He had grasped Edwards by the arm and was peering into his face.

“I don’t know,” said the Inspector. “I don’t play billiards.”

“Neither do I,” said Kent, “but I can find out. Quick! The nearest book-store. I must buy a book on billiards.”

With a wave of the arm, Kent vanished.

The Inspector stood for a moment in thought.

“Gone!” he murmured to himself (it was his habit to murmur all really important speeches aloud to himself). “Now, why did Throgton telephone to me to put a watch on Kent? Ten dollars a day to shadow him! Why?”

IV

That Is not Billiard Chalk

Meantime at the Planet office Masterman Throgton was putting on his coat to go home.

“Excuse me, sir,” said an employé, “there’s a lot of green billiard chalk on your sleeve.”

Throgton turned and looked the man full in the eye.

“That is not billiard chalk,” he said, “it is face powder.”

Saying which this big, imperturbable, self-contained man stepped into the elevator and went to the ground floor in one drop.

V

Has Anybody Here
Seen Kelly?

The inquest upon the body of Kivas Kelly was held upon the following day. Far from offering any solution of what had now become an unfathomable mystery, it only made it deeper still. The medical testimony, though given by the most distinguished consulting expert of the city, was entirely inconclusive. The body, the expert testified, showed evident marks of violence. There was a distinct lesion of the oesophagus and a decided excoriation of the fibula. The mesodenum was gibbous. There was a certain quantity of flab in the binomium and the proscenium was wide open.

One striking fact, however, was decided from the testimony of the expert, namely, that the stomach of the deceased was found to contain half a pint of arsenic. On this point the questioning of the district attorney was close and technical. Was it unusual, he asked, to find arsenic in the stomach? In the stomach of a club man, no. Was not half a pint a large quantity? He would not say that. Was it a small quantity? He should not care to say that it was. Would half a pint of arsenic cause death? Of a club man, no, not necessarily. That was all.

The other testimony submitted to the inquest jury brought out various facts of a substantive character, but calculated rather to complicate than to unravel the mystery. The butler swore that on the very day of the murder he had served his master a half-pint of arsenic at lunch. But he claimed that this was quite a usual happening with his master. On cross-examination it appeared that he meant apollinaris. He was certain, however, that it was half a pint. The butler, it was shown, had been in Kivas Kelly’s employ for twenty years.

The coachman, an Irishman, was closely questioned. He had been in Mr. Kelly’s employ for three years – ever since his arrival from the old country. Was it true that he had had, on the day of the murder, a violent quarrel with his master? It was. Had he threatened to kill him? No. He had threatened to knock his block off, but not to kill him.

The coroner looked at his notes. “Call Alice Delary,” he commanded. There was a deep sensation in the court as Miss Delary quietly stepped forward to her place in the witness-box.

Tall, graceful and willowy, Alice Delary was in her first burst of womanhood. Those who looked at the beautiful girl realized that if her first burst was like this, what would the second, or the third be like?

The girl was trembling, and evidently distressed, but she gave her evidence in a clear, sweet, low voice. She had been in Mr. Kelly’s employ three years. She was his stenographer. But she came only in the mornings and always left at lunch-time. The question immediately asked by the jury – “Where did she generally have lunch?” – was disallowed by the coroner. Asked by a member of the jury what system of shorthand she used, she answered, “Pitman’s.” Asked by another juryman whether she ever cared to go to moving pictures, she said that she went occasionally. This created a favourable impression. “Miss Delary,” said the district attorney, “I want to ask if it is your hat that was found hanging in the billiard-room after the crime?”

“Don’t you dare ask that girl that,” interrupted the magistrate. “Miss Delary, you may step down.”

But the principal sensation of the day arose out of the evidence offered by Masterman Throgton, general manager of the Planet. Kivas Kelly, he testified, had dined with him at his club on the fateful evening. He had afterwards driven him to his home.

“When you went into the house with the deceased,” asked the district attorney, “how long did you remain there with him?”

“That,” said Throgton quietly, “I must refuse to answer.”

“Would it incriminate you?” asked the coroner, leaning forward.

“It might,” said Throgton.

“Then you’re perfectly right not to answer it,” said the coroner. “Don’t ask him that any more. Ask something else.”

“Then did you,” questioned the attorney, turning to Throgton again, “play a game of billiards with the deceased?”

“Stop, stop,” said the coroner, “that question I can’t allow. It’s too direct, too brutal; there’s something about that question, something mean, dirty. Ask another.”

“Very good,” said the attorney. “Then tell me, Mr. Throgton, if you ever saw this blue envelope before?” He held up in his hand a long blue envelope.

“Never in my life,” said Throgton.

“Of course he didn’t,” said the coroner. “Let’s have a look at it. What is it?”

“This envelope, your Honour, was found sticking out of the waistcoat pocket of the deceased.”

“You don’t say,” said the coroner. “And what’s in it?”

Amid breathless silence, the attorney drew forth a sheet of blue paper, bearing a stamp, and read:

“This is the last will and testament of me, Kivas Kelly of New York. I leave everything of which I die possessed to my nephew, Peter Kelly.”

The entire room gasped. No one spoke. The coroner looked all around. “Has anybody here seen Kelly?” he asked.

There was no answer.

The coroner repeated the question.

No one moved.

“Mr. Coroner,” said the attorney, “it is my opinion that if Peter Kelly is found the mystery is fathomed.”

Ten minutes later the jury returned a verdict of murder against a person or persons unknown, adding that they would bet a dollar that Kelly did it.

The coroner ordered the butler to be released, and directed the issue of a warrant for the arrest of Peter Kelly.

VI

Show Me the Man
Who Wore Those Boots

The remains of the unhappy club man were buried on the following day as reverently as those of a club man can be. None followed him to the grave except a few morbid curiosity-seekers, who rode on top of the hearse.

The great city turned again to its usual avocations. The unfathomable mystery was dismissed from the public mind.

Meantime Transome Kent was on the trail. Sleepless, almost foodless, and absolutely drinkless, he was everywhere. He was looking for Peter Kelly. Wherever crowds were gathered, the Investigator was there, searching for Kelly. In the great concourse of the Grand Central Station, Kent moved to and fro, peering into everybody’s face. An official touched him on the shoulder. “Stop peering into the people’s faces,” he said. “I am unravelling a mystery,” Kent answered. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the man, “I didn’t know.”

Kent was here, and everywhere, moving ceaselessly, pro and con, watching for Kelly. For hours he stood beside the soda-water fountains examining every drinker as he drank. For three days he sat on the steps of Masterman Throgton’s home, disguised as a plumber waiting for a wrench.

But still no trace of Peter Kelly. Young Kelly, it appeared, had lived with his uncle until a little less than three years ago. Then suddenly he had disappeared. He had vanished, as a brilliant writer for the New York Press framed it, as if the earth had swallowed him up.

Transome Kent, however, was not a man to be baffled by initial defeat.

A week later, the Investigator called in at the office of Inspector Edwards.

“Inspector,” he said, “I must have some more clues. Take me again to the Kelly residence. I must re-analyse my first diaeresis.”

Together the two friends went to the house. “It is inevitable,” said Kent, as they entered again the fateful billiard-room, “that we have overlooked something.”

“We always do,” said Edwards gloomily.

“Now tell me,” said Kent, as they stood beside the billiard table, “what is your own theory, the police theory, of this murder? Give me your first theory first, and then go on with the others.”

“Our first theory, Mr. Kent, was that the murder was committed by a sailor with a wooden leg, newly landed from Java.”

“Quite so, quite proper,” nodded Kent.

“We knew that he was a sailor,” the Inspector went on, dropping again into his sing-song monotone, “by the extraordinary agility needed to climb up the thirty feet of bare brick wall to the window – a landsman could not have climbed more than twenty; the fact that he was from the East Indies we knew from the peculiar knot about his victim’s neck. We knew that he had a wooden leg——”

The Inspector paused and looked troubled.

“We knew it.” He paused again. “I’m afraid I can’t remember that one.”

“Tut, tut,” said Kent gently, “you knew it, Edwards, because when he leaned against the billiard table the impress of his hand on the mahogany was deeper on one side than the other. The man was obviously top heavy. But you abandoned this first theory.”

“Certainly, Mr. Kent, we always do. Our second theory was——”

But Kent had ceased to listen. He had suddenly stooped down and picked up something off the floor.

“Ha ha!” he exclaimed. “What do you make of this?” He held up a square fragment of black cloth.

“We never saw it,” said Edwards.

“Cloth,” muttered Kent, “the missing piece of Kivas Kelly’s dinner jacket.” He whipped out a magnifying glass. “Look,” he said, “it’s been stamped upon – by a man wearing hob-nailed boots – made in Ireland – a man of five feet nine and a half inches high——”

“One minute, Mr. Kent,” interrupted the Inspector, greatly excited, “I don’t quite get it.”

“The depth of the dint proves the lift of his foot,” said Kent impatiently, “and the lift of the foot indicates at once the man’s height. Edwards, find me the man who wore these boots and the mystery is solved!”

At that very moment a heavy step, unmistakably to the trained ear that of a man in hob-nailed boots, was heard upon the stair. The door opened and a man stood hesitating in the doorway.

Both Kent and Edwards gave a start, two starts, of surprise.

The man was exactly five feet nine and a half inches high. He was dressed in coachman’s dress. His face was saturnine and evil.

It was Dennis, the coachman of the murdered man.

“If you’re Mr. Kent,” he said, “there’s a lady here asking for you.”

VII

Oh, Mr. Kent, Save Me!

In another moment an absolutely noiseless step was heard upon the stair.

A young girl entered, a girl, tall, willowy and beautiful, in the first burst, or just about the first burst, of womanhood.

It was Alice Delary.

She was dressed with extreme taste, but Kent’s quick eye noted at once that she wore no hat.

“Mr. Kent,” she cried, “you are Mr. Kent, are you not? They told me that you were here. Oh, Mr. Kent, help me, save me!”

She seemed to shudder into herself a moment. Her breath came and went quickly.

She reached out her two hands.

“Calm yourself, my dear young lady,” said Kent, taking them. “Don’t let your breath come and go so much. Trust me. Tell me all.”

“Mr. Kent,” said Delary, regaining her control, but still trembling, “I want my hat.”

Kent let go the beautiful girl’s hands. “Sit down,” he said. Then he went across the room and fetched the hat, the light gossamer hat, with flowers in it, that still hung on a peg.

“Oh, I am so glad to get it back,” cried the girl. “I can never thank you enough. I was afraid to come for it.”

“It is all right,” said the Inspector. “The police theory was that it was the housekeeper’s hat. You are welcome to it.”

Kent had been looking closely at the girl before him.

“You have more to say than that,” he said. “Tell me all.”

“Oh, I will, I will, Mr. Kent. That dreadful night! I was here. I saw, at least I heard it all.”

She shuddered.

“Oh, Mr. Kent, it was dreadful! I had come back that evening to the library to finish some work. I knew that Mr. Kelly was to dine out and that I would be alone. I had been working quietly for some time when I became aware of voices in the billiard-room. I tried not to listen, but they seemed to be quarrelling, and I couldn’t help hearing. Oh, Mr. Kent, was I wrong?”

“No,” said Kent, taking her hand a moment, “you were not.”

“I heard one say, ‘Get your foot off the table, you’ve no right to put your foot on the table.’ Then the other said, ‘Well, you keep your stomach off the cushion then.’” The girl shivered. “Then presently one said, quite fiercely, ‘Get back into balk there, get back fifteen inches,’ and the other voice said, ‘By God! I’ll shoot from here.’ Then there was a dead stillness, and then a voice almost screamed, ‘You’ve potted me. You’ve potted me. That ends it.’ And then I heard the other say in a low tone, ‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean it. I never meant it to end that way.’

“I was so frightened, Mr. Kent, I couldn’t stay any longer. I rushed downstairs and ran all the way home. Then next day I read what had happened, and I knew that I had left my hat there, and was afraid. Oh, Mr. Kent, save me!”

“Miss Delary,” said the Investigator, taking again the girl’s hands and looking into her eyes, “you are safe. Tell me only one thing. The man who played against Kivas Kelly – did you see him?”

“Only for one moment” – the girl paused – “through the keyhole.”

“What was he like?” asked Kent. “Had he an impenetrable face?”

“He had.”

“Was there anything massive about his face?”

“Oh, yes, yes, it was all massive.”

“Miss Delary,” said Kent, “this mystery is now on the brink of solution. When I have joined the last links of the chain, may I come and tell you all?”

She looked full in his face.

“At any hour of the day or night,” she said, “you may come.”

Then she was gone.

VIII

You Are Peter Kelly

Within a few moments Kent was at the phone.

“I want four, four, four, four. Is that four, four, four, four? Mr. Throgton’s house? I want Mr. Throgton. Mr. Throgton speaking? Mr. Throgton, Kent speaking. The Riverside mystery is solved.”

Kent waited in silence a moment. Then he heard Throgton’s voice – not a note in it disturbed:

“Has anybody found Kelly?”

“Mr. Throgton,” said Kent, and he spoke with a strange meaning in his tone, “the story is a long one. Suppose I relate it to you” – he paused, and laid a peculiar emphasis on what followed—”over a game of billiards.”

“What the devil do you mean?” answered Throgton.

“Let me come round to your house and tell the story. There are points in it that I can best illustrate over a billiard table. Suppose I challenge you to a fifty point game before I tell my story.”

—

It required no little hardihood to challenge Masterman Throgton at billiards. His reputation at his club as a cool, determined player was surpassed by few. Throgton had been known to run nine, ten, and even twelve at a break. It was not unusual for him to drive his ball clear off the table. His keen eye told him infallibly where each of the three balls was; instinctively he knew which to shoot with.

In Kent, however, he had no mean adversary. The young reporter, though he had never played before, had studied his book to some purpose. His strategy was admirable. Keeping his ball well under the shelter of the cushion, he eluded every stroke of his adversary, and in his turn caused his ball to leap or dart across the table with such speed as to bury itself in the pocket at the side.

The score advanced rapidly, both players standing precisely equal. At the end of the first half-hour it stood at ten all. Throgton, a grim look upon his face, had settled down to work, playing with one knee on the table. Kent, calm but alive with excitement, leaned well forward to his stroke, his eye held within an inch of the ball.

At fifteen they were still even. Throgton with a sudden effort forced a break of three; but Kent rallied and in another twenty minutes they were even again at nineteen all.

But it was soon clear that Transome Kent had something else in mind than to win the game. Presently his opportunity came. With a masterly stroke, such as few trained players could use, he had potted his adversary’s ball. The red ball was left over the very jaws of the pocket. The white was in the centre.

Kent looked into Throgton’s face.

The balls were standing in the very same position on the table as on the night of the murder.

“I did that on purpose,” said Kent quietly.

“What do you mean?” asked Throgton.

“The position of those balls,” said Kent. “Mr. Throgton, come into the library. I have something to say to you. You know already what it is.”

They went into the library. Throgton, his hand unsteady, lighted a cigar.

“Well,” he said, “what is it?”

“Mr. Throgton,” said Kent, “two weeks ago you gave me a mystery to solve. Tonight I can give you the solution. Do you want it?”

Throgton’s face never moved.

“Well,” he said.

“A man’s life,” Kent went on, “may be played out on a billiard table. A man’s soul, Throgton, may be pocketed.”

“What devil’s foolery is this?” said Throgton. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that your crime is known – plotter, schemer that you are, you are found out – hypocrite, traitor; yes, Masterman Throgton, or rather – let me give you your true name-Peter Kelly, murderer, I denounce you!”

Throgton never flinched. He walked across to where Kent stood, and with his open palm he slapped him over the mouth.

“Transome Kent,” he said, “you’re a liar.”

Then he walked back to his chair and sat down.

“Kent,” he continued, “from the first moment of your mock investigation, I knew who you were. Your every step was shadowed, your every movement dogged. Transome Kent – by your true name, Peter Kelly, murderer, I denounce you.”

Kent walked quietly across to Throgton and dealt him a fearful blow behind the ear.

“You’re a liar,” he said, “I am not Peter Kelly.”

They sat looking at one another.

At that moment Throgton’s servant appeared at the door.

“A gentleman to see you, sir.”

“Who?” said Throgton.

“I don’t know, sir, he gave his card.”

Masterman Throgton took the card.

On it was printed:

PETER KELLY

IX

Let Me Tell You
the Story of My Life

For a moment Throgton and Kent sat looking at one another.

“Show the man up,” said Throgton.

A minute later the door opened and a man entered. Kent’s keen eye analysed him as he stood. His blue clothes, his tanned face, and the extraordinary dexterity of his fingers left no doubt of his calling. He was a sailor.

“Sit down,” said Throgton.

“Thank you,” said the sailor, “it rests my wooden leg.”

The two men looked again. One of the sailor’s legs was made of wood. With a start Kent noticed that it was made of East Indian sandalwood.

“I’ve just come from Java,” said Kelly quietly, as he sat down.

Kent nodded. “I see it all now,” he said. “Throgton, I wronged you. We should have known it was a sailor with a wooden leg from Java. There is no other way.”

“Gentlemen,” said Peter Kelly, “I’ve come to make my confession. It is the usual and right thing to do, gentlemen, and I want to go through with it while I can.”

“One moment,” said Kent, “do you mind interrupting yourself with a hacking cough?”

“Thank you, sir,” said Kelly, “I’ll get to that a little later. Let me begin by telling you the story of my life.”

“No, no,” urged Throgton and Kent, “don’t do that!”

Kelly frowned. “I think I have a right to,” he said. “You’ve got to hear it. As a boy I had a wild, impulsive nature. Had it been curbed——”

“But it wasn’t,” said Throgton. “What next?”

“I was the sole relative of my uncle, and heir to great wealth. Pampered with every luxury, I was on a footing of——”

“One minute,” interrupted Kent, rapidly analysing as he listened. “How many legs had you then?”

“Two – on a footing of ease and indolence. I soon lost——”

“Your leg,” said Throgton. “Mr. Kelly, pray come to the essential things.”

“I will,” said the sailor. “Gentlemen, bad as I was, I was not altogether bad.”

“Of course not,” said Kent and Throgton soothingly. “Probably not more than ninety per cent.”

“Even into my life, gentlemen, love entered. If you had seen her you would have known that she is as innocent as the driven snow. Three years ago she came to my uncle’s house. I loved her. One day, hardly knowing what I was doing, I took her——” he paused.

“Yes, yes,” said Throgton and Kent, “you took her?”

“To the Aquarium. My uncle heard of it. There was a violent quarrel. He disinherited me and drove me from the house. I had a liking for the sea from a boy.”

“Excuse me,” said Kent, “from what boy?”

Kelly went right on. “I ran away as a sailor before the mast.”

“Pardon me,” interrupted Kent, “I am not used to sea terms. Why didn’t you run behind the mast?”

“Hear me out,” said Kelly, “I am nearly done. We sailed for the East Indies – for Java. There a Malay pirate bit off my leg. I returned home, bitter, disillusioned, the mere wreck that you see. I had but one thought. I meant to kill my uncle.”

For a moment a hacking cough interrupted Kelly. Kent and Throgton nodded quietly to one another.

“I came to his house at night. With the aid of my wooden leg I scaled the wall, lifted the window and entered the billiard-room. There was murder in my heart. Thank God I was spared from that. At the very moment when I got in, a light was turned on in the room and I saw before me – but no, I will not name her – my better angel. ‘Peter!’ she cried, then with a woman’s intuition she exclaimed, ‘You have come to murder your uncle. Don’t do it.’ My whole mood changed. I broke down and cried like a – like a——”

Kelly paused a moment.

“Like a boob,” said Kent softly. “Go on.”

“When I had done crying, we heard voices. ‘Quick,’ she exclaimed, ‘flee, hide, he must not see you.’ She rushed into the adjoining room, closing the door. My eye had noticed already the trap above. I climbed up to it. Shall I explain how?”

“Don’t,” said Kent, “I can analyse it afterwards.”

“There I saw what passed. I saw Mr. Throgton and Kivas Kelly come in. I watched their game. They were greatly excited and quarrelled over it. Throgton lost.”

The big man nodded with a scowl. “By his potting the white,” he said.

“Precisely,” said Kelly, “he missed the red. Your analysis was wrong, Mr. Kent. The game ended. You started your reasoning from a false diaeresis. In billiards people never mark the last point. The board still showed ninety-nine all. Throgton left and my uncle, as often happens, kept trying over the last shot – a half-ball shot, sir, with the red over the pocket. He tried again and again. He couldn’t make it. He tried various ways. His rest was too unsteady. Finally he made his tie into a long loop round his neck and put his cue through it. ‘Now, by gad!’ he said, ‘I can do it.’”

“Ha!” said Kent. “Fool that I was.”

“Exactly,” continued Kelly. “In the excitement of watching my uncle I forgot where I was, I leaned too far over and fell out of the trap. I landed on uncle, just as he was sitting on the table to shoot. He fell.”

“I see it all!” said Kent. “He hit his head, the loop tightened, the cue spun round and he was dead.”

“That’s it,” said Kelly. “I saw that he was dead, and I did not dare to remain. I straightened the knot in his tie, laid his hands reverently across his chest, and departed as I had come.”

“Mr. Kelly,” said Throgton thoughtfully, “the logic of your story is wonderful. It exceeds anything in its line that I have seen published for months. But there is just one point that I fail to grasp. The two bullet holes?”

“They were old ones,” answered the sailor quietly. “My uncle in his youth had led a wild life in the west; he was full of them.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Kelly spoke again:

“My time, gentlemen, is short.” (A hacking cough interrupted him.) “I feel that I am withering. It rests with you, gentlemen, whether or not I walk out of this room a free man.”

Transome Kent rose and walked over to the sailor.

“Mr. Kelly,” he said, “here is my hand.”

X

So Do I

A few days after the events last narrated, Transome Kent called at the boarding-house of Miss Alice Delary. The young Investigator wore a light grey tweed suit, with a salmon-coloured geranium in his buttonhole. There was something exultant yet at the same time grave in his expression, as of one who has taken a momentous decision, affecting his future life.

“I wonder,” he murmured, “whether I am acting for my happiness.”

He sat down for a moment on the stone steps and analysed himself.

Then he rose.

“I am,” he said, and rang the bell.

“Miss Delary?” said a maid, “she left here two days ago. If you are Mr. Kent, the note on the mantelpiece is for you.”

Without a word (Kent never wasted them) the Investigator opened the note and read:

Dear Mr. Kent,

Peter and I were married yesterday morning, and have taken an apartment in Java, New Jersey. You will be glad to hear that Peter’s cough is ever so much better. The lawyers have given Peter his money without the least demur.

We both feel that your analysis was simply wonderful. Peter says he doesn’t know where he would be without it.

Very sincerely,

Alice Kelly.

P.S.—I forgot to mention to you that I saw Peter in the billiard-room. But your analysis was marvellous just the same.

—

That evening Kent sat with Throgton talking over the details of the tragedy.

“Throgton,” he said, “it has occurred to me that there were points about that solution that we didn’t get exactly straight somehow.”

“So do I,” said Throgton.

TOC     INDEX

Broken Barriers

—or—
Red Love on a Blue Island

(The kind of thing that has replaced the good Old Sea Story)

It was on a bright August afternoon that I stepped on board the steamer Patagonia at Southampton outward bound for the West Indies and the Port of New Orleans.

I had at the time no presentiment of disaster. I remember remarking to the ship’s purser, as my things were being carried to my state-room, that I had never in all my travels entered upon any voyage with so little premonition of accident. “Very good, Mr. Borus,” he answered. “You will find your state-room in the starboard aisle on the right.” I distinctly recall remarking to the Captain that I had never, in any of my numerous seafarings, seen the sea of a more limpid blue. He agreed with me so entirely, as I recollect it, that he did not even trouble to answer.

Had anyone told me on that bright summer afternoon that our ship would within a week be wrecked among the Dry Tortugas, I should have laughed. Had anyone informed me that I should find myself alone on a raft in the Caribbean Sea, I should have gone into hysterics.

We had hardly entered the waters of the Caribbean when a storm of unprecedented violence broke upon us. Even the Captain had never, so he said, seen anything to compare with it. For two days and nights we encountered and endured the full fury of the sea. Our soup plates were secured with racks and covered with lids. In the smoking-room our glasses had to be set in brackets, and as our steward came and went, we were from moment to moment in imminent danger of seeing him washed overboard.

On the third morning just after daybreak the ship collided with something, probably either a floating rock or one of the dry Tortugas. She blew out her four funnels, the bowsprit dropped out of its place, and the propeller came right off. The Captain, after a brief consultation, decided to abandon her. The boats were lowered, and, the sea being now quite calm, the passengers were emptied into them.

By what accident I was left behind I cannot tell. I had been talking to the second mate and telling him of a rather similar experience of mine in the China Sea, and holding him by the coat as I did so, when quite suddenly he took me by the shoulders, and rushing me into the deserted smoking-room said, “Sit there, Mr. Borus, till I come back for you.” The fellow spoke in such a menacing way that I thought it wiser to comply.

When I came out they were all gone. By good fortune I found one of the ship’s rafts still lying on the deck. I gathered together such articles as might be of use and contrived, though how I do not know, to launch it into the sea.

On my second morning on my raft I was sitting quietly polishing my boots and talking to myself when I became aware of an object floating in the sea close beside the raft. Judge of my feelings when I realized it to be the inanimate body of a girl. Hastily finishing my boots and stopping talking to myself, I made shift as best I could to draw the unhappy girl towards me with a hook.

After several ineffectual attempts I at last managed to obtain a hold of the girl’s clothing and drew her on to the raft.

She was still unconscious. The heavy lifebelt round her person must (so I divined) have kept her afloat after the wreck. Her clothes were sodden, so I reasoned, with the sea-water.

On a handkerchief which was still sticking into the belt of her dress, I could see letters embroidered. Realizing that this was no time for hesitation, and that the girl’s life might depend on my reading her name, I plucked it forth. It was Edith Croyden.

As vigorously as I could I now set to work to rub her hands. My idea was (partly) to restore her circulation. I next removed her boots, which were now rendered useless, as I argued, by the sea-water, and began to rub her feet.

I was just considering what to remove next, when the girl opened her eyes. “Stop rubbing my feet,” she said.

“Miss Croyden,” I said, “you mistake me.”

I rose, with a sense of pique which I did not trouble to conceal, and walked to the other end of the raft. I turned my back upon the girl and stood looking out upon the leaden waters of the Caribbean Sea. The ocean was now calm. There was nothing in sight.

I was still searching the horizon when I heard a soft footstep on the raft behind me, and a light hand was laid upon my shoulder. “Forgive me,” said the girl’s voice.

I turned about. Miss Croyden was standing behind me. She had, so I argued, removed her stockings and was standing in her bare feet. There is something, I am free to confess, about a woman in her bare feet which hits me where I live. With instinctive feminine taste the girl had twined a piece of seaweed in her hair. Seaweed, as a rule, gets me every time. But I checked myself.

“Miss Croyden,” I said, “there is nothing to forgive.”

At the mention of her name the girl blushed for a moment and seemed about to say something, but stopped.

“Where are we?” she queried presently.

“I don’t know,” I answered, as cheerily as I could, “but I am going to find out.”

“How brave you are!” Miss Croyden exclaimed.

“Not at all,” I said, putting as much heartiness into my voice as I was able to.

The girl watched my preparations with interest.

With the aid of a bent pin hoisted on a long pole I had no difficulty in ascertaining our latitude.

“Miss Croydon,” I said, “I am now about to ascertain our longitude. To do this I must lower myself down into the sea. Pray do not be alarmed or anxious. I shall soon be back.”

With the help of a long line I lowered myself deep down into the sea until I was enabled to ascertain, approximately at any rate, our longitude. A fierce thrill went through me at the thought that this longitude was our longitude, hers and mine. On the way up, hand over hand, I observed a long shark looking at me. Realizing that the fellow if voracious might prove dangerous, I lost but little time – indeed, I may say I lost absolutely no time – in coming up the rope.

The girl was waiting for me.

“Oh, I am so glad you have come back,” she exclaimed, clasping her hands.

“It was nothing,” I said, wiping the water from my ears, and speaking as melodiously as I could.

“Have you found our whereabouts?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “Our latitude is normal, but our longitude is, I fear, at least three degrees out of the plumb. I am afraid, Miss Croyden,” I added, speaking as mournfully as I knew how, “that you must reconcile your mind to spending a few days with me on this raft.”

“Is it as bad as that?” she murmured, her eyes upon the sea.

In the long day that followed, I busied myself as much as I could with my work upon the raft, so as to leave the girl as far as possible to herself. It was, so I argued, absolutely necessary to let her feel that she was safe in my keeping. Otherwise she might jump off the raft and I should lose her.

I sorted out my various cans and tins, tested the oil in my chronometer, arranged in neat order my various ropes and apparatus, and got my frying-pan into readiness for any emergency. Of food we had for the present no lack.

With the approach of night I realized that it was necessary to make arrangements for the girl’s comfort. With the aid of a couple of upright poles I stretched a grey blanket across the raft so as to make a complete partition.

“Miss Croyden,” I said, “this end of the raft is yours. Here you may sleep in peace.”

“How kind you are,” the girl murmured.

“You will be quite safe from interference,” I added. “I give you my word that I will not obtrude upon you in any way.”

“How chivalrous you are,” she said.

“Not at all,” I answered, as musically as I could. “Understand me, I am now putting my head over this partition for the last time. If there is anything you want, say so now.”

“Nothing,” she answered.

“There is a candle and matches beside you. If there is anything that you want in the night, call me instantly. Remember, at any hour I shall be here. I promise it.”

“Good night,” she murmured. In a few minutes her soft regular breathing told me that she was asleep.

I went forward and seated myself in a tar-bucket, with my head against the mast, to get what sleep I could.

But for some time – why, I do not know – sleep would not come.

The image of Edith Croyden filled my mind. In vain I told myself that she was a stranger to me: that – beyond her longitude – I knew nothing of her. In some strange way this girl had seized hold of me and dominated my senses.

The night was very calm and still, with great stars in a velvet sky. In the darkness I could hear the water lapping the edge of the raft.

I remained thus in deep thought, sinking further and further into the tar-bucket. By the time I reached the bottom of it I realized that I was in love with Edith Croyden.

Then the thought of my wife occurred to me and perplexed me. Our unhappy marriage had taken place three years before. We brought to one another youth, wealth and position. Yet our marriage was a failure. My wife – for what reason I cannot guess – seemed to find my society irksome. In vain I tried to interest her with narratives of my travels. They seemed – in some way that I could not divine – to fatigue her. “Leave me for a little, Harold,” she would say (I forgot to mention that my name is Harold Borus), “I have a pain in my neck.” At her own suggestion I had taken a trip around the world. On my return she urged me to go round again. I was going round for the third time when the wrecking of the steamer had interrupted my trip.

On my own part, too, I am free to confess that my wife’s attitude had aroused in me a sense of pique, not to say injustice. I am not in any way a vain man. Yet her attitude wounded me. I would no sooner begin, “When I was in the Himalayas hunting the humpo or humped buffalo,” than she would interrupt and say, “Oh, Harold, would you mind going down to the billiard-room and seeing if I left my cigarettes under the billiard-table?” When I returned, she was gone.

By agreement we had arranged for a divorce. On my completion of my third voyage we were to meet in New Orleans. Clara was to go there on a separate ship, giving me the choice of oceans.

Had I met Edith Croyden three months later I should have been a man free to woo and win her. As it was I was bound. I must put a clasp of iron on my feelings. I must wear a mask. Cheerful, helpful, and full of narrative, I must yet let fall no word of love to this defenceless girl.

After a great struggle I rose at last from the tar-bucket, feeling, if not a brighter, at least a cleaner man.

Dawn was already breaking. I looked about me. As the sudden beams of the tropic sun illumined the placid sea, I saw immediately before me, only a hundred yards away, an island. A sandy beach sloped back to a rocky eminence, broken with scrub and jungle. I could see a little stream leaping among the rocks. With eager haste I paddled the raft close to the shore till it ground in about ten inches of water.

I leaped into the water.

With the aid of a stout line, I soon made the raft fast to a rock. Then as I turned I saw that Miss Croyden was standing upon the raft, fully dressed, and gazing at me. The morning sunlight played in her hair, and her deep blue eyes were as soft as the Caribbean Sea itself.

“Don’t attempt to wade ashore, Miss Croyden,” I cried in agitation. “Pray do nothing rash. The waters are simply infested with bacilli.”

“But how can I get ashore?” she asked, with a smile which showed all, or nearly all, of her pearl-like teeth.

“Miss Croyden,” I said, “there is only one way. I must carry you.”

In another moment I had walked back to the raft and lifted her as tenderly and reverently as if she had been my sister – indeed more so – in my arms.

Her weight seemed nothing. When I get a girl like that in my arms I simply don’t feel it. Just for one moment as I clasped her thus in my arms, a fierce thrill ran through me. But I let it run.

When I had carried her well up the sand close to the little stream, I set her down. To my surprise, she sank down in a limp heap.

The girl had fainted.

I knew that it was no time for hesitation.

Running to the stream, I filled my hat with water and dashed it in her face. Then I took up a handful of mud and threw it at her with all my force. After that I beat her with my hat.

At length she opened her eyes and sat up.

“I must have fainted,” she said, with a little shiver. “I am cold. Oh, if we could only have a fire.”

“I will do my best to make one, Miss Croyden,” I replied, speaking as gymnastically as I could. “I will see what I can do with two dry sticks.”

“With dry sticks?” queried the girl. “Can you light a fire with that? How wonderful you are!”

“I have often seen it done,” I replied thoughtfully; “when I was hunting the humpo, or humped buffalo, in the Himalayas, it was our usual method.”

“Have you really hunted the humpo?” she asked, her eyes large with interest.

“I have indeed,” I said, “but you must rest; later on I will tell you about it.”

“I wish you could tell me now,” she said with a little moan.

Meantime I had managed to select from the driftwood on the beach two sticks that seemed absolutely dry. Placing them carefully together, in Indian fashion, I then struck a match and found no difficulty in setting them on fire.

In a few moments the girl was warming herself beside a generous fire.

Together we breakfasted upon the beach beside the fire, discussing our plans like comrades.

Our meal over, I rose.

“I will leave you here a little,” I said, “while I explore.”

With no great difficulty I made my way through the scrub and climbed the eminence of tumbled rocks that shut in the view.

On my return Miss Croyden was still seated by the fire, her head in her hands.

“Miss Croyden,” I said, “we are on an island.”

“Is it inhabited?” she asked.

“Once, perhaps, but not now. It is one of the many keys of the West Indies. Here, in old buccaneering days, the pirates landed and careened their ships.”

“How did they do that?” she asked, fascinated.

“I am not sure,” I answered. “I think with white-wash. At any rate, they gave them a good careening. But since then these solitudes are only the home of the sea-gull, the sea-mew, and the albatross.”

The girl shuddered.

“How lonely!” she said.

“Lonely or not,” I said with a laugh (luckily I can speak with a laugh when I want to), “I must get to work.”

I set myself to work to haul up and arrange our effects. With a few stones I made a rude table and seats. I took care to laugh and sing as much as possible while at my work. The close of the day found me still busy with my labours.

“Miss Croyden,” I said, “I must now arrange a place for you to sleep.”

With the aid of four stakes driven deeply into the ground and with blankets strung upon them, I managed to fashion a sort of rude tent, roofless, but otherwise quite sheltered.

“Miss Croyden,” I said when all was done, “go in there.”

Then, with little straps which I had fastened to the blankets, I buckled her in reverently.

“Good night, Miss Croyden,” I said.

“But you,” she exclaimed, “where will you sleep?”

“Oh, I?” I answered, speaking as exuberantly as I could, “I shall do very well on the ground. But be sure to call me at the slightest sound.”

Then I went out and lay down in a patch of cactus plants.

—

I need not dwell in detail upon the busy and arduous days that followed our landing upon the island. I had much to do. Each morning I took our latitude and longitude. By this I then set my watch, cooked porridge, and picked flowers till Miss Croyden appeared.

With every day the girl came forth from her habitation as a new surprise in her radiant beauty. One morning she had bound a cluster of wild arbutus about her brow. Another day she had twisted a band of convolvulus around her waist. On a third she had wound herself up in a mat of bulrushes.

With her bare feet and wild bulrushes all around her, she looked as a cave woman might have looked, her eyes radiant with the Caribbean dawn. My whole frame thrilled at the sight of her. At times it was all I could do not to tear the bulrushes off her and beat her with the heads of them. But I schooled myself to restraint, and handed her a rock to sit upon, and passed her her porridge on the end of a shovel with the calm politeness of a friend.

Our breakfast over, my more serious labours of the day began. I busied myself with hauling rocks or boulders along the sand to build us a house against the rainy season. With some tackle from the raft I had made myself a set of harness, by means of which I hitched myself to a boulder. By getting Miss Croyden to beat me over the back with a stick, I found that I made fair progress.

But even as I worked thus for our common comfort, my mind was fiercely filled with the thought of Edith Croyden. I knew that if once the barriers broke everything would be swept away. Heaven alone knows the effort that it cost me. At times nothing but the sternest resolution could hold my fierce impulses in check. Once I came upon the girl writing in the sand with a stick. I looked to see what she had written. I read my own name “Harold.” With a wild cry I leapt into the sea and dived to the bottom of it. When I came up I was calmer. Edith came towards me; all dripping as I was, she placed her hands upon my shoulders. “How grand you are!” she said. “I am,” I answered; then I added, “Miss Croyden, for Heaven’s sake don’t touch me on the ear. I can’t stand it.” I turned from her and looked out over the sea. Presently I heard something like a groan behind me. The girl had thrown herself on the sand and was coiled up in a hoop. “Miss Croyden,” I said, “for God’s sake don’t coil up in a hoop.”

I rushed to the beach and rubbed gravel on my face.

With such activities, alternated with wild bursts of restraint, our life on the island passed as rapidly as in a dream. Had I not taken care to notch the days upon a stick and then cover the stick with tar, I could not have known the passage of the time. The wearing out of our clothing had threatened a serious difficulty. But by good fortune I had seen a large black and white goat wandering among the rocks and had chased it to a standstill. From its skin, leaving the fur still on, Edith had fashioned us clothes. Our boots we had replaced with alligator hide. I had, by a lucky chance, found an alligator upon the beach, and attaching a string to the fellow’s neck I had led him to our camp. I had then poisoned the fellow with tinned salmon and removed his hide.

Our costume was now brought into harmony with our surroundings. For myself, garbed in goatskin with the hair outside, with alligator sandals on my feet and with whiskers at least six inches long, I have no doubt that I resembled the beau ideal of a cave man. With the open-air life a new agility seemed to have come into my limbs. With a single leap in my alligator sandals I was enabled to spring into a coco-nut tree.

As for Edith Croyden, I can only say that as she stood beside me on the beach in her suit of black goatskin (she had chosen the black spots) there were times when I felt like seizing her in the frenzy of my passion and hurling her into the sea. Fur always acts on me just like that.

It was at the opening of the fifth week of our life upon the island that a new and more surprising turn was given to our adventure. It arose out of a certain curiosity, harmless enough, on Edith Croyden’s part. “Mr. Borus,” she said one morning, “I should like so much to see the rest of our island. Can we?”

“Alas, Miss Croyden,” I said, “I fear that there is but little to see. Our island, so far as I can judge, is merely one of the uninhabited keys of the West Indies. It is nothing but rock and sand and scrub. There is no life upon it. I fear,” I added, speaking as jauntily as I could, “that unless we are taken off it we are destined to stay on it.”

“Still I should like to see it,” she persisted.

“Come on, then,” I answered, “if you are good for a climb we can take a look over the ridge of rocks where I went up on the first day.”

We made our way across the sand of the beach, among the rocks and through the close matted scrub, beyond which an eminence of rugged boulders shut out the further view.

Making our way to the top of this we obtained a wide look over the sea. The island stretched away to a considerable distance to the eastward, widening as it went, the complete view of it being shut off by similar and higher ridges of rock.

But it was the nearer view, the foreground, that at once arrested our attention. Edith seized my arm. “Look, oh, look!” she said.

Down just below us on the right hand was a similar beach to the one that we had left. A rude hut had been erected on it and various articles lay strewn about.

Seated on a rock with their backs towards us were a man and a woman. The man was dressed in goatskins, and his whiskers, so I inferred from what I could see of them from the side, were at least as exuberant as mine. The woman was in white fur with a fillet of seaweed round her head. They were sitting close together as if in earnest colloquy.

“Cave people,” whispered Edith, “aborigines of the island.”

But I answered nothing. Something in the tall outline of the seated woman held my eye. A cruel presentiment stabbed me to the heart.

In my agitation my foot overset a stone, which rolled noisily down the rocks. The noise attracted the attention of the two seated below us. They turned and looked searchingly towards the place where we were concealed. Their faces were in plain sight. As I looked at that of the woman I felt my heart cease beating and the colour leave my face.

I looked into Edith’s face. It was as pale as mine.

“What does it mean?” she whispered.

“Miss Croyden,” I answered, “Edith – it means this. I have never found the courage to tell you. I am a married man. The woman seated there is my wife. And I love you.”

Edith put out her arms with a low cry and clasped me about the neck. “Harold,” she murmured, “my Harold.”

“Have I done wrong?” I whispered.

“Only what I have done too,” she answered. “I, too, am married, Harold, and the man sitting there below, John Croyden, is my husband.”

With a wild cry such as a cave man might have uttered, I had leapt to my feet.

“Your husband!” I shouted. “Then, by the living God, he or I shall never leave this place alive.”

He saw me coming as I bounded down the rocks. In an instant he had sprung to his feet. He gave no cry. He asked no question. He stood erect as a cave man would, waiting for his enemy.

And there upon the sands beside the sea we fought, barehanded and weaponless. We fought as cave men fight.

For a while we circled round one another, growling. We circled four times, each watching for an opportunity. Then I picked up a great handful of sand and threw it flap into his face. He grabbed a coco-nut and hit me with it in the stomach. Then I seized a twisted strand of wet seaweed and landed him with it behind the ear. For a moment he staggered. Before he could recover I jumped forward, seized him by the hair, slapped his face twice and then leaped behind a rock. Looking from the side I could see that Croyden, though half dazed, was feeling round for something to throw. To my horror I saw a great stone lying ready to his hand. Beside me was nothing. I gave myself up for lost, when at that very moment I heard Edith’s voice behind me saying, “The shovel, quick, the shovel!” The noble girl had rushed back to our encampment and had fetched me the shovel. “Swat him with that,” she cried. I seized the shovel, and with the roar of a wounded bull – or as near as I could make it – I rushed out from the rock, the shovel swung over my head.

But the fight was all out of Croyden.

“Don’t strike,” he said, “I’m all in. I couldn’t stand a crack with that kind of thing.”

He sat down upon the sand, limp. Seen thus, he somehow seemed to be quite a small man, not a cave man at all. His goatskin suit shrunk in on him. I could hear his pants as he sat.

“I surrender,” he said. “Take both the women. They are yours.”

I stood over him leaning upon the shovel. The two women had closed in near to us.

“I suppose you are her husband, are you?” Croyden went on.

I nodded.

“I thought you were. Take her.”

Meantime Clara had drawn nearer to me. She looked somehow very beautiful with her golden hair in the sunlight, and the white furs draped about her.

“Harold!” she exclaimed. “Harold, is it you? How strange and masterful you look. I didn’t know you were so strong.”

I turned sternly towards her.

“When I was alone,” I said, “on the Himalayas hunting the humpo or humped buffalo——”

Clara clasped her hands, looking into my face.

“Yes,” she said, “tell me about it.”

Meantime I could see that Edith had gone over to John Croyden.

“John,” she said, “you shouldn’t sit on the wet sand like that. You will get a chill. Let me help you to get up.”

I looked at Clara and at Croyden.

“How has this happened?” I asked. “Tell me.”

“We were on the same ship,” Croyden said. “There came a great storm. Even the Captain had never seen——”

“I know,” I interrupted, “so had ours.”

“The ship struck a rock, and blew out her four funnels——”

“Ours did too,” I nodded.

“The bowsprit was broken, and the steward’s pantry was carried away. The Captain gave orders to leave the ship——”

“It is enough, Croyden,” I said, “I see it all now. You were left behind when the boats cleared, by what accident you don’t know——”

“I don’t,” said Croyden.

“As best you could, you constructed a raft, and with such haste as you might you placed on it such few things——”

“Exactly,” he said, “a chronometer, a sextant——”

“I know,” I continued, “two quadrants, a bucket of water, and a lightning rod. I presume you picked up Clara floating in the sea.”

“I did,” Croyden said; “she was unconscious when I got her, but by rubbing——”

“Croyden,” I said, raising the shovel again, “cut that out.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right. But you needn’t go on. I see all the rest of your adventures plainly enough.”

“Well, I’m done with it all anyway,” said Croyden gloomily. “You can do what you like. As for me, I’ve got a decent suit back there at our camp, and I’ve got it dried and pressed and I’m going to put it on.”

He rose wearily, Edith standing beside him.

“What’s more, Borus,” he said, “I’ll tell you something. This island is not uninhabited at all.”

“Not uninhabited!” exclaimed Clara and Edith together. I saw each of them give a rapid look at her goatskin suit.

“Nonsense, Croyden,” I said, “this island is one of the West Indian keys. On such a key as this the pirates used to land. Here they careened their ships——”

“Did what to them?” asked Croyden.

“Careened them all over from one end to the other,” I said. “Here they got water and buried treasure; but beyond that the island was, and remained, only the home of the wild gull and the sea-mews——”

“All right,” said Croyden, “only it doesn’t happen to be that kind of key. It’s a West Indian island all right, but there’s a summer hotel on the other end of it not two miles away.”

“A summer hotel!” we exclaimed.

“Yes, a hotel. I suspected it all along. I picked up a tennis racket on the beach the first day; and after that I walked over the ridge and through the jungle and I could see the roof of the hotel. Only,” he added rather shamefacedly, “I didn’t like to tell her.”

“Oh, you coward!” cried Clara. “I could slap you.”

“Don’t you dare,” said Edith. “I’m sure you knew it as well as he did. And anyway, I was certain of it myself. I picked up a copy of last week’s paper in a lunch-basket on the beach, and hid it from Mr. Borus. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

At that moment Croyden pointed with a cry towards the sea.

“Look,” he said, “for Heaven’s sake, look!”

He turned.

Less than a quarter of a mile away we could see a large white motor launch coming round the corner. The deck was gay with awnings and bright dresses and parasols.

“Great Heavens!” said Croyden. “I know that launch. It’s the Appin-Joneses’.”

“The Appin-Joneses’!” cried Clara. “Why, we know them too. Don’t you remember, Harold, the Sunday we spent with them on the Hudson?”

Instinctively we had all jumped for cover, behind the rocks.

“Whatever shall we do?” I exclaimed.

“We must get our things,” said Edith Croyden. “Jack, if your suit is ready run and get it and stop the launch. Mrs. Borus and Mr. Borus and I can get our things straightened up while you keep them talking. My suit is nearly ready anyway; I thought some one might come. Mr. Borus, would you mind running and fetching me my things, they’re all in a parcel together? And perhaps if you have a looking-glass and some pins, Mrs. Borus, I could come over and dress with you.”

—

That same evening we found ourselves all comfortably gathered on the piazza of the Hotel Christopher Columbus. Appin-Jones insisted on making himself our host, and the story of our adventures was related again and again to an admiring audience, with the accompaniment of cigars and iced champagne. Only one detail was suppressed, by common instinct. Both Clara and I felt that it would only raise needless comment to explain that Mr. and Mrs. Croyden had occupied separate encampments.

Nor is it necessary to relate our safe and easy return to New York.

Both Clara and I found Mr. and Mrs. Croyden delightful travelling companions, though perhaps we were not sorry when the moment came to say good-bye.

“The word ‘good-bye,’” I remarked to Clara, as we drove away, “is always a painful one. Oddly enough when I was hunting the humpo, or humped buffalo, of the Himalayas——”

“Do tell me about it, darling,” whispered Clara, as she nestled beside me in the cab.

TOC     INDEX

The Kidnapped Plumber

A Tale of the New Time

(Being one chapter – and quite enough – from the Reminiscences of an Operating Plumber)

“Personally,” said Thornton, speaking for the first time, “I never care to take a case that involves cellar work.”

We were sitting – a little group of us – round about the fire in a comfortable corner of the Steam and Air Club. Our talk had turned, as always happens with a group of professional men, into more or less technical channels. I will not say that we were talking shop; the word has an offensive sound and might be misunderstood. But we were talking as only a group of practising plumbers – including some of the biggest men in the profession – would talk. With the exception of Everett, who had a national reputation as a Consulting Barber, and Thomas, who was a vacuum cleaner expert, I think we all belonged to the same profession. We had been holding a convention, and Fortescue, who had one of the biggest furnace practices in the country, had read us a paper that afternoon – a most revolutionary thing – on External Diagnosis of Defective Feed Pipes, and naturally the thing had bred discussion. Fortescue, who is one of the most brilliant men in the profession, had stoutly maintained his thesis that the only method of diagnosis for trouble in a furnace is to sit down in front of it and look at it for three days; others held out for unscrewing it and carrying it home for consideration; others of us, again, claimed that by tapping the affected spot with a wrench the pipe might be fractured in such a way as to prove that it was breakable. It was at this point that Thornton interrupted with his remark about never being willing to accept a cellar case.

Naturally all the men turned to look at the speaker. Henry Thornton, at the time of which I relate, was at the height of his reputation. Beginning, quite literally, at the bottom of the ladder, he had in twenty years of practice as an operating plumber raised himself to the top of his profession. There was much in his appearance to suggest the underlying reasons of his success. His face, as is usual with men of our calling, had something of the dreamer in it, but the bold set of the jaw indicated determination of an uncommon kind. Three times President of the Plumbers’ Association, Henry Thornton had enjoyed the highest honours of his chosen profession. His book on Nut Coal was recognized as the last word on the subject, and had been crowned by the French Academy of Nuts.

I suppose that one of the principal reasons for his success was his singular coolness and resource. I have seen Thornton enter a kitchen, with that quiet reassuring step of his, and lay out his instruments on the table, while a kitchen tap with a broken washer was sprizzling within a few feet of him, as calmly and as quietly as if he were in his lecture-room of the Plumbers’ College.

“You never go into a cellar?” asked Fortescue. “But hang it, man, I don’t see how one can avoid it!”

“Well, I do avoid it,” answered Thornton, “at least as far as I possibly can. I send down my solderist, of course, but personally, unless it is absolutely necessary, I never go down.”

“That’s all very well, my dear fellow,” Fortescue cut in, “but you know as well as I do that you get case after case where the cellar diagnosis is simply vital. I had a case last week, a most interesting thing—” he turned to the group of us as he spoke – “a double lesion of a gas-pipe under a cement floor – half a dozen of my colleagues had been absolutely baffled. They had made an entirely false diagnosis, operated on the dining-room floor, which they removed and carried home, and when I was called in they had just obtained permission from the Stone Mason’s Protective Association to knock down one side of the house.”

“Excuse me interrupting just a minute,” interjected a member of the group who hailed from a distant city, “have you much trouble about that? I mean about knocking the sides out of houses?”

“No trouble now,” said Fortescue. “We did have. But the public is getting educated up to it. Our law now allows us to knock the side out of a house when we feel that we would really like to see what is in it. We are not allowed, of course, to build it up again.”

“No, of course not,” said the other speaker. “But I suppose you can throw the bricks out on the lawn.”

“Yes,” said Fortescue, “and sit on them to eat lunch. We had a big fight in the legislature over that, but we got it through.”

“Thank you, but I feel I am interrupting.”

“Well, I was only saying that, as soon as I had made up my mind that the trouble was in the cellar, the whole case was simple. I took my colleagues down at once, and we sat on the floor of the cellar and held a consultation till the overpowering smell of gas convinced me that there was nothing for it but an operation on the floor. The whole thing was most successful. I was very glad, as it happened that the proprietor of the house was a very decent fellow, employed, I think, as a manager of a bank, or something of the sort. He was most grateful. It was he who gave me the engraved monkey wrench that some of you were admiring before dinner. After we had finished the whole operation – I forgot to say that we had thrown the coal out on the lawn to avoid any complication – he quite broke down. He offered us to take his whole house and keep it.”

“You don’t do that, do you?” asked the outsider.

“Oh no, never,” said Fortescue. “We’ve made a very strict professional rule against it. We found that some of the younger men were apt to take a house when they were given it, and we had to frown down on it. But, gentlemen, I feel that when Mr. Thornton says that he never goes down into a cellar there must be a story behind it. I think we should invite him to relate it to us.”

A murmur of assent greeted the speaker’s suggestion. For myself I was particularly pleased, inasmuch as I have long felt that Thornton as a raconteur was almost as interesting as in the rôle of an operating plumber. I have often told him that, if he had not happened to meet success in his chosen profession, he could have earned a living as a day writer: a suggestion which he has always taken in good part and without offence.

Those of my readers who have looked through the little volume of Reminiscences which I have put together, will recall the narrative of The Missing Nut and the little tale entitled The Blue Blow Torch as instances in point.

“Not much of a story, perhaps,” said Thornton, “but such as it is you are welcome to it. So, if you will just fill up your glasses with raspberry vinegar, you may have the tale for what it is worth.”

We gladly complied with the suggestion and Thornton continued:

“It happened a good many years ago at a time when I was only a young fellow fresh from college, very proud of my Plumb. B., and inclined to think that I knew it all. I had done a little monograph on Choked Feed in the Blow Torch, which had attracted attention, and I suppose that altogether I was about as conceited a young puppy as one would find in the profession. I should mention that at this time I was not married, but had set up a modest apartment of my own with a consulting-room and a single manservant. Naturally I could not afford the services of a solderist or a gassist and did everything for myself, though Simmons, my man, could at a pinch be utilized to tear down plaster and break furniture.”

Thornton paused to take a sip of raspberry vinegar and went on:

“Well, then. I had come home to dinner particularly tired after a long day. I had sat in an attic the greater part of the afternoon (a case of top story valvular trouble) and had had to sit in a cramped position which practically forbade sleep. I was feeling, therefore, none too well pleased, when a little while after dinner the bell rang and Simmons brought word to the library that there was a client in the consulting-room. I reminded the fellow that I could not possibly consider a case at such an advanced hour unless I were paid emergency overtime wages with time and a half during the day of recovery.”

“One moment,” interrupted the outside member. “You don’t mention compensation for mental shock. Do you not draw that here?”

“We do now” explained Thornton, “but the time of which I speak is some years ago and we still got nothing for mental shock, nor disturbance of equilibrium. Nowadays, of course, one would insist on a substantial retainer in advance.

“Well, to continue. Simmons, to my surprise, told me that he had already informed the client of this fact, and that the answer had only been a plea that the case was too urgent to admit of delay. He also supplied the further information that the client was a young lady. I am afraid,” added Thornton, looking round his audience with a sympathetic smile, “that Simmons (I had got him from Harvard and he had not yet quite learned his place) even said something about her being strikingly handsome.”

A general laugh greeted Thornton’s announcement.

“After all,” said Fortescue, “I never could see why an Ice Man should be supposed to have a monopoly on gallantry.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Thornton. “For my part – I say it without affectation – the moment I am called in professionally, women, as women, cease to exist for me. I can stand beside them in the kitchen and explain to them the feed tap of a kitchen range without feeling them to be anything other than simply clients. And for the most part, I think, they reciprocate that attention. There are women, of course, who will call a man in with motives – but that’s another story. I must get back to what I was saying.

“On entering the consulting-room I saw at once that Simmons had exaggerated nothing in describing my young client as beautiful. I have seldom, even among our own class, seen a more strikingly handsome girl. She was dressed in a very plain and simple fashion which showed me at once that she belonged merely to the capitalist class. I am, as I think you know, something of an observer, and my eye at once noted the absence of heavy gold ear-rings and wrist-bangles. The blue feathers at the side of her hat were none of them more than six inches long, and the buttons on her jacket were so inconspicuous that one would hardly notice them. In short, while her dress was no doubt good and serviceable, there was an absence of chic, a lack of noise about it, that told at once the tale of narrow circumstances.

“She was evidently in great distress.

“‘Oh, Mr. Thornton,’ she exclaimed, advancing towards me, ‘do come to our house at once. I simply don’t know what to do.’

“She spoke with great emotion, and seemed almost on the point of breaking into tears.

“‘Pray, calm yourself, my dear young lady,’ I said, ‘and try to tell me what is the trouble.’

“‘Oh, don’t lose any time,’ she said, ‘do, do come at once.’

“‘We will lose no time’ I said reassuringly, as I looked at my watch. ‘It is now seven-thirty. We will reckon the time from now, with overtime at time and a half. But if I am to do anything for you I must have some idea of what has happened.’

“‘The cellar boiler,’ she moaned, clasping her hands together, ‘the cellar boiler won’t work!’

“‘Ah!’ I said soothingly. ‘The cellar boiler won’t work. Now tell me, is the feed choked, miss?’

“‘I don’t know,’ she exclaimed.

“‘Have you tried letting off the exhaust?’

“She shook her head with a doleful look.

“‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said.

“But already I was hastily gathering together a few instruments, questioning her rapidly as I did so.

“‘How’s your pressure gauge?’ I asked. ‘How’s your water? Do you draw from the mains or are you on the high level reservoir?’

“It had occurred to me at once that it might be merely a case of stoppage of her main feed, complicated, perhaps, with a valvular trouble in her exhaust. On the other hand it was clear enough that, if her feed was full and her gauges working, her trouble was more likely a leak somewhere in her piping.

“But all attempts to draw from the girl any clear idea of the symptoms were unavailing. All she could tell me was that the cellar boiler wouldn’t work. Beyond that her answers were mere confusion. I gathered enough, however, to feel sure that her main feed was still working, and that her top story check valve was probably in order. With that I had to be content.

“As a young practitioner, I had as yet no motor car. Simmons, however, summoned me a taxi, into which I hurriedly placed the girl and my basket of instruments, and was soon speeding in the direction she indicated. It was a dark, lowering night, with flecks of rain against the windows of the cab, and there was something in the lateness of the hour (it was now after half-past eight) and the nature of my mission which gave me a stimulating sense of adventure. The girl directed me, as I felt sure she would, towards the capitalist quarter of the town. We had soon sped away from the brightly lighted streets and tall apartment buildings among which my usual practice lay, and entered the gloomy and dilapidated section of the city where the unhappy capitalist class reside. I need not remind those of you who know it that it is scarcely a cheerful place to find oneself in after nightfall. The thick growth of trees, the silent gloom of the ill-lighted houses, and the rank undergrowth of shrubs give it an air of desolation, not to say danger. It is certainly not the place that a professional man would choose to be abroad in after dark. The inhabitants, living, so it is said, on their scanty dividends and on such parts of their income as our taxation is still unable to reach, are not people that one would care to fall in with after nightfall.

“Since the time of which I speak we have done much to introduce a better state of things. The opening of day schools of carpentry, plumbing and calcimining for the children of the capitalist is already producing results. Strange though it may seem, one of the most brilliant of our boiler fitters of today was brought up haphazard in this very quarter of the town and educated only by a French governess and a university tutor. But at the time practically nothing had been done. The place was infested with consumers, and there were still, so it was said, servants living in some of the older houses. A butler had been caught one night in a thick shrubbery beside one of the gloomy streets.

“We alighted at one of the most sombre of the houses, and our taxi-driver, with evident relief, made off in the darkness.

“The girl admitted us into a dark hall, where she turned on an electric light. ‘We have light,’ she said, with that peculiar touch of pride that one sees so often in her class, ‘we have four bulbs.’

“Then she called down a flight of stairs that apparently led to the cellar:

“‘Father, the plumber has come. Do come up now, dear, and rest.’

“A step sounded on the stairs, and there appeared beside us one of the most forbidding-looking men that I have ever beheld. I don’t know whether any of you have ever seen an Anglican Bishop. Probably not. Outside of the bush, they are now never seen. But at the time of which I speak there were a few still here and there in the purlieus of the city. The man before us was tall and ferocious, and his native ferocity was further enhanced by the heavy black beard which he wore in open defiance of the compulsory shaving laws. His black shovel-shaped hat and his black clothes lent him a singularly sinister appearance, while his legs were bound in tight gaiters, as if ready for an instant spring. He carried in his hand an enormous monkey wrench, on which his fingers were clasped in a restless grip.

“‘Can you fix the accursed thing?’ he asked.

“I was not accustomed to being spoken to in this way, but I was willing for the girl’s sake to strain professional courtesy to the limit.

“‘I don’t know,’ I answered, ‘but if you will have the goodness first to fetch me a little light supper, I shall be glad to see what I can do afterwards.’

“My firm manner had its effect. With obvious reluctance the fellow served me some biscuits and some not bad champagne in the dining-room.

“The girl had meantime disappeared upstairs.

“‘If you’re ready now,’ said the Bishop, ‘come on down.’

“We went down to the cellar. It was a huge, gloomy place, with a cement floor, lighted by a dim electric bulb. I could see in the corner the outline of a large furnace (in those days the poorer classes had still no central heat) and near it a tall boiler. In front of this a man was kneeling, evidently trying to unscrew a nut, but twisting it the wrong way. He was an elderly man with a grey moustache, and was dressed, in open defiance of the law, in a military costume or uniform.

“He turned round towards us and rose from his knees.

“‘I’m dashed if I can make the rotten thing go round,’ he said.

“‘It’s all right, General,’ said the Bishop. ‘I have brought a plumber.’

“For the next few minutes my professional interest absorbed all my faculties. I laid out my instruments upon a board, tapped the boiler with a small hammer, tested the feed-tube, and in a few moments had made what I was convinced was a correct diagnosis of the trouble.

“But here I encountered the greatest professional dilemma in which I have ever been placed. There was nothing wrong with the boiler at all. It connected, as I ascertained at once by a thermo-dynamic valvular test, with the furnace (in fact, I could see it did), and the furnace quite evidently had been allowed to go out.

“What was I to do? If I told them this, I broke every professional rule of our union. If the thing became known I should probably be disbarred and lose my overalls for it. It was my plain professional duty to take a large hammer and knock holes in the boiler with it, smash up the furnace pipes, start a leak of gas, and then call in three or more of my colleagues.

“But somehow I couldn’t find it in my heart to do it. The thought of the girl’s appealing face arose before me.

“‘How long has this trouble been going on?’ I asked sternly.

“‘Quite a time,’ answered the Bishop. ‘It began, did it not, General, the same day that the confounded furnace went out? The General here and Admiral Hay and I have been working at it for three days.’

“‘Well, gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to read you a lesson on your own ineptitude, and I don’t suppose you would understand it if I did. But don’t you see that the whole trouble is because you let the furnace out? The boiler itself is all right, but you see, gents, it feeds off the furnace.’

“‘Ah,’ said the Bishop in a deep melodious tone, ‘it feeds off the furnace. Now that is most interesting. Let me repeat that; I must try to remember it; it feeds off the furnace. Just so.’

“The upshot was that in twenty minutes we had the whole thing put to rights. I set the General breaking up boxes and had the Bishop rake out the clinkers, and very soon we had the furnace going and the boiler in operation.

“‘But now tell me,’ said the Bishop, ‘suppose one wanted to let the furnace out – suppose, I mean to say, that it was summer-time, and suppose one rather felt that one didn’t care about a furnace and yet one wanted one’s boiler going for one’s hot water, and that sort of thing, what would one do?’

“‘In that case,’ I said, ‘you couldn’t run your heating off your furnace: you’d have to connect in your tubing with a gas generator.’

“‘Ah, there you get me rather beyond my depth,’ said the Bishop.

“The General shook his head. ‘Bishop,’ he said, ‘just step upstairs a minute; I have an idea.’

“They went up together, leaving me below. To my surprise and consternation, as they reached the top of the cellar stairs, I saw the General swing the door shut and heard a key turn in the lock. I rushed to the top of the stairs and tried in vain to open the door. I was trapped. In a moment I realized my folly in trusting myself in the hands of these people.

“I could hear their voices in the hall, apparently in eager discussion.

“‘But the fellow is priceless,’ the General was saying. ‘We could take him round to all the different houses and make him fix them all. Hang it, Bishop, I haven’t had a decent tap running for two years, and Admiral Hay’s pantry has been flooded since last March.’

“‘But one couldn’t compel him?’

“‘Certainly, why not? I’d compel him bally quick with this.’

“I couldn’t see what the General referred to, but had no doubt that it was the huge wrench that he still carried in his hand.

“‘We could gag the fellow,’ he went on, ‘take him from house to house and make him put everything right.’

“‘Ah, but afterwards?’ said the Bishop.

“‘Afterwards,’ answered the General, ‘why kill him! Knock him on the head and bury him under the cement in the cellar. Hay and I could easily bury him, or for that matter I imagine one could easily use the furnace itself to dispose of him.’

“I must confess that my blood ran cold as I listened.

“‘But do you think it right?’ objected the Bishop. ‘You will say, of course, that it is only killing a plumber; but yet one asks oneself whether it wouldn’t be just a leetle bit unjustifiable.’

“‘Nonsense,’ said the General. ‘You remember that last year, when Hay strangled the income tax collector, you yourself were very keen on it.’

“‘Ah, that was different,’ said the Bishop, ‘one felt there that there was an end to serve, but here——’

“‘Nonsense,’ repeated the General, ‘come along and get Hay. He’ll make short work of him.’

“I heard their retreating footsteps and then all was still.

“The horror which filled my mind as I sat in the half darkness waiting for their return I cannot describe. My fate appeared sealed and I gave myself up for lost, when presently I heard a light step in the hall and the key turned in the lock.

“The girl stood in front of me. She was trembling with emotion.

“‘Quick, quick, Mr. Thornton,’ she said. ‘I heard all that they said. Oh, I think it’s dreadful of them, simply dreadful. Mr. Thornton, I’m really ashamed that Father should act that way.’

“I came out into the hall still half dazed.

“‘They’ve gone over to Admiral Hay’s house, there among the trees. That’s their lantern. Please, please, don’t lose a minute. Do you mind not having a cab? I think really you’d prefer not to wait. And look, won’t you please take this?’ – she handed me a little packet as she spoke – ‘this is a piece of pie: you always get that, don’t you? and there’s a bit of cheese with it, but please run.’

“In another moment I had bounded from the door into the darkness. A wild rush through the darkened streets, and in twenty minutes I was safe back again in my own consulting-room.”

Thornton paused in his narrative, and at that moment one of the stewards of the club came and whispered something in his ear.

He rose.

“I’m sorry,” he said, with a grave face. “I’m called away; a very old client of mine. Valvular trouble of the worst kind. I doubt if I can do anything, but I must at least go. Please don’t let me break up your evening, however.”

With a courtly bow he left us.

“And do you know the sequel to Thornton’s story?” asked Fortescue with a smile.

We looked expectantly at him.

“Why, he married the girl,” explained Fortescue. “You see, he had to go back to her house for his wrench. One always does.”

“Of course,” we exclaimed.

“In fact he went three times; and the last time he asked the girl to marry him and she said ‘yes.’ He took her out of her surroundings, had her educated at a cooking school, and had her given lessons on the parlour organ. She’s Mrs. Thornton now.”

“And the Bishop?” asked some one.

“Oh, Thornton looked after him. He got him a position heating furnaces in the synagogues. He worked at it till he died a few years ago. They say that once he got the trick of it he took the greatest delight in it. Well, I must go too. Good night.”

TOC     INDEX

The Blue and the Gray

A Pre-War War Story

(The title is selected for its originality. A set of seventy-five maps will be supplied to any reader free for seventy-five cents. This offer is only open till it is closed)

CHAPTER I

The scene was a striking one. It was night. Never had the Mississippi presented a more remarkable appearance. Broad bayous, swollen beyond our powers of description, swirled to and fro in the darkness under trees garlanded with Spanish moss. All moss other than Spanish had been swept away by the angry flood of the river.

Eggleston Lee Carey Randolph, a young Virginian, captain of the ——th company of the ——th regiment of ——’s brigade – even this is more than we ought to say, and is hard to pronounce – attached to the Army of the Tennessee, struggled in vain with the swollen waters. At times he sank. At other times he went up.

In the intervals he wondered whether it would ever be possible for him to rejoin the particular platoon of the particular regiment to which he belonged, and of which’s whereabouts (not having the volume of the army record at hand) he was in ignorance. In the intervals, also, he reflected on his past life to a sufficient extent to give the reader a more or less workable idea as to who and to what he was. His father, the old grey-haired Virginian aristocrat, he could see him still. “Take this sword, Eggleston,” he had said, “use it for the State; never for anything else: don’t cut string with it or open tin cans. Never sheathe it till the soil of Virginia is free. Keep it bright, my boy: oil it every now and then, and you’ll find it an A 1 sword.”

Did Eggleston think, too, in his dire peril of another – younger than his father and fairer? Necessarily, he did. “Go, Eggleston!” she had exclaimed, as they said farewell under the portico of his father’s house where she was visiting, “it is your duty. But mine lies elsewhere. I cannot forget that I am a Northern girl. I must return at once to my people in Pennsylvania. Oh, Egg, when will this cruel war end?”

So had the lovers parted.

Meanwhile – while Eggleston is going up and down for the third time, which is of course the last – suppose we leave him, and turn to consider the general position of the Confederacy. All right: suppose we do.

CHAPTER II

At this date the Confederate Army of the Tennessee was extended in a line with its right resting on the Tennessee and its left resting on the Mississippi. Its rear rested on the rugged stone hills of the Chickasaba range, while its front rested on the marshes and bayous of the Yazoo. Having thus – as far as we understand military matters – both its flanks covered and its rear protected, its position was one which we ourselves consider very comfortable.

It was thus in an admirable situation for holding a review or for discussing the Constitution of the United States in reference to the right of secession.

The following generals rode up and down in front of the army, namely, Mr. A. P. Hill, Mr. Longstreet, and Mr. Joseph Johnston. All these three celebrated men are thus presented to our readers at one and the same time without extra charge.

But who is this tall, commanding figure who rides beside them, his head bent as if listening to what they are saying (he really isn’t) while his eye alternately flashes with animation or softens to its natural melancholy? (In fact, we can only compare it to an electric light bulb with the power gone wrong.) Who is it? It is Jefferson C. Davis, President, as our readers will be gratified to learn, of the Confederate States.

It being a fine day and altogether suitable for the purpose, General Longstreet reined in his prancing black charger (during this distressed period all the horses in both armies were charged: there was no other way to pay for them), and in a few terse words, about three pages, gave his views on the Constitution of the United States.

Jefferson Davis, standing up in his stirrups, delivered a stirring harangue, about six columns, on the powers of the Supreme Court, admirably calculated to rouse the soldiers to frenzy. After which General A. P. Hill offered a short address, soldier-like and to the point, on the fundamental principles of international law, which inflamed the army to the highest pitch.

At this moment an officer approached the President, saluted and stood rigidly at attention. Davis, with that nice punctilio which marked the Southern army, returned the salute.

“Do you speak first?” he said, “or did I?”

“Let me,” said the officer. “Your Excellency,” he continued, “a young Virginian officer has just been fished out of the Mississippi.”

Davis’s eye flashed. “Good!” he said. “Look and see if there are many more,” and then he added with a touch of melancholy, “The South needs them: fish them all out. Bring this one here.”

Eggleston Lee Carey Randolph, still dripping from the waters of the bayou, was led by the faithful negroes who had rescued him before the generals. Davis, who kept every thread of the vast panorama of the war in his intricate brain, eyed him keenly and directed a few searching questions to him, such as: “Who are you? Where are you? What day of the week is it? How much is nine times twelve?” and so forth. Satisfied with Eggleston’s answers, Davis sat in thought a moment, and then continued:

“I am anxious to send some one through the entire line of the Confederate armies in such a way that he will be present at all the great battles and end up at the battle of Gettysburg. Can you do it?”

Randolph looked at his chief with a flush of pride.

“I can.”

“Good!” resumed Davis. “To accomplish this task you must carry despatches. What they will be about I have not yet decided. But it is customary in such cases to write them so that they are calculated, if lost, to endanger the entire Confederate cause. The main thing is, can you carry them?”

“Sir,” said Eggleston, raising his hand in a military salute, “I am a Randolph.”

Davis with soldierly dignity removed his hat. “I am proud to hear it, Captain Randolph,” he said.

“And a Carey,” continued our hero.

Davis, with a graciousness all his own, took off his gloves. “I trust you, Major Randolph,” he said.

“And I am a Lee,” added Eggleston quickly.

Davis with a courtly bow unbuttoned his jacket. “It is enough,” he said. “I trust you. You shall carry the despatches. You are to carry them on your person and, as of course you understand, you are to keep on losing them. You are to drop them into rivers, hide them in old trees, bury them under moss, talk about them in your sleep. In fact, sir,” said Davis, with a slight gesture of impatience – it was his one fault – “you must act towards them as any bearer of Confederate despatches is expected to act. The point is, can you do it, or can’t you?”

“Sir,” said Randolph, saluting again with simple dignity, “I come from Virginia.”

“Pardon me,” said the President, saluting with both hands, “I had forgotten it.”

CHAPTER III

Randolph set out that night, mounted upon the fastest horse, in fact the fleetest, that the Confederate Army could supply. He was attended only by a dozen faithful negroes, all devoted to his person.

Riding over the Tennessee mountains by paths known absolutely to no one and never advertised, he crossed the Tombigbee, the Tahoochie and the Tallahassee, all frightfully swollen, and arrived at the headquarters of General Braxton Bragg.

At this moment Bragg was extended over some seven miles of bush and dense swamp. His front rested on the marshes of the Tahoochie River, while his rear was doubled sharply back and rested on a dense growth of cactus plants. Our readers can thus form a fairly accurate idea of Bragg’s position. Over against him, not more than fifty miles to the north, his indomitable opponent, Grant, lay in a frog-swamp. The space between them was filled with Union and Confederate pickets, fraternizing, joking, roasting corn, and firing an occasional shot at one another.

One glance at Randolph’s despatches was enough.

“Take them at once to General Hood,” said Bragg.

“Where is he?” asked Eggleston, with military precision.

Bragg waved his sword towards the east. It was characteristic of the man that even on active service he carried a short sword, while a pistol, probably loaded, protruded from his belt. But such was Bragg. Anyway, he waved his sword. “Over there beyond the Tahoochicaba range,” he said. “Do you know it?”

“No,” said Randolph, “but I can find it.”

“Do,” said Bragg, and added, “One thing more. On your present mission let nothing stop you. Go forward at all costs. If you come to a river, swim it. If you come to a tree, cut it down. If you strike a fence, climb over it. But don’t stop! If you are killed, never mind. Do you understand?”

“Almost,” said Eggleston.

Two days later Eggleston reached the headquarters of General Hood, and flung himself, rather than dismounted, from his jaded horse.

“Take me to the General!” he gasped.

They pointed to the log cabin in which General Hood was quartered.

Eggleston flung himself, rather than stepped, through the door.

Hood looked up from the table.

“Who was that flung himself in?” he asked.

Randolph reached out his hand. “Despatches!” he gasped. “Food, whisky!”

“Poor lad,” said the General, “you are exhausted. When did you last have food?”

“Yesterday morning,” gasped Eggleston.

“You’re lucky,” said Hood bitterly. “And when did you last have a drink?”

“Two weeks ago,” answered Randolph.

“Great Heaven!” said Hood, starting up. “Is it possible? Here, quick, drink it!”

He reached out a bottle of whisky. Randolph drained it to the last drop.

“Now, General,” he said, “I am at your service.”

Meanwhile Hood had cast his eye over the despatches.

“Major Randolph,” he said, “you have seen General Bragg?”

“I have.”

“And Generals Johnston and Smith?”

“Yes.”

“You have been through Mississippi and Tennessee and seen all the battles there?”

“I have,” said Randolph.

“Then,” said Hood, “there is nothing left except to send you at once to the army in Virginia under General Lee. Remount your horse at once and ride to Gettysburg. Lose no time.”

CHAPTER IV

It was at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania that Randolph found General Lee.

The famous field is too well known to need description. The armies of the North and the South lay in and around the peaceful village of Gettysburg. About it the yellow cornfields basked in the summer sun. The voices of the teachers and the laughter of merry children rose in the harvest-fields. But already the shadow of war was falling over the landscape. As soon as the armies arrived, the shrewder of the farmers suspected that there would be trouble.

General Lee was seated gravely on his horse, looking gravely over the ground before him.

“Major Randolph,” said the Confederate chieftain gravely, “you are just in time. We are about to go into action. I need your advice.”

Randolph bowed. “Ask me anything you like,” he said.

“Do you like the way I have the army placed?” asked Lee.

Our hero directed a searching look over the field. “Frankly, I don’t,” he said.

“What’s the matter with it?” questioned Lee eagerly. “I felt there was something wrong myself. What is it?”

“Your left,” said Randolph, “is too far advanced. It sticks out.”

“By Heaven!” said Lee, turning to General Longstreet, “the boy is right! Is there anything else?”

“Yes,” said Randolph, “your right is crooked. It is all sideways.”

“It is. It is!” said Lee, striking his forehead. “I never noticed it. I’ll have it straightened at once. Major Randolph, if the Confederate cause is saved, you, and you alone, have saved it.”

“One thing more,” said Randolph. “Is your artillery loaded?”

“Major Randolph,” said Lee, speaking very gravely, “you have saved us again. I never thought of it.”

At this moment a bullet sang past Eggleston’s ear. He smiled.

“The battle has begun,” he murmured. Another bullet buzzed past his other ear. He laughed softly to himself. A shell burst close to his feet. He broke into uncontrolled laughter. This kind of thing always amused him. Then, turning grave in a moment, “Put General Lee under cover,” he said to those about him, “spread something over him.”

In a few moments the battle was raging in all directions. The Confederate Army was nominally controlled by General Lee, but in reality by our hero. Eggleston was everywhere. Horses were shot under him. Mules were shot around him and behind him. Shells exploded all over him; but with undaunted courage he continued to wave his sword in all directions, riding wherever the fight was hottest.

The battle raged for three days.

On the third day of the conflict, Randolph, his coat shot to rags, his hat pierced, his trousers practically useless, still stood at Lee’s side, urging and encouraging him.

Mounted on his charger, he flew to and fro in all parts of the field, moving the artillery, leading the cavalry, animating and directing the infantry. In fact, he was the whole battle.

But his efforts were in vain.

He turned sadly to General Lee. “It is bootless,” he said.

“What is?” asked Lee.

“The army,” said Randolph. “We must withdraw it.”

“Major Randolph,” said the Confederate chief, “I yield to your superior knowledge. We must retreat.”

A few hours later the Confederate forces, checked but not beaten, were retiring southward towards Virginia.

Eggleston, his head sunk in thought, rode in the rear.

As he thus slowly neared a farmhouse, a woman – a girl – flew from it towards him with outstretched arms.

“Eggleston!” she cried.

Randolph flung himself from his horse. “Leonora!” he gasped. “You here! In all this danger! How comes it? What brings you here?”

“We live here,” she said. “This is Pa’s house. This is our farm. Gettysburg is our home. Oh, Egg, it has been dreadful, the noise of the battle! We couldn’t sleep for it. Pa’s all upset about it. But come in. Do come in. Dinner’s nearly ready.”

Eggleston gazed a moment at the retreating army. Duty and affection struggled in his heart.

“I will,” he said.

CHAPTER V

Conclusion

The strife is done. The conflict has ceased. The wounds are healed. North and South are one. East and West are even less. The Civil War is over. Lee is dead. Grant is buried in New York. The Union Pacific runs from Omaha to San Francisco. There is total prohibition in the United States. The output of dressed beef last year broke all records.

And Eggleston Lee Carey Randolph survives, hale and hearty, bright and cheery, free and easy – and so forth. There is grey hair upon his temples (some, not much), and his step has lost something of its elasticity (not a great deal), and his form is somewhat bowed (though not really crooked).

But he still lives there in the farmstead at Gettysburg, and Leonora, now, like himself, an old woman, is still at his side.

You may see him any day. In fact, he is the old man who shows you over the battlefield for fifty cents and explains how he himself fought and won the great battle.

TOC     INDEX

Buggam Grange

A Good Old Ghost Story

The evening was already falling as the vehicle in which I was contained entered upon the long and gloomy avenue that leads to Buggam Grange.

A resounding shriek echoed through the wood as I entered the avenue. I paid no attention to it at the moment, judging it to be merely one of those resounding shrieks which one might expect to hear in such a place at such a time. As my drive continued, however I found myself wondering in spite of myself why such a shriek should have been uttered at the very moment of my approach.

I am not by temperament in any degree a nervous man, and yet there was much in my surroundings to justify a certain feeling of apprehension. The Grange is situated in the loneliest part of England, the marsh country of the fens to which civilization has still hardly penetrated. The inhabitants, of whom there are only one and a half to the square mile, live here and there among the fens and eke out a miserable existence by frog-fishing and catching flies. They speak a dialect so broken as to be practically unintelligible, while the perpetual rain which falls upon them renders speech itself almost superfluous.

Here and there where the ground rises slightly above the level of the fens there are dense woods tangled with parasitic creepers and filled with owls. Bats fly from wood to wood. The air on the lower ground is charged with the poisonous gases which exude from the marsh, while in the woods it is heavy with the dank odours of deadly nightshade and poison ivy.

It had been raining in the afternoon, and as I drove up the avenue the mournful dripping of the rain from the dark trees accentuated the cheerlessness of the gloom. The vehicle in which I rode was a fly on three wheels, the fourth having apparently been broken and taken off, causing the fly to sag on one side and drag on its axle over the muddy ground, the fly thus moving only at a foot’s pace in a way calculated to enhance the dreariness of the occasion. The driver on the box in front of me was so thickly muffled up as to be indistinguishable, while the horse which drew us was so thickly coated with mist as to be practically invisible. Seldom, I may say, have I had a drive of so mournful a character.

The avenue presently opened out upon a lawn with overgrown shrubberies, and in the half darkness I could see the outline of the Grange itself, a rambling, dilapidated building. A dim light struggled through the casement of a window in a tower room. Save for the melancholy cry of a row of owls sitting on the roof, and croaking of the frogs in the moat which ran around the grounds, the place was soundless. My driver halted his horse at the hither side of the moat. I tried in vain to urge him, by signs, to go further. I could see by the fellow’s face that he was in a paroxysm of fear, and indeed nothing but the extra sixpence which I had added to his fare would have made him undertake the drive up the avenue. I had no sooner alighted than he wheeled his cab about and made off.

Laughing heartily at the fellow’s trepidation (I have a way of laughing heartily in the dark), I made my way to the door and pulled the bell-handle. I could hear the muffled reverberations of the bell far within the building. Then all was silent. I bent my ear to listen, but could hear nothing except, perhaps, the sound of a low moaning as of a person in pain or in great mental distress. Convinced, however, from what my friend Sir Jeremy Buggam had told me, that the Grange was not empty, I raised the ponderous knocker and beat with it loudly against the door.

But perhaps at this point I may do well to explain to my readers (before they are too frightened to listen to me) how I came to be beating on the door of Buggam Grange at nightfall on a gloomy November evening.

A year before I had been sitting with Sir Jeremy Buggam, the present baronet, on the verandah of his ranch in California.

“So you don’t believe in the supernatural?” he was saying.

“Not in the slightest,” I answered, lighting a cigar as I spoke. When I want to speak very positively, I generally light a cigar as I speak.

“Well, at any rate, Digby,” said Sir Jeremy, “Buggam Grange is haunted. If you want to be assured of it go down there any time and spend the night and you’ll see for yourself.”

“My dear fellow,” I replied, “nothing will give me greater pleasure. I shall be back in England in six weeks, and I shall be delighted to put your ideas to the test. Now tell me,” I added somewhat cynically, “is there any particular season or day when your Grange is supposed to be specially terrible?”

Sir Jeremy looked at me strangely. “Why do you ask that?” he said. “Have you heard the story of the Grange?”

“Never heard of the place in my life,” I answered cheerily. “Till you mentioned it tonight, my dear fellow, I hadn’t the remotest idea that you still owned property in England.”

“The Grange is shut up,” said Sir Jeremy, “and has been for twenty years. But I keep a man there – Horrod – he was butler in my father’s time and before. If you care to go, I’ll write him that you’re coming. And, since you are taking your own fate in your hands, the fifteenth of November is the day.”

At that moment Lady Buggam and Clara and the other girls came trooping out on the verandah, and the whole thing passed clean out of my mind. Nor did I think of it again until I was back in London. Then, by one of those strange coincidences or premonitions – call it what you will – it suddenly occurred to me one morning that it was the fifteenth of November. Whether Sir Jeremy had written to Horrod or not, I did not know. But none the less nightfall found me, as I have described, knocking at the door of Buggam Grange.

The sound of the knocker had scarcely ceased to echo when I heard the shuffling of feet within, and the sound of chains and bolts being withdrawn. The door opened. A man stood before me holding a lighted candle which he shaded with his hand. His faded black clothes, once apparently a butler’s dress, his white hair and advanced age left me in no doubt that he was Horrod of whom Sir Jeremy had spoken.

Without a word he motioned me to come in, and, still without speech, he helped me to remove my wet outer garments, and then beckoned me into a great room, evidently the dining-room of the Grange.

I am not in any degree a nervous man by temperament, as I think I remarked before, and yet there was something in the vastness of the wainscoted room, lighted only by a single candle, and in the silence of the empty house, and still more in the appearance of my speechless attendant, which gave me a feeling of distinct uneasiness. As Horrod moved to and fro I took occasion to scrutinize his face more narrowly. I have seldom seen features more calculated to inspire a nervous dread. The pallor of his face and the whiteness of his hair (the man was at least seventy), and still more the peculiar furtiveness of his eyes, seemed to mark him as one who lived under a great terror. He moved with a noiseless step and at times he turned his head to glance in the dark corners of the room.

“Sir Jeremy told me,” I said, speaking as loudly and as heartily as I could, “that he would apprise you of my coming.”

I was looking into his face as I spoke.

In answer Horrod laid his finger across his lips and I knew that he was deaf and dumb. I am not nervous (I think I said that), but the realization that my sole companion in the empty house was a deaf mute struck a cold chill to my heart.

Horrod laid in front of me a cold meat pie, a cold goose, a cheese, and a tall flagon of cider. But my appetite was gone. I ate the goose, but found that after I had finished the pie I had but little zest for the cheese, which I finished without enjoyment. The cider had a sour taste, and after having permitted Horrod to refill the flagon twice I found that it induced a sense of melancholy and decided to drink no more.

My meal finished, the butler picked up the candle and beckoned me to follow him. We passed through the empty corridors of the house, a long line of pictured Buggams looking upon us as we passed, their portraits in the flickering light of the taper assuming a strange and life-like appearance, as if leaning forward from their frames to gaze upon the intruder.

Horrod led me upstairs and I realized that he was taking me to the tower in the east wing, in which I had observed a light.

The rooms to which the butler conducted me consisted of a sitting-room with an adjoining bedroom, both of them fitted with antique wainscoting against which a faded tapestry fluttered. There was a candle burning on the table in the sitting-room, but its insufficient light only rendered the surroundings the more dismal. Horrod bent down in front of the fireplace and endeavoured to light a fire there. But the wood was evidently damp and the fire flickered feebly on the hearth.

The butler left me, and in the stillness of the house I could hear his shuffling step echo down the corridor. It may have been fancy, but it seemed to me that his departure was the signal for a low moan that came from somewhere behind the wainscot. There was a narrow cupboard door at one side of the room, and for the moment I wondered whether the moaning came from within. I am not as a rule lacking in courage (I am sure my reader will be decent enough to believe this), yet I found myself entirely unwilling to open the cupboard door and look within. In place of doing so I seated myself in a great chair in front of the feeble fire. I must have been seated there for some time when I happened to lift my eyes to the mantel above and saw, standing upon it, a letter addressed to myself. I knew the handwriting at once to be that of Sir Jeremy Buggam.

I opened it, and spreading it out within reach of the feeble candlelight, I read as follows:

My dear Digby,

In our talk that you will remember, I had no time to finish telling you about the mystery of Buggam Grange. I take for granted, however, that you will go there and that Horrod will put you in the tower rooms, which are the only ones that make any pretence of being habitable. I have, therefore, sent him this letter to deliver at the Grange itself.

The story is this:

On the night of the fifteenth of November, fifty years ago, my grandfather was murdered in the room in which you are sitting, by his cousin, Sir Duggam Buggam. He was stabbed from behind while seated at the little table at which you are probably reading this letter. The two had been playing cards at the table and my grandfather’s body was found lying in a litter of cards and gold sovereigns on the floor. Sir Duggam Buggam, insensible from drink, lay beside him, the fatal knife at his hand, his fingers smeared with blood. My grandfather, though of the younger branch, possessed a part of the estates which were to revert to Sir Duggam on his death. Sir Duggam Buggam was tried at the Assizes and was hanged. On the day of his execution he was permitted by the authorities, out of respect for his rank, to wear a mask to the scaffold. The clothes in which he was executed are hanging at full length in the little cupboard to your right, and the mask is above them. It is said that on every fifteenth of November at midnight the cupboard door opens and Sir Duggam Buggam walks out into the room. It has been found impossible to get servants to remain at the Grange, and the place – except for the presence of Horrod – has been unoccupied for a generation. At the time of the murder Horrod was a young man of twenty-two, newly entered into the service of the family. It was he who entered the room and discovered the crime. On the day of the execution he was stricken with paralysis and has never spoken since. From that time to this he has never consented to leave the Grange, where he lives in isolation.

Wishing you a pleasant night after your tiring journey,

I remain,

Very faithfully,

Jeremy Buggam.

I leave my reader to imagine my state of mind when I completed the perusal of the letter.

I have as little belief in the supernatural as anyone, yet I must confess that there was something in the surroundings in which I now found myself which rendered me at least uncomfortable. My reader may smile if he will, but I assure him that it was with a very distinct feeling of uneasiness that I at length managed to rise to my feet, and, grasping my candle in my hand, to move backward into the bedroom. As I backed into it something so like a moan seemed to proceed from the closed cupboard that I accelerated my backward movement to a considerable degree. I hastily blew out the candle, threw myself upon the bed and drew the bedclothes over my head, keeping, however, one eye and one ear still out and available.

How long I lay thus listening to every sound, I cannot tell. The stillness had become absolute. From time to time I could dimly hear the distant cry of an owl, and once far away in the building below a sound as of some one dragging a chain along a floor. More than once I was certain that I heard the sound of moaning behind the wainscot. Meantime I realized that the hour must now be drawing close upon the fatal moment of midnight. My watch I could not see in the darkness, but by reckoning the time that must have elapsed I knew that midnight could not be far away. Then presently my ear, alert to every sound, could just distinguish far away across the fens the striking of a church bell, in the clock tower of Buggam village church, no doubt, tolling the hour of twelve.

On the last stroke of twelve, the cupboard door in the next room opened. There is no need to ask me how I knew it. I couldn’t, of course, see it, but I could hear, or sense in some way, the sound of it. I could feel my hair, all of it, rising upon my head. I was aware that there was a presence in the adjoining room, I will not say a person, a living soul, but a presence. Anyone who has been in the next room to a presence will know just how I felt. I could hear a sound as of some one groping on the floor and the faint rattle as of coins.

My hair was now perpendicular. My reader can blame it or not, but it was.

Then at this very moment from somewhere below in the building there came the sound of a prolonged and piercing cry, a cry as of a soul passing in agony. My reader may censure me or not, but right at this moment I decided to beat it. Whether I should have remained to see what was happening is a question that I will not discuss. My one idea was to get out, and to get out quickly. The window of the tower room was some twenty-five feet above the ground. I sprang out through the casement in one leap and landed on the grass below. I jumped over the shrubbery in one bound and cleared the moat in one jump. I went down the avenue in about six strides and ran five miles along the road through the fens in three minutes. This at least is an accurate transcription of my sensations. It may have taken longer. I never stopped till I found myself on the threshold of the Buggam Arms in Little Buggam, beating on the door for the landlord.

I returned to Buggam Grange on the next day in the bright sunlight of a frosty November morning, in a seven-cylinder motor car with six local constables and a physician. It makes all the difference. We carried revolvers, spades, pickaxes, shotguns and an ouija board.

What we found cleared up for ever the mystery of the Grange. We discovered Horrod the butler lying on the dining-room floor quite dead. The physician said that he had died from heart failure. There was evidence from the marks of his shoes in the dust that he had come in the night to the tower room. On the table he had placed a paper which contained a full confession of his having murdered Jeremy Buggam fifty years before. The circumstances of the murder had rendered it easy for him to fasten the crime upon Sir Duggam, already insensible from drink. A few minutes with the ouija board enabled us to get a full corroboration from Sir Duggam. He promised, moreover, now that his name was cleared, to go away from the premises for ever.

My friend, the present Sir Jeremy, has rehabilitated Buggam Grange. The place is rebuilt. The moat is drained. The whole house is lit with electricity. There are beautiful motor drives in all directions in the woods. He has had the bats shot and the owls stuffed. His daughter, Clara Buggam, became my wife. She is looking over my shoulder as I write. What more do you want?

TOC     INDEX

My Discovery of England

(1922)

~

Introduction of Mr. Stephen Leacock
The Balance of Trade in Impressions
I Am Interviewed by the Press
Impressions of London

A Clear View of the Government and Politics of England

Oxford as I See It

The British and the American Press

Business in England.

Is Prohibition Coming to England?

“We Have with Us Tonight”

Have the English any Sense of Humour?

Introduction of
Mr. Stephen Leacock

Given by Sir Owen Seaman on the Occasion of His First Lecture in London

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is usual on these occasions for the chairman to begin something like this: “The lecturer, I am sure, needs no introduction from me.” And indeed, when I have been the lecturer and somebody else has been the chairman, I have more than once suspected myself of being the better man of the two. Of course I hope I should always have the good manners – I am sure Mr. Leacock has – to disguise that suspicion. However, one has to go through these formalities, and I will therefore introduce the lecturer to you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Stephen Leacock. Mr. Leacock, this is the flower of London intelligence – or perhaps I should say one of the flowers; the rest are coming to your other lectures.

In ordinary social life one stops at an introduction and does not proceed to personal details. But behaviour on the platform, as on the stage, is seldom ordinary. I will therefore tell you a thing or two about Mr. Leacock. In the first place, by vocation he is a Professor of Political Economy, and he practises humour – frenzied fiction instead of frenzied finance – by way of recreation. There he differs a good deal from me, who have to study the products of humour for my living, and by way of recreation read Mr. Leacock on political economy.

Further, Mr. Leacock is all-British, being English by birth and Canadian by residence. I mention this for two reasons: firstly, because England and the Empire are very proud to claim him for their own, and, secondly, because I do not wish his nationality to be confused with that of his neighbours on the other side. For English and American humorists have not always seen eye to eye. When we fail to appreciate their humour they say we are too dull and effete to understand it: and when they do not appreciate ours they say we haven’t got any.

Now Mr. Leacock’s humour is British by heredity; but he has caught something of the spirit of American humour by force of association. This puts him in a similar position to that in which I found myself once when I took the liberty of swimming across a rather large loch in Scotland. After climbing into the boat I was in the act of drying myself when I was accosted by the proprietor of the hotel adjacent to the shore. “You have no business to be bathing here,” he shouted. “I’m not,” I said; “I’m bathing on the other side.” In the same way, if anyone on either side of the water is unintelligent enough to criticise Mr. Leacock’s humour, he can always say it comes from the other side. But the truth is that his humour contains all that is best in the humour of both hemispheres.

Having fulfilled my duty as chairman, in that I have told you nothing that you did not know before – except, perhaps, my swimming feat, which never got into the Press because I have a very bad publicity agent – I will not detain you longer from what you are really wanting to get at; but ask Mr. Leacock to proceed at once with his lecture on “Frenzied Fiction.”

TOC     INDEX

The Balance of Trade
in Impressions

For some years past a rising tide of lecturers and literary men from England has washed upon the shores of our North American continent. The purpose of each one of them is to make a new discovery of America. They come over to us travelling in great simplicity, and they return in the ducal suite of the Aquitania. They carry away with them their impressions of America, and when they reach England they sell them. This export of impressions has now been going on so long that the balance of trade in impressions is all disturbed. There is no doubt that the Americans and Canadians have been too generous in this matter of giving away impressions. We emit them with the careless ease of a glow-worm, and like the glow-worm ask for nothing in return.

But this irregular and one-sided traffic has now assumed such great proportions that we are compelled to ask whether it is right to allow these people to carry away from us impressions of the very highest commercial value without giving us any pecuniary compensation whatever. British lecturers have been known to land in New York, pass the customs, drive uptown in a closed taxi, and then forward to England from the closed taxi itself ten dollars’ worth of impressions of American national character. I have myself seen an English literary man – the biggest, I believe: he had at least the appearance of it – sit in the corridor of a fashionable New York hotel and look gloomily into his hat, and then from his very hat produce an estimate of the genius of America at twenty cents a word. The nice question as to whose twenty cents that was never seems to have occurred to him.

I am not writing in the faintest spirit of jealousy. I quite admit the extraordinary ability that is involved in this peculiar susceptibility to impressions. I have estimated that some of these English visitors have been able to receive impressions at the rate of four to the second; in fact, they seem to get them every time they see twenty cents. But without jealousy or complaint, I do feel that somehow these impressions are inadequate and fail to depict us as we really are.

Let me illustrate what I mean. Here are some of the impressions of New York, gathered from visitors’ discoveries of America and reproduced not perhaps word for word but as closely as I can remember them. “New York,” writes one, “nestling at the foot of the Hudson, gave me an impression of cosiness, of tiny graciousness: in short, of weeness.” But compare this – “New York,” according to another discoverer of America, “gave me an impression of size, of vastness; there seemed to be a bigness about it not found in smaller places.” A third visitor writes, “New York struck me as hard, cruel, almost inhuman.” This, I think, was because his taxi driver had charged him three dollars. “The first thing that struck me in New York,” writes another, “was the Statue of Liberty.” But, after all, that was only natural: it was the first thing that could reach him.

Nor is it only the impressions of the metropolis that seem to fall short of reality. Let me quote a few others taken at random here and there over the continent.

“I took from Pittsburg,” says an English visitor, “an impression of something that I could hardly define – an atmosphere rather than an idea.”

All very well. But, after all, had he the right to take it? Granted that Pittsburg has an atmosphere rather than an idea, the attempt to carry away this atmosphere surely borders on rapacity.

“New Orleans,” writes another visitor, “opened her arms to me and bestowed upon me the soft and languorous kiss of the Caribbean.” This statement may or may not be true: but in any case it hardly seems the fair thing to mention it.

“Chicago,” according to another book of discovery, “struck me as a large city. Situated as it is and where it is, it seems destined to be a place of importance.”

Or here, again, is a form of “impression” that recurs again and again – “At Cleveland I felt a distinct note of optimism in the air.”

This same note of optimism is found also at Toledo, at Toronto – in short, I believe it indicates nothing more than that some one gave the visitor a cigar. Indeed it generally occurs during the familiar scene in which the visitor describes his cordial reception in an unsuspecting American town: thus:

“I was met at the station (called in America the depot) by a member of the Municipal Council driving his own motor car. After giving me an excellent cigar, he proceeded to drive me about the town, to various points of interest, including the municipal abattoir, where he gave me another excellent cigar, the Carnegie public library, the First National Bank (the courteous manager of which gave me an excellent cigar) and the Second Congregational Church where I had the pleasure of meeting the pastor. The pastor, who appeared a man of breadth and culture, gave me another cigar. In the evening a dinner, admirably cooked and excellently served, was tendered to me at a leading hotel.” And of course he took it. After which his statement that he carried away from the town a feeling of optimism explains itself: he had four cigars, the dinner, and half a page of impressions at twenty cents a word.

Nor is it only by the theft of impressions that we suffer at the hands of these English discoverers of America. It is a part of the system also that we have to submit to being lectured to by our talented visitors. It is now quite understood that as soon as an English literary man finishes a book he is rushed across to America to tell the people of the United States and Canada all about it, and how he came to write it. At home, in his own country, they don’t care how he came to write it. He’s written it and that’s enough. But in America it is different. One month after the distinguished author’s book on The Boyhood of Botticelli has appeared in London, he is seen to land in New York very quietly out of one of the back portholes of the Olympic. That same afternoon you will find him in an armchair in one of the big hotels giving off impressions of America to a group of reporters. After which notices appear in all the papers to the effect that he will lecture in Carnegie Hall on Botticelli the Boy. The audience is assured beforehand. It consists of all the people who feel that they have to go because they know all about Botticelli and all the people who feel that they have to go because they don’t know anything about Botticelli. By this means the lecturer is able to rake the whole country from Montreal to San Francisco with Botticelli the Boy. Then he turns round, labels his lecture Botticelli the Man, and rakes it all back again. All the way across the continent and back he emits impressions, estimates of national character, and surveys of American genius. He sails from New York in a blaze of publicity, with his cordon of reporters round him, and a month later publishes his book America as I Saw It. It is widely read – in America.

In the course of time a very considerable public feeling was aroused in the United States and Canada over this state of affairs. The lack of reciprocity in it seemed unfair. It was felt (or at least I felt) that the time had come when some one ought to go over and take some impressions off England. The choice of such a person (my choice) fell upon myself. By an arrangement with the Geographical Society of America, acting in conjunction with the Royal Geographical Society of England (to both of whom I communicated my proposal), I went at my own expense.

It is scarcely feasible to give here full details in regard to my outfit and equipment, though I hope to do so in a later and more extended account of my expedition. Suffice it to say that my outfit, which was modelled on the equipment of English lecturers in America, included a complete suit of clothes, a dress shirt for lecturing in, a fountain pen and a silk hat. The dress shirt, I may say for the benefit of other travellers, proved invaluable. The silk hat, however, is no longer used in England except perhaps for scrambling eggs in.

I pass over the details of my pleasant voyage from New York to Liverpool. During the last fifty years so many travellers have made the voyage across the Atlantic that it is now impossible to obtain any impressions from the ocean of the slightest commercial value. My readers will recall the fact that Washington Irving, as far back as a century ago, chronicled the pleasure that one felt during an Atlantic voyage in idle day dreams while lying prone upon the bowsprit and watching the dolphins leaping in the crystalline foam. Since his time so many gifted writers have attempted to do the same thing that on the large Atlantic liners the bowsprit has been removed, or at any rate a notice put up: “Authors are requested not to lie prostrate on the bowsprit.” But even without this advantage, three or four generations of writers have chronicled with great minuteness their sensations during the transit. I need only say that my sensations were just as good as theirs. I will content myself with chronicling the fact that during the voyage we passed two dolphins, one whale and one iceberg (none of them moving very fast at the time), and that on the fourth day out the sea was so rough that the Captain said that in forty years he had never seen such weather. One of the steerage passengers, we were told, was actually washed overboard: I think it was over board that he was washed, but it may have been on board the ship itself.

I pass over also the incidents of my landing in Liverpool, except perhaps to comment upon the extraordinary behaviour of the English customs officials. Without wishing in any way to disturb international relations, one cannot help noticing the rough and inquisitorial methods of the English customs men as compared with the gentle and affectionate ways of the American officials at New York. The two trunks that I brought with me were dragged brutally into an open shed, the strap of one of them was rudely unbuckled, while the lid of the other was actually lifted at least four inches. The trunks were then roughly scrawled with chalk, the lids slammed to, and that was all. Not one of the officials seemed to care to look at my things or to have the politeness to pretend to want to. I had arranged my dress suit and my pyjamas so as to make as effective a display as possible: a New York customs officer would have been delighted with it. Here they simply passed it over. “Do open this trunk,” I asked one of the officials, “and see my pyjamas.” “I don’t think it is necessary, sir,” the man answered. There was a coldness about it that cut me to the quick.

But bad as is the conduct of the English customs men, the immigration officials are even worse. I could not help being struck by the dreadful carelessness with which people are admitted into England. There are, it is true, a group of officials said to be in charge of immigration, but they know nothing of the discriminating care exercised on the other side of the Atlantic.

“Do you want to know,” I asked one of them, “whether I am a polygamist?”

“No, sir,” he said very quietly.

“Would you like me to tell you whether I am fundamentally opposed to any and every system of government?”

The man seemed mystified. “No, sir,” he said. “I don’t know that I would.”

“Don’t you care?” I asked.

“Well, not particularly, sir,” he answered.

I was determined to arouse him from his lethargy.

“Let me tell you, then,” I said, “that I am an anarchistic polygamist, that I am opposed to all forms of government, that I object to any kind of revealed religion, that I regard the state and property and marriage as the mere tyranny of the bourgeoisie, and that I want to see class hatred carried to the point where it forces every one into brotherly love. Now, do I get in?”

The official looked puzzled for a minute. “You are not Irish, are you, sir?” he said.

“No.”

“Then I think you can come in all right,” he answered.

The journey from Liverpool to London, like all other English journeys, is short. This is due to the fact that England is a small country: it contains only 50,000 square miles, whereas the United States, as every one knows, contains three and a half billion. I mentioned this fact to an English fellow passenger on the train, together with a provisional estimate of the American corn crop for 1922: but he only drew his rug about his knees, took a sip of brandy from his travelling flask, and sank into a state resembling death. I contented myself with jotting down an impression of incivility and paid no further attention to my fellow traveller other than to read the labels on his luggage and to peruse the headings of his newspaper by peeping over his shoulder.

It was my first experience of travelling with a fellow passenger in a compartment of an English train, and I admit now that I was as yet ignorant of the proper method of conduct. Later on I became fully conversant with the rule of travel as understood in England. I should have known, of course, that I must on no account speak to the man. But I should have let down the window a little bit in such a way as to make a strong draught on his ear. Had this failed to break down his reserve I should have placed a heavy valise in the rack over his head so balanced that it might fall on him at any moment. Failing this again, I could have blown rings of smoke at him or stepped on his feet under the pretence of looking out of the window. Under the English rule as long as he bears this in silence you are not supposed to know him. In fact, he is not supposed to be there. You and he each presume the other to be a mere piece of empty space. But let him once be driven to say, “Oh, I beg your pardon, I wonder if you would mind my closing the window,” and he is lost. After that you are entitled to tell him anything about the corn crop that you care to.

But in the present case I knew nothing of this, and after three hours of charming silence I found myself in London.

TOC     INDEX

I Am Interviewed
by the Press

Immediately upon my arrival in London I was interviewed by the Press. I was interviewed in all twenty times. I am not saying this in any spirit of elation or boastfulness. I am simply stating it as a fact – interviewed twenty times, sixteen times by men and twice by women. But as I feel that the results of these interviews were not all that I could have wished, I think it well to make some public explanation of what happened.

The truth is that we do this thing so differently over in America that I was for the time being completely thrown off my bearings. The questions that I had every right to expect after many years of American and Canadian interviews failed to appear.

I pass over the fact that being interviewed for five hours is a fatiguing process. I lay no claim to exemption for that. But to that no doubt was due the singular discrepancies as to my physical appearance which I detected in the London papers.

The young man who interviewed me immediately after breakfast described me as “a brisk, energetic man, still on the right side of forty, with energy in every movement.”

The lady who wrote me up at 11.30 reported that my hair was turning grey, and that there was “a peculiar languor” in my manner.

And at the end the boy who took me over at a quarter to two said, “The old gentleman sank wearily upon a chair in the hotel lounge. His hair is almost white.”

The trouble is that I had not understood that London reporters are supposed to look at a man’s personal appearance. In America we never bother with that. We simply describe him as a “dynamo.” For some reason or other it always pleases everybody to be called a “dynamo,” and the readers, at least with us, like to read about people who are “dynamos,” and hardly care for anything else.

In the case of very old men we sometimes call them “battle-horses” or “extinct volcanoes,” but beyond these three classes we hardly venture on description. So I was misled. I had expected that the reporter would say: “As soon as Mr. Leacock came across the floor we felt we were in the presence of a ‘dynamo’ (or an ‘extinct battle-horse’ as the case may be).” Otherwise I would have kept up those energetic movements all the morning. But they fatigue me, and I did not think them necessary. But I let that pass.

The more serious trouble was the questions put to me by the reporters. Over in our chief centres of population we use another set altogether. I am thinking here especially of the kind of interview that I have given out in Youngstown, Ohio, and Richmond, Indiana, and Peterborough, Ontario. In all these places – for example, in Youngstown, Ohio – the reporter asks as his first question, “What is your impression of Youngstown?”

In London they don’t. They seem indifferent to the fate of their city. Perhaps it is only English pride. For all I know they may have been burning to know this, just as the Youngstown, Ohio, people are, and were too proud to ask. In any case I will insert here the answer I had written out in my pocket-book (one copy for each paper – the way we do it in Youngstown), and which read:

“London strikes me as emphatically a city with a future. Standing as she does in the heart of a rich agricultural district with railroad connection in all directions, and resting, as she must, on a bed of coal and oil, I prophesy that she will one day be a great city.”

The advantage of this is that it enables the reporter to get just the right kind of heading: Prophesies Bright Future for London. Had that been used my name would have stood higher there than it does today – unless the London people are very different from the people in Youngstown, which I doubt. As it is they don’t know whether their future is bright or is as dark as mud. But it’s not my fault. The reporters never asked me.

If the first question had been handled properly it would have led up by an easy and pleasant transition to question two, which always runs: “Have you seen our factories?” To which the answer is:

“I have. I was taken out early this morning by a group of your citizens (whom I cannot thank enough) in a Ford car to look at your pail and bucket works. At eleven-thirty I was taken out by a second group in what was apparently the same car to see your soap works. I understand that you are the second nail-making centre east of the Alleghenies, and I am amazed and appalled. This afternoon I am to be taken out to see your wonderful system of disposing of sewerage, a thing which has fascinated me from childhood.”

Now I am not offering any criticism of the London system of interviewing, but one sees at once how easy and friendly for all concerned this Youngstown method is; how much better it works than the London method of asking questions about literature and art and difficult things of that sort. I am sure that there must be soap works and perhaps a pail factory somewhere in London. But during my entire time of residence there no one ever offered to take me to them. As for the sewerage – oh, well, I suppose we are more hospitable in America. Let it go at that.

I had my answer all written and ready, saying:

“I understand that London is the second greatest hop-consuming, the fourth hog-killing, and the first egg-absorbing centre in the world.”

But what I deplore still more, and I think with reason, is the total omission of the familiar interrogation: “What is your impression of our women?”

That’s where the reporter over on our side hits the nail every time. That is the point at which we always nudge him in the ribs and buy him a cigar, and at which youth and age join in a sly jest together. Here again the sub-heading comes in so nicely: Thinks Youngstown Women Charming. And they are. They are, everywhere. But I hate to think that I had to keep my impression of London women unused in my pocket while a young man asked me whether I thought modern literature owed more to observation and less to inspiration than some other kind of literature.

Now that’s exactly the kind of question, the last one, that the London reporters seem to harp on. They seemed hipped about literature; and their questions are too difficult. One asked me whether the American drama was structurally inferior to the French. I don’t call that fair. I told him I didn’t know; that I used to know the answer to it when I was at college, but that I had forgotten it, and that, anyway, I am too well off now to need to remember it.

That question is only one of a long list that they asked me about art and literature. I missed nearly all of them, except one as to whether I thought Al Jolson or Frank Tinney was the higher artist, and even that one was asked by an American who is wasting himself on the London Press.

I don’t want to speak in anger. But I say it frankly, the atmosphere of these young men is not healthy, and I felt that I didn’t want to see them any more.

Had there been a reporter of the kind we have at home in Montreal or Toledo or Springfield, Illinois, I would have welcomed him at my hotel. He could have taken me out in a Ford car and shown me a factory and told me how many cubic feet of water go down the Thames in an hour. I should have been glad of his society, and he and I would have together made up the kind of copy that people of his class and mine read. But I felt that if any young man came along to ask about the structure of the modern drama, he had better go on to the British Museum.

Meantime as the reporters entirely failed to elicit the large fund of information which I acquired, I reserve my impressions of London for a chapter by themselves.

TOC     INDEX

Impressions of London

Before setting down my impressions of the great English metropolis – a phrase which I have thought out as a designation for London – I think it proper to offer an initial apology. I find that I receive impressions with great difficulty and have nothing of that easy facility in picking them up which is shown by British writers on America. I remember Hugh Walpole telling me that he could hardly walk down Broadway without getting at least three dollars’ worth and on Fifth Avenue five dollars’ worth; and I recollect that St. John Ervine came up to my house in Montreal, drank a cup of tea, borrowed some tobacco, and got away with sixty dollars’ worth of impressions of Canadian life and character.

For this kind of thing I have only a despairing admiration. I can get an impression if I am given time and can think about it beforehand. But it requires thought. This fact was all the more distressing to me in as much as one of the leading editors of America had made me a proposal, as honourable to him as it was lucrative to me, that immediately on my arrival in London – or just before it – I should send him a thousand words on the genius of the English, and five hundred words on the spirit of London, and two hundred words of personal chat with Lord Northcliffe. This contract I was unable to fulfil except the personal chat with Lord Northcliffe, which proved an easy matter as he happened to be away in Australia.

But I have since pieced together my impressions as conscientiously as I could and I present them here. If they seem to be a little bit modelled on British impressions of America I admit at once that the influence is there. We writers all act and react on one another; and when I see a good thing in another man’s book I react on it at once.

London, the name of which is already known to millions of readers of this book, is beautifully situated on the river Thames, which here sweeps in a wide curve with much the same breadth and majesty as the St. Jo River at South Bend, Indiana. London, like South Bend itself, is a city of clean streets and admirable sidewalks, and has an excellent water supply. One is at once struck by the number of excellent and well-appointed motor cars that one sees on every hand, the neatness of the shops and the cleanliness and cheerfulness of the faces of the people. In short, as an English visitor said of Peterborough, Ontario, there is a distinct note of optimism in the air. I forget who it was who said this, but at any rate I have been in Peterborough myself and I have seen it.

Contrary to my expectations and contrary to all our Transatlantic precedents, I was not met at the depot by one of the leading citizens, himself a member of the Municipal Council, driving his own motor car. He did not tuck a fur rug about my knees, present me with a really excellent cigar and proceed to drive me about the town so as to show me the leading points of interest, the municipal reservoir, the gas works and the municipal abattoir. In fact he was not there. But I attribute his absence not to any lack of hospitality but merely to a certain reserve in the English character. They are as yet unused to the arrival of lecturers. When they get to be more accustomed to their coming, they will learn to take them straight to the municipal abattoir just as we do.

For lack of better guidance, therefore, I had to form my impressions of London by myself. In the mere physical sense there is much to attract the eye. The city is able to boast of many handsome public buildings and offices which compare favourably with anything on the other side of the Atlantic. On the bank of the Thames itself rises the power house of the Westminster Electric Supply Corporation, a handsome modern edifice in the later Japanese style. Close by are the commodious premises of the Imperial Tobacco Company, while at no great distance the Chelsea Gas Works add a striking feature of rotundity. Passing northward, one observes Westminster Bridge, notable as a principal station of the underground railway. This station and the one next above it, the Charing Cross one, are connected by a wide thoroughfare called Whitehall. One of the best American drug stores is here situated. The upper end of Whitehall opens into the majestic and spacious Trafalgar Square. Here are grouped in imposing proximity the offices of the Canadian Pacific and other railways, The International Sleeping Car Company, the Montreal Star, and the Anglo-Dutch Bank. Two of the best American barber shops are conveniently grouped near the Square, while the existence of a tall stone monument in the middle of the Square itself enables the American visitor to find them without difficulty. Passing eastward towards the heart of the city, one notes on the left hand the imposing pile of St. Paul’s, an enormous church with a round dome on the top, suggesting strongly the first Church of Christ (Scientist) on Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. But the English churches not being labelled, the visitor is often at a loss to distinguish them.

A little further on one finds oneself in the heart of financial London. Here all the great financial institutions of America – The First National Bank of Milwaukee, The Planters National Bank of St. Louis, The Montana Farmers Trust Co., and many others – have either their offices or their agents. The Bank of England – which acts as the London Agent of The Montana Farmers Trust Company – and the London County Bank, which represents the People’s Deposit Co., of Yonkers, N. Y., are said to be in the neighbourhood.

This particular part of London is connected with the existence of that strange and mysterious thing called “the City.” I am still unable to decide whether the city is a person, or a place, or a thing. But as a form of being I give it credit for being the most emotional, the most volatile, the most peculiar creature in the world. You read in the morning paper that the City is “deeply depressed.” At noon it is reported that the City is “buoyant” and by four o’clock that the City is “wildly excited.”

I have tried in vain to find the causes of these peculiar changes of feeling. The ostensible reasons, as given in the newspaper, are so trivial as to be hardly worthy of belief. For example, here is the kind of news that comes out from the City. “The news that a modus vivendi has been signed between the Sultan of Kowfat and the Shriek-ul-Islam has caused a sudden buoyancy in the City. Steel rails which had been depressed all morning reacted immediately while American mules rose up sharply to par.” . . . “Monsieur Poincaré, speaking at Bordeaux, said that henceforth France must seek to retain by all possible means the ping-pong championship of the world: values in the City collapsed at once.” . . . “Despatches from Bombay say that the Shah of Persia yesterday handed a golden slipper to the Grand Vizier Feebli Pasha as a sign that he might go and chase himself: the news was at once followed by a drop in oil, and a rapid attempt to liquidate everything that is fluid. . . .”

But these mysteries of the City I do not pretend to explain. I have passed through the place dozens of times and never noticed anything particular in the way of depression or buoyancy, or falling oil, or rising rails. But no doubt it is there.

A little beyond the city and further down the river the visitor finds this district of London terminating in the gloomy and forbidding Tower, the principal penitentiary of the city. Here Queen Victoria was imprisoned for many years.

Excellent gasoline can be had at the American Garage immediately north of the Tower, where motor repairs of all kinds are also carried on.

These, however, are but the superficial pictures of London, gathered by the eye of the tourist. A far deeper meaning is found in the examination of the great historic monuments of the city. The principal ones of these are the Tower of London (just mentioned), the British Museum and Westminster Abbey. No visitor to London should fail to see these. Indeed he ought to feel that his visit to England is wasted unless he has seen them. I speak strongly on the point because I feel strongly on it. To my mind there is something about the grim fascination of the historic Tower, the cloistered quiet of the Museum and the majesty of the ancient Abbey, which will make it the regret of my life that I didn’t see any one of the three. I fully meant to: but I failed: and I can only hope that the circumstances of my failure may be helpful to other visitors.

The Tower of London I most certainly intended to inspect. Each day, after the fashion of every tourist, I wrote for myself a little list of things to do and I always put the Tower of London on it. No doubt the reader knows the kind of little list that I mean. It runs:

1. Go to bank.

2. Buy a shirt.

3. National Picture Gallery.

4. Razor blades.

5. Tower of London.

6. Soap.

This itinerary, I regret to say, was never carried out in full. I was able at times both to go to the bank and buy a shirt in a single morning: at other times I was able to buy razor blades and almost to find the National Picture Gallery. Meantime I was urged on all sides by my London acquaintances not to fail to see the Tower. “There’s a grim fascination about the place,” they said; “you mustn’t miss it.” I am quite certain that in due course of time I should have made my way to the Tower but for the fact that I made a fatal discovery. I found out that the London people who urged me to go and see the Tower had never seen it themselves. It appears they never go near it. One night at a dinner a man next to me said, “Have you seen the Tower? You really ought to. There’s a grim fascination about it.” I looked him in the face. “Have you seen it yourself?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” he answered. “I’ve seen it.” “When?” I asked. The man hesitated. “When I was just a boy,” he said, “my father took me there.” “How long ago is that?” I enquired. “About forty years ago,” he answered; “I always mean to go again but I don’t somehow seem to get the time.”

After this I got to understand that when a Londoner says, “Have you seen the Tower of London?” the answer is, “No, and neither have you.”

Take the parallel case of the British Museum. Here is a place that is a veritable treasure house. A repository of some of the most priceless historical relics to be found upon the earth. It contains, for instance, the famous Papyrus Manuscript of Thotmes II of the first Egyptian dynasty – a thing known to scholars all over the world as the oldest extant specimen of what can be called writing; indeed one can here see the actual evolution (I am quoting from a work of reference, or at least from my recollection of it) from the ideographic cuneiform to the phonetic syllabic script. Every time I have read about that manuscript and have happened to be in Orillia (Ontario) or Schenectady (N. Y.) or any such place, I have felt that I would be willing to take a whole trip to England to have five minutes at the British Museum, just five, to look at that papyrus. Yet as soon as I got to London this changed. The railway stations of London have been so arranged that to get to any train for the north or west, the traveller must pass the British Museum. The first time I went by it in a taxi, I felt quite a thrill. “Inside those walls,” I thought to myself, “is the manuscript of Thotmes II.” The next time I actually stopped the taxi. “Is that the British Museum?” I asked the driver. “I think it is something of the sort, sir,” he said. I hesitated. “Drive me,” I said, “to where I can buy safety razor blades.”

After that I was able to drive past the Museum with the quiet assurance of a Londoner, and to take part in dinner table discussions as to whether the British Museum or the Louvre contains the greater treasures. It is quite easy any way. All you have to do is to remember that The Winged Victory of Samothrace is in the Louvre and the papyrus of Thotmes II (or some such document) is in the Museum.

The Abbey, I admit, is indeed majestic. I did not intend to miss going into it. But I felt, as so many tourists have, that I wanted to enter it in the proper frame of mind. I never got into the frame of mind; at least not when near the Abbey itself. I have been in exactly that frame of mind when on State Street, Chicago, or on King Street, Toronto, or anywhere three thousand miles away from the Abbey. But by bad luck I never struck both the frame of mind and the Abbey at the same time.

But the Londoners, after all, in not seeing their own wonders, are only like the rest of the world. The people who live in Buffalo never go to see Niagara Falls; people in Cleveland don’t know which is Mr. Rockefeller’s house, and people live and even die in New York without going up to the top of the Woolworth Building. And anyway the past is remote and the present is near. I know a cab driver in the city of Quebec whose business in life it is to drive people up to see the Plains of Abraham, but unless they bother him to do it, he doesn’t show them the spot where Wolfe fell: what he does point out with real zest is the place where the Mayor and the City Council sat on the wooden platform that they put up for the municipal celebration last summer.

No description of London would be complete without a reference, however brief, to the singular salubrity and charm of the London climate. This is seen at its best during the autumn and winter months. The climate of London and indeed of England generally is due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. The way it works is thus: The Gulf Stream, as it nears the shores of the British Isles and feels the propinquity of Ireland, rises into the air, turns into soup, and comes down on London. At times the soup is thin and is in fact little more than a mist: at other times it has the consistency of a thick Potage St. Germain. London people are a little sensitive on the point and flatter their atmosphere by calling it a fog: but it is not: it is soup. The notion that no sunlight ever gets through and that in the London winter people never see the sun is of course a ridiculous error, circulated no doubt by the jealousy of foreign nations. I have myself seen the sun plainly visible in London, without the aid of glasses, on a November day in broad daylight; and again one night about four o’clock in the afternoon I saw the sun distinctly appear through the clouds. The whole subject of daylight in the London winter is, however, one which belongs rather to the technique of astronomy than to a book of description. In practice daylight is but little used. Electric lights are burned all the time in all houses, buildings, railway stations and clubs. This practice which is now universally observed is called Daylight Saving.

But the distinction between day and night during the London winter is still quite obvious to any one of an observant mind. It is indicated by various signs such as the striking of clocks, the tolling of bells, the closing of saloons, and the raising of taxi rates. It is much less easy to distinguish the technical approach of night in the other cities of England that lie outside the confines, physical and intellectual, of London and live in a continuous gloom. In such places as the great manufacturing cities, Buggingham-under-Smoke, or Gloomsbury-on-Ooze, night may be said to be perpetual.

—

I had written the whole of the above chapter and looked on it as finished when I realized that I had made a terrible omission. I neglected to say anything about the Mind of London. This is a thing that is always put into any book of discovery and observation and I can only apologise for not having discussed it sooner. I am quite familiar with other people’s chapters on “The Mind of America,” and “The Chinese Mind,” and so forth. Indeed, so far as I know it has turned out that almost everybody all over the world has a mind. Nobody nowadays travels, even in Central America or Thibet, without bringing back a chapter on “The Mind of Costa Rica,” or on the “Psychology of the Mongolian.” Even the gentler peoples such as the Burmese, the Siamese, the Hawaiians, and the Russians, though they have no minds are written up as souls.

It is quite obvious then that there is such a thing as the mind of London: and it is all the more culpable in me to have neglected it in as much as my editorial friend in New York had expressly mentioned it to me before I sailed. “What,” said he, leaning far over his desk after his massive fashion and reaching out into the air, “what is in the minds of these people? Are they,” he added, half to himself, though I heard him, “are they thinking? And, if they think, what do they think?”

I did therefore, during my stay in London, make an accurate study of the things that London seemed to be thinking about. As a comparative basis for this study I brought with me a carefully selected list of the things that New York was thinking about at the moment. These I selected from the current newspapers in the proportions to the amount of space allotted to each topic and the size of the heading that announced it. Having thus a working idea of what I may call the mind of New York, I was able to collect and set beside it a list of similar topics, taken from the London Press to represent the mind of London. The two placed side by side make an interesting piece of psychological analysis. They read as follows:

THE MIND OF
NEW YORK
What is it thinking?

THE MIND OF
LONDON
What is it thinking?

1.  Do chorus girls make good wives? | 1.  Do chorus girls marry well?
2.  Is red hair a sign of temperament? | 2.  What is red hair a sign of?
3.  Can a woman be in love with two men? | 3.  Can a man be in love with two women?
4.  Is fat a sign of genius? | 4.  Is genius a sign of fat?

Looking over these lists, I think it is better to present them without comment; I feel sure that somewhere or other in them one should detect the heart-throbs, the pulsations of two great peoples. But I don’t get it. In fact the two lists look to me terribly like “the mind of Costa Rica.”

The same editor also advised me to mingle, at his expense, in the brilliant intellectual life of England. “There,” he said, “is a coterie of men, probably the most brilliant group East of the Mississippi” (I think he said the Mississippi). “You will find them,” he said to me, “brilliant, witty, filled with repartee.” He suggested that I should send him back, as far as words could express it, some of this brilliance. I was very glad to be able to do this, although I fear that the results were not at all what he had anticipated. Still, I held conversations with these people and I gave him, in all truthfulness, the result. Sir James Barrie said, “This is really very exceptional weather for this time of year.” Cyril Maude said, “And so a Martini cocktail is merely gin and vermouth.” Ian Hay said, “You’ll find the underground ever so handy once you understand it.”

I have a lot more of these repartees that I could insert here if it was necessary. But somehow I feel that it is not.

TOC     INDEX

A Clear View
of the Government
and Politics of England

A loyal British subject like myself in dealing with the government of England should necessarily begin with a discussion of the monarchy. I have never had the pleasure of meeting the King – except once on the G.T.R. platform in Orillia, Ontario, when he was the Duke of York and I was one of the welcoming delegates of the town council. No doubt he would recall it in a minute.

But in England the King is surrounded by formality and circumstance. On many mornings I waited round the gates of Buckingham Palace but I found it quite impossible to meet the King in the quiet sociable way in which one met him in Orillia. The English, it seems, love to make the kingship a subject of great pomp and official etiquette. In Canada it is quite different. Perhaps we understand kings and princes better than the English do. At any rate we treat them in a far more human heart-to-heart fashion than is the English custom, and they respond to it at once. I remember when King George – he was, as I say, Duke of York then – came up to Orillia, Ontario, how we all met him in a delegation on the platform. Bob Curran – Bob was Mayor of the town that year – went up to him and shook hands with him and invited him to come right on up to the Orillia House where he had a room reserved for him. Charlie Janes and Mel Tudhope and the other boys who were on the town Council gathered round the royal prince and shook hands and told him that he simply must stay over. George Rapley, the bank manager, said that if he wanted a cheque cashed or anything of that sort to come right into the Royal Bank and he would do it for him. The prince had two aides-de-camp with him and a secretary, but Bob Curran said to bring them uptown too and it would be all right. We had planned to have an oyster supper for the Prince at Jim Smith’s hotel and then take him either to the Y.M.C.A. Pool Room or else over to the tea social in the basement of the Presbyterian Church.

Unluckily the prince couldn’t stay. It turned out that he had to get right back into his train and go on to Peterborough, Ontario, where they were to have a brass band to meet him, which naturally he didn’t want to miss.

But the point is that it was a real welcome. And you could see that the prince appreciated it. There was a warmth and a meaning to it that the prince understood at once. It was a pity that he couldn’t have stayed over and had time to see the carriage factory and the new sewerage plant. We all told the prince that he must come back and he said that if he could he most certainly would. When the prince’s train pulled out of the station and we all went back uptown together (it was before prohibition came to Ontario) you could feel that the institution of royalty was quite solid in Orillia for a generation.

But you don’t get that sort of thing in England. There’s a formality and coldness in all their dealings with royalty that would never go down with us. They like to have the King come and open Parliament dressed in royal robes, and with a clattering troop of soldiers riding in front of him. As for taking him over to the Y.M.C.A. to play pin pool, they never think of it. They have seen so much of the mere outside of his kingship that they don’t understand the heart of it as we do in Canada.

But let us turn to the House of Commons: for no description of England would be complete without at least some mention of this interesting body. Indeed for the ordinary visitor to London the greatest interest of all attaches to the spacious and magnificent Parliament Buildings. The House of Commons is commodiously situated beside the River Thames. The principal features of the House are the large lunch room on the western side and the tea-room on the terrace on the eastern. A series of smaller luncheon rooms extend (apparently) all round about the premises: while a commodious bar offers a ready access to the members at all hours of the day. While any members are in the bar a light is kept burning in the tall Clock Tower at one corner of the building, but when the bar is closed the light is turned off by whichever of the Scotch members leaves last. There is a handsome legislative chamber attached to the premises from which – so the antiquarians tell us – the House of Commons took its name. But it is not usual now for the members to sit in the legislative chamber as the legislation is now all done outside, either at the home of Mr. Lloyd George, or at the National Liberal Club, or at one or other of the newspaper offices. The House, however, is called together at very frequent intervals to give it an opportunity of hearing the latest legislation and allowing the members to indulge in cheers, sighs, groans, votes and other expressions of vitality. After having cheered as much as is good for it, it goes back again to the lunch rooms and goes on eating till needed again.

It is, however, an entire exaggeration to say that the House of Commons no longer has a real share in the government of England. This is not so. Anybody connected with the government values the House of Commons in a high degree. One of the leading newspaper proprietors of London himself told me that he has always felt that if he had the House of Commons on his side he had a very valuable ally. Many of the labour leaders are inclined to regard the House of Commons as of great utility, while the leading women’s organizations, now that women are admitted as members, may be said to regard the House as one of themselves.

Looking around to find just where the natural service of the House of Commons comes in, I am inclined to think that it must be in the practice of “asking questions” in the House. Whenever anything goes wrong a member rises and asks a question. He gets up, for example, with a little paper in his hand, and asks the government if ministers are aware that the Khedive of Egypt was seen yesterday wearing a Turkish Tarbosh. Ministers say very humbly that they hadn’t known it, and a thrill runs through the whole country. The members can apparently ask any questions they like. In the repeated visits which I made to the gallery of the House of Commons I was unable to find any particular sense or meaning in the questions asked, though no doubt they had an intimate bearing on English politics not clear to an outsider like myself. I heard one member ask the government whether they were aware that herrings were being imported from Hamburg to Harwich. The government said no. Another member rose and asked the government whether they considered Shakespere or Molière the greater dramatic artist. The government answered that ministers were taking this under their earnest consideration and that a report would be submitted to Parliament. Another member asked the government if they knew who won the Queen’s Plate this season at Toronto. They did – in fact this member got in wrong, as this is the very thing that the government do know. Towards the close of the evening a member rose and asked the government if they knew what time it was. The Speaker, however, ruled this question out of order on the ground that it had been answered before.

The Parliament Buildings are so vast that it is not possible to state with certainty what they do, or do not, contain. But it is generally said that somewhere in the building is the House of Lords. When they meet they are said to come together very quietly shortly before the dinner hour, take a glass of dry sherry and a biscuit (they are all abstemious men), reject whatever bills may be before them at the moment, take another dry sherry and then adjourn for two years.

The public are no longer allowed unrestricted access to the Houses of Parliament; its approaches are now strictly guarded by policemen. In order to obtain admission it is necessary either to (A) communicate in writing with the Speaker of the House, enclosing certificates of naturalization and proof of identity, or (B) give the policeman five shillings. Method B is the one usually adopted. On great nights, however, when the House of Commons is sitting and is about to do something important, such as ratifying a Home Rule Bill or cheering, or welcoming a new lady member, it is not possible to enter by merely bribing the policeman with five shillings; it takes a pound. The English people complain bitterly of the rich Americans who have in this way corrupted the London public. Before they were corrupted they would do anything for sixpence.

This peculiar vein of corruption by the Americans runs like a thread, I may say, through all the texture of English life. Among those who have been principally exposed to it are the servants – especially butlers and chauffeurs, hotel porters, bell-boys, railway porters and guards, all taxi-drivers, pew-openers, curates, bishops, and a large part of the peerage.

The terrible ravages that have been made by the Americans on English morality are witnessed on every hand. Whole classes of society are hopelessly damaged. I have it in the evidence of the English themselves and there seems to be no doubt of the fact. Till the Americans came to England the people were an honest, law-abiding race, respecting their superiors and despising those below them. They had never been corrupted by money and their employers extended to them in this regard their tenderest solicitude. Then the Americans came. Servants ceased to be what they were; butlers were hopelessly damaged; hotel porters became a wreck; taxi-drivers turned out thieves; curates could no longer be trusted to handle money; peers sold their daughters at a million dollars a piece or three for two. In fact the whole kingdom began to deteriorate till it got where it is now. At present after a rich American has stayed in any English country house, its owners find that they can do nothing with the butler; a wildness has come over the man. There is a restlessness in his demeanour and a strange wistful look in his eye as if seeking for something. In many cases, so I understand, after an American has stayed in a country house the butler goes insane. He is found in his pantry counting over the sixpence given to him by a Duke, and laughing to himself. He has to be taken in charge by the police. With him generally go the chauffeur, whose mind has broken down from driving a rich American twenty miles; and the gardener, who is found tearing up raspberry bushes by the roots to see if there is any money under them; and the local curate whose brain has collapsed or expanded, I forget which, when a rich American gave him fifty dollars for his soup kitchen.

There are, it is true, a few classes that have escaped this contagion, shepherds living in the hills, drovers, sailors, fishermen and such like. I remember the first time I went into the English country-side being struck with the clean, honest look in the people’s faces. I realized exactly where they got it: they had never seen any Americans. I remember speaking to an aged peasant down in Somerset. “Have you ever seen any Americans?” “Nah,” he said, “uz eeard a mowt o’ ’em, zir, but uz zeen nowt o’ ’em.” It was clear that the noble fellow was quite undamaged by American contact.

Now the odd thing about this corruption is that exactly the same idea is held on the other side of the water. It is a known fact that if a young English Lord comes to an American town he puts it to the bad in one week. Socially the whole place goes to pieces. Girls whose parents are in the hardware business and who used to call their father “pop” begin to talk of precedence and whether a Duchess Dowager goes in to dinner ahead of or behind a countess scavenger. After the young Lord has attended two dances and one tea-social in the Methodist Church Sunday School Building (Adults 25 cents, children 10 cents – all welcome.) there is nothing for the young men of the town to do except to drive him out or go further west.

One can hardly wonder then that this general corruption has extended even to the policemen who guard the Houses of Parliament. On the other hand this vein of corruption has not extended to English politics. Unlike ours, English politics – one hears it on every hand – are pure. Ours unfortunately are known to be not so. The difference seems to be that our politicians will do anything for money and the English politicians won’t; they just take the money and won’t do a thing for it.

Somehow there always seems to be a peculiar interest about English political questions that we don’t find elsewhere. At home in Canada our politics turn on such things as how much money the Canadian National Railways lose as compared with how much they could lose if they really tried; on whether the Grain Growers of Manitoba should be allowed to import ploughs without paying a duty or to pay a duty without importing the ploughs. Our members at Ottawa discuss such things as highway subsidies, dry farming, the Bank Act, and the tariff on hardware. These things leave me absolutely cold. To be quite candid there is something terribly plebeian about them. In short, our politics are what we call in French “peuple.”

But when one turns to England, what a striking difference! The English, with the whole huge British Empire to fish in and the European system to draw upon, can always dig up some kind of political topic of discussion that has a real charm about it. One month you find English politics turning on the Oasis of Merv and the next on the hinterland of Albania; or a member rises in the Commons with a little bit of paper in his hand and desires to ask the foreign secretary if he is aware that the Ahkoond of Swat is dead. The foreign secretary states that the government have no information other than that the Ahkoond was dead a month ago. There is a distinct sensation in the House at the realisation that the Ahkoond has been dead a month without the House having known that he was alive. The sensation is conveyed to the Press and the afternoon papers appear with large headings, The Ahkoond of Swat Is Dead. The public who have never heard of the Ahkoond bare their heads in a moment in a pause to pray for the Ahkoond’s soul. Then the cables take up the refrain and word is flashed all over the world, The Ahkoond of Swat is Dead.

There was a Canadian journalist and poet once who was so impressed with the news that the Ahkoond was dead, so bowed down with regret that he had never known the Ahkoond while alive, that he forthwith wrote a poem in memory of The Ahkoond of Swat. I have always thought that the reason of the wide admiration that Lannigan’s verses received was not merely because of the brilliant wit that is in them but because in a wider sense they typify so beautifully the scope of English politics. The death of the Ahkoond of Swat, and whether Great Britain should support as his successor Mustalpha El Djin or Kamu Flaj – there is something worth talking of over an afternoon tea table. But suppose that the whole of the Manitoba Grain Growers were to die. What could one say about it? They’d be dead, that’s all.

So it is that people all over the world turn to English politics with interest. What more delightful than to open an atlas, find out where the new kingdom of Hejaz is, and then violently support the British claim to a protectorate over it. Over in America we don’t understand this sort of thing. There is naturally little chance to do so and we don’t know how to use it when it comes. I remember that when a chance did come in connection with the great Venezuela dispute over the ownership of the jungles and mud-flats of British Guiana, the American papers at once inserted headings, Where Is the Essiquibo River? That spoiled the whole thing. If you admit that you don’t know where a place is, then the bottom is knocked out of all discussion. But if you pretend that you do, then you are all right. Mr. Lloyd George is said to have caused great amusement at the Versailles Conference by admitting that he hadn’t known where Teschen was. So at least it was reported in the papers; and for all I know it might even have been true. But the fun that he raised was not really half what could have been raised. I have it on good authority that two of the American delegates hadn’t known where Austria Proper was and thought that Unredeemed Italy was on the East side of New York, while the Chinese Delegate thought that the Cameroons were part of Scotland. But it is these little geographic niceties that lend a charm to European politics that ours lack forever.

I don’t mean to say the English politics always turn on romantic places or on small questions. They don’t. They often include questions of the largest order. But when the English introduce a really large question as the basis of their politics they like to select one that is insoluble. This guarantees that it will last. Take for example the rights of the Crown as against the people. That lasted for one hundred years – all the seventeenth century. In Oklahoma or in Alberta they would have called a convention on the question, settled it in two weeks and spoiled it for further use. In the same way the Protestant Reformation was used for a hundred years and the Reform Bill for a generation.

At the present time the genius of the English for politics has selected as their insoluble political question the topic of the German indemnity. The essence of the problem as I understand it may be stated as follows:

It was definitely settled by the Conference at Versailles that Germany is to pay the Allies 3,912,486,782,421 marks. I think that is the correct figure, though of course I am speaking only from memory. At any rate, the correct figure is within a hundred billion marks of the above.

The sum to be paid was not reached without a great deal of discussion. Monsieur Briand, the French Minister, is reported to have thrown out the figure 4,281,390,687,471. But Mr. Lloyd George would not pick it up. Nor do I blame him unless he had a basket to pick it up with.

Lloyd George’s point of view was that the Germans could very properly pay a limited amount such as 3,912,486,782,421 marks, but it was not feasible to put on them a burden of 4,281,390,687,471 marks.

By the way, if any one at this point doubts the accuracy of the figures just given, all he has to do is to take the amount of the indemnity as stated in gold marks and then multiply it by the present value of the mark and he will find to his chagrin that the figures are correct. If he is still not satisfied I refer him to a book of Logarithms. If he is not satisfied with that I refer him to any work on conic sections and if not convinced even then I refer him so far that he will never come back.

The indemnity being thus fixed, the next question is as to the method of collecting it. In the first place there is no intention of allowing the Germans to pay in actual cash. If they do this they will merely inflate the English beyond what is bearable. England has been inflated now for eight years and has had enough of it.

In the second place, it is understood that it will not do to allow the Germans to offer 4,281,390,687,471 marks’ worth of coal. It is more than the country needs.

What is more, if the English want coal they propose to buy it in an ordinary decent way from a Christian coal-dealer in their own country. They do not purpose to ruin their own coal industry for the sake of building up the prosperity of the German nation.

What I say of coal is applied with equal force to any offers of food, grain, oil, petroleum, gas, or any other natural product. Payment in any of these will be sternly refused. Even now it is all the British farmers can do to live and for some it is more. Many of them are having to sell off their motors and pianos and to send their sons to college to work. At the same time, the German producer by depressing the mark further and further is able to work fourteen hours a day. This argument may not be quite correct but I take it as I find it in the London Press. Whether I state it correctly or not, it is quite plain that the problem is insoluble. That is all that is needed in first class politics.

A really good question like the German reparation question will go on for a century. Undoubtedly in the year 2000 A.D., a British Chancellor of the Exchequer will still be explaining that the government is fully resolved that Germany shall pay to the last farthing (cheers): but that ministers have no intention of allowing the German payment to take a form that will undermine British industry (wild applause): that the German indemnity shall be so paid that without weakening the power of the Germans to buy from us it shall increase our power of selling to them.

Such questions last forever.

On the other hand sometimes by sheer carelessness a question gets settled and passes out of politics. This, so we are given to understand, has happened to the Irish question. It is settled. A group of Irish delegates and British ministers got together round a table and settled it. The settlement has since been celebrated at a demonstration of brotherhood by the Irish Americans of New York with only six casualties. Henceforth the Irish question passes into history. There may be some odd fighting along the Ulster border, or a little civil war with perhaps a little revolution every now and then, but as a question the thing is finished.

I must say that I for one am very sorry to think that the Irish question is gone. We shall miss it greatly. Debating societies which have flourished on it ever since 1886 will be wrecked for want of it. Dinner parties will now lose half the sparkle of their conversation. It will be no longer possible to make use of such good old remarks as, “After all the Irish are a gifted people,” or, “You must remember that fifty per cent of the great English generals were Irish.”

The settlement turned out to be a very simple affair. Ireland was merely given dominion status. What that is, no one knows, but it means that the Irish have now got it and that they sink from the high place that they had in the white light of publicity to the level of the Canadians or the New Zealanders.

Whether it is quite a proper thing to settle trouble by conferring dominion status on it, is open to question. It is a practice that is bound to spread. It is rumoured that it is now contemplated to confer dominion status upon the Borough of Poplar and on the Cambridge undergraduates. It is even understood that at the recent disarmament conference England offered to confer dominion status on the United States. President Harding would assuredly have accepted it at once but for the protest of Mr. Briand, who claimed that any such offer must be accompanied by a permission to increase the French fire-brigade by fifty per cent.

It is lamentable, too, that at the very same moment when the Irish question was extinguished, the Naval Question which had lasted for nearly fifty years was absolutely obliterated by disarmament. Henceforth the alarm of invasion is a thing of the past and the navy practically needless. Beyond keeping a fleet in the North Sea and one on the Mediterranean, and maintaining a patrol all round the rim of the Pacific Ocean, Britain will cease to be a naval power. A mere annual expenditure of fifty million pounds sterling will suffice for such thin pretence of naval preparedness as a disarmed nation will have to maintain.

This thing too, came as a surprise, or at least a surprise to the general public who are unaware of the workings of diplomacy. Those who know about such things were fully aware of what would happen if a whole lot of British sailors and diplomatists and journalists were exposed to the hospitalities of Washington. The British and Americans are both alike. You can’t drive them or lead them or coerce them, but if you give them a cigar they’ll do anything.

The inner history of the conference is only just beginning to be known. But it is whispered that immediately on his arrival Mr. Balfour was given a cigar by President Harding. Mr. Balfour at once offered to scrap five ships, and invited the entire American cabinet into the British Embassy, where Sir A. Geddes was rash enough to offer them champagne.

The American delegates immediately offered to scrap ten ships. Mr. Balfour, who simply cannot be outdone in international courtesy, saw the ten and raised it to twenty. President Harding saw the twenty, raised it to thirty, and sent out for more poker chips.

At the close of the play Lord Beatty, who is urbanity itself, offered to scrap Portsmouth Dockyard, and asked if anybody present would like Canada. President Harding replied with his customary tact that if England wanted the Philippines, he would think it what he would term a residuum of normalcy to give them away. There is no telling what might have happened had not Mr. Briand interposed to say that any transfer of the Philippines must be regarded as a signal for a twenty per cent increase in the Boy Scouts of France. As a tactful conclusion to the matter President Harding raised Mr. Balfour to the peerage.

As things are, disarmament coming along with the Irish settlement, leaves English politics in a bad way. The general outlook is too peaceful altogether. One looks round almost in vain for any of those “strained relations” which used to be the very basis of English foreign policy. In only one direction do I see light for English politics, and that is over towards Czecho-Slovakia. It appears that Czecho-Slovakia owes the British Exchequer fifty million sterling. I cannot quote the exact figure, but it is either fifty million or fifty billion. In either case Czecho-Slovakia is unable to pay. The announcement has just been made by M. Sgitzch, the new treasurer, that the country is bankrupt or at least that he sees his way to make it so in a week.

It has been at once reported in City circles that there are “strained relations” between Great Britain and Czecho-Slovakia. Now what I advise is, that if the relations are strained, keep them so. England has lost nearly all the strained relations she ever had; let her cherish the few that she still has. I know that there are other opinions. The suggestion has been at once made for a “round table conference,” at which the whole thing can be freely discussed without formal protocols and something like a “gentleman’s agreement” reached. I say, don’t do it. England is being ruined by these round table conferences. They are sitting round in Cairo and Calcutta and Capetown, filling all the best hotels and eating out the substance of the taxpayer.

I am told that Lloyd George has offered to go to Czecho-Slovakia. He should be stopped. It is said that Professor Keynes has proved that the best way to deal with the debt of Czecho-Slovakia is to send them whatever cash we have left, thereby turning the exchange upside down on them, and forcing them to buy all their Christmas presents in Manchester.

It is wiser not to do anything of the sort. England should send them a good old-fashioned ultimatum, mobilize all the naval officers at the Embankment hotels, raise the income tax another sixpence, and defy them.

If that were done it might prove a successful first step in bringing English politics back to the high plane of conversational interest from which they are threatening to fall.

TOC     INDEX

Oxford as I See It

My private station being that of a university professor, I was naturally deeply interested in the system of education in England. I was therefore led to make a special visit to Oxford and to submit the place to a searching scrutiny. Arriving one afternoon at four o’clock, I stayed at the Mitre Hotel and did not leave until eleven o’clock next morning. The whole of this time, except for one hour spent in addressing the undergraduates, was devoted to a close and eager study of the great university. When I add to this that I had already visited Oxford in 1907 and spent a Sunday at All Souls with Colonel L. S. Amery, it will be seen at once that my views on Oxford are based upon observations extending over fourteen years.

At any rate I can at least claim that my acquaintance with the British university is just as good a basis for reflection and judgment as that of the numerous English critics who come to our side of the water. I have known a famous English author to arrive at Harvard University in the morning, have lunch with President Lowell, and then write a whole chapter on the Excellence of Higher Education in America. I have known another one come to Harvard, have lunch with President Lowell, and do an entire book on the Decline of Serious Study in America. Or take the case of my own university. I remember Mr. Rudyard Kipling coming to McGill and saying in his address to the undergraduates at 2.30 p.m., “You have here a great institution.” But how could he have gathered this information? As far as I know he spent the entire morning with Sir Andrew Macphail in his house beside the campus, smoking cigarettes. When I add that he distinctly refused to visit the Palaeontologic Museum, that he saw nothing of our new hydraulic apparatus, or of our classes in Domestic Science, his judgment that we had here a great institution seems a little bit superficial. I can only put beside it, to redeem it in some measure, the hasty and ill-formed judgment expressed by Lord Milner, “McGill is a noble university”: and the rash and indiscreet expression of the Prince of Wales, when we gave him an LL.D. degree, “McGill has a glorious future.”

To my mind these unthinking judgments about our great college do harm, and I determined, therefore, that anything that I said about Oxford should be the result of the actual observation and real study based upon a bona fide residence in the Mitre Hotel.

On the strength of this basis of experience I am prepared to make the following positive and emphatic statements. Oxford is a noble university. It has a great past. It is at present the greatest university in the world: and it is quite possible that it has a great future. Oxford trains scholars of the real type better than any other place in the world. Its methods are antiquated. It despises science. Its lectures are rotten. It has professors who never teach and students who never learn. It has no order, no arrangement, no system. Its curriculum is unintelligible. It has no president. It has no state legislature to tell it how to teach, and yet – it gets there. Whether we like it or not, Oxford gives something to its students, a life and a mode of thought, which in America as yet we can emulate but not equal.

If anybody doubts this let him go and take a room at the Mitre Hotel (ten and six for a wainscotted bedroom, period of Charles I) and study the place for himself.

These singular results achieved at Oxford are all the more surprising when one considers the distressing conditions under which the students work. The lack of an adequate building fund compels them to go on working in the same old buildings which they have had for centuries. The buildings at Brasenose College have not been renewed since the year 1525. In New College and Magdalen the students are still housed in the old buildings erected in the sixteenth century. At Christ Church I was shown a kitchen which had been built at the expense of Cardinal Wolsey in 1527. Incredible though it may seem, they have no other place to cook in than this and are compelled to use it today. On the day when I saw this kitchen, four cooks were busy roasting an ox whole for the students’ lunch: this at least is what I presumed they were doing from the size of the fire-place used, but it may not have been an ox; perhaps it was a cow. On a huge table, twelve feet by six and made of slabs of wood five inches thick, two other cooks were rolling out a game pie. I estimated it as measuring three feet across. In this rude way, unchanged since the time of Henry VIII, the unhappy Oxford students are fed. I could not help contrasting it with the cosy little boarding houses on Cottage Grove Avenue where I used to eat when I was a student at Chicago, or the charming little basement dining-rooms of the students’ boarding houses in Toronto. But then, of course, Henry VIII never lived in Toronto.

The same lack of a building-fund necessitates the Oxford students, living in the identical old boarding houses they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Technically they are called “quadrangles,” “closes” and “rooms”; but I am so broken in to the usage of my student days that I can’t help calling them boarding houses. In many of these the old stairway has been worn down by the feet of ten generations of students: the windows have little latticed panes: there are old names carved here and there upon the stone, and a thick growth of ivy covers the walls. The boarding house at St. John’s College dates from 1509, the one at Christ Church from the same period. A few hundred thousand pounds would suffice to replace these old buildings with neat steel and brick structures like the normal school at Schenectady, N. Y., or the Peel Street High School at Montreal. But nothing is done. A movement was indeed attempted last autumn towards removing the ivy from the walls, but the result was unsatisfactory and they are putting it back. Any one could have told them beforehand that the mere removal of the ivy would not brighten Oxford up, unless at the same time one cleared the stones of the old inscriptions, put in steel fire-escapes, and in fact brought the boarding houses up to date.

But Henry VIII being dead, nothing was done. Yet in spite of its dilapidated buildings and its lack of fire-escapes, ventilation, sanitation, and up-to-date kitchen facilities, I persist in my assertion that I believe that Oxford, in its way, is the greatest university in the world. I am aware that this is an extreme statement and needs explanation. Oxford is much smaller in numbers, for example, than the State University of Minnesota, and is much poorer. It has, or had till yesterday, fewer students than the University of Toronto. To mention Oxford beside the 26,000 students of Columbia University sounds ridiculous. In point of money, the 39,000,000 dollar endowment of the University of Chicago, and the $35,000,000 one of Columbia, and the $43,000,000 of Harvard seem to leave Oxford nowhere. Yet the peculiar thing is that it is not nowhere. By some queer process of its own it seems to get there every time. It was therefore of the very greatest interest to me, as a profound scholar, to try to investigate just how this peculiar excellence of Oxford arises.

It can hardly be due to anything in the curriculum or programme of studies. Indeed, to any one accustomed to the best models of a university curriculum as it flourishes in the United States and Canada, the programme of studies is frankly quite laughable. There is less Applied Science in the place than would be found with us in a theological college. Hardly a single professor at Oxford would recognise a dynamo if he met it in broad daylight. The Oxford student learns nothing of chemistry, physics, heat, plumbing, electric wiring, gas-fitting or the use of a blow-torch. Any American college student can run a motor car, take a gasoline engine to pieces, fix a washer on a kitchen tap, mend a broken electric bell, and give an expert opinion on what has gone wrong with the furnace. It is these things indeed which stamp him as a college man, and occasion a very pardonable pride in the minds of his parents. But in all these things the Oxford student is the merest amateur.

This is bad enough. But after all one might say this is only the mechanical side of education. True: but one searches in vain in the Oxford curriculum for any adequate recognition of the higher and more cultured studies. Strange though it seems to us on this side of the Atlantic, there are no courses at Oxford in Housekeeping, or in Salesmanship, or in Advertising, or on Comparative Religion, or on the influence of the Press. There are no lectures whatever on Human Behaviour, on Altruism, on Egotism, or on the Play of Wild Animals. Apparently, the Oxford student does not learn these things. This cuts him off from a great deal of the larger culture of our side of the Atlantic. “What are you studying this year?” I once asked a fourth year student at one of our great colleges. “I am electing Salesmanship and Religion,” he answered. Here was a young man whose training was destined inevitably to turn him into a moral business man: either that or nothing. At Oxford Salesmanship is not taught and Religion takes the feeble form of the New Testament. The more one looks at these things the more amazing it becomes that Oxford can produce any results at all.

The effect of the comparison is heightened by the peculiar position occupied at Oxford by the professors’ lectures. In the colleges of Canada and the United States the lectures are supposed to be a really necessary and useful part of the student’s training. Again and again I have heard the graduates of my own college assert that they had got as much, or nearly as much, out of the lectures at college as out of athletics or the Greek letter society or the Banjo and Mandolin Club. In short, with us the lectures form a real part of the college life. At Oxford it is not so. The lectures, I understand, are given and may even be taken. But they are quite worthless and are not supposed to have anything much to do with the development of the student’s mind. “The lectures here,” said a Canadian student to me, “are punk.” I appealed to another student to know if this was so. “I don’t know whether I’d call them exactly punk,” he answered, “but they’re certainly rotten.” Other judgments were that the lectures were of no importance: that nobody took them: that they don’t matter: that you can take them if you like: that they do you no harm.

It appears further that the professors themselves are not keen on their lectures. If the lectures are called for they give them; if not, the professor’s feelings are not hurt. He merely waits and rests his brain until in some later year the students call for his lectures. There are men at Oxford who have rested their brains this way for over thirty years: the accumulated brain power thus dammed up is said to be colossal.

I understand that the key to this mystery is found in the operations of the person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him, that the students learn all that they know: one and all are agreed on that. Yet it is a little odd to know just how he does it. “We go over to his rooms,” said one student, “and he just lights a pipe and talks to us.” “We sit round with him,” said another, “and he simply smokes and goes over our exercises with us.” From this and other evidence I gather that what an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of students together and smoke at them. Men who have been systematically smoked at for four years turn into ripe scholars. If anybody doubts this, let him go to Oxford and he can see the thing actually in operation. A well-smoked man speaks and writes English with a grace that can be acquired in no other way.

In what was said above, I seem to have been directing criticism against the Oxford professors as such: but I have no intention of doing so. For the Oxford professor and his whole manner of being I have nothing but a profound respect. There is indeed the greatest difference between the modern up-to-date American idea of a professor and the English type. But even with us in older days, in the bygone time when such people as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were professors, one found the English idea; a professor was supposed to be a venerable kind of person, with snow-white whiskers reaching to his stomach. He was expected to moon around the campus oblivious of the world around him. If you nodded to him he failed to see you. Of money he knew nothing; of business, far less. He was, as his trustees were proud to say of him, “a child.”

On the other hand he contained within him a reservoir of learning of such depth as to be practically bottomless. None of this learning was supposed to be of any material or commercial benefit to anybody. Its use was in saving the soul and enlarging the mind.

At the head of such a group of professors was one whose beard was even whiter and longer, whose absence of mind was even still greater, and whose knowledge of money, business, and practical affairs was below zero. Him they made the president.

All this is changed in America. A university professor is now a busy, hustling person, approximating as closely to a business man as he can do it. It is on the business man that he models himself. He has a little place that he calls his “office,” with a typewriter machine and a stenographer. Here he sits and dictates letters, beginning after the best business models, “in re yours of the eighth ult., would say, etc., etc.” He writes these letters to students, to his fellow professors, to the president, indeed to any people who will let him write to them. The number of letters that he writes each month is duly counted and set to his credit. If he writes enough he will get a reputation as an “executive,” and big things may happen to him. He may even be asked to step out of the college and take a post as an “executive” in a soap company or an advertising firm. The man, in short, is a “hustler,” an “advertiser” whose highest aim is to be a “live-wire.” If he is not, he will presently be dismissed, or, to use the business term, be “let go,” by a board of trustees who are themselves hustlers and live-wires. As to the professor’s soul, he no longer needs to think of it as it has been handed over along with all the others to a Board of Censors.

The American professor deals with his students according to his lights. It is his business to chase them along over a prescribed ground at a prescribed pace like a flock of sheep. They all go humping together over the hurdles with the professor chasing them with a set of “tests” and “recitations,” “marks” and “attendances,” the whole apparatus obviously copied from the time-clock of the business man’s factory. This process is what is called “showing results.” The pace set is necessarily that of the slowest, and thus results in what I have heard Mr. Edward Beatty describe as the “convoy system of education.”

In my own opinion, reached after fifty-two years of profound reflection, this system contains in itself the seeds of destruction. It puts a premium on dulness and a penalty on genius. It circumscribes that latitude of mind which is the real spirit of learning. If we persist in it we shall presently find that true learning will fly away from our universities and will take rest wherever some individual and enquiring mind can mark out its path for itself.

Now the principal reason why I am led to admire Oxford is that the place is little touched as yet by the measuring of “results,” and by this passion for visible and provable “efficiency.” The whole system at Oxford is such as to put a premium on genius and to let mediocrity and dulness go their way. On the dull student Oxford, after a proper lapse of time, confers a degree which means nothing more than that he lived and breathed at Oxford and kept out of jail. This for many students is as much as society can expect. But for the gifted students Oxford offers great opportunities. There is no question of his hanging back till the last sheep has jumped over the fence. He need wait for no one. He may move forward as fast as he likes, following the bent of his genius. If he has in him any ability beyond that of the common herd, his tutor, interested in his studies, will smoke at him until he kindles him into a flame. For the tutor’s soul is not harassed by herding dull students, with dismissal hanging by a thread over his head in the class room. The American professor has no time to be interested in a clever student. He has time to be interested in his “deportment,” his letter-writing, his executive work, and his organising ability and his hope of promotion to a soap factory. But with that his mind is exhausted. The student of genius merely means to him a student who gives no trouble, who passes all his “tests,” and is present at all his “recitations.” Such a student also, if he can be trained to be a hustler and an advertiser, will undoubtedly “make good.” But beyond that the professor does not think of him. The everlasting principle of equality has inserted itself in a place where it has no right to be, and where inequality is the breath of life.

American or Canadian college trustees would be horrified at the notion of professors who apparently do no work, give few or no lectures and draw their pay merely for existing. Yet these are really the only kind of professors worth having – I mean, men who can be trusted with a vague general mission in life, with a salary guaranteed at least till their death, and a sphere of duties entrusted solely to their own consciences and the promptings of their own desires. Such men are rare, but a single one of them, when found, is worth ten “executives” and a dozen “organisers.”

The excellence of Oxford, then, as I see it, lies in the peculiar vagueness of the organisation of its work. It starts from the assumption that the professor is a really learned man whose sole interest lies in his own sphere: and that a student, or at least the only student with whom the university cares to reckon seriously, is a young man who desires to know. This is an ancient mediaeval attitude long since buried in more up-to-date places under successive strata of compulsory education, state teaching, the democratisation of knowledge and the substitution of the shadow for the substance, and the casket for the gem. No doubt, in newer places the thing has got to be so. Higher education in America flourishes chiefly as a qualification for entrance into a money-making profession, and not as a thing in itself. But in Oxford one can still see the surviving outline of a nobler type of structure and a higher inspiration.

I do not mean to say, however, that my judgment of Oxford is one undiluted stream of praise. In one respect at least I think that Oxford has fallen away from the high ideals of the Middle Ages. I refer to the fact that it admits women students to its studies. In the Middle Ages women were regarded with a peculiar chivalry long since lost. It was taken for granted that their brains were too delicately poised to allow them to learn anything. It was presumed that their minds were so exquisitely hung that intellectual effort might disturb them. The present age has gone to the other extreme: and this is seen nowhere more than in the crowding of women into colleges originally designed for men. Oxford, I regret to find, has not stood out against this change.

To a profound scholar like myself, the presence of these young women, many of them most attractive, flittering up and down the streets of Oxford in their caps and gowns, is very distressing.

Who is to blame for this and how they first got in I do not know. But I understand that they first of all built a private college of their own close to Oxford, and then edged themselves in foot by foot. If this is so they only followed up the precedent of the recognised method in use in America. When an American college is established, the women go and build a college of their own overlooking the grounds. Then they put on becoming caps and gowns and stand and look over the fence at the college athletics. The male undergraduates, who were originally and by nature a hardy lot, were not easily disturbed. But inevitably some of the senior trustees fell in love with the first year girls and became convinced that coeducation was a noble cause. American statistics show that between 1880 and 1900 the number of trustees and senior professors who married girl undergraduates or who wanted to do so reached a percentage of – I forget the exact percentage; it was either a hundred or a little over.

I don’t know just what happened at Oxford but presumably something of the sort took place. In any case the women are now all over the place. They attend the college, lectures, they row in a boat, and they perambulate the High Street. They are even offering a serious competition against the men. Last year they carried off the ping-pong championship and took the chancellor’s prize for needlework, while in music, cooking and millinery the men are said to be nowhere.

There is no doubt that unless Oxford puts the women out while there is yet time, they will overrun the whole university. What this means to the progress of learning few can tell and those who know are afraid to say.

Cambridge University, I am glad to see, still sets its face sternly against this innovation. I am reluctant to count any superiority in the University of Cambridge. Having twice visited Oxford, having made the place a subject of profound study for many hours at a time, having twice addressed its undergraduates, and having stayed at the Mitre Hotel, I consider myself an Oxford man. But I must admit that Cambridge has chosen the wiser part.

Last autumn, while I was in London on my voyage of discovery, a vote was taken at Cambridge to see if the women who have already a private college nearby, should be admitted to the university. They were triumphantly shut out; and as a fit and proper sign of enthusiasm the undergraduates went over in a body and knocked down the gates of the women’s college. I know that it is a terrible thing to say that any one approved of this. All the London papers came out with headings that read – Are Our Undergraduates Turning Into Baboons? and so on. The Manchester Guardian draped its pages in black and even the London Morning Post was afraid to take bold ground in the matter. But I do know also that there was a great deal of secret chuckling and jubilation in the London clubs. Nothing was expressed openly. The men of England have been too terrorised by the women for that. But in safe corners of the club, out of earshot of the waiters and away from casual strangers, little groups of elderly men chuckled quietly together. “Knocked down their gates, eh?” said the wicked old men to one another, and then whispered guiltily behind an uplifted hand, “Serve ’em right.” Nobody dared to say anything outside. If they had some one would have got up and asked a question in the House of Commons. When this is done all England falls flat upon its face.

But for my part when I heard of the Cambridge vote, I felt as Lord Chatham did when he said in parliament, “Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted.” For I have long harboured views of my own upon the higher education of women. In these days, however, it requires no little hardihood to utter a single word of criticism against it. It is like throwing half a brick through the glass roof of a conservatory. It is bound to make trouble. Let me hasten, therefore, to say that I believe most heartily in the higher education of women; in fact, the higher the better. The only question to my mind is: What is “higher education” and how do you get it? With which goes the secondary enquiry, What is a woman and is she just the same as a man? I know that it sounds a terrible thing to say in these days, but I don’t believe she is.

Let me say also that when I speak of coeducation I speak of what I know. I was coeducated myself some thirty-five years ago, at the very beginning of the thing. I learned my Greek alongside of a bevy of beauty on the opposite benches that mashed up the irregular verbs for us very badly. Incidentally, those girls are all married long since, and all the Greek they know now you could put under a thimble. But of that presently.

I have had further experience as well. I spent three years in the graduate school of Chicago, where coeducational girls were as thick as autumn leaves – and some thicker. And as a college professor at McGill University in Montreal, I have taught mingled classes of men and women for twenty years.

On the basis of which experience I say with assurance that the thing is a mistake and has nothing to recommend it but its relative cheapness. Let me emphasise this last point and have done with it. Coeducation is of course a great economy. To teach ten men and ten women in a single class of twenty costs only half as much as to teach two classes. Where economy must rule, then, the thing has got to be. But where the discussion turns not on what is cheapest, but on what is best, then the case is entirely different.

The fundamental trouble is that men and women are different creatures, with different minds and different aptitudes and different paths in life. There is no need to raise here the question of which is superior and which is inferior (though I think, the Lord help me, I know the answer to that too). The point lies in the fact that they are different.

But the mad passion for equality has masked this obvious fact. When women began to demand, quite rightly, a share in higher education, they took for granted that they wanted the same curriculum as the men. They never stopped to ask whether their aptitudes were not in various directions higher and better than those of the men, and whether it might not be better for their sex to cultivate the things which were best suited to their minds. Let me be more explicit. In all that goes with physical and mathematical science, women, on the average, are far below the standard of men. There are, of course, exceptions. But they prove nothing. It is no use to quote to me the case of some brilliant girl who stood first in physics at Cornell. That’s nothing. There is an elephant in the zoo that can count up to ten, yet I refuse to reckon myself his inferior.

Tabulated results spread over years, and the actual experience of those who teach show that in the whole domain of mathematics and physics women are outclassed. At McGill the girls of our first year have wept over their failures in elementary physics these twenty-five years. It is time that some one dried their tears and took away the subject.

But, in any case, examination tests are never the whole story. To those who know, a written examination is far from being a true criterion of capacity. It demands too much of mere memory, imitativeness, and the insidious willingness to absorb other people’s ideas. Parrots and crows would do admirably in examinations. Indeed, the colleges are full of them.

But take, on the other hand, all that goes with the aesthetic side of education, with imaginative literature and the cult of beauty. Here women are, or at least ought to be, the superiors of men. Women were in primitive times the first story-tellers. They are still so at the cradle side. The original college woman was the witch, with her incantations and her prophecies and the glow of her bright imagination, and if brutal men of duller brains had not burned it out of her, she would be incanting still. To my thinking, we need more witches in the colleges and less physics.

I have seen such young witches myself – if I may keep the word: I like it – in colleges such as Wellesley in Massachusetts and Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, where there isn’t a man allowed within the three mile limit. To my mind, they do infinitely better thus by themselves. They are freer, less restrained. They discuss things openly in their classes; they lift up their voices, and they speak, whereas a girl in such a place as McGill, with men all about her, sits for four years as silent as a frog full of shot.

But there is a deeper trouble still. The careers of the men and women who go to college together are necessarily different, and the preparation is all aimed at the man’s career. The men are going to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, business men, and politicians. And the women are not.

There is no use pretending about it. It may sound an awful thing to say, but the women are going to be married. That is, and always has been, their career; and, what is more, they know it; and even at college, while they are studying algebra and political economy, they have their eye on it sideways all the time. The plain fact is that, after a girl has spent four years of her time and a great deal of her parents’ money in equipping herself for a career that she is never going to have, the wretched creature goes and gets married, and in a few years she has forgotten which is the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, and she doesn’t care. She has much better things to think of.

At this point some one will shriek: “But surely, even for marriage, isn’t it right that a girl should have a college education?” To which I hasten to answer: most assuredly. I freely admit that a girl who knows algebra, or once knew it, is a far more charming companion and a nobler wife and mother than a girl who doesn’t know x from y. But the point is this: Does the higher education that fits a man to be a lawyer also fit a person to be a wife and mother? Or, in other words, is a lawyer a wife and mother? I say he is not. Granted that a girl is to spend four years in time and four thousand dollars in money in going to college, why train her for a career that she is never going to adopt? Why not give her an education that will have a meaning and a harmony with the real life that she is to follow?

For example, suppose that during her four years every girl lucky enough to get a higher education spent at least six months of it in the training and discipline of a hospital as a nurse. There is more education and character making in that than in a whole bucketful of algebra.

But no, the woman insists on snatching her share of an education designed by Erasmus or William of Wykeham or William of Occam for the creation of scholars and lawyers; and when later on in her home there is a sudden sickness or accident, and the life or death of those nearest to her hangs upon skill and knowledge and a trained fortitude in emergency, she must needs send in all haste for a hired woman to fill the place that she herself has never learned to occupy.

But I am not here trying to elaborate a whole curriculum. I am only trying to indicate that higher education for the man is one thing, for the woman another. Nor do I deny the fact that women have got to earn their living. Their higher education must enable them to do that. They cannot all marry on their graduation day. But that is no great matter. No scheme of education that any one is likely to devise will fail in this respect.

The positions that they hold as teachers or civil servants they would fill all the better if their education were fitted to their wants.

Some few, a small minority, really and truly “have a career,” – husbandless and childless – in which the sacrifice is great and the honour to them, perhaps, all the higher. And others no doubt dream of a career in which a husband and a group of blossoming children are carried as an appendage to a busy life at the bar or on the platform. But all such are the mere minority, so small as to make no difference to the general argument.

But there – I have written quite enough to make plenty of trouble except perhaps at Cambridge University. So I return with relief to my general study of Oxford. Viewing the situation as a whole, I am led then to the conclusion that there must be something in the life of Oxford itself that makes for higher learning. Smoked at by his tutor, fed in Henry VIII’s kitchen, and sleeping in a tangle of ivy, the student evidently gets something not easily obtained in America. And the more I reflect on the matter the more I am convinced that it is the sleeping in the ivy that does it. How different it is from student life as I remember it!

When I was a student at the University of Toronto thirty years ago, I lived – from start to finish – in seventeen different boarding houses. As far as I am aware these houses have not, or not yet, been marked with tablets. But they are still to be found in the vicinity of McCaul and Darcy, and St. Patrick Streets. Any one who doubts the truth of what I have to say may go and look at them.

I was not alone in the nomadic life that I led. There were hundreds of us drifting about in this fashion from one melancholy habitation to another. We lived as a rule two or three in a house, sometimes alone. We dined in the basement. We always had beef, done up in some way after it was dead, and there were always soda biscuits on the table. They used to have a brand of soda biscuits in those days in the Toronto boarding houses that I have not seen since. They were better than dog biscuits but with not so much snap. My contemporaries will all remember them. A great many of the leading barristers and professional men of Toronto were fed on them.

In the life we led we had practically no opportunities for association on a large scale, no common rooms, no reading rooms, nothing. We never saw the magazines – personally I didn’t even know the names of them. The only interchange of ideas we ever got was by going over to the Caer Howell Hotel on University Avenue and interchanging them there.

I mention these melancholy details not for their own sake but merely to emphasise the point that when I speak of students’ dormitories, and the larger life which they offer, I speak of what I know.

If we had had at Toronto, when I was a student, the kind of dormitories and dormitory life that they have at Oxford, I don’t think I would ever have graduated. I’d have been there still. The trouble is that the universities on our Continent are only just waking up to the idea of what a university should mean. They were, very largely, instituted and organised with the idea that a university was a place where young men were sent to absorb the contents of books and to listen to lectures in the class rooms. The student was pictured as a pallid creature, burning what was called the “midnight oil,” his wan face bent over his desk. If you wanted to do something for him you gave him a book: if you wanted to do something really large on his behalf you gave him a whole basketful of them. If you wanted to go still further and be a benefactor to the college at large, you endowed a competitive scholarship and set two or more pallid students working themselves to death to get it.

The real thing for the student is the life and environment that surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by the active operation of his own intellect and not as the passive recipient of lectures. And for this active operation what he really needs most is the continued and intimate contact with his fellows. Students must live together and eat together, talk and smoke together. Experience shows that that is how their minds really grow. And they must live together in a rational and comfortable way. They must eat in a big dining room or hall, with oak beams across the ceiling, and the stained glass in the windows, and with a shield or tablet here or there upon the wall, to remind them between times of the men who went before them and left a name worthy of the memory of the college. If a student is to get from his college what it ought to give him, a college dormitory, with the life in common that it brings, is his absolute right. A university that fails to give it to him is cheating him.

If I were founding a university – and I say it with all the seriousness of which I am capable – I would found first a smoking room; then when I had a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory; then after that, or more probably with it, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over that I couldn’t use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.

This chapter has sounded in the most part like a continuous eulogy of Oxford with but little in favour of our American colleges. I turn therefore with pleasure to the more congenial task of showing what is wrong with Oxford and with the English university system generally, and the aspect in which our American universities far excell the British.

The point is that Henry VIII is dead. The English are so proud of what Henry VIII and the benefactors of earlier centuries did for the universities that they forget the present. There is little or nothing in England to compare with the magnificent generosity of individuals, provinces and states, which is building up the colleges of the United States and Canada. There used to be. But by some strange confusion of thought the English people admire the noble gifts of Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII and Queen Margaret, and do not realize that the Carnegies and Rockefellers and the William Macdonalds are the Cardinal Wolseys of today. The University of Chicago was founded upon oil. McGill University rests largely on a basis of tobacco. In America the world of commerce and business levies on itself a noble tribute in favour of the higher learning. In England, with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as that at Bristol, there is little of the sort. The feudal families are content with what their remote ancestors have done: they do not try to emulate it in any great degree.

In the long run this must count. Of all the various reforms that are talked of at Oxford, and of all the imitations of American methods that are suggested, the only one worth while, to my thinking, is to capture a few millionaires, give them honorary degrees at a million pounds sterling apiece, and tell them to imagine that they are Henry the Eighth. I give Oxford warning that if this is not done the place will not last another two centuries.

TOC     INDEX

The British and
the American Press

The only paper from which a man can really get the news of the world in a shape that he can understand is the newspaper of his own “home town.” For me, unless I can have the Montreal Gazette at my breakfast, and the Montreal Star at my dinner, I don’t really know what is happening. In the same way I have seen a man from the south of Scotland settle down to read the Dumfries Chronicle with a deep sigh of satisfaction: and a man from Burlington, Vermont, pick up the Burlington Eagle and study the foreign news in it as the only way of getting at what was really happening in France and Germany.

The reason is, I suppose, that there are different ways of serving up the news and we each get used to our own. Some people like the news fed to them gently: others like it thrown at them in a bombshell: some prefer it to be made as little of as possible; they want it minimised: others want the maximum.

This is where the greatest difference lies between the British newspapers and those of the United States and Canada. With us in America the great thing is to get the news and shout it at the reader; in England they get the news and then break it to him as gently as possible. Hence the big headings, the bold type, and the double columns of the American paper, and the small headings and the general air of quiet and respectability of the English Press.

It is quite beside the question to ask which is the better. Neither is. They are different things: that’s all. The English newspaper is designed to be read quietly, propped up against the sugar bowl of a man eating a slow breakfast in a quiet corner of a club, or by a retired banker seated in a leather chair nearly asleep, or by a country vicar sitting in a wicker chair under a pergola. The American paper is for reading by a man hanging on the straps of a clattering subway express, by a man eating at a lunch counter, by a man standing on one leg, by a man getting a two-minute shave, or by a man about to have his teeth drawn by a dentist.

In other words, there is a difference of atmosphere. It is not merely in the type and the lettering, it is a difference in the way the news is treated and the kind of words that are used. In America we love such words as “gun-men” and “joy-ride” and “death-cell”: in England they prefer “person of doubtful character” and “motor travelling at excessive speed” and “corridor No. 6.” If a milk-waggon collides in the street with a coal-cart, we write that a “life-waggon” has struck a “death-cart.” We call a murderer a “thug” or a “gun-man” or a “yeg-man.” In England they simply call him “the accused who is a grocer’s assistant in Houndsditch.” That designation would knock any decent murder story to pieces.

Hence comes the great difference between the American “lead” or opening sentence of the article, and the English method of commencement. In the American paper the idea is that the reader is so busy that he must first be offered the news in one gulp. After that if he likes it he can go on and eat some more of it. So the opening sentence must give the whole thing. Thus, suppose that a leading member of the United States Congress has committed suicide. This is the way in which the American reporter deals with it.

“Seated in his room at the Grand Hotel with his carpet slippers on his feet and his body wrapped in a blue dressing-gown with pink insertions, after writing a letter of farewell to his wife and emptying a bottle of Scotch whisky in which he exonerated her from all culpability in his death, Congressman Ahasuerus P. Tigg was found by night-watchman, Henry T. Smith, while making his rounds as usual with four bullets in his stomach.”

Now let us suppose that a leading member of the House of Commons in England had done the same thing. Here is the way it would be written up in a first-class London newspaper. The heading would be Home and General Intelligence. That is inserted so as to keep the reader soothed and quiet and is no doubt thought better than the American heading Bughouse Congressman Blows Out Brains in Hotel. After the heading Home and General Intelligence the English paper runs the subheading Incident at the Grand Hotel. The reader still doesn’t know what happened; he isn’t meant to. Then the article begins like this:

“The Grand Hotel, which is situated at the corner of Millbank and Victoria Streets, was the scene last night of a distressing incident.”

“What is it?” thinks the reader.

“The hotel itself, which is an old Georgian structure dating probably from about 1750, is a quiet establishment, its clientele mainly drawn from business men in the cattle-droving and distillery business from South Wales.”

“What happened?” thinks the reader.

“Its cuisine has long been famous for the excellence of its boiled shrimps.”

“What happened?”

“While the hotel itself is also known as the meeting place of the Surbiton Harmonic Society and other associations.”

“What happened?”

“Among the more prominent of the guests of the hotel has been numbered during the present Parliamentary session Mr. Llewylln Ap. Jones, M. P., for South Llanfydd. Mr. Jones apparently came to his room last night at about ten p.m., and put on his carpet slippers and his blue dressing gown. He then seems to have gone to the cupboard and taken from it a whisky bottle which however proved to be empty. The unhappy gentleman then apparently went to bed. . . .”

At that point the American reader probably stops reading, thinking that he has heard it all. The unhappy man found that the bottle was empty and went to bed: very natural: and the affair very properly called a “distressing incident”: quite right. But the trained English reader would know that there was more to come and that the air of quiet was only assumed, and he would read on and on until at last the tragic interest heightened, the four shots were fired, with a good long pause after each for discussion of the path of the bullet through Mr. Ap. Jones.

I am not saying that either the American way or the British way is the better. They are just two different ways, that’s all. But the result is that anybody from the United States or Canada reading the English papers gets the impression that nothing is happening: and an English reader of our newspapers gets the idea that the whole place is in a tumult.

When I was in London I used always, in glancing at the morning papers, to get a first impression that the whole world was almost asleep. There was, for example, a heading called Indian Intelligence that showed, on close examination, that two thousand Parsees had died of the blue plague, that a powder boat had blown up at Bombay, that some one had thrown a couple of bombs at one of the provincial governors, and that four thousand agitators had been sentenced to twenty years hard labour each. But the whole thing was just called “Indian Intelligence.” Similarly, there was a little item called, “Our Chinese Correspondent.” That one explained ten lines down, in very small type, that a hundred thousand Chinese had been drowned in a flood. And there was another little item labelled “Foreign Gossip,” under which was mentioned that the Pope was dead, and that the President of Paraguay had been assassinated.

In short, I got the impression that I was living in an easy drowsy world, as no doubt the editor meant me to. It was only when the Montreal Star arrived by post that I felt that the world was still revolving pretty rapidly on its axis and that there was still something doing.

As with the world news so it is with the minor events of ordinary life – birth, death, marriage, accidents, crime. Let me give an illustration. Suppose that in a suburb of London a housemaid has endeavoured to poison her employer’s family by putting a drug in the coffee. Now on our side of the water we should write that little incident up in a way to give it life, and put headings over it that would capture the reader’s attention in a minute. We should begin it thus:

Pretty Parlour Maid

Deals Death-Drink

To Clubman’s Family

The English reader would ask at once, how do we know that the parlour maid is pretty? We don’t. But our artistic sense tells us that she ought to be. Pretty parlour maids are the only ones we take any interest in: if an ugly parlour maid poisoned her employer’s family we should hang her. Then again, the English reader would say, how do we know that the man is a clubman? Have we ascertained this fact definitely, and if so, of what club or clubs is he a member? Well, we don’t know, except in so far as the thing is self-evident. Any man who has romance enough in his life to be poisoned by a pretty housemaid ought to be in a club. That’s the place for him. In fact, with us the word club man doesn’t necessarily mean a man who belongs to a club: it is defined as a man who is arrested in a gambling den, or fined for speeding a motor or who shoots another person in a hotel corridor. Therefore this man must be a club man. Having settled the heading, we go on with the text:

“Brooding over love troubles which she has hitherto refused to divulge under the most grilling fusillade of rapid-fire questions shot at her by the best brains of the New York police force, Miss Mary De Forrest, a handsome brunette thirty-six inches around the hips, employed as a parlour maid in the residence of Mr. Spudd Bung, a well-known club man forty-two inches around the chest, was arrested yesterday by the flying squad of the emergency police after having, so it is alleged, put four ounces of alleged picrate of potash into the alleged coffee of her employer’s family’s alleged breakfast at their residence on Hudson Heights in the most fashionable quarter of the metropolis. Dr. Slink, the leading fashionable practitioner of the neighbourhood who was immediately summoned said that but for his own extraordinary dexterity and promptness the death of the whole family, if not of the entire entourage, was a certainty. The magistrate in committing Miss De Forrest for trial took occasion to enlarge upon her youth and attractive appearance: he castigated the moving pictures severely and said that he held them together with the public school system and the present method of doing the hair, directly responsible for the crimes of the kind alleged.”

Now when you read this over you begin to feel that something big has happened. Here is a man like Dr. Slink, all quivering with promptness and dexterity. Here is an inserted picture, a photograph, a brick house in a row marked with a cross (+) and labelled “The Bung Residence as it appeared immediately after the alleged outrage.” It isn’t really. It is just a photograph that we use for this sort of thing and have grown to like. It is called sometimes: “Residence of Senator Borah” or “Scene of the Recent Spiritualistic Manifestations” or anything of the sort. As long as it is marked with a cross (+) the reader will look at it with interest.

In other words we make something out of an occurrence like this. It doesn’t matter if it all fades out afterwards when it appears that Mary De Forrest merely put ground allspice into the coffee in mistake for powdered sugar and that the family didn’t drink it anyway. The reader has already turned to other mysteries.

But contrast the pitifully tame way in which the same event is written up in England. Here it is:

SUBURBAN ITEM

“Yesterday at the police court of Surbiton-on-Thames Mary Forrester, a servant in the employ of Mr. S. Bung was taken into custody on a charge of having put a noxious preparation, possibly poison, into the coffee of her employer’s family. The young woman was remanded for a week.”

Look at that. Mary Forrester a servant? How wide was she round the chest? It doesn’t say. Mr. S. Bung? Of what club was he a member? None, apparently. Then who cares if he is poisoned? And “the young woman!” What a way to speak of a decent girl who never did any other harm than to poison a club man. And the English magistrate! What a tame part he must have played: his name indeed doesn’t occur at all: apparently he didn’t enlarge on the girl’s good looks, or “comment on her attractive appearance,” or anything. I don’t suppose that he even asked Mary Forrester out to lunch with him.

Notice also that, according to the English way of writing the thing up, as soon as the girl was remanded for a week the incident is closed. The English reporter doesn’t apparently know enough to follow Miss De Forrest to her home (called “the De Forrest Residence” and marked with a cross, +) The American reporter would make certain to supplement what went above with further information of this fashion. “Miss De Forrest when seen later at her own home by a representative of The Eagle said that she regretted very much having been put to the necessity of poisoning Mr. Bung. She had in the personal sense nothing against Mr. Bung and apart from poisoning him she had every respect for Mr. Bung. Miss De Forrest, who talks admirably on a variety of topics, expressed herself as warmly in favour of the League of Nations and as a devotee of the short ballot and proportional representation.”

Any American reader who studies the English Press comes upon these wasted opportunities every day. There are indeed certain journals of a newer type which are doing their best to imitate us. But they don’t really get it yet. They use type up to about one inch and after that they get afraid.

I hope that in describing the spirit of the English Press I do not seem to be writing with any personal bitterness. I admit that there might be a certain reason for such a bias. During my stay in England I was most anxious to appear as a contributor to some of the leading papers. This is, with the English, a thing that always adds prestige. To be able to call oneself a “contributor” to the Times or to Punch or the Morning Post or the Spectator, is a high honour. I have met these “contributors” all over the British Empire. Some, I admit, look strange. An ancient wreck in the back bar of an Ontario tavern (ancient régime) has told me that he was a contributor to the Times: the janitor of the building where I lived admits that he is a contributor to Punch: a man arrested in Bristol for vagrancy while I was in England pleaded that he was a contributor to the Spectator. In fact, it is an honour that everybody seems to be able to get but me.

I had often tried before I went to England to contribute to the great English newspapers. I had never succeeded. But I hoped that while in England itself the very propinquity of the atmosphere, I mean the very contiguity of the surroundings, would render the attempt easier. I tried and I failed. My failure was all the more ignominious in that I had very direct personal encouragement. “By all means,” said the editor of the London Times, “do something for us while you are here. Best of all, do something in a political way; that’s rather our special line.” I had already received almost an identical encouragement from the London Morning Post, and in a more qualified way from the Manchester Guardian. In short, success seemed easy.

I decided therefore to take some simple political event of the peculiar kind that always makes a stir in English politics and write it up for these English papers. To simplify matters I thought it better to use one and the same incident and write it up in three different ways and get paid for it three times. All of those who write for the Press will understand the motive at once. I waited therefore and watched the papers to see if anything interesting might happen to the Ahkoond of Swat or the Sandjak of Novi Bazar or any other native potentate. Within a couple of days I got what I wanted in the following item, which I need hardly say is taken word for word from the Press despatches:

“Perim, via Bombay. News comes by messenger that the Shriek of Kowfat who has been living under the convention of 1898 has violated the modus operandi. He is said to have torn off his suspenders, dipped himself in oil and proclaimed a Jehad. The situation is critical.”

Everybody who knows England knows that this is just the kind of news that the English love. On our side of the Atlantic we should be bothered by the fact that we did not know where Kowfat is, nor what was the convention of 1898. They are not. They just take it for granted that Kowfat is one of the many thousand places that they “own,” somewhere in the outer darkness. They have so many Kowfats that they cannot keep track of them.

I knew therefore that everybody would be interested in any discussion of what was at once called “the Kowfat Crisis” and I wrote it up. I resisted the temptation to begin after the American fashion, “Shriek sheds suspenders,” and suited the writing, as I thought, to the market I was writing for. I wrote up the incident for the Morning Post after the following fashion:

“The news from Kowfat affords one more instance of a painful back-down on the part of the Government. Our policy of spineless supineness is now reaping its inevitable reward. To us there is only one thing to be done. If the Shriek has torn off his suspenders he must be made to put them on again. We have always held that where the imperial prestige of this country is concerned there is no room for hesitation. In the present instance our prestige is at stake: the matter involves our reputation in the eyes of the surrounding natives, the Bantu Hottentots, the Negritos, the Dwarf Men of East Abyssinia, and the Dog Men of Darfur. What will they think of us? If we fail in this crisis their notion of us will fall fifty per cent. In our opinion this country cannot stand a fifty per cent drop in the estimation of the Dog Men. The time is one that demands action. An ultimatum should be sent at once to the Shriek of Kowfat. If he has one already we should send him another. He should be made at once to put on his suspenders. The oil must be scraped off him, and he must be told plainly that if a pup like him tries to start a Jehad he will have to deal with the British Navy. We call the Shriek a pup in no sense of belittling him as our imperial ally but because we consider that the present is no time for half words and we do not regard pup as half a word. Events such as the present, rocking the Empire to its base, make one long for the spacious days of a Salisbury or a Queen Elizabeth, or an Alfred the Great or a Julius Caesar. We doubt whether the present Cabinet is in this class.”

Not to lose any time in the coming and going of the mail, always a serious thought for the contributor to the Press waiting for a cheque, I sent another editorial on the same topic to the Manchester Guardian. It ran as follows:

“The action of the Shriek of Kowfat in proclaiming a Jehad against us is one that amply justifies all that we have said editorially since Jeremy Bentham died. We have always held that the only way to deal with a Mohammedan potentate like the Shriek is to treat him like a Christian. The Khalifate of Kowfat at present buys its whole supply of cotton piece goods in our market and pays cash. The Shriek, who is a man of enlightenment, has consistently upheld the principles of Free Trade. Not only are our exports of cotton piece goods, bibles, rum, and beads constantly increasing, but they are more than offset by our importation from Kowfat of ivory, rubber, gold, and oil. In short, we have never seen the principles of Free Trade better illustrated. The Shriek, it is now reported, refuses to wear the braces presented to him by our envoy at the time of his coronation five years ago. He is said to have thrown them into the mud. But we have no reason to suppose that this is meant as a blow at our prestige. It may be that after five years of use the little pulleys of the braces no longer work properly. We have ourselves in our personal life known instances of this, and can speak of the sense of irritation occasioned. Even we have thrown on the floor ours. And in any case, as we have often reminded our readers, what is prestige? If any one wants to hit us, let him hit us right there. We regard a blow at our trade as far more deadly than a blow at our prestige.

“The situation as we see it demands immediate reparation on our part. The principal grievance of the Shriek arises from the existence of our fort and garrison on the Kowfat river. Our proper policy is to knock down the fort, and either remove the garrison or give it to the Shriek. We are convinced that as soon as the Shriek realizes that we are prepared to treat him in the proper Christian spirit, he will at once respond with true Mohammedan generosity.

“We have further to remember that in what we do we are being observed by the neighbouring tribes, the Negritos, the Dwarf Men, and the Dog Men of Darfur. These are not only shrewd observers but substantial customers. The Dwarf Men at present buy all their cotton on the Manchester market and the Dog Men depend on us for their soap.

“The present crisis is one in which the nation needs statesmanship and a broad outlook upon the world. In the existing situation we need not the duplicity of a Machiavelli, but the commanding prescience of a Gladstone or an Alfred the Great, or a Julius Caesar. Luckily we have exactly this type of man at the head of affairs.”

After completing the above I set to work without delay on a similar exercise for the London Times. The special excellence of the Times, as everybody knows is its fulness of information. For generations past the Times has commanded a peculiar minuteness of knowledge about all parts of the Empire. It is the proud boast of this great journal that to whatever far away, outlandish part of the Empire you may go, you will always find a correspondent of the Times looking for something to do. It is said that the present proprietor has laid it down as his maxim, “I don’t want men who think; I want men who know.” The arrangements for thinking are made separately.

Incidentally I may say that I had personal opportunities while I was in England of realising that the reputation of the Times staff for the possession of information is well founded. Dining one night with some members of the staff, I happened to mention Saskatchewan. One of the editors at the other end of the table looked up at the mention of the name. “Saskatchewan,” he said, “ah, yes; that’s not far from Alberta, is it?” and then turned quietly to his food again. When I remind the reader that Saskatchewan is only half an inch from Alberta he may judge of the nicety of the knowledge involved. Having all this in mind, I recast the editorial and sent it to the London Times as follows:

“The news that the Sultan of Kowfat has thrown away his suspenders renders it of interest to indicate the exact spot where he has thrown them. (See map). Kowfat, lying as the reader knows, on the Kowfat River, occupies the hinterland between the back end of south-west Somaliland and the east, that is to say, the west, bank of Lake P’schu. It thus forms an enclave between the Dog Men of Darfur and the Negritos of T’chk. The inhabitants of Kowfat are a coloured race three quarters negroid and more than three quarters tabloid.

“As a solution of the present difficulty, the first thing required in our opinion is to send out a boundary commission to delineate more exactly still just where Kowfat is. After that an ethnographical survey might be completed.”

—

It was a matter not only of concern but of surprise to me that not one of the three contributions recited above was accepted by the English Press. The Morning Post complained that my editorial was not firm enough in tone, the Guardian that it was not humane enough, the Times that I had left out the latitude and longitude always expected by their readers.

I thought it not worth while to bother to revise the articles as I had meantime conceived the idea that the same material might be used in the most delightfully amusing way as the basis of a poem for Punch. Everybody knows the kind of verses that are contributed to Punch by Sir Owen Seaman and Mr. Charles Graves and men of that sort. And everybody has been struck, as I have, by the extraordinary easiness of the performance. All that one needs is to get some odd little incident, such as the revolt of the Sultan of Kowfat, make up an amusing title, and then string the verses together in such a way as to make rhymes with all the odd words that come into the narrative. In fact, the thing is ease itself.

I therefore saw a glorious chance with the Sultan of Kowfat. Indeed, I fairly chuckled to myself when I thought what amusing rhymes could be made with “Negritos,” “modus operandi” and “Dog Men of Darfur.” I can scarcely imagine anything more excruciatingly funny than the rhymes which can be made with them. And as for the title, bringing in the word Kowfat or some play upon it, the thing is perfectly obvious. The idea amused me so much that I set to work at the poem at once. I am sorry to say that I failed to complete it. Not that I couldn’t have done so, given time; I am quite certain that if I had had about two years I could have done it. The main structure of the poem, however, is here and I give it for what it is worth. Even as it is it strikes me as extraordinarily good. Here it is:

Title

................... | ............ Kowfat

Verse One

................... | ...................
................... | ..... modus operandi;
................... | ...................
................... | ..... Negritos:
................... | ..... P’shu.

Verse Two

................... | ...................
................... | ..... Khalifate;
................... | ..... Dog Men of Darfur:
................... | ..... T’chk.

Excellent little thing, isn’t it? All it needs is the rhymes. As far as it goes it has just exactly the ease and the sweep required. And if some one will tell me how Owen Seaman and those people get the rest of the ease and the sweep I’ll be glad to put it in.

One further experiment of the same sort I made with the English Press in another direction and met again with failure. If there is one paper in the world for which I have respect and – if I may say it – an affection, it is the London Spectator. I suppose that I am only one of thousands and thousands of people who feel that way. Why under the circumstances the Spectator failed to publish my letter I cannot say. I wanted no money for it: I only wanted the honour of seeing it inserted beside the letter written from the Rectory, Hops, Hants, or the Shrubbery, Potts, Shrops – I mean from one of those places where the readers of the Spectator live. I thought too that my letter had just the right touch. However, they wouldn’t take it: something wrong with it somewhere, I suppose. This is it:

To the Editor,

The Spectator,

London, England.

Dear Sir,

Your correspondence of last week contained such interesting information in regard to the appearance of the first cowslip in Kensington Common that I trust that I may, without fatiguing your readers to the point of saturation, narrate a somewhat similar and I think, sir, an equally interesting experience of my own. While passing through Lambeth Gardens yesterday towards the hour of dusk I observed a crow with one leg sitting beside the duck-pond and apparently lost in thought. There was no doubt that the bird was of the species pulex hibiscus, an order which is becoming singularly rare in the vicinity of the metropolis. Indeed, so far as I am aware, the species has not been seen in London since 1680. I may say that on recognising the bird I drew as near as I could, keeping myself behind the shrubbery, but the pulex hibiscus which apparently caught a brief glimpse of my face uttered a cry of distress and flew away.

I am, sir,

Believe me,
yours, sir,

O. Y. Botherwithit.

(Ret’d Major
Burmese Army.)

Distressed by these repeated failures, I sank back to a lower level of English literary work, the puzzle department. For some reason or other the English delight in puzzles. It is, I think, a part of the peculiar school-boy pedantry which is the reverse side of their literary genius. I speak with a certain bitterness because in puzzle work I met with no success whatever. My solutions were never acknowledged, never paid for, in fact they were ignored. But I append two or three of them here, with apologies to the editors of the Strand and other papers who should have had the honour of publishing them first.

Puzzle I

Can you fold a square piece of paper in such a way that with a single fold it forms a pentagon?

My Solution: Yes, if I knew what a pentagon was.

Puzzle II

A and B agree to hold a walking match across an open meadow, each seeking the shortest line. A, walking from corner to corner, may be said to diangulate the hypotenuse of the meadow. B, allowing for a slight rise in the ground, walks on an obese tabloid. Which wins?

My Solution: Frankly, I don’t know.

Puzzle III

(With apologies to the Strand.)

A rope is passed over a pulley. It has a weight at one end and a monkey at the other. There is the same length of rope on either side and equilibrium is maintained. The rope weighs four ounces per foot. The age of the monkey and the age of the monkey’s mother together total four years. The weight of the monkey is as many pounds as the monkey’s mother is years old. The monkey’s mother was twice as old as the monkey was when the monkey’s mother was half as old as the monkey will be when the monkey is three times as old as the monkey’s mother was when the monkey’s mother was three times as old as the monkey. The weight of the rope with the weight at the end was half as much again as the difference in weight between the weight of the weight and the weight of the monkey. Now, what was the length of the rope?

My Solution: I should think it would have to be a rope of a fairly good length.

In only one department of English journalism have I met with a decided measure of success – I refer to the juvenile competition department. This is a sort of thing to which the English are especially addicted. As a really educated nation for whom good literature begins in the home they encourage in every way literary competitions among the young readers of their journals. At least half a dozen of the well-known London periodicals carry on this work. The prizes run all the way from one shilling to half a guinea and the competitions are generally open to all children from three to six years of age. It was here that I saw my open opportunity and seized it. I swept in prize after prize. As “Little Agatha” I got four shillings for the best description of Autumn in two lines, and one shilling for guessing correctly the missing letters in Br-stol, Sh-f-ield, and H-ll. A lot of the competitors fell down on H-ll. I got six shillings for giving the dates of the Norman Conquest – 1492 A.D., and the Crimean War of 1870. In short, the thing was easy. I might say that to enter these competitions one has to have a certificate of age from a member of the clergy. But I know a lot of them.

TOC     INDEX

Business in England

Wanted – More Profiteers

It is hardly necessary to say that so shrewd an observer as I am could not fail to be struck by the situation of business in England. Passing through the factory towns and noticing that no smoke came from the tall chimneys and that the doors of the factories were shut, I was led to the conclusion that they were closed.

Observing that the streets of the industrial centres were everywhere filled with idle men, I gathered that they were unemployed: and when I learned that the moving picture houses were full to the doors every day and that the concert halls, beer gardens, grand opera, and religious concerts were crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the country was suffering from an unparalleled depression. This diagnosis turned out to be absolutely correct. It has been freely estimated that at the time I refer to almost two million men were out of work.

But it does not require government statistics to prove that in England at the present day everybody seems poor, just as in the United States everybody, to the eye of the visitor, seems to be rich. In England nobody seems to be able to afford anything: in the United States everybody seems to be able to afford everything. In England nobody smokes cigars: in America everybody does. On the English railways the first class carriages are empty: in the United States the “reserved drawing-rooms” are full. Poverty no doubt is only a relative matter: but a man whose income used to be £10,000 a year and is now £5,000, is living in “reduced circumstances”: he feels himself just as poor as the man whose income has been cut from five thousand pounds to three, or from five hundred pounds to two. They are all in the same boat. What with the lowering of dividends and the raising of the income tax, the closing of factories, feeding the unemployed and trying to employ the unfed, things are in a bad way.

The underlying cause is plain enough. The economic distress that the world suffers now is the inevitable consequence of the war. Everybody knows that. But where the people differ is in regard to what is going to happen next, and what we must do about it. Here opinion takes a variety of forms. Some people blame it on the German mark: by permitting their mark to fall, the Germans, it is claimed, are taking away all the business from England; the fall of the mark, by allowing the Germans to work harder and eat less than the English, is threatening to drive the English out of house and home: if the mark goes on falling still further the Germans will thereby outdo us also in music, literature and in religion. What has got to be done, therefore, is to force the Germans to lift the mark up again, and make them pay up their indemnity.

Another more popular school of thought holds to an entirely contrary opinion. The whole trouble, they say, comes from the sad collapse of Germany. These unhappy people, having been too busy for four years in destroying valuable property in France and Belgium to pay attention to their home affairs, now find themselves collapsed: it is our first duty to pick them up again. The English should therefore take all the money they can find and give it to the Germans. By this means German trade and industry will revive to such an extent that the port of Hamburg will be its old bright self again and German waiters will reappear in the London hotels. After that everything will be all right.

Speaking with all the modesty of an outsider and a transient visitor, I give it as my opinion that the trouble is elsewhere. The danger of industrial collapse in England does not spring from what is happening in Germany but from what is happening in England itself. England, like most of the other countries in the world, is suffering from the over-extension of government and the decline of individual self-help. For six generations industry in England and America has flourished on individual effort called out by the prospect of individual gain. Every man acquired from his boyhood the idea that he must look after himself. Morally, physically and financially that was the recognised way of getting on. The desire to make a fortune was regarded as a laudable ambition, a proper stimulus to effort. The ugly word “profiteer” had not yet been coined. There was no income tax to turn a man’s pockets inside out and take away his savings. The world was to the strong.

Under the stimulus of this the wheels of industry hummed. Factories covered the land. National production grew to a colossal size and the whole outer world seemed laid under a tribute to the great industry. As a system it was far from perfect. It contained in itself all kinds of gross injustices, demands that were too great, wages that were too small; in spite of the splendour of the foreground, poverty and destitution hovered behind the scenes. But such as it was, the system worked: and it was the only one that we knew.

Or turn to another aspect of this same principle of self-help. The way to acquire knowledge in the early days was to buy a tallow candle and read a book after one’s day’s work, as Benjamin Franklin read or Lincoln: and when the soul was stimulated to it, then the aspiring youth must save money, put himself to college, live on nothing, think much, and in the course of this starvation and effort become a learned man, with somehow a peculiar moral fibre in him not easily reproduced today. For today the candle is free and the college is free and the student has a “Union” like the profiteer’s club and a swimming-bath and a Drama League and a coeducational society at his elbow for which he buys Beauty Roses at five dollars a bunch.

Or turn if one will to the moral side. The older way of being good was by much prayer and much effort of one’s own soul. Now it is done by a Board of Censors. There is no need to fight sin by the power of the spirit: let the Board of Censors do it. They together with three or four kinds of Commissioners are supposed to keep sin at arm’s length and to supply a first class legislative guarantee of righteousness. As a short cut to morality and as a way of saving individual effort our legislatures are turning out morality legislation by the bucketful. The legislature regulates our drink, it begins already to guard us against the deadly cigarette, it regulates here and there the length of our skirts, it safeguards our amusements and in two states of the American Union it even proposes to save us from the teaching of the Darwinian Theory of evolution. The ancient prayer “Lead us not into temptation” is passing out of date. The way to temptation is declared closed by Act of Parliament and by amendment to the constitution of the United States. Yet oddly enough the moral tone of the world fails to respond. The world is apparently more full of thugs, hold-up men, yeg-men, bandits, motor-thieves, porch-climbers, spotters, spies and crooked policemen than it ever was; till it almost seems that the slow, old-fashioned method of an effort of the individual soul may be needed still before the world is made good.

This vast new system, the system of leaning on the government, is spreading like a blight over England and America, and everywhere we suffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union of effort and a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the land. It has become like a dead weight upon us. Wherever it touches industry it cripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy deficit: it builds ships and loses money on them: it operates the ships and loses more money: it piles up taxes to fill the vacuum and when it has killed employment, opens a bureau of unemployment and issues a report on the depression of industry.

Now, the only way to restore prosperity is to give back again to the individual the opportunity to make money, to make lots of it, and when he has got it, to keep it. In spite of all the devastation of the war the raw assets of our globe are hardly touched. Here and there, as in parts of China and in England and in Belgium with about seven hundred people to the square mile, the world is fairly well filled up. There is standing room only. But there are vast empty spaces still. Mesopotamia alone has millions of acres of potential wheat land with a few Arabs squatting on it. Canada could absorb easily half a million settlers a year for a generation to come. The most fertile part of the world, the valley of the Amazon, is still untouched: so fertile is it that for tens of thousands of square miles it is choked with trees, a mere tangle of life, defying all entry. The idea of our humanity sadly walking the streets of Glasgow or sitting mournfully fishing on the piers of the Hudson, out of work, would be laughable if it were not for the pathos of it.

The world is out of work for the simple reason that the world has killed the goose that laid the golden eggs of industry. By taxation, by legislation, by popular sentiment all over the world, there has been a disparagement of the capitalist. And all over the world capital is frightened. It goes and hides itself in the form of an investment in a victory bond, a thing that is only a particular name for a debt, with no productive effort behind it and indicating only a dead weight of taxes. There capital sits like a bull-frog hidden behind water-lilies, refusing to budge.

Hence the way to restore prosperity is not to multiply government departments and government expenditures, nor to appoint commissions and to pile up debts, but to start going again the machinery of bold productive effort. Take off all the excess profits taxes and the super-taxes on income and as much of the income tax itself as can be done by a wholesale dismissal of government employés and then give industry a mark to shoot at. What is needed now is not the multiplication of government reports, but corporate industry, the formation of land companies, development companies, irrigation companies, any kind of corporation that will call out private capital from its hiding places, offer employment to millions and start the wheels moving again. If the promoters of such corporations presently earn huge fortunes for themselves society is none the worse: and in any case, humanity being what it is, they will hand back a vast part of what they have acquired in return for LL.D. degrees, or bits of blue ribbon, or companionships of the Bath, or whatever kind of glass bead fits the fancy of the retired millionaire.

The next thing to be done, then, is to “fire” the government officials and to bring back the profiteer. As to which officials are to be fired first it doesn’t matter much. In England people have been greatly perturbed as to the use to be made of such instruments as the “Geddes Axe”: the edge of the axe of dismissal seems so terribly sharp. But there is no need to worry. If the edge of the axe is too sharp, hit with the back of it.

As to the profiteer, bring him back. He is really just the same person who a few years ago was called a Captain of Industry and an Empire Builder and a Nation Maker. It is the times that have changed, not the man. He is there still, just as greedy and rapacious as ever, but no greedier: and we have just the same social need of his greed as a motive power in industry as we ever had, and indeed a worse need than before.

We need him not only in business but in the whole setting of life, or if not him personally, we need the eager, selfish, but reliant spirit of the man who looks after himself and doesn’t want to have a spoon-fed education and a government job alternating with a government dole, and a set of morals framed for him by a Board of Censors. Bring back the profiteer: fetch him from the Riviera, from his country place on the Hudson, or from whatever spot to which he has withdrawn with his tin box full of victory bonds. If need be, go and pick him out of the penitentiary, take the stripes off him and tell him to get busy again. Show him the map of the world and ask him to pick out a few likely spots. The trained greed of the rascal will find them in a moment. Then write him out a concession for coal in Asia Minor or oil in the Mackenzie Basin or for irrigation in Mesopotamia. The ink will hardly be dry on it before the capital will begin to flow in: it will come from all kinds of places whence the government could never coax it and where the tax-gatherer could never find it. Only promise that it is not going to be taxed out of existence and the stream of capital which is being dried up in the sands of government mismanagement will flow into the hands of private industry like a river of gold.

And incidentally, when the profiteer has finished his work, we can always put him back into the penitentiary if we like. But we need him just now.

TOC     INDEX

Is Prohibition
Coming to England?

In the United States and Canada the principal topic of polite conversation is now prohibition. At every dinner party the serving of the cocktails immediately introduces the subject: the rest of the dinner is enlivened throughout with the discussion of rum-runners, bootleggers, storage of liquor and the State constitution of New Jersey. Under this influence all social and conversational values are shifted and rearranged. A “scholarly” man no longer means a man who can talk well on literary subjects but a man who understands the eighteenth amendment and can explain the legal difference between implementing statutes such as the Volstead Act and the underlying state legislation. A “scientist” (invaluable in these conversations) is a man who can make clear the distinction between alcoholic percentages by bulk and by weight. And a “brilliant engineer” means a man who explains how to make home-brewed beer with a kick in it. Similarly, a “raconteur” means a man who has a fund of amusing stories about “bootleggers” and an “interesting traveller” means a man who has been to Havana and can explain how wet it is. Indeed, the whole conception of travel and of interest in foreign countries is now altered: as soon as any one mentions that he has been in a foreign country, all the company ask in one breath, “Is it dry?” The question “How is Samoa?” or “How is Turkey?” or “How is British Columbia?” no longer refers to the climate or natural resources: it means “Is the place dry?” When such a question is asked and the answer is “It’s wet,” there is a deep groan all around the table.

I understand that when the recent disarmament conference met at Washington just as the members were going to sit down at the table Monsieur Briand said to President Harding, “How dry is the United States, anyway?” And the whole assembly talked about it for half an hour. That was why the first newspaper bulletins merely said, “Conference exchanges credentials.”

As a discoverer of England I therefore made it one of my chief cares to try to obtain accurate information of this topic. I was well aware that immediately on my return to Canada the first question I would be asked would be “Is England going dry?” I realized that in any report I might make to the National Geographical Society or to the Political Science Association, the members of these bodies, being scholars, would want accurate information about the price of whiskey, the percentage of alcohol, and the hours of opening and closing the saloons.

My first impression on the subject was, I must say, one of severe moral shock. Landing in England after spending the summer in Ontario, it seemed a terrible thing to see people openly drinking on an English train. On an Ontario train, as everybody knows, there is no way of taking a drink except by climbing up on the roof, lying flat on one’s stomach, and taking a suck out of a flask. But in England in any dining car one actually sees a waiter approach a person dining and say, “Beer, sir, or wine?” This is done in broad daylight with no apparent sense of criminality or moral shame. Appalling though it sounds, bottled ale is openly sold on the trains at twenty-five cents a bottle and dry sherry at eighteen cents a glass.

When I first saw this I expected to see the waiter arrested on the spot. I looked around to see if there were any “spotters,” detectives, or secret service men on the train. I anticipated that the train conductor would appear and throw the waiter off the car. But then I realized that I was in England and that in the British Isles they still tolerate the consumption of alcohol. Indeed, I doubt if they are even aware that they are “consuming alcohol.” Their impression is that they are drinking beer.

At the beginning of my discussion I will therefore preface a few exact facts and statistics for the use of geographical societies, learned bodies and government commissions. The quantity of beer consumed in England in a given period is about 200,000,000 gallons. The life of a bottle of Scotch whiskey is seven seconds. The number of public houses, or “pubs,” in the English countryside is one to every half mile. The percentage of the working classes drinking beer is 125: the percentage of the class without work drinking beer is 200.

Statistics like these do not, however, give a final answer to the question, “Is prohibition coming to England?” They merely show that it is not there now. The question itself will be answered in as many different ways as there are different kinds of people. Any prohibitionist will tell you that the coming of prohibition to England is as certain as the coming eclipse of the sun. But this is always so. It is in human nature that people are impressed by the cause they work in. I once knew a minister of the Scotch Church who took a voyage round the world: he said that the thing that impressed him most was the growth of Presbyterianism in Japan. No doubt it did. When the Orillia lacrosse team took their trip to Australia, they said on their return that lacrosse was spreading all over the world. In the same way there is said to be a spread all over the world of Christian Science, proportional representation, militarism, peace sentiment, barbarism, altruism, psychoanalysis and death from wood alcohol. They are what are called world movements.

My own judgment in regard to prohibition in the British Isles is this: In Scotland, prohibition is not coming: if anything, it is going. In Ireland, prohibition will only be introduced when they have run out of other forms of trouble. But in England I think that prohibition could easily come unless the English people realize where they are drifting and turn back. They are in the early stage of the movement already.

Turning first to Scotland, there is no fear, I say, that prohibition will be adopted there: and this from the simple reason that the Scotch do not drink. I have elsewhere alluded to the extraordinary misapprehension that exists in regard to the Scotch people and their sense of humour. I find a similar popular error in regard to the use of whiskey by the Scotch. Because they manufacture the best whiskey in the world, the Scotch, in popular fancy, are often thought to be addicted to the drinking of it. This is purely a delusion. During the whole of two or three pleasant weeks spent in lecturing in Scotland, I never on any occasion saw whiskey made use of as a beverage. I have seen people take it, of course, as a medicine, or as a precaution, or as a wise offset against a rather treacherous climate; but as a beverage, never.

The manner and circumstance of their offering whiskey to a stranger amply illustrates their point of view towards it. Thus at my first lecture in Glasgow where I was to appear before a large and fashionable audience, the chairman said to me in the committee room that he was afraid that there might be a draft on the platform. Here was a serious matter. For a lecturer who has to earn his living by his occupation, a draft on the platform is not a thing to be disregarded. It might kill him. Nor is it altogether safe for the chairman himself, a man already in middle life, to be exposed to a current of cold air. In this case, therefore, the chairman suggested that he thought it might be “prudent” – that was his word, “prudent” – if I should take a small drop of whiskey before encountering the draft. In return I told him that I could not think of his accompanying me to the platform unless he would let me insist on his taking a very reasonable precaution. Whiskey taken on these terms not only seems like a duty but it tastes better.

In the same way I find that in Scotland it is very often necessary to take something to drink on purely meteorological grounds. The weather simply cannot be trusted. A man might find that on “going out into the weather” he is overwhelmed by a heavy fog or an avalanche of snow or a driving storm of rain. In such a case a mere drop of whiskey might save his life. It would be folly not to take it. Again – “coming in out of the weather” is a thing not to be trifled with. A person coming in unprepared and unprotected might be seized with angina pectoris or appendicitis and die upon the spot. No reasonable person would refuse the simple precaution of taking a small drop immediately after his entry.

I find that, classified altogether, there are seventeen reasons advanced in Scotland for taking whiskey. They run as follows: Reason one, because it is raining; Two, because it is not raining; Three, because you are just going out into the weather; Four, because you have just come in from the weather; Five – no, I forget the ones that come after that. But I remember that reason number seventeen is “because it canna do ye any harm.” On the whole, reason seventeen is the best.

Put in other words this means that the Scotch make use of whiskey with dignity and without shame: and they never call it alcohol.

In England the case is different. Already the English are showing the first signs that indicate the possible approach of prohibition. Already all over England there are weird regulations about the closing hours of the public houses. They open and close according to the varying regulations of the municipality. In some places they open at six in the morning, close down for an hour from nine till ten, open then till noon, shut for ten minutes, and so on; in some places they are open in the morning and closed in the evening; in other places they are open in the evening and closed in the morning. The ancient idea was that a wayside public house was a place of sustenance and comfort, a human need that might be wanted any hour. It was in the same class with the life boat or the emergency ambulance. Under the old common law the innkeeper must supply meat and drink at any hour. If he was asleep the traveller might wake him. And in those days meat and drink were regarded in the same light. Note how great the change is. In modern life in England there is nothing that you dare wake up a man for except gasoline. The mere fact that you need a drink is no longer held to entitle you to break his rest.

In London especially one feels the full force of the “closing” regulations. The bars open and shut at intervals like daisies blinking at the sun. And like the flowers at evening they close their petals with the darkness. In London they have already adopted the deadly phrases of the prohibitionist, such as “alcohol” and “liquor traffic” and so on: and already the “sale of spirits” stops absolutely at about eleven o’clock at night.

This means that after theatre hours London is a “city of dreadful night.” The people from the theatre scuttle to their homes. The lights are extinguished in the windows. The streets darken. Only a belated taxi still moves. At midnight the place is deserted. At 1 a.m., the lingering footfalls echo in the empty street. Here and there a restaurant in a fashionable street makes a poor pretence of keeping open for after theatre suppers. Odd people, the shivering wrecks of theatre parties, are huddled here and there. A gloomy waiter lays a sardine on the table. The guests charge their glasses with Perrier Water, Lithia Water, Citrate of Magnesia, or Bromo Seltzer. They eat the sardine and vanish into the night. Not even Oshkosh, Wisconsin, or Middlebury, Vermont, is quieter than is the night life of London. It may no doubt seem a wise thing to go to bed early. But it is a terrible thing to go to bed early by Act of Parliament.

All of which means that the people of England are not facing the prohibition question fairly and squarely. If they see no harm in “consuming alcohol” they ought to say so and let their code of regulations reflect the fact. But the “closing” and “regulating” and “squeezing” of the “liquor traffic”, without any outspoken protest, means letting the whole case go by default. Under these circumstances an organised and active minority can always win and impose its will upon the crowd.

When I was in England I amused myself one day by writing an imaginary picture of what England will be like when the last stage is reached and London goes the way of New York and Chicago. I cast it in the form of a letter from an American prohibitionist in which he describes the final triumph of prohibition in England. With the permission of the reader I reproduce it here:

THE ADVENT OF PROHIBITION
IN ENGLAND

As written in the correspondence
of an American visitor

How glad I am that I have lived to see this wonderful reform of prohibition at last accomplished in England. There is something so difficult about the British, so stolid, so hard to move.

We tried everything in the great campaign that we made, and for ever so long it didn’t seem to work. We had processions, just as we did at home in America, with great banners carried round bearing the inscription: “Do you want to save the boy?” But these people looked on and said, “Boy? Boy? What boy?” Our workers were almost disheartened. “Oh, sir,” said one of them, an ex-barkeeper from Oklahoma, “it does seem so hard that we have total prohibition in the States and here they can get all the drink they want.” And the good fellow broke down and sobbed.

But at last it has come. After the most terrific efforts we managed to get this nation stampeded, and for more than a month now England has been dry. I wish you could have witnessed the scenes, just like what we saw at home in America, when it was known that the bill had passed. The members of the House of Lords all stood up on their seats and yelled, “Rah! Rah! Rah! Who’s bone dry? We are!” And the brewers and innkeepers were emptying their barrels of beer into the Thames just as at St. Louis they emptied the beer into the Mississippi.

I can’t tell you with what pleasure I watched a group of members of the Athenaeum Club sitting on the bank of the Thames and opening bottles of champagne and pouring them into the river. “To think,” said one of them to me, “that there was a time when I used to lap up a couple of quarts of this terrible stuff every evening.” I got him to give me a few bottles as a souvenir, and I got some more souvenirs, whiskey and liqueurs, when the members of the Beefsteak Club were emptying out their cellars into Green Street; so when you come over, I shall still be able, of course, to give you a drink.

We have, as I said, been bone dry only a month, and yet already we are getting the same splendid results as in America. All the big dinners are now as refined and as elevating and the dinner speeches as long and as informal as they are in New York or Toronto. The other night at a dinner at the White Friars Club I heard Sir Owen Seaman speaking, not in that light futile way that he used to have, but quite differently. He talked for over an hour and a half on the State ownership of the Chinese Railway System, and I almost fancied myself back in Boston.

And the working class too. It is just wonderful how prohibition has increased their efficiency. In the old days they used to drop their work the moment the hour struck. Now they simply refuse to do so. I noticed yesterday a foreman in charge of a building operation vainly trying to call the bricklayers down. “Come, come, gentlemen,” he shouted, “I must insist on your stopping for the night.” But they just went on laying bricks faster than ever.

Of course, as yet there are a few slight difficulties and deficiencies, just as there are with us in America. We have had the same trouble with wood-alcohol (they call it methylated spirit here), with the same deplorable results. On some days the list of deaths is very serious, and in some cases we are losing men we can hardly spare. A great many of our leading actors – in fact, most of them – are dead. And there has been a heavy loss, too, among the literary class and in the legal profession.

There was a very painful scene last week at the dinner of the Benchers of Gray’s Inn. It seems that one of the chief justices had undertaken to make home brew for the Benchers, just as the people do on our side of the water. He got one of the waiters to fetch him some hops and three raw potatoes, a packet of yeast and some boiling water. In the end, four of the Benchers were carried out dead. But they are going to give them a public funeral in the Abbey.

I regret to say that the death list in the Royal Navy is very heavy. Some of the best sailors are gone, and it is very difficult to keep admirals. But I have tried to explain to the people here that these are merely the things that one must expect, and that, with a little patience, they will have bone-dry admirals and bone-dry statesmen just as good as the wet ones. Even the clergy can be dried up with firmness and perseverance.

There was also a slight sensation here when the Chancellor of the Exchequer brought in his first appropriation for maintaining prohibition. From our point of view in America, it was modest enough. But these people are not used to it. The Chancellor merely asked for ten million pounds a month to begin on; he explained that his task was heavy; he has to police, not only the entire coast, but also the interior; for the Grampian Hills of Scotland alone he asked a million. There was a good deal of questioning in the House over these figures. The Chancellor was asked if he intended to keep a hired spy at every street corner in London. He answered, “No, only on every other street.” He added also that every spy must wear a brass collar with his number.

I must admit further, and I am sorry to have to tell you this, that now we have prohibition it is becoming increasingly difficult to get a drink. In fact, sometimes, especially in the very early morning, it is most inconvenient and almost impossible. The public houses being closed, it is necessary to go into a drug store – just as it is with us – and lean up against the counter and make a gurgling sound like apoplexy. One often sees these apoplexy cases lined up four deep.

But the people are finding substitutes, just as they do with us. There is a tremendous run on patent medicines, perfume, glue and nitric acid. It has been found that Shears’ soap contains alcohol, and one sees people everywhere eating cakes of it. The upper classes have taken to chewing tobacco very considerably, and the use of opium in the House of Lords has very greatly increased.

But I don’t want you to think that if you come over here to see me, your private life will be in any way impaired or curtailed. I am glad to say that I have plenty of rich connections whose cellars are very amply stocked. The Duke of Blank is said to have 5,000 cases of Scotch whiskey, and I have managed to get a card of introduction to his butler. In fact you will find that, just as with us in America, the benefit of prohibition is intended to fall on the poorer classes. There is no desire to interfere with the rich.

TOC     INDEX

“We Have with Us Tonight”

Not only during my tour in England but for many years past it has been my lot to speak and to lecture in all sorts of places, under all sorts of circumstances and before all sorts of audiences. I say this, not in boastfulness, but in sorrow. Indeed, I only mention it to establish the fact that when I talk of lecturers and speakers, I talk of what I know.

Few people realize how arduous and how disagreeable public lecturing is. The public sees the lecturer step out on to the platform in his little white waistcoat and his long tailed coat and with a false air of a conjurer about him, and they think him happy. After about ten minutes of his talk they are tired of him. Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of a grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs.

For my own part I always try to appear as happy as possible while I am lecturing. I take this to be part of the trade of anybody labelled a humorist and paid as such. I have no sympathy whatever with the idea that a humorist ought to be a lugubrious person with a face stamped with melancholy. This is a cheap and elementary effect belonging to the level of a circus clown. The image of “laughter shaking both his sides” is the truer picture of comedy. Therefore, I say, I always try to appear cheerful at my lectures and even to laugh at my own jokes. Oddly enough this arouses a kind of resentment in some of the audience. “Well, I will say,” said a stern-looking woman who spoke to me after one of my lectures, “you certainly do seem to enjoy your own fun.” “Madam,” I answered, “if I didn’t, who would?” But in reality the whole business of being a public lecturer is one long variation of boredom and fatigue. So I propose to set down here some of the many trials which the lecturer has to bear.

The first of the troubles which any one who begins giving public lectures meets at the very outset is the fact that the audience won’t come to hear him. This happens invariably and constantly, and not through any fault or shortcoming of the speaker.

I don’t say that this happened very often to me in my tour in England. In nearly all cases I had crowded audiences: by dividing up the money that I received by the average number of people present to hear me I have calculated that they paid thirteen cents each. And my lectures are evidently worth thirteen cents. But at home in Canada I have very often tried the fatal experiment of lecturing for nothing: and in that case the audience simply won’t come. A man will turn out at night when he knows he is going to hear a first class thirteen cent lecture; but when the thing is given for nothing, why go to it?

The city in which I live is overrun with little societies, clubs and associations, always wanting to be addressed. So at least it is in appearance. In reality the societies are composed of presidents, secretaries and officials, who want the conspicuousness of office, and a large list of other members who won’t come to the meetings. For such an association, the invited speaker who is to lecture for nothing prepares his lecture on “Indo-Germanic Factors in the Current of History.” If he is a professor, he takes all the winter at it. You may drop in at his house at any time and his wife will tell you that he is “upstairs working on his lecture.” If he comes down at all it is in carpet slippers and dressing gown. His mental vision of his meeting is that of a huge gathering of keen people with Indo-Germanic faces, hanging upon every word.

Then comes the fated night. There are seventeen people present. The lecturer refuses to count them. He refers to them afterwards as “about a hundred.” To this group he reads his paper on the Indo-Germanic Factor. It takes him two hours. When he is over the chairman invites discussion. There is no discussion. The audience is willing to let the Indo-Germanic factors go unchallenged. Then the chairman makes this speech. He says:

“I am very sorry indeed that we should have had such a very poor ‘turn-out’ tonight. I am sure that the members who were not here have missed a real treat in the delightful paper that we have listened to. I want to assure the lecturer that if he comes to the Owl’s Club again we can guarantee him next time a capacity audience. And will any members, please, who haven’t paid their dollar this winter, pay it either to me or to Mr. Sibley as they pass out.”

I have heard this speech (in the years when I have had to listen to it) so many times that I know it by heart. I have made the acquaintance of the Owl’s Club under so many names that I recognise it at once. I am aware that its members refuse to turn out in cold weather; that they do not turn out in wet weather; that when the weather is really fine, it is impossible to get them together; that the slightest counter-attraction – a hockey match, a sacred concert – goes to their heads at once.

There was a time when I was the newly appointed occupant of a college chair and had to address the Owl’s Club. It is a penalty that all new professors pay; and the Owls batten upon them like bats. It is one of the compensations of age that I am free of the Owl’s Club forever. But in the days when I still had to address them, I used to take it out of the Owls in a speech, delivered, in imagination only and not out loud, to the assembled meeting of the seventeen Owls, after the chairman had made his concluding remarks. It ran as follows:

“Gentlemen – if you are such, which I doubt. I realize that the paper which I have read on “Was Hegel a deist?” has been an error. I spent all the winter on it and now I realize that not one of you pups know who Hegel was or what a deist is. Never mind. It is over now, and I am glad. But just let me say this, only this, which won’t keep you a minute. Your chairman has been good enough to say that if I come again you will get together a capacity audience to hear me. Let me tell you that if your society waits for its next meeting till I come to address you again, you will wait indeed. In fact, gentlemen – I say it very frankly – it will be in another world.”

But I pass over the audience. Suppose there is a real audience, and suppose them all duly gathered together. Then it becomes the business of that gloomy gentleman – facetiously referred to in the newspaper reports as the “genial chairman” – to put the lecturer to the bad. In nine cases out of ten he can do so. Some chairmen, indeed, develop a great gift for it. Here are one or two examples from my own experience:

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the chairman of a society in a little country town in Western Ontario, to which I had come as a paid (a very humbly paid) lecturer, “we have with us tonight a gentleman” (here he made an attempt to read my name on a card, failed to read it and put the card back in his pocket) – “a gentleman who is to lecture to us on” (here he looked at his card again) – “on Ancient – Ancient – I don’t very well see what it is – Ancient – Britain? Thank you, on Ancient Britain. Now, this is the first of our series of lectures for this winter. The last series, as you all know, was not a success. In fact, we came out at the end of the year with a deficit. So this year we are starting a new line and trying the experiment of cheaper talent.”

Here the chairman gracefully waved his hand toward me and there was a certain amount of applause. “Before I sit down,” the chairman added, “I’d like to say that I am sorry to see such a poor turn-out tonight and to ask any of the members who haven’t paid their dollar to pay it either to me or to Mr. Sibley as they pass out.”

Let anybody who knows the discomfiture of coming out before an audience on any terms, judge how it feels to crawl out in front of them labelled cheaper talent.

Another charming way in which the chairman endeavours to put both the speaker for the evening and the audience into an entirely good humour, is by reading out letters of regret from persons unable to be present. This, of course, is only for grand occasions when the speaker has been invited to come under very special auspices. It was my fate, not long ago, to “appear” (this is the correct word to use in this connection) in this capacity when I was going about Canada trying to raise some money for the relief of the Belgians. I travelled in great glory with a pass on the Canadian Pacific Railway (not since extended: officials of the road kindly note this) and was most generously entertained wherever I went.

It was, therefore, the business of the chairman at such meetings as these to try and put a special distinction or cachet on the gathering. This is how it was done:

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the chairman, rising from his seat on the platform with a little bundle of papers in his hand, “before I introduce the speaker of the evening, I have one or two items that I want to read to you.” Here he rustles his papers and there is a deep hush in the hall while he selects one. “We had hoped to have with us tonight Sir Robert Borden, the Prime Minister of this Dominion. I have just received a telegram from Sir Robert in which he says that he will not be able to be here” (great applause). The chairman puts up his hand for silence, picks up another telegram and continues, “Our committee, ladies and gentlemen, telegraphed an invitation to Sir Wilfrid Laurier very cordially inviting him to be here tonight. I have here Sir Wilfrid’s answer in which he says that he will not be able to be with us” (renewed applause). The chairman again puts up his hand for silence and goes on, picking up one paper after another. “The Minister of Finance regrets that he will be unable to come” (applause). “Mr. Rodolphe Lemieux (applause) will not be here (great applause) – the Mayor of Toronto (applause) is detained on business (wild applause) – the Anglican Bishop of the Diocese (applause) – the Principal of the University College, Toronto (great applause) – the Minister of Education (applause) – none of these are coming.” There is a great clapping of hands and enthusiasm, after which the meeting is called to order with a very distinct and palpable feeling that it is one of the most distinguished audiences ever gathered in the hall.

Here is another experience of the same period while I was pursuing the same exalted purpose: I arrived in a little town in Eastern Ontario, and found to my horror that I was billed to “appear” in a church. I was supposed to give readings from my works, and my books are supposed to be of a humorous character. A church hardly seemed the right place to get funny in. I explained my difficulty to the pastor of the church, a very solemn looking man. He nodded his head, slowly and gravely, as he grasped my difficulty. “I see,” he said, “I see, but I think that I can introduce you to our people in such a way as to make that right.”

When the time came, he led me up on to the pulpit platform of the church, just beside and below the pulpit itself, with a reading desk and a big bible and a shaded light beside it. It was a big church, and the audience, sitting in half darkness, as is customary during a sermon, reached away back into the gloom. The place was packed full and absolutely quiet. Then the chairman spoke:

“Dear friends,” he said, “I want you to understand that it will be all right to laugh tonight. Let me hear you laugh heartily, laugh right out, just as much as ever you want to, because” (and here his voice assumed the deep sepulchral tones of the preacher) – “when we think of the noble object for which the professor appears tonight, we may be assured that the Lord will forgive any one who will laugh at the professor.”

I am sorry to say, however, that none of the audience, even with the plenary absolution in advance, were inclined to take a chance on it.

I recall in this same connection the chairman of a meeting at a certain town in Vermont. He represents the type of chairman who turns up so late at the meeting that the committee have no time to explain to him properly what the meeting is about or who the speaker is. I noticed on this occasion that he introduced me very guardedly by name (from a little card) and said nothing about the Belgians, and nothing about my being (supposed to be) a humorist. This last was a great error. The audience, for want of guidance, remained very silent and decorous, and well behaved during my talk. Then, somehow, at the end, while some one was moving a vote of thanks, the chairman discovered his error. So he tried to make it good. Just as the audience were getting up to put on their wraps, he rose, knocked on his desk and said:

“Just a minute, please, ladies and gentlemen, just a minute. I have just found out – I should have known it sooner, but I was late in coming to this meeting – that the speaker who has just addressed you has done so in behalf of the Belgian Relief Fund. I understand that he is a well-known Canadian humorist (ha! ha!) and I am sure that we have all been immensely amused (ha! ha!). He is giving his delightful talks (ha! ha!) – though I didn’t know this till just this minute – for the Belgian Relief Fund, and he is giving his services for nothing. I am sure when we realize this, we shall all feel that it has been well worth while to come. I am only sorry that we didn’t have a better turn-out tonight. But I can assure the speaker that if he will come again, we shall guarantee him a capacity audience. And I may say, that if there are any members of this association who have not paid their dollar this season, they can give it either to myself or to Mr. Sibley as they pass out.”

With the amount of accumulated experience that I had behind me I was naturally interested during my lecture in England in the chairmen who were to introduce me. I cannot help but feel that I have acquired a fine taste in chairmen. I know them just as other experts know old furniture and Pekinese dogs. The witty chairman, the prosy chairman, the solemn chairman – I know them all. As soon as I shake hands with the chairman in the Committee room I can tell exactly how he will act.

There are certain types of chairmen who have so often been described and are so familiar that it is not worth while to linger on them. Everybody knows the chairman who says – “Now, ladies and gentlemen, you have not come here to listen to me. So I will be very brief; in fact, I will confine my remarks to just one or two very short observations.” He then proceeds to make observations for twenty-five minutes. At the end of it he remarks with charming simplicity, “Now I know that you are all impatient to hear the lecturer. . . .”

And everybody knows the chairman who comes to the meeting with a very imperfect knowledge of who or what the lecturer is, and is driven to introduce him by saying:

“Our lecturer of the evening is widely recognised as one of the greatest authorities on – on – on his subject in the world today. He comes to us from – from a great distance and I can assure him that it is a great pleasure to this audience to welcome a man who has done so much to – to – to advance the interests of – of – of everything as he has.”

But this man, bad as he is, is not so bad as the chairman whose preparation for introducing the speaker has obviously been made at the eleventh hour. Just such a chairman it was my fate to strike in the form of a local alderman, built like an ox, in one of those small manufacturing places in the north of England where they grow men of this type and elect them into office.

“I never saw the lecturer before,” he said, “but I’ve read his book.” (I have written nineteen books.) “The committee was good enough to send me over his book last night. I didn’t read it all but I took a look at the preface and I can assure him that he is very welcome. I understand he comes from a college. . . .” Then he turned directly towards me and said in a loud voice, “What was the name of that college over there you said you came from?”

“McGill,” I answered equally loudly.

“He comes from McGill,” the chairman boomed out. “I never heard of McGill myself but I can assure him he’s welcome. He’s going to lecture to us on – what did you say it was to be about?”

“It’s a humorous lecture,” I said.

“Ay, it’s to be a humorous lecture, ladies and gentlemen, and I’ll venture to say it will be a rare treat. I’m only sorry I can’t stay for it myself as I have to get back over to the Town Hall for a meeting. So without more ado I’ll get off the platform and let the lecturer go on with his humour.”

A still more terrible type of chairman is one whose mind is evidently preoccupied and disturbed with some local happening and who comes on to the platform with a face imprinted with distress. Before introducing the lecturer he refers in moving tones to the local sorrow, whatever it is. As a prelude to a humorous lecture this is not gay.

Such a chairman fell to my lot one night before a gloomy audience in a London suburb.

“As I look about this hall tonight,” he began in a doleful whine, “I see many empty seats.” Here he stifled a sob. “Nor am I surprised that a great many of our people should prefer tonight to stay quietly at home—”

I had no clue to what he meant. I merely gathered that some particular sorrow must have overwhelmed the town that day.

“To many it may seem hardly fitting that after the loss our town has sustained we should come out here to listen to a humorous lecture—”

“What’s the trouble?” I whispered to a citizen sitting beside me on the platform.

“Our oldest resident” – he whispered back – “he died this morning.”

“How old?”

“Ninety-four,” he whispered.

Meantime the chairman, with deep sobs in his voice, continued:

“We debated in our committee whether or not we should have the lecture. Had it been a lecture of another character our position would have been less difficult—”

By this time I began to feel like a criminal.

“The case would have been different had the lecture been one that contained information, or that was inspired by some serious purpose, or that could have been of any benefit. But this is not so. We understand that this lecture which Mr. Leacock has already given, I believe, twenty or thirty times in England—”

Here he turned to me with a look of mild reproval while the silent audience, deeply moved, all looked at me as at a man who went around the country insulting the memory of the dead by giving a lecture thirty times.

“We understand, though this we shall have an opportunity of testing for ourselves presently, that Mr. Leacock’s lecture is not of a character which – has not, so to speak, the kind of value – in short, is not a lecture of that class.”

Here he paused and choked back a sob.

“Had our poor friend been spared to us for another six years he would have rounded out the century. But it was not to be. For two or three years past he has noted that somehow his strength was failing, that, for some reason or other, he was no longer what he had been. Last month he began to droop. Last week he began to sink. Speech left him last Tuesday. This morning he passed, and he has gone now, we trust, in safety to where there are no lectures.”

The audience were now nearly in tears.

The chairman made a visible effort towards firmness and control.

“But yet,” he continued, “our committee felt that in another sense it was our duty to go on with our arrangements. I think, ladies and gentlemen, that the war has taught us all that it is always our duty to ‘carry on,’ no matter how hard it may be, no matter with what reluctance we do it, and whatever be the difficulties and the dangers, we must carry on to the end: for after all there is an end and by resolution and patience we can reach it.

“I will, therefore, invite Mr. Leacock to deliver to us his humorous lecture, the title of which I have forgotten, but I understand it to be the same lecture which he has already given thirty or forty times in England.”

But contrast with this melancholy man the genial and pleasing person who introduced me, all upside down, to a metropolitan audience.

He was so brisk, so neat, so sure of himself that it didn’t seem possible that he could make any kind of a mistake. I thought it unnecessary to coach him. He seemed absolutely all right.

“It is a great pleasure,” – he said, with a charming, easy appearance of being entirely at home on the platform – “to welcome here tonight our distinguished Canadian fellow citizen, Mr. Learoyd” – he turned half way towards me as he spoke with a sort of gesture of welcome, admirably executed. If only my name had been Learoyd instead of Leacock it would have been excellent.

“There are many of us,” he continued, “who have awaited Mr. Learoyd’s coming with the most pleasant anticipations. We seemed from his books to know him already as an old friend. In fact I think I do not exaggerate when I tell Mr. Learoyd that his name in our city has long been a household word. I have very, very great pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, in introducing to you Mr. Learoyd.”

As far as I know that chairman never knew his error. At the close of my lecture he said that he was sure that the audience “were deeply indebted to Mr. Learoyd,” and then with a few words of rapid, genial apology buzzed off, like a humming bird, to other avocations. But I have amply forgiven him: anything for kindness and geniality; it makes the whole of life smooth. If that chairman ever comes to my home town he is hereby invited to lunch or dine with me, as Mr. Learoyd or under any name that he selects.

Such a man is, after all, in sharp contrast to the kind of chairman who has no native sense of the geniality that ought to accompany his office. There is, for example, a type of man who thinks that the fitting way to introduce a lecturer is to say a few words about the finances of the society to which he is to lecture (for money) and about the difficulty of getting members to turn out to hear lectures.

Everybody has heard such a speech a dozen times. But it is the paid lecturer sitting on the platform who best appreciates it. It runs like this:

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, before I invite the lecturer of the evening to address us there are a few words that I would like to say. There are a good many members who are in arrears with their fees. I am aware that these are hard times and it is difficult to collect money but at the same time the members ought to remember that the expenses of the society are very heavy. The fees that are asked by the lecturers, as I suppose you know, have advanced very greatly in the last few years. In fact I may say that they are becoming almost prohibitive.”

This discourse is pleasant hearing for the lecturer. He can see the members who have not yet paid their annual dues eyeing him with hatred. The chairman goes on:

“Our finance committee were afraid at first that we could not afford to bring Mr. Leacock to our society. But fortunately through the personal generosity of two of our members who subscribed ten pounds each out of their own pocket we are able to raise the required sum.”

(Applause: during which the lecturer sits looking and feeling like the embodiment of the “required sum.”)

“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” continues the chairman, “what I feel is that when we have members in the society who are willing to make this sacrifice – because it is a sacrifice, ladies and gentlemen – we ought to support them in every way. The members ought to think it their duty to turn out to the lectures. I know that it is not an easy thing to do. On a cold night, like this evening, it is hard, I admit it is hard, to turn out from the comfort of one’s own fireside and come and listen to a lecture. But I think that the members should look at it not as a matter of personal comfort but as a matter of duty towards this society. We have managed to keep this society alive for fifteen years and, though I don’t say it in any spirit of boasting, it has not been an easy thing to do. It has required a good deal of pretty hard spade work by the committee. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I suppose you didn’t come here to listen to me and perhaps I have said enough about our difficulties and troubles. So without more ado (this is always a favourite phrase with chairmen) I’ll invite Mr. Leacock to address the society – oh, just a word before I sit down. Will all those who are leaving before the end of the lecture kindly go out through the side door and step as quietly as possible? Mr. Leacock.”

Anybody who is in the lecture business knows that that introduction is far worse than being called Mr. Learoyd.

When any lecturer goes across to England from this side of the water there is naturally a tendency on the part of the chairman to play upon this fact. This is especially true in the case of a Canadian like myself. The chairman feels that the moment is fitting for one of those great imperial thoughts that bind the British Empire together. But sometimes the expression of the thought falls short of the full glory of the conception.

Witness this (word for word) introduction that was used against me by a clerical chairman in a quiet spot in the south of England:

“Not so long ago, ladies and gentlemen,” said the vicar, “we used to send out to Canada various classes of our community to help build up that country. We sent out our labourers, we sent out our scholars and professors. Indeed we even sent out our criminals. And now,” with a wave of his hand towards me, “they are coming back.”

There was no laughter. An English audience is nothing if not literal; and they are as polite as they are literal. They understood that I was a reformed criminal and as such they gave me a hearty burst of applause.

But there is just one thing that I would like to chronicle here in favour of the chairman and in gratitude for his assistance. Even at his worst he is far better than having no chairman at all. Over in England a great many societies and public bodies have adopted the plan of “cutting out the chairman.” Wearying of his faults, they have forgotten the reasons for his existence and undertaken to do without him.

The result is ghastly. The lecturer steps up on to the platform alone and unaccompanied. There is a feeble ripple of applause; he makes his miserable bow and explains with as much enthusiasm as he can who he is. The atmosphere of the thing is so cold that an Arctic expedition isn’t in it with it. I found also the further difficulty that in the absence of the chairman very often the audience, or a large part of it, doesn’t know who the lecturer is. On many occasions I received on appearing a wild burst of applause under the impression that I was somebody else. I have been mistaken in this way for Mr. Briand, then Prime Minister of France, for Charlie Chaplin, for Mrs. Asquith – but stop, I may get into a libel suit. All I mean is that without a chairman “we celebrities” get terribly mixed up together.

To one experience of my tour as a lecturer I shall always be able to look back with satisfaction. I nearly had the pleasure of killing a man with laughing: and this in the most literal sense. American lecturers have often dreamed of doing this. I nearly did it. The man in question was a comfortable apoplectic-looking man with the kind of merry rubicund face that is seen in countries where they don’t have prohibition. He was seated near the back of the hall and was laughing uproariously. All of a sudden I realized that something was happening. The man had collapsed sideways on to the floor; a little group of men gathered about him; they lifted him up and I could see them carrying him out, a silent and inert mass. As in duty bound I went right on with my lecture. But my heart beat high with satisfaction. I was sure that I had killed him. The reader may judge how high these hopes rose when a moment or two later a note was handed to the chairman who then asked me to pause for a moment in my lecture and stood up and asked, “Is there a doctor in the audience?” A doctor rose and silently went out. The lecture continued; but there was no more laughter; my aim had now become to kill another of them and they knew it. They were aware that if they started laughing they might die. In a few minutes a second note was handed to the chairman. He announced very gravely, “A second doctor is wanted.” The lecture went on in deeper silence than ever. All the audience were waiting for a third announcement. It came. A new message was handed to the chairman. He rose and said, “If Mr. Murchison, the undertaker, is in the audience, will he kindly step outside.”

That man, I regret to say, got well. Disappointing though it is to read it, he recovered. I sent back next morning from London a telegram of enquiry (I did it in reality so as to have a proper proof of his death) and received the answer, “Patient doing well; is sitting up in bed and reading Lord Haldane’s Relativity; no danger of relapse.”

TOC     INDEX

Have the English
any Sense of Humour?

It was understood that the main object of my trip to England was to find out whether the British people have any sense of humour. No doubt the Geographical Society had this investigation in mind in not paying my expenses. Certainly on my return I was at once assailed with the question on all sides, “Have they got a sense of humour? Even if it is only a rudimentary sense, have they got it or have they not?” I propose therefore to address myself to the answer to this question.

A peculiar interest always attaches to humour. There is no quality of the human mind about which its possessor is more sensitive than the sense of humour. A man will freely confess that he has no ear for music, or no taste for fiction, or even no interest in religion. But I have yet to see the man who announces that he has no sense of humour. In point of fact, every man is apt to think himself possessed of an exceptional gift in this direction, and that even if his humour does not express itself in the power either to make a joke or to laugh at one, it none the less consists in a peculiar insight or inner light superior to that of other people.

The same thing is true of nations. Each thinks its own humour of an entirely superior kind, and either refuses to admit, or admits reluctantly, the humorous quality of other peoples. The Englishman may credit the Frenchman with a certain light effervescence of mind which he neither emulates nor envies; the Frenchman may acknowledge that English literature shows here and there a sort of heavy playfulness; but neither of them would consider that the humour of the other nation could stand a moment’s comparison with his own.

Yet, oddly enough, American humour stands as a conspicuous exception to this general rule. A certain vogue clings to it. Ever since the spacious days of Artemus Ward and Mark Twain it has enjoyed an extraordinary reputation, and this not only on our own continent, but in England. It was in a sense the English who “discovered” Mark Twain; I mean it was they who first clearly recognised him as a man of letters of the foremost rank, at a time when academic Boston still tried to explain him away as a mere comic man of the West. In the same way Artemus Ward is still held in affectionate remembrance in London, and, of the later generation, Mr. Dooley at least is a household word.

This is so much the case that a sort of legend has grown around American humour. It is presumed to be a superior article and to enjoy the same kind of pre-eminence as French cooking, the Russian ballet, and Italian organ grinding. With this goes the converse supposition that the British people are inferior in humour, that a joke reaches them only with great difficulty, and that a British audience listens to humour in gloomy and unintelligent silence. People still love to repeat the famous story of how John Bright listened attentively to Artemus Ward’s lecture in London and then said, gravely, that he “doubted many of the young man’s statements”; and readers still remember Mark Twain’s famous parody of the discussion of his book by a wooden-headed reviewer of an English review.

But the legend in reality is only a legend. If the English are inferior to Americans in humour, I, for one, am at a loss to see where it comes in. If there is anything on our continent superior in humour to Punch I should like to see it. If we have any more humorous writers in our midst than E. V. Lucas and Charles Graves and Owen Seaman I should like to read what they write; and if there is any audience capable of more laughter and more generous appreciation than an audience in London, or Bristol, or Aberdeen, I should like to lecture to it.

During my voyage of discovery in Great Britain I had very exceptional opportunities for testing the truth of these comparisons. It was my good fortune to appear as an avowed humorist in all the great British cities. I lectured as far north as Aberdeen and as far south as Brighton and Bournemouth; I travelled eastward to Ipswich and westward into Wales. I spoke on serious subjects, but with a joke or two in loco, at the universities, at business gatherings, and at London dinners; I watched, lost in admiration, the inspired merriment of the Savages of Adelphi Terrace, and in my moments of leisure I observed, with a scientific eye, the gaieties of the London revues. As a result of which I say with conviction that, speaking by and large, the two communities are on the same level. A Harvard audience, as I have reason gratefully to acknowledge, is wonderful. But an Oxford audience is just as good. A gathering of business men in a textile town in the Midlands is just as heavy as a gathering of business men in Decatur, Indiana, but no heavier; and an audience of English schoolboys as at Rugby or at Clifton is capable of a wild and sustained merriment not to be outdone from Halifax to Los Angeles.

There is, however, one vital difference between American and English audiences which would be apt to discourage at the outset any American lecturer who might go to England. The English audiences, from the nature of the way in which they have been brought together, expect more. In England they still associate lectures with information. We don’t. Our American lecture audiences are, in nine cases out of ten, organised by a woman’s club of some kind and drawn not from the working class, but from – what shall we call it? – the class that doesn’t have to work, or, at any rate, not too hard. It is largely a social audience, well educated without being “highbrow,” and tolerant and kindly to a degree. In fact, what the people mainly want is to see the lecturer. They have heard all about G. K. Chesterton and Hugh Walpole and John Drinkwater, and so when these gentlemen come to town the woman’s club want to have a look at them, just as the English people, who are all crazy about animals, flock to the zoo to look at a new giraffe. They don’t expect the giraffe to do anything in particular. They want to see it, that’s all. So with the American woman’s club audience. After they have seen Mr. Chesterton they ask one another as they come out – just as an incidental matter – “Did you understand his lecture?” and the answer is, “I can’t say I did.” But there is no malice about it. They can now go and say that they have seen Mr. Chesterton; that’s worth two dollars in itself. The nearest thing to this attitude of mind that I heard of in England was at the City Temple in London, where they have every week a huge gathering of about two thousand people, to listen to a (so-called) popular lecture. When I was there I was told that the person who had preceded me was Lord Haldane, who had lectured on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. I said to the chairman, “Surely this kind of audience couldn’t understand a lecture like that!” He shook his head. “No,” he said, “they didn’t understand it, but they all enjoyed it.”

I don’t mean to imply by what I said above that American lecture audiences do not appreciate good things or that the English lecturers who come to this continent are all giraffes. On the contrary: when the audience finds that Chesterton and Walpole and Drinkwater, in addition to being visible, are also singularly interesting lecturers, they are all the better pleased. But this doesn’t alter the fact that they have come primarily to see the lecturer.

Not so in England. Here a lecture (outside London) is organised on a much sterner footing. The people are there for information. The lecture is organised not by idle, amiable, charming women, but by a body called, with variations, the Philosophical Society. From experience I should define an English Philosophical Society as all the people in town who don’t know anything about philosophy. The academic and university classes are never there. The audience is only of plainer folk. In the United States and Canada at any evening lecture a large sprinkling of the audience are in evening dress. At an English lecture (outside of London) none of them are; philosophy is not to be wooed in such a garb. Nor are there the same commodious premises, the same bright lights, and the same atmosphere of gaiety as at a society lecture in America. On the contrary, the setting is a gloomy one. In England, in winter, night begins at four in the afternoon. In the manufacturing towns of the Midlands and the north (which is where the philosophical societies flourish) there is always a drizzling rain and wet slop underfoot, a bedraggled poverty in the streets, and a dimness of lights that contrasts with the glare of light in an American town. There is no visible sign in the town that a lecture is to happen, no placards, no advertisements, nothing. The lecturer is conducted by a chairman through a side door in a dingy building (The Institute, established 1840), and then all of a sudden in a huge, dim hall – there sits the Philosophical Society. There are a thousand of them, but they sit as quiet as a prayer meeting. They are waiting to be fed – on information.

Now I don’t mean to say that the Philosophical Society are not a good audience. In their own way they’re all right. Once the Philosophical Society has decided that a lecture is humorous they do not stint their laughter. I have had many times the satisfaction of seeing a Philosophical Society swept away from its moorings and tossing in a sea of laughter, as generous and as whole-hearted as anything we ever see in America.

But they are not so willing to begin. With us the chairman has only to say to the gaily dressed members of the Ladies’ Fortnightly Club, “Well, ladies, I’m sure we are all looking forward very much to Mr. Walpole’s lecture,” and at once there is a ripple of applause, and a responsive expression on a hundred charming faces.

Not so the Philosophical Society of the Midlands. The chairman rises. He doesn’t call for silence. It is there, thick. “We have with us tonight,” he says, “a man whose name is well known to the Philosophical Society” (here he looks at his card), “Mr. Stephen Leacock.” (Complete silence.) “He is a professor of political economy at—” Here he turns to me and says, “Which college did you say?” I answer quite audibly in the silence, “At McGill.” “He is at McGill,” says the chairman. (More silence.) “I don’t suppose, however, ladies and gentlemen, that he’s come here to talk about political economy.” This is meant as a jest, but the audience takes it as a threat. “However, ladies and gentlemen, you haven’t come here to listen to me” (this evokes applause, the first of the evening), “so without more ado” (the man always has the impression that there’s been a lot of “ado” but I never see any of it) “I’ll now introduce Mr. Leacock.” (Complete silence.)

Nothing of which means the least harm. It only implies that the Philosophical Society are true philosophers in accepting nothing unproved. They are like the man from Missouri. They want to be shown. And undoubtedly it takes a little time, therefore, to rouse them. I remember listening with great interest to Sir Michael Sadler, who is possessed of a very neat wit, introducing me at Leeds. He threw three jokes, one after the other, into the heart of a huge, silent audience without effect. He might as well have thrown soap bubbles. But the fourth joke broke fair and square like a bomb in the middle of the Philosophical Society and exploded them into convulsions. The process is very like what artillery men tell of “bracketing” the object fired at, and then landing fairly on it.

In what I have just written about audiences I have purposely been using the word English and not British, for it does not in the least apply to the Scotch. There is, for a humorous lecturer, no better audience in the world than a Scotch audience. The old standing joke about the Scotch sense of humour is mere nonsense. Yet one finds it everywhere.

“So you’re going to try to take humour up to Scotland,” the most eminent author in England said to me. “Well, the Lord help you. You’d better take an axe with you to open their skulls; there is no other way.” How this legend started I don’t know, but I think it is because the English are jealous of the Scotch. They got into the Union with them in 1707 and they can’t get out. The Scotch don’t want Home Rule, or Swa Raj, or Dominion status, or anything; they just want the English. When they want money they go to London and make it; if they want literary fame they sell their books to the English; and to prevent any kind of political trouble they take care to keep the Cabinet well filled with Scotchmen. The English for shame’s sake can’t get out of the Union, so they retaliate by saying that the Scotch have no sense of humour. But there’s nothing in it. One has only to ask any of the theatrical people and they will tell you that the audiences in Glasgow and Edinburgh are the best in the British Isles – possess the best taste and the best ability to recognise what is really good.

The reason for this lies, I think, in the well-known fact that the Scotch are a truly educated people, not educated in the mere sense of having been made to go to school, but in the higher sense of having acquired an interest in books and a respect for learning. In England the higher classes alone possess this, the working class as a whole know nothing of it. But in Scotland the attitude is universal. And the more I reflect upon the subject, the more I believe that what counts most in the appreciation of humour is not nationality, but the degree of education enjoyed by the individual concerned. I do not think that there is any doubt that educated people possess a far wider range of humour than the uneducated class. Some people, of course, get overeducated and become hopelessly academic. The word “highbrow” has been invented exactly to fit the case. The sense of humour in the highbrow has become atrophied, or, to vary the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under the accumulated strata of his education, on the top soil of which flourishes a fine growth of conceit. But even in the highbrow the educated appreciation of humour is there – away down. Generally, if one attempts to amuse a highbrow he will resent it as if the process were beneath him; or perhaps the intellectual jealousy and touchiness with which he is always overcharged will lead him to retaliate with a pointless story from Plato. But if the highbrow is right off his guard and has no jealousy in his mind, you may find him roaring with laughter and wiping his spectacles, with his sides shaking, and see him converted as by magic into the merry, clever little school-boy that he was thirty years ago, before his education ossified him.

But with the illiterate and the rustic no such process is possible. His sense of humour may be there as a sense, but the mechanism for setting it in operation is limited and rudimentary. Only the broadest and most elementary forms of joke can reach him. The magnificent mechanism of the art of words is, quite literally, a sealed book to him. Here and there, indeed, a form of fun is found so elementary in its nature and yet so excellent in execution that it appeals to all alike, to the illiterate and to the highbrow, to the peasant and the professor. Such, for example, are the antics of Mr. Charles Chaplin or the depiction of Mr. Jiggs by the pencil of George McManus. But such cases are rare. As a rule the cheap fun that excites the rustic to laughter is execrable to the man of education.

In the light of what I have said before it follows that the individuals that are findable in every English or American audience are much the same. All those who lecture or act are well aware that there are certain types of people that are always to be seen somewhere in the hall. Some of these belong to the general class of discouraging people. They listen in stolid silence. No light of intelligence ever gleams on their faces; no response comes from their eyes.

I find, for example, that wherever I go there is always seated in the audience, about three seats from the front, a silent man with a big motionless face like a melon. He is always there. I have seen that man in every town or city from Richmond, Indiana, to Bournemouth in Hampshire. He haunts me. I get to expect him. I feel like nodding to him from the platform. And I find that all other lecturers have the same experience. Wherever they go the man with the big face is always there. He never laughs; no matter if the people all round him are convulsed with laughter, he sits there like a rock – or, no, like a toad – immovable. What he thinks I don’t know. Why he comes to lectures I cannot guess. Once, and once only, I spoke to him, or, rather, he spoke to me. I was coming out from the lecture and found myself close to him in the corridor. It had been a rather gloomy evening; the audience had hardly laughed at all; and I know nothing sadder than a humorous lecture without laughter. The man with the big face, finding himself beside me, turned and said, “Some of them people weren’t getting that tonight.” His tone of sympathy seemed to imply that he had got it all himself; if so, he must have swallowed it whole without a sign. But I have since thought that this man with the big face may have his own internal form of appreciation. This much, however, I know: to look at him from the platform is fatal. One sustained look into his big, motionless face and the lecturer would be lost; inspiration would die upon one’s lips – the basilisk isn’t in it with him.

Personally, I no sooner see the man with the big face than instinctively I turn my eyes away, I look round the hall for another man that I know is always there, the opposite type, the little man with the spectacles. There he sits, good soul, about twelve rows back, his large spectacles beaming with appreciation and his quick face anticipating every point. I imagine him to be by trade a minor journalist or himself a writer of sorts, but with not enough of success to have spoiled him.

There are other people always there, too. There is the old lady who thinks the lecture improper; it doesn’t matter how moral it is, she’s out for impropriety and she can find it anywhere. Then there is another very terrible man against whom all American lecturers in England should be warned – the man who is leaving on the 9 p.m. train. English railways running into suburbs and near-by towns have a schedule which is expressly arranged to have the principal train leave before the lecture ends. Hence the 9-p.m.-train man. He sits right near the front, and at ten minutes to nine he gathers up his hat, coat, and umbrella very deliberately, rises with great calm, and walks firmly away. His air is that of a man who has stood all that he can and can bear no more. Till one knows about this man, and the others who rise after him, it is very disconcerting; at first I thought I must have said something to reflect upon the royal family. But presently the lecturer gets to understand that it is only the nine-o’clock train and that all the audience know about it. Then it’s all right. It’s just like the people rising and stretching themselves after the seventh innings in baseball.

In all that goes above I have been emphasising the fact that the British and the American sense of humour are essentially the same thing. But there are, of course, peculiar differences of form and peculiar preferences of material that often make them seem to diverge widely.

By this I mean that each community has, within limits, its own particular ways of being funny and its own particular conception of a joke. Thus, a Scotchman likes best a joke which he has all to himself or which he shares reluctantly with a few; the thing is too rich to distribute. The American loves particularly as his line of joke an anecdote with the point all concentrated at the end and exploding in a phrase. The Englishman loves best as his joke the narration of something that actually did happen and that depends, of course, for its point on its reality.

There are plenty of minor differences, too, in point of mere form, and very naturally each community finds the particular form used by the others less pleasing than its own. In fact, for this very reason each people is apt to think its own humour the best.

Thus, on our side of the Atlantic, to cite our own faults first, we still cling to the supposed humour of bad spelling. We have, indeed, told ourselves a thousand times over that bad spelling is not funny, but is very tiresome. Yet it is no sooner laid aside and buried than it gets resurrected. I suppose the real reason is that it is funny, at least to our eyes. When Bill Nye spells wife with “yph” we can’t help being amused. Now Bill Nye’s bad spelling had absolutely no point to it except its oddity. At times it was extremely funny, but as a mode it led easily to widespread and pointless imitation. It was the kind of thing – like poetry – that anybody can do badly. It was most deservedly abandoned with execration. No American editor would print it today. But witness the new and excellent effect produced with bad spelling by Mr. Ring W. Lardner. Here, however, the case is altered; it is not the falseness of Mr. Lardner’s spelling that is the amusing feature of it, but the truth of it. When he writes, “dear friend, Al, I would of rote sooner,” etc., he is truer to actual sound and intonation than the lexicon. The mode is excellent. But the imitations will soon debase it into such bad coin that it will fail to pass current. In England, however, the humour of bad spelling does not and has never, I believe, flourished. Bad spelling is only used in England as an attempt to reproduce phonetically a dialect; it is not intended that the spelling itself should be thought funny, but the dialect that it represents. But the effect, on the whole, is tiresome. A little dose of the humour of Lancashire or Somerset or Yorkshire pronunciation may be all right, but a whole page of it looks like the gibbering of chimpanzees set down on paper.

In America also we run perpetually to the (supposed) humour of slang, a form not used in England. If we were to analyse what we mean by slang I think it would be found to consist of the introduction of new metaphors or new forms of language of a metaphorical character, strained almost to the breaking point. Sometimes we do it with a single word. When some genius discovers that a “hat” is really only “a lid” placed on top of a human being, straightway the word “lid” goes rippling over the continent. Similarly a woman becomes a “skirt,” and so on ad infinitum.

These words presently either disappear or else retain a permanent place, being slang no longer. No doubt half our words, if not all of them, were once slang. Even within our own memory we can see the whole process carried through; “cinch” once sounded funny; it is now standard American-English. But other slang is made up of descriptive phrases. At the best, these slang phrases are – at least we think they are – extremely funny. But they are funniest when newly coined, and it takes a master hand to coin them well. For a supreme example of wild vagaries of language used for humour, one might take O. Henry’s “Gentle Grafter.” But here the imitation is as easy as it is tiresome. The invention of pointless slang phrases without real suggestion or merit is one of our most familiar forms of factory-made humour. Now the English people are apt to turn away from the whole field of slang. In the first place it puzzles them – they don’t know whether each particular word or phrase is a sort of idiom already known to Americans, or something (as with O. Henry) never said before and to be analysed for its own sake. The result is that with the English public the great mass of American slang writing (genius apart) doesn’t go. I have even found English people of undoubted literary taste repelled from such a master as O. Henry (now read by millions in England) because at first sight they get the impression that it is “all American slang.”

Another point in which American humour, or at least the form which it takes, differs notably from British, is in the matter of story telling. It was a great surprise to me the first time I went out to a dinner party in London to find that my host did not open the dinner by telling a funny story; that the guests did not then sit silent trying to “think of another”; that some one did not presently break silence by saying, “I heard a good one the other day,” – and so forth. And I realized that in this respect English society is luckier than ours.

It is my candid opinion that no man ought to be allowed to tell a funny story or anecdote without a license. We insist rightly enough that every taxi-driver must have a license, and the same principle should apply to anybody who proposes to act as a raconteur. Telling a story is a difficult thing – quite as difficult as driving a taxi. And the risks of failure and accident and the unfortunate consequences of such to the public, if not exactly identical, are, at any rate, analogous.

This is a point of view not generally appreciated. A man is apt to think that just because he has heard a good story he is able and entitled to repeat it. He might as well undertake to do a snake dance merely because he has seen Madame Pavlowa do one. The point of a story is apt to lie in the telling, or at least to depend upon it in a high degree. Certain stories, it is true, depend so much on the final point, or “nub,” as we Americans call it, that they are almost fool-proof. But even these can be made so prolix and tiresome, can be so messed up with irrelevant detail, that the general effect is utter weariness relieved by a kind of shock at the end. Let me illustrate what I mean by a story with a “nub” or point I will take one of the best known, so as to make no claim to originality – for example, the famous anecdote of the man who wanted to be “put off at Buffalo.” Here it is:

A man entered a sleeping-car and said to the porter, “At what time do we get to Buffalo?” The porter answered, “At half-past three in the morning, sir.” “All right,” the man said; “now I want to get off at Buffalo, and I want you to see that I get off. I sleep heavily and I’m hard to rouse. But you just make me wake up, don’t mind what I say, don’t pay attention if I kick about it, just put me off, do you see?” “All right, sir,” said the porter. The man got into his berth and fell fast asleep. He never woke or moved till it was broad daylight and the train was a hundred miles beyond Buffalo. He called angrily to the porter, “See here, you, didn’t I tell you to put me off at Buffalo?” The porter looked at him, aghast. “Well, I declare to goodness, boss!” he exclaimed; “if it wasn’t you, who was that man that I threw off this train at half-past three at Buffalo?”

Now this story is as nearly fool-proof as can be. And yet it is amazing how badly it can be messed up by a person with a special gift for mangling a story. He does it something after this fashion:

“There was a fellow got on the train one night and he had a berth reserved for Buffalo; at least the way I heard it, it was Buffalo, though I guess, as a matter of fact, you might tell it on any other town just as well – or no, I guess he didn’t have his berth reserved, he got on the train and asked the porter for a reservation for Buffalo – or, anyway, that part doesn’t matter – say that he had a berth for Buffalo or any other place, and the porter came through and said, ‘Do you want an early call?’ – or no, he went to the porter – that was it – and said—”

But stop. The rest of the story becomes a mere painful waiting for the end.

Of course the higher type of funny story is the one that depends for its amusing quality not on the final point, or not solely on it, but on the wording and the narration all through. This is the way in which a story is told by a comedian or a person who is a raconteur in the real sense. When Sir Harry Lauder narrates an incident, the telling of it is funny from beginning to end. When some lesser person tries to repeat it afterwards, there is nothing left but the final point. The rest is weariness.

As a consequence most story-tellers are driven to telling stories that depend on the point or “nub” and not on the narration. The story-teller gathers these up till he is equipped with a sort of little repertory of fun by which he hopes to surround himself with social charm. In America especially (by which I mean here the United States and Canada, but not Mexico) we suffer from the story-telling habit. As far as I am able to judge, English society is not pervaded and damaged by the story-telling habit as much as is society in the United States and Canada. On our side of the Atlantic story-telling at dinners and on every other social occasion has become a curse. In every phase of social and intellectual life one is haunted by the funny anecdote. Any one who has ever attended a Canadian or American banquet will recall the solemn way in which the chairman rises and says: “Gentlemen, it is to me a very great pleasure and a very great honour to preside at this annual dinner. There was an old darky once—” and so forth. When he concludes he says, “I will now call upon the Rev. Dr. Stooge, Head of the Provincial University, to propose the toast ‘Our Dominion.’” Dr. Stooge rises amid great applause and with great solemnity begins, “There were once two Irishmen—” and so on to the end. But in London, England, it is apparently not so. Not long ago I had the pleasure of meeting at dinner a member of the Government. I fully anticipated that as a member of the Government he would be expected to tell a funny story about an old darky, just as he would on our side of the water. In fact, I should have supposed that he could hardly get into the Government unless he did tell a funny story of some sort. But all through dinner the Cabinet Minister never said a word about either a Methodist minister, or a commercial traveller, or an old darky, or two Irishmen, or any of the stock characters of the American repertory. On another occasion I dined with a bishop of the Church. I expected that when the soup came he would say, “There was an old darky—” After which I should have had to listen with rapt attention, and, when he had finished, without any pause, rejoin, “There were a couple of Irishmen once—” and so on. But the bishop never said a word of the sort.

I can further, for the sake of my fellow-men in Canada and the United States who may think of going to England, vouchsafe the following facts: If you meet a director of the Bank of England, he does not say: “I am very glad to meet you. Sit down. There was a mule in Arkansas once,” etc. How they do their banking without that mule I don’t know. But they manage it. I can certify also that if you meet the proprietor of a great newspaper he will not begin by saying, “There was a Scotchman once.” In fact, in England, you can mingle freely in general society without being called upon either to produce a funny story or to suffer from one.

I don’t mean to deny that the American funny story, in capable hands, is amazingly funny and that it does brighten up human intercourse. But the real trouble lies, not in the fun of the story, but in the painful waiting for the point to come and in the strained and anxious silence that succeeds it. Each person around the dinner table is trying to “think of another.” There is a dreadful pause. The hostess puts up a prayer that some one may “think of another.” Then at last, to the relief of everybody, some one says: “I heard a story the other day – I don’t know whether you’ve heard it—” And the grateful cries of “No! no! go ahead” show how great the tension has been.

Nine times out of ten the people have heard the story before; and ten times out of nine the teller damages it in the telling. But his hearers are grateful to him for having saved them from the appalling mantle of silence and introspection which had fallen upon the table. For the trouble is that when once two or three stories have been told it seems to be a point of honour not to subside into mere conversation. It seems rude, when a story-teller has at last reached the triumphant ending and climax of the mule from Arkansas, it seems impolite, to follow it up by saying, “I see that Germany refuses to pay the indemnity.” It can’t be done. Either the mule or the indemnity – one can’t have both.

The English, I say, have not developed the American custom of the funny story as a form of social intercourse. But I do not mean to say that they are sinless in this respect. As I see it, they hand round in general conversation something nearly as bad in the form of what one may call the literal anecdote or personal experience. By this I refer to the habit of narrating some silly little event that has actually happened to them or in their sight, which they designate as “screamingly funny,” and which was perhaps very funny when it happened but which is not the least funny in the telling. The American funny story is imaginary. It never happened. Somebody presumably once made it up. It is fiction. Thus there must once have been some great palpitating brain, some glowing imagination, which invented the story of the man who was put off at Buffalo. But the English “screamingly funny” story is not imaginary. It really did happen. It is an actual personal experience. In short, it is not fiction but history.

I think – if one may say it with all respect – that in English society girls and women are especially prone to narrate these personal experiences as contributions to general merriment rather than the men. The English girl has a sort of traditional idea of being amusing; the English man cares less about it. He prefers facts to fancy every time, and as a rule is free from that desire to pose as a humorist which haunts the American mind. So it comes about that most of the “screamingly funny” stories are told in English society by the women. Thus the counterpart of “put me off at Buffalo” done into English would be something like this: “We were so amused the other night in the sleeping-car going to Buffalo. There was the most amusing old negro making the beds, a perfect scream, you know, and he kept insisting that if we wanted to get up at Buffalo we must all go to bed at nine o’clock. He positively wouldn’t let us sit up – I mean to say it was killing the way he wanted to put us to bed. We all roared!”

Please note that roar at the end of the English personal anecdote. It is the sign that indicates that the story is over. When you are assured by the narrators that all the persons present “roared” or “simply roared,” then you can be quite sure that the humorous incident is closed and that laughter is in place.

Now, as a matter of fact, the scene with the darky porter may have been, when it really happened, most amusing. But not a trace of it gets over in the story. There is nothing but the bare assertion that it was “screamingly funny” or “simply killing.” But the English are such an honest people that when they say this sort of thing they believe one another and they laugh.

But, after all, why should people insist on telling funny stories at all? Why not be content to buy the works of some really first-class humorist and read them aloud in proper humility of mind without trying to emulate them? Either that or talk theology.

On my own side of the Atlantic I often marvel at our extraordinary tolerance and courtesy to one another in the matter of story-telling. I have never seen a bad story-teller thrown forcibly out of the room or even stopped and warned; we listen with the most wonderful patience to the worst of narration. The story is always without any interest except in the unknown point that will be brought in later. But this, until it does come, is no more interesting than tomorrow’s breakfast. Yet for some reason or other we permit this story-telling habit to invade and damage our whole social life. The English always criticise this and think they are absolutely right. To my mind in their social life they give the “funny story” its proper place and room and no more. That is to say – if ten people draw their chairs in to the dinner table and somebody really has just heard a story and wants to tell it, there is no reason against it. If he says, “Oh, by the way, I heard a good story today,” it is just as if he said, “Oh, by the way, I heard a piece of news about John Smith.” It is quite admissible as conversation. But he doesn’t sit down to try to think, along with nine other rival thinkers, of all the stories that he had heard, and that makes all the difference.

The Scotch, by the way, resemble us in liking to tell and hear stories. But they have their own line. They like the stories to be grim, dealing in a jocose way with death and funerals. The story begins (will the reader kindly turn it into Scotch pronunciation for himself), “There was a Sandy MacDonald had died and the wife had the body all laid out for burial and dressed up very fine in his best suit,” etc. Now for me that beginning is enough. To me that is not a story, but a tragedy. I am so sorry for Mrs. MacDonald that I can’t think of anything else. But I think the explanation is that the Scotch are essentially such a devout people and live so closely within the shadow of death itself that they may without irreverence or pain jest where our lips would falter. Or else, perhaps they don’t care a cuss whether Sandy MacDonald died or not. Take it either way.

But I am tired of talking of our faults. Let me turn to the more pleasing task of discussing those of the English. In the first place, and as a minor matter of form, I think that English humour suffers from the tolerance afforded to the pun. For some reason English people find puns funny. We don’t. Here and there, no doubt, a pun may be made that for some exceptional reason becomes a matter of genuine wit. But the great mass of the English puns that disfigure the Press every week are mere pointless verbalisms that to the American mind cause nothing but weariness.

But even worse than the use of puns is the peculiar pedantry, not to say priggishness, that haunts the English expression of humour. To make a mistake in a Latin quotation or to stick on a wrong ending to a Latin word is not really an amusing thing. To an ancient Roman, perhaps, it might be. But then we are not ancient Romans; indeed, I imagine that if an ancient Roman could be resurrected, all the Latin that any of our classical scholars can command would be about equivalent to the French of a cockney waiter on a Channel steamer. Yet one finds even the immortal Punch citing recently as a very funny thing a newspaper misquotation of “urbis et orbis” instead of “urbi et orbos” or the other way round. I forget which. Perhaps there was some further point in it that I didn’t see, but, anyway, it wasn’t funny. Neither is it funny if a person, instead of saying Archimedes, says Archimeeds; why shouldn’t it have been Archimeeds? The English scale of values in these things is all wrong. Very few Englishmen can pronounce Chicago properly and they think nothing of that. But if a person mispronounces the name of a Greek village of what O. Henry called “The Year B.C.” it is supposed to be excruciatingly funny.

I think in reality that this is only a part of the overdone scholarship that haunts so much of English writing – not the best of it, but a lot of it. It is too full of allusions and indirect references to all sorts of extraneous facts. The English writer finds it hard to say a plain thing in a plain way. He is too anxious to show in every sentence what a fine scholar he is. He carries in his mind an accumulated treasure of quotations, allusions, and scraps and tags of history, and into this, like Jack Horner, he must needs “stick in his thumb and pull out a plum.” Instead of saying, “It is a fine morning,” he prefers to write, “This is a day of which one might say with the melancholy Jacques, it is a fine morning.”

Hence it is that many plain American readers find English humour “highbrow.” Just as the English are apt to find our humour “slangy” and “cheap,” so we find theirs academic and heavy. But the difference, after all, is of far less moment than might be supposed. It lies only on the surface. Fundamentally, as I said in starting, the humour of the two peoples is of the same kind and on an equal level.

There is one form of humour which the English have more or less to themselves, nor do I envy it to them. I mean the merriment that they appear able to draw out of the criminal courts. To me a criminal court is a place of horror, and a murder trial the last word in human tragedy. The English criminal courts I know only from the newspapers and ask no nearer acquaintance. But according to the newspapers the courts, especially when a murder case is on, are enlivened by flashes of judicial and legal humour that seem to meet with general approval. The current reports in the Press run like this:

“The prisoner, who is being tried on a charge of having burned his wife to death in a furnace, was placed in the dock and gave his name as Evans. Did he say ‘Evans or Ovens?’ asked Mr. Justice Blank. The court broke into a roar, in which all joined but the prisoner. . . .” Or take this: “How many years did you say you served the last time?” asked the judge. “Three,” said the prisoner. “Well, twice three is six,” said the judge, laughing till his sides shook; “so I’ll give you six years.”

I don’t say that those are literal examples of the humour of the criminal court. But they are close to it. For a judge to joke is as easy as it is for a schoolmaster to joke in his class. His unhappy audience has no choice but laughter. No doubt in point of intellect the English judges and the bar represent the most highly trained product of the British Empire. But when it comes to fun, they ought not to pit themselves against the unhappy prisoner. Why not take a man of their own size? For true amusement Mr. Charles Chaplin or Mr. Leslie Henson could give them sixty in a hundred. I even think I could myself.

One final judgment, however, might with due caution be hazarded. I do not think that, on the whole, the English are quite as fond of humour as we are. I mean they are not so willing to welcome at all times the humorous point of view as we are in America. The English are a serious people, with many serious things to think of – football, horse racing, dogs, fish, and many other concerns that demand much national thought: they have so many national preoccupations of this kind that they have less need for jokes than we have. They have higher things to talk about, whereas on our side of the water, except when the World’s Series is being played, we have few, if any, truly national topics.

And yet I know that many people in England would exactly reverse this last judgment and say that the Americans are a desperately serious people. That in a sense is true. Any American who takes up with an idea such as New Thought, Psychoanalysis or Eating Sawdust, or any “uplift” of the kind becomes desperately lopsided in his seriousness, and as a very large number of us cultivate New Thought, or practise breathing exercises, or eat sawdust, no doubt the English visitors think us a desperate lot.

Anyway, it’s an ill business to criticise another people’s shortcomings. What I said at the start was that the British are just as humorous as are the Americans, or the Canadians, or any of us across the Atlantic, and for greater certainty I repeat it at the end.

TOC     INDEX

College Days

(1923)

~

Preface
My College Days: A Retrospect
My Memories and Miseries as a Schoolmaster
Laus Varsitatis
The Oldest Living Graduate
The Faculty of Arts
English as She Is Taught at College
Little Glimpses of the College Future
A Subscription with Reflections
Toronto and McGill
The Children’s Corner
A Sermon on College Humour
A Christmas Examination
Idleness
The Old College and the New University
The Diversions of a Professor of History

Preface

I present this little book to such of the public as care to read it, without apology. The “pieces” that are included in it appeared in bygone years in the Toronto Varsity, the McGill Outlook, the Harvard Advocate, the Princeton Tiger and other journals of the same uncommercial and ideal character. The responsibility for their existence rests with the brilliant and uncalculating young men who are editors of such publications.

I am aware that some of these sketches and verses are local and topical in their nature. But I have lived and breathed so long in a college atmosphere that I am convinced that all colleges are in a measure alike, and that what is said of one is true of all.

Many of the men whose names appear here in print are now numbered with the majority. I trust that it is no violation of good taste to leave any mention of them unaltered from what it was. I have no other intention than to honour their memory.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

McGill University

October 1923

My College Days:
A Retrospect

When I look back upon the men and things of my college days, and compare them with the college days of those who are now undergraduates, I stand appalled at the contrast.

What strikes me most in looking back to the college life of my time is the extraordinary brilliance, the wonderful mental powers of the students of those days. In my time there were men at college, especially in the years above me, who could easily have discovered, had they cared to, the Newtonian Laws of Motion and the Theory of Light.

This, I think, was particularly noticeable in the very year when I happened to be a freshman. The fourth year, the graduating class, of that moment represented a galaxy of intellectual capacity which was probably unparalleled in the history of the human mind. I state this in positive terms because I myself witnessed it. I knew, or, at any rate, I saw and heard, these very men. It will always remain with me as a source of gratification till I die, that it was my lot to enter college at the very time when the fourth year represented an exaltation of the intellect never since equalled.

The deplorable change which has since happened was already, I fear, setting in during my own college days. The third year and the second year men, when they came to graduate, although infinitely in advance of anything I have since known, stood for a range of mentality far below that of the first graduating class that I remember. More than that, I am compelled to admit that the classes which followed immediately upon my own year were composed of the very dregs of the human intelligence, and betokened an outlook and a point of view more fitted for the nursery than the classroom.

Nor is the change that I observe only in the students. The professors whom I see about me today, ordinary, quiet men, with the resigned tranquillity that betrays the pathos of intellectual failure – how can I compare them with the intellectual giants to whom I owe everything that I have forgotten. The professors of my college days were scholars – vast reservoirs of learning, into whose depths one might drop the rope and bucket of curiosity to bring it up full to the brim with the limpid waters of truth. Plumb them? You couldn’t. Measure their learning? Impossible. It defied it. They acknowledged it themselves. They taught – not for mere pecuniary emolument – they despised it – but for the sheer love of learning. And now when I look about me at their successors, I half suspect (it is a hideous thought) that there is a connection between their work and their salaries.

Nor is it only a change in the students and the professors. The old place itself – my Alma Mater – how it has altered. Is this the great campus that I remember so well from my freshman days? What was it? – half a mile long I think, and broader even than its length. That football goal that stood some fifty or sixty feet in the air, has it shrunk to these poor sticks? These simple trees, can they be the great elms that reared themselves up to the autumn sky? And was the Tower no higher then than this?

Nay Fate, that hath given me so much, that hath brought to me my lettered degrees, and my academic standing with its comfortable licence to forget – wilt thou not take it all back again and give me in return by some witchery of recollection – one hour of the Brave Old Days Beyond Recall.

TOC     INDEX

My Memories and Miseries
as a Schoolmaster

For ten years I was a schoolmaster. About thirty years ago I was appointed on to the staff of a great Canadian school. It took me ten years to get off it. Being appointed to the position of a teacher is just as if Fate passed a hook through one’s braces and hung one up against the wall. It is hard to get down again.

For those ten years I carried away nothing in money and little in experience; indeed, no other asset whatever, unless it be, here and there, a pleasant memory or two and the gratitude of my former pupils. There was nothing really in my case for them to be grateful about. They got nothing from me in the way of intellectual food, but a lean and perfunctory banquet; and anything that I gave them in the way of sound moral benefit I gave gladly and never missed.

But schoolboys have a way of being grateful. It is the decent thing about them. A schoolboy, while he is at school, regards his masters as a mixed assortment of tyrants and freaks. He plans vaguely that at some future time in life he will “get even” with them. I remember well, for instance, at the school where I used to teach, a little Chilian boy who kept a stiletto in his trunk with which he intended to kill the second mathematical master.

But somehow a schoolboy is no sooner done with his school and out in the business of life, than a soft haze of retrospect suffuses a new colour over all that he has left behind. There is a mellow sound in the tones of the school bell that he never heard in his six years of attendance. There is a warmth in the colour of the old red bricks that he never saw before; and such a charm and such a sadness in the brook or in the elm trees beside the school playground that he will stand beside them with a bowed and reverent head as in the silence of a cathedral. I have seen an “Old Boy” gaze into the open door of an empty classroom and ask, “And those are the same old benches?” with a depth of meaning in his voice. He has been out of school perhaps five years and the benches already seem to him infinitely old. This, by the way, is the moment and this the mood in which the “Old Boy” may be touched for a subscription to the funds of the school. This is the way, in fact, in which the sagacious head master does it. The foolish head master, who has not yet learned his business, takes the “Old Boy” round and shows him all the new things, the fine new swimming pool built since his day and the new gymnasium with up-to-date patent apparatus. But this is all wrong. There is nothing in it for the “Old Boy” but boredom. The wise head master takes him by the sleeve and says “Come”; he leads him out to a deserted corner of the playground and shows him an old tree behind an ash house and the “Old Boy” no sooner sees than he says:

“Why, Great Caesar! that’s the same old tree that Jack Counsell and I used to climb up to hook out of bounds on Saturday night! Old Jimmy caught us at it one night and licked us both. And look here, here’s my name cut on the boarding at the back of the ash house. See? They used to fine us five cents a letter if they found it. Well, Well!”

The “Old Boy” is deep in his reminiscences examining the board fence, the tree and the ash house.

The wise head master does not interrupt him. He does not say that he knew all along that the “Old Boy’s” name was cut there and that that’s why he brought him to the spot. Least of all does he tell him that the boys still “hook out of bounds” by this means and that he licked two of them for it last Saturday night. No, no, retrospect is too sacred for that. Let the “Old Boy” have his fill of it and when he is quite down and out with the burden of it, then as they walk back to the school building, the head master may pick a donation from him that falls like a ripe thimbleberry.

And most of all, by the queer contrariety of things, does this kindly retrospect envelop the person of the teachers. They are transformed by the alchemy of time into a group of profound scholars, noble benefactors through whose teaching, had it been listened to, one might have been lifted into higher things. Boys who never listened to a Latin lesson in their lives look back to the memory of their Latin teacher as the one great man that they have known. In the days when he taught them they had no other idea than to put mud in his ink or to place a bent pin upon his chair. Yet they say now that he was the greatest scholar in the world, and that if they’d only listened to him they would have got more out of his lessons than from any man that ever taught. He wasn’t and they wouldn’t – but it is some small consolation to those who have been schoolmasters to know that after it is too late this reward at least is coming to them.

Hence it comes about that even so indifferent a vessel as I should reap my share of schoolboy gratitude. Again and again it happens to me that some unknown man, well on in middle life, accosts me with a beaming face and says, “You don’t remember me. You licked me at Upper Canada College,” and we shake hands with a warmth and heartiness as if I had been his earliest benefactor. Very often if I am at an evening reception or anything of the sort, my hostess says, “Oh, there is a man here so anxious to meet you,” and I know at once why. Forward he comes, eagerly pushing his way among the people to seize my hand. “Do you remember me?” he says. “You licked me at Upper Canada College.” Sometimes I anticipate the greeting. As soon as the stranger grasps my hand and says, “Do you remember me?” I break in and say, “Why, let me see, surely I licked you at Upper Canada College.” In such a case the man’s delight is beyond all bounds. Can I lunch with him at his Club? Can I dine at his home? He wants his wife to see me. He has so often told her about having been licked by me that she too will be delighted.

I do not like to think that I was in any way brutal or harsh, beyond the practice of my time, in beating the boys I taught. Looking back on it, the whole practice of licking and being licked seems to me mediaeval and out of date. Yet I do know that there are, apparently, boys that I have licked in all quarters of the globe. I get messages from them. A man says to me, “By the way, when I was out in Sumatra there was a man there that said he knew you. He said you licked him at Upper Canada College. He said he often thought of you.” I have licked, I believe, two Generals of the Canadian Army, three Cabinet Ministers, and more Colonels and Mayors than I care to count. Indeed all the boys that I have licked seem to be doing well.

I am stating here what is only simple fact, not exaggerated a bit. Any schoolmaster and every “Old Boy” will recognize it at once; and indeed I can vouch for the truth of this feeling on the part of the “Old Boys” all the better in that I have felt it myself. I always read Ralph Connor’s books with great interest for their own sake, but still more because, thirty-two years ago, the author “licked me at Upper Canada College.” I have never seen him since, but I often say to people from Winnipeg, “If you ever meet Ralph Connor – he’s Major Charles Gordon, you know – tell him that I was asking about him and would like to meet him. He licked me at Upper Canada College.”

But enough of “licking.” It is, I repeat, to me nowadays a painful and a disagreeable subject. I can hardly understand how we could have done it. I am glad to believe that at the present time it has passed or is passing out of use. I understand that it is being largely replaced by “moral suasion.” This, I am sure, is a great deal better. But when I was a teacher moral suasion was just beginning at Upper Canada College. In fact I saw it tried only once. The man who tried it was a tall, gloomy-looking person, a university graduate in psychology. He is now a well-known Toronto lawyer, so I must not name him. He came to the school only as a temporary substitute for an absent teacher. He was offered a cane by the College janitor, whose business it was to hand them round. But he refused it. He said that a moral appeal was better: he said that psychologically it set up an inhibition stronger than the physical. The first day that he taught – it was away up in a little room at the top of the old college building on King Street – the boys merely threw paper wads at him and put bent pins on his seat. The next day they put hot bees-wax on his clothes, and the day after that they brought screwdrivers and unscrewed the little round seats of the classroom and rolled them down the stairs. After that day the philosopher did not come back, but he has since written, I believe, a book called Psychic Factors in Education, which is very highly thought of.

But the opinion of the “Old Boy” about his teachers is only a part of his illusionment. The same peculiar haze of retrospect hangs about the size and shape and kind of boys who went to school when he was young as compared with the boys of today.

“How small they are!” is always the exclamation of the “Old Boy” when he looks over the rows and rows of boys sitting in the assembly hall. “Why, when I went to school the boys were ever so much bigger.”

After which he goes on to relate that when he first entered the school as a youngster (the period apparently of maximum size and growth), the boys in the sixth form had whiskers! These whiskers of the sixth form are a persistent and Perennial school tradition that never dies. I have traced them, on personal record from eye-witnesses, all the way from 1829, when the college was founded, until today. I remember well, during my time as a schoolmaster, receiving one day a parent, an “Old Boy,” who came accompanied by a bright little son of twelve whom he was to enter at the school. The boy was sent to play about with some new acquaintances while I talked with the father.

“The old school,” he said, in the course of our talk, “is greatly changed, very much altered. For one thing the boys are very much younger than they were in my time. Why, when I entered the school – though you will hardly believe it – the boys in the sixth form had whiskers!”

I had hardly finished expressing my astonishment and appreciation when the little son came back and went up to his father’s side and started whispering to him. “Say, dad,” he said, “there are some awfully big boys in this school. I saw out there in the hall some boys in the sixth form with whiskers.”

From which I deduced that what is whiskers to the eye of youth fades into fluff before the disillusioned eye of age. Nor is there need to widen the application or to draw the moral.

The parents of the boys at school naturally fill a broad page in the schoolmaster’s life and are responsible for many of his sorrows. There are all kinds and classes of them. Most acceptable to the schoolmaster is the old-fashioned type of British father who enters his boy at the school and says:

“Now I want this boy well thrashed if he doesn’t behave himself. If you have any trouble with him let me know and I’ll come and thrash him myself. He’s to have a shilling a week pocket money and if he spends more than that let me know and I’ll stop his money altogether.” Brutal though his speech sounds, the real effect of it is to create a strong prejudice in the little boy’s favour, and when his father curtly says, “Good-bye, Jack,” and he answers, “Good-bye, father,” in a trembling voice, the schoolmaster would be a hound indeed who could be unkind to him.

But very different is the case of the up-to-date parent. “Now I’ve just given Jimmy fifty dollars,” he says to the schoolmaster, in the same tone as he would use to an inferior clerk in his office, “and I’ve explained to him that when he wants any more he’s to tell you to go to the bank and draw for him what he needs.” After which he goes on to explain that Jimmy is a boy of very peculiar disposition, requiring the greatest nicety of treatment; that they find if he gets in tempers the best way is to humour him and presently he’ll come round. Jimmy, it appears, can be led, if led gently, but never driven. During all of which time the schoolmaster, insulted by being treated as an underling – for the iron bites deep into the soul of every one of them – has already fixed his eye on the undisciplined young pup called Jimmy with a view to trying out the problem of seeing whether he can’t be driven after all.

But the greatest nuisance of all to the schoolmaster is the parent who does his boy’s home exercises and works his boy’s sums. I suppose they mean well by it. But it is a disastrous thing to do for any child. Whenever I found myself correcting exercises that had obviously been done for the boys in their homes I used to say to them:

“Paul, tell your father that he must use the ablative after pro.”

“Yes, sir,” says the boy.

“And, Edward, you tell your grandmother that her use of the dative case simply won’t do. She’s getting along nicely and I’m well satisfied with the way she’s doing, but I cannot have her using the dative right and left on every occasion. Tell her it won’t do.”

“Yes, sir,” says little Edward.

I remember one case in particular of a parent who did not do the boy’s exercise but, after letting the boy do it himself, wrote across the face of it a withering comment addressed to me and reading: “From this exercise you can see that my boy, after six months of your teaching, is completely ignorant. How do you account for it?”

I sent the exercise back to him with the added note: “I think it must be hereditary.”

In the whole round of the school year, there was, as I remember it, but one bright spot – the arrival of the summer holidays. Somehow, as the day draws near for the school to break up for holidays, a certain touch of something human pervades the place. The masters lounge round in cricket flannels smoking cigarettes almost in the corridors of the school itself. The boys shout at their play in the long June evenings. At the hour when, on the murky winter nights, the bell rang for night study, the sun is still shining upon the playground and the cricket match between House and House is being played out between daylight and dark. The masters – good fellows that they are – have cancelled evening study to watch the game. The head master is there himself. He is smoking a briar-root pipe and wearing his mortar-board sideways. There is wonderful greenness in the new grass of the playground and a wonderful fragrance in the evening air. It is the last day of school but one. Life is sweet indeed in the anticipation of this summer evening.

If every day in the life of a school could be the last day but one, there would be little fault to find with it.

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Laus Varsitatis

A Song in Praise of
the University of Toronto

(Varsity War Supplement)

(1916)

Note: It would be false modesty to conceal the fact that this poem was submitted for the Chancellor’s Gold Medal. It didn’t get it.

No one I think can blame me if I want to

Exalt in verse the University of Toronto.

I always do, I hope I always will

Speak in the highest terms of Old McGill;

That institution, I admit with tears,

Has paid my salary for sixteen years.

But what is money to a man like me?

Toronto honoured me with her degree.

Oh, Seat of Learning, at whose Norman Gate

My feeble steps learned to matriculate,

Oh, ancient corridors and classrooms dim,

That youth that once you sheltered, I am him.

Ghosts of departed decades, wake and see,

That boy in the short trousers, I am he,

And after thirty years I bring along

This unsolicited return of song.

Roll back the years, O Time, and let me see

The College that was Varsity to me;

Show me again those super-sylvan spots

Now turned to choice suburban building lots.

Spread wide the trees and stretch the park afar,

Unvexed as yet by the electric car,

Till once again my listening ear shall seize

The Taddle murmuring among the trees

And Fancy see in that far yesterday

The Bloor Street farmers hauling in their hay.

Thus at fond memory’s call as through a haze

I see the men and things of other days.

Dim shades appear within the corridor

And noiseless footsteps fall upon the floor.

Lo! noble Wilson – dared we call him Dan?

Musing, the while, on Prehistoric Man,

Draw nearer still, O Venerable Shade,

Read me that lecture on the Third Crusade,

Let thy grave voice its even tenor keep,

Read it again. This time I will not sleep.

Profound in thought, melodious in tongue

I seem to see thee still, Oh Paxton Young;

How gladly I would ask thee, if I could,

One or two points I never understood.

You said one day that all our judgments were

Synthetically a priori, sir—

I never doubted it, I never will.

I thought so then and I believe it still,

Yet whisper low into my ear intent

What did you say that a priori meant?

But see these shadowy forms, so strange yet like,

That head! – ’tis Chapman – and that brow – ’tis Pike.

That coloured chalk, that moving hand, that bright

Description of the Neurilemma – Wright!

That voice within the room – pause here and listen—

Mittel Hoch Deutsch – it is, it’s Vandersmissen.

Oh Noble Group! what learning! There were some

Possessed a depth one hardly dared to plumb,

Others a width of superficies that

Makes the professor of today look flat.

And all are gone, departed, vanished, nil—

Called to the States or summoned further still,

Some have resigned, or been dismissed, or died;

Others, while still alive, Carnegified,

And in their stead their soft successors play,

In flannelled idleness at Go-Home Bay.

All gone? Not so, some still are on the ground;

Fraser is with us still, and Squair is round,

Still Hutton’s Attic wit the classroom pleases

And Baker keeps at least as young as Keys is.

Others there are – j’en passe et des meilleurs—

Who still recall to us the days that were.

For those were days of Peace. We heeded not.

Men talked of Empire and we called it rot;

Indeed the Empire had no further reach

Than to round out an after-dinner speech,

Or make material from which John A.

Addressed us on our Convocation Day.

There was not in the class of ’91

A single student who could fire a gun,

Our longest route march only took us – well,

About as far as the Caer Howell Hotel,

Our sole protection from aggression lay

In one small company – its number K.

Oh, little company, I see thee still

Upon the campus at thine evening drill;

Forming in fours, with only three in line,

A target for such feeble wit as mine.

All honour to the few who led the way,

Barker and Coleman, Edgar and McCrae,

Geary, Ruttan and Andy Eliot, who

Is now dispensing justice at the Soo;

And Ryckert – let me pause and think of him,

Is it conceivable he once was slim!

And, yes, perhaps the most important one,

Friend of my youth, good Howard Ferguson,

The kindest man that ever failed to pass

In First Year Trigonometry, alas!—

This man of place and power, has he forgot

His boyhood friend? Oh, surely, he has not;

When next some well-paid sinecure you see,

Oh, Howard, pass it, pass it on to me.

A noble band, those veterans of K.,

Born out of time, living before their day,

Paying their own expense, their belts, their boots,

And calling ever vainly for recruits.

Oh K., thou wert O.K., but not to be

And sank as sinks a raindrop in the sea;

Yet from thine ashes – if a raindrop can

Be said to have such things – there then began

A mighty movement, and one well may say,

You put the K in Canada today.

For see, the past has gone! It fades apace

And the loud angry Present takes its place,

Lurid and red, and shaken with alarms,

The thunder that proclaims a world in arms.

What sounds are these, O Varsity, that fall

Loud on thy corridors, the bugle call,

The muster roll, the answering cry, the drum,

As from thy quiet halls thy students come?

Oh ancient corridor! soft falls the light

Upon their hurrying faces, brave and bright;

Children they seemed but yesterday, and then

As in a moment they are turned to men.

Hush low the echoes of thy stone-flagged floor,

Footsteps are passing now that come no more.

And they are gone! The summer sunshine falls

Through the closed windows of thy silent halls,

The winter drags its round, the weary spring

And the slow summer still no tidings bring

Of their return. Yet still, O Gateway Grey,

Silent but hopeful thou dost wait the day—

And it shall come. Then shall the bonfires burn

To tell the message of their glad return.

Ho, porter, wide the gate, beat loud the drum,

Up with the Union Jack, they come, they come!

Majors and Generals and some V.C.’s—

Had ever college such a class as these?

Let the wine flow – excuse me, I forgot—

I should say, in Ontario, let it not,

But let at least the pop be strongly made

And more than lemons in the lemonade.

Let the loud harp and let the mandolin,

In fact, let any kind of music in—

And while the wildest music madly whirls,

Why, then – if I may say it – bring the girls.

And under circumstances such as these

Come, give them all gratuitious degrees.

And there are those who come not. But for them

We sing no dirge, we chant no requiem.

What though afar beneath a distant sky,

Broken and spent, shall their torn bodies lie,

And the soft flowers of France bloom once again

Upon the liberated soil above the slain

Who freed it, and her rivers lave

As with their tears the unforgotten grave,

Whilst thou, Oh Land of murmuring lake and pine,

Shall call in vain these vanished sons of thine—

They are not dead. They shall not die while still

Affection live and Memory fulfil

Its task of gratitude. Nor theirs alone

The sculptured monument, the graven stone;

The Commonwealth of Freedom that shall rise

World wide shall tell their noble sacrifice.

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The Oldest Living Graduate

I find him wherever I go among the colleges – the Oldest Living Graduate. At every College Reunion, there he is; at each Commencement Day you may expect him among the first – a trifle bent he is and leans, one cannot but note it, somewhat heavily upon his stick; and there is something in his eye, a dimness, a far-away look as of one to whom already a further horizon is opening.

Yet, frail or not, he is there among the graduates at the earliest call. The younger men may hesitate about a hundred-mile journey to attend the Annual Dinner of the Alumni – not he. The younger men may grudge the time or count the cost – not so the Oldest Living Graduate.

See, it is Commencement Day. There sits the Oldest Living Graduate in the very foremost row of the seats in the college hall. His hand is bent to his ear as he listens to the President’s farewell address to the graduates. But he hears no word of it. His mind is back on a bright day in June – can it be sixty years ago? – when first he heard the like of it.

Easy and careless he was then, the Youngest Living Graduate, happy in his escape from the walls of the Temple of Learning. A butterfly he was, hatched from his silken skeins and glorying in the sunshine.

The gaze of the Youngest Living Graduate was turned forwards, not back. He was looking out upon life, eagerly and expectantly. For the time being the sights of the grounds of the campus had faded from his eye and ear. His mind was bent, his strength was braced, to meet the struggle of the coming years. It is the law of life. He had no time, as yet, for retrospect, and in his very eagerness was over-careless of the things that lay behind.

But as the years slipped past the ties of memory began to tighten in their hold. There was time, here and there, in the struggle of life, for a fleeting glance towards the past. And lo! How soft the colours that began to lie on the pictured vision of his college days. The professoriate, once derided, how wise they seemed. It is ever their hard lot to be honoured only when they are dead; but all the greater is the honour. The glory of the campus, the football game played into the November dusk – how the shouts of it will linger in the ear of memory when half a century has gone. Nay, even the lamp of learning itself, how softly now does it illuminate the long-neglected page; and the brave lettering of the degree, what a fine pride of forgotten knowledge does it now contain! Ah, my friends, you and I and each of us were once the youngest, or at least the latest living graduate. The time is coming, if we stay to see it, when we shall be the oldest. The time is coming when you and I and an ancient group that we still call our “Class” will walk the green grass of the campus on Commencement Day with the yearning regret for all that we might have done; with the longing for lost opportunity that is the chief regret of Age.

While there is time, let us be up and doing. Before yet we are the Oldest Living Graduate, let us borrow something of the spirit that inspires him. Let us discount a note against the future with Father Time, and receive its value in the glowing coin of a present affection. While our class yet live let us realize what a splendid group they are; and let us find the opportunity to tell the professors how much we owe to them before we write our gratitude upon their tombstones. And if our college wants our support, our help, and our enthusiasm, let us bring it forth with all the affection of the Oldest Living Graduate and with all the power and eagerness of the youngest.

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The Faculty of Arts

(Verses written for Dean Moyse’s Dinner to the Professors of the Faculty of Arts, McGill University, October 29, 1909.)

—

Dear Mr. Dean, I think it much completer,

To voice tonight my sentiments in metre,

This little thing – I ask your blessing on it—

Is what we technically call a sonnet.

Sonno, I sing, and Nitto, I do not,

A derivation made upon the spot.

Here let me interject to save confusion,

There has not been the very least collusion,

I had not given any intimation

That I intended such an innovation,

And if you find my verses poor and mean,

Worthy professors, do not blame the Dean.

For years I have dissembled, now you know it,

My friends! behold in me an unknown poet

Careless of notoriety, of fame unthinking,

But singing like a skylark after drinking.

So tasting this good cheer from soup to Stilton,

I can’t remain a mute inglorious Milton.

Let every man pursue his different way

And seek his life work where he finds his pay.

I leave to Walker gas, to Caldwell Kant,

Adams the rock; Penhallow keeps the plant,

Let the bacilli stay where they belong.

But leave to me the humble joy of song.

A sonnet did I say? Nay I confess

This is an epic neither more nor less,

Arts and the Men, I sing, for I am yearning

To sound the praise of Academic learning.

How start the theme with teeming fancies fraught,

How measure into feet the crowding thought,

How mark the rhythm and divide the time

And bid the stubborn syllables to rhyme—

In other words, how can I jam it, sir,

In Petersonian Pentameter?

First, let me voice a wish I must avow,

The Board of Governors might see us now.

That we might have to make the tale complete,

An Angus and a Greenshields, and a Fleet.

Oh, sirs, this spectacle would make them feel

That poor professors like a solid meal,

That learning, since it is no hollow sham,

Looks best with a distended diaphragm.

Well may they boast among their employees

A group of smiling faces such as these!

Yet ’tis a theme on which I must not touch,

In fairness be it said we owe them much,

And let us hope the future has in store

That one and all shall shortly owe them more.

Yes, let me voice this humble, earnest plea,

Participated by this company—

When next the stream of benefaction starts,

Pray, pour it on the Faculty of Arts!

Oh, Edward, William, Robert, James and John

Delay no longer, kindly turn it on!

For this the Faculty of Arts is known,

Of other studies the foundation stone,

It forms the base, however deeply hid,

Of higher education’s pyramid.

Let medicine discourse in cultured tone

Of pickled corpse and desiccated bone,

Yet let it answer, if it dares to speak,

Who taught it how to name the bones in Greek?

Or let the scientist pursue his toil,

Grease his machines with lubricating oil,

Fling far the bridge and excavate the mine,

And bid the incandescent light to shine.

Yet let him answer – will he dare to tell,

Who tries to teach the engineer to spell?

Or let the law, if proof be needed yet,

To our great Faculty deny its debt,

The Latin it must use to mystify

Is raw material that we supply.

The logic that Dean Walton takes his tricks on

Is manufactured by Professor Hickson.

But I have said enough, I think, to show

The debt of gratitude all others owe

To this our Faculty. Now let me come

To details lying rather nearer home,

And let me speak about the various parts

That constitute this Faculty of Arts.

This done, with your permission I will then

Say something of our most distinguished men,

And with all gentleness I will assign

To each a brief Thanksgiving Valentine.

Here first the Classics holds its honoured place,

The centre stone of the aforesaid base,

In education’s whirling stream and jam,

It lies embedded like a coffer dam.

So deeply down do its foundations lie,

Its worth is hidden from the common eye.

The vulgar think the Classics are a sham,

O noble edifice, O Greek, O dam!

Yet judge its worth when you can find them beaten,

Messrs. Macnaughton, Peterson and Eaton.

See where Macnaughton with imperious tread

Rudely disturbs the archaeologic dead,

Watch him receive in his extended hat

The venal offering of the plutocrat.

Watch this, my friends, and will you dare to say

The study of the Classics does not pay?

Or see, a Peterson with spade and hoe

In ducal vaults exhumes a Cicero!

Carries it gently to the outer air,

Removes the dust with Caledonian care,

And straightway to the Classics is annexed

A new and highly controversial text.

A noble feat! and yet alas! I own,

Like Dr. Cook, he did it all alone;

When next in search of Cicero you go,

Take, Mr. Principal, an Eskimo.

Lo! Mathematics hidden from the view,

Behind its symbols though it may be true,

The upper part of it so wrapped in darkness,

That no one sees it but Professor Harkness.

The very Queen of Sciences they say!

It is, for the professor, anyway.

In lectures he is not obliged to talk,

Needs but a blackboard and a bit of chalk,

A set of problems given as a test,

Then down he sits – the students do the rest.

Forgive me if I fall into ecstatics,

Would I were taught to teach the Mathematics!

Charming as is the mathematic mystery,

It will not stand comparison with history;

Imagine what a splendid tour de force

To trace the Norman Conquest to its source,

Think of a man who still quite young was skilled

To analyse the Mediaeval Guild!

To follow it and trace its root-age down

Deep buried in the Anglo-Saxon town!

Yet such is Colby! Oh, what joy complete

To terrorize the man upon the street,

To hush his crude attempts at conversation

By quoting pages of the Reformation;

And that his cup of misery be filled,

To crush him with the Mediaeval Guild.

Oh, Charles, with all thy knowledge, is it right

That thou art not beside the board tonight?

That thou shouldst set thy brain to overplan

The simple, unsuspecting business man!

See! at the bidding of the gentle sage

The Caligraph creeps noiseless o’er the page,

The clatter of the busy key is dumb,

Destroyed by Colby’s patent Liquid Gum.

Oh, second Gutenberg, God speed the ship

That bears you on your European trip,

Let bulky Germans drink your health in hock,

And frantic Frenchmen clamour for the stock;

And, Noiseless Charles, when you have had your fill

Of business life, come back to fond McGill.

Surely no nobler theme the poet chants

Then the soft science of the blooming plants.

How sweet it were in some sequestered spot

To classify the wild forget-me-not;

To twine about the overheated brow

The coolness of the rhododendron bough;

To lie recumbent on a mossy heap

And draw a salary while fast asleep.

Dr. Penhallow, it would need a Herrick

To sing your work and that of Carrie Derick.

Nor shall my halting Muse in vain essay

Such sweet co-operation to portray.

Would that your time allowed you once or twice

To drink to Barnes, discoverer of ice!

All unsuspected in the river bed

The tiny frazil reared its dainty head.

No one had known for centuries untold

Why the Canadian climate was so cold;

Why winter should be vigorous and rude

In such a truly Southern latitude.

Barnes after years of thought and anxious teasing,

Decided that there must be something freezing.

He stopped his lectures, bundled up his pack,

Braved untold hardships at the Frontenac,

And there within a stone’s throw of Quebec,

Found ice that no one ventured to suspect.

Let ice and snowdrift sing their requiem,

Our Howard Barnes is going to settle them.

A fairer prospect opens to the eye!

A Canada beneath a sultry sky!

Already the prophetic eye of hope

Sees grape vines circle the Laurentian slope.

Palms and pomegranates with the breezes play

And luscious figs droop over Hudson Bay.

Last, but of all departments valued most,

Is that illuminated by our host;

English, the very word inspires the thought

With memories of a noble nation fraught.

English, the tongue of Tennyson, of Gray,

Of Milton, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Pope and Gay;

Of still more widely circulated names,

Of Henty, E. P. Rowe and G. P. James,

The tongue of Bobbie Burns and Walter Scott—

You interrupt me? – strictly it was not.

But let me tell you, sirs, who dares to fight it?

Let Saxons speak it but let Scotsmen write it!

English, to add to this enumeration

The tongue today of every place and nation,

For cultured Chinaman, for mild Hindoo,

For travelling Russian nothing else will do.

The tongue of every race and every clan,

Just think how needful to a gentleman!

Varied as are the forms of English speech,

Our Dean has got his solid grip on each;

Here sits a man who positively knows

The whole life history of our nation’s prose,

Who can, and will, at your request rehearse

One thousand lines of Anglo-Saxon verse.

To him, we feel it in his every look,

Chaucer and Gower are an open book;

He finds the verse of Caedmon light and breezy,

And Beowulf, if anything, too easy—

Nay, bless my soul, the man can even read

The writings of the Venerable Bede.

Yet not for this, or not for this alone

We love to claim him as our very own;

Rich in the scholar’s gift in every part,

Yet more we prize the richness of his heart.

The cheerful humour nothing can dismay,

Unruffled by the cares of day to day.

The industry that does not flag or shirk,

That stints not trouble, measures not its work.

The kindness never failing and the hand

Outstretched to help, the brain to understand

With ready sympathy another’s cares

And lighten thus the burden that it shares.

Oh, sirs, if this in English may be sought,

Would that such English were more widely taught.

Let him recite us Caedmon if he will

Or sing us Beowulf, we will be still:

Nay, let him quote us, if he feel the need,

Whole chapters from the Venerable Bede;

Still shall we cry the pauses in between

God’s blessing on our well-beloved Dean.

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English as She Is Taught at College

It is an amazing fact, but it is nevertheless true, that Mr. Rudyard Kipling or Sir James Barrie, or, let us say, ex-President Eliot of Harvard, would fail hopelessly in English if they tried to pass the entrance examination of any American or Canadian University. King George, from whom presumably the King’s English flows as from its fountain source, might get perhaps half-way through a high school in the subject.

As for Shakespeare, I doubt if he knew enough of what is called English by our education departments to get beyond a kindergarten. As to passing an examination on one of his own plays, such as is set by our colleges for matriculation, he couldn’t have done it; he hadn’t the brains – at least not the kind of brains that are needed for it.

These are not exaggerations, they are facts. I admit that when the facts are not good enough I always exaggerate them. This time they don’t need it.

Our study of English – not merely in any one State or Province but all over North America, except in happy Mexico – begins with years and years of the silly stuff called grammar and rhetoric. All the grammar that any human being ever needs, or that is of any use as an intellectual training, can be learned in a few weeks from a little book as thin as a Ritz-Carlton sandwich. All the rest of the solid manuals on the subject is mere stodge. It serves no other purpose than to put royalties into the pockets of the dull pedants who elaborate it.

Rhetoric is worse. It lays down laws for the writing of sentences and paragraphs about as reasonable and as useful as a set of directions telling how to be a gentleman, or how to have a taste for tomatoes.

Then comes English Literature. This is the last stage, open only to minds that have already been debilitated by grammar and rhetoric.

We actually proceed on the silly supposition that you can “examine” a person in English literature, torture it out of him, so to speak, in the course of a two hours’ inquisition. We ask him to distinguish the “styles” of different authors as he would the colour of their whiskers. We expect him to divide up authors into “schools” and to sort them out as easily as a produce merchant classifies fish.

The truth is that you cannot examine in English in this way, or only at the cost of killing the very thing that you wish to create. The only kind of examination in the subject I can think of would be to say to the pupil, for example, “Have you read the novels of Charles Dickens and do you like them?” and when he answered that he didn’t care for them but that his uncle read them all the time, to send a B.A. degree to his uncle.

We make our pupils spend about two hours a day for ten years in the silly pursuit of what we call English, and yet at the end of it we wonder that our students have less real appreciation of literature in them than when they read a half-dime novel for sheer artistic joy of it.

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Little Glimpses
of the College Future

THE LENGTHENING
OF THE COLLEGE COURSE

The Final Result if College Courses keep Getting Longer and Longer

—

(Harvard Commencement Day of 1950.
Current Press Report of the President’s Speech to the Graduating Class.)

The President, in his valedictory address, spoke with deep feeling, and was frequently interrupted by the sobs of the graduating class. They had now been together, he said, more years than he cared to count. They had come together as young men; they had spent the energetic years of their middle age together in these venerable halls, and now with advancing old age it had become absolutely necessary that they should graduate before they died. He felt that it was hard indeed to part. He could not but contrast on this occasion the organization of the college and the new meaning which graduation from Harvard had acquired with the almost unbelievable condition of things which he could recall as actually existing in his youth. In those days men graduated from the university after perhaps no more than eight or nine years of study. He himself had actually seen a Harvard degree given to a man – a brilliant man, he admitted – who had spent only six years at the college. Under such conditions education was necessarily slipshod and incomplete. It was customary, as he remembered, for men to go no further in Conic Sections than page 150; as to what came after page 150 there had prevailed a regrettable indifference. He was glad to say that he could see men seated before him this morning who had done the entire book (applause). In earlier days students were allowed to go out of Harvard knowing something of plane trigonometry but absolutely ignorant of spherical (groans and sobs). No such man could get out now (renewed groans). He himself, and he said it with emphasis, would rather keep a man at Harvard till he died than send him out adorned with the college degree yet ignorant even of the simplest spherical formulae (applause). Such a thing was unfair to the graduates themselves. They went out into the business world ignorant and ill-equipped. They fell an easy prey to the rapacity of the business man. No such thing, he ventured to say, could happen today.

In continuation, the President said that he was assured that any one of the venerable gentlemen seated before him in the graduating class would meet with nothing but respect and consideration during his life in the outside world. His life might indeed be short. That he would not deny. But it would, he hoped, be full (applause). Experience had taught him that it was better to be short and full than not to be. In conclusion, he congratulated the venerable gentlemen before him on their long and sustained acquirement of knowledge. He could see men in front of him who had learned in their Latin Grammar not some of the irregular verbs, but all of the irregular verbs. There were men before him who knew what came after the first book of Xenophon’s Anabasis: men who had read not one Canto of Dante’s Inferno, but all of it: who had read and appreciated not merely a part of English literature, but the whole of it. This, he said, was education indeed. He did not wish to keep the class seated too long and he would gladly request some of the older members to lie down if they wished to do so. But he would like to detain them and the audience long enough to invite their consideration of the question as to why a Harvard man should ever graduate (applause). This question, he was pleased to say, was being earnestly debated by the corporation. Funds would probably be available within a short time to render graduation unnecessary, and to keep the Harvard men of the future at college until removed by death. The increasing comfort of the dormitories, the continued improvement of the food in the college halls, together with the fearful rise of the cost of living in the outside world and the spread of Bolshevism and other dangers, rendered this reform more and more desirable. He felt that in turning these venerable gentlemen out into the cold world, the college was performing an ungrateful task. He shuddered to think of what might happen if a Bolshevist should get hold of one of them. The corporation was engaged, however, in looking round for new things that could be studied. It was felt that there must be something left if one could only find it. In conclusion, he would like to ask the audience to step out quietly as he observed that some of the senior graduates were asleep.

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A Subscription
with Reflections

(The reflections which here follow were occasioned, by my having to subscribe seventy-five cents to a new students’ journal.)

—

The enclosed seventy-five cents, like all other money, speaks for itself. If The Rebel goes on as it has begun I am sure it will have no difficulty in knocking the public out of their seventy-five cents’s. To me The Rebel came as a real enlightenment. I realized that I had been, without knowing it, a rebel for thirty years past; in fact ever since the time when I sat on the benches of University College and speculated on men and things with the same irresponsible freedom that The Rebel shows today. I found, if I remember rightly, much to criticize and much to alter. In fact the whole college of those days seemed gradually subsiding, for want of a little active interference on my part, into the mud of its own foundations. I found, too, upon diligent inquiry, that this same situation had existed before, very notably indeed, in the generation of the older graduates; in fact, had existed and persisted and seemed to follow the good old college like a ghost – the ghost, if one had to name it, of Academic Discontent, that has moaned and wrung its hands at the gates of colleges and academies from the time of Plato to the age of Theodore Roosevelt. It is credibly reported that in Plato’s later days his students used to gather in little knots among the trees of his Academy, and shake their heads at the kind of “dope” that Plato was “putting over” in his lectures. It had, they said, no “punch.” And it is equally strongly affirmed that the students of Aristarchos of Samos denounced his theories of lunar motion as “chestnuts”; that the students of Marsiglio of Padua were openly heard to avow that “the old man was going ‘batty’”; that the students of Sir Isaac Newton at Cambridge said that they were “simply sick” of hearing about gravitation, with the same old joke each year about the apple; that the students of Adam Smith at Glasgow said that if he could only cut out his everlasting “division of labour” for a lecture or two and get down to common sense, they might listen to him. Nay, worst of all, I have seen students in the back of my own classroom shake their heads and murmur that my lectures are “bum stuff” to what they used to be.

Yet I have grown to know that out of the empty breath of discontent is blown the inspiration of the future. And I have ceased to regret that academic discontent should be. On the contrary, I am even inclined, as a professor, to harbour a little bit of academic discontent of my own. Discontent, perhaps, is a word a trifle too strong; in the quiet and regulated life of a professor no passion as strong as that can find a place; for the life of a professor passes from middle age to seniority and from seniority to senility with the measured and majestic transit of the harvest moon passing over the ripened field of corn, and mellowing all that it illuminates. But if ever a professor could voice a wish for a change in the methods or aspect of universities, I may say that it often occurs to me that our colleges would be greatly brightened if there were no students; if the professors could saunter undisturbed among the elm trees in friendly colloquy, lecturing – for they know no other form of conversation – to one another; if the library and the campus could enjoy at all seasons the quiet hush that now only falls on them in August; if the deep peace where learning loves to brood were never broken by examinations and roll-calls – and – dear me, I see that I am unconsciously falling into poetry; suppose that I loop the loop clear into it and continue:

“Oh, that the peace where learning loves to brood

Were never broken by the student rude,

And that the corridor and classroom dim

Sheltered the prof. but quite excluded HIM!

Thus the professor, free from every care,

Might settle down in comfort on his chair,

And while the noiseless years in gentle current flow

Pursue profound research or, better, let it go.”

Let me, in conclusion, draw your attention to the elegance of the introduction of that Alexandrine couplet at the end of the verse, a neat trick which I had of my instructors at University College thirty years ago.

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Toronto and McGill

(1913)

(This poem was composed in celebration of a great football victory of these two colleges over one another. It is written in what is now called vers libre. But in my college days we used to call it worse than that.)

—

The object of this poem is not very difficult to get on to,

Since it is intended all through as what is called a paean on Toronto.

I don’t deny, have not and never will

My debt of gratitude to old McGill,

Nor have I any other wish or hope

Than here upon Mount Royal’s leafy slope

To theorize, to formulate conjectures,

In short to give the kind of thing called lectures,

Here live, here die, and after – who can tell,

To go on giving lectures up in . . .  [3]

Let me explain at once for those who do not know ’em,

The kind of meters, called gas meters, which I use in this poem.

Anybody with a quick ear will have no doubt from the very start

That it must be a most extraordinarily difficult kind of art.

Each foot begins and ends just where I end or begin it,

I defy any man to scan it, though it might be possible to skin it.

Not even the combined strength of Dr. Peterson and Mr. Slack

Could tackle one of these verses and throw it on its back.

But as I say, I want to sound the praise

Of old Toronto, long may be her days.

You taught me all I know, oh good old College,

Greek, Latin, Algebra, Religious Knowledge,

Fondly and freely gave it all away,

And made me at the end of it B.A.

You taught me Greek, can I forget it? No!

I’ve tried to, but it simply will not go.

Still in my dreams my wayward thoughts incline,

Irregular exceptions to decline;

And up and down my midnight fancies go

To the strange rhythm of a ὁ, ἡ, τὸ.

When my declining years their shadows lengthen,

I’ll end in an irregular declension.

Toronto, you taught me Latin, yes you did,

I have the marks, the thing cannot be hid.

Deep in the fibre of my brain is sunk

The furrow of hic, haec hoc, hujus hunc.

I bear the marks of Virgil and the scar

Where Julius Caesar wrote his Gallic War.

Horatius Flaccus stamped me with his verse

And Cicero: I don’t know which was worse.

’Twas cruel while it lasted, it is done:

Through this I learned to use my mother tongue.

You taught me Mathematics, let it pass,

How could you know I was a hopeless ass?

You tried in vain my intellect to hem

Inside the harsh binomial theorem.

I tried my best, no one can say I wouldn’t—

Learned what I could and copied what I couldn’t.

This too was, while it lasted, very rotten,

But now, thank God, forgiven and forgotten.

But what I chiefly hope will some day save me

Are the instructors that you nobly gave me.

McGill may boast her Peterson, her Slack,

Rose and Macnaughton, standing back to back.

For such instructors care I not a button,

My mind, good sirs, was fashioned by a Hutton!

McGill may have in history her Fryer,

And her sagacious Colby still is by her;

I grant them merit, it is very strong,

Their history is all right, but mine was Wrong!

Or would you speak of French? You would not dare,

For all of mine was taught me on the Squair.

Or if you boast of German, pause and listen,

I had my dose direct from Vandersmissen.

Yet in my humble self I like to think

I typify a sort of missing link;

The phrase is ill-advised, I simply mean

I constitute a sort of go-between.

Trained at Toronto, nurtured by McGill,

I know not which should my affection fill.

Backward and forward my affection goes,

One gave me knowledge, one supplies my clothes.

One knew me as a gentle silly youth

Eager for learning, passionate for truth,

Deep in philosophy, immersed in Greek,

Looking for mental trouble, so to speak.

The other as a teacher of the young,

Prosing on economics all day long,

Pent in a little classroom giving notes

And stuffing theories down students’ throats—

Nor visible regard for truth whatever

And yet as young and sillier than ever.

Yet if I do thus form a missing link

I am but one of several, I think.

I do not stand alone, will any man

Refuse to lift his hat to our Ruttan?

Toronto gave him, may her name be blest;

In giving him she gave us of her best.

Nor he alone, will some one kindly say

What thinks the universe of John McCrae.

That he’s all right! I thank you from my soul.

Toronto numbers him upon her roll.

They may thus stand united, side by side,

McGill and Varsity – with each its pride;

Let games like this one we have seen today

A double glory to the world display.

Where emulation struggles void of spite,

And men who play the game shall guard the right.

If it were possible a toast to fill,

I’d give you, Friends, Toronto and McGill.

[3]  Word apparently missing.—Ed.

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The Children’s Corner

(1902)

(This little essay was written as a contribution to a newly established and very learned college magazine. It was intended to put life into it. The magazine died.)

—

Our good friend, the Editor of this magazine, had some fears that it might suffer by very reason of its excellence; that it might be bowed down by the weight of erudition it contains and become top-heavy with learning. Now this is as grave an ailment as can well threaten any publication, for it acts directly on the circulation. Knowing the Editor’s apprehensions, we have ventured to suggest to him that possibly a hypodermic injection of some lighter matter near the back of the cover might be advisable. He has, therefore, permitted us to variegate this issue by the addition of a Children’s Corner for College Boys and Girls. For the insertion of such a column we are convinced we need offer no apology to our young friends. Even in the cultivated mind of the college graduate – cultivated indeed by the years of diligent rolling, harrowing, planting, and possibly ploughing, at the hands of his tutors and examiners – it is often found that the wheat of wisdom is not unmixed with the chaff of childishness.

As soon, then, as we had conceived the idea of a Children’s Corner, we set about thinking what we could put into it. We decided that the very best thing we could have to begin with would be a lot of letters from our little friends who have graduated, treating of some topic not too exacting on the intellect. This we knew to be the usual method of eliciting interest in the Children’s Corners of Saturday journalism. So we sent them all a circular, which we felt sure would draw; we couched it in the following couching:

“Dear Sir – Please write to the Editor of the Children’s Corner and state your personal experience of the value of a college education. Speak freely of yourself, but don’t get delirious over it. Limit yourself, if you can, to a thousand words, and never write to us again. Send five dollars with your manuscript, and the Editor promises to make use of it.”

The results obtained from our circular have been eminently satisfactory; indeed, we have received so many bright little letters that we are able to print only a small proportion of them. Here is our first example. It is from “Little Charlie,” aged 29, a graduate with double first class in English and Metaphysics, now doing splendidly in a position of great trust in a sawmill.

“Dear Mr. Editor – I am glad you are asking a lot of college boys to write to you. I think a college training is a great help. I have found English invaluable and use nothing else. I must now close.”

“Dear Mr. Editor – I graduated not long ago and am only twenty-two, but I feel very old. I took Archaeology and Sanskrit. Our course of reading in Sanskrit was the Vishnubuddayat, Part one, Book one, Page one. We also scanned the first three lines and examined the skins under the microscope. I don’t think anything could have developed my mind quite in the way that Sanskrit and Noah’s Archaeology have. I owe a lot to my teachers and mean to pay them back some day. Since I took my degree I have got a job opening gates at a railway crossing, and am doing well, as I have just the touch required. When I get a little older I may get a job at a toll-gate.”

So many thanks for your bright little letter, Teddie, and be sure not to let us hear from you from time to time. You forgot your five dollars, careless boy.

Here is a writer who signs himself Rev. Willie Weekshanks, aged thirty:

“Dear Mr. Editor – I think a college education is a very valuable thing, and I wish I had had one instead of taking Theology. I liked my college life so much and I revered all my professors. I used to take exact notes of everything they told me, exactly as I remembered it a week afterwards. If need be I could produce my notes before a . . .” (Hush, hush, Willie, please don’t talk of anything so painful as producing your notes. Surely, my dear little boy, we have had trouble enough).

Here is a letter from an Honour graduate in Classics:

“Dear Mr. Editor – I took Classics. For my part I think, at least, certainly on the one hand, that a college education, especially indeed Greek, develops the faculty of thinking, writing and quoting, on the other hand, with less lack of not saying nothing than anything. A man with a full knowledge of Latin and Greek feels himself a ‘pons asinorum,’ and in the hours of weariness and discouragement can always turn to his education as a delightful ‘reductio ad absurdum.’”

But let us pass on to some of the other features of our Children’s Corner. Not to be in any way behind our great contemporaries in journalism, we hasten to present a Puzzle Competition. It is constructed on the very latest models. The puzzles are indeed somewhat difficult and elaborate, but we confidently invite all college children, both graduate and undergraduate, to try them. Come on, then, here is our first. It is called, The Buried Word:

LAERTNOM

There! try and guess it! The letters of the above word if spelt backwards will produce the name of a Canadian city. Sit down now and work at it; if you don’t get at the solution at once, keep at it. To any McGill graduate or undergraduate sending a correct solution, accompanied by five dollars, we will forward a copy of the McGill Calendar.

Our second puzzle. This is for some of our little mathematical friends. It is called a double acrostic:

MCG*LL

On inserting a vowel in place of the above asterisk, the word will become the same word that was the word before the vowel removed was removed. Anyone finding the correct solution will forward us three dollars; on the receipt of each three dollars the competition is declared closed – as far as that competitor is concerned.

Our final puzzle. It consists in an historical prize competition, for which we propose the following:

Name the four Georges, giving reasons, and sending four dollars.

—

OUR HOME STUDY CIRCLE

We had hoped to supplement our Puzzle Department with another feature which is its invariable accompaniment, and which we thought especially appropriate for a College Magazine. This is the Home Study Circle. It is one of the noblest and most philanthropic developments of the modern journal. The admirable facilities for learning offered by these Home Study Circles, with the gratuitous examination papers and short lectures that accompany them, cannot fail to be highly estimated. By this means any man whose affairs have never given him leisure for academic instruction, may pick up in the course of, say, ten years, a fair knowledge of Persian or Syriac, enough, that is to say, to make himself easily misunderstood. Indeed, with the help of such a Home Study Course, any intelligent boy or girl with a keen desire to add something to his ordinary studies may very quickly lose it. We had, therefore, begun to prepare a short Home Study Course in higher German philosophy. Our aim was to come to the help of people who were anxious to familiarize themselves with the ideas of some of the great German thinkers (Kant, Schopenhauer, Pilsener Lager, Wiener Schnitzel, etc. etc.), and yet who were unable to get a knowledge of these ideas either from their writings or from the criticisms on them, or through prayer for direct intervention. Unfortunately, difficulties of a technical nature, which need not here be explained, have prevented us from completing our course.

INDOOR GAMES

From the somewhat heavy subject that we treated in our last paragraph we turn with pleasure to present to our readers a sample of one of the new “Indoor Games for College Students” that we hope soon to give to the world. It is called

Indoor Football,
or Football Without a Ball

In this game any number of players from fifteen to thirty seat themselves in a heap on any one player, usually the player next to the dealer. They then challenge him to get up, while one player stands with a stop-watch in his hand and counts forty seconds. Should the first player fail to rise before forty seconds are counted, the player with the watch declares him suffocated. This is called a “Down” and counts one. The player who was the “Down” is then leaned against the wall; his wind is supposed to be squeezed out. The player called the referee then blows a whistle and the players select another player and score a “down” off him. While the player is supposed to be down, all the rest must remain seated as before, and not rise from him until the referee, by counting forty and blowing his whistle, announces that in his opinion the other player is stifled. He is then leant against the wall beside the first player. When the whistle again blows the player nearest the referee strikes him behind the right ear. This is a “Touch,” and counts two.

We cannot, of course, in this place attempt to give all the rules in detail. We may add, however, that while it counts two to strike the referee, to kick him counts three. To break his arm or leg counts four, to kill him outright is called Grand Slam, and counts one game.

There are so many interesting things that we are most eager to insert in this Children’s Corner, that we fear the limited space at our disposal will not allow us to treat them all. In the interest, however, of our fairer readers, we cannot well refrain from introducing one or two short extracts from our new “College Girls’ Cookery Book.”

1.  Receipt for Latin Paste

Take one pound of Bradley’s Arnold, a little fluent extract of Virgil, some strong stems and roots. Grind well and soak. Let the mixture stand till it forms into a thick paste, which may be used for all kinds of Latin composition. It will be found an agreeable relish in quotations, and does well for public speeches if mixed with a little ginger. The paste is admirably suited for quotations in after-dinner speaking if well soaked in alcohol.

2.  Receipt for Preserved Lectures

(Crême de Lecture)

First take a lecture. Then boil it down and remove the froth and gas from it by constant stirring. Skim it, strain it through a wet towel and serve hot or cold according to the taste of the examiner.

3.  How to Make Hash of an Examination Paper

(Papier Mâché)

Take a thorough smattering of the subject. Mix it completely in your mind. Spread it very thinly on paper and serve lukewarm. Try to avoid roasting.

We should have been delighted to add a few extracts from our new “Elementary Taxidermy for Students, or How to Stuff Examiners,” which we are certain would have made a pleasant feature of our Children’s Corner. A few lines from our “Carpentry for College Boys; or how to make German Brackets,” would not have been amiss. But we fear we have already trespassed too far on the Editor’s kindness.

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A Sermon
on College Humour

(This exhortation was addressed to the infant college paper called “The Goblin” of Toronto. “The Goblin” followed my advice, and look at it now.)

—

I should like just for once to have the privilege of delivering a sermon. And I know no better opportunity for preaching it than to do so across the cradle of this infant Goblin, to those who are gathered at its christening.

As my text let me take the words that were once said in playful kindliness by Charles the Second: “Good jests ought to bite like lambs, not dogs; they should cut, not wound.” I invite the editors of this publication to ponder deeply on the thought, and when they have a sanctum, to carve the words in oak below the chimney-piece.

The best of humour is always kindly. The worst and the cheapest is malicious. The one is arduous and the other facile. But, like the facile descent of Avernus, it leads only to destruction.

A college paper is under very peculiar temptations to indulge in the cheaper kind of comicality. In the first place, its writers and its readers are for the most part in that early and exuberant stage of life in which the boisterous assertion of one’s own individuality is still only inadequately tempered by consideration for the feelings of others.

In the second place, it finds itself in an environment that lends itself to the purposes of easy ridicule. The professor stands ready as its victim.

The professor is a queer creature; of a type inviting the laughter of the unwise. His eye is turned in. He sees little of externals and values them hardly at all. Hence in point of costume and appearance he becomes an easy mark. He wears a muffler in April, not having noticed that the winter has gone by! He will put on a white felt hat without observing that it is the only one in town; and he may be seen with muffetees upon his wrists fifty years after the fashion of wearing them has passed away.

I can myself recall a learned man at the University of Chicago, who appeared daily during the summer quarter in an English morning coat with white flannel trousers and a little round straw hat with a blue and white ribbon on it, fit for a child to wear at the seaside. That man’s own impression of his costume was that it was a somewhat sporty and debonair combination, such as any man of taste might assume under the more torrid signs of the Zodiac.

As with dress, so with manner. The professor easily falls into little ways and mannerisms of his own. In the deference of the classroom they pass unchallenged and uncorrected. With the passage of the years they wear into his mind like ruts. One I have known who blew imaginary chalk dust off his sleeve at little intervals; one who turned incessantly a pencil up and down. One hitches continuously at his tie; one smoothes with meaningless care the ribbons of his college gown.

As with his dress, so with the professor’s speech. The little jest that he uttered in gay impromptu in his first year as a lecturer is with him still in his declining age. The happy phrase and the neat turn of thought are none the less neat and happy to him for all that he has turned them regularly once a year for thirty sessions. It is too late to bid them good-bye. In any case, perhaps the students, or perhaps some student, has not heard them; and that were indeed a pity.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto thirty years ago, the noblest of our instructors had said the words “Hence accordingly” at the commencement of such innumerable sentences that the words had been engraved by a college joker across the front of the lecturer’s desk. They had been there so long that all memory of the original joker had been lost. Yet the good man had never seen them. Coming always into his classroom from the same quarter of the compass, he was still able after forty years to use the words “Hence accordingly” as a new and striking mode of thought. The applause which always greeted the phrase he attributed to our proper appreciation of the resounding period that had just been closed. He always bowed slightly at our applause and flushed a little with the pardonable vanity of age.

Having fun over a thing of that sort is as easy as killing a bird on the nest, and quite as cruel.

Can it be wondered, then, that every college paper that sets out to be “funny” turns loose upon the professoriate? It fastens upon the obvious idiosyncrasies of the instructors. It puts them in the pillory. It ridicules their speech. It lays bare in cruel print and mimic dialogue the little failings hitherto unconscious and unknown. And for the sake of a cheap and transitory laughter it often leaves a wound that rankles for a lifetime.

My young friends, who are to conduct this little Goblin, pause and beware.

For the essential thing is that such cheap forms of humour are not worth while. Even from the low plane of editorial advantages they are poor “copy.” The appeal is too narrow. The amusement is too restricted; and the after-taste too bitter.

If the contents of a college paper are nothing more than college jokes upon the foibles of professors and fellow-students, the paper is not worth printing. Such matter had better be set forth with a gum machine upon a piece of foolscap and circulated surreptitiously round the benches of the classroom.

If the editors of The Goblin are wise, they will never encourage or accept contributions that consist of mere personal satire. If a student is as fat as the Fat Boy himself let him pass his four years unrecorded in the peace due to his weight. If a professor is as thin as a meridian of longitude let no number of The Goblin ever chronicle the fact.

At the end of every sermon there is, so far as I remember, a part of it that is called the benediction. It consists in invoking a blessing upon the hearers. This I do now. I should not have written in such premonitory criticism of The Goblin if I did not feel myself deeply interested in its fortunes. I think that a journal of this kind fills a great place in the life of a university. As a wholesome corrective of the pedantry and priggishness which is the reverse side of scholarship it has no equal. It can help to give to the outlook of its readers a better perspective. In the surroundings of your University and your province it has, I think, a peculiar part to play. You are in great need – I hope I say it in all gentleness – of the genial corrective of the humorous point of view. You live in an atmosphere somewhat overcharged with public morality. The virtue that surrounds you is passing – so it sometimes seems to more sinful outsiders – into austerity.

In other words, to put it briefly, you are in a bad way. Your undergraduates, if they are well advised, would migrate to the larger atmosphere and the more humane culture of McGill. But if they refuse to do that, I know nothing that will benefit them more than the publication of a journal such as yours is destined, I hope, to be.

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A Christmas Examination

With every revolving year – and the poets and the physicists agree that they do revolve – I am struck with the strange inconsistency of the words “Christmas Examination.” Here on the one hand is Christmas, good, glad, old season with its holly berries and its lighted candles and its little children dancing in a world of magic round a glittering tree; Christmas with its fabled Santa Claus defying our modern civilization by squeezing his way down the galvanized iron pipe of a gas grate; Christmas with the sleigh-bells all a-jingle, with bright snow in the streets, with the church-bells ringing on a week day and such a crisp gladness in the air that even the angular faces of university professors are softened out into something approaching human kindliness.

Here, I say, on the one hand is Christmas.

And here on the other hand are Examinations with their sleepless nights and their fevered days, with crazy questions and crooked answers, set with the calculating cruelty of the inquisitor, answered with the patient resignation of the martyr, or with the fanatical frenzy of the devotee who has swallowed his instructor’s text book and gone crazy over it; Examinations with their hideous percentages, their insulting distinctions of rank, and paid for, in cold fees, with money enough to spread a Christmas banquet for the whole university.

Here is Christmas and here are the Examinations. And the two won’t go together.

We can’t alter Christmas. We’ve had it nearly two thousand years now. In a changing world its lights glimmer through the falling snow as a quiet beacon on things that alter not. It stands there fixed as a very saturnalia of good deeds, a reckless outbreak of licensed benevolence, with its loosened pocket books and smiling faces, just to show us on one day of the year what we might be on the other three hundred and sixty-four – stands a moment and then passes, leaving us to button about us again our little suit of protective selfishness with nothing but a memory to keep us warm inside.

Christmas we cannot alter. But the Examinations, we can. Why not? Why will not some theorist in education tell us how we can infuse into the Christmas examinations something of the spirit of the season that gives them birth? Can we not break down something of these rigid regulations that every candidate reads shuddering in the printed instructions on his examination book? Can we not so estimate our percentages and frame our questions?

And when I had written thus far the whole idea of the thing broke upon me with the floodlight of discovery. Of course, nothing simpler; I reached out my hand and drew to me the hideous code of the examination regulations. I read it over with a shudder. Is it possible that for fifty years this university has tolerated such a flat violation of every rule of Christmas behaviour? I saw at once how, not only the regulations, but the very examination papers themselves ought to be so altered that the old malicious spirit might be driven right out of them and Christmas come to its own again even in an examination hall.

Here is the way it is done:

REGULATIONS FOR
CHRISTMAS EXAMINATIONS

1.  Candidates are permitted, nay they are encouraged, to enter the examination hall half an hour after the examination has begun, and to leave it, re-enter it, walk across it, jump across it, roll round in it, lie down in it, tear their clothes, mutilate their books and, generally, to make themselves thoroughly and completely at home at the expense of the University.

2.  Candidates are not only permitted to ask questions of the presiding examiner, but they may, if they like, talk to him, sing to him, hum grand opera to him in whole or in part, use his fountain pen, borrow his money, and, if need be, for the sake of order, request him to leave the hall. But remember that the presiding examiner is like yourself – a very human being and, if you had the advantage of knowing him outside the classroom, you would find him at this time of year one of the jolliest creatures conceivable.

If you could see him presiding over the little candidates around the Christmas tree in his own house you would almost forgive him that silly dignity which he assumes to cover his natural humanity.

3.  Speaking or communicating with every other candidate, male or female, is of course the privilege of every student and the use of the megaphone and gramophone shall in no way be curtailed or abridged.

4.  Students may either make use of the books, papers and memoranda provided by the examiner, or may bring in their own memorandums, vademecums and conundrums, together with such dictographs, gramophones, linotypes, stethoscopes, or any other aids to memory that they may see fit to use.

5.  The plea of accident or forgetfulness will, of course, be immediately received in the same spirit as given.

6.  Five per cent will be accepted as a satisfactory standard, but all students failing to obtain it may be, and most certainly will be, specially exempted from further effort by a vote of the Board of Governors.

So much for the regulations. But, of course, still more can be accomplished if the examiners will only frame their questions to suit the gentle kindliness of the season. I should not wish to show in any great detail how this is to be accomplished. That would be trespassing on the work of departments other than our own. But I may be allowed to point the pathway of reform by proposing a few specimen questions in representative subjects.

CHRISTMAS EXAMINATION
IN CLASSICS

1.  Who was Themistocles? (Note in italics): If you can’t think it out for yourself, he was a great Roman general, or Greek, or something. The examiner doesn’t know much about it himself, but Lord bless you, at this time of year he doesn’t care any more than you do.

2.  Translate the accompanying passages, or don’t bother to, just as you happen to feel about it. After all you must remember that ability to translate a lot of Latin verses is a poor test of what you really are worth.

3.  Pick out all the verbs in the above and parse them, or, if you don’t feel like picking them out, leave them sticking where they are. Remember that they’ve been there for two thousand years already.

There! That’s the way the Christmas examination in Classics is to be conducted. And in the same fashion one might try to soften down the mathematical examination into something like this:

EXAMINATION
IN MATHEMATICS

1.  Solve the following equations – but if you can’t solve them, my dear boy, don’t worry about it. Take them home to father as a Christmas present and tell him to solve them. It’s his business anyway, not yours. He pays the fees and if he can’t solve the equations, why your family must stand the loss of them. And, anyway, people ought not to mind the loss of a few equations at Christmas time.

There! That’s enough for the Mathematical examination. And as for the rest, you can easily see how they ought to be framed.

But just wait a minute before we come to the end. There would remain one examination, just one, that I think every student ought to pass at this season, though he may forget it if he will, as all the kind things of Christmas are forgotten all too soon. I should call it, for want of another name, an Examination in Christmas Kindliness, and I warn you that nothing but a hundred per cent in it can be accepted for a pass. So here it is.

EXAMINATION
IN CHRISTMAS KINDLINESS

1.  Is the University such a bad place after all?

2.  Don’t you think that perhaps after all the professors and the faculty and the examiners and all the rest of the crabbed machinery of your daily toil is something striving for your good? Dip deep your pen in your Christmas ink, my boy, and overstate the truth for your soul’s good.

3.  Are you not going some day, when your college years are long since past, and when the poor fretful thing that is called practical life has caught you in its toils, and carries you onwards towards your last Christmas – are you not going to look back at them through the soft haze of recollection, as to the memory of a shaded caravansary in a long and weary pilgrimage?

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Idleness

A Song for the Long Vacation

Let me sing a song for summer, when the college days are done,

In the drowsy long vacation underneath the torrid sun,

Let me summarize the knowledge that the student gains at college,

Let me sing to you the Vanity of Life.

Let me lie among the daisies, with my stomach to the sky,

Making poses in the roses, in the middle of July,

Let me nestle in the nettles, let me there absorb the dew

On a pair of flannel breeches with the stitches worked in blue.

Let me set me,

Just to pet me,

Where the college cannot get me,

Won’t you let me, O Yes, do!

Let me sing to you the Nothingness, the Vanity of Life,

Let me teach you of the effort you should shirk,

Let me show you that you never ought to make the least endeavour,

Or indulge yourself in any kind of work.

You never ought to tire yourself with trying to be good,

Or to waste yourself with wishing to be wise,

For a man of low capacity whose head is made of wood,

Never, never can be clever if he tries.

O, the Wickedness of Working, and the Sin of being Strong,

O, the folly of distinguishing between the Right and Wrong,

O, the Evilness of Effort, and the Sorrow of Succeeding,

O, the risk of Early Rising and the Shame of Underfeeding;—

O, there’s nothing in sincerity,

And inspiration’s bad,

Asperity, austerity,

Are nothing but a fad,

Morality and charity

Are only for the sick,

Fixed conviction,

Earnest Diction,

Merely Rhetoric:

Piety,

Sobriety,

All of that I vow

Is just a lot

Of Tommy Rot

That won’t do now:

When the Politicians’ Politics are written out in ink,

And their true convictions set in black and white,

Then a chemical analysis of what they really think

Would leave nothing but a vacuum in sight.

’Tis the standing proposition of an honest opposition

A perpetual corruption to imply,

And the steady obligation of a just administration

To consider every statement is a lie.

When the Orator enrages in a speech of fifty pages,

He does not really mean to use a gun,

When the candidate enlarges on the vigour of his charges

It is only just his little bit of fun.

O, there’s nothing on the platform,

And there’s nothing in the press,

Give it this or that form,

Its neither more nor less,

Liquefied loquacity,

Ink in torrents shed,

Copious Mendacity,

But really, nothing said.

When the business man is busy with the buzzing of his brain

And his mind is set on bonds and stocks and shares,

While he’s building up the country with his utmost might and main,

Do you think it’s for the country that he cares?

When he’s making us a railroad, when he’s digging us a mine

Every philanthropic benefit he flaunts,

When he says that he has blest us with his output of asbestos,

It is nothing but our money that he wants.

Why bother then to fake it, why not knock us down and take it?

Let the jobber be a robber if he must,

Let the banker tell the teller to go down into the cellar,

And then hash the cash and swear the bank is bust.

O, there’s only Sin in Syndicates,

And who can trust a Trust?

The Golden Cloth

Conceals the Moth

And cankers into Rust.

The truly wise

Will lift his eyes

Towards a higher goal.

Will steal a pile

That’s worth the while

And get out whole.

Then gather in the meadows all, as quickly as you can,

The pompous politician and the bulky business man,

Let the lawyer in the lilies lie becalmed in statu quo,

And the broker break off broking just for half an hour or so:

Let the politician prattle to the periwinkle blue,

Covered over with the clover let him play at Peek-a-boo,

Let the clergy in the cowslips cuddle down and double up,

And there imbibe the buttermilk from out the buttercup.

Let us gambol,

Let us ramble,

O’er the flower-embowered lea,

O’er the meadow

In the shadow

Of the elderberry tree.

Let us dress us

As may bless us,

With no public there to see,

Care not which is

Proper breeches

For a summer negligee,

Or array us

To display us

In a pair of flannel pants,

Taking chances

On advances

From the enterprising ants.

Then at even

When the heaven

Reddens to the western sky,

All together

In the heather

Sing a summer

Lullaby.

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The Old College and
the New University

(Written for the “McGill Annual” of 1923.)

I have it on tradition that in the year 1860 or thereabouts, the way in which a student matriculated into a college was, that the venerable gentleman named the Principal called him into his office and asked him who his father was, and whether he had read Virgil.

If the old gentleman liked the answers to these questions, he let the boy in.

Nowadays when a student matriculates, it requires in the first place some four pages of printed regulations to tell him how; after which there is demanded two weeks of continuous writing, and the consumption of at least twenty square yards of writing paper.

One of these two systems is what we now call Organization; the other is not. I dare not doubt for a minute which is the best. There is the same difference as there is between a Court Martial and an Appeal to the Privy Council, so that it would be folly, if not treason, to express a preference for the older plan.

But like many other things the plan was not wholly bad. For they do say that sometimes the venerable Principal would keep the boy talking for half an hour or so, and when the youth left, he would say, “Remarkable boy, that! Has the makings of a scholar in him!” And the little matriculant, his heart swollen with pride, would hurry away to the college library with a new fever for Virgil’s Aeneid burning within him. By such and similar processes there was set up in the college a sort of personal relationship, not easily established nowadays even by the “contact” section of the “Committee on Friendliness.”

For nowadays every matriculant is just a name and a number, and when he gets to the first year he is merely a “case,” and in his second year simply a “seat,” and in his third year a “condition,” and in his fourth year, at the best, a “parchment,” and after that not even a memory.

There can, of course, be no doubt that present days and present things are better – none whatever. To anybody who attended a place that was called a “college” and had three hundred students, it is wonderful to come back and find it grown – or at any rate swollen, inflated, shall I say? – into a University of three thousand students, with a President instead of a Principal, and with as many “faculties” and departments and committees as there are in the League of Nations. It is wonderful to think of this vast organization pouring out its graduates like beans out of a hopper. It is marvellous, I repeat, to reflect on the way that everything is organized, standardized, unified, and reduced to a provable sample of excellence.

The college athletics of the older day, how feeble they seem by comparison now. The group of students gathered round the campus in the October dusk to cheer the football team – each cheering, or calling, upon some poor notion of his own as to the merits of the play – how crude it seems beside the organized hysteria of the Rooters Club. The college daily journal of today with its seven columns of real “news,” and needing nothing but a little murder to put it right in line with the big one-cent papers, the organs of one-cent opinion – how greatly superior it is to the old time College Journal. That poor maundering thing made its appearance at irregular intervals, emerging feebly like the Arctic sun from behind its cloud of debt, and containing nothing later in the way of “news” than a disquisition on The Art of William Shakespeare.

Or take the college library of the old days, how limited it was, with its one ancient librarian, with a beard that reached his girdle, handing out the books one by one, and remembering the students by their faces. As if up-to-date students had any!

The old college is no doubt gone and we could not bring it back if we would. But it would perhaps be well for us if we could keep alive something of the intimate and friendly spirit that inspired it.

Whereupon, I am certain, someone will at once propose a University committee on brotherly love, with power to compel attendance and impose fines.

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The Diversions
of a Professor of History

In my earlier days of college teaching, I was for a time, under the sharp spur of necessity, a professor of history. I expected at that period that my researches in this capacity would add much to our knowledge of the known globe. They did not. But they at least enabled me to survive the financial strain of the long vacation by writing historical poetry for the press.

The little verses which here follow were written day by day and appeared here and there in the forgotten corners of odd newspapers. They occasioned about as much interest or illumination as a fire-fly at midday.

It will be noted that I used up only the month of August. Any professor of history in the same need as I was may have all the other eleven months.

TODAY IN HISTORY

August 4, 1778

(Victory of Gwalior)

O, the neglected education

Of this poor young Canadian nation,

To think that you never heard before

Of the wonderful victory of Gwalior!

How the British suffered with heat and thirst

And they curst

Their worst

Till they nearly burst

And then in the end came out victorious.

O! wasn’t the whole thing Gwaliorious.

August 2, 1704

(Battle of Blenheim)

This was the very occasion when

Great Marlborough gained the battle of Blen.

The rest of the noble word won’t rhyme,

Say it in silence or call it “heim.”

On the very same spot

In other years

Old Caspar shed his senile tears

And the reason was

If you ask me why

Because his father was “forced to fly!”

O, poor old Caspar, you really ought

To have lived in the age of the aeronaut.

August 5, 1809

(Birth of Alfred Tennyson)

On this very day

At early morn

Lord Alfred Tennyson chanced to be born.

Had it not been so, I really hate

To think of the poor elocutionist’s fate.

He couldn’t have been

The sad May Queen,

He couldn’t have brayed

The Light Brigade

To a ten cent audience (half afraid,

When he hitches

His breeches

With soldier-like twitches

To shew how the Russians were killed in the ditches).

He never could shake

With emotion and make

The price of a meal with his ‘Break, Break, Break.’

Alas, poor bloke,

He’d be broke, broke, broke.

August 8, 1843

(The Annexation of Natal)

When we in touch with heathens come,

We send them first a case of rum,

Next, to rebuke their native sin,

We send a missionary in:

Then when the hungry Hottentot

Has boiled his pastor in a pot,

We teach him Christian, dumb contrition,

By means of dum-dum ammunition,

The situation grows perplexed,

The wicked country is annexed:

But, O! the change when o’er the wild,

Our sweet Humanity has smiled!

The savage shaves his shaggy locks,

Wears breeches and Balbriggan socks,

Learns Euclid, classifies the fossils,

Draws pictures of the Twelve Apostles—

And now his pastor at the most,

He is content to simply roast:

Forgetful of the art of war,

He smokes a twenty cent cigar,

He drinks not rum, his present care is

For whisky and Apollinaris.

Content for this his land to change,

He fattens up and dies of mange.

Lo! on the ashes of his Kraal,

A Protestant Ca-the-der-al!

August 9, 1902

(King Edward VII crowned)

Again the changing year shall bring

The Coronation of a King,

While yet the reign seemed but begun,

The sceptre passes to the son.

O! little, little round of life,

Where each must walk the selfsame way,

O, little fever fret and strife

That passes into yesterday

When each at last, with struggling breath,

Clasps in the dark the hand of Death.

O! Sorrow of our Common Lot,

Go, mark it well, and Envy not.

August 10, 1866

(The Straits Settlements founded)

Tell me now, will you please relate,

Why do they call these Settlements straight?

Does it mean to say

That the gay

Malay

Is too moral

To quarrel

In any way?

Does he never fight

On a Saturday night,

When he’s drunk in his junk

And his heart is light?

Have they got no music, no whisky, no ladies?

Well – it may be straight, but it’s gloomy as Hades.

August 12, 1905

(Anglo-Japanese Alliance)

Valiant, noble Japanee,

Listen to Britannia’s plea,

Since the battle of Yalu

I’ve been yearning all for you;

Since the fight at Meter Hill

Other suitors make me ill;

Tell me not of German beaux

Addle-headed, adipose,

Double-barrelled Dutchman plain,

Sullen, sombre sons of Spain,

Flaxen Swede, Roumanian red,

Fickle Frenchmen, underfed,

Nay, I care for none of these,

Take me, O, my Japanese,

Yamagata, you of Yeddo,

Fold me, hold me to your heart,

Togo, take me to Tokio,

Tell me not that we must part;

In your home at Nagasaki

Cuddle me against your Khaki,

Since the Russians couldn’t tan you,

Rule, I pray you, Rule Britannia!

August 14, 1763

(Admiral Albemarle took Havana)

On a critical day,

In those awful wars,

The fleet, they say,

Ran out of cigars;

It sounds like a nightmare, a dream, a bogie,

They hadn’t even a Pittsburg stogie,

Nor a single plug,

Of the noble drug,

And from vessel to vessel the signal flew

“Our Sailors are dying for want of a chew.”

From boyhood up those sailors had been

Preserved and pickled in nicotine,

By conscientious smoking and drinking

They had kept themselves from the horror of thinking.

Then Admiral Albemarle looked to leeward

And summoned in haste his bedroom steward,

And said, “My hearty, just cast your eyes on

The sou’-sou’-west, and skin the horizon,

That cloud of smoke and that fort and banner?”

The sailor answered, “That place is Havana.”

Within a second or even a fraction

The Admiral summoned the ships to action,

The signal was read by every tar,

“You hit a Spaniard and get a cigar.”

Now need I say to readers that smoke

How the furious burst of Artillery broke,

How they shot at Havana, bombarded and shook it

And so as a matter of course they took it.

The terms of surrender were brief but witty,

“We’ll take the cigars, you can keep the city.”

August 11, 1535

(Jacques Cartier discovered
the St. Lawrence)

This is the day

When Cartier

Came sailing up to the Saguenay.

He found the St. Lawrence

Without a chart.

O, wasn’t Cart.

Exceedingly smart!

August 15, 1870

(Manitoba becomes a Province)

Now everybody, drunk or sober,

Sing loud the praise of Manitoba;

Throw back your head, inflate your chest,

And sing the glories of the West;

Sing, without slackening or stop,

The jubilation of the crop;

Sing of the bending ear of wheat,

That stands at least some fourteen feet;

And soft its tasselled head inclines,

To flirt with the potato vines;

Sing of the prairie covered over

With cabbage trees and shrubs of clover;

While English settlers lose their way

In forests of gigantic hay.

How wonderful be it confessed,

The passing of the bygone West;

The painted Indian rides no more,

He stands – at a tobacco store,

His cruel face proclaims afar

The terror of the cheap cigar;

Behold his once downtrodden squaw,

Protected by Provincial Law;

Their tee-pee has become – Oh, gee,

A station on the G.T.P.,

And on the scenes of Ancient War,

Thy rails I.C.O. C.P.R.

August 16, 1713

(New Brunswick founded)

I need not sing your praises, every word

Of mine, New Brunswick, would appear absurd

Beside the melody that freely pours

From out these polysyllables of yours.

Where Chedabudcto roars and bold Buctouche

Rivals the ripples of the Restigouche;

Or where beneath its ancient British flag

Aroostook faces Mettawamkeag.

Oh, fairy-land of meadow, vale and brook

Kennebekasis, Chiputneticook,

Shick-Shock and Shediac, Point Escuminac,

Miramachi and Peticodiac.

This is no place to try poetic wit,

I guess at least I know enough to quit.

August 17, 1896

(Gold discovered in the Yukon)

This is the day

In a climate cold

They found that wretched thing called Gold;

That miserable, hateful stuff,

How can I curse at it enough,

That foul, deceitful, meretricious,

Abominable, avaricious,

That execrable, bought and sold

Commodity that men call gold.

How can I find the words to state it,

The deep contempt with which I hate it;

I charge you, nay, I here command it,

Give it me not, I could not stand it:

You hear me shout, you mark me holler?

Don’t dare to offer me a dollar.

The mere idea of taking it

Gives me an epileptic fit.

What use is Gold?

Alas, poor dross,

That brings but sorrow, pain and loss,

What after all the use of riches?

’Twill buy fine clothes and velvet breeches,

Stone houses, pictures, motor cars,

Roast quail on toast and large cigars.

But oh, my friends, will this compare

With a fresh draught of mountain air?

Will wretched viands such as these

Compare with simple bread and cheese?

Nay let me to my bosom press

The gastronomic watercress,

And hug within my diaphragm

The spoon of thimbleberry jam,

And while the wicked wine I spurn,

Quaff deep the wholesome mountain burn,

The simple life, the harmless drink

Is good enough – I do not think.

August 18, 1577

(Birth of Rubens)

Think it not idle affectation

If I express my admiration

Of frescoes, canvases and plasters,

In short, the work of Ancient Masters.

You take a man like Botticelli,

Or the Italian Vermicelli,

Rubens and Titian, Angelo,

Anheuser Busch, Sapolio,

John P. Velasquez and Murillo,

Fra Lippo Lipp, Buffalo Billo,

Pilsener Lager and Giotto;

Admire them! Why you’ve simply got to!

What if you do not understand

Just the idea they had in hand,

What if they do not quite convey

The meaning that they should portray?

What if you don’t exactly find

A purpose in them, never mind,

Beneath the coat of gathered dust

Take the great geniuses on trust.

If you should see in public places

Fat cherubs whose expansive faces

Wear a strong anti-temperance air

The work is Rubens, you may swear;

Fat ladies in inclined position

You always may ascribe to Titian,

While simple love-scenes in a grotto

Portray the master hand of Giotto.

But if you doubt, do not enquire,

Fall into ecstasies, admire,

Stare at the picture, deeply peer

And murmur, “What an atmosphere”;

And if your praises never tire

No one will know you are a liar.

August 19, 1897

(Introduction of
the Horseless Cab)

Farewell, a long farewell, Old Friend,

’Tis the beginning of the end.

So there you stand, poor patient brute,

Dressed in your little leather suit;

Your harness, buckles, straps and bows

An outline parody of clothes.

Speechless, confined, without volition,

It seems to me that your position

Is with a subtle meaning rife—

A queer analogy with life.

A depth of meaning underlies

Those blinkers that restrain your eyes;

I see a melancholy omen

In straps that cramp your poor abdomen,

I could supply, would it avail,

Sad speculations on your tail

So docked that, swishing at the fleas,

Its arc is only nine degrees;

But more than all, I seem to trace

Analogies in your long face,

So utterly devoid of humour,

Long ears that hearken every rumour,

A sweeping snout, protruding teeth,

And chinless underlip beneath;

So joyless and so serious

Well may your features weary us.

For musing thus, I think perhaps

Your life is ours; the little straps,

The shafts that hold us to the track,

The burden ever on the back—

Enough. The theme is old, of course,

I am an ass, you are a horse.

August 20, 1896

(Fridtjof Nansen’s Ship “The Fram”
returns safely to Skjervoe)

What a glorious day

For old Norway,

When The Fram came sailing into the Bay

To the dear old fjord,

With its crew on bjord

All safely restjord

By the hand of the Ljord;

And they shouted “Whoe

Is this Skjervoe?”

And they rent the ajer with a loud Hulljoe;

While the crowd on skiis

As thick as biis

Slid down

To the town

On their hands and kniis.

And oh! what cries

When they recognize

A man with a pair of sealskin pants on

And thjere, I decljare, is Fridtjof Nansen.

August 22, 1903

(Expedition on the “Neptune”
under Commander Low to Hudson Straits)

While we welter

In the swelter

Of the pestilential Heat

Drinking Sodas

In Pagodas

At the Corner of the Street

It seems to me

That it would be

My highest aspiration

To Sail away

On a Holiday

Of Arctic Exploration.

Let me lie in my pyjamas on the ice of Baffin’s Bay,

In the thinnest of chemises, where the Polar breezes play,

Underneath a frozen awning let me lie at ease a span,

While beneath the bright Aurora roars the ventilation fan.

Can you wonder now that Nansen, and that Peary, and that Low,

Should wander forth,

And struggle North,

As far as they can go?

When the hero

Under Zero

Lives on frozen lager beer

And a demi-can

Of Pemmican,

You need not shed a tear.

He seeks a higher latitude,

I quite admit the feat;

The reason is a platitude,

He’s crazy with the heat.

August 26, 1346

(Great Slaughter of the French
by the English at Creçy)

How strange it seems to me that even then

Man raised his hand against his fellow-men,

Fretful and eager, still his mind he bent

New Engines of destruction to invent.

Poor little Creature, through his whole life story

Waving his little flag and shouting Glory.

Vexing his puny strength and panting breath

Merely to hasten ever-certain Death.

August 27, 1870

(Invention of the Gramophone)

I freely admit that the gay gramophone

Possesses attractions entirely its own,

I frankly concede that the wonders of science

Are seen at their best in that very appliance;

And yet notwithstanding, I deeply deplore

The gramophone owned by the Joneses next door.

I rise in the morning, the first thing I hear

Is “Sleep on, my Darling, for Mother is near,”

I sit down to breakfast and hear with surprise

A loud invitation to “Drink with Mine Eyes.”

I come from my office, the gramophone’s strain

Informs me that Johnnie has marched home again.

I sit down to read, but the minute I do so

The Joneses arouse a carouse with Caruso,

Their strains all the veins of my cerebrum clog,

My slumbers their numbers monotonous dog,

Will nothing but homicide end or prevent it,

Oh, Edison, why did you ever invent it?

TOC     INDEX

Over the Footlights

(1923)

~

Over the Footlights

Cast Up by the Sea
The Soul Call
Dead Men’s Gold
Oroastus – A Greek Tragedy
The Sub-Contractor
Historical Drama
The Russian Drama
The Platter of Life
People We Meet in the Movies
The Raft: An Interlude

Other Fancies

First Call for Spring
How I Succeeded in My Business
The Dry Banquet
My Lost Dollar
Radio: A New Form of Trouble
Roughing It in the Bush
Abolishing the Heroine
My Affair with My Landlord
Why I Refuse to Play Golf
The Approach of the Comet
Personal Experiments with the Black Bass
L’envoi: The Faded Actor

Over the Footlights

Cast Up by the Sea

A Sea Coast Melodrama
(As Thrown up for 30 cents)
Period, 1880

Everybody who has reached or passed middle age looks back with affection to that splendid old melodrama Cast Up by the Sea. Perhaps it wasn’t called exactly that. It may have been named Called Back from the Dead, or Broken Up by the Wind, or Buried Alive in the Snow, or anything of the sort. In fact I believe it was played under about forty different names in fifty different forms. But it was always the same good old melodrama of the New England Coast, with the farmhouse and the yellow fields running down to the sea, and the lighthouse right at the end of the farm with the rocks and the sea beyond, looking for trouble.

Before the cinematograph had addled the human brain and the radio broadcast had disintegrated the human mind, you could go and see Cast Up by the Sea any Saturday afternoon in any great American City for thirty cents; you got a thrill from it that lasted twenty years. For thirty cents you had an orchestra chair on the ground floor where you could sit and eat peanuts and study the program till the play began. After it had begun you couldn’t eat any more; you were too excited.

The first thing everybody used to do in studying the program was to see how many years elapsed between the acts; because in those days everybody used to find it wiser to go out between the acts – for air. And the more years that elapsed and the more acts there were, the more air they could get. Some of the plays used to have ten acts and the people got out nine times. Nowadays this is all changed. People talk now of the unity of the drama, and in some of the plays today there is a deliberate announcement on the program that reads “Between Acts II and III the curtain will be merely lowered and raised again.” We wouldn’t have stood for that in 1880. We needed our two years between the acts. We had a use for it.

As I say, it was necessary to study the program. Nobody had yet invented that system of marking the characters “in the order of their appearance.” You had to try and learn up the whole lot before the play began. You couldn’t really. But you began conscientiously enough. Hiram Haycroft, a farmer; Martha, his wife; Hope, their daughter; Phoebe, a girl help; Zeke, a hired man – Rube also a hired man – and by that time you had just forgotten the farmer’s own name and looked back for it when just then—

Up went the curtain with a long stately roll, two men at the side hoisting it, and there you were looking at the farmstead by the sea.

Notice how quick and easy and attractive that old fashioned beginning was. One minute you were eating peanuts and studying the program and the next minute the play had begun. There was none of that agonizing stuff that precedes the moving pictures of today: No “Authorized by the Board of Census of the State of New York.” The world, even New York State, was so good in 1880 that it had never heard of a censor. Nor was there any announcement of something else altogether heralded as “A Great Big Compelling Life Drama – Next Week.”

If the moving picture people could have been in control (forty years before their time) they would have announced the farm and lighthouse play with a written panegyric on what they were going to show – “a gripping heart-drama in which the foam of the sea and the eerie of the spindrift carry to the heart a tale of true love battled by the wind next Thursday.”

But if they had worked that stuff on an audience of 1880 it would have gone out and taken another drink, and never come back until next Thursday.

So the play began at once. There was the farmhouse, or at least the porch and door, at the right hand side of the stage, all bathed in sunlight (yellow gas) and the grass plot and the road in the centre, and the yellow wheat (quite a little bunch of it) at the left, and the fields reaching back till they hit the painted curtain with the lighthouse and the rocks and the sea.

Everybody who looked at that painted curtain and saw that lighthouse knew it wasn’t there for nothing. There’d be something doing from that all right, and when they looked back at the program and saw that Act IV was marked In the Lighthouse Tower – Midnight, they got the kind of a thrill that you can never get by a mere announcement that there is going to be a “gripping heart-drama next Tu., Thurs., and Sat.”

Surely enough there would be something doing with that lighthouse. Either the heroine thrown off it, or the hero thrown over it – anyway something good.

But for the moment all is peace and sunlight, on the seashore farm. There is no one on the stage but two men on the left, evidently Zeke and Rube, the hired men. They’ve got scythes and they are cutting the little patch of wheat over at the edge of the stage. Just imagine it, real wheat, they’re actually cutting it! Upon my word those stage effects of 1880 were simply wonderful. I do wish that “Doug” Fairbanks and those fellows who work so hard to give us thrills could realize what we used to get in 1880 by seeing Zeke and Rube cutting real wheat on the left hand side of the stage.

Then they speak. You can’t really hear what they say – but it sounds like this:

Zeke says, “I swan b’gosh heck b’gosh gum yak! yak!”

And Rube answers: “Heck gosh b’gum, yes, yak! yak!”

And they both laugh.

These words probably have a meaning, but you don’t need it. The people are still moving into their seats and this is just the opening of the play. It’s a mere symbol. It stands for New England dialect, farm life, and honesty of character. Presently Rube gets articulate. He quits reaping and he says:

“So Miss Hope’ll be coming back this morning.”

“Yes, sir, that she will. A whole year now it’ll be that she’s been to boarding school.”

And Rube says:

“Yep, a whole yer come Gurdlemas.”

Rube and Zeke have a calendar all their own.

“She’ll be a growd up lady now all right.”

“Yes sir, and as purty as a pitcher, I’ll be bound, by heck.”

They whet their scythes with a clang and out comes Martha, the farmer’s wife, and Phoebe, the help, from the porch on the right. With them comes a freckled boy, evidently the younger son of the farm family. This freckled boy is in all the melodramas. It is his business to get his ears boxed, mislay the will, lose the mortgage, forget to post the letters and otherwise mix up the plot.

“Do you see the buggy yet, Rube? Can you see them coming yet, Zeke?”

Zeke and Rube hop about making gestures of looking down the road, their hands up over their eyes.

“Not yet, Missus, but they’ll be along right soon now.”

“There they are,” calls Phoebe, “coming along down in the hollow.”

There is great excitement at once. Martha cries, “Land’s sake, if it ain’t Hope all right,” and boxes the freckled boy’s ears. The others run to and fro saying, “Here they come!” so as to get the audience worked up with excitement, at the height of which there comes the actual clatter of the horse’s hoofs and the next moment a horse and buggy, a real horse and buggy, drive on to the stage. That clattering horse coming on to the stage was always one of the great effects in 1880 – a real horse with real harness and with added anxiety for fear that the horse would misbehave himself when he came on.

The buggy stops with a lot of shouting of “Whoa there,” – intended to keep the horse lively. If they didn’t shout at it this stage horse was apt to subside into a passive melancholy not suited for the drama.

So here is the farmer sitting in the buggy in a suit of store clothes and a black slouch hat, and beside him is Hope, his daughter, just home from boarding school. How sweet and fresh she looks in her New England sun hat with the flowers on it. I don’t know what they did to the girls in the boarding schools in 1880 – some line of algebra perhaps – to make them look so fresh. There are none like them now.

Hope leaps out in one spring and kisses her mother in one bound and she cries, “Well, Mother! Well, Phoebe! Why, Zeke! Why Rube!” They all circulate and hop and dance about saying, “Well, Miss Hope, well I never!” And all the while there’s the sunshine in the yellow fields and the red hollyhocks beside the porch, and light and happiness everywhere.

You’d think, would you not, that that old homestead represented the high water mark of happiness? And so it does. But wait a bit. Before long they’ll start trouble enough. All the audience know in advance that that farm will be mortgaged and the farmer ruined and Hope driven from home – oh, there’s lots of trouble coming. Trouble was the proper business of the melodrama. So presently they all get through their congratulations and Hope has embraced everybody, and the farmer’s wife has got off two jokes about the size of Boston and then the freckled boy wants to take Hope away to see the brindle cow, and they all fade away off the stage except the farmer and his wife.

And right away the whole tone of the play changes, just like that.

The farmer stands alone with his wife.

And Martha comes over to him and puts her hand timidly on his shoulder. The joy has gone out of her face.

“Hiram,” she says, “Lawyer Ellwood’s agent was here this morning.”

The farmer fairly humps into his shoulders with anger.

“Ay,” he snarls.

“And Hiram, Lawyer Ellwood wants his money.”

“Ay! he wants his money, does he? Curse him!”

The farmer’s fist is clenched and there’s a scowl on his face.

“He says, Hiram, that it’s got to be paid tomorrow. Oh, Hiram, we can’t never pay it.”

Martha puts her apron up to her face and sobs.

The farmer turns and shakes his clenched fist at the scenery away off to the left.

“Curse him!” he rages. “Ay, curse him. This three years he has thrown a blight across our life.”

“You was friends oncet, Hiram,” sobs Martha again, “years ago before he went to the city you was friends.”

“Friends!” raves the farmer, “a fine friend, drawing me on with his schemes of money and profit. ‘To make my fortune,’ he said – a fine fortune – ruin, ruin it meant – till I had signed this and signed that, till it was all mortgaged away and till he held me, as he thought, in the hollow of his hand. Martha, if that man stood before me now, by the God that lives, I could choke him with these hands.”

Hiram makes a gesture so terrible and yet so passionate that the one hope of the audience in the top gallery is that Lawyer Ellwood will happen along right now and get choked.

Martha tries to dry her eyes.

“Nay, Hiram, you mustn’t talk like that. Those are evil thoughts. It is God’s will, Hiram, and it must be right. But we can’t never pay.”

“Not pay,” shouts Hiram, “who says I can’t pay? I can pay and when that man comes tomorrow I can throw the money in his face. Look, Martha, there it is!”

Hiram Haycroft draws a great wallet from his pocket and slaps it down on the palm of his hand.

“Two thousand dollars, every cent of his accursed debt. Martha, it will mean poverty and hard times for us where all was plenty, but, thank God! it can be paid.”

“Why, Hiram!”

“I’ve raised it, Martha. I’ve sold the stock, I’ve parted with this and I’ve pledged that – everything but the roof above our heads is sold or pledged. But this accursed mortgage can be paid.”

“Oh, Hiram!”

“It will mean hard times again, hard and bitter times—”

“I don’t mind that, Hiram,” – and Martha puts her hands up to her husband’s neck, “we’ve borne it together before and we can bear it together again – But oh, Hiram, if only our boy Jack had been spared to us, I could have borne it so easily then.”

Martha begins to cry.

“There, there, Martha,” says the farmer, “you mustn’t lay it so to heart. The sea has taken him, Mother, as it has taken many a brave lad before him—”

“The sea, the sea—” groans Martha, “I see it there so bright and calm in the sunlight. But will it give me back my boy? Three years this day, Hiram since he left us. I can feel his good-bye kiss still on my cheek. And since then no word, never a word.”

Hiram draws his wife to him to comfort her.

“Come, Mother, come into the house; we mustn’t show sad faces for Hope’s home coming – come—”

They go in through the wooden porch under the flowers on the right, leaving the audience sad and disturbed. That infernal lawyer! But they were all alike in 1880. Show them a sun-lit farm and a happy family and they clap a mortgage on it at sight. And to think that farmer Haycroft and his wife had lost their only son at sea – that calm blue sea in the back curtain with the sunlight on it.

In fact the play is getting too sad; so it has to be relieved and Rube and Phoebe are brought on to the stage again and go through one of those rural love scenes that were used to ease the strain of the melodrama. Rube shambles over to her in a sheepish way, evidently proposing to kiss her, and says:

“Ain’t you got nothing for me this morning, Phoebe?”

And Phoebe says:

“Go along, you big thing, I’ve got that for you,” and swats him over the face with a thistle. The audience roar with laughter, the strain is removed and they’re ready to get on with the play when Phoebe disappears with Rube in pursuit.

“Why, Mother,” – it is Hope calling – “where are you, Mother?”

“I’m here, daughter,” says Martha, reappearing out of the porch.

“I was looking for you all over, Mother,” says Hope, coming over to her coyly. “I have been wanting so much to talk to you all by ourselves.”

“Ah! And I think I can guess something of what that’s about.” Martha has taken Hope’s hand in hers and is patting it and Hope is looking at the ground and swinging herself about on one heel in a way that in a New England play always symbolized the approach of love.

“—and now Hope tell me all about it,” says the farmer’s wife.

“You remember, Mother, that I wrote and told you that I had a secret—”

“Yes, dearie, a great secret, you said—”

“—a secret that I didn’t want to put on paper and didn’t want to tell to anybody till I could tell it to you first, Mother dear.”

Hope has snuggled up close to her mother, who is patting her on the shoulder and repeating. “Ay, lass a great secret, and I’ll be bound I can guess a little of what it is – I suppose it means that there is someone – that my little girl—”

She whispers into Hope’s ear.

“Oh, Mother,” Hope goes on, “it’s even greater than that. Look, Mother, see what’s on my hand.”

Hope holds out her hand, her face downcast and not only her mother but even the girls in the gallery can see the plain gold ring that’s on her finger. The men in the audience don’t get it, but the girls and women explain to them what it is.

“Why Hope, darling,” says Martha, all in a tremble, “what does it mean?”

“Why, Mother, it means – it means,” Hope takes a flying leap into her mother’s arms – “it means, Mother, that I’m married.”

“Married!”

“Yes, married, Mother, last Saturday in Boston at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

“Married, my little girl married!”

Martha has to be terribly astonished so as to keep the audience in the same frame of mind: not at Hope being married the very day she left her finishing school. That was nothing – that was a favourite way of getting married in 1880 – but at the fact that she hadn’t told her mother about it. So Martha keeps repeating—

“Married! My little girl married!”

“It was all in such a hurry, Mother – I couldn’t tell you. It all came so sudden—”

Hope is half crying, half smiling.

“But I shouldn’t cry, Mother, because really I’m so happy—”

“That’s right, darling, and now tell me all about it.”

“We were married in Boston last Saturday, Mother. And, oh, I did so want you to be there, only it couldn’t be. It was all in such a hurry – because Ned was offered a new ship – just think, Mother, captain of a ship at twenty-one.”

“Not a sailor, dearie,” says Martha Haycroft in evident agitation, “don’t tell me that your man is a sailor.”

“Why, yes, Mother, Ned’s been at sea ever since he was fifteen.”

“The sea, the sea,” groans the farmer’s wife. “I see it flying there in the sunlight. I hear it roaring in the winter wind. When will it give me back my boy?”

“Mother, you mustn’t cry. It was years ago and it was God’s will, and Mother, Ned will only be at sea a little while longer now – just this one voyage in his new ship, and listen, Mother, Ned’s new ship (it’s a schooner, Mother, and it’s Ned’s father who owns it and it’s called the Good Hope, after me) – will be off the coast here this evening, and if Ned can manage it he’ll come ashore and see us all, and his father – though I’ve never seen him – will be with Ned. And Ned is to settle down and be a farmer, Mother, on a farm beside the sea. His father is a rich lawyer in Boston, Mother, and Ned says that his father has a mortgage on a farm right on the seashore just like this, and after this one voyage—”

“A lawyer, a rich lawyer!”

“Yes, Mother, a rich lawyer in Boston, but he once lived in the country, near here I think, years ago.”

“His name? What name?”

“Ellwood, Mother, Lawyer Ephraim Ellwood.”

Martha breaks from her daughter in alarm.

“No, no, not that, don’t say it’s that name – Hope, it couldn’t be, it can’t be.”

And at that moment the farmer, Hiram Haycroft, steps on to the stage.

“Why, Mother! Why, Hope! What’s – what’s all this?”

Hope (tearfully) – “I don’t know Father; I only began to tell Mother a secret—”

“Yes, daughter!”

“That I – that we – that I am married, Father.”

“Married, my little girl married! That don’t seem possible. But what’s all this ado about, Mother, and who’s the lucky man that’s gone and taken my little girl?”

Hiram comes over affectionately and takes Hope’s two hands.

“Only yesterday, it seems,” he says, “that I held you on my knees, little gal, and now to be married.”

All the audience waits in a luxury of expectation. They know that the farmer is going to get an awful jolt.

Then he gets it.

“He’s the son of a rich Boston lawyer, Father, who – has a mortgage on a farm—”

The farmer has dropped Hope’s hands, his face is darkening.

“And Ned is to have the farm – Ned Ellwood is his name, Father, see it here.”

Hope timidly takes out a paper from her dress.

“Here on my marriage certificate.”

But the farmer doesn’t hear her. He stands a moment, his fists clenched, then bursts into wild rage.

“Ellwood, Lawyer Ellwood. My daughter marry a son of that man! By the living God, Hope, sooner than see you married to a son of his, I’d see you lying fathoms deep under the sea beside my son. God hears me say it, and may God so order it!”

And as Hiram Haycroft stands, with this fateful invocation on his lips, the freckled boy runs on the stage and says:

“Say, Hope, ain’t you never coming to see that brindle cow?”

.  .  .  .  .

And with that the curtain slowly falls, and Act I is over.

No wonder that as the curtain falls there’s a terrible feeling of sadness and apprehension all over the audience. No wonder that even before the curtain has reached the floor a great many of the men in that 1880 audience have risen and are walking up the aisles to get out of the theatre. They can’t stand the strain of it – the thought of the beautiful old New England homestead all brought to sorrow and tragedy like this. It’s too much for them. They must have air. They’ve gone to look for it outside the theatre. Even though the playbill says that only ten hours elapse between Act I and II (pretty rapid work for 1880) they’re taking a chance on it.

So the able-bodied men in the audience go out leaving behind only the young, the infirm, and the women (women never took anything to drink, anyway, before prohibition). There is a great sadness over the audience now because they know by experience that once the old homestead starts going to pieces like this things will go from bad to worse. Even the fact that the orchestra is now playing In the Gloaming, Oh, My Darling doesn’t help things much.

So presently the men come back and the orchestra is stopped and the gas cut down and the curtain is hauled away up to the roof and it’s—

ACT II—

Same Evening.
The Kitchen of the Haycroft Farm.

“You’ll find us plain folk, sir, just plain folk. But if it’ll please you to take what plain folk can offer you’re heartily welcome. Now then, Phoebe girl, a chair here for the gentleman. Put another stick in the stove, Rube, it’s a cold night in this November wind.”

The stranger, in a strange voice, “Ay, it’s a cold night.”

The scene is in the farm kitchen, one of those big old farm kitchens of 1880 that filled the whole stage. There was a cooking stove – about ten feet by six in the centre stage and a fireplace with a mantel off at one side, and doors and windows – in fact all the things that will be needed in the act, not forgetting a shotgun hanging ominously on two hooks. At the back is a big table all laid out for about a dozen guests, with Phoebe all done up in her best things fussing round laying dishes. Martha Haycroft, also in her best things (black satin with a sort of crispiness to it), is cooking at the stove. Putting the farm people with their best clothes was always supposed to imply a comic touch. Rube has on clothes like a congressman’s, only lower in the coat tails and higher in the collar.

This, of course, was the supper that the farmer spoke of when he said they’d call in the neighbours.

Only for the moment all the eyes of the audience are turned on the stranger. He has a crop of straight white hair (a wig evidently) and a white beard – false, of course – and he walks partly bent with a stick, and he looks all about him, all round the room with such a queer look, as if he recognized it.

All the audience feel instinctively that that stranger is disguised. Indeed in this sort of play there always had to be somebody who turned out to be someone else.

“A raw night, sir,” repeats the farmer, “there’s an evil howl in the wind; I reckon there’ll be stormy weather at sea, tonight, sir—”

The farmer is evidently right – for just as he says it somebody behind the scene turns on the wind with a wild and mournful howl. Luckily they don’t leave it on long, just enough to let the audience know it’s there.

“I just been down to the shore, sir,” the farmer goes on, “I tend the light here at the foot of the farm. ’Twill be a bad night at sea tonight.”

“A bad night for those at sea,” repeats the stranger.

The wind howls again. Martha pauses in her cooking, looks a moment towards the window and murmurs, “The sea, the sea.”

Martha, the farmer’s wife had to play alternatively a pathetic character and a comic one. It was hard to do, but the audience understood it. So she mutters “The sea! the sea!” with the yearning of a mother for her lost son, and then goes back to blowing up pancakes on the cook-stove. If that violated unity of the drama we didn’t know it in 1880, so it did no harm.

“But come, come,” says the farmer, “this ain’t no night for feeling down-hearted: I hear the neighbours outside. Come, Martha, we’ll go out and bring them in.”

This leaves Phoebe and Rube alone except for the stranger who has gone across the room and is standing with his back to them, lost in thought. So Rube and Phoebe do another love scene. Rube comes to her along side the table and has only just time to say “Phoebe!” with a slow grin and to try to take her by the waist when she lands him across the face with a pancake. The audience roar with delight and continue laughing till they suddenly come to a full stop when they see that there is something happening with the stranger.

He has been standing with his back turned, silent. Then without warning, he speaks, his back still turned, not in his counterfeited tone, but in a loud clear voice, the voice of youth:

“Rube!”

Rube and Phoebe start. “What voice is that?” says Rube shaking with agitation.

The stranger turns, plucks away his white wig and his white beard and stands revealed.

“Jack! It’s Mr. Jack, come back from the dead!” cries Phoebe.

“Ain’t you drowned?” cries Rube.

They crowd close to him in eager recognition; and Jack, young and boyish now, laughs and greets them. “Let me run and call the boss and the missus,” pleads Phoebe, but Jack restrains her.

“Not now,” he says, “they mustn’t know yet.”

He goes on to reveal, all in whispers and in gestures which the audience are not intended to unravel, that his father and mother must not know yet. He takes from his pocket a bundle of something – is it paper or money or what? The audience can’t see it decently but Rube and Phoebe seem to understand and he is just explaining about it when the noise is heard of the farmer and his wife and the farm guests all coming back.

The stranger motions Rube and Phoebe to secrecy and is disguised again in a minute.

In they all come, the farm people all dressed in the queer pathos of their Sunday things and there follows the great supper scene, without which no rural melodrama was complete. Hear how they chatter and laugh. “Well, for the land’s sake, taste them doughnuts!” “Neighbour Jephson, try a slice of this pie.” “Well, I don’t mind if I do.” “Farmer Haycroft here’s your good health and Miss Hope’s good health and of all present.” “Hear! Hear!” and then someone chokes on a crumb and is beaten on the back.

The supper scene lasts ten minutes by the clock. The stranger has sat silent, beaming quiet approval and at the height of the merriment retired quietly to his room, a side room opening on the kitchen. Martha has lighted a candle for him and as he thanks her for it she says – “You’re a stranger in these parts, sir? There’s something in your voice I seem to know.” All the audience want to shout “He’s your son.” It is a touch taken right out of Sophocles. Hope meantime busies herself among the guests. Hiram Haycroft drinks great flagons of cider. At intervals the wind is turned on against the window panes to remind the audience that it’s a wild night outside.

Then for a moment the farmer leaves the room because he has to go and trim his light down on the shore.

While he is still out there is loud knocking at the door. Rube goes to it and opens it – with a special biff of wind produced for his benefit – and then shows in two strangers.

A young man and an old. The young man is tall and bronzed and sailorlike and Hope runs to him at once, with a glad cry of “Ned! My Ned!” His arms are about her in a moment and the whole theatre knows that it is her husband.

“We’ve put in under the point,” Ned explains, “and I come ashore. But it’s only to say good-bye. The Good Hope can’t lie there in this rising wind. We’ll have to put off at once. This is my father, Hope. You’ll be a daughter to him while I’m gone!”

Hope goes up to the old man and puts her two hands in his and says, oh so sweetly, “I will indeed, sir, for Ned’s sake.”

But her mother has risen, shrinking, from her place.

“Ellwood,” she says, “Lawyer Ellwood.”

All the audience look at the old man. A fox certainly – oh, a sly old fox – just that look of mean cunning that stamped every rural lawyer in every melodrama for thirty years. But Hope sees nothing of it.

“No, Ned, you mustn’t put to sea tonight. It’s too wild a night. Hear how the rain is driving at the windows. You must stay here and your father, too. Mother, this is Ned, my husband, and this is his father, and these are our friends, Ned, and father’s only gone to the light. He’ll be back in just a minute—”

And at that moment the door swings open and Hiram Haycroft – shaking the wet from his black oilskins – strides back into the room. Hope comes to him pleadingly.

“Father, Father dear, this is my husband—”

But he doesn’t see her. He is staring at Ellwood.

“You!” he shouts. “You that have sought to bring ruin upon me and mine!”

Ellwood comes towards him, raising a protesting hand.

“Hiram!” he says.

“Out of my house!” shouts Haycroft. “Your accursed money is not due till tomorrow and tomorrow it shall be paid. Out! before I lay hands on you.” He steps forward menacingly, his hand uplifted. Ned Ellwood steps in his way.

“Put down your hands,” he says, “and listen to me.”

Hiram refuses to listen. He reaches for the gun that hangs above the mantel. The affrighted guests crowd around him. There is noise and confusion, above which is Haycroft’s voice, calling, “Out of my house! I say.”

The father and son move to the door, but as they go Hope rushes to her husband.

“Father! he is my husband! Where he goes I go. Ned, take me with you, out into the night and the storm.” (At these words the wind which has been quite quiet breaks out again.) “Out into the world, for better or for worse. Where you go I follow, my place is at your side!”

There is a burst of applause from the audience at this sentiment. That was the kind of girl they raised in 1880. There are none left now.

And so with her father’s imprecations ringing in her ears Hope casts a little grey cloak over her head and shoulders and with arm clinging to her husband passes out into the storm.

The door closes after them.

There is a hush and silence.

Not even Rube and Phoebe can break it now. The farm guests, almost inarticulate, come and say good-night and pass out. Martha, lamp in hand, goes tearfully up the stairs. Rube and Phoebe fade away.

Hiram Haycroft sits alone. The lights are dimmed down. There is a flicker of light from the fire in the stove but little more. At times the rattle of the storm at the window makes him lift his head. Once he walks to the window and stands and gazes out into the darkness towards the sea.

And once he goes over to the dresser at the side of the room and takes from it the wallet that has in it his two thousand dollars, holds it a moment in his hand and then replaces it.

At intervals the storm is heard outside. The audience by instinct know that the act is not over. There is more tragedy to come.

The farmer rises slowly from his chair. He lays aside his oilskins. Then, still slowly, he takes off his boots – with a boot jack – a stage effect much valued in melodrama.

He moves about the room, a candle in his hand, bolts and chains the door, and so, step by step slowly and with much creaking, ascends the stairs to bed.

The audience follow in a breathless stillness. They know that something is going to happen.

Deep silence and waiting. You can hear the audience breathing. No one speaks.

Then a side door in the room is opened, slowly, cautiously. You can see a dark figure stealing across the stage – nearer and nearer to the drawer where the wallet of money is lying. Look! What is he doing? Is he taking it, or is he moving it? Is it a thief or what?

Then suddenly the farmer’s voice from above.

“Who’s that down there?”

You can half see the farmer as he stands on the upper landing, a candle in his hand.

“Who’s that, I say?” he calls again.

The crouching figure crawls away, making for the door.

What happens after that follows with a rush. The farmer comes hurrying down the stairs, tears open the drawer and with a loud cry of “Thief! A thief!” rouses the sleeping house. You hear the people moving above. You see the lights on the stairs as the crouching figure rushes for the door. The farmer has seized his shotgun. There is a cry of “Stand there, or I’ll shoot,” then the flash of fire and the roar of the gun and the crouching figure falls to the floor, the farmer shouting, “Lights here. Bring a light! A thief!”

It is Rube who enters first, the others crowding after. It is Rube who lifts the fallen body, Rube who holds the light on the pale face so that the audience may see who it is – but something has long since told them that. It is Rube who pulls aside the white wig and the white beard that had disguised the youthful features. There is a loud cry from the farmer’s wife as she sinks down beside the body.

“Jack, Jack, it’s my boy come back to me.”

And the farmer, the gun still clenched and smoking in his hand cries:

“My son! I have killed my son.”

And with that down sinks the sombre curtain on a silent audience.

.  .  .  .  .

That’s the way, you see that the drama was put over in 1880. We weren’t afraid of real effects – terror, agony, murder – anything and the more of it the better. In a modern drawing-room play the characters get no nearer to murder than to have Pup No. 1 dressed in grey tweeds, discuss the theory of homicide with Pup No. 2, dressed in a brown golf costume. That’s all the excitement there is. But in this good old farm melodrama they weren’t afraid of mixing the thing up.

So the farmer is ruined, he’s driven his daughter from the door and has shot his son – and there you are.

When the play reaches this point, at the end of Act Two, there is nothing for it but a two years’ wait. So the play bill at this point bears the legend “Two Years Elapse between Acts Two and Three.” The audience are glad of it. Without that they couldn’t have stood the tragedy of it. But as it is there are two years; the men rise and file out up the aisle; very slowly – there was no need to hurry with two years ahead of them.

The gas is turned up now and the audience are gradually recovering; a boy comes down the aisle and shouts “Peanuts!” That helps a lot. And presently when the orchestra begins to play My Mother Said That I Never Should they begin to get reconciled to life again. Anyway, being used to this type of play they know that things aren’t so bad as they seem. Jack can’t really be dead. He’ll be brought to life somehow. He was shot, but he can’t have been killed. Every audience knows its own line of play; in fact in all the drama the audience has to be taken for granted or the play wouldn’t be intelligible. Anybody who has seen a moving picture audience snap up the symbols and legends and conventions of a photoplay and get the required meaning out of it will know just what I mean. So it was in 1880. The audience got cheered up because they realized that Jack couldn’t really be dead.

So they look at their programs with a revived interest to see what happens next.

Here it is:

ACT III—

Two Years Later.
The Fore Shore After Sunset. A Gathering Storm.

Ah! Look at the scene as the curtain goes up now. Isn’t it grand! The rocks and the breaking water and the white foam in the twilight! How ever do they do it? And the lighthouse there at the right hand side, how it towers into the dark sky! Look at the fishermen all in black oilskins and sou’westers, glistening in the wet, moving about on the shore and pointing to the sea.

Notice that short flash of yellow lightning and the rumble of thunder away behind the scene. And look at the long beams of the light from the lighthouse far out on the water.

Don’t talk to me of a problem play, played in a modern drawing room as between a man in tweed and a woman in sequins. When I attend the theatre let there be a lighthouse and a gathering of huddled fisherman and danger lowering over the sea. As drama it is worth all the sex stuff that was ever slopped over the footlights.

“A wild night!”

It’s a fisherman speaking – or no, it’s Rube, only you would hardly know him – all in oilskins. In the New England play all the farmers turn into fishermen as the plot thickens. So it is Zeke, as another fisherman, who answers:

“It’s all that! God help all poor souls out at sea tonight.”

The lightning and thunder make good again, the fishermen and the women on the shore move to and fro, talking, and excited, and pointing at the sea. Rube and Zeke come together in the foreground, talking. Their function is to let the audience know all that has happened in two years.

“A wild night,” Zeke repeats, “such a night as it was two years ago, you mind, the night that Mr. Jack was shot.”

They both shake their heads. “’Twould have been a sight better,” says Rube, “if the farmer’s bullet had killed him that night. A sad sight it is to see him as he is, witless and speechless. It’s cruel hard on them all. Is he here tonight?”

“Ay, he’s here tonight – he’s always here on the shore when a storm is on. Look, see him there, always looking to the sea!”

The audience look at once and see in the little group standing in the gathering storm, Jack – holding to his mother hard and looking out to sea.

“She’s leading him away. She’ll be wanting him to go home. . . .”

So Jack isn’t dead! But what is that queer, strange look on his face? Something blank, unhuman, witless. His mother leads him down the stage.

“Jack, come home, Jack. It’s no place for you here in the storm.”

The thunder and lightning break in again sharp and vivid and the wind roars behind the scenes.

Jack turns a vacant countenance upon his mother. His face is pale and thin. His eyes are bright.

The audience get it. Since he was shot down he has been there two years speechless and demented.

His mother keeps begging him to come home. He tries to drag her towards the sea. Demented as he is, there is a wild and growing excitement in his manner. He is pointing at the waves, gesticulating.

“What does he see?” Rube is asking. “What is it? He has a sailor’s eyes. What does he see out there?”

And at that minute there comes a shout from the clustered fishermen on the Fore Shore.

“A ship! A ship! There’s a vessel out on the reef. See! look!”

They run up and down, pointing and shouting. And far out on the waves lit for a moment by a flash of lightning, the audience sees a dismasted schooner – she’s made of cardboard – out beside the breakers on the reef.

At this moment the freckled boy, all in oilskins, rushes breathless on to the stage. He hasn’t grown an inch in two years but nobody cares about that.

“Mother, Rube,” he gasps. “I’ve been down to the Long Point – I ran all the way – there is a schooner going on the reef. Look, you can see, and Mother, Mother—”

The boy is almost frenzied into excitement. The crowd gathers about him.

“Mother it’s the Good Hope, her ship!”

“The Good Hope?” exclaims everybody.

The boy gasps on.

“They were lowering the boats – I could see them – but nothing can live in that sea – one boat went down – I saw it – and I could see her, Hope, standing by the mast. I could see her face when the lightning came. Then I ran here. We must go out; we must get the life boats; we’ve got to go. You men, who’ll come?”

Come! they’ll all come! Listen to the shout of them. See! they are dragging forth the life boat from its wooden house on the left of the stage. There are swinging lanterns and loud calls and the roaring of the wind. The stage is darkening and the lightning glares on the sea. But even as they are trying to launch the life boat, there’s a new cry—

“Look – a boat! a boat! out there on the reef, right among the breakers.”

The fishermen rush up and down in great excitement. “There’s a woman in the boat! God help her! She’s lost!”

“Mother, Mother, it’s Hope! See she’s alone in the boat, she’s kneeling up; she’s praying.”

There are new cries:

“Man the life boat! Man the life boat!”

The great boat is dragged out and ready. The men are climbing in over the side.

Then a fisherman shouts out and is heard, clear and single, for a moment in the lull of the storm.

“There’s only one man can pilot this boat across that reef, only Hiram Haycroft.”

There are cries of “Hiram! Hiram!” They point out at the lighthouse from which the long beams still revolve on the water. “He can’t leave the light.”

Noise and commotion.

“He must leave the light.”

“It’s life or death on this one chance. Lads, stand ready there with the life boat and come some of you with me and bring him down.” They rush towards the lighthouse. There is noise and thunder; a flash of light shows the boat, clearly in sight now, right out among the breakers and Hope seen for a moment kneeling in the bow praying, her face illuminated in the lightning. Then in a swirl of white water, the boat vanishes in the foam of the reef.

ACT IV

Then the scene changes – all done in a minute – from the shore to the Lighthouse Tower. It was what used to be called a “transformation scene.” It involved an eclipse of darkness punctured by little gas jets, and a terrible thumping and bumping with an undertone of curses. You could hear a voice in the darkness say quite distinctly, “Get that blank blank drop over there,” and you could see black figures running round in the transformation. Then there came an awful crash and a vision of a back curtain sliding down amongst the dark men. The lights flicked up again and all the audience broke into applause at the final wonder of it.

Look! It’s the lighthouse tower with the big lights burning and the storm howling outside. How bright and clear it is here inside the tower with its great windows looking out over the storm sixty feet above the sea.

He stands beside the lights, trimming the lamps, calm and steady at his task. The storm is all about him, but inside the lighthouse tower all is bright and still.

Hiram peers a moment from the lighthouse window. He opens the little door and steps out on the iron platform high above the sea. The wind roars about him and the crest of the driven water leaps to his very feet. He comes in, closing the door quietly and firmly behind him and turns again to his light.

“God help all poor souls at sea tonight,” he says.

And then with a rush and clatter of feet they burst in upon him, the group of fishermen, Martha, and his demented son, crowding into the lighthouse tower and standing on the stairs. Jack is at the rear of all, but there is a strange look on his face, a light of new intelligence.

“Quick, Hiram, you must come. There’s been a wreck. Look, there’s a boat going on the reef. The men are ready in the life boat, you must steer her through. It’s life or death There’s not a moment to lose.”

Hiram looks for a moment at the excited crowd and then turns quietly to his task.

“My place is here,” he says.

There is a moment’s hush. Martha rushes to him and clutches him by the coat.

“Hiram, they haven’t told you. The schooner that was wrecked tonight is the Good Hope.”

Hiram staggers back against the wall.

“And the boat that’s drifting on the reef, it’s Hope, it’s our daughter.”

Hiram stands grasping the rail along the wall. He speaks panting with agitation, but firm:

“Martha – I’m sworn to tend the light. If the light fails God knows what it means to the ships at sea. If my child is lost it is God’s will – but – my place is here.”

And he turns back to the light.

The fishermen who have been crowding close to the window cry:

“Look down below. The boat – she’s driving in here right on the rocks – the woman’s still clinging to her.”

Martha rushes to the window and calls, “My child, save my child! save her!” And at exactly this minute Jack steps out into the centre of the floor. His face is clear and plain beneath the light. There is no dementia left in it now.

“Father,” he says, “Mother.”

They all turn to look at him. But no one speaks.

“The rope,” he says, “give me the rope.”

He points to a long coil of rope that hangs against the wall. With a sailor’s quickness of hand he takes the rope and runs a bowline knot in the end of it. In a moment, with the end of the line about his body, he throws open the door and rushes on the iron platform. “Hold fast to the line,” he calls, and then the audience see him mount the iron rail, pause a moment, and then dive head first into the sea beneath.

There is shouting and clamour from the fishermen.

“There he is! Look, he’s swimming to her! Hold fast there! . . . He’s got her. . . . Now then, in with the line.”

And with one glorious haul, up comes the line from the roaring sea with Jack at the end of it, and, tight held in his encircling arms, the fainting form of Hope his sister.

Couldn’t be done? Nonsense! That was nothing to what we used to see done in the oldtime plays. If need be, Jack could have fished out a whole shipload.

There is a cry of “Saved, saved!” and Hiram Haycroft clasping the senseless form of his daughter to his heart, cries:

“My little gal! Cast up by the sea!”

And the curtain comes down in a roar of applause.

ACT V.

Six Months Later.

Scene: The Kitchen of the Haycroft Farm.

This last act in the melodrama is all to the good. There is no more tragedy, no strain, no trouble. The play is really over but this part is always put in as a sort of wind-up to make everybody happy. The audience are now sitting in a swim of luxurious sentimentality. How fine everything has turned out – Jack has got his mind back, and Hope is saved and her husband, too, and the old farm isn’t mortgaged or sold and the Haycroft’s are not ruined after all. Yes, and more than that; there are all kinds of little items of happiness to be thrown in.

So here we are back in the old farm kitchen, and here, of course, are Rube and Phoebe again. And Rube tries to grab Phoebe round the waist, but she says, “Oh you Rube, you go along,” and lands a dish towel in his face. But this time Rube won’t go along. He manages to catch Phoebe and tell her that he wants her to be his wife and throw dishcloths at him all his life, and Phoebe calls him a “big thing,” and gives him a kiss like a smack (worse than a dish cloth or a pancake). So there they are, all set for marriage, as they might have been in the first act if Rube had had the nerve.

Well, they are no sooner straightened out than in come the farmer and his son Jack and Ned, Hope’s husband. The farmer seems very old and infirm, though suffused with the same air of peace and happiness as all the others. The two young men help him into an arm rocking chair. “Easy now.” Then Hiram sits down with that expression of difficulty “ay-ee-ee,” always used to symbolize stage rheumatism. There is no need for the farmer to become so suddenly old in the last act. But it was a favourite convention of 1880 to make all the old people very infirm and very happy at the end of the play.

So they begin to talk, just to pile on the happiness.

“I’m getting old, lads, I’m not the man I was.”

“Old, Father,” laughs Jack, “why you’re the youngest and spryest of all of us—”

“I’m getting past work, boys,” says the farmer, shaking his head, “past work—”

“Work,” says Jack, “why should you work?” and as the talk goes on you get to understand that Jack will never go to sea again but will stay and work the farm and they’ve just received the “papers” that appoint him keeper of the light in his father’s place, with a pension for the old man. And Ned, Hope’s husband, is going to stay right there too. His father has bought him the farm just adjoining with house and stock and everything and he and Hope are all ready to move into it just as soon as—

But wait a minute.

His father! Lawyer Ellwood! And the terribly enmity and feud!

Oh, pshaw, just watch that feud vanish! In the fifth act of an old time melodrama a feud could be blown to the four winds like thistledown.

Like this:

There’s a knocking at the door and Ned goes to it and comes back all smiling and he says:

“There’s someone at the door to see you Mr. Haycroft. An old friend he says, shall he come in?”

“An old friend?” And in slips Ellwood – the farmer’s enemy, Hope’s father-in-law – looking pretty hale and hearty, but with the same touch of the old age of the fourth act visible.

He comes over and says:

“Well, Hiram, have you a shake of the hand for an old friend?”

And the farmer, rising, unsteadily:

“Why, Ephraim, it’s not your hand I should be taking; it’s your forgiveness, I ought to ask for my mad folly these two years past.”

“Forgiveness,” says the lawyer; how honest and cheery he looks now, not a bit like the scoundrel he seemed in the second act – “forgiveness!”

And off he goes with his explanation.

That’s the whole purpose of the fourth act – explanation.

And what do you think! He’d been Hiram’s friend all along and was not in earnest about wanting the money back from Hiram – didn’t want it at all! And he knew all about Hope’s love affair and Jack’s safe return with his son and was tickled to death over it – and that night two years ago when the farmer drove him out he had come over to tell the Haycrofts that the debt was cancelled, and he was going to buy a farm and start the young people, Ned and Hope, in life – and it was the cancelled mortgage that Jack was trying to sneak over and put in the drawer when his father shot him down! – and – why dear me, how simple it all is in the fifth act. Why didn’t he explain? Why didn’t he shout out, “Hiram I’m not a villain at all, I’m your old friend—” Oh pshaw, who ever did explain things in the second act of a melodrama? And where would the drama be if they did?

So they are still explaining and counter-explaining and getting happier and happier when the last climax is staged.

The audience hear Martha’s voice as she comes on to the stage, talking back into the wings, “Carry him carefully there, Phoebe, for the land’s sake, if you drop that precious child—”

And in they come.

Martha and Hope! Looking as sweet and fresh as when she started out years ago in the first act. And bringing up the rear Phoebe – carrying the Baby.

Yes, believe it or not, a baby! – or the very semblance of one all bundled up in white.

Hope’s baby!

No melodrama was ever brought to its righteous end without a baby.

How the women all cuddle round it and croon over it! They put it on the farmer’s lap – and say, isn’t he just clumsy when he tries to take it – and when Rube offers to help, and Phoebe slaps his face with a dish rag, the audience just go into paroxysms of laughter.

So there you are – and everybody saved. All happy, the baby installed on the farmer’s knees and explanations flowing like autumn cider.

All that is needed now is the farmer to get off the Final Religious Sentiment which is the end and benediction of the good old melodrama. So he utters it with all due solemnity: “Ay, lads, pin your hope in Providence and in the end you land safe in port.”

It sounds as convincing as a proposition in Euclid. Then the curtain slowly comes down and the matinée audience melts away, out into the murky November evening, with the flickering gas lamps in the street, and the clanging bells of the old horse-cars in their ears, but with their souls uplifted and illuminated with the moral glow of the melodrama.

TOC     INDEX

The Soul Call

An Up-to-Date Piffle Play.
Period, 1923.
(In Which a Man and Woman, Both Trying to Find Themselves, Find One Another)

At the opposite pole of thought from the good old melodrama, with its wind and sea-weed and danger, and its happy ending, is the ultra-modern, up-to-date Piffle Play.

It is named by such a name as The Soul Call, or The Heart Yearn, or The Stomach Trouble – always something terribly perplexed, and with sixty per cent of sex in it. It always deals in one way or another with the Problem of Marriage. Let it be noted that marriage, which used to be a sacrament, became presently a contract, and is now a problem. In art and literature it used to constitute the happy ending. Now it is just the bad beginning.

You always hear of The Soul Call long before you see it. It is being played in London before New York or in New York before London, or, at any rate, it is always played somewhere else first. It has to be. That’s part of the charm of it; so that, long before you see the play, you have heard people discussing it at dinner and debating whether Helga was right in wanting to poison her husband, and whether Lionel Derwent could live with such a woman as Mabel.

When at last it is played, it is put on in a little theatre, a small bijou place with seats for only two hundred and fifty. Even that is too many. The great mass of the theatre goers don’t go to The Soul Call; they are all round the corner in the huge picture-house (capacity three thousand) looking at “DEAD MEN’S GOLD – A FILM OF WESTERN LIFE, THROUGH WHICH BLOWS THE OZONE OF THE COW PASTURE.” That’s the stuff they want. But the really cultivated people want to know whether Helga should or should not have poisoned her husband and whether Mabel could or could not live with Lionel Derwent. So they are all there in evening clothes, with other people’s wives with white necks and plenty of jewels in their hair. So it is not a bit like the setting of the old melodrama with the huge theatre full of noise and clatter, the boys shouting “Peanuts, Program!”

In the little theatre all is quiet, with just dim red lights here and there and noiseless ushers selling the Book of the Play on embossed paper for fifty cents. This is the only kind of atmosphere in which people can properly analyze the Problem of Marriage.

When the Piffle Play begins, the curtain doesn’t go up; it is parted in the middle and silently drawn aside by a thing in black silk knee breeches. When it is drawn back the scene is a room. It is called A Room in The Derwent Residence and it is evidently just a “room.” The stage of the old melodrama had wings and flies and drops and open spaces up above and glimpses at the sides of actors not wanted and waiting till they were. But the stage of the Piffle Play is made into a room with a real ceiling and real doors and a real fire burning in a real grate.

By the time the audience have examined this, they see that there is an ineffective young man in a grey tweed suit seated at a little table on the left, playing patience with a pack of cards.

He flings down a card and he exclaims, “Oh, hang these cards!” then calls, “Meadows, I say, Meadows!” The audience by looking up on their programs “The characters in the order of their appearance,” know that the ineffective young man at the table is Lionel Derwent, husband of Mabel Derwent. The book of the play explains to them that “Lionel Derwent is the type of young man who would rather smoke a cigarette than work in a coal mine. In appearance he looks as if a proposition in solid geometry would bore him. He is quite visibly a man who might be fond of a Pekinese dog, but one sees at once that he would not care to attend a Hotel Men’s Annual Convention at Niagara-on-the-Lake.” Reading this, the audience knows exactly what sort of man he is.

When Derwent calls “Meadows, I say; Meadows!” in comes the butler. Derwent says, “Get me some more cards, will you, Meadows. These are perfectly rotten,” and Meadows says, “Yes, sir, at once, sir,” exactly as a butler would say it. The acting is so perfect that it isn’t acting at all. Meadows is, or at least was, a butler. That’s how he got the part. In the old melodrama days the actor made the part. Now the part makes the actor. The old time actor used to act anything and everything. One day he was a villain, the next a hero, one day old, the next young. One week he was six feet high, the next he had shrunk to five feet, four inches. He acted a bishop one night and an idiot the next. It was all the same to him. Bring him anything and he’d act it.

But in the Piffle Play on the New Stage the actor is cast for his part. When they want a man to act as a butler they don’t advertise for actors; they advertise for butlers.

Meadows has in his hand a little silver tray with a card on it and he says:

“Mr. Chown is downstairs, sir. May I show him up—”

Derwent says:

“Queen – four – Queen – yes, do, Meadows.”

Derwent goes on:

“King – six – eight—” till the door opens again and Meadows announces, “Mr. Chown.”

In comes another young man with a hat and stick in his hand. This is Charles Chown. He is just as well dressed as Derwent (only well-dressed people can get into a Piffle Play) but he looks somewhat rougher in texture. In fact the book says of him:

“Charles Chown is evidently the kind of man who would react to a share of Canadian Pacific stock rather than to a bunch of carnations. His air is that of a man who would fail to read a page of Bergson’s philosophy but would like a marginal option in an oil company. He would probably prefer a Cattle Show to a meeting of Secondary School teachers.” So we know exactly what Charles Chown is like.

Lionel says languidly:

“Ah – Charles. Sit down – ace – ten – queen—”

“I’ve just run in for a minute,” says Chown, “to give you your cigarette case. You left it at our house last night. Still nothing better to do than play patience, eh?”

“My dear fellow, what is there to do? Everything’s been done long ago.”

Chown grunts and sits down.

“After all, what is there in life? One simply lives.”

Chown grunts.

“Take the thing anyway you will, I’m hanged if I can see anything more in existence than simply existing. One breathes, but why?”

Chown grunts. He evidently doesn’t see why.

“I mean, here one is. Did one ask to be? Hardly. It is a matter in which one had no say. One wasn’t consulted.”

At this point Lionel Derwent gets up and walks over to the mantelpiece where he takes a cigarette and lights it.

This thrilling piece of action quite palpably lifts the whole play up.

Charles Chown goes and puts his hat and stick down on a table and pulls a chair near the fire and lights a cigar. This again is a regular thriller. In fact the action of the play is getting too wild altogether. So Lionel and Charles go back to their analysis of life. Some of the audience, who don’t understand that they are “analyzing life” wonder what in Hades they’re talking about. But these are uncultivated people who have no business in the Little Theatre and ought to be at Dead Men’s Gold next door. The bulk of the audience are fascinated.

Chown speaks.

“That’s all right, Derwent, but it’s all rot – puff – You ought to come down to the Exchange – puff – some morning, then you’d know that there’s something doing in life – puff.”

“My dear fellow!”

“This morning, for instance. Steel fell fifteen points.”

Lionel, very languidly, “Fell down or fell up?”

“Why, down, of course. You never heard such a racket as the fellows made.”

“How can they care about it?”

“Why, hang it, think of the money it meant!”

“Money! Oh, I say, Chown, money! Come, come!”

Lionel who has been standing, stretches his elbows with a yawn and walks over and stands looking at a picture and muttering, “Money! I say, Chown that’s rather thick! Money!”

Lionel’s acting when he yawns is simply admirable. In fact it was principally his yawn that got him where he is. In the old melodrama a good actor was one who could handle a broadsword in a Highland duelling scene, or leap off a lighthouse into the sea. In the Piffle Play it means one who can yawn.

“Well, I must skip along,” says Chown. “I must get down to the Exchange. So long.”

When Chown goes out Lionel shrugs his shoulders as he lights another cigarette.

“What a clod!” he murmurs; then he pushes a bell button and calls out, “Meadows!”

The butler reappears.

“Will you kindly dust off that chair where Mr. Chown was sitting.”

“Yes, sir—”

Lionel watches Meadows dusting the chair for a minute. Then he says:

“I say, Meadows.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Has it ever occurred to you, Meadows, that some men have souls about the size of a share of preferred stock?”

“No, sir, I can’t say it has – ah, excuse me, sir, there’s the bell.”

In another half minute Meadows reopens the door with the words:

“Mrs. Chown!”

Helga Chown comes sliding into the room. She is dark, very beautiful and as slender as a liqueur glass. Her clothes are pure art and droop on her like a butterfly’s wings.

As to her character, the audience know all about it already from reading about The Soul Call before they see it; and, anyway, they have the book of the play which says:

“Helga, the wife of Charles Chown, is a woman whose soul has overgrown her body. Life presses on her on all sides and she cannot escape. She beats her wings against the bars in vain . . .” On the old fashioned stage this beating her wings against the bars might have been misunderstood. But not so now.

Derwent rises and they come together, saying “Helga!” and “Lionel!” with an infinite depth of meaning.

Helga draws off her gloves and drops into a chair.

“Charles here?” she says.

“Just left. Did you want to see him?”

“No, to not see him. Give me a cigarette.”

Lionel comes over near her and gives her a cigarette and lights it.

“Where’s Mabel?” she asks.

“Gone out to the Dog Show!”

They both shudder.

“And Charles?”

“Went to the Stock Exchange.”

They both shiver.

The audience are following the play with great expectancy and growing excitement. They don’t expect a passionate love scene. They know better than that. But Lionel and Helga are going to “analyze themselves!” and the audience wait for it with breathless interest.

Lionel starts first.

“How easy people like Charles and Mabel seem to find life!”

Helga nods. “Yes, don’t they?”

“They never seem to stop to analyze themselves.”

“Perhaps,” murmurs Helga, “they can’t.” This terrible thought holds them both silent for a minute. Then Helga, as if beating her wings against the bars, speaks.

“Lionel,” she says, “lately, I’ve been trying to think it all out, what it all means. I want to see it all clearly – you and me and everything—”

Lionel has taken her hand very gently.

“Yes, dear?” he murmurs.

“No, don’t. I mean don’t take my hand, not now.” She turns to him with a perplexed, beautiful face, “I want to think!”

It is evidently so difficult for her to think that if he takes her hand he’ll queer it.

“I want to think it all out and when I think about it, I want to be all me, can’t you understand, just me and not a bit you. Do you know how I mean?”

“I think I do, dear.”

He doesn’t really, but this is the kind of lie that must be told.

Helga goes on with rising animation breaking into passionate analysis of herself.

“Sometimes I sit by myself and think, and try to analyze myself and everything seems so small and myself so small too, as if nothing mattered, just like an infinitely small bit of something bigger, something lost in itself and looking for itself in itself. You know what I mean.”

“I think I do.”

“Often it seems as if there were just nothing—”

“I know,” Lionel murmurs.

“—and then, sometimes, it seems as if there must be something—”

“I know,” murmurs Lionel again.

Then they are both silent. Presently Helga speaks in a more commonplace tone.

“Doesn’t it seem queer, Lionel, how people just go on living? Take Charles and Mabel. There they are; two commonplace, ordinary people. They go about together, to Dog Shows and things – and that seems to be enough – I suppose they like one another and that’s all – they seem satisfied – and with you and me it’s so different – people like them don’t seem to know when the soul calls to another soul—”

“I know,” Lionel murmurs. His part here is very difficult. He has to sit and look like a soul and keep murmuring, “I know,” and he can’t even yawn.

Helga goes on.

“The other night at that silly Dog Show as soon as I saw you I could feel my soul calling to yours, right over the dogs – and at the Cat Show, the same thing. But Charles and Mabel don’t seem to feel things like that. At the Dog Show they seemed to be looking at the dogs. Just imagine!”

There is a long silence, and then Lionel gets up and walks the whole length of the room and back again and sits down again. This dramatic piece of action means that something is coming.

He speaks.

“Helga,” he says, “I only mention this as an idea. Have you ever thought of poison?”

Helga very calmly takes out a cigarette from a case and lights it very deliberately. The audience are desperately anxious. Has she or has she not?

“Have I ever thought of poison? Poison for whom? Do you mean for us, for you and me?”

“Oh, dear, no. For Charles and Mabel. Mind, it’s only an idea. If you don’t like it, I’ll say no more.”

Helga turns to him a face of passionate yearning.

“Yes, Lionel, I have thought of it – often, and often. In fact I came over here to talk of it. Every time I look at Charles I feel that the only way my soul can grow is to poison him.”

“I know,” Lionel murmurs. “I feel that way towards Mabel that it’s only just to her, poor girl, to poison her.”

Presently Helga says:

“When can we do it?”

“Today would be all right unless you’ve anything else on. Mabel’s going over to tea with you this afternoon, isn’t she? We can arrange it for then.”

“But I don’t know whether I have any poison in the house. I am so unpractical a housekeeper, you know, dear.”

“That doesn’t matter. I’ll tell Meadows to get some and take it over to Annette, your maid.”

“But then Meadows would know.”

“So he would. But that needn’t matter. One could poison Meadows too.”

“But Annette?”

“The simplest thing would be to poison Annette as well. After all, what does life mean for people like Annette and Meadows? They breathe, but that’s all.”

“And after it’s over?”

Lionel and Helga have risen and he draws close to her and puts his hand on her shoulders and is looking into her eyes.

“After it’s over, then we shall be free, free to be ourselves and go away, far, far, away – together—”

They embrace and when they break away Lionel leads Helga to the door and shows her out.

Then he goes and sits down again and picks up a newspaper to read. After a minute he rings the bell. Meadows comes.

“I say, Meadows, pack up a trunk of my things. I’m going away tonight.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, Meadows, I wish you’d be good enough to go out and get a packet of arsenic.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get enough to, let me see—”

“To poison an animal, sir?”

“Yes, four animals. Thank you, Meadows—”

And with that the two sides of the curtain fall slowly together and the first act is over.

In the old melodrama when the curtain fell there was always a wild burst of music and bright lights and shouts of “Peanuts.” Not so in this. Only very soft lights, mostly red, are turned on and mere wisps of music thin as smoke.

Meantime everybody discusses the play. In the old days the men used to go out and drink. Now they stay in and discuss. There is a general feeling among the women that Helga is quite right in proposing to poison Charles. Till she does that she can never expand. The case of Mabel being poisoned is not so clear. The audience haven’t seen her yet, so they can’t tell. But it is certain that two commonplace people like Charles and Mabel have no right to prevent Lionel and Helga from following the higher call of their natures. The discussion is still at its height when the curtain slides aside on

ACT II

The Drawing Room
of the Chown Residence

And there are Lionel Derwent and his wife Mabel being shown in by Annette, the stage maid.

It is a large and sumptuous room with a real ceiling like the one in the first act, and with real mahogany furniture and Chippendale chairs and vases of Beauty roses – in fact just like the rooms that the audience have come out of. There are tea things on a large Hindoo brass tray on eight legs.

Mabel Derwent goes over to the Hindoo tray and picks up a big cream-candy out of a box and eats it and says “Yum! Yum!” with animal relish. All the audience look at Mabel. They see in her a dashing, good looking woman, a blonde, all style. All the women in the audience decide at once that she ought to be poisoned, but the men aren’t so sure.

Mabel says:

“I say, Lionel, do eat one of these. They’re just scrumptious.”

This is meant to show how terribly material she is.

Lionel just shrugs his shoulders in mute appeal to heaven.

Mabel walks around the room looking at things. She picks up a book and reads the title. “Bergsonian Illusionism,” she says, “oh, help!” and drops it.

This shows how uncultivated she is.

Presently she says:

“Wonder where Charles is. If he’s out in the stables I’ll go out and dig him up. He told me he has a new hunter, a regular corker. Suppose we go out to the stables—”

Lionel says with great languor:

“Thank you. I take no interest in stables.”

By this time the audience are supposed to have the exact measure of Mabel Derwent, materialism, ignorance, candy, and the horse stable. But even at that a lot of the men would refuse to poison her. Her figure is too good. On the other hand all the thin women in the audience think her too fat. The amount of fat permitted to actresses in the Piffle Play is a matter of great nicety. They have to be cast for it as carefully as tallow candles.

So as the audience now know exactly what Mabel Derwent is like, the play passes on.

Charles Chown comes briskly in, shaking hands with both of them. “Hullo, Mabel. How do you do, Lionel; so sorry to keep you waiting. I think Helga’s in the conservatory, she’ll be here in a minute.”

In which Lionel Derwent says, “In the conservatory? Then I think I’ll go and look for her. I want to see that new begonia that Helga’s so keen about.”

And with that out he goes, leaving Charles and Mabel together, as they are meant to be.

And just the minute they are alone Mabel comes close up to Charles and looks all round and says:

“Well?” in quite a different voice from anything she has used before. So the audience are certain that there is going to be something doing.

Charles says:

“It’s all right. Everything arranged.”

And Mabel says, “Good boy—” and then she says, “Take that,” and comes and gives him a kiss. A real one, one with no new art or new thought about it.

Charles goes on.

“It’s all arranged. We’ll go out to the stables presently and I’ve got a taxi coming round there with your things in it.”

“And it’s all right about the trains—”

“Right as rain,” says Charles, drawing out a railroad folder. “We get the five thirty at the Central. Change trains half an hour out of town to get the Havana boat Wednesday evening.”

“Lovely!” Mabel says, and then repeats more slowly and thoughtfully, “Lovely – and yet do you know, Charlie, now that it’s come at last I feel – don’t you know – half afraid – or not that – but don’t you know?” hesitating.

Charles says “Nonsense,” and is just about to draw her to him when the door opens and Lionel and Helga come in. Lionel says to his wife:

“Helga’s just been showing me her new begonia – a most amazing thing.”

And Mabel says:

“A new begonia! Where did it come from, Helga?”

And Helga answers,

“From Havana. They grow so beautifully there. I should just love to see Havana. Shouldn’t you?”

This little touch makes quite a hit with the audience. The irony of truth always does. As a matter of fact Sophocles started it four or five hundred years before Christ. But they don’t know it. They think it awfully up-to-date.

After this there’s a little random conversation just to fill up time and then Charles says:

“I say, Mabel, how would you like to come out to the stables and see my new mare before we have tea?”

And Mabel answers:

“Oh, I’d love to. I wanted to ask you about her. Come along. We won’t be long, Helga.”

And with that they go out and Lionel and Helga are left together.

Just as soon as they are alone Helga says:

“So you’re off the poison idea?”

“Clear off it,” says Lionel; “as I told you just now, I don’t think it’s worth it.”

“Worth it?”

“Yes – I mean it would involve such a terrible fuss and nuisance. Here’s the poison – Meadows got it all right—”

Lionel takes from his pocket a large packet in light green paper, marked with a skull and crossbones and labelled ARSENIC in large letters.

“We can use it if you like. I’m not awfully particular. Only I don’t believe that much would kill Mabel anyway.”

Helga takes the packet of poison and holds it in her hand musing—

“But think,” she murmurs, “of the relief of death. Think of the relief to a person of Charlie’s temperament to be dead—”

“Oh, I know that. And for that matter, Meadows ought to be glad to be dead. But you see Helga, it isn’t done.”

Lionel walks across the stage and lights a cigarette.

“But what can we do?” says Helga. She clasps her hands about her knees as she sits. When she does that the audience know at once that she is going to analyze herself. “Do you ever look into yourself, Lionel, deep, deep into yourself? I do. Sometimes I try to picture to myself that it’s not me but just something inside of me. Do you know what I mean, dear?”

“I think I do,” murmurs Lionel.

They’re off. For the next ten minutes Helga plunges into a fierce analysis of herself. As the critics of the play say afterwards, she “bares her soul,” and when she has bared it it’s “the soul of a woman buffeted by the intense light of self-perplexity and finding no anchorage in it.”

When she is finished or as nearly finished as she is likely to be, Lionel says—

“Then I suppose we must simply go on as we are—”

“I suppose so, Lionel. If, as you say, Charles and Mabel have a right to live, it seems as if we have to be satisfied.”

“Perhaps it does,” says Lionel. He takes a turn up and down the room and then he says:

“There’s just one thing I’ve thought about Helga. It’s only an idea, so of course you can say no to it at once if there’s nothing in it. But couldn’t we perhaps get just on a train together and go away together?”

“Where?” says Helga.

“Oh, just anywhere. It’s only an idea. You mentioned Havana just now. Couldn’t we just get a train or a boat or something and go to Havana?”

“I don’t know, Lionel. It all seems so strange. I must think.”

Helga presses her hand to her forehead; this is always a sign that she is thinking, or trying to. Lionel lets her think undisturbed.

“I don’t know, Lionel. I must think it all out. I must analyze myself and try to analyze Havana. Listen, Lionel; let me think a month. Perhaps it will be clearer then—”

Lionel looks at his watch.

“I say,” he says, “Charles and Mabel seem a long time in looking at that mare. How strange it seems that commonplace people like Charles and Mabel can know nothing of the kind of thing that means so much to us. I suppose they never stop to think.”

“They never analyze themselves—” murmurs Helga.

And just then there is a light knock at the door and Annette steps in with an envelope on a tray.

“Mr. Chown asked me to give you this letter, ma’am, after he had gone.”

“Had gone?”

“Yes, ma’am, he went away in a taxi with Mrs. Derwent.”

“In a taxi?”

“Yes, ma’am, with luggage in it.”

“A taxi with luggage. Give me the letter.”

Annette presents the letter and goes out.

Helga takes the letter, tears open the envelope and reads aloud—

“Dear Helga: Mabel and I have decided to go away together. We are taking a train South this afternoon. I have made every arrangement for you in regard to money and that sort of thing and of course now you will be completely free. We shall not be in your way at all, as we are going far away; in fact we are going to Havana!”

As Helga finishes reading, she and Lionel remain looking at one another.

“To Havana!” they both repeat and then there is a little silence.

After which Lionel says—

“Do you know, Helga, it rather occurs to me that it’s the commonplace people who do things.”

On which the curtain comes sliding together and the audience rises and wraps its furs round its neck, and goes home with a problem theme to ponder over and with an impression of profound thought.

TOC     INDEX

Dead Men’s Gold

A film of the great Nevada desert in which Red-Blooded, Able-Bodied Men and Women a hundred per cent American live and love among the cactus and chaparral. Something of the Ozone of the Cow Pasture mingled with the gloom of the great canyons blows all through this play.

Shall we go together this raw, gusty afternoon to the enchantment of the moving-pictures? Here, this looks a good place, this large and lighted hallway leading off the street itself. Let’s get our tickets from this golden girl behind the glass, seated there under a magic spell no doubt. This must be a good play, look how pretty the girl is! Two, yes please, downstairs – extra ten cents? oh, the Amusement Tax, of course!

Now through these doors and down this corridor, and through these swinging doors again and into the dark. What a vast place it is. Dear me, it’s absolutely empty! Empty? Oh, no, they are all there but you don’t see them yet, seated silent in the dark like toads under leaves. Excuse me, sir, I’m afraid I stepped on your foot. I beg your pardon madam, I didn’t see the little girl. All that bright picture stuff being flashed on the screen? Never mind it now till we get our seats. It’s not part of our play anyhow. There, sit down in this row – now we can look – what does it say? – TURKISH TROOPS ENTER THE – something – I couldn’t see – anyway it doesn’t matter where they enter, it’s only the News of the World. PASADENA CALIFORNIA, PRESIDENT HARDING PRESENTS FLOWERS TO GIRL GUIDES – STATE UNIVERSITY OF OHIO DEFEATS MIAMI AT BASKET-BALL – NATIVES OF DUTCH PAPUA HUNTING FROGS – PRINCE ARTHUR IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY CATCHING TARPON: Oh, don’t let us bother with all this, the pictures haven’t begun yet.

Ah, now it’s going to begin. Look at that notice on the screen—

Dead Men’s Gold. In Which Full-Blooded Men and Women Live and Love Among the Cactus and Chaparral Authorized by the Censor of New York State

That sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Now let’s see what’s put up next. Ah, a great face, a huge face under a cowboy hat, a face with a grin on it, yes, that’s him, see it says so underneath:

Big-Hearted Jim, Sheriff of Dead Bones County, Nevada

See him turn his face round as he grins. My! how honest and attractive the human face looks when you make it four feet long. I wish they’d put it upside down. I think it would look even better. Now, what’s this next – ah—

Bessemer Steel, Banker of New York

—Very rich indeed evidently. How do I know that? – Oh, pshaw, you don’t understand moving pictures – look at his grey spats and that white frill along his waistcoat – that means a millionaire. No, no, this isn’t the play yet, these are only the people who are going to be in the play when it starts. Ah, now look!

Maisie, Bessemer Steel’s Only Daughter

Isn’t she just cute? See her smile, no wonder they applaud her – and who is this?

Dan Yegg, Bad Man of Dead Man’s Gulch

Bad, well I should say so. And now see all these little scenes going rapidly past – well, they’re not the play yet – those are merely places that are going to be in the play – just little touches of lonely desert, and terrible caverns, and a dear little vignette of a man choking another in a cave – and a pretty little wee glimpse of a man dying of thirst – just little foretastes of the play itself. It looks good stuff, doesn’t it? Now, we’re off!

Bessemer Steel of New York, Banker and Financier Has Spent His Life in the Amassing of Millions

There he is in his office; see all the desks and stenographers round him. What a big, dull face he has; like a bull-frog, you say? Yes, all New York bankers have faces like that in the movies. See him speaking into his desk telephone. Say, isn’t he authoritative? Now, look, he’s listening. Must be about money from the way he shuts up his face. I guess he’s refusing somebody one of those millions that he’s amassed. Now he’s signing a cheque. Now he’s receiving a telegram . . . in fact by this time I think we’ve quite grasped the idea that he’s a rich banker with no soul. In fact, I think I could have grasped it a little sooner, couldn’t you? But, still, remember the moving-pictures have to be made clear to the humblest intelligence. And that isn’t us. . . . Ah, ha, no soul did we say? – Look at this;—

The Only Tender Spot In the Banker’s Heart Is for His Daughter Maisie. To Her He Denies Nothing.

See, the pictures are about to establish the fact that Maisie is denied nothing. Look at her there in her palatial home, romping with a pet dog. Oh, how sweet she is! See her kiss that dog – oh, my, I wonder what they pay that dog for his part. There she is, riding her pony round the grounds; now she is entertaining a whole bevy of her girl friends on the lawn – now she’s in a store buying rich things – say, I think it’s proved up to the hilt that that girl is denied nothing! On with the film! – but wait – just a minute – did you notice among the clerks in the office, that young man? . . . sort of Spanish-looking, mean-looking – kind of a crook – species of skunk – evidently not a hundred per cent American – in fact hardly twenty per cent. See the way he keeps a sort of furtive eye on the banker. Say, I believe that fellow must come into the play somehow – just watch him. Never mind, he’s gone, but he’ll come in again. Now we go on. Ah, this is more like.

Ascot Wright, Student at Harvard

I’m glad it’s Harvard. So much more class to it than the Ontario Agricultural College—

Has Discovered in His Researches in the Harvard Library the Location of a Lost Gold Mine in a Cavern in Dead Men’s Gulch near Graveyard Canyon in Dead Bones County, Nevada

Here we have him, Ascot Wright researching in the library, the way all Harvard students do. How neat he is. I thought all researchers looked pretty dusty, but perhaps not. Anyhow Ascot is as neat as a pin, and athletic-looking, and awfully well dressed for a student. Perhaps his father is a Harvard professor.

Now see! Evidently he’s struck something among the books – see him take a paper from the leaves of an old volume! He’s examining it – feverishly; say, I can just tell that Ascot has discovered a gold mine. He’s working his face just the way a student does when he finds one. Ah, see that! You don’t understand? Those pictures represent what Ascot is reading about. Look! that’s the Great Western Desert. . . . See the little troop of people! horsemen and mules with pack-saddles, crossing it, see the steel uniforms and breastplates, and swords – early Spaniards, that’s what they are . . . the first discoverers of the West . . . look! they’ve entered a cavern; say, the gloom of it! They’re digging with pickaxes! Look, look! They’re piling up great bars of gold. They’re mad with excitement . . . they’re quarrelling – they’re fighting – they’re stabbing one another. . . . Look, dead bodies – dead bones – dead bones in the cavern – dead bones all along the trail – it means the survivors tried to escape, do you see? Look, here’s one, he’s the last . . . he’s dying of thirst in the desert; see him writing on a bit of paper . . . there, he’s folded it into a missal, a prayer book or something. I know what it is – it’s the description of all about the mine in the cavern, and the piled-up gold, do you see? and that’s the paper that Ascot Wright has found in the Harvard library three hundred years later. Look! it’s saying so:

The Manuscript Written in Latin by the Dying Spanish Explorer Pedro Alvarez De Estorga is Deciphered by the Harvard Student.

There’s Ascot, look at him with the paper in front of him, deciphering it! – deciphering Latin! Isn’t he a bird? My! A Harvard education is a wonderful thing. . . . Now what’s it saying?

The Harvard Student Lays His Discovery Before the Great Financier.

There he is, that’s Ascot in Bessemer Steel’s inner office. How neat he looks in his covert coat and his hard hat. These Harvard students certainly have class. He’s explaining to the banker all about the mine. . . . The great banker is listening. . . . He’s hearing all about the documents. See! the pictures go by again – desert – cavern – bones – more bones – dying Spaniard – document – bones – gold – He’s got it. These New York bankers are just lightning at picking up bones and gold.

Now he’s speaking—

“Mr. Wright, This Must Be Kept a Profound Secret.”

Oh, but can it be? Look who’s listening . . . that clerk, you remember the crook, the one with the cunning face – he’s pushed open the door a little way – He’s standing listening – they don’t see him.

“. . . We Will Go West at Once. I Will Defray the Expenses of the Search and Divide with You Fifty-Fifty”

What splendid English, those great bankers use! So clear, isn’t it?

And just then, who comes dancing into the office through the side door – Maisie. Isn’t she just sweet with her fur around her neck; say, look, she’s got one of those new skirts. Watch her go and throw her arms around the banker’s neck . . . see his face light up! In fact, you can see him light it up. Now he is introducing Ascot Wright to Maisie – They bow to one another – say, Ascot is taken with Maisie right away, isn’t he? – Now the Spanish clerk comes in with papers in his hands. He bows to Maisie. How coldly she nods to him. But look at his eyes when he looks at her. I get it, don’t you? And that look of hate that he hands to Ascot! Those Spaniards certainly have temperament. The moving pictures would be lost without them.

Now, the banker is speaking to the Spaniard.

Mr. Gonzalez, I Am Leaving Tonight for Nevada. Will You Kindly Make the Arrangements for My Transportation——

Look! Maisie wants to go too. . . . She’s questioning her father . . . he’s shaking his head. . . . She’s put her arms around his neck. Oh, take her, take her, or I’ll buy a ticket to Nevada and take her myself. . . .

Scene changed. The Pennsylvania Station. Look at all the people. Isn’t it just wonderful to see the Pennsylvania Station in moving pictures; much better than in real life; but then, so’s everything. They’re leaving for Nevada. Maisie is going too; there she is: do you notice, she’s got on one of those new coats they’re wearing. Do you like them?

And there’s Ascot. That’s a nice valise he has . . . and the banker, and Gonzalez. No he’s not going, he’s just seeing them off. The banker’s giving him papers and instructions . . . there, they’re starting on their journey – See the landscape flying past – now they’re in a dining-car. See the darky waiters – look at the banker ordering lunch. . . . I’ll bet he knows how: He’ll eat lunch all the way to Nevada.

But look – we’re back at the station. It’s Gonzalez, he’s buying a ticket. He’s getting on the train. . . . I see it, don’t you? He’s following them. I knew he would—

Now the scene has changed altogether. They’re arriving in Nevada. This is Canyon City . . . a queer, empty spot . . . shack houses and desert and hills all around it . . . see the wooden hotel with the verandah and the men on horseback with leather trousers and with lariats on the pommel of the saddle . . . and the men leaning against the verandah posts with lariats slung over their arms. Look at that big man with the slouch hat and the wide face. That’s the one it showed at the beginning . . . he’s Big Jim, the Sheriff . . . he’s talking to them . . . they’re explaining what they want.

Now it’s changed again. Where is this place? Oh, yes, I recognize it – it’s a saloon – see the bar and all the bottles and the bartender leaning over it – pretty tough looking, isn’t . . . see the men sitting at the little table drinking whisky. . . . I’ve seen this sort of place a hundred times in the movies, haven’t you? It’s always called Pete’s Place or something like that. . . . That’s Gonzalez, one of the men drinking, and that other is Dan Yegg, the bad man that we saw, and the rest, I guess, are bandits . . . they must be. . . . Now, Gonzalez is explaining. He’s telling about Bessemer Steel and Ascot Wright coming to hunt for the gold . . . he’s telling the story of the Spanish explorers. . . . There it goes – desert – bones, gold, more bones, dying Spaniard – They’ve got it: Look how excited they get—

Now it’s changed back to Ascot and his friends. . . . They’re mounting on horseback. Doesn’t Maisie look nice in that short skirt? I guess she brought it with her on purpose. Look at the armed men! quite a troop of them. Oh, I guess they’d need them in a place like that. . . . Big Jim is pointing and giving advice: I suppose he’s telling them the way to Dead Men’s Gulch. There, they’re off – clattering out of the town and away.

Separated from Their Armed Escort, Ascot and His Companions Make Their Way into the Heart of Dead Men’s Gulch

Separated from their armed escort? A crazy thing to do in a place like that, you say? Oh, yes, but they always do it, in all romances. The first thing you have to do with an armed escort is to separate yourself from it.

But say! look at the Gulch. Isn’t that the gloom spot? See the great walls of rock towering above their heads, and the litters of boulders where they pick their way. Look, that’s a snake, a real snake. Ugh! Aren’t they crazy to go into a place like that? There’s Ascot leading them, with a little bit of map or chart in his hand. And, oh look! look! Do you see that? Those heads behind the rocks, they’re being followed – it’s Gonzalez and Dan Yegg and Mexican bandits. Say! it’s just madness to get separated from that escort.

What’s this? They’ve stopped. Ascot’s pointing. He’s found the entrance of a sort of tunnel into the cliff . . . they’re going into it. . . . They’re carrying flashlights. . . . The light shines on the rock walls. . . . What a fearsome place. Look – written there on the wall in strange lettering:

Pedro Alvarez De Estorga
1621

They gather round it. . . . They’re reading the inscription. . . . Now they’re going on – the tunnel is widening – it’s opening into a great cavern . . . notice the high ceiling and the hanging rocks – with the water dripping from it. . . . I suppose it’s dripped like that for centuries – see the floor all sand – and there! bones of dead men – and a steel breastplate and part of a broken sword . . . and over in the corner gold piled up in bars, and great nuggets of it heaped up – on the floor.

Ascot is picking up the gold and showing it to Maisie. Bessemer Steel has taken up a nugget and is examining it. I bet he knows to a fraction what is worth – Ha! He’s showing it and speaking:

“I Estimate that There Is at a Conservative Estimate Two Million Dollars of Gold Lying at Our Feet”

Say! Two million! and at a conservative estimate! Think of the coolness of the man making a conservative estimate in a place like that.

Great Heavens! The whole three of them have turned in sharp alarm! They hear something – some one in the tunnel. Here they come dashing into the cavern – armed men – Gonzalez and Yegg and the bandits. They’ve rushed at Ascot and the banker – three of them are fighting Ascot all at once . . . go to it, Ascot, that’s the way – Now he’s down – no, he’s up again – he’s down – they’re clubbing him – and the banker, Dan Yegg has him down and is choking him – That’s the way, choke him – keep it up – Now this is really enjoyable. This is the real thing . . . go on – keep on choking him . . . that’s right, pound Ascot over the head with a rock – admirable! I do like these choking scenes, don’t you?

They’re both insensible – inanimate on the floor of the cave – now they’ve grabbed Maisie – they’re binding her with cords – good . . . twist her up tight – that’s the way – give her another wind. It enhances the educational value of the film. . . .

There, they’ve gathered her up . . . they’ve put the gold into bags . . . they’re carrying Maisie and the gold down the tunnel . . . they’re coming out at the entrance. Oh, see what they’re doing! . . . they’re blocking the mouth of the tunnel with great rocks . . . the bodies of Ascot and Bessemer will never be found. . . .

Now they’re lifting Maisie into a motor car . . . that must have been waiting down the gulch . . . they’ve got her mouth gagged; I hadn’t noticed that before. That’s a good touch, isn’t it? . . . There! they’re all in . . . they’re off . . . out of the gulch . . . out on the mesa . . . away . . . away . . . fading into the distant hills . . . gone.

.  .  .  .  .

Where is it now? It’s such a poor light, I can’t see, can you? Oh, yes, I got it. It’s inside the cave again. . . . Ascot and Bessemer Steel flat on the sand . . . the light is that electric torch still lying on its side and burning . . . Look, Ascot moved his arm . . . he’s reviving . . . he’s half sitting up . . . he’s feeling Bessemer Steel’s heart. Bessemer is reviving too. They’ll both be all right in a few minutes. They were only clubbed with rocks and stabbed and choked. That’s nothing. Movie actors go through far worse than that and revive. . . . Didn’t I tell you? . . . Ascot has stood up . . . he walks painfully . . . for five seconds . . . now he walks all right . . . he’s looking round . . . he’s taking the torch and going into the tunnel . . . he is speaking to Bessemer:

“They Have Walled Up the Mouth of the Tunnel”

Yes, Ascot, we knew that, we saw them doing it. But look at the horror on Bessemer Steel’s face . . . now he’s speaking:

“Ascot, We Are Lost. There Is Nothing in Front of Us but a Slow Death”

But look at Ascot . . . see his set jaw and his clenched hand and his brave face! see what he says!

“We Are Not Lost Mr. Steel. I Can Save Us Yet”

Oh, bully for you Ascot, that’s the stuff. That Harvard training does it every time.

Whatever is Ascot doing now? . . . he’s picking up the broken bits of the old Spanish armor . . . he’s fitting things together . . . what’s he making? He’s taken out a long thin wire from his pocket, a coil of it . . . he’s fastened a weight to it, he’s thrown it to the roof of the cave . . . it’s caught on a jag of rock . . . now he’s fastening it down tight on the ground and attaching something to it. Ah, I catch on, I see it, don’t you? Why, radio! He’s got a radio machine with him; now they’ll make it all clear in writing in a minute – didn’t I tell you? There it is—

Ascot Wright with the Aid of a Wire and the Fragments of Old Armour and an Electric Torch Makes a Radio. “Mr. Steel in Five Minutes I Shall Be in Communication with Canyon City”

Look! He’s getting into communication . . . zik – zik – see the big blue sparks running down the wire and lighting up the cave – zik – zik – zak – zak – zik . . . he’s sending his message. . . .

Ah! Here’s the other end of it. The wireless station at Canyon City . . . see the operator in his room with a sort of helmet on and wires and sparks all round him . . . zik – zak – zik . . . the message is coming through. . . . Look at the operator – all hurry and alarm – he writes down the message, he’s dashed out with it in his hand . . . he’s reading it to Big Jim, the Sheriff, see the excited crowd gathering. . . . Jim’s haranguing them.

“Mr. Steel and Ascot Wright Are Walled Up in a Cave off Dead Man’s Gulch. . . . Miss Steel Has Been Carried off by Bandits. I Want Every Man that Can Ride and Handle a Gun”

Hurrah! That’s the way – off they go . . . see them leap on the horses and off in a whirl of dust. . . . See the Winchester rifles slung over their shoulders . . . there’s Big Jim at the head of them . . . out of the town and over the desert. . . . There, they’re riding into the gulch. . . . Ascot must have given them the directions . . . they’ve halted . . . they’re at the walled-up tunnel . . . they’re tearing down the stones . . . they’re entering the cave, it’s bright now with torches . . . and crowded with men . . . they’ve found Ascot and Bessemer Steel. . . . Big Jim has put a flask to their lips . . . that’ll help them. . . . Now Ascot’s explaining, the gold, the attack – everything . . . see them crowd listening with the light on their faces. . . .

Out of the cave . . . out into the bright sunshine . . . and riding, riding for life . . . but where? How can they know . . . and the motor had a long start. What is that they plan to do . . . riding, riding, they don’t seem to be chasing anything, they seem to be going somewhere. Oh! look! what’s this place with tall frame sheds and the level ground? Oh, I get it – fine! fine! See that great sign:

Aeroplane Station of the Government of the United States

Isn’t that great? What a thing it is to live under a government that keeps airplanes even away out in the desert.

Now they’re running an airplane out of the shed – what a huge machine! They’re getting in, Bessemer Steel, and Big Jim, the Sheriff, and his men; see, Ascot is going to steer: I guess his head is all right again now. That little thumping up with the rocks merely woke up his brain.

Away they go – up – up – see the machine soaring in the blue sky, floating, hovering like a great bird watching for its prey . . . it’s circling round searching for the motor car. Aha! they must see it now. . . . Look at the airplane swooping down . . . and see, there’s the motor . . . rushing over the mesa . . . here it’s coming right past us. Gonzalez is at the wheel. There’s Maisie, in the back of the car still tied . . . here’s the airplane right after it . . . look at Dan Yegg standing up in the car and shooting at the airplane with a revolver. . . . They’re shooting back . . . that’s Big Jim with his Winchester leaning over the edge of the car . . . look, the motor running straight for the edge of the canyon. . . . Great Caesar, it’s gone over . . . it’s a drop of a thousand feet . . . look . . . there’s the car falling through the air, the wheels still spinning . . . and there’s the airplane chasing it as it falls . . . watch Big Jim . . . he’s got a coil of rope, a lasso . . . he’s lassoed Maisie with it. . . . Hurrah, they’re hauling her on the airplane. . . . The motor can fall now, it doesn’t matter where it falls to. . . . there’s the airplane, landed . . . Maisie’s unbound . . . she’s in her father’s arms . . . he’s handing her to Ascot. . . .

What’s it saying? – oh, that’s just the wind-up.

And So These Twin Souls Join Henceforth to Walk Life’s Pathway Hand in Hand. Next Week Mutt and Jeff among the Monkeys. Don’t Miss It.

TOC     INDEX

Oroastus – A Greek Tragedy

(As presented in our colleges)

The Greek Drama, as everybody knows, possesses a majesty that we do not find elsewhere. It has a loftiness, a sublimity, to which no later theatre has obtained. Anybody who has seen the play of Alcestis put on by the Senior class of the Podunk High School will admit this at once.

The Greek Drama, unfortunately, is no longer exhibited to the ordinary theatre-going public.

It is too sublime for them. They are away beneath it. The attempt to put on one act of the Oedippus Polyphlogistus of Boanerges at the entertainment evening of the annual convention of the Rubber Men of America last January was voted down by a nine to one vote in favour of having Highland Dances of the Six Susquehanna Sisters.

Another difficulty is that a lot of the Greek Drama is lost. Some critics think that all the best of it is lost; others say, not all; others again claim that what we have, ought to make us feel that we have no right to complain over what is lost.

But though the Greek Drama is not presented in our commercial theatres, it still flourishes in our institutions of learning. One may yet see the stupendous tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides put on in the auditorium of the Jefferson High School or acted, under pressure, by the boys of St. Peter’s (Episcopal) Resident Academy, or presented in commencement week by the Fi Fi Omega (oil) Fraternity of the University of Atalanta.

The open season for the Greek Drama in the college is the month of February. This gives the students four months to learn the Greek lines, and is based on a piece work rate of five words a day. After the play they have still time to get back to what is now called “normalcy” before the end of the college session.

Let us therefore transport ourselves in fancy to the winter evening in a college town when the Greek play is to be put on by the senior class in classics. There is no unusual light or brilliance in the streets to announce this fact. On the contrary, the general appearance is as of gloom. Here and there a glaring light against a boarding brazenly announces the vulgar fact that Harold Lloyd, or rather the shade of him, is revolving at the Colisseum. But of the fact that the shade of Sophocles is to be at the auditorium of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, there is no public indication. Nor is the location of Sophocles easy to find. Our first attempt to follow what seems to be the movement of the crowd leads us vainly towards the entrance of Third Street Skating Rink and then to the lighted portico of the Gayety Burlesque Theatre, Ladies Cordially Welcomed. No such lighted path leads to the august dead. Nor are the services of a taxi of any use to us. The driver has not heard of the performance, is not aware apparently of the existence of the college auditorium and can only suggest that Sophocles himself may be staying at the Jefferson. Most of the actors do.

But to anybody accustomed to colleges and their ways it is not difficult to find the auditorium. One has but to notice here and there among the elm trees of the side streets a few shivering figures moving in the same direction and wearing a costume half way between fashion and disreputability. These are college professors and they are going to the play. Let us follow them.

We do this and we easily find the auditorium – in fact on a close inspection we can distinctly see light here and there in its windows and people going in. Entrance is effected in two ways, either by ticket, for those who have tickets, or without a ticket for those who haven’t got a ticket. When we are well inside the place, we find a large placard, visible only to those who have got in, announcing the attraction:

A GREAT TRAGEDY

The Greek Play

OROASTUS

Put on in the original
by the Senior Class

.  .  .  .  .

A MASTERPIECE OF SORROW

DON’T MISS IT

“ALL UP”

There is quite a sprinkling of people already seated. There must be what is called “easily three hundred.” But on such occasions nobody is mean enough to count the audience. We are shown to our seats by girl ushers in college gowns and bobbed hair, a touch of old Greek life which goes to our heart.

If the senior class understood advertising as well as they know Greek, they would have put that placard near the railway station and had a band playing and one or two of the girls with bobbed hair selling tickets behind glass. Nor would it have been necessary to select the girls who know most Greek. But still – we started by saying that the Greek drama was lofty: Let it remain so.

When we get to our seats we realize that we needn’t have come for a long time yet. There is no evidence of anybody starting anything, Greek or otherwise. There is a subdued chatter among the audience and people straggling in, one, two, and even three at a time. We notice presently that all the audience in the hall except ourselves have got little books or pamphlets – paper things that look like the uplift hymns at a Rotary Club six o’clock supper on the hymnal of a Chautauqua Society. We go back to the outer entrance and get one (fifty cents each) and find that this priceless thing is the book of the play with the Greek on one side and the English (it seems English) on the other. So now we can take our seats again and study the thing out.

On the outside of the book of the play is an announcement for

KOLLEGE KLOTHES

Superb Suits, $13.50.

CLASSY OVERCOATS $9.50

– but we had always known that education was a struggle and we pass this by.

On the inside the thing begins in earnest.

It is still a little sprinkled with advertisements here and there, but we rightly gather that they are not essential to the tragedy. The book runs thus:

OROASTUS

KOLLEGE KLOTHES AND STUDENTS’ BOOTS. A Greek Drama dating probably from the fifth century STUDENTS’ SHIRTS before Christ. The play is generally attributed to Diplodocus, who lived probably at Megara but also perhaps KNIT TO FIT UNDERWEAR FOR COLLEGE MEN at Syracuse. His work ALL WOOL is generally esteemed on a part with that of his great contemporaries Iambilichus and Euarbilius. He is said on what seems credible ground to have died during the presentation of one of his own plays. But the place of his death THIRD AVENUE AND JEFFERSON ST. THE HOME LUNCH RESORT is unknown.

The entire works of Diplodocus with the single extant exception of Oroastus are lost but they are none the less esteemed on that account. A full account of his life was written by Polybius but is lost. (RAH! RAH! JOIN THE MANDOLIN CLUB) A critique of his genius written by Diogenes Laertius but attributed also to Pliny, has perished. The bust of Diplodocus, said to be the work of Phidias Senior, was lost, either at sea or on land. The bust now in the Louvre was executed one thousand six hundred years after his supposed death, and may or may not show him as he was. Internal evidence goes to show that Diplodocus was, internally, very unhappy. TRY POSSUMS PILLS ONE A DAY From the play before us many lines have unfortunately been lost. But the loss is in every case indicated by asterisks in the text GET YOUR NECKTIES AT APPLETONS.

The simple theme of sorrow, the rigour of fate, and the emptiness of human desire dominate the play HAVE YOU JOINED THE BIBLE CLASS? NOW IS THE TIME TO JOIN.

And at this point the solid Greek begins, pages and pages of it, and facing it on the other side solid masses of English. And just as we begin to try and study it out – we ought really to have begun a month ago – we realize that the entertainment is beginning.

.  .  .  .  .

The huge white sheet that acts as a curtain slides sideways groaning on a wire and behold the platform of the auditorium, converted into the severe stage of the Greeks with white curtains at the sides and a bare floor, and of stage properties no trace. No comfortable little red mica fire burning at the side such as cheers the actors of a drawing-room play; none of the green grass and the cardboard inn with the swinging sign that stand for eighteenth century comedy; nothing of the sweep of rock and the curtain of cloud that indicates that Forbes Robertson is about to be Hamlet. Nothing, just nothing; boards, a little sawdust, room to come in and out, and sorrow. That is all that the Greeks asked or wanted. How infinitely superior to ourselves, who have so piled up the panoply of life about us that our lightest acts and our deepest grief must alike be hanged with priceless decorations. But the Greek Theatre like the four bare walls of the Puritan House of Worship – but stop, the play has started.

A tall figure walks in, a player in a long draped sheet of white, a bearded player, with a chaplet of leaves about his head. . . . This must be Oroastus, let me look – yes it’s Oroastus, King of Thebes. What’s he saying? A sort of long-drawn howling “Aie! Aie! Aie! Aie!” My! My! Oroastus must be in a terrible way—

Aie, aie, aie, aie.

This must be that note of sorrow that it spoke about; or else it is some of the internal melancholy of Diplodocus.

Oroastus, King of Thebes, walks out pretty well into the middle of the stage and stands there groaning, Aie, Aie, Aie, . . .

So to get a clue to what is now going to happen we look at our book of the play to see that the next thing marked in the English text is:

ENTRY OF THE CHORUS

Ah now! cheer up! that’s something like, the chorus! Bring them right along in: No doubt they will be of that beautiful type of classic Greek girls. If there is one thing that we specialize on in the modern drama it is the chorus. Fetch the girls in by all means.

In they come. Help! What is this? Three old men – very aged, with cotton wool beards and long white robes like the one Oroastus wears.

No, there is no doubt about it, the Greek idea of a chorus is a matter on which we take issue at once. These three old men may think themselves terribly cute, but for us, quite frankly they are not in it. We knew before we came that the Greek tragedy was severe but this is a pitch of severity for which we were not prepared.

However, as these three saucy old men are on the stage, let’s see what they’re doing. Look, they all lift their arms up straight above their heads and they all begin to moan.

Aie, Aie, Aie-e.

In fact just like King Oroastus. They evidently have got the same internal trouble that he has.

Now they seem to be breaking into a kind of sustained talk in a sort of chant. It’s impossible to know what they are saying because it’s all in Greek – or no – of course we can follow it. We have the English in the book of the play; in fact you can see all the people in the audience turning the leaves of their little book and burying their heads in them up to their spectacles. At a Greek college play the audience don’t look at the stage, they look at the little book.

This is what the three saucy old men are saying:

O how unhappy is this (now standing before us) King!

O Fate! with what dark clouds art thou about to overwhelm (or perhaps to soak him).

O what grief is his: and how on the one hand shall he for his part escape it. Oh, woe! O anxiety, O grief, Oh woe!

In other words in the Greek play the business of the chorus is to come in and tell the audience what a classy spectacle it is going to be. Sorrow being the chief idea of Greek tragedy, the chorus have to inform the audience what they’re going to get, and to get it good. It’s a great idea in dramatic construction. It’s just as if at the beginning of Hamlet the chorus stuck their heads over the battlements of Elsinore and said, in up-to-date English, “Say, look at this young man! Isn’t he going to get it in the neck. Eh what? Isn’t he in for hard luck; just wait till his father ghost gets a twist on him.”

So the chorus groan and the King keeps howling, Aie, aie, aie, and after they’ve done it long enough, the three chorus men walk out one behind the other like the figures on an Athenian frieze, and the King is left alone.

He speaks (and a footnote in the book says that this speech is one of the finest things in Greek tragedy):

What awful fate hangs over (or perhaps overhangs) me this unhappy king.

What sorrow now does the swift-moving hand (or perhaps the revolving finger) of doom make for me.

Where shall I turn? Whither shall I go? What is going to hit me next?

What would I not give, even if it were my palace itself to be let loose from this overwhelming anxiety (or perhaps this rather unusual situation).

Beside it my palace and my crown are nothing.

The King pauses and lifts his two hands straight up in the air and cries:

Oh, Zeus, what next?

And at this juncture the little book says:

ENTER A HERALD
and the audience look up from their books a minute to see this herald come in. In runs the herald. He is young and has no beard. He has a tunic and bare legs and on his feet are sandals with wings and on his head also are wings and he carries a wand. The wings on his feet are meant to show how fast he could go if he really had to – like the bicycle that the telegraph messenger pushes along with him. The wand means that if he needed to he could fly.

The entrance of this Herald causes the only interruptions from the audience that occurs during the play. There are cries from the gallery of “Attaboy! Good work, Teddy!” The Herald is one of the most popular members of the Fi Fi Omega Society. Anybody looking at that Herald approves of him. He is the best stage effect of the lot. In fact there is more “pep” about the Herald than in all the rest put together.

He confronts Oroastus and they hold a dialogue like this:

O King.

O Herald.

Aie.

Me, too.

Woe, woe! King.

I believe you.

Things are bad.

They are indeed. What misfortune brings you in this direction?

A grave one.

I guess it must be; but tell me that my ear may hear it.

Grievous are my tidings.

I am sure they are.

And hard for you to hear.

.  .  .  .  .

The slowness of the Herald in giving the bad news to the King is one of the striking things in the Greek drama. It is only equalled on the modern stage by the great detective revealing the mystery in the fifth act, or a lawyer explaining the terms of the secret will, or the dying criminal (shot, deservedly in a cellar) confessing the innocence of the heroine. In fact the Greek Herald was the man who started this kind of trouble. He was the first original exponent of the idea of not telling a good thing in a hurry.

He speaks again.

Things are not what they seem.

Oroastus groans, O: All the dialogue has by this time been knocked out of him. The Herald realizes that he can’t get another rise out of him. So he gets down to facts.

Your palace, O King, has on the one hand been destroyed by fire and your crown which in and of itself for the most part signified your kingship, has on the other hand been stolen.

Oroastus: Aie, Aie, Aie, my palace is destroyed and my crown is lost. Oh, woe, this is grief.

The Herald: It is. Good-bye. I have other tasks (or perhaps avocations).

The Herald says this and withdraws and as he goes out in come the three old chorus men again. That was the great thing about the Greek tragedy. It never stopped. It went right on. In the modern play when the Herald said “Good-bye,” the curtain would fall on Act I. In the moving picture the scene would shift and show the palace being burnt. But the good old Greek tragedy went right on like sawing wood. This is called the unity of the drama, and so far nothing beats it.

The chorus of course have merely come in to have a good time by piling up the sorrow and gloating over Oroastus.

They line up and they chant out—

Oh! look at this – now standing before us King (or sometimes rendered this ordinary man). Sorrow has struck him.

His palace and his crown are destroyed.

But fate is not done with him yet.

All compelling fate is getting ready another arrow (or, perhaps, is going to take another crack at him).

He has lost his palace.

But watch out.

There is more coming.

And at this the three miserable old brutes troop out again. Then the King says:

Oh, me, alas. My palace is gone and yet a further fate overhangs me. What is this hangover?

For so much indeed have I borne that to me now it seems that nothing further could overwhelm me even if it were the loss of my tender consort herself.

And just as he says this the sign goes up again in the book.

THE HERALD ENTERS

The King speaks:

What now? And why have your feet brought you back?

It was evident that a favourite idea of the Greek tragedians that a man went where his feet took him. This was part of the general necessity or rigour of fate.

The Herald says:

Terrible are the tidings.

What are they?

Something awful.

Tell me what they are.

How can I?

Go at it (or perhaps go to it).

Dark indeed is the news and terrible is the certainty.

What is it?

How can I say it. It is dark.

What is the dark stuff that you are giving to me. Does it perhaps concern my consort the fair-fingered Apologee?

It does.

How much?

Very much.

Tell me then the whole extent of the matter, concealing nothing.

I will.

Do.

With my lips I will say it.

Do so.

The King groans. The Herald knows that the time has come to let loose his information. He says, Listen then, oh King. Your queenly consort, the fair-fingered Apologee has gone to Hades.

The King: Too bad.

The Herald: Gloomy Pluto has carried her off.

The King: This is deplorable (or perhaps reprehensible).

The Herald: Good-bye. I have other avocations.

The Herald retires and the King has hardly had time to say Aie, before the chorus come trailing on again and take up their station. They chant out.

Look at this.

How’s this for grief.

The royal consort has been carried off by the Gloomy Dis, he of the long ears, to his dark home. But sorrow is not yet done. There is a whole lot more coming. For such is the fate of Kings. Either they have a good time or they don’t.

With this sentiment the chorus all troop off again. We gather from the little book, even if we didn’t know it already that their last sentiment “either they have a good time or they don’t,” is considered one of the gems of the Greek drama. The commentator says that this shows us the profundity of the mind of Diplodocus: Some think that this places him above the lighter work of such men as Iambilichus or Euarbilius. Others again claim that this passage “either they have a good time or they don’t,” shows (internally of course) that the life of Diplodocus was not all sorrow. To write this Diplodocus must himself have had a good time some of the time. In fact these lines, we are given to understand, have occasioned one of those controversies which have made the Greek drama what it is.

King Oroastus being now left alone starts a new fit of sorrow, “Aie, aie, aie,” – in fact just as we expected he would. By this time we have grasped the idea of the tragedy, the successive blows of sorrow that hit Oroastus one after the other. First the chorus say there’ll be sorrow, then Oroastus says here comes a sorrow, and then the Herald comes in and says get ready now, stand by for a new sorrow, and lands it at him. There’s a beautiful simplicity about it that you never see on the stage today. In fact this is that sublimity that loftiness that only the Fi Fi Omega players can catch.

So the King groans:

Oh what an absolutely complete sorrow this is, this last one.

O Apologee!

O Hades!

For me, what now is left. My palace is destroyed and the fair-fingered Apologee has gone to Hades. What now is left to me but my old dog.

Old dog that I am myself on the one hand, my old dog on the other hand is all.

This passage “old dog that I am myself” is indicated in the text as one of the high spots. In fact it is a joke. The text says so. From where we sit we can see the professor of Greek laughing at it. Indeed we could easily prove by looking up the large editions of the play that this is a joke. The commentator says:

The bitter jest of Oroastus in calling himself an old dog illustrates for us the delicious irony of the great tragedian. Certain commentators have claimed indeed that the passage is corrupt and that Oroastus called himself not an old dog but a hot dog. We prefer, however, the earlier reading which seems to us exquisite. Diplodocus undoubtedly felt that the weight of sorrow at this point had become more than Oroastus or even the spectators could bear. By making Oroastus call himself an old dog he removes exactly that much of it.

This contention seems pretty well sustained. In fact anybody accustomed to the modern stage will realize that we are here at the source of the alleviating joke, introduced at any moment of terrible tension. In the modern play a comic character is carried all through the piece in order to make these jokes. But the Greek tragedy was nothing if not simple, direct, and honest. The hero has to make his own jokes.

Still, we are keeping the Herald waiting. The time is ripe for him to come in again.

ENTER THE HERALD

In he comes just as before (the Greeks didn’t believe in variety) and the King at once asks him the usual question about his feet.

For what purpose, Oh Herald, he enquires, do your feet bring you this way again?

The Herald: A gloomy one.

Let me have it.

I will.

Do. For however dark it is I being now an old dog (or perhaps a hot dog) have no further consolation in life than my dog.

It is to be noticed that Diplodocus here uses the same joke twice. Anybody who deals in humour will warmly approve of this. To get the best out of a joke it must be used over and over again. In this matter the Greeks have nothing on us.

This time the Herald knows that Oroastus can’t stand for much more. So he says.

Old dog indeed? Did your lips lead you to say old dog?

They did indeed.

Are you perhaps under the impression, Oh King, that you still have an old dog?

Such is my impression.

In that case you never made a bigger mistake in your life.

Let me know it and if indeed I have made a mistake, let me hear it.

Hear it then. Your old dog is gone to Hades. Good-bye. I have other avocations.

The Herald leaves and the King breaks out into lamentations.

Aie, aie, he says, my consort the fair-fingered Apologee and my old dog are in Hades. Why I am still left in the upper air (or perhaps in the air). Oh Whoa!

The King lifts his hands up in sorrow and a note in the book says: “King Oroastus has now had nearly enough.” To this we quite agree. One might say, in fact, he had had plenty.

But the chorus are not done with him yet. On they come with the remorselessness of the Greek drama.

They line up.

Look then at this standing before us King. What a load he has. But worse is yet coming. Keep your seats and watch him.

They go out in their usual undisturbed way, and Oroastus says:

Oh, what a last final instalment (or hangover) of bitter grief is now mine. What now is left? Now that everything has gone to Hades of what use is life itself. O, day! Oh, sunshine! O, light! Let me withdraw myself, I before my time, to my tomb, to my mausoleum which I have had made by the skilled hands of artificers and there let me join hands with Death.

Oroastus has hardly said this when the Herald comes back. By this time everybody guesses the news that he brings. Under the circumstances not even a Greek Herald could string it out. The thing is too obvious.

The King says – well there is no need to write it again – the Herald’s feet, that same stuff, but what he really means is, Are you back again? and the Herald says, “Yes.” This is the first plain answer that the Herald has given all through the play.

Then Oroastus says:

Is it dark stuff again?

And the Herald says:

The darkest!

At which the King gives a groan and says:

Then let me not hear it. For already to me thinking over pretty well everything the matter seems more or less what you would call played out (or possible worked to death). It is now in my mind hearing nothing further to repair to the mausoleum which I have long since caused to be built by skilled artificers and there lying down upon the stone to clasp the hand of Death.

The Herald: You can’t.

The King: Why not? What is which? For your words convey nothing.

Tell me what it is.

The Herald: I will.

The King: Do.

The Herald: All right. Get ready for something pretty tough. Are you all set?

The King: I am.

The Herald: Know then that your mausoleum no longer is. It was broken into by burglars and is unfit to use. Good-bye. I have other avocations.

Oroastus: Aie, aie, aie, . . .

Then they line up for a last crack at Oroastus.

Look at him!

Isn’t he the unlucky bean (or perhaps turnip).

Did you ever hear of worse luck than his?

Can you beat it?

But such is life, Oroastus, and it is a necessity of the Gods that even Death is withheld from the sorrowful. Aie, aie, aie.

And with that the play gives every symptom of being over. The white sheet that acts as the curtain glides down and there is quite a burst of applause from the audience. The actors line up on the stage and all the Fi Fi Omega crowd in the gallery call out, “Attaboy Oroastus! Good work Teddy!”

After which the audience doesn’t break up as an ordinary theatre audience does, but coagulates itself into little knots and groups. It knows that presently coffee and sandwiches are going to be passed around and the Greek professor will stand in the middle of an admiring group while he explains to them that Oroastus is under the compulsion of ANANGKE.

But for us no cake nor coffee. Let us get back to the Jefferson Hotel Grill Room while the supper is still on and while we can still get places for the midnight vaudeville show with the Dances of the Susquehanna Sextette and the black-faced comedian with the saxophone. This Greek stuff is sublime, we admit it, and it is lofty, we know it; and it has a dignity that the Susquehanna Sextette has not.

But after seeing Greek tragedy once, we know our level. And henceforth we mean to stick to it.

TOC     INDEX

The Sub-Contractor

An Ibsen Play. Done out of the Original Norwegian with an axe.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

SLUMP:

A Builder.

VAMP:

His Wife.

DUMP:

A professor of Thermodynamics.

SIMP:

A maid servant.

YOOP:

An accountant.

SCOOP:

His sister.

PASTOR GYMP:

A pastor.

CRAMP:

His mother-in-law.

etc. . . . etc. . . . etc.

. . . and as many more with names of that kind and with occupations of that sort, as there is room for on the page. Some of them may not get into the play at all. But that doesn’t matter. An Ibsen Dramatis Personae is a thing by itself.

Scene: A room in Slump’s house. (There are flowers on the table.)

Slump:

What beautiful flowers.

Vamp:

Yes, they are fresh this morning.

(Slump and Vamp speak one after the other in short turns, like sawing wood with a crosscut saw. But there is no need to indicate which is speaking. It doesn’t matter.)

Are they indeed?

Yes they are.

How sweet they smell.

Yes, don’t they?

I like flowers.

So do I. I think they smell so beautiful.

It’s a beautiful morning.

Yes, the spring will soon be here.

The air is deliciously fresh.

Yes, it is, isn’t it?

I saw a bobolink in the garden.

A bobolink already? Then the summer is soon here.

Soon indeed, the meadows are already green.

I like the green meadows.

Yes, isn’t it?

The angle of the sun is getting high.

I suppose it is. I noticed yesterday that the diameter of the moon was less.

Much less, and the planets are higher than they were. Their orbits are elongating.

I suppose so.

Vamp:

How I love the spring!

Slump:

So do I. The evaporation of the air closes the pores of my skin.

.  .  .  .  .

This completes round number one. It is meant to show Norwegian home life, the high standard of education among the Norwegians and, just at the end, the passionate nature of Vamp.

The spring fills her with longings. It also shows where Slump stands. For him the spring merely opens the pores of his skin.

With this understanding we are ready for a little action.

(A bell rings. Then Simp the maid enters, showing in Dump, a Professor of Thermodynamics.)

Good-morning, Dump. Good-morning, Slump. Good-morning, Vamp. Good-morning, Dump.

Dump:

The spring will soon be here.

Vamp:

I saw a bobolink in the garden.

Dump:

Yes, I saw a wagtail on the thatch of the dovecote.

Slump:

Spring is coming.

Dump:

It will do my cough good.

Vamp:

Yes, you will soon be well.

Dump:

Never well. (He coughs again.)

Slump:

You think too much. You need pleasure. For me each time I finish a sub-contract, I like to take my ease and drink sprott.

Dump:

I can’t drink sprott. (He coughs.) I have a mortal disease.

Vamp:

Don’t say that.

Dump:

In six years I shall be dead.

Slump:

Nonsense. Come, drink a glass of sprott.

No.

Have some yip?

No.

Take some pep?

No.

(Dump goes and sits down near a window; the others look at him in silence.)

.  .  .  .  .

This completes round two. It is intended to establish the fact that Dump has a mortal disease. There is nothing visibly wrong with Dump except that he looks bilious. But in every Ibsen play it is understood that one of the characters has to have a mortal disease. Dump in the Ibsen drama will die of biliousness and ill-temper in six years. Biliousness and ill temper take the place of Anangke in the Greek tragedy.

.  .  .  .  .

Slump:

Well, I must be about my work. Come, Simp, come and help me get my wallet and my compasses.

Simp:

Yes, sir.

(Simp and Slump go out. Vamp and Dump are left alone.)

Vamp:

Come and sit down.

Dump:

I don’t want to sit down. I’m too ill to sit down.

Here, get into this long chair, let me make you comfortable.

(Vamp makes Dump sit down.)

There, now, you’re comfortable.

Why should I be comfortable? I’m too ill to be comfortable. In six years I shall be dead.

Oh no! Don’t say that.

Yes I will. The bile is mounting to my oesophagous.

Oh, no!

I say it is. There’s an infiltration into my ducts. My bones are turning into calcareous feldspar.

.  .  .  .  .

This dialogue is supposed to bring out the full charm of Dump. The more bilious he is the better Vamp likes him. It is a law of the Norwegian drama that the heroines go simply crazy over bilious disagreeable men with only from six to twenty years to live. This represents the “everlasting-mother-soul.” They go on talking:

.  .  .  .  .

Vamp:

Let me dance for you.

Dump:

Yes, yes.

Vamp:

Let me dance for you.

Dump:

No. Yes, yes. Dance for me.

Vamp is evidently smitten with that peculiar access of gayety that is liable to overcome the heroine of an Ibsen play at any time. She dances about the room singing as she goes:

Was ik en Butterflog

Flog ik dein Broost enswog,

Adjö, mein Hertzenhog,

Adje, Adjö!

Dump (passionately):

More, more, keep on singing. Keep on dancing. It exhilarates my capillary tissue. More, more.

Vamp:

Do you love me?

Dump:

I do.

Vamp:

No, you mustn’t say that. It’s wicked to say that. What put that into your head?

Dump:

Dance for me again.

Vamp:

No, I mustn’t. Listen. I hear them coming back.

(Slump and Simp come back into the room.)

Slump:

There, I have everything, my wallet, my compasses, my slide rule – right, everything is here.

Dump:

You are very busy. What are you building now?

Slump:

I am laying gas mains. They are to go under the market hall. They are twenty feet under the pavement. I have forty workmen working – and six steam dredges digging. When I see them dig I want to shout “Ha! ha! Dig harder! Dig harder!” Do you like steam shovels?

No, they make a noise.

I like noise. It makes my veins tingle. Don’t you like it?

No. It closes my ducts. I don’t like it.

Ha! This morning we are to explode dynamite to blow out the boulders. When it explodes I like to shout, “Ha! That was a good one!” Don’t you like dynamite?

No, it oscillates my diaphragm.

Slump:

Ha, you should learn to like it. Look, here are sticks of it. Like shaving sticks, aren’t they? Slump takes from his pockets some short sticks of dynamite.

Vamp:

Don’t speak so roughly. It is bad for Dump. It will make him cough.

(Dump coughs.)

Vamp:

You see. Come away, Dump. Come into the conservatory. I have a lovely Eschscholzia that I want to show you.

(Vamp and Dump go out.)

.  .  .  .  .

Round three is now complete. It is meant to show that Slump the sub-contractor is a man of terrible driving powers. He is filled with the “drang” of life. You have to call this “drang” simply “drang” because in English we don’t have it. It means something the same as “pep” but not quite. Pep is intellectual; drang is bodily. It means, as all the critics of the play point out, that Slump represents the upsurge of elemental forces.

.  .  .  .  .

Slump (calling):

Now then, Simp, my hat, my stick and a glass of sprott. Where are you?

I am coming, master.

(Simp comes in with a hat and stick and with a glass of sprott in her hand.)

Ha, give it me. I like my sprott. It makes my eyes bulge. (He drinks greedily.)

You shouldn’t drink so fast.

I like to drink fast. It inflates me. Ha! (He finishes the glass and puts it aside.) Ha! That’s good. You’re a pretty girl.

Oh!

Come and give me a kiss.

No.

Yes, you shall. (He takes hold of Simp and draws her towards him.)

No.

Yes, I say. (He kisses Simp greedily three or four times.) There!

Simp:

You shouldn’t kiss me.

Why not?

I have a hereditary taint.

Slump (aghast):

What?

I have a hereditary taint. My grandmother died of appendicitis.

Slump (staggering back, his hand to his brow):

Appendicitis!

Simp:

Yes, look, I have the marks of it.

(Simp raises her sleeve and shows a round red mark on her wrist.)

Slump:

Great Heavens! Sprott! Give me some more sprott.

(He stands staring in front of him while Simp fetches another glass of sprott. He drinks it eagerly.)

Simp:

How do you feel now?

Slump:

Bad. There are specks dancing in front of my eyes. What does it mean?

Simp:

Appendicitis.

Slump:

I am doomed! Give me more sprott. Appendicitis! Sprott!

The action of the play pauses here a moment to let the audience appreciate the full measure of retribution that has fallen upon Slump for kissing a Norwegian housemaid. Slump has sunk into a chair and sits with his eyes staring in front of him. Simp stands looking at him unconcerned. Vamp and Dump come back.

Vamp:

Good heavens! What is the matter?

Dump:

What is it?

Simp:

I don’t know. I don’t think he is well.

Slump (beginning to hark like a dog):

Wow. Wow.

Vamp:

No, he is not well.

Dump:

He is hardly himself.

Slump:

Bow, wow.

Vamp:

I should say that he is ill.

Dump:

Yes, he seems poorly.

Slump:

Wow.

Vamp:

He appears in poor health.

Dump:

Yes, he looks out of sorts.

(Slump takes the sticks of dynamite out of his pocket and begins to eat them.)

Vamp:

What is he doing now?

Dump:

I think he is eating dynamite.

Vamp:

Will it hurt him?

Dump:

Yes, presently.

Vamp:

In what particular way?

Dump:

After the warmth of his body warms it he will explode.

Vamp:

How curious. How warm will it have to be?

Dump:

About 90 degrees. It will take about a minute for each degree. He will explode in twelve minutes.

Vamp:

Is it wise to stay near him?

Dump:

No, it is highly imprudent. We had better go. Simp had better gather up your things. We will go together. It is scarcely wise to linger.

Vamp:

No, let us hasten.

Slump:

Wow! Wow!

.  .  .  .  .

The curtain falls, leaving as usual after an Ibsen play a profound problem stated but not solved.

TOC     INDEX

Historical Drama

After all there is nothing like the Historical Drama! Say what you will about moving pictures or high-speed vaudeville they never have the same air and class to them. For me as soon as I see upon the program “A tucket sounds!” I am all attention, and when it says “Enter Queen Elizabeth to the sound of Hoboes,” I am thrilled. What does it matter if the queen’s attendants seem to speak as if they came from Yonkers? There is dignity about it all the same. When you have, moving in front of you on the stage, people of the class of Louis Quatorze, Henry Quinze, Arthur Cromwell and Mary of Roumania, you feel somehow as if they were distinctly superior to such characters as Big-hearted Jim, and Shifty Pete and Meg of the Bowery and Inspector Corcoran. Perhaps they are!

But of all the characters that walk upon the stage, commend me to Napoleon. What I don’t know about that man’s life, from seeing him on the boards is not worth discussing. I have only to close my eyes and I can see him before me as depicted by our greatest actors, with his one lock of hair and his forehead like a door knob, his melancholy eyes painted black and yellow underneath. And as for his family life, his relations with Josephine, his dealings with the Countess Skandaliska, I could write it all down if it was lost.

There is something about that man – I don’t mind admitting it – that holds me. And he exercises the same fascination over all our great actors. About once in every ten years some one of them, intoxicated by success, decides that he wants to be Napoleon. It is a thing that happens to all of them. It is something in their brain that breaks.

Every time that this happens a new Napoleonic play is produced. That is, it is called new but it is really the same old play over again. The title is always entirely new but that is because it is a convention that the title of a Napoleon play is never a straight-out statement of what it means such as “Napoleon, Emperor of France” or “Napoleon and Josephine.” It is called, let us say, “Quinze Pour Cent” or “Mille Fois Non” or “Des Deux Choses L’Une” – that sort of thing. And after it is named it is always strung together in the same way and it is always done in little fits and starts that have no real connection with one another but are meant to show Napoleon at all the familiar angles. In fact, here is how it goes:

“DES DEUX CHOSES L’UNE”

A Drama of the First Empire

Adapted from the French of Dumas, Sardou, Hugo, Racine, Corneille, and all others who ever wrote of Napoleon.

The opening part of the play is intended to show the extraordinary fidelity towards the Emperor on the part of the marshals of France whom he had created.

Scene: The ballroom of the palace of the Tuileries. Standing around are ladies in directoire dresses, brilliant as rainbows. Up right beside them are the marshals of France. There is music and a buzz of conversation.

Enter Napoleon followed by Talleyrand in black, and two secretaries carrying boxes. There is silence. The Emperor seats himself at a little table. The secretaries place on it two black despatch boxes.

The Emperor speaks: Marshal Junot.

The Marshal steps forward and salutes.

The Emperor: Marshal: I have heard strange rumours and doubts about your fidelity. I wish to test it. I have here – he opens one of the boxes – a vial of poison. Here – Drink it.

Junot: With pleasure, Sire.

Junot drinks the poison and stands to attention.

The Emperor: Go over there and stand beside the Comtesse de la Polissonerie till you die.

Junot (saluting): With pleasure, Sire.

Napoleon (turns to another marshal): Berthier?

Here Sire!

Berthier steps out in front of the Emperor.

The Emperor (rising): Ha! Ha! Is it you – he reaches up and pinches Berthier’s ear – Vieux paquet de linge sale!

Berthier looks delighted. It is amazing what a French marshal will do for you if you pinch his ear. At least it is a tradition of the stage. In these scenes Napoleon always pinched the Marshals’ ears and called them – Vieux paquet de linge sale, etc.

The Emperor turns stern in a moment.

Marshal Berthier!

Sire!

Are you devoted to my person?

Sire, you have but to put me to the test.

Very well. Here, Marshal Berthier (Napoleon reaches into the box) is a poisoned dog biscuit. Eat it.

Berthier (saluting): With pleasure, Sire. It is excellent.

Napoleon: Very good, Mon Vieux trait d’union. Now go and talk to the Duchesse de la Rotisserie till you die.

Berthier bows low.

The Emperor: Marshal Lannes! You look pale. Here is a veal chop. It is full of arsenic. Eat it.

Marshal Lannes bows in silence and swallows the chop in one bite.

The Emperor then gives a paquet of prussic acid to Marshal Soult, one pill each to Marshals Ney and Augereau, then suddenly he rises and stamps his foot.

No Talleyrand, no! The farce is finished! I can play it no longer. Look, les braves enfants! They have eaten poison for me. Ah non, mes amis, mon vieux. Reassure yourselves. You are not to die. See the poison was in the other box.

Talleyrand (shrugging his shoulders): If your Majesty insists upon spoiling everything.

Napoleon: Yes, yes, those brave fellows could not betray me. Come Berthier. Come Junot, come and let us cry together—

The Emperor and his marshals all gather in a group, sobbing convulsively and pulling one another’s ears.

.  .  .  .  .

But one must not think that the Imperial Court was all sentiment. Ah. No! The great brain of the Emperor could be turned in a moment to other concerns and focused into a single point of concentrated efficiency. As witness:

SCENE TWO

Showing how Napoleon used to dictate a letter, carry on a battle, and Reveal Business Efficiency at the Acme.

Napoleon in a room in a château, announced to be somewhere near a battle, striding up and down, dictating a letter with his hat on. On the stage the great Emperor always dictates through his hat. A secretary sitting at a table is vainly trying to keep pace with the rush of words.

Now are you ready, de Meneval. Have you written that last sentence?

De Meneval (writing desperately): In a moment, Sire, in a moment.

Imbecile, write this then, “The Prefect of Lyons is ordered to gather all possible cannon for the defence of Toulon . . . He is reminded that there are six cannon on the ramparts of Lyons which he has apparently forgotten. The Emperor orders him to pass them forward at once,” – Have you written that, imbecile?

In a moment, Sire, in a moment.

To have them forwarded to Toulon. He is reminded that there are six more in the back garden of the ministry of the Marine, and two put away in the basement of the Methodist Church.

The Secretary collapses. Napoleon stamps his foot. A terrible looking Turkish attendant, Marmalade the Mameluke comes in and drags him out by the collar, and then drags in another secretary and props him up in a chair where he at once commences to write furiously.

Napoleon never stops dictating—

“There are two more cannons in the garage of the Prefect of Police. One has a little piece knocked out of the breech—”

The Secretary (pausing in surprise): Mon Dieu!

The Emperor: Eh, what, mon enfant. What surprises you?

The Secretary: Ah, Sire, it is too wonderful. How can you tell that a piece is out of the breeches?

Napoleon (pinching his ear): Ha! You think me wonderful!

The Secretary: I do.

Napoleon (pulling his hair): I am. And my cannon! I know them all. That one with the piece knocked out of the breech shall I tell you how I know it?

The Secretary: Ah, Sire!

Marmalade, the Mameluke comes in and salaams to the ground.

The Emperor: Well, what is it? Vieux fromage de cuir!

The Mameluke gurgles about a pint of Turkish.

The Emperor: Ha! Bring her in (to the secretary) You may go. You, Marmalade, after she enters, stand behind that curtain, so – your scimitar so – if I stamp my left foot – you understand.

Marmalade (with a salaam): Zakouski, Anchovi.

The Emperor: Good. Show her in.

There enters with a rush the beautiful half Polish Countess Skandaliska. She throws herself at the Emperor’s feet.

Sire, Sire, my husband! I crave his life.

Napoleon (taking her by the chin and speaking coldly): You are very beautiful.

Sire! My husband. I ask his life. He is under orders to be shot this morning.

The Emperor (coldly): “Let me feel your ears.”

Ah! Sire. In pity, I beg you for his life.

The Emperor (absently): You have nice fat arms. Let me pinch them.

Sire! My husband. . . .

The Emperor (suddenly changing his tone): Yes your husband. Did you think I did not know. I have it here. (He turns his back on the Countess, picks up a document from the table and reads):

“Scratchitoff Skandaliska, Count of Poland, Baron of Lithuania, Colonel of the Fifth Lancers, reported by the Imperial police as in the pay of the Czar of Russia – Ha! Did you think I did not know that?—”

His back is still turned. The Countess is standing upright. Her face is as of stone. Slowly she draws from her bodice a long poniard, slowly she raises it above the Emperor’s back.

Napoleon goes on reading.

“—conspired with seven others, since executed, to take the life of the Emperor, and now this 5th day of September . . .”

The Countess has raised the poniard to its height. As she is about to stab the Emperor, he taps slightly with his foot. Marmalade, the Mameluke, has flung aside the curtain and grasps the Countess from behind by both wrists. The poniard rattles to the floor. The Emperor turns and goes on calmly reading the document.

“This 5th day of September, pardoned by the clemency of the Emperor and restored to his estates.”

The Countess released by Marmalade, falls weeping at the Emperor’s feet.

Ah! Sire, you are indeed noble.

Napoleon: Am I not? Take her out, Marmalade. (The Mameluke bows, takes out the weeping Countess and returns with a renewed salaam.)

The Emperor (dreamily): We know how to treat them, don’t we? old trognan de chou. Let no one disturb that mirror. It may serve us again. And now, bring me a secretary, and I will go on dictating.

In this way did the great Emperor transact more business in a week than most men would get through in a day.

.  .  .  .  .

But in this very same play of Des Deux Choses L’Une, we have to remember that while all these other things are happening Napoleon is also fighting a battle.

In fact hardly is the Countess Skandaliska well off the premises before a military aide-de-camp comes rattling into the room. The great Brain is in full operation again in a second.

Ha! Colonel Escargot. What news?

Bad news, Sire. Marshal Masséna reports the battle is lost.

The Emperor (frowning): Bad news. The battle lost? Do you not know Colonel Escargot, that I do not permit a battle to be lost? How long have you been in my service? Let me see, you were at Austerlitz?

I was, Sire.

And you were afterwards in Cantonments at Strasburg?

It is true, Sire.

I saw you there for five minutes on the afternoon of the 3rd of November of 1810.

Sire! It is wonderful.

Tut, tut, it is nothing. You were playing dominoes. I remember you had just thrown a double three when I arrived.

Colonel Escargot: (falling on his knees): Sire, it is too much. You are inspired.

The Emperor (smiling): Perhaps. But realize then, that I do not allow a battle to be lost. Get up, mon vieux bonnet de coton, let me pinch your ear. Now then, this battle, let us see. You, the secretary, give me a map.

The secretary unfolds a vast map on the table. The Emperor stands in deep thought regarding it. Presently he speaks:

Where is Masséna?

Colonel Escargot (indicating a spot): He is here, Sire.

What is his right resting on?

His right, Sire, is extended here. It is endangered. (The Emperor remains a moment in thought.)

How is his centre?

His centre is solid.

And where has he got his rear?

His rear, Sire, is resting on a thorn hedge.

The Emperor: Ha! Ride to Masséna at once. Tell him to haul in his centre and to stick out his rear. The battle will be won in two hours.

Escargot (saluting): Sire. It is wonderful. (He clatters out.)

Napoleon sinks wearily into a chair. His head droops in his hands. “Wonderful!” he broods, “and yet the one thing of all things that I want to do, I can’t do.”

Indeed the man is really up against it. He can remember cannons and win battles and tell Masséna where to put his rear, but when it comes to Josephine, he is no better than the rest of us.

The Emperor rings the bell.

The secretary comes in.

Listen, I have taken a decision. I am going to divorce Josephine.

The secretary bows.

Go to her at once and tell her that she is divorced.

The secretary bows again.

If she asks why, say that it is the Emperor’s command. You understand.

I do.

If she tries to come here, do not permit it. Stop her, if need be with your own hands. Tell Marmalade she is not to pass. Tell him to choke her. Tell the guard outside to stop her. Tell them to fire a volley at her. Do you understand? She is not to come.

Alas, Sire, it is too late. She is here now. I hear her voice.

One can hear outside the protests of the guards.

The Empress Josephine, beautiful and disheveled and streaming with tears pushes Marmalade aside with an imperious gesture and dashes into the room. She speaks:

Napoleon, what is this? What does it mean? Tell me it is not true? You could not dare?

Napoleon (timidly): I think there is some mistake. Not dare what?

Josephine: To divorce me? You could not? You would not? Ah! heartless one, you could not do it.

She falls upon Napoleon’s neck weeping convulsively.

The Emperor: Josephine, there has been a delusion, a misunderstanding, of course I would not divorce you. Who dares hint at such a thing?

Josephine: Outside, in the waiting room, in the court they are all saying it.

Napoleon: Ha! Let them dare! They shall answer with their heads.

Josephine: Ah, now, you are my own dear Napoleon. Let me fold you in my arms. Let me kiss you on the top of the head. (She hugs and kisses the Emperor with enthusiasm.)

Napoleon: Ah, Josephine, how much I love you.

A voice is heard without. Colonel Escargot enters rapidly. He is deadly pale but has a triumphant look on his face. He salutes.

Sire, everything is saved.

Napoleon: Ah! So the battle was not lost after all.

No Sire, your orders were sent by semaphore telegraph. Masséna withdrew his rear and thrust out his centre. A panic broke out in the ranks of the enemy.

Ha! The enemy? Who are they?

We are not sure. We think Russians. But at least Sire, they are fleeing in all directions. Masséna is in pursuit. The day is ours.

The Emperor: It is well. But you Colonel Escargot, you are wounded!

The Colonel (faintly): No, Sire, not wounded.

Napoleon: But, yes—

Colonel Escargot: Not wounded, Sire, killed, I have a bullet through my heart.

He sinks down on the carpet.

The Emperor bends over him.

Escargot (feebly): Vive l’Empereur. (He dies.)

Napoleon (standing for a moment and looking at the body of Colonel Escargot): Alas! Josephine, all my victories cannot give me back the life of one brave man. I might have known it at the start.

He remains in reflection. “I should have chosen at the beginning. Tranquillity or conquest, greatness or happiness – Des Deux Choses L’Une.”

And as he says that the curtain slowly sinks upon the brooding Emperor. The play is over. In fact there is no need to go on with it. Now that the audience know why it is called Des Deux Choses L’Une, there is no good going any further. All that is now needed is the usual Transfiguration Scene.

Napoleon, dying at St. Helena, seen in a half light with a vast net curtain across the stage and a dim background of storm, thunder, and the armies of the dead—

That, with a little rumbling of cannon – the distant rolling of a South Atlantic storm—

—and then – the pomp has passed – turn up the lamps and let the matinée audience out into the daylight.

—

But we must not suppose for a minute that French history has any monopoly of dramatic interest. Oh, dear no. We have recently discovered that right here on the North American continent there is material teeming with dramatic interest. Any quantity of it. In fact it begins right at the start of our history and goes right on. Consider the aboriginal Indian; what a figure for tragedy. Few people perhaps realize that no less than seventeen first-class tragedies, each as good as Shakespeare’s, and all in blank verse, have been written about the Indians. They have to be in blank verse. There was something about the primitive Indian that invited it. It was the real way to express him.

Unfortunately these Indian tragedies cannot be produced on the stage. They are ahead of the age. The managers to whom they have been submitted say that as yet there is no stage suitable for them, and no actors capable of acting them, and no spectators capable of sitting for them. Here is a sample of such a tragedy.

METTAWAMKEAG

An Indian Tragedy

The scene is laid on the shores of Lake Mettawamkeag near the junction of the Peticodiac, and the Passamoquidiac Rivers. The sun is rising.

Enter Areopagitica, an Indian chief.

With The Encyclopedia – a brave of the Appendixes.

And Pilaffe de Volaille, a French Coureur des bois.

.  .  .  .  .

Areopagitica:

Hail, vernal sun, that thus with trailing beam

Illuminates with gold the flaming east,

Hail, too, cerulean sky that touched with fire

Expels th’ accumulate cloud of vanished night.

The Encyclopedia: Hail! Oh! Hail.

Pilaffe De Volaille: Hêle! Oh, hêle.

Areopagitica:

All nature seems to leap with morn to song,

Tempting to gladness the awakening bird,

E’en the dark cedar feels the gladsome hour

And the light larch pulsates in every frond.

Who art thou? Whence? And whither goest thou?

Pilaffe De Volaille:

Thrice three revolving suns have waxed and waned

Since first I wended hither from afar,

Nor knowing not, nor caring aught, if here or there,

Who am I? One that is. Whence come I? From beyond,

The restless main whose hyperboreal tide

Laves coast and climes unknown, Oh Chief, to thy sagacity.

From France I came.

Areopagitica: Hail!

(What Pilaffe de Volaille means is that he has been out here for nine years and lives near Mettawamkeag. But there is such a size and feeling about this other way of saying it, that it seems a shame that dramas of this kind can’t be acted.)

After they have all said “Oh Hail!” and “Oh Hêle,” as many times as is necessary, Areopagitica and The Encyclopedia take Pilaffe de Volaille to the Lodge of the Appendixes.

There he is entertained on hot dog. And there he meets Sparkling Soda Water, the daughter of Areopagitica.

After the feast the two wander out into the moonlight together beside the waterfall. Love steals into their hearts.
Pilaffe de Volaille invokes the moon.

“Thou silver orb whose incandescent face

Smiles on the bosom of the turgid flood

Look deep into mine heart and search if aught

Less pure than thy white beam inspires its love,

Soda, be mine!”

Soda Water speaks:

Alas! What words are these! What thought is this!

Thy meaning what? Unskilled to know,

My simple woods can find no answer to the hearts appeal,

Where am I at?

Pilaffe De Volaille: Flee with me.

Soda Water: Alas!

Pilaffe: Flee.

Soda Water (invoking the constellations of the Zodiac):

Ye glimmering lights that from the Milky Way

To the tall zenith of the utmost pole

Illume the vault of heaven and indicate

The inclination of the axis of the earth

Showing sidereal time and the mean measurement

Of the earth’s parallax,

Help me.

Pilaffe De Volaille (in despair): “Oh hêle!”

Both the lovers know that their tragic love is hopeless. For them, marriage is out of the question. De Volaille is sprung from an old French family, with eight quarters of noble birth, a high average even at a time when most people were well born. He cannot ally himself with anything less white than himself. On the other hand Sparkling Soda knows that, after the customs of her time, her father has pledged her hand to the Encyclopedia. She cannot marry a paleface.

Thus, what might have been a happy marriage, is queered from the start. Each is too well born to stoop to the other. This often happens.

Standing thus in the moonlight beside the waterfall the lovers are surprised by Areopagitica and The Encyclopedia. In despair Sparkling Soda leaps into the flood. The noble Encyclopedia plunges headlong after her into the boiling water and is boiled. De Volaille flees.

Areopagitica vows vengeance. Staining himself with grape juice he declares a war of extermination against the white race. The camp of the French is surprised in a night attack. Pilaffe de Volaille, fighting with the courage of his race, is pierced with an Indian arrow. He expires on the spot, having just time before he dies to prophesy in blank verse the future greatness of the United States.

Areopagitica standing among the charred ruins of the stockaded fort and gazing upon the faces of the dead, invokes the nebular Hypothesis and prophesies clearly the League of Nations.

—

The same dramatic possibilities seem to crop up all through American history from Christopher Columbus to President Harding.

But to see the thing at its height it is better to skip about three hundred years in one hop and come down to what is perhaps the greatest epic period in American history – the era of the Civil War.

This great event has been portrayed so often in the drama and the moving pictures that everybody knows just how it is dealt with. It is generally put on under some such title as the Making of the Nation, or The Welding of the Nation, or the Rivetting of the Nation – or, The Hammering, or the Plastering – in short, a metaphor taken from the building and contracting trades. Compare this:

FORGING THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT

A Drama of the Civil War

The scene is laid in the Council room of the White House. There are present Abraham Lincoln, Seward, Staunton, Artemus Ward, and the other members of the cabinet.

Lincoln (speaking very gravely):

Mr. Secretary, what news have you from the Army of the Potomac?

Staunton:

Mr. President, the news is bad. General Halleck has been driven across the Rappahannock, General Pope has been driven across the Roanoke, and General Burnside has been driven across the Pamunkey.

Lincoln (with quiet humour):

And has anybody been driven across the Chickahominy?

Staunton:

Not yet.

Lincoln:

Then it might be worse. Let me tell you a funny story that I heard ten years ago.

Seward (with ill-disguised impatience):

Mr. President, this is no time for telling stories ten years old.

Lincoln (wearily):

Perhaps not. In that case fetch me the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution is brought and is spread out on the table, in front of them. They bend over it anxiously.

Lincoln (with deep emotion):

What do you make of it?

Staunton:

It seems to me, from this, that all men are free and equal.

Seward (gravely):

And that the power of Congress extends to the regulation of commerce between the States, with foreign states, and with Indian Tribes.

Lincoln (thoughtfully):

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

(In the printed text of the play there is a note here to the effect that Lincoln did not on this particular occasion use this particular phrase. Indeed it was said by some one else on some other occasion. But it is such a good thing for any one to say on any occasion, that it is the highest dramatic art to use it.)

Lincoln (standing up from the table to his full height and speaking as one who looks into the future):

Gentlemen, I am prepared to sacrifice any part of this Constitution to save the whole of it, or to sacrifice the whole of it to save any part of it, but what I will not do is to sacrifice all of it to save none of it.

There is a murmur of applause. But at this very moment, a messenger dashes in.

The Messenger:

Mr. President, telegraphic news from the seat of war. General Grant has been pushed over the Chickahominy.

Lincoln:

Pushed backwards or pushed forwards?

The Messenger:

Forwards.

Lincoln (gravely):

Gentlemen, the Union is safe.

TOC     INDEX

The Russian Drama

(A)  Old Style

This is the kind of play that used to deal with dear old Russia when there was nothing more dangerous there than the knout, and exile to Siberia, and the salt mines, and Nihilists with black whiskers and bombs as large as a plum pudding. The good old place is changed now. Life there, from what I can gather at a distance of six thousand miles – which is all I propose to gather – seems in some way – how shall I say it, restrained, what one might call unhomelike. But in the dear old days there was a freedom and a space about Russia which reflected itself in the drama.

Here is the sort of thing that we used to gaze at spellbound in the middle eighties.

SCENE: SIBERIA. A POST STATION

In the old days there was always a peculiar touch about the very word “Siberia,” – a sort of thrill, or chill, that you couldn’t get elsewhere. It suggested great empty spaces, a vast plain of snow broken with dark pine woods, and moujiks with long whips driving one-horse tarantulas over the frozen surface of the endless samovar. Everywhere was the tunga tufted here and there with vodka.

At intervals in the snow was a “post house,” a rude building made of logs with outhouses for shutting exiles in. Everywhere there were prisoners and nihilists with bombs, girls who had lost their fathers, wives who had lost their husbands, anarchists, Tartars, in fact a varied and cheerful lot. The prisoners moved around in little strings. They never got anywhere that I know of. They were just driven from play to play and from story to story.

The opening scene was always laid thus:

INSIDE THE POST HOUSE

It is a long room, with a fire burning at the side, a few rough chairs and tables – only one person is in it, a moujik or sort of peasant servant in a tattered fur hat and a chewed-up fur coat.

The door opens with a burst of paper snow and in stride two Russian officers. They go to the fire and stick their hands out towards its warmth.

“It’s a cold night, Petroff.”

“A cold night, Dimitri Dimitrivitch, but not so cold as in the outshed where the exiles are – ha! ha!”

Both officers laugh heartily.

This is a first class Russian jest.

“One of the dogs,” says Petroff, expanding his back to the fire, “fell in the snow on the march today.”

“And what did you do, Petroff?”

“I ordered him a touch of the knout. I think the dog died where he fell. Ha! ha!”

Both laugh heartily again. Petroff turns to the peasant servant.

“Here, dog, bring vodka.”

“At once, excellence, at once.” The moujik fumbles in a cupboard and brings a bottle and glasses.

Both officers drink.

“To the Czar, Petroff!”

“Dimitri; to the Czar!”

A Russian soldier with a gun and a bayonet about two feet long steps in and salutes.

“Excellence, a woman is outside.”

“A woman? Ha! What like of woman, Ivan?”

“Excellence, a young woman.”

“A young woman! Ha! Ha-ha-ha!”

The two officers strode up and down repeating, “A young woman, ha! Bring her in.” It is plain that they mean to eat her.

The soldier salutes and goes out and returns in a moment dragging in a girl by the wrist.

This is Nitnitska Nitouscha, and she is looking for her father. She is very beautiful, with her hair in two braids and a bright coloured schapska thrown over her head and shoulders.

Petroff grabs her by the wrists and twists her arm twice round and says “Ho! Ha! The girl is not ill to look at.”

Dimitri: And what want you here, pretty one?

Nitnitska: I am seeking my father.

Petroff gives her arm two more turns and says, “Your father?”

“Yes, he is among the prisoners.”

Both officers laugh – “Among the prisoners. Ha! ha!”

Dimitri steps up to the girl and twists her other wrist.

“And what might his name be, tell me that.”

Petroff takes her by the ear and twists it and says: “Yes, tell us that.”

“His name is written here on the paper and his is an old man, a very old man. He is too feeble to walk?”

Dimitri laughs brutally. “So! He is too feeble to walk? In that case we can help him with the knout. Ha! ha!”

He takes the girl by the other ear and turns it twice round.

“And what would you with your father?”

“I want his freedom.”

Both officers laugh. “His freedom. Ha! ha!”

“His freedom. See, on this paper, I have an order for his freedom signed by the Czar himself.”

“By the Czar?”

Both officers fall back from the girl repeating, “By the Czar?”

“Yes, here it is on the paper.”

Nitnitska hands over a paper. Petroff takes it and reads it aloud scowling—

“By command of His Imperial Highness and in accord with the signed order annexed, you are commanded to release into liberty the person of Vladimir Ilyitch!”

Petroff with a start, repeats the name “Vladimir Ilyitch.”

Nitnitska: Yes, yes, my father, Vladimir Ilyitch.

Petroff: Dimitri, a word in your ear.

They step aside.

“Vladimir Ilyitch. That dog that was struck down with the knout and left for dead—”

Dimitri nods. “That was his name.”

Petroff: The girl must never leave here alive.

Dimitri: No, we must choke her.

Petroff, turning towards Nitnitska, “Girl, we are going to choke you.”

Nitnitska: Cowards!

She has set her back against the wall near the window and looks at them defiantly.

“If you dare to choke me, you shall die. Look!” She draws forth from her dress a silver whistle on a chain. “I have but to blow upon this whistle and Basilisk Vangorod and his Tartars will fall upon the post.”

Petroff: Seize her!

They rush at her. Nitnitska blows a long blast on the silver whistle. Petroff and Dimitri start to choke her, both together, but before they get her more than half choked there is a sudden outbreak of gunfire outside. Ivan the sentinel rushes in—

“Excellence, the post is attacked by Tartars.”

Petroff, letting go the girl, “Call all the guards, every man to his post!”

The guards – three of them – rush in and begin firing through the windows. There is a tremendous quantity of firing outside. Presently a full sized explosion blows in the door. In rushes Basilisk Vangorod followed by his whole Tartar Army – four of them. The Russian guards are hopelessly outnumbered – four to three. They lay down their arms. Basilisk Vangorod rushes at Petroff and Dimitri, and fights them both in a sword combat which circles round the stage so that everybody can see a piece of it. As it concludes he kills Dimitri and Petroff, clasps Nitnitska in his arms, calls in her father (who is outside, not dead) and stands in the middle of the stage, waves his sword and says, “For the freedom of Russia. Long live the Czar!”

And the curtain falls.

—

The Russian Drama
(B)  New Style

DAMNED SOULS

(A bright little tragedy of Russian home life, written with a little assistance by Maxim Gherkin, Shootitoff, Dustanashej and a few men like that.)

Scene: An underground lodging in Pinsk: water exudes from the walls: dim daylight comes through a half window. There is a crazy table in the middle of the room, some crazy chairs, a crazy stove on which is a samovar with some crazy tea. In a corner of the room is a low vaulted door which opens on rickety stairs descending to a black cellar.

THE CAST OF (WANT OF) CHARACTERS

STYLIPIN:

A Thief

YATSCHSCHA:

His Wife

PATCH:

An Imbecile

HOOTCH:

A Homicidal Maniac

All these are in the room already when the play begins.

Later the following further want of characters come in, namely:

PRAVDA (aged eighty):

An Immoral Woman

PRYBILOFF:

A Murderer

Their entry is kept until a little later to brighten things up in case they get dull.

.  .  .  .  .

When the curtain rises, Itch the Paragoric is lying on a truckle bed, under dirty bedclothes, in a corner of the room. He is evidently dying by inches, in fact by centimeters: his feet are already ossified. In short he is quite sick.

Patch, the Imbecile, is making faces at himself in a broken looking-glass. Hootch, the Homicidal Maniac, is sharpening a butcher’s knife. Stylipin and Yatschscha are drinking vodka out of dirty glasses at the crazy table. In other words it’s a regular Russian home scene.

Itch (sitting up in bed):

I’m hungry.

Stylipin:

Shut up.

Itch:

Give me some water, I’m thirsty.

Stylipin:

Shut up, or I’ll choke you.

Yatschscha:

That’s right. Choke him. (Aside) He has money under his bed, in the mattress. I saw it yesterday. Choke him and take it.

Stylipin (aside):

Later.

Itch:

Mother Pravda, Mother Pravda, give me some food!

Stylipin:

Shut up, I say. She’s out. Mother Pravda is out.

Itch:

I’m dying.

The Imbecile (with sudden laughter):

He’s dying! Ha, ha! Isn’t he lucky. He’s dying!

(Itch falls back on his bed. There is a gurgling in his throat. Nobody pays any more attention to him.)

Stylipin (turns to Yatschscha):

Where is that money you brought in from the street?

Yatschscha:

I brought no money from the street.

Stylipin:

You’re lying, you foul huzzy. Give it or I’ll beat you!

(He picks up a stick. Patch, the idiot, claps his hands with insane laughter.)

Patch:

Ha! ha! Beat her! That’s right, beat her.

Stylipin:

Give me the money, or I’ll choke you.

(He takes Yatschscha by the throat and begins to choke her. Strange cries come from her. The idiot capers and chuckles.)

Hootch:

Choke her! That’s it! choke her.

Hootch (the homicidal maniac):

Stop your accursed noise. Do you want to bring the whole street in on us? Stop, I say, there’s some one coming down the steps.

(All are still a moment, their motions arrested as they stand. Only the gurgling noise is still heard from the throat of Itch the paragoric.)

.  .  .  .  .

This opening part of the play is intended to develop that atmosphere of cheerfulness and comfort which surrounds the Russian drama of today. It can, if need be, be prolonged still more with little vignettes of choking, poisoning and knifing. But there should be at least enough of it to develop the temperamental aspect of the Russian stage.

.  .  .  .  .

Stylipin:

Yes, there’s some one coming down the steps. Quiet, I say!

(There is a beating at the chained door. Stylipin goes to the door. He motions for silence, his hand upon the chain. He calls):

Who’s there?

It is I. Open the door.

It’s Mother Pravda. Are you alone, little mother?

No, one is with me. It is all right. Open.

(Stylipin opens the door. Mother Pravda enters; she is followed by Prybiloff, the murderer. His face is like ashes. His eyes wander. He is afraid.)

Who has she got? What is it? Who is she bringing?

This is Prybiloff, children. He has done a murder.

Hootch (the homicidal maniac):

Aha! A murderer! With a knife was it, brother? With a knife? A knife like this? (His eyes glisten.)

Prybiloff goes and sits down. He is shaking.)

I don’t know. It was dark.

And you struck him down in the dark? Eh, brother, in the dark? Was there blood? Tell me if there was blood?

Prybiloff (his face in his hands):

I don’t know. I didn’t see.

The Imbecile (going near him):

Don’t cry, little brother.

Yatschscha (taking her husband aside):

Listen, there is money in his pocket – coins, real money. I heard it jingle in his pocket.

Stylipin:

I know it. I heard it too. Who did he kill, Mother Pravda?

Pravda:

He killed a commissary. The people are after him in the streets. They are searching. They want to burn him. Listen!

(There is heard a confused sound of shouting and running feet as from the streets outside.)

Prybiloff (lifting his head, his hands clenched on the table):

They’re coming!

Pravda:

Have no fear. Look, come with me. There is a cellar below here. I’ll put you there. Come. (She leads him towards the low vaulted door in the corner.)

The Imbecile:

She is taking him below! Ha! ha! Don’t go, brother, it’s too good a jest. Don’t let her take you!

Stylipin and Hootch:

Shut up, fool, shut up!

(Mother Pravda opens the door, leads Prybiloff down the dark steps. The sound of shouting has died away. Pravda’s voice can be heard down below.)

This way, little brother. There, I will make a light.

One can see the gleam of yellow candlelight through the door.

Stylipin (to Hootch):

Shall we go down?

Hootch:

Let her do it alone.

Stylipin:

No, no, I’m going down. I don’t trust her. She’ll take more than her share.

Hootch:

All right. Here, take the spade with us. Better finish the job.

Stylipin (to Yatschscha):

Wait here. Keep the door chained. Let no one in. Come on, Hootch.

(They go through the door down the steps. There is a confused sound of voices from below. Then the sudden noise of a scuffle, one strange cry and silence.)

The Imbecile (with laughter):

Ha! ha! he would go! Like the others: Now they will bury him down there with the shovels. Oh what fun! Do you hear, little brother, what a rare joke? (He goes over to Itch’s bed.) Do you hear, brother, a rare joke? He doesn’t answer.

Yatschscha (looking at Itch callously):

He can’t answer. He is dead.

(A voice calls from below.)

Are you there, Yatschscha. Bring the vodka. The work is hard.

Yatschscha:

One minute, one minute.

(She takes from her pocket a little phial with green liquid in it)—

.    .    .    .    .

But there, there. What’s the use of going on with it. The full temperamentality of the thing has been developed by this time. What happens is that Yatschscha puts poison in the vodka. And when she has done that she goes out stealthily to denounce her husband and Hootch to the commissaries of the police. She does this to get the blood money offered by the police for Stylipin dead or alive. In fact this is a favourite means of support in Russia. So Stylipin and Hootch and dear old Mother Pravda presently come up and drink the poisoned vodka and die in contortions. And when the commissaries of the police, led by Yatschscha, come in, there is only the idiot laughing over all the corpses.

Nice little thing, isn’t it? There is no doubt that life in Russia has a charm all its own, and that Russian literature has a tang to it, that you don’t get in the duller countries.

TOC     INDEX

The Platter of Life

I observe that a new controversy has broken out about the moving pictures. Somebody has just calculated that in America twenty million people attend the picture houses every day and the public is aghast. And even this figure, it seems, doesn’t include the Mexicans, the Lower Californians, and the Canadians and the Esquimaux.

It appears also that $50,000,000 of new capital is being put into moving pictures every year – either that or, $50,000,000,000. I forget which, but it doesn’t matter. It is freely stated that the moving pictures are four-fifths piffle, and the other fifth poison; and that they are made up altogether of sex stuff, sob stuff, crime stuff, and hysteria and vanity all mixed up together.

I do not wish to take any personal part in this controversy. Indeed, as one who has made not one moving picture scenario but hundreds of them I should feel a delicacy in doing so. But it may be of interest to know just exactly how we scenario-makers make scenarios. Perhaps I may be able to prove that even a moving picture may move on a high plane.

The first thing that a writer has to do to make a scenario is to get a general topic or story. This is absolutely easy. There is no need to invent a new one; and it is impossible anyway. All the stories were invented long ago.

Open any book of folklore or fairy tales or nursery rhymes, and you can pick them out like plums, you could select “Little Bo Peep” or “Mother Hubbard” or “Jack Spratt,” or any of them as the basis. Suppose we take “Jack Spratt.”

The original text of the rhyme runs:

Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean,

And so it was, between them both, they licked the platter clean.

That’s the ground work to begin upon, the next thing is to find the general name of the picture. That suggests itself at once from the rhyme.

THE PLATTER OF LIFE

OR

PARTED AND UNITED

(Authorized by the Board of Censors)

After that it is necessary to work out the descriptive stuff that goes along with the title for advertising purposes. This is where the highest art of moving-picture-making comes in. It is done more or less like this:

Have You Ever Felt Your Husband Turning Cold? Cold as the Untasted Bacon upon the Platter? Or You – Have You Ever Watched Your Wife Growing Fat? Have You Seen Her Expand Hour by Hour? If So, You Must Not Miss this Big New Heart-Throbbing, Pulse-Accelerating Picture. In It You Will See an Aesthetic, Temperamental, Lean-Eating Man Yoked to a Full-Blooded, Double-Chested Woman, Vibrating with the Joy of Eating by the Pound. What Will Happen? Can They Do It?

It Is a Beautiful, Wholesome Picture of Modern Life. The Clergy of all Denominations Have Come to It in Thousands and Shed Tears.

Now the picture begins to spin and they show the familiar interior, called “The Spratt Mansion,” well known also as “The Anstruther Residence,” or “The De Kuyper Home.” It stands for High Society, as seen in the movies. It has in it a wooden Butler to take Spratt’s coat and stick each time he goes in and out, and a hundred-dollar housemaid, much prettier than Mrs. Spratt.

Somewhere in here put in the legend:

John Spratt, Aesthetic, Temperamental, a Poet, and a Graduate of Oberlin College, Is Married to Gloria Spratt, His Wife

The pictures ripple on. The Spratts at breakfast. Jack Spratt has a manuscript poem spread in front of him. He keeps raising his eyes to the ceiling and nibbling lean bacon. This means that he is making up poetry. Gloria Spratt is eating fat pork with molasses in it. She comes over to kiss Spratt. He repulses her. She wants to bite his ear. He won’t let her. She tries to pick him up and hug him, but he slips out of her arms and darts out of the room.

At this point, the legend is put on the screen:

This Great Big, Yearning, Full-Blooded, Over-Ballasted Woman Is Not Satisfied. Her Love Turns Cold

Mrs. Spratt, now cold, writing at a little table a telegram to a former lover. You can see the address, “William de Bulk, New York,” and the message is put right on to the screen to read:

My Marriage Is a Mistake.
Come to Me

This is the point, I think, at which the clergy begin to weep. But before they have time to weep much the scene changes with a sudden flip. A title is written:

Spratt, in His Study, Dictates his Poem to His Stenographer, Clementina Click

Ha! Ha! Do you notice his stenographer, as thin as a meridian of longitude, and with her hair in Cleo de Merode forehead flaps, and with eyes like a cow? Something will be doing here.

The Gentle Girl, as Thin as She Is Good, Hangs on the Poet’s Words

Then the picture changes again. Arrival of William de Bulk. You see him buzz up in his motor. You see the wooden Butler take his stick. Then you see him enter and greet Gloria.

“William! How Stout You Have Grown!”

He has a big face like a thug, but he must be all right because the writing says:

The Big, True-Hearted Man has Come at Once to the Woman He Had Loved

William takes Gloria Spratt away in his motor. It is made to look like an elopement, but if you follow it closely it is all in the same day. It has to be, or the clergy would stop crying!

“Take Me Away, William. I Want to Forget. I Want to Plunge into the Vortex of Gaiety”

He plunges her in. William and Gloria in a restaurant eating beefsteak; wild scene of gaiety; Hawaiian orchestra; ginger ale; Greek waiters; gramophones; all the fierce vortex of Metropolitan life. William tells the story of his life. You can see him do it in side pictures:

“Yes, Gloria, after You Left Me, I Married. But I Grew Stout, and My Wife Abandoned Me to Seek a More Intellectual Life than I could Give Her”

William is seen to bow his head in grief. Then the picture changes back to the Spratt mansion.

Freed from the Pressure of His Wife’s Society, Spratt Abandons Himself to His Poetic Dreams

The picture spins. Spratt (at 10.30) writing a sonnet. Spratt in the garden of the Spratt mansion (11.30) reading the sonnets to his stenographer. Spratt at lunch with his stenographer, reading the sonnet again. Ease and a tranquil mind are changing him already. At 11.30 he is distinctly stouter than he was. At 1 p.m. he is quite fat.

The scene changes. Gloria and William at afternoon tea. (4 p.m.)

But Even in the Whirl of Gaiety This Great Big, True-Hearted, Able-Bodied Woman Cannot Forget.
She Pines

Pictures of Mrs. Spratt pining. She is losing flesh. At 4 p.m., she is far less stout than she was at 3.30. At 4.30 it is still more noticeable.

The picture changes. Spratt with Clementina Click in the garden. He is reading her his sonnet for the tenth time. He is quite stout. Clementina Click shows signs of restlessness. She rises and paces to and fro:

“Mr. Spratt, Don’t Read It any More. I Have Made a Fatal Mistake. I Do Not Care for Poetry as I Thought I Did. I Left the Best Husband in the World to Seek the Intellectual Life.
I Want it No Longer”

The picture changes. William and Gloria beside the Duck Pond in Central Park (5.30 p.m.) She is now quite tall and thin:

“William, I Have Done Wrong. Even in this Mad World of Gaiety, Among these Ducks, I Cannot Forget.
Take Me Home”

Concluding scenes. Arrival of the motor at the Spratt mansion (6 p.m., daylight-saving time). Entry of William and Gloria. The Spratts meet. They each weigh 150 pounds now. They fall into one another’s arms. William and Clementina meet. They fall into one another’s arms. She is his wife.

“William, I Have Been Wrong.
Take me Back”

Mrs. Spratt leads them all to the supper table:

“Come, We Will Eat the Platter Clean”

And the picture concludes with the legend:

And from the Dead Ashes of their Past Lives these Renewed Souls Lift Themselves into a Higher Being. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. All this Week

TOC     INDEX

People We Meet
in the Movies

The Vampire Woman;
as Met in the Movies

I understand that there is a kind of woman round just now called a Vampire Woman, or a Vamp. I’d like to know her. From all I hear she is just the kind of woman that I think I’d like.

I believe I first noticed her in the moving pictures. In these she wears a shimmering, snaky kind of dress that fits her like onion peel. Personally, I know nothing of dress. In fact, my wife says I never observe it. That is an error. At the right moment, I do. And I must say that that onion-peel effect commands my warmest approval. The Vampire Woman wears nothing on her arms and shoulders. She doesn’t need to. And her dress is generally slit up the side a good deal. This allows her freedom of movement. In my opinion she ought to have it. Freedom of movement is a splendid thing.

I don’t mean to say that the Vampire Woman is found only in the moving pictures. You see her in all the new plays and in the magazines, and on the book-covers, and in all the up-to-date advertisements. I read a description of her on the playbill of a theatre the other day, and it said: “Dowered with a fatal and mesmeric charm, the lure of the iridescent beauty concealed the smallness of the soul within.” But that’s all right about the soul. I’m not looking for that. I don’t care how small it is. Give me the iridescent stuff and I can overlook any shortage of soul that goes with it.

In the magazines the Vampire is generally shown in that scene in her boudoir where her victim (she’s been luring him to his destruction) is seen grovelling at her feet. But I never worry about him. He’s a nut. Let him grovel.

In the moving-pictures you always see the two of them – the Vampire and the Nut – going out together for the evening. He’s in evening dress, very pale and with his hair plastered down (poor Nut, he’s nearing his end) and she’s in her onion-skin dress with a seal cloak thrown over her shoulders. In this dress you see them entering one of those dreadful places where all the men and women – other Nuts, and Vampires – are sitting at little tables drinking black sarsaparilla out of champagne glasses, and eating black oysters on the half-shell. In other words the place is one of those that are called “fashionable Hadeses” or words to that effect. I know these places ever so well by sight – little marble tables and beautiful rubber trees and Vampires everywhere. I know them. But I can’t find them. I wish someone would open up a few fashionable Hadeses in my home town. I know a lot of men who’d go.

Well, that’s where the pictured Vampire is principally seen; leading the Nut after her; and, of course, as soon as they sit down at the marble table and she picks up the bill of fare, you know that she’s going to order a champagne glass of black sarsaparilla and a plate of black oysters. That’s all right. Let her. I’d pay for them myself. If I could meet that woman I’d buy her black oysters all the evening.

Later on you see her dropping little drops of something into the Nut’s glass. She’s drugging him. I think she puts in little drops of Scotch whisky, or some dreadful stuff like that. In fact, this Vampire Woman doesn’t care for the eighteenth amendment one little bit, nor for the interstate commerce clause, nor the ten commandments, nor anything. So she drugs the Nut without compunction. And when she has him just about drugged, she winds her long arms about his neck and that is the end of him. At the same time, if she wants more men to drug I’ll find her a dozen; friends of mine; I know lots of them.

But somehow wherever you see the pictured Vampire woman, it’s always this lucky Nut who is with her. Sometimes you see them in a motor – they use one about as big as a freight car. Sometimes you see them at a Swiss hotel (that’s where she throws the Nut over a precipice); and sometimes on an ocean steamer where there are three thugs, in league with the Vampire, hidden behind a ventilator. But it is always this same kind of Nut that is with her. I wonder at it. It seems as if our whole art and literature – drama, films, magazines and all – were getting filled up and preoccupied with Vampires and Nuts.

But what I think particularly exasperating is the impossibility of finding the Vamp in real life. Often you think you are very near to it, but you never are. In my own town, for example, there are getting to be a lot of women who look a good bit like Vampires. It’s something, I suppose, in the way they dress; not that I ever observe dress at all; like all men I hardly see it. But I’m wonderfully quick in the absence of it. And very often when I come into the After Dinner Alley of a hotel, or the corridor of the theatre. I say to myself, “Here are Vampires!” But they never are. You think they are till you get near them and meet them, and then you’re disappointed. The other night just when I thought I had met a real one, she turned to me and said, “I want so much to introduce my husband.” It jarred upon me. And a few nights before that I met two, or what I thought to be two, who had on Onion Skins and were just going out for the evening. So I took it for granted that they must be going to one of those fashionable Hadeses with the sarsaparilla and the black oysters. I went with them. But it turned out to be a lecture on Recent Advances in Physical Science. Too bad, wasn’t it? Personally, I don’t care whether Physical Science advances or goes backward. Especially after that.

I suppose the trouble is that they want to be Vampires and can’t. We’re such a hopelessly moral race, after two thousand years of law courts and penitentiaries that we can’t be bad if we try to. It’s no use. We give a “New Year’s Revel” and you couldn’t distinguish it in tone from a Sunday school picnic. We hold a Mardi Gras, and it’s as moral as a Mother’s Convention. So I see now why those women went to the Advances in Physical Science. It’s the only thing that dares to make them.

And I think I begin to see, too, more in that Nut than I did at first. After all he has his points about him. Did you notice, in the movies the reckless way in which he left that pocketbook full of money on the leather seat? I wouldn’t do that. And did you observe how he gave the twenty dollar gold piece to the doorkeeper, and the way in which, on the steamer, even after they had him drugged, he tried to fight the three thugs all at once? That little Nut has a size to him that you and I haven’t got. And he and the Vampires are primitive elemental types and we aren’t and haven’t been for two thousand years. But there’s a faint survival in us of what we were that makes us admire them.

In anything that I have said I shouldn’t wish to disparage for a moment the splendid types of women that we see about us. It is fine to think of the progress that women have made in this last generation. Everywhere now we have women who vote. We have even women who are fit to hold office and take a seat upon a board. In fact I know a lot of them that I would be pleased to put on a board and leave there for years.

Oh no, I have nothing to say against the new women’s movement. I only mean that when it started I got left behind. I imagine that quite a lot of other men did, too.

TOC     INDEX

–10–
The Raft:
An Interlude

(The kind of interlude that is sandwiched in for fifteen minutes between the dances in a musical revue.)  [4]

The curtain rises and the light comes on the stage slowly, gradually revealing a raft in the middle of the sea. The dawn is breaking. The raft has the stub of a mast sticking up on it and there is a chair on it and a litter of boxes and things.

On the raft is a man. He has on white flannel trousers, and a sky-blue flannel shirt, but no collar and tie.

He stands up and looks all around the horizon, his hand shading his eyes. He speaks in a sepulchral voice.

“Lost! Lost! Alone on the Caribbean Sea.” (In a more commonplace voice) “at least I think it’s the Caribbean. It looks Caribbean to me. Lost! And not a woman in sight. . . . I thought that in this kind of thing there is always a woman. Ha! Wait! There’s one!”

(He is much excited and gets a long spy-glass and shoots it in and out at different lengths searching the sea.)

“No! – it’s only seaweed. . . . Bah!”

(He goes and sits down on a chair and yawns.)

“I call this kind of thing dull! There’s really nothing to do.”

(He gets a box of shoe polish and starts to polish his shoes with a rag. Presently—)

“I think I’ll look around for a woman again. It really is the only thing to do, on a raft – or anywhere else.”

(He takes his spy-glass and looks again.)

“By Jove! Yes! yes! There’s one floating in the sea right there. Quick! Quick!”

(In great excitement he runs over to the mast, where a little looking-glass hangs and starts putting on a collar and tie, and brushing his hair in terrible haste. . . . He can’t find his collar-stud, etc., etc., and keeps muttering—)

“I must keep calm – a woman’s life depends on my getting this collar on.”

(He looks over his shoulder.)

“She’s floating nearer—”

(In the light of the rising sun the girl is now seen floating nearer and nearer.)

“—and nearer – and she’s a peach. . . . I must save her! I must plunge in after her.”

(He stands in the attitude of a person about to dive into the sea, swinging his arms and counting.)

“One – two – three—” (nearly dives but checks himself and goes on) “four – five – SIX. . . . Ah, I forgot! I’ve no swimming costume. . . . Wait a bit, though!”

(He picks up off the raft a long, long pole with a hook on the end.)

“Ha!”

(The girl is quite near now. He hooks her on the pole and hauls her on to the raft. . . . She sinks down flat on it, inanimate, her eyes closed, her face to the audience.) (Note: the girl of course is not wet: that would only mess the act up.)

“What next? Ah, one moment.”

(He runs over to a little bookshelf that is stuck up on the top of the mast, takes out a book, sits down in a chair, and reads aloud very deliberately.)

“‘Rules for re – for, re-sus – for resuscitating the Damned – the Drowned: In resuscitating the drowned it must be remembered that not a moment must be lost.’”

(He settles himself more comfortably in his chair to get a better light to read by.)

“‘Every minute is of vital – of vital’ – humph, I must get my eye glass.”

(He goes and hunts it up, polishes it and continues—)

“‘Of vital importance. First, it is necessary to ascertain whether the heart is still beating.’ – Ah!”

(He gets of his chair and on to the floor of the raft on his toes and hands, makes the motions of attempting to put his ear close down on the girl’s heart, but keeps withdrawing it with sudden shyness.)

“Stop a bit.”

(He goes and gets a cardboard box and takes out a stethoscope so long that, still standing up, he fixes it to his ears and it reaches the girl’s body. He listens and counts, his head on one side and with an air of great absorption.)

“One.”

(A long pause.)

“One and a half.”

(Another pause.)

“One – eighty-five – right! She’s alive!”

(He gets his book again and reads.)

“‘The strength of the circulation being different in the male and the female sex, the first thing to do if the victim is a woman is to rub her – to rub her – ’”

(He finds it difficult to read, and says conclusively—)

“The first thing to do is to rubber. Oh, yes I see: Now where shall I begin? I’ll rub her hands.”

(He takes one of her hands and strokes it very slowly in long loving strokes. After a moment he plucks at the lace cuff at her wrist.)

“Ah, a laundry mark! her name! I must read. Her life hangs on it. ‘Edith Croydon!’ What a beautiful name!”

(He goes on stroking her hand.)

“It doesn’t seem to revive her. Oh, very well, there’s nothing for it.”

(He stands up with an air of great determination, and rolls back his cuffs.)

“I must rub her legs.”

(The girl starts up.)

“Don’t you dare! You’re no gentleman!”

“Miss Croydon, you misunderstand my motives!”

(He walks away in a huff to the extreme end of the raft and stands with his back turned. The girl meantime runs to the mirror and starts doing her hair, etc.)

“And for the matter of that, I am a gentleman. You’ll find my card hanging there beside the mirror.”

(The girl picks down a large card that hangs beside the mirror and reads aloud.)

“HAROLD BORUS

STORY TALE ADVENTURER

Rafts, Rescues and Other Specialities

Hairbreadth Escapes Shaved to Order.”

“Oh, Mr. Borus, I’m so sorry! Of course I know all about you – everybody does! I must apologize. Do come back on this part of the raft. Forgive me.”

(Borus, coming back, and taking her hand with emotion.)

“Miss Croydon, there is nothing to forgive! If I have saved your life, forget it. Let us never speak of it. Think of me not as a hero, but only as a man!”

“I will!”

“And meantime, please make yourself comfortable. Do take this chair. The entire raft, I need hardly say, is at your disposition. You’ll find the view from the east side most interesting.”

“Thank you so much.”

(They make themselves comfortable and intimate, she on the chair, he on the soapbox, with elaborate gestures of politeness.)

“And do tell me, Mr. Borus, how did you get here?”

“Very gladly. You won’t mind if I begin at the beginning?”

“Must you?”

“It’s usual. . . .”

“Oh, all right.”

“Well then—” (striking an attitude of recitation.)

“Little did I think—”

“No, I suppose not.”

“—when I left Havana in a packet—”

“Oh, Mr. Borus, who put you in a packet?”

“—in a packet-boat, that I should be wrecked on the dry Tortugas.”

(The Girl, clasping her hands with agitation.)

“The Dry Tortugas!! Oh, Mr. Borus, have the Tortugas gone dry?”

“We had hardly left when a great storm arose. . . . A monstrous wave carried away the bridge.”

“Good heavens!”

“We struggled on. A second wave carried away the rudder, the propeller, the wireless apparatus and the stethescope!!”

“Great heavens!”

“We struggled on. A third wave carried away the bar. It was at once decided to abandon the ship and lower the boats.”

(The Girl, perplexed.)

“But why?”

“To look for the bar. . . . In the confusion I was left behind. The storm subsided. I continued to make a raft out of a few loose iron beams fastened together by nuts.”

“Fastened by nuts, Mr. Borus, but I thought you were the only one left in the ship?”

“—by nuts. This raft, Miss Croydon, cannot sink, it is all made of iron.”

“How splendid! And now let me tell you my adventures.”

“No, no, don’t trouble, please. You’re exhausted! Don’t – you might faint!”

“Looking back,” (The Girl goes on very dramatically) “it all seems a blank.”

(Borus very hurriedly.)

“All right, it’s a blank. It’s a blank. Let it go at that.”

“Mr. Borus, I think you’re terribly rude. You might let me tell my adventures!”

“Miss Croydon” (very seriously) “how many heroes are there in any story of adventure?”

“Only one.”

“Well, I’m it. You must be something else.”

(Miss Croydon pettishly.)

“I don’t want to be. All I know is that I’m cold and I’m hungry, and I don’t think that I’ll stay!”

“Cold! Hungry!!”

(He gets up and starts running round with animation, making preparations.)

“Cold! Ha! ha! I’ll soon have a fire for you!”

“A fire, Mr. Borus, how can you possibly start a fire?”

(Borus laughs.)

“A very simple matter, Miss Croydon, to a trained hero like myself.”

(He has picked up an empty pan and set it on a box.)

“I do it simply with sticks rubbed together.”

“By rubbing dry sticks together! Like the Indians I’ve read about? How wonderful you are.”

“I am.”

(He picks up two or three very little dry twigs.)

“I take the dry sticks, so—”

“Yes! Yes!”

“And first rub them together, so—”

“Yes! Yes!”

“With a sort of twisting motion.”

“Yes! Yes!”

“Then I put them in the pan with a bit of paper, so—” (he takes out a match-box as he speaks) “and strike a match and light them.”

(He lights the paper and the twigs and they blaze up in a little flame. Edith Croydon and Borus warm their hands at it; she speaks.)

“How really wonderful!”

“Yes. It’s the Peruvian method! And now for food and drink.”

(The little fire presently flickers out, and has nothing more to do with the act.)

“Have you food and drink on the raft, Mr. Borus? I think you are simply superb.”

“I am. Now let me see.” (He starts taking things out of a box.) “What have we here? Tinned paté de foie gras.”

“Lovely!”

“Canned asparagus. Do you like canned asparagus?”

“Oh, I worship it.”

“Tin of boneless pheasant.”

“Oh, Mr. Borus, I’m just mad over boneless pheasant!”

(Borus, taking out the cans and reading the labels, with exclamations from The Girl—)

“Boneless pheasant – finless fish – spineless sardines – tongueless tongue – now what shall it be first?”

(Borus with great empressement has just laid a little white cloth on a soap-box, and quickly spread out glasses and dishes and knives and forks till it has the appearance of an appetizing preparation. They both accompany it with exclamations of interest and delight. Miss Croydon says)

“Let me see. I think I’d like first, paté de foie gras and finless fish, and just a teeny bit of shelless lobster – and – and—”

(When suddenly Borus has sprung to his feet with a sort of howl.)

“Oh, Mr. Borus, what is it?”

(Borus casting his hands to heaven—)

“I haven’t got – I haven’t got—”

“Yes – yes—”

“I forgot—”

“Yes – yes – you forgot—”

“The can opener! Great heavens, we have no can opener!!”

(The Girl exclaims—)

“No can opener!” (and falls forward on the table.)

(Borus): “Stop! Wake up! I can open them!”

(He makes a wild attack on the tins, beating them, and stamping on them, and biting them, etc., etc. Presently he subsides in despair and collapses on the soap-box.)

“It’s no good, Miss Croydon. We must eat the tins. You eat first. You are a woman.”

“No, Mr. Borus, not yet. We can at least” (she speaks with tragedy) – “we can at least drink. Let us drink before we die.”

“You are right. We can drink before we die. It is more than a lot of people can do.”

(He recovers something of his animation and begins taking out bottles and setting them on the table.)

“There! Bottled ale. Bass’s bottled ale!”

“Oh, Mr. Borus, how divine! I just worship Bass’s bottled ale.”

“Now then, get your glass ready.”

“Right.”

(Then he leaps up again with a howl.)

“What is it, Mr. Borus – Oh, what is it?”

“The thing – the thing you open it with!! I haven’t got one!”

(They both collapse. Borus slightly recovering, but gloomily):

“There’s a way of opening these bottles with a fifty-cent piece. . . .” (feeling in his pocket) “but I haven’t got a fifty-cent piece.”

(Miss Croydon, brightly)

“Oh, never mind, I think I have a dollar bill in my purse.”

(Business here of trying to open the bottle by holding a dollar bill over it. At last Borus says):

“It’s no good, Miss Croydon. We must resign ourselves to our fate. If we must die” (he takes a noble attitude) – “you are a woman. Die first!”

(There is a sadness and then Miss Croydon says):

“Mr. Borus, it’s getting dark.”

(Borus looks up at the sky.)

“Yes, the sun will soon set.”

“Already, Mr. Borus?”

“Yes, Miss Croydon. Night comes quickly in the tropics. Look, the sun is setting.”

(The sun, seen as a round, red disk at the back of the stage, begins to set in jumps, about a yard at a time. When it has got near the bottom it takes a long whirl up again and then goes under. The stage is half dark.)

(Borus): “It is night!”

“Night! Here on the raft? Oh, I mustn’t stay.”

“Miss Croydon, I intend to treat you with the chivalry of a hero. One moment.”

(Borus takes an oar and sticks it up, and takes a big grey blanket and fastens it across the raft like a partition, so as to divide the raft in two.)

“Miss Croydon” (says Borus, looking over the top of the blanket) “that end of the raft is absolutely yours.”

“How chivalrous you are!”

“Not at all. I shall not intrude upon you in any way. Good-night.”

“Good-night, Mr. Borus.”

(They each begin making preparations for sleep, one each side of the curtain. Borus stands up and puts his head over again.)

“You’ll find a candle and matches near your bed.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Borus, how noble you are.”

“Not at all.”

(After another little interlude Borus puts his head over the top again.)

“I am now putting my head over this blanket for the last time. If there is anything you want, say so now. And remember if you want anything in the night do not hesitate to call me. I shall be here – at any moment. I promise it. Good-night.”

“Good-night, Mr. Borus.”

(They settle down in the growing darkness for a few minutes as if falling asleep. Then all of a sudden a bright light, a searchlight; comes shining over the sea, full on the raft. They both start up.)

“Oh, Mr. Borus, look, look, a light – a ship!!”

(Borus): “A light – a ship! They may have a corkscrew! We’re saved. Look – it’s a large yacht – a pleasure yacht.”

(There are voices heard.)

“Raft, Ahoy!” – (and shouts.)

(Miss Croydon): “A pleasure yacht! Oh, then I recognize it!”

“You recognize it?”

“It’s the yacht I fell out of this morning.”

“Fell out of—”

“Yes. You wouldn’t let me tell you. . . .”

(There is a call across the water.)

“Raft ahoy! Stand by! We’re lowering a boat.”

(Borus): “Saved! Saved! But there is just one thing I want to say before we go aboard . . . Miss Croydon – Edith – since I’ve been on this raft I’ve learned to love you as I never could have anywhere else. Edith, will you be my wife?”

(Miss Croydon, falling into his arms):

“Will I? Oh, Harold, that’s what I fell out of the yacht for!”

CURTAIN

[4]  It is to be noticed that this piece is all ready to put on the stage. Actors anxious for dramatic rights may apply by telegraph or on foot.

TOC     INDEX

Other Fancies

First Call for Spring

—or—
Oh, Listen to the Birds

I gather that spring is approaching. I am not an observant man, but as the days go by, the signs begin to multiply. Even for me that means that spring is at hand.

I take this early occasion to notify the public of my opinion and to support it with collateral facts. I am anxious this year to be among the first in the field. Among the signs on which I base my views that spring is near, I may mention that I observe that the snow has gone: that the income tax declarations are being distributed at the post-office; and that the sign BOCK BEER is hung out at the Marshal Foch Café, formerly the Kaiserhoh.

Spring then is upon us. The first call for spring has come: and I should like to suggest that this year we meet it firmly and quietly and with none of the hysterical outburst that it usually provokes in people of a certain temperament. I refer to those unfortunate beings called “lovers of nature.”

Each year I have been pained to notice that the approach of spring occasions a most distressing aberration in the conduct of many of my friends. Beside my house, a few doors on the right, I have an acquaintance who is a Nature Man. All through the winter he is fairly quiet, and an agreeable friendly fellow, quite fit for general society. I notice him, it is true, occasionally grubbing under the snow. I have once or twice seen him break off a frozen twig from a tree, and examine it. On one occasion, indeed, last winter he was temporarily unmanned by seeing a black bird (otherwise harmless) sitting on a bough. But for the most part his conduct during the colder weather is entirely normal.

Spring, however, at once occasions in my Nature friend a distressing disturbance. He seems suddenly to desire, at our every meeting, to make himself a channel of information as between the animate world and me. From the moment that the snow begins to melt, he keeps me posted as to what the plants and the birds and the bees are doing. This is a class of information which I do not want, and which I cannot use. But I have to bear it.

My Nature friend passes me every morning with some new and bright piece of information: something that he thinks so cheery that irradiates his face. “I saw a finch this morning,” he says. “Oh, did you,” I answer. “I noticed a scarlet tanager this afternoon,” says my friend. “You don’t say so!” I reply. What a tanager is I have never known: I hope I never shall. When my Nature friend says things of this sort all I can do is to acquiesce. I can’t match his information in any way. In point of ornithology I only know two birds, the crow and the hen. I can tell them at once either by their plumage or by their song. I can carry on a nature conversation up to the limit of the crow and the hen; beyond that, not.

My Nature friend passes me every morning with some new and bright piece of information: something that he thinks so cheery that irradiates his face. “I saw a finch this morning,” he says. “Oh, did you,” I answer. “I noticed a scarlet tanager this afternoon,” says my friend. “You don’t say so!” I reply. What a tanager is I have never known: I hope I never shall. When my Nature friend says things of this sort all I can do is to acquiesce. I can’t match his information in any way. In point of ornithology I only know two birds, the crow and the hen. I can tell them at once either by their plumage or by their song. I can carry on a nature conversation up to the limit of the crow and the hen; beyond that, not.

So for the first day or so in spring, I am able to say, “I saw a crow yesterday,” or “I noticed a hen out walking this morning.” But somehow my crow and hen seem to get out of date awfully quickly. I get ashamed of them and never refer to them again. But my friend keeps up his information for weeks, running through a whole gamut of animals. “I saw a gopher the other day,” he says, “guess what the little fellow was doing?” If only he knew it I’d like to break out and answer, “I don’t care what the Hades the little fellow was doing.” But, like everybody else, I suppose, I have not the assurance or the cruelty to break in upon the rapture of the Nature Man. Some day I shall: and when I do, let him watch out.

My particular anger with these Nature Men such as my friend, springs, I think, from the singularly irritating kind of language that they use: a sort of ingratiating wee-wee way in which they amalgamate themselves, as it were, with nature. They really seem to feel so cute about it. If a wee hepatica peeps above the snow they think they’ve done it. They describe it to you in a peculiar line of talk almost like baby language. “What do you think I saw?” says the Nature Man. “Just the tiniest little shoot of green peeping from the red-brown of the willow!” He imitates it with his thumb and finger to show the way the tiny little shoot shoots. I suppose he thinks he’s a little bud himself. I really believe that my particular friend actually imagines himself in spring-time to be a wee hepatica, or a first crocus, or the yellow-underleaf of a daffodil.

And notice, too, the way in which they refer to colours; never plain and simple ones like red or black or blue; always stuff like “red-brown” or “blue-green.” My friend asks me if I have noticed the peculiar soft “yellow-brown” that the water fowl puts on in spring. Answer: No, I haven’t: I haven’t seen any water-fowl: I don’t know where you look for them and I didn’t know that they put anything on. As for “yellow-brown” I didn’t know that there was any such colour. I have seen a blue-black crow this year, and I have noticed a burnt-indigo-sepia hen: but beyond that I have not seen anything doing.

Worst of all, and, in fact, verging on paresis is the state of mind of the Nature Man in regard to the birds. When he speaks of them his voice takes on a peculiar whine. My Nature friend told me yesterday that he had seen two orioles just beginning to build a nest behind his garage. He said he “tiptoed” to the spot (notice the peculiar wee-wee language that these people use) – and then stood rooted there watching them. I forget whether he said “rooted” or “riveted”: on occasions like this he sometimes reports himself as one and sometimes as the other. But why on earth, if he is once fairly rooted does he come unrooted again?

I therefore wish to give this plain and simple notice, meant without malice: If any other of my friends has noticed a snowdrop just peeping above the edge of the turf, will he mind not telling me. If any of them has noticed that the inner bark of the oak is beginning to blush a faint blue-red, would he mind keeping it to himself. If there is any man that I know who has seen two orioles starting to build a nest behind his garage, and if he has stood rooted to the ground with interest and watched the dear little feathered pair fluttering to and fro, would he object to staying rooted and saying nothing about it?

I am aware that I ought long ago to have spoken out openly to my nature friends. But I have, I admit, the unfortunate and weak-minded disposition that forces me to smile with hatred in my heart. My unhappy neighbour does not suspect that I mean to kill him. But I do. I have stood for all that tanager and oriole stuff that I can. The end is coming. And as for that hepatica just putting its tiny face above the brown of the leaf – well, wait, that’s all. Some day, I know it, I shall all of a sudden draw a revolver on my friend and say, “Listen. This has gone far enough. Every spring for many years you have stopped me in the street and told me of this nature stuff. And I have stood for it and smiled. You told me when the first touch of brown appeared on the underwing of the lark, and I let you say it. You kept me posted as to when the first trillium appeared from a pile of dead oak leaves under a brush-heap: and I let you tell it to me and never said that all I knew of trilliums was in connection with the German reparations indemnity. But the thing is exhausted. Meet your fate as you can. You are going where the first purple-pink of the young rhododendron will be of no interest to you.”

I don’t want to appear surly. But I am free to admit that I am the kind of man who would never notice an oriole building a nest unless it came and built it in my hat in the hat room of the club. There are other men like me too: and the time has come when we must protect ourselves. There are signs of spring that every sensible man respects and recognizes. He sees the oysters disappear from the club bill-of-fare, and knows that winter is passing; he watches boiled new California potatoes fall from 25 to 10 cents a portion and realizes that the season is advancing. He notes the first timid appearance of the asparagus just peeping out of its melted butter: and he sees the first soft blush on the edge of the Carolina Strawberry at one-dollar-and-fifty cents a box. And he watches, or he used to watch, in the old day beyond recall, for the sign BOCK BEER TODAY that told him that all nature was glad.

These are the signs of spring that any man can appreciate. They speak for themselves. Viewed thus, I am as sensitive to the first call for spring as any of my fellows. I like to sit in my club with my fellow members of like mind and watch its coming and herald its approach.

But for the kind of spring that needs a whole text book of biology to interpret it, I have neither use nor sympathy.

TOC     INDEX

How I Succeeded
in My Business

Secrets of Success as Related
in the Best Current Literature

I had been employed in one business and another quite a good few years, more years than I cared to look back upon; and yet I hadn’t made good. I hadn’t made good, and I knew I hadn’t made good, and sometimes the knowledge that I hadn’t made good made me feel bad. Often I said to my wife when I came home nights, “Doll,” I said, “I haven’t made good.” “No, Jim, old boy,” she’d say, “I know you haven’t made good, but never mind you’ll make good yet.” And then I’d see a tear fall from her eye on to the dresser. After that I’d go out and sit in the back yard and feel real bad.

Often I used to think it over as to why it was I hadn’t made good. I’d had about as much education as most, and more experience than many and better chances than some. I was willing enough and steady enough. I was a non-drinker and a non-smoker; I never touched a card and had never seen a horse race in my life, and never been inside the doors of a pool-room. Yet I knew as well as anybody just where my shortcomings were; I lacked pep, I had no punch, I had practically no magnetism, and I didn’t react quickly on a given environment. And I knew that now-a-days in business it is magnetism and pep and reaction that make for success. Then, too, I failed in the little things; I couldn’t add up more than one column of figures at a time and my memory was no good: things seemed to slip out of it. Often when I came home of an evening I’d say to my wife, “Doll,” I’d say, “my memory is no good.” “What is it you can’t remember, Jim?” she’d say. “I forget,” I’d answer, and I’d groan.

Then, also, though of course I didn’t know it, my diet was all wrong. Every morning I filled myself up with coffee, and I was a meat eater, and I used to enjoy every meal I ate without any idea of the proper proportion of farraginous and nitrogenous units. I had no notion in those days that for every unit of albuminous farrago that a man eats, he ought to have a definite quantity of hydrogen and a fixed proportion of pollen.

Well, I was thinking it all over one Monday morning in the back yard before going to work, when all of a sudden the reason of my failure came to me like a flash. I had no belief in myself: that was it. I couldn’t accomplish anything because I couldn’t believe in myself and didn’t react upon myself. I got up and I walked right into the house to the kitchen where Doll was getting the breakfast ready. “Doll,” I said, “I’ve found out what was wrong. I’ve got to believe in myself,” and I hit the table with my fist till it jumped up. “Oh, Jim,” Doll said, “you frighten me!” “Ha! Ha!” I laughed – that was the first time in six years that Doll had ever said that I frightened her – “I frighten you, do I? Well, then fetch me some farraginous food.” “Won’t you have your bacon,” says Doll, “I was just getting it ready?” “No, Doll,” I said, “don’t you realize that bacon contains more units of nitrogen than I can absorb in the office. The attempt to absorb nitrogenous food, Doll, depresses the nerve centres and lowers the tone of the system. Get me some sour buttermilk and half a dipper of baked beans so cooked as to emphasize their albuminous properties.” “Coffee?” said Doll. “No, Doll,” I answered, “not a drop: get me a little popped bran, mixed with warm water.”

Well, I got my breakfast and I started down to the office for my new job just feeling fine. I could sense myself reacting against everything. “Jim Dudley,” I kept repeating to myself, “you’re going to make good.” The first person I ran into at the office was the general manager just going in.

“You’re ten minutes early, Dudley,” he said.

“Mr. Kitson,” I answered, “I’d rather be early than not: the employee who values his employer’s time more than his own reacts backward to his own emolument.”

And with that I opened my desk and got right to work. I guess I never worked in my life as I did that morning. Everything seemed easy. Letters I would have taken half an hour to consider I answered in two minutes. And every letter I answered I tried to put in just a little sunshine. Even if I didn’t know who the correspondent was I found time to write in Peek-a-boo! or Keep on Smiling! or some little thing like that. “Jim Dudley,” I said to myself, “you’re going to make good.”

Two or three times in the morning Mr. Kitson walked through the office. “Hard at it, Dudley,” he said. “Mr. Kitson,” I answered, “the employee who is not hard at it is defrauding both himself and his employer of his proper integument.”

Well, along about one o’clock Mr. Kitson came over to my desk. “Dudley,” he said, “I’ve something I want to talk to you about, come out to have lunch with me.” “All right, Mr. Kitson,” I answered, “I’ve one more postcard to write and then I’ll come.” “Never mind the postcard, Jim,” he said, “that can look after itself.” “Mr. Kitson,” I said, “Napoleon used to make it a rule never to begin a postcard without finishing it.”

Well, I got the postcard all nicely fixed up and signed and got my hat and went out with Mr. Kitson to a swell club. There was a big bill of fare, but I took no meat at all, only half a bucket of spinach. I noticed that Mr. Kitson ate nothing but boiled water-cress.

“Now, Jim,” said Mr. Kitson, “I’ve had my eye on you all the morning, and I believe you’re the man we want. The company wants someone to go to Kansas City to line up a man and to swing a big proposition.”

“Mr. Kitson,” I interrupted, “I can line him up and swing it.”

“When can you go?”

“Right now,” I said, “as soon as I finish my spinach. Just tell me what it is that I swing when I get there.”

“Good!” he said. “The man that you are to see is John Smith of John Street. Can you remember the name? Better write it down.”

“I don’t need to,” I said. “Just say the name over three or four times and my memory will take a grip on it. I’ll take a few deep breaths while you say it.”

So I went right over to the house and packed my grip.

“Doll,” I said, “I’m off to Kansas City.”

“What to do?” Doll asked.

“To swing a proposition,” I answered. “It’s a big thing, Doll, with big people, and if I make good we’ll come out big.”

I left on the cars that night, and all the way out I ate grass and cultivated my memory and reacted all the time on everything I saw.

Well, when I got to Kansas City, I found I was up against something pretty big, all right. I found John Smith but he wouldn’t see me. I went right into his office, and I said, “Mr. Smith, can I see you?” “No,” he said, “you can’t.” However, I hung on. “Let me see you,” I said. “No, I won’t,” he answered. Still I wouldn’t give in. I went up to his house that evening and right into his library. “Can I see you now?” I asked. “No,” he answered, “you can’t see me.” “Look here! Mr. Smith,” I pleaded, “I’ve come two thousand miles to see you: let me see you!” “No, Dudley,” he said, “I won’t.”

That went on four days and at last he gave in. “All right, Jim,” he said, “state your business. What do you want?” “I want to line you up – swing you,” I said, “come out with me, Mr. Smith, and eat spinach, and I’ll tell you about it.”

So I took him out to a swell restaurant where they had the best spinach in Kansas City. “Now,” I said after we had eaten, “you’re a big man and this is a big thing: we want to put over something pretty big and you’re the man we want in on it. You’re big.”

“Jim,” he said, “you talk well. And what’s more, you’ve got personality and that’s the biggest thing in business today. As soon as I see a man who has personality, I do whatever he wants. Personality gets me every time.”

So I got what I wanted, and I took the train right back to New York. Doll met me at the depot. I kissed her right there on the platform. “Did you swing it?” she asked. “Yes, Doll, I did,” I answered. I saw Doll drop a tear right on the platform. “Good old Jim,” she said.

Next morning I found an envelope on my desk with a cheque for five thousand dollars in it.

Well, that was how I got my first start. Once the firm found that I could line up a man and swing a thing of that size there was lots more for me to do. So the end of it was they made me the head of the company. “It’s no use trying to keep you down, Jim,” said Mr. Kitson. “You’re the biggest of all of us.”

So I went home to Doll and I said, “Doll,” I said, “I’m made president of the company.” “Oh, Jim!” she said, “you’ve made good. I’m so proud – and I’m proud of the company, too, now that you’re president of it. So you must tell me all about it, what it does and what it makes and sells.”

“Doll,” I answered, “don’t ask me. I’ve been so busy swinging propositions and lining things up and breathing and eating spinach, that I’ve never had time to find out what on earth the company does do.”

TOC     INDEX

The Dry Banquet

I had once a good friend, now gone from this scene, whose custom it was, on any and each occasion when a topic of importance came up, to say “Well! let us start a national movement about it.”

As I remember it, he never got very far with any of them. He generally started them at our club at lunch, which is always the brightest hour of the social reformer. “Let us organize ourselves, into an informal committee,” he would say. And he organized us. It was done, as I recall it, merely by pushing the bell and ordering another bottle of claret.

But after lunch my friend always fell asleep, and somehow, by the time he woke, the national movement had vanished. He is gone now where there are no national movements and no organization. But I have served, I hope with distinction, on so great a number of his informal committees that something of the habit clings to me.

I have a national movement that I want to organize now. And I know no better way of doing it than through the pages of this book. I want to gather together into one single compact body all my fellow sufferers of the dry banquet, and, when I have us together, I want to hurl us with irresistible impact at the walls of society. Of our power there can be no doubt. I believe that if we were extended in a single line we would reach nearly to Havana. Unfortunately, not quite.

But observe that I am not saying a word, here and now, against prohibition. I am only talking of the obvious insanity, under prohibition of keeping up the peculiar institution called a BANQUET. Even the most ardent prohibitionist will admit that the original meaning of a Banquet was a gathering for the sake of eating and drinking. It may have been wrong. But that was the idea. And what is more, they didn’t drink water.

At Belshazzar’s Feast, when Belshazzar arose and said “Gentlemen, I want you to rise and fill your glasses and drink to the health of a man whom this city of Babylon delights to honour, a man whom we have the privilege of entertaining tonight, Mr. Nebuchadnezzar,” – when he said that, the Babylonians did not fill up their glasses with water, or lift up their coffee cups and make a pretense of drinking from the cold dregs of a demi tasse.

If you remove the drinking of toasts from a banquet, you are acting the play of Hamlet without Hamlet. For the eating part of it is at best only Ophelia.

If there is anything more conspicuously silly than a group of two or three hundred men being invited to “fill up their glasses” and drink pint after pint of water to the health of their fellow-sufferer, I want to see it. If you add to this the fact that heavy eating has already brought them to the verge of somnolence, that their native spirits are buried under four pounds of beefsteak, some idea may be formed of the ironic misery of a dry “banquet.”

Speaking in a personal sense, I do not want to seem ungrateful for the hospitality that I have received. But I have attended four dry banquets in the last four weeks, and am suffering still. At the latest of them I drank a pint of water to the health of the President of the United States. I drank, as a loyal British subject, nearly a quart for King George. I drank half a pint to the Supreme Court of the United States; one pint to our Great Universities; two each to our larger railroads, and one gill to the League of Nations. It is, speaking frankly, just a little too much.

Even more dreadful to contemplate is the awful quantity of food devoured, in sheer ennui, at the dry banquet. With the absence of wine, the lightness of the thing is lost. There is nothing to do but eat. I have seen a man sit and eat celery, at the opening of a dry banquet, for twenty minutes from sheer misery of soul. I have watched another eat forty-two olives one after the other. I have even noticed men pick the table decorations off the cloth and eat them; and last week I saw a man eat a flag without observing what it was. When the different meats are brought, the guests go on eating automatically and undiscerningly; they only stop when there is no more.

Last month at one single sitting we each ate:

10 olives

2 yards of celery

1 half a bucket of soup

12 sq. inches Filet de Sole Mornay

16 ozs. avoirdup. Virginia Ham

16 "" Beef au J.

108 Cubic Centimetres Soufflé

and after that we lost track, and sat among a welter of French pastry, cheese, and fruit, scarcely conscious. And right at the end I saw my left hand neighbour reach out and eat a radish. Some of us would have eaten nuts, but we had no strength to crack them.

And then, it is at this moment of the dry banquet that the toastmaster, merry fellow, rises with his glass of water and starts up the oratory of the evening.

In the wicked old days, now amended constitutionally, the speeches were supposed to be gay. Laughter was the order of the evening. I am quite sure that, at Belshazzar’s Feast, Mr. Nebuchadnezzar had no sooner got upon his feet than the whole room was filled with a pleasant expectancy. “Well, gentlemen,” he would say, “I want to tell you that I am glad to be here!” That was all that was needed. The company burst into a roar of merriment. There was, or was supposed to be, something so droll in the way in which Mr. Nebuchadnezzar got up, something so inimitable in the way in which he looked about him round the room, that the impulse to laughter was irresistible. And when Mr. Nebuchadnezzar went on to say: “I want to tell you, gentlemen, a little story about a commercial traveller who was going from Babylon to Damascus,” the room became a mere uproar of laughter and applause.

But now! O Tempora, O Mores! The after-dinner speeches have changed into after-dinner lectures. Nebuchadnezzar rises in his place, serious, lantern-jawed and dull. Who ever could have thought the fellow amusing! He faces an audience, heavy, somnolent, bored to death already, hating everything and everybody, and only wanting to be gone.

Then he makes a speech on the Babylonian Canal System. There are reporters sitting all around him writing it down on tablets of mud. He gives all the statistics of the mileage of the Babylonian canals, he goes into the technique of the siltage of the mud, he touches lightly on the new mud shovel, he assures the auditors that we can now lift fifty tons of mud per hour. You can almost feel him lifting it as he talks. And the next day the Babylonian papers record the gay gathering with a great capital heading. FIFTY TONS OF MUD PER HOUR – enjoyable gathering at the Belshazzar Banquet.

This is what is going on about us every evening. And for some reason or other there has arisen a sort of conspiracy of silence in regard to it. There is such a decent tradition abroad among us about the acceptance of hospitality that no invited guest cares to refuse his invitation. He accepts. He goes. He stands, mournful and resigned, among the little group of the reception committee waiting for the banquet to begin. He walks like a dumb sheep into the banquet hall to the music of “Hail, Columbia!” He eats with due submission his four pounds of beefsteak. He endures the full mud-shovel of statistics that is dumped over him; and, still suffering, reaches, at last the happy moment when he may wrap his fur-lined coat about him and step out into the night. Not even the immortal words of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” can present, to our minds, a deeper picture of the welcome of everlasting sleep.

If we must be prohibitionists, why not do the thing properly. If the wine is out, away with the Banquet. Let us do all things in order. Let us gather without food or drink and bring our knitting and our crochet work instead. Then, to the cheerful clicking of the busy needles, let us hear with pleased attentiveness the proud statistics of our transportation system.

I have reason to know that there are others, thousands of others who suffer as I do. Some of them are so highly placed that to mention their names might crack the Constitution. One is an Ambassador, several are Governors of States, many, a great many, are Generals, and one a Prince. I can only hope that when the definite announcement of my New Movement is made they will get their knitting needles together and join in.

TOC     INDEX

My Lost Dollar

My friend Todd owes me a dollar. He has owed it to me for twelve months, and I fear there is little prospect of his ever returning it. I can realize whenever I meet him that he has forgotten that he owes me a dollar. He meets me in the same frank friendly way as always. My dollar has clean gone out of his mind. I see that I shall never get it back.

On the other hand I know that I shall remember all my life that Todd owes me a dollar. It will make no difference, I trust, to our friendship, but I shall never be able to forget it. I don’t know how it is with other people; but if any man borrows a dollar from me I carry the recollection of it to the grave.

Let me relate what happened. Todd borrowed this dollar last year on the 8th of April, (I mention the date in case this should ever meet Todd’s eye) just as he was about to leave for Bermuda. He needed a dollar in change to pay his taxi; and I lent it to him. It happened quite simply and naturally, I hardly realized it till it was all over. He merely said “Let me have a dollar, will you!!” And I said, “Certainly. Is a dollar enough?” I believe, in fact I know, that when Todd took that dollar he meant to pay for it.

He sent me a note from Hamilton, Bermuda. I thought when I opened it that the dollar would be in it. But it wasn’t. He merely said that the temperature was up to nearly 100. The figure misled me for a moment.

Todd came back in three weeks. I met him at the train – not because of the dollar, but because I really esteem him. I felt it would be nice for him to see someone waiting for him on the platform after being away for three weeks. I said, “Let’s take a taxi up to the Club.” But he answered, “No, let’s walk.”

We spent the evening together, talking about Bermuda. I was thinking of the dollar but of course I didn’t refer to it. One simply can’t. I asked him what currency is used in Bermuda, and whether the American Dollar goes at par. (I put a slight emphasis on the American Dollar), but found again that I could not bring myself to make any reference to it.

It took me some time (I see Todd practically every day at my Club) to realize that he had completely forgotten the dollar. I asked him one day what his trip cost him and he said that he kept no accounts. A little later I asked him if he felt settled down after his trip, and he said that he had practically forgotten about it. So I knew it was all over.

In all this I bear Todd no grudge. I have simply added him to the list of men who owe me a dollar and who have forgotten it. There are quite a few of them now. I make no difference in my demeanour to them, but I only wish that I could forget.

I meet Todd very frequently. Only two nights ago I met him out at dinner and he was talking, apparently without self-consciousness, about Poland. He said that Poland would never pay her debts. You’d think a thing like that would have reminded him, wouldn’t you? But it didn’t seem to.

But meantime a thought – a rather painful thought – has begun to come in to my mind at intervals. It is this. If Todd owes me a dollar and has forgotten it, it is possible – indeed it is theoretically probable – that there must be men to whom I owe a dollar which I have forgotten. There may be a list of them. The more I think of it the less I like it, because I am quite sure that if I had once forgotten a dollar, I should never pay it, on this side of the grave.

If there are such men I want them to speak out. Not all at once: but in reasonable numbers, and as far as may be in alphabetical order, and I will immediately, write their names down on paper. I don’t count here men who may have lent me an odd dollar over a bridge table: and I am not thinking (indeed I am taking care not to think) of the man who lent me thirty cents to pay for a bottle of plain soda in the Detroit Athletic Club last month. I always find that there’s nothing like plain soda after a tiring ride across the Canadian frontier, and that man who advanced that thirty cents knows exactly why I felt that I had done enough for him. But if any man ever lent me a dollar to pay for a taxi when I was starting for Bermuda, I want to pay it.

More than that: I want to start a general movement, a Back to Honesty movement, for paying all these odd dollars that are borrowed in moments of expansion. Let us remember that the greatest nations were built up on the rock basis of absolute honesty.

In conclusion may I say that I do particularly ask that no reader of this book will be careless enough to leave this copy round where it might be seen by Major Todd, of the University Club of Montreal.

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Radio:
A New Form of Trouble

What is Radio? I shall be only too glad if any reader of this book will write and tell me, simply and in words that I can understand, what Radio is.

Let him understand at the outset that it is no use telling me that by means of Radio, I would be able, seated comfortably in my own armchair to hear the Pittsburgh orchestra. I know it. I don’t want to. Nor need he inform me that, seated comfortably in my own armchair, I can hear a speech by W. J. Bryan. I don’t need to. I heard one.

Nor do I wish for information involving the use of such words as “receiving circuit,” “rheostal,” and “variometer.” These words are no help to me. I have tried them out and I don’t get them. I have already read a little book called “Radio for the Beginner” and it has beaten me. I have sent away for another that is called “Radio for Infants,” but I have very little hope from it. I know already that it will tell me that, any infant nowadays, seated comfortably in his high chair, can hear the Pittsburgh orchestra. And of course it will contain what are called “directions” telling me to “insert my antennae in my ears.” But I refuse to. It sounds like insults, that we use to use when I was young.

And, most particularly, I don’t want surprising statements about the rapidity of ether waves. It is no use telling me that the Hertzian waves represents 3,000,000,000,000,000 oscillations per second. I believe that that figure is correct but it doesn’t strike me as so terribly fast anyway. After reading for months the statistical figures on the bill of Reparations against Germany and the fall of the Russian Ruble, it leaves me cold.

All that I clearly perceive about Radio is, that a new form of trouble has broken out in the world. One more item has been added to the growing list of Things I Don’t Understand. I know now just how they felt in Ancient Babylon when they hanged the man who invented the first wheelbarrow. Radio, in short, just adds one length to the distance by which I am being left behind.

Indeed the whole Radio business as I read it in the newspapers, seems to be largely in the hands of children. Only last week I noticed that a little boy in the Schenectady Technical High School had made a Radio machine out of an empty sardine can and a piece of stove pipe wire. He must be a bright little fellow. I’d like to choke him. And I see where another bright little fellow (they are called “bright little fellows” in Radio literature) has fixed up a Radio set in his bedroom: it said that his “aerial” was 75 feet long and that he had a “flat top lead-in.” Poor Boy! I forget what he uses his Radio set for. Perhaps he listens to the Pittsburgh orchestra. They mostly do.

Meantime the thing has assumed the proportions of a vast movement. There are Radio shops, Radio fans and a whole growth of Radio literature, magazines, journals, advertisements, and prize competitions. In fact it’s a “world movement”; it takes its place right alongside of prohibition and psychoanalysis and the subconscious mind. In a very short time it will get into the moving pictures and on the stage and into our current novels and eat the heart out of our literature. I was reading the other night – or was I dreaming – a “Radio novel” which began something like this—

“Angelina sat in her cloistered room, her antennae in her ears and her eyes idly resting on her direction finder, hearing and yet half not hearing the Pittsburgh orchestra while the Hertzian waves moved drowsily past her at the rate of three million billion miles a second. Suddenly the girl noted among the waves one which sent a throb to her heart. It was his – Eduardo’s. That familiar and beloved call, “K double Z O double Z.” She would recognize it anywhere. There was a romance about it which thrilled the young girl – “K ZZ, O. ZZ.”

Hastily she adjusted her amplifier, moved her spark to a better audio-frequency, and opened her condenser till its capacity increased one millionth of a farad. “Eduardo,” she clicked. “It is I. Where are you?” “I am here,” came the answer, “seated comfortably in my armchair, I am listening to a broadcast by one of our greatest national preachers. Tune your wave length, darling” (he said the word, in Radio), “QQ is the sign for it, and cut in and we will listen to it together.” “I will sweetheart,” she answered (HKW).

Rapidly this bright young girl – she was in the highest grade of the Schenectady Technical High School: the last one that they will allow them to be in – adjusted her Radio set. In a few moments she had cut in on the same broadcast that Eduardo, far away in the ether, was also absorbing into his vacuum tube. It was wonderful to the girl to think that her antennae were joined to his by the same wave and that his amplitude and hers, with a proportional deduction for the square of the distance, were now in the circuit. “Thus together they listened to the broadcast their antennae close locked—”

And would you believe it by the time I had got to this point in the narration of the new Radio novel all of a sudden, it began to seem strangely like, and yet unlike, something that I had read long ago in a forgotten story dealing with New England life in the older days.

Something like this it went. “Together they sat and listened to the voice of the preacher in the pulpit, and as they sat thus, his hand found hers, and their hands remained as they listened, close locked together—”

Queer isn’t it? The similarity. This new world is not quite so new as might appear. And on the whole I must say I prefer the hand to the antennae.

Not but what there are great advantages about the new Radio method as thus applied. Before John Strongface (I think that was his name in the New England Novel either that or John Ironheart) could get Priscilla to that pew in the church where he held her hand he had to walk eight miles through the forest on his snow shoes with bears after him and after the service was over he had to help her put on her wraps and tie her muffler round her neck and take her home four miles and eat pumpkin pie with her mother.

Whereas Eduardo with his Radio set! a cinch! No trouble about taking her home, no expense, nothing. All he has to do is to “cut her out.” It is done like this.

“Somehow he felt that the vibration of the girl’s battery was growing fainter. “Tired, love,” he whispered (ZZZZ) (a whisper is indicated by four loud blue sparks). “A little,” she amplified. “Then let us cut out,” signalled Eduardo, “and tomorrow night at eight, seated comfortably in our armchairs we will listen to the Pittsburgh orchestra.” “That will be lovely dearest,” she answered, (QQQ)—

Then this pure girl – she was taking pure mathematics and pure physics at the Schenectady Technical High School – clicked out her simple prayers on her Radio, and sank to rest.”

There! Out of all which there seems to grow a moral. I could feel it growing while I was writing this, but it seemed to slip away from me at the end. Something about all the rush and bustle of our modern life, full of inventions and machinery and wonders, leaving us no further on after all, eh, what?

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Roughing It in the Bush

My Plans for Moose Hunting
in the Canadian Wilderness

The season is now opening when all those who have a manly streak in them like to get out into the bush and “rough it” for a week or two of hunting and fishing. For myself, I never feel that the autumn has been well spent unless I can get out after the moose. And when I go I like to go right into the bush and “rough it” – get clear away from civilization, out in the open, and take fatigue or hardship just as it comes.

So this year I am making all my plans to get away for a couple of weeks of moose hunting along with my brother George and my friend Tom Gass. We generally go together because we are all of us men who like the rough stuff and are tough enough to stand the hardship of living in the open. The place we go to is right in the heart of the primitive Canadian forest, among big timber, broken with lakes as still as glass, just the very ground for moose.

We have a kind of lodge up there. It’s just a rough place that we put up, the three of us, the year before last – built out of tamarack logs faced with a broad axe. The flies, while we were building it, were something awful. Two of the men that we sent in there to build it were so badly bitten that we had to bring them out a hundred miles to a hospital. None of us saw the place while we were building it – we were all busy at the time – but the teamsters who took in our stuff said it was the worst season for the black flies that they ever remembered.

Still we hung to it, in spite of the flies, and stuck at it till we got it built. It is, as I say, only a plain place but good enough to rough it in. We have one big room with a stone fireplace, and bedrooms round the sides, with a wide verandah, properly screened, all along the front. The verandah has a row of upright tamaracks for its posts and doesn’t look altogether bad. In the back part we have quarters where our man sleeps. We had an ice-house knocked up while they were building and water laid on in pipes from a stream. So that on the whole the place has a kind of rough comfort about it – good enough anyway for fellows hunting moose all day.

The place, nowadays, is not hard to get at. The government has just built a colonization highway, quite all right for motors, that happens to go within a hundred yards of our lodge.

We can get the railway for a hundred miles, and then the highway for forty, and the last hundred yards we can walk. But this season we are going to cut out the railway and go the whole way from the city in George’s car with our kit with us.

George has one of those great big cars with a roof and thick glass sides. Personally none of the three of us would have preferred to ride in a luxurious darned thing like that. Tom says that as far as he is concerned he’d much sooner go into the bush over a rough trail in a buckboard, and for my own part a team of oxen would be more the kind of thing that I’d wish.

However the car is there, so we might as well use the thing especially as the provincial government has built the fool highway right into the wilderness. By taking the big car also we can not only carry all the hunting outfit that we need but we can also, if we like, shove in a couple of small trunks with a few clothes. This may be necessary as it seems that somebody has gone and slapped a great big frame hotel right there in the wilderness, not half a mile from the place we go to. The hotel we find a regular nuisance. It gave us the advantage of electric light for our lodge (a thing none of us care about), but it means more fuss about clothes. Clothes, of course, don’t really matter when a fellow is roughing it in the bush, but Tom says that we might find it necessary to go over to the hotel in the evenings to borrow coal oil or a side of bacon or any rough stuff that we need; and they do such a lot of dressing up at these fool hotels now, that if we do go over for bacon or anything in the evening we might just as well slip on our evening clothes, as we could chuck them off the minute we get back. George thinks it might not be a bad idea – just as a way of saving all our energy for getting after the moose – to dine each evening at the hotel itself. He knew some men who did that last year and they told him that the time saved for moose hunting in that way is extraordinary. George’s idea is that we could come in each night with our moose – such and such a number as the case might be – either bringing them with us or burying them where they die – change our things, slide over to the hotel and get dinner and then beat it back into the bush by moonlight and fetch in the moose. It seems they have a regular two dollar table d’hôte dinner at the hotel – just rough stuff of course but after all, as we all admit, we don’t propose to go out into the wilds to pamper ourselves with high feeding: a plain hotel meal in a home-like style at two dollars a plate is better than cooking up a lot of rich stuff over a camp fire.

If we do dine at the hotel we could take our choice each evening between going back into the bush by moonlight to fetch in the dead moose from the different caches where we had hidden them, or sticking round the hotel itself for a while. It seems that there is dancing there. Nowadays such a lot of women and girls get the open air craze for the life in the bush that these big wilderness hotels are crowded with them. There is something about living in the open that attracts modern women and they like to get right away from everybody and everything; and of course hotels of this type in the open are nowadays always well closed in with screens so that there are no flies or anything of that sort.

So it seems that there is dancing at the hotel every evening – nothing on a large scale or pretentious – just an ordinary hardwood floor – they may wax it a little for all I know – and some sort of plain, rough Italian orchestra that they fetch up from the city. Not that any of us care for dancing. It’s a thing that personally we wouldn’t bother with. But it happens that there are a couple of young girls that Tom knows that are going to be staying at the hotel and of course naturally he wants to give them a good time. They are only eighteen and twenty (sisters) and that’s really younger than we care for, but with young girls like that – practically kids – any man wants to give them a good time. So Tom says, and I think quite rightly, that as the kids are going to be there we may as well put in an appearance at the hotel and see that they are having a good time. Their mother is going to be with them too, and of course we want to give her a good time as well; in fact I think I will lend her my moose rifle and let her go out and shoot a moose. One thing we are all agreed upon in the arrangement of our hunting trip, is in not taking along anything to drink. Drinking spoils a trip of that sort. We all remember how in the old days we’d go out into a camp in the bush (I mean before there used to be any highway or any hotel) and carry in rye whiskey in demijohns (two dollars a gallon it was) and sit around the camp fire drinking it in the evenings.

But there’s nothing in it. We all agree that the law being what it is, it is better to stick to it. It makes a fellow feel better. So we shall carry nothing in. I don’t say that one might not have a flask or something in one’s pocket in the car; but only as a precaution against accident or cold. And when we get to our lodge we all feel that we are a darned sight better without it. If we should need anything – though it isn’t likely – there are still three cases of old Scotch whiskey, kicking around the lodge somewhere; I think they are kicking round in a little cement cellar with a locked door that we had made so as to use it for butter or anything of that sort. Anyway there are three, possibly four, or maybe, five, cases of Scotch there and if we should for any reason want it, there it is. But we are hardly likely to touch it – unless we hit a cold snap, or a wet spell; – then we might; or if we strike hot dry weather. Tom says he thinks there are a couple of cases of champagne still in the cellar; some stuff that one of us must have shot in there just before prohibition came in. But we’ll hardly use it. When a man is out moose hunting from dawn to dusk he hasn’t much use for champagne, not till he gets home anyway. The only thing that Tom says the champagne might come in useful for would be if we cared to ask the two kids over to some sort of dinner; it would be just a rough kind of camp dinner (we could hardly ask their mother to it) but we think we could manage it. The man we keep there used to be a butler in England, or something of the sort, and he could manage some kind of rough meal where the champagne might fit in.

There’s only one trouble about our plans for our fall camp that bothers us just a little. The moose are getting damn scarce about that place. There used, so they say, to be any quantity of them. There’s an old settler up there that our man buys all our cream from who says that he remembers when the moose were so thick that they would come up and drink whiskey out of his dipper. But somehow they seem to have quit the place. Last year we sent our man out again and again looking for them and he never saw any. Three years ago a boy that works at the hotel said he saw a moose in the cow pasture back of the hotel and there were the tracks of a moose seen last year at the place not ten miles from the hotel where it had come to drink. But apart from these two exceptions the moose hunting has been poor.

Still, what does it matter? What we want is the life, the rough life just as I have described it. If any moose comes to our lodge we’ll shoot him, or tell the butler to. But if not – well, we’ve got along without for ten years, I don’t suppose we shall worry.

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Abolishing the Heroine

(A Plea that Fewer Heroines and More Crimes Would Add Sprightliness to our Fiction)

I want to lead a bold national movement for the abolition of the Heroine out of our literature. In my opinion the time has come when this young woman has grown to be a nuisance. All our stories would be much better without her. She just clutters them all up.

What I mean is this. Open any story of adventure or excitement or crime; and you find that it runs along admirably for a certain distance but just when it is getting exciting and worth while, in steps The Heroine and spoils it.

Let me give an example of what I mean. Every reader of up-to-date fiction will recognize the thing in a minute. Call the story:

AFTER MIDNIGHT
or,

How the Heroine
Spoils a Crime Story

Now we begin.

John Curbstone is a young bachelor clubman of great wealth. He is a man of culture, being a graduate of Harvard University. (In all these stories Harvard is the best place to graduate them from. It sounds far better than the Minnesota Agricultural College.) He is a keen sportsman because this enables him to wear the right kind of breeches for the illustrator to use – shaped like a ham at the hips and tight at the knee. All Harvard graduates wear them. He plays polo, golf and bridge, would drink brandy and soda if he could get it, and has one of those clean-shaven aristocratic faces seen only in a democratic country.

He lives – with a butler who doesn’t count and some servants who don’t come into the story – in a large sandstone house on Riverside Drive. This family residence had belonged to Curbstone’s father before him, which shows that his family is an old one. Indeed the Curbstones have lived on that street for thirty years which gives young Curbstone a sense of noblesse oblige towards the whole district up to 125th Street.

The scene is now laid.

Returning home late one night from his club (he never leaves his club till it shuts), John realizes that his house has been burglarized. In the dining-room the side-board has been rudely broken open, apparently with a jimmy. A glass still reeking with ginger ale, rests on the top of it; an open bottle, evidently opened with a jimmy, is near it. In the corner of the room the iron safe has been forced, most likely with a jimmy. There is a litter of bonds and family jewelry on the floor. It is clear that the burglar has been interrupted at his work. It is likely that he is still on the premises.

John Curbstone stands motionless in the centre of the room listening. There is absolute silence. There is no sound in the still house but the ticking of a clock.

Then as Curbstone listens intently his ear just catches a faint sound from behind the closed door of a cupboard. The burglar must be there hidden behind the door! Curbstone draws his revolver from his hip (it was the revolver that he had used that night for playing poker), and levels it full at the cupboard.

“I shall count three,” he announced in clear even tones, “and if you are not out of that cupboard then, I shall fire through the door.” Curbstone counted, still in clear, even tones, “One, two,” – but just as he was going to say three, an agitated voice exclaimed, “Oh, please don’t shoot,” the cupboard door opened and there stepped out into the room—

A girl! Just think of it, a girl! And what makes it worse, only a mere slip of a girl! If it had been a big one – you know, one of those great big fine-looking ones it wouldn’t have been so bad. But this one is only a slip!

She came forward towards John Curbstone, her large blue eyes distracted with apprehension. She was in evening dress with a light peignoir, or baignoire or boudoir, thrown about her shoulders. “Please don’t shoot,” she repeated (at this point in the story the illustrator gets in his work and doesn’t have to read any further).

Curbstone lowered his revolver.

“So,” he said, sternly, “you are a thief.” The girl shuddered into herself. The word seemed to sting her. She didn’t mind breaking open Curbstone’s safe but when she was called a “thief” she was stung.

“I’m not a thief,” she panted.

There! Let us leave her there a little panting while I talk about her. I have seen that girl come out of that cupboard and similar places so often that I’m sick of her. I know that just as soon as the man in the story opens a cupboard door, or draws aside a curtain, out comes “a slip of a girl.” He hears a noise in the attic. What is there? A girl. He hears some one in the cellar. Who is it? A girl. Who did it? A girl, a mere child!

Now what I say is that this kind of thing is ruining our best stories. They start in excitement and end in slush. In the story I have just outlined when the cupboard door opened, Curbstone ought to have been confronted with something worth while – a burglar – a real one, with short-cropped hair under a low cap, with a dark lantern in one hand and a jimmy in the other. Then when Curbstone said sternly, “So, you are a thief,” the burglar could answer, “I sure am.” Or better still the door might open, and three burglars come out, or even four, in short a cupboardful of burglars. Even if it has to be a girl, why make her a “slip”? Why not let it read “There stepped out of the cupboard a great big girl about six feet high and at least seventeen inches around the neck.” In any such case the adventure and excitement of the story could continue. There could be a tremendous fight – in which let us hope, they might have killed Curbstone and sent him back to his club dead and so put him out of literature for ever.

But it is understood that a man, or at least a Harvard graduate, must not use force against a slip of a girl. So in default of a decent ending the story has to run off into slush.

Ending it up is quite simple: it would probably be done somewhat as follows:

“I’m not a thief,” she repeated.

She looked at him for a minute proudly defiantly: for she came of an old family just as proud as his. Her people had had the same summer cottage in the Adirondacks for six years running.

John Curbstone looked at the girl calmly. “Miss Chetwynde,” he said, “if you are not a thief, will you kindly tell me why you tried to rob my safe?” When he calls her “Miss Chetwynde,” this is meant as an indication to the reader that Curbstone knows her.

“Oh, how can I explain?” exclaimed the girl wringing her hands, “you wouldn’t understand! you couldn’t understand! I wanted the money so much! There is so much to do with money, so much suffering to alleviate! And you with your great wealth you do nothing! Ask yourself,” she continued, her voice thrilled with earnestness, “what do you do for social service, for sanitation, for reforestation, for the girl guides, for the boy scouts—”

John Curbstone hung his head with a groan. “Nothing,” he said.

“This afternoon,” the girl went on, “I came to your office. I asked you for a hundred thousand dollars for the Metropolitan Police Picnic, and you refused!”

“Miss Chetwynde,” said Curbstone in the same clear even tones that he had used earlier, “I did not refuse. I asked you to marry me. It was you who did me the honour of refusal.”

“It maddened me,” the girl went on, “and I determined to take your money, yes take it, and give it to the Police. If that is stealing I don’t care. Then I came here to rob you. The Police themselves lent me the jimmy! Oh, it was madness, madness—”

She paused. They were both silent for a moment. Then Curbstone reached out and took her by the hand.

“Miss Chetwynde – Alice,” he said, “don’t you think that we have both been a little wrong—”

She looked up timidly. “A little, John dear,” she murmured.

—

And with that the story is ended, and looks just like any of the other two hundred that are published every month. But what I want is to see that disturbing girl cut out, and real adventure put in – in short more crime and plenty of it.

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My Affair with My Landlord

As it is now pretty generally known that I have murdered the landlord of our flat, I feel that I should like to make some sort of public explanation of the matter.

I have been assured on all sides that there is no need to do this, but my own feelings on the question were so acute that I felt myself compelled to call upon the Superintendent of Police and offer him an exact account of what I had done. He told me that there is absolutely no need to offer any explanation at all. It is neither customary nor desirable.

“You have killed your landlord,” he said, “very good, what of it?” I asked him whether it was not, in a sense, a matter for the law to deal with. But he shook his head. “In what way?” he asked.

I told him that I felt that the affair was putting me in a somewhat false position; that the congratulations that I have been receiving from my friends, and even from strangers, were perhaps, if the full circumstances were known, hardly merited; in short, that I should like a certain publicity given to the whole surroundings of the act.

“Very good,” said the Superintendent, “you are entitled to fill out a form if you wish to do so.” He searched among his papers.

“Did you say,” he asked, “that you have killed your landlord, or that you are going to kill him?” “I have killed him,” I said firmly. “Very good,” said the officer, “we use separate forms.” He gave me a long printed slip with blanks to fill in – my age, occupation, reasons (if any) for the killing, etc.

“What shall I put,” I asked, “under the heading of reasons?”

“I think,” he answered, “that it will be better to put simply, ‘no reasons,’ or if you like, the ‘usual reasons’!” With that he bowed me politely out of his office, expressing, as he did so, the hope that I would bury the landlord and not leave him lying about.

To me the interview was unsatisfactory. I am well aware that the Superintendent was within the strict nicety of the law. No doubt if every case of the shooting of a landlord were made a matter of inquiry the result would be embarrassing and tedious.

The shooting is generally done in connection with a rise of rent, and nothing more needs to be said about it. “I am increasing your rent another $10.00 a month,” says the landlord. “All right,” says the tenant, “I’ll shoot you.” Sometimes he does, sometimes he forgets to.

But my own case was quite different. The proposal of the National Tenant League to give me a gold medal next Saturday has brought things to a head and forces an explanation.

I recall distinctly the time, now some five years ago, when my wife and I first took our flat. The landlord showed us over it himself, and I am free to confess that there was nothing in his manner, or very little indeed, to suggest anything out of the normal.

Only one small incident stuck in my mind. He apologized for the lack of cupboard space.

“There are not enough cupboards in this flat,” he said.

It made me slightly uncomfortable to hear him speak in this way. “But look,” I said, “how large and airy this pantry is. It is at least four feet each way.”

He shook his head and repeated that the cupboards were small. “I must build in better ones,” he said.

Two months later he built in new cupboards. It gave me a shock of surprise – a touch of the uncanny – to notice that he did not raise the rent. “Are you not raising the rent because of the cupboards?” I asked. “No,” he said, “they only cost me fifty dollars.” “But, my dear fellow,” I objected, “surely the interest on fifty dollars is sixty dollars a year?”

He admitted this, but said that he would rather not raise the rent. Thinking it over, I decided that his conduct might be due to incipient paresis or coagulation of the arteries of the head. At that time I had no idea of killing him. That came later.

I recall no incident of importance till the spring of the year following. My landlord appeared unexpectedly one day with apologies for intruding (a fact which of itself seemed suspicious), and said that he proposed to repaper the entire apartment. I expostulated in vain.

“The paper,” I said, “is only ten years old.” “It is,” he said, “but wall paper has gone up to double its value since that time.” “Very good, then,” I said firmly, “you must raise the rent twenty dollars a month for the paper.” “I shall not,” he answered. The incident led to a distinct coolness between us for some months.

The next episodes were of a more pronounced character. Everybody recalls the great increases of rent due to the terrific rise in building costs. My landlord refused to raise the rent of my flat.

“The cost of building,” I said, “has increased at least one hundred per cent.”

“Very good,” he answered, “but I am not building. I have always been getting ten per cent on my investment in this property, and I am still getting it.”

“Think of your wife,” I said.

“I won’t,” he answered.

“It is your duty,” I went on, “to think of her. Let me tell you that only yesterday I saw in the papers a letter from a landlord, one of the most beautiful letters I ever saw (from a landlord), in which he said the rise in the cost of building materials compelled him to think of his wife and children. It was a touching appeal.”

“I don’t care,” my landlord answered, “I’m not married.”

“Ah,” I said, “not married.” It was, I think, at this moment that the idea first occurred to me that the man might be put out of the way.

There followed the episode of November. My readers will all remember the fifty per cent increase of rents made to celebrate Armistice Day. My landlord refused to join in the celebrations.

This lack of patriotism in the fellow irritated me greatly. The same thing happened at the time of the rise of rents that was instituted to celebrate the visit of Marshal Foch, and the later rise – twenty-five per cent, if I remember rightly – that was made as a tribute to the ex-service men.

It was purely a patriotic movement, done in a spontaneous way without premeditation.

I have heard many of the soldiers say that it was their first welcome home, and that they would never forget it.

It was followed a little later by the rise of rents held as a welcome to the Prince of Wales. No better congratulation could have been planned.

My landlord, alas, remained outside of all this. He made no increase in his rent. “I have,” he said, “my ten per cent, and that is enough.”

I know now that the paresis or coagulation must have overwhelmed one entire lobe or hemisphere of his head.

I was meditating action.

The crisis came last month. A sharp rise in rent had been very properly instituted to counterbalance the fall in the German mark. It was based quite evidently on the soundest business reasoning.

If the fall in the mark is not countered in this way, it is plain that we are undone. The cheap German mark will enable the Germans to take away our houses.

I waited for three days, looking in vain for a notice of increase in my rent.

Then I went to visit my landlord in his office. I admit that I was armed, but in extenuation I want to say that I knew that I had to deal with an abnormal, aberrated man, one-half of whose brain was now coagulated.

I wasted no words on preliminaries.

“You have seen,” I said, “this fall of the German mark.”

“Yes,” he answered, “what of it?”

“Simply this,” I said. “Are you going to raise my rent or are you not?”

“No,” he said doggedly, “I am not.”

I raised the revolver and fired. He was sitting sideways to me as I did so. I fired, in all, four shots. I could see through the smoke that one, at least, of the shots had cut his waistcoat into strips, a second had ripped off his collar, while the third and fourth had cut through his braces at the back. He was visibly in a state of collapse. It was doubtful if he could reach the street. But even if he could, it was certain that he couldn’t walk upon it.

I left him as he was and reported, as I have said, to the police.

If the Tenant League medal is given to me, I want it to be with full understanding of the case.

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Why I Refuse to Play Golf

I am old enough to remember very distinctly the first coming of the game of golf to the city where I live. It came in that insidious but forceful way that characterizes everything Scottish. It was similar to the spread of Scottish Banking, the Scottish Church, and Scotch whiskey.

The exact circumstances were these. One afternoon in April when the wind was on the new grass, three Scotsmen went out to a hill slope near the town. They carried with them three crooked sticks and a little ball. There was a firmness in their manner but nothing obviously criminal. They laid the ball down and began to beat it about on the grass. In fairness it must be admitted that they made no parade of the matter. They paid no attention to the few mystified people who watched them. At the end of about an hour they were seen to sit down under a briar bush: there they remained for some time: it was thought at the time that they were either praying or drinking whiskey. Opinion was divided. But the real truth was that they had formed themselves into a Golf Club.

This, I say, was on a Saturday. Had the city been well advised these men could have been arrested on the following Monday. A judicious application of the Vagrancy Laws or rather free interpretation of the Sedition Acts might have forestalled at the outset a grave national peril.

But nothing was done. Indeed at the moment little was thought of the matter, or, at any rate, little was manifested in the shape of public indignation or public protest. Even when six Scotsmen appeared on the ground the following Saturday, and twelve the week after, and twenty-four on the last Saturday in the month, few people, if any, realized the magnitude of what was happening. The news that a Golf Club had been formed in Montreal was presently printed quite openly, in the newspapers as if it were an ordinary event.

One must admit, even, that a very lively curiosity mixed with something approaching to envy began to surround the afternoon gatherings of the Scotsmen. There is something in the sweep of the wind over the April grass, something in the open space and the blue sky that conveys an insidious appeal to the lower side of a man’s nature. It is difficult to sit indoors at one’s desk and to know that other men are striding over the turf. Moreover the ingenious expedient of carrying out a ball and beating it round with sticks supplied a colour of activity and purpose that acted as a drug upon the conscience. Had it not been for this use of the sticks and the ball the players would have appeared as mere loafers. But the evident earnestness with which they followed their avocation robbed it of every appearance of idleness; and the public was entirely deceived as to its character.

In short, it was not long before the game began to exercise an evident effect upon those who at first had been idle spectators. They became anxious to join in. Here and there, by a very obvious and cunning piece of policy, they were invited to try their hand. The spectator then found to his surprise the peculiar difficulty of the game. He discovered that, simple though it looked, it was not possible for him to place the ball on the ground, take a drink of Scotch whiskey, and then hit it with the stick. He tried again and again but failed each time. The natural result was that he solicited membership in the Club, and reappeared on the following Saturday with a ball and stick of his own and with a flask of whiskey on his hip. The Saturday after that he turned up in a pair of knickerbocker trousers, a round tam o’shanter hat and a Cluny Macpherson tartan over his shoulder; after that, as far as any general utility to the community went, the man was lost.

I remember well, some eighteen months after the Club started, realizing how far already the movement had gone when I heard the head of our greatest bank accost the president of a railway, on St. James Street, with the words, “Hoot, mon! it’s a braw morning the day!” Up till that time language of the sort would have come under the criminal code.

I have since learned that this same kind of thing was going on all over the country just as it was in my own city. Men were appearing in the business streets in the Cluny Macpherson tartan. Some even had tall feathers stuck sideways in their tam o’shanters. At more than one public dinner the music of the bagpipes was not only tolerated but even applauded. On every Saturday and presently even on week days men were seen lifting long bags filled with crooked sticks on to the street cars.

In those days the public at large was still innocent and ignorant. We had not even heard the word “propaganda.” Otherwise we should have seen under all this a dangerous organized movement for the spread of Presbyterianism and the sale of the poetry of Robert Burns.

The original Club of which I speak soon took further steps. They erected a kind of wooden structure on the ground where they played. It was a modest affair – merely two large rooms, one a sitting-room, with easy chairs, for talking about golf in, and the other a rest or silence room for thinking about golf in. The ground on which they played was supposedly public property. But any attempt at ejectment was rendered out of the question by the fact that they had enrolled among their membership all the leaders of the bar and all the senior judges.

This last point, indeed, went strongly in their favour throughout. Even when they had left the modest building of which I speak and were spreading over the landscape, it was plain that the game of golf had insinuated itself most daringly into the structure of our legal institutions. A decision of the courts decided that the game of golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort. Another decision laid down the principle that a golf club need never close the bar, not being a bar within the legal meaning of the term, but a place of rest insomuch as the drinks sold are not drinks as known to the statute but a form of recuperation. In the same way, the pay given to a boy attendant, or caddy, is not pay but a reward, and exempts him from the Cruelty to Children Act. The excess profits tax, the license tax and the property tax do not apply, it is held, to the premises of a golf club, as it is a religious institution; and both the Privy Council and the Supreme Courts are said to be preparing decisions to the effect that consuming whiskey in or near a golf club does not constitute a breach of the law provided that it is taken only when needed and in the proportion or quantity needed and that it is not made the subject of treating.

But I anticipate: these decisions belong, of course, to later days. I was saying that in my own town, and no doubt everywhere else, the golf club idea once started and established soon spread. The original ground was abandoned. A vast stretch of beautiful land that might easily have supported hundreds and hundreds of hogs was laid out into a golf course. It was whispered that the ground was not purchased but seized; this is no doubt untrue, but it is an undeniable fact that this beautiful hog pasture was presently laid out into flat lawns and greens. In reality, nothing more is needed for the driving of a golf ball except a straight piece of air two hundred yards long. But it is a nice pretence of the game that a whole landscape must be seized and occupied to the exclusion of agriculture, manufacture, and all other uses. In the case of which I speak, the vast purposelessness of the affair was concealed by the cunning device of setting out tomato cans and red flags at irregular intervals. By walking among these the players are made to appear as if pursuing some known object. The position of the flags are so contrived that each player is led in a circular course and returns at intervals to the club house where he may take a drink and start again. Each set of drinks is call a “round,” and of course an expert player can make a round far more rapidly than a beginner.

One large club, I say, was established. Yet even after it was definitely in operation very few people realized the way in which it was disturbing our civic life. It was noticed, indeed, that the schedule of trains of our greatest railway had undergone marked changes. A great number of suburban trains were introduced and a sharp discrimination made against transcontinental and other needless traffic. A branch line was built in a convenient situation to form a natural obstacle, or bunker, for the golf course. But few people connected these changes with the fact that the president of the railway and the entire directorate were members of the golf club.

A new stage of development presently appeared. There is a certain kind of animal, so biology teaches us, which increases its numbers by simply dividing itself in two. The original animal is called, I think, an amoeba. But the real type of the species is the golf club. If you put one of them in the landscape and leave it there for a year or so you presently come back and find two; and if the two are left unmolested for a short period they presently turn into four. Where the landscape is especially favourable, where nature has spread out her fertile land all ready to make bunkers and her pure streams all ready to mix with Scotch whiskey, the two clubs will even turn into six.

Such has been the case in our city, and I imagine, in every other. There are now twelve golf clubs in the vicinity with ten others being organized. The area now covered occupies, it is said, twelve thousand acres. One passes in the train from the crowded confines of the city to the wide expanses of the golf clubs. Everywhere there are little greens, and tin-cans and red flags, and club members in knickerbockers. Each year the city is more and more crowded. Each year the golf area is bigger and bigger.

Nor is there any public protest. Each year more and more men, hitherto respectable God-fearing citizens, are being caught in the lure of it. It is difficult to say just what the fascination is. But it is there. Sometimes I think that it lies in pretending to be a Scotsman. It may be that: there are so many things about the Scotch that attract – their contempt of rain, their peculiar nerve in wearing a hen’s feather in their hat, their comprehensive ideas on damnation – that it may well be that the golf members are simply trying to be Scotsmen. In addition to that I blame Harry Lauder a good deal: and undoubtedly Robert Burns has a lot to answer for. But taking it as you will the golf club has become a grave national menace.

In my own city we are, I suppose, beyond redemption. We have golf tournaments, golf teas, and golf dinners: golf trains and golf cars and golf motors. The use of the bagpipes is everywhere tolerated and we eat Haggis on St. Andrew’s Day. But if there are any cities in which this insidious movement is still in its infancy, I can only exhort them to suppress it while there is yet time.

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–10–
The Approach
of the Comet

Do You Really Care if It Hits You?

By this time everybody knows that a comet is due to hit the earth early in the month of June. Last week it passed through the Constellation of Capricorn going like blue-lightning. It is now moving through Virgo to beat – all records. At the moment of writing, it can hardly be more than a few thousand billion miles away: in short, it is right upon us. Just three weeks before the celebration of the Fourth of July the comet will hit us: in fact there will not be any Fourth of July. There will be nothing but a hole where it used to be.

Strangely enough I was one of the very first people to know what was going to happen. It is my custom every now and then to visit our University Observatory, the astronomer in charge of which is a friend of mine. About three weeks ago on a clear, still night, I found him peeping and peering into his telescope with evident excitement.

“This is most gratifying,” he said, rubbing his hands, “most gratifying.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“A comet,” he said, “is coming straight towards us. We learned yesterday that it had been seen from the observatory at Bungwelo in Java; there seems to be no doubt that its path is directed exactly towards us.”

“Will it hit us?” I asked.

“Undoubtedly. But astronomical interest will not centre so much in the mere moment of collision as in the antecedent period, possibly extending over thirty-six hours, during which time we shall have unparalleled opportunities of observation never enjoyed before. In fact, I may say that the thirty-six hours before the comet intersects our path will be quite unique.”

“So I should think,” I answered, “and no doubt the collision itself will be not half bad.”

The astronomer shook his head. “The mere collision itself,” he said, “or, more properly, the intersection of two orbits, will be commonplace. A collossal collision occurred in Sagittarius last year involving probably the destruction of a star of the first magnitude. We can hardly hope for any phenomena of such prime interest in connection with our own globe. Attention will be focussed chiefly upon the opportunities for testing the new theory of light during the hours just preceding the precipitation of the comet against the earth. There will undoubtedly be keen controversy in the astronomical world during that period: unfortunately it will be all too brief for adequate discussion.”

“And what,” I said, “will become of us after the comet has hit us?”

“That is the most interesting question of all. But unfortunately there is no agreement on the subject. According to one school the generation of heat in the impact will resolve us into a burning nebula.”

“That’s nice,” I said, “and what do the other schools say?”

“According to them we shall not be dissolved into a nebula at all, but broken into a group of say half a million burning asteroids composed of a nucleus of molten matter, and a corona of incandescent hydrogen gas, but still revolving in our orbit with scarcely any displacement.”

“Great!” I said, “I don’t wonder that you are interested. But now tell me. How long will it take for the comet to reach us?”

“It is a matter of rather nice calculation,” replied the astronomer. “I could hardly calculate it off-hand; one would be compelled to use a series of logarithms.”

“Use them,” I said, “use them.”

The astronomer began to calculate, then paused and looked up quickly from his work. “I am assuming a constant density of the ether,” he said. “That’s all right,” I answered. He worked again in silence for a while, and then again spoke.

“I am disregarding all perturbation of the outer planets,” he said.

“Certainly,” I said, “to Hades with them.”

Presently the astronomer stopped figuring.

“Well,” I asked, “what is it?”

“Speaking approximately, and assuming an elliptical path with a more or less hypothetical focus—”

“Forget it,” I said, “when does the comet hit us? Stick to that.”

“On the tenth of next June.”

He spoke quite calmly; for the moment it gave me a shock.

“And who,” I said, “gets it in the neck first? I mean, when the comet hits the earth, which side of the earth, which country, gets hit? Does it hit us, or does it hit the Japanese, or does it bump into Soviet Russia, or where?”

The astronomer shook his head. “I can’t say,” he said, “and meantime will you excuse me if I return to my telescope. There is a very interesting disturbance going on tonight among the planetary asteroids. I don’t like to miss it.”

“Yes,” I answered, “and they expect the same kind of thing at the big hockey match, so I’ll say good-night.”

I spoke cheerfully, but after I left him I felt troubled. On the street I noticed the people going to and fro, and surging in and out of the moving-picture houses, and hanging on to the tail end of the street cars: talking and chattering as if nothing was going to happen.

“Alas!” I thought, “what will they do when they hear that a comet is going to strike us on the tenth of June?”

For about two weeks I carried round this terrible knowledge alone. I say “alone” because naturally the astronomical world doesn’t count. They knew, of course, but they saw no particular reason for talking about it: the January disturbance among the planetary asteroids was too absorbing.

During these two weeks I bore the fate of the world all alone. It seemed dreadful to think that on the tenth of June it would all be over and that the world that I had known would end in a collision and that some of my friends would be dissolved into a nebula and others turned into molten asteroids enveloped in a corona of incandescent hydrogen. The situation had, I admit, a few advantages, I raised a note at my bank payable on the eleventh of June with a peculiar sense of gratification: and at my club at meal times it was pleasant to look round the room at certain members (I must not name them) and reflect that they would soon be enveloped in a corona of hydrogen.

But take it all in all it was a depressing period.

And then, strangely enough, the entire outlook altered. The astronomers having finished their calculations – announced to the public that the comet was coming straight at us and was due to hit us: and to my surprise I heard a man only last night telling another about it as they hung on the straps of a street car. “I see,” he said, “that a comet is due to hit us in the month of June. You didn’t notice it? It was in the paper this afternoon. It seems it is coming straight at us and it is to collide with us on the tenth, I think it said, anyway sometime early in June.” And at this they both laughed.

I find the same attitude everywhere. I heard a little boy last Sunday, on his way into church, say to his mother, “Mother, is it true that a comet is going to hit the world?” And she said, “Yes, dear, the newspapers say so.” “And where shall we be after it hits us?” “I suppose, darling,” she answered, with a touch of reverence, I admit, in her voice, “that we shall be dissolved into a nebular nucleus with an enveloping corona of incandescent hydrogen.” After that they passed into church, and I heard no more.

The situation puzzles me. Here we are about to crash into a comet in a few months time, and nobody seems to worry at all. The world goes on its way as if nothing were going to happen. In my own town we are going on building a new hotel to accommodate a thousand guests. Why? Where will those guests be after the comet hits them? Asteroids. In Washington they are starting preparations now for the Fourth of July. What will be left of the Fourth of July when it comes? Gas, and nothing else.

If I were a psychologist I should start up theories about the impossibility of frightening all the people all the time: I would explain that as long as everybody is going to be destroyed all together nobody minds it: it’s only the invidiousness of being destroyed alone that is distressing. In fact, I find that now that the others don’t mind, I don’t care either. I have raised a second note at the bank payable on the eleventh of June, and as a matter of fact if the world is not destroyed on the tenth I shall be, personally, a rather worse kind of asteroid than if it is.

Perhaps right there is the explanation of what is happening. We have got this unhappy world into such a miserable condition that in our hearts we don’t care if it is destroyed or not. We’ve got war debts to pay that run up to 300,000,000,000 dollars: we’ve got the Housing Question, and the Irish Question, and the Navy Question, and Bolshevism and Socialism and Atavism: the Treaty of Sèvres is broken, the German mark is falling, the League of Nations is creaking – in short, if the comet does hit us, who cares?

—

When I had written all that I took the manuscript over to a friend at the observatory to see if I had got the astronomical part of it right. And he says that it is wrong. He says that I have misunderstood things. It seems that we don’t hit the comet in the sense that ordinary plain people understand it, at all. He says that the intersection of our orbits will be confined to a conjunction of our path with the corona of the comet’s tail, or words to that effect. I asked him if we shall know it when it happens, and he said that by going up to the top of a high building and looking through a piece of smoked glass towards the constellation of Virgo the comet will be visible, presenting the appearance of a speck of dust with its tail comparable to the wing of a mosquito.

That’s pretty small business for a world catastrophe, isn’t it? As for me, having got used to the idea of destruction, I am worried now about the eleventh of June.

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–11–
Personal Experiments
with the Black Bass

It was my good fortune to spend a large part of the summer just past in fishing for bass. The season may be regarded as now definitely closed, and the time is appropriate for a scientific summarizing of the results achieved and the information gained.

My experiments are entitled to all the greater weight in as much as a large part of them were conducted in the immediate presence of so well known a man as Mr. John Counsell of Hamilton, Ontario, who acted as my assistant. Mr. Counsell very kindly permits me to say that all statements, measurements, and estimates of weight contained in the following discussion are personally vouched for by him. He has even offered to lend his oath, or any number of his oaths, to the accuracy of my statements. But it has been thought wiser not to use Mr. Counsell’s oath in print.

I take this opportunity in turn to express my high appreciation of the hardihood, the endurance and the quiet courage manifested by my assistant throughout our experiments. If Mr. Counsell was ever afraid of a bass I never knew it. I have seen him immersed in mud on the banks of the river where we fished. I have observed him submerged under rapids; I have seen Mr. Counsell fall from the top of rocks into water so deep and remain under so long that I was just cranking up our car to go home, and yet I never knew him to hesitate for a moment to attack a black bass at sight and kill it.

I can guarantee to anybody who is hesitating whether or not to invite Mr. Counsell to go fishing, that he is a man who may safely be taken anywhere where the bass are, and is an adornment to any party of sportsmen.

I turn therefore with added confidence to the tabulated results drawn by myself and Mr. Counsell from our experiments.

In the first place, we are able to throw much light on the vexed question as to the circumstances under which the bass bite. There has been a persistent belief that during the glare of the middle part of the day the bass do not bite. This belief is correct. They do not. It is also true that in the sunnier part of the morning itself the black bass do not, or does not, bite. Nor do they, or rather does it, bite during the more drowsy part of the afternoon.

Let the angler, therefore, on a day when the sun is bright in a cloudless sky, lay aside his rod from eight in the morning till six in the afternoon. On such a day as this the fish do not bite. The experienced angler knows this. He selects a suitable tree, lies down beneath it and waits. Nor do the bass, oddly enough, bite, on a cloudy day. The bass dislike clouds. Very often the appearance of a single cloud on the horizon is a sign for the experienced angler to retire to a quiet spot upon the bank and wait till the cloud goes by. It has been said that the bass bite well in the rain. This is an error. They don’t.

Another popular error that ought, in the interest of the young angler to be dispelled is that the bass bite in the evening; that is not so. The bass loves the day, and at the first sign of darkness it sinks to the bottom of the water from which it obstinately refuses to move.

I am well aware that the young angler might find himself seriously discouraged at what has just been said. “What then!” he might ask, “do the bass never bite at all? Is it never possible to get a bite from them?” To this I answer very positively that they both do and it is.

The results, in fine, of the experiments carried on by Mr. Counsell and myself lead us to the conclusion that the bass bites at midnight. We offer this only as a preliminary hypothesis, for which perhaps a more ample verification will be found in the ensuing season. We ourselves have never fished till midnight. And we observed that even the most persistent angler, as the darkness gathers around him, becomes discouraged, and at some time before midnight, quits. Here he is in error. Our advice to the angler in all such cases is to keep on until midnight. The black bass which is chary of biting in the glare of the day and which dislikes the cool of the evening, must, we argue, be just in the mood needed at midnight.

Nor let the young angler run away with the idea that the black bass never bites in the daytime. If he (the young angler) does this he must be hauled in again on the reel of actual experience. They do and they have. I recall in particular one case in point in the experiments of Mr. Counsell and myself. At the time of which I speak we were fishing from a rocky ledge at the edge of the river that was the scene of our operations. The circumstances were most propitious. The hour was just before daylight, so that there was still an agreeable sense of chilliness in the air. It was raining heavily as we took our places on the rock. Much of this rain, though not all of it, had gone down our shirts. There had been a certain amount of lightning, two cracks of which had hit Mr. Counsell in the neck. In short, the surroundings were all that the most ardent fisherman could desire.

For a moment the rain cleared, a first beam of sunlight appeared through the woods on the bank, and at that very moment Mr. Counsell called to me that he had a bite. I immediately dropped my rod into the river, and urged Mr. Counsell to avoid all excitement; to keep as calm as possible, and to maintain his hold upon his line. Mr. Counsell in turn exhorted me to be cool, and assured me of his absolute readiness should the fish bite again to take whatever action the circumstances might seem to us to warrant. I asked him in the meantime whether he was prepared to give me an idea of the dimensions of the fish which had bitten him. He assured me that he could, and to my great delight informed me that the fish was at least three feet long. The reader may imagine, then, with what suppressed excitement Mr. Counsell and I waited for this monster to return and bite again. Nor had we long to wait. Not more than two or three minutes had elapsed when I suddenly saw my assistant’s line in violent commotion, Mr. Counsell exerting his whole strength in a magnificent combat with the fish. I called to Mr. Counsell to be cautious and adjured him to the utmost calmness, running up and down on the bank and waving my arms to emphasize what I said. But there was no need for such an exhortation. Mr. Counsell had settled down to one of those steady fights with the black bass which are the proudest moments in the angler’s life. The line was now drawn absolutely taut and motionless. Mr. Counsell was exerting his full strength at one end and the fish, apparently lying at a point of vantage at the very bottom of the river, was exerting its full strength at the other. But here intervened one of those disappointments which the angler must learn to bear as best he may. The bass is nothing if not cunning. And an older, larger fish of the extraordinary size and mass of the one in question shows often an almost incredible strategy in escaping from the hook. After a few minutes of hard strain my assistant suddenly became aware that the fish had left his hook, and at the very moment of escaping had contrived to fasten the hook deep into a log at the bottom of the river. Investigation with a pike pole showed this to be the case. This trick on the part of the bass is, of course, familiar to all experienced anglers. It was fortunate in this case that Mr. Counsell had contrived to get such an accurate estimate of the size of the fish before it escaped.

The young angler may well ask how it is that we are able to know the size of a fish as soon as it bites, without even the slightest glimpse of it. To this I can merely answer that we do know. It is, I suppose, an instinct. The young angler will get it himself if he goes on fishing long enough.

Nor need it be supposed that there is anything unusual or out of the way in the means of escape adopted by the particular bass in question. Indeed, I have on various occasions known the bass not merely to contrive to pass the hook into a log, but even, after it has been firmly hooked, to substitute a smaller fish than itself. I recall in particular one occasion when Mr. Counsell called to me that he had a fish. I ran to his side at once, encouraging and exhorting him as I did so. In this instance the fish came towards the top of the water with a rush: we were both able to distinguish it clearly as it moved below the surface. It was a magnificent black bass measuring seventeen inches from its face to its tail, and weighing four and a half pounds. The gleam of its scales as it shot through the foaming water is a sight that I shall not readily forget. The fish dived low. Meantime, Mr. Counsell had braced himself so as to exert his full strength and I placed myself behind him with my arms around his body to prevent the fish from dragging him into the stream. By this strategy the fish was thrown clear up on the rock, where Mr. Counsell attacked it at once and beat the breath out of it with a boat hook. But judge of our surprise when we found that the fish landed was not the fish originally caught on the hook. The bass had contrived in its downward plunge to free itself from the hook and to replace itself by a yellow perch six inches long.

From what has been said above, it is only too clear that the life of the black bass fisherman has its disappointments and its hardships. The black bass is wary and elusive, more crafty, for example, than the lobster, and a gamer fighter than the sardine. The angler must face danger and discomfort. He gets rained upon: he falls into the river: he gets struck by lightning. But, for myself, when the ice of the winter has cleared away and the new season opens up, I ask no better fate than to be out again at daybreak with Mr. Counsell sitting on a rock beside the river, with the rain soaking into our shirts, waiting for a bite.

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L’envoi:

The Faded Actor

I can call him to my mind as I have seen him burlesqued and parodied a hundred times – The Faded Actor. There he stands in his bell-shaped coat drawn at the waist and ample in the shirt. The battered hat that he handles in his elaborate gestures, and holds against his heart as he bows, is but the wreck of a hat that was. His faded trousers are tight upon his leg, drawn downwards with a strap, and carrying some lingering suggestion of the days of Beau Brummel and George the Fourth. His ample buttons are pieced out with string. His frilled cuffs are ostentatious in their raggedness.

From top to toe his creators have made a guy of him, a mean parody of forgotten graces. When he speaks his voice is raucous and rotund. There is something of Shakespeare in it, and something of gin. His face is a blossom that has bloomed overmuch. His feet move in long shoes, fitless, and so worn that he slides noiseless across the stage. Beneath his arm, as if to complete the pathos of his figure, is the rolled up manuscript of the play that he has composed and that the managers, shame be to them, refuse to produce.

In a thousand plays and parodies you shall see this figure of the Faded Actor, a stock abject of undying ridicule. It is a signal for our laughter when he takes a drink, fawning to get it and swallowing it as if into a funnel; it is a signal for our laughter when he cadges for a coin, the smallest not coming amiss; when he arranges with elaborate care upon his uplifted wrist the ruins of his cuff; and most of all when he draws forth from beneath his arm his manuscript and stands forth to read what none will hear except in mockery, with his poor self carried away unconscious with the art of it.

Mark him now as he strikes his attitude to read. Hear the full voice, deep and resonant for all the gin that is in it. No parody can quite remove the majesty of that, nor the grace that has once lived in those queer gestures. Let us temper our laughter, as we look upon him, with something kindlier than mockery, something nearer to respect; for in the Faded Actor with his strange twists and graces, his futile manuscript, his blighted hopes, his unredeemed ambitions, we are looking upon all that is best in the great traditions of the stage. That thick deep voice – comic now, but once revered – that is the surviving tradition of the Elizabethan tragedy, declaimed as a Shakespeare or a Marlowe would have had it. That sliding step so funny to our eye, is all that lingers of the dainty grace of the eighteenth century when dance and stage were one; or that dragging limp with which the poor Faded Actor crosses the stage – he does not know it, but that has come to him from Garrick; or see that long gesticulation of the hand revealing the bare wrist below the cuff, there was a time when such gesticulation was the admired model of a Fox or a Sheridan, and held, even at second hand, the admiration of a senate.

Nay more, there is a thing in the soul of the Faded Actor that all may envy who in this life are busied with the aesthetic arts. For after all what does he want, poor battered guy, with his queer gestures and his outlandish graces? Money? Not he. He has never had, nor ever dreamed of it. A coin here, and there, enough to buy a dram of gin or some broad cheap writing paper on which to enscribe his thoughts – that much he asks; but beyond that his ambition never goes, for it travels elsewhere and by another road. His soul at least is pure of the taint that is smeared across the arts by the money rewards of a commercial age. He lived too soon to hear of the millions a year that crown success and kill out genius; that substitute publicity for fame; that tempt a man to do the work that pays and neglect the promptings of his soul, and that turn the field of the arts into one great glare of notoriety and noise. Not so worked and lived a Shakespeare or a Michael Angelo; and the Faded Actor descends directly from them. Art for Art’s sake, is his whole creed, unconscious though it be. Some one to listen to his lines, an audience though only in a barn or beside the hedge row, a certain mead of praise that is the breath of art and the inspiration of effort; this he asks and no more. A yacht, a limousine, a palace beside the sea – of these things the Faded Actor has never heard. A shelter in some one else’s premises, enough gin to keep his voice as mellow as Shakespeare would have wished it, and with that, permission to recite his lines, and to stand forth in his poor easy fancy as a King of Carthage, or a Sultan of Morocco. Such is the end and aim of his ambition. But out of such forms of ambition has been built up all that is best in art.

To him, therefore, I dedicate this book. He will never read it, and I easily forgive him that. His brain has long since acquired a delicacy of adjustment that renders reading a superfluity. But I make the dedication all the same as a humble tribute to those high principles of art which are embodied in the Faded Actor.

TOC     INDEX

The Garden of Folly

(1924)

~

Preface
The Secrets of Success
The Human Mind Up to Date
The Human Body – Its Care and Prevention
The Perfect Salesman

Romances of Business

Alfred of the Advertisements
Tom Lachford, Promoter
Our Business Benefactors

The Perfect Lover’s Guide

Studies of the Progress of Human Knowledge

The Restoration of Whiskers

Then and Now

Little Glimpses of the Future in America
My Unposted Correspondence
Letters to the New Rulers of the World

Preface

Concerning Humour
and Humorists

I do not claim that this preface has anything in particular to do with the book that follows. Readers who desire to do so, and are mean enough, may safely omit either the book or the preface without serious loss. I admit that the preface is merely inserted in order to give me a chance to expound certain views on the general nature of humour and on the general aspects of the person called the humorist.

There is a popular impression that a humorists or comedian must needs be sad; that in appearance he should be tall, lantern-jawed and cadaverous; and that his countenance should wear a woe-begone expression calculated to excite laughter. The loss of his hair is supposed to increase his market value, and if he is as bald as a boiled egg with the shell off, his reputation is assured.

This I think springs from the fact that, in the past at least, people did not propose to laugh with the humorist but at him. They laughed in an apologetic way. They considered him simply too silly. He wrung a laugh from them in spite of their better selves.

In other words, till our own time laughter was low. Our dull forefathers had no notion of its intellectual meaning and reach. The Court jester, referred to haughtily as “yon poor fool,” was most likely the cleverest man around the Court; and yet historical novels are filled with little touches such as this:

“The King sank wearily upon his couch. ‘My Lady,’ he said, ‘I am aweary. My mind is distraught. In faith I am like to become as deftless as yon poor fool.’”

Now as a matter of fact, the King was probably what we should call in North America a “great big boob”; and the poor fool if he had lived with us would be either on the staff of Life or Punch, or at the head of a University – whichever he pleased.

A generation or so ago the idea of the melancholy humorist got a lot of corroboration from the fact that some of the best humorists of the time were in actual reality of a woe-begone appearance. The famous Bill Nye was tall, mournful, and exceedingly thin, a fact which he exploited to the full. He used to tell his hearers that there had been a request for him to come to them again and to appear “in broadsword combat with a parallel of latitude.” The still more celebrated Artemus Ward was also of a shambling and woe-begone habit; his melancholy face and feeble frame bespoke in reality the ravages of a mortal disease. The laughter that greeted his shambling appearance and his timid gestures appear in retrospect as cruel mockery. The humour of Ward’s public appearance which captivated the London of sixty years ago is turned now to pathos.

But Ward and Nye are only two examples of the “melancholy comedian,” a thing familiar through the ages. Yet in spite of all such precedents, and admitting that exceptions are exceptions, I cannot but think that the true manner of the comedian is that of smiles and laughter. If I am to be amused let me see on the stage before me, not the lantern jaws of sorrow but a genial countenance shaped like the map of the world, lit with spectacles, and illuminated with a smile. Let me hear the comedian’s own laughter come first and mine shall follow readily enough, laughing not at him, but with him. I admit that when the comedian adopts this mode he runs the terrible risk of being the only one to laugh at his own fun. This is indeed dreadful. There is no contempt so bitter as that of the man who will not laugh for the man who will. The poor comedian’s merriment withers under it and his laughter turns to a sad and forced contortion pitiful to witness. But it is a risk that he must run. And there is no doubt that if he can really and truly laugh his audience will laugh with him. His only difficulty is in doing it.

This much however, I will admit, that if a man has a genuine sense of humour, he is apt to take a somewhat melancholy, or at least a disillusioned view of life. Humour and disillusionment are twin sisters. Humour cannot exist alongside of eager ambition, brisk success, and absorption in the game of life. Humour comes best to those who are down and out, or who have at least discovered their limitations and their failures. Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.

This is why I think such a great number of people are cut off from having any very highly developed sense of humour.

If I had to make a list of them I would put at the head all eminent and distinguished people whose lofty position compels them to take themselves seriously. The list would run something like this.

1.  The Pope of Rome. I doubt if he could have a very keen sense of fun.

2.  Archbishops and the more dignified clergy, sense of humour – none.

3.  Emperors, Kaisers, Czars, Emirs, Emus, Sheiks, etc, etc, – absolutely none.

4.  Captains of Industry (I mean the class that used to be called “Nation Makers” and are now known as “profiteers”) – atrophied.

5.  Great scholars, thinkers, philanthropists, martyrs, reformers, and patriots – petrified.

As against this I would set a list of people who probably would show a sense of humour brought to its full growth:

1.  Deposed kings.

2.  Rejected candidates for election to a national legislature.

3.  Writers whose work has been refused by all the publishers.

4.  Inventors who have lost their patents, actors who have been hooted off the stage, painters who can’t paint, and speaking broadly, all the unemployed and the unsuccessful.

I have no doubt that this theory, like most of the things that I say in this book, is an over-statement. But I have always found that the only kind of statement worth making is an over-statement. A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries further.

TOC     INDEX

The Secrets of Success

As Revealed at One Dollar and Fifty Cents a Revelation

Note: This opening chapter deals with the secrets of material success and shows how easily it can be achieved. Indeed anybody who is willing to take a brief correspondence course can achieve it in a few weeks. What follows here is based upon the best and newest manuals on the subject, and every word is guaranteed.

The New Race of Big Men and Big Women

Dear friend reader – for you will not mind my calling you this, or both of this, for I feel already that we are friends, are we not, don’t you? – let us sit down and have a comfortable get-together visit and talk things over.

Are you aware that there is a big movement going on in this country, and that a lot of big-hearted men and ever so many big women are in it? Perhaps not. Then let me try to tell you all about it and the way in which the world is being transformed by it.

No, don’t suggest sending me any money. I don’t want it. Neither I nor any of these big men and women who are working on this thing want money. We all take coupons, however, and if you care to cut out any coupons from any newspaper or magazine and send them to me I shall be glad to get them. But, remember, sending a coupon pledges you to nothing. It does not in any way bring you within reach of the law, and you may cut out as many as you like. Only a little while ago a young boy, scarcely more than a man, came into my office in great distress and in evident remorse. “What have I done?” he moaned. “What is it?” I asked. “I have cut out a coupon,” he said, wringing his hands, “and sent it in.” “To where?” I asked. “To Department B. The Success Editor, Box 440-J. Phoenix, Arizona.” “My dear friend,” I said, “cutting out a coupon pledges you to nothing.” He left my office (after in vain offering me money) a new being. I may say that he is now at the head of one of the biggest dried-prune businesses in Kalamazoo.

In other words, that boy had found the secret of success. A chance remark had suddenly put him in the path of Opportunity.

My dear reader, you may be, all unknowing, in exactly the position of that young man. You may be, like him, on the very verge of opportunity. Like him, you may need only a friendly shove to put you where you belong.

Now this movement that I am in, along with these big women, etc., that I spoke of, is a movement for putting success within reach of all, even of the dullest. You need not despair merely because you are dull. That’s nothing. A lot of these big men in the movement were complete nuts before they came in.

Perhaps it is a new idea to you that success can be deliberately achieved. Let me assure you, on the contrary, that achieving it is the only way to get it.

I wonder, for example, if the thought has ever occurred to you that you would like your salary raised. If so, nothing is more simple. Read the chapters which follow and your salary will be raised before you finish them. After having studied the literature of this big movement for success, I can tell you of hundreds, of thousands, of men and women in this country whose salaries have been raised beyond recognition.

What would you say, for example, to earning sixty-three dollars a week without leaving home, and using only your spare time; and that, too, at an agreeable occupation, needing no preparation and no skill? Do you want to do it? Well, that is what young Edward Beanhead – Kid Ed, they call him – is doing right at this minute in Houston, Texas.

Or what do you say to cleaning up half a million cold in a fortnight, on the sale of an article indispensable to every home in the country, easily understood and never out of order, patent applied for? Well, that was what was done by Callicot Johnson – Cal. Johnson, they generally call him, at least if they’re busy, or Millionaire Johnson, or Lucky Johnson – they call him a lot of names like that. You can see his picture in half the papers in the country – Bull Johnson, he’s often called – you must have seen him. Well, here was a man, this Cal, or this Bull, who never knew till he was forty-one years old that he had personality, and then all of a sudden, one day – but, stop – I’ll tell you later on all about this Bull, or Buffalo Johnson. They often call him Buffalo. I merely say that at present Buffalo – or Buff – is at the head of one of the biggest nut syndicates in El Paso.

Or how would you like to imagine yourself becoming the head of one of the biggest mercantile concerns in the country? Would you have any use for it? I mean, would it make a hit with you? If so, I shall have to tell you presently about Robert J. Rubberheart – Bull Dog Bob they usually call him. It occurred to Bob one day that eighty-five per cent of his efficiency was being squandered in – but, no, I’d better keep it. Suffice it to say that you can see, in the back pages of almost any of the current magazines, a picture of Bob at his mahogany desk in his office in that mercantile firm. He is pointing his finger right at his stenographer’s eye, and underneath him is written, “This man earns ten dollars a minute.” Well, that’s Bob. He has cut out the waste of his efficiency and he has “made good.”

But talking of Bull Dog Bob and the way he “made good,” reminds me of a lot of other cases which I have met in my study of this big movement, of men, yes, and of women, who have “made good.” Perhaps you don’t realize, reader, that no matter if a man is a long way down, almost down and out, he can still “come back” and “make good.” If a man has got sufficient pep and grit not to let the sand get choked out of him he will come back every time. I am thinking here specially – as no doubt you are – of the instance of the Hon. E. Final Upshot, now one of the leading men, one of the big men in the senate of Nicaragua. Yet there was a man who had been nearly beaten out by fate; health gone, friends gone, memory gone – he couldn’t even have remembered his friends if he had kept them – money gone, everything in fact, except that somewhere away down in that man was sand. And so one day just by chance, Ed – his friends now always called him Honest Ed – saw in a paper . . . but don’t let’s spoil the story.

In any case, the real point is that men like Buff Johnson, and Bull Dog Bob, and the Honourable Final Upshot have got personality. That’s it. Some of them had it from the start but didn’t know it. You may be in that class. Concealed in these men was an unsuspected asset, like the jewel in the toad of which Shakespeare speaks. It may be in you.

And having personality, they set to work to develop themselves. They built up their efficiency. They studied their bodies. They took exercises which gave them constitutions like ostriches. They eliminated waste. They chewed their food for hours before they used it. Realizing that a ferruginous diet breaks down the tissues and sets up a subterfuge of gas throughout the body, they took care to combine in their diet a proper proportion of explosives. Having grasped the central fact that the glory of a man’s strength is in his hair, these people, by adopting a system of rubbing (easily learned in six lessons and involving nothing more than five minutes of almost hysterical fun every morning), succeeded in checking the falling of the follicles, or capillary basis of the hair itself. In short, as one of the greatest of them has said, “Hair power is brain power.”

As with personality and efficiency, so with memory. These men of the class of which we are speaking, grasped the idea that Memory Means Money. To gain it, they adopted a simple formula (easily learned in six lessons without sending money) first invented by the ancient Aztecs, but now made available for everybody by the splendid efforts of the famous Doctor Allforce. The doctor, whose picture shows him to be a G. D. M. of Kansas, is often called (presumably by his friends) the Wizard of Mind Power. He is a man of whom we shall have a lot to say. Undoubtedly the man has psychic power. Whether or not it is the selfsame psychic power enjoyed by Ancient Chaldeans and the Magi who make the Magi Water, is a point on which we must not try to pronounce. But the man certainly has it, and no doubt it was for that that Kansas gave him his G. D. M. The Doctor claims that memory can be built up by a rearrangement of the colloid particles of the human brain. So convinced is the doctor of the validity of this daring claim that he offers a personal guarantee of $100 (one hundred dollars) for anybody disproving it to his satisfaction. Thus far, no single professor of any of the colleges (all known to be effete) has come forward to challenge this daring piece of scientific prophylaxis. In short, as the doctor himself says, Hypothesis is truth!

But we must not talk of the Doctor too much. We shall have plenty to say of him in his place. Just remember him as the Man Who Does Not Forget. We only mention him here in this connection as one of the big men whose ideas are reshaping the globe. Indeed, the Doctor himself has gone on record with the words, “I can reshape your head.”

But even all that we have said does not exhaust the scope of this great movement which is building up a new race of men and women. There are bigger things yet. Have you ever thought of the large place that love plays in this world? Perhaps not. You may be too big a boob to have thought about it. And yet it is a thing about which every well-constituted man and every well-constructed woman ought to think. If you have hitherto been clean outside of our great movement toward the new life and the new success you have probably never read the booklet (obtainable anywhere or to be had by cutting out a coupon) entitled How to Choose a Mate. Apart from its obvious usefulness at sea, this is a little book that should be studied by every young man and woman in the land. It is written by a man whose name of course you know, Dr. O. Salubrious, Med. Mis. Wash. He practically gives it away.

It may never have occurred to you how many men in picking a mate, or a life companion, or even a wife, make a bad pick. There are ever so many cases on record where serious dissatisfaction arises with the selection which has been made. With so many to choose from, this seems unnecessary. If you will study the work of Dr. Salubrious you will see that he makes the bold claim that men and women are animals and they should mate with the same care as is shown by the lobster, the lizard, and the graminiferous mammalia.

But for the moment we need follow the Doctor no farther. The essential idea which arises from what we have said above is that a new race of men and women is emerging under our eyes. These people like Cal. Johnson and Dr. Salubrious and Doctor Allforce and the Honourable Final Upshot are a new set of beings. Alive with personality, using one hundred per cent of their efficiency, covered with glossy hair rich in its natural oil, forgetting nothing, earning sixty-three dollars a week at occupations which fill only their leisure time, these people are rapidly inheriting the earth. As Doctor ——— himself has put it, “The future will belong to those who own it.”

Do you want then, reader – and I am asking you for the last time – to be in this movement or out of it? Or no, let me put it in the striking way phrased by Allforce, “Can you afford to be out of it?”

A Chat on Personality:
What it is and how to get it

Let us therefore proceed to study out this question quietly and systematically, taking nothing for granted. We have said above that personality is the greatest thing in the world. But now let us ask ourselves: How do we know that personality is the greatest thing in the world? From what corollaries do we draw this hypothesis, and is such an innuendo justified? In other words, who says so?

Our answer to this is very simple. The greatest men in the world, those, that is to say, who draw the largest salaries, do so by their personality. Ask any truly great man how he made all his money, and he will always tell you the same thing. The bigger the man is the more loudly he will say it.

The other day I had a few minutes’ conversation (I couldn’t afford more) with one of the biggest-priced men in this country. “To what,” I asked, “do you attribute your own greatness?” He answered without hesitation, “To myself.”

Yet this was a man who has the reputation of being the second biggest consumer of crude rubber in this country. He may do it and he may not, but he has that reputation. I asked another man, a large consumer of adjustable bicycle parts, how much he thought he owed of his present commanding position to education. He answered emphatically, “Nothing.” Something in his tone made me believe him.

Now the common element in all these men is personality. Each one of them has a developed, balanced, nicely adjusted well-hung personality. You feel that as soon as such a man is in your presence; when he enters a room, you are somehow aware that he has come in. When he leaves, you realize that he has gone out. As soon as he opens his mouth, you know that he is speaking. When he shuts his mouth, you feel that he has stopped.

Until the recent discoveries of the success movement it was not known that personality could be acquired. We know now that it can.

For the acquirement of personality, the first thing needed is to get into harmony with yourself. You may think that this is difficult. But a little practice will soon show you how. Make the effort, so far as you can, to set up a bilateral harmony between your inner and your outer ego. When you get this done start and see what you can do to extend yourself in all directions. This is a little hard at first, but the very difficulty will lend zest to the effort. As soon as you begin to feel that you are doing it, then try, gently at first, but with increasing emphasis, to revolve about your own axis. When you have got this working nicely, slowly and carefully at first, lift yourself to a new level of thinking. When you have got up there, hold it.

As soon as in this way you have got yourself sufficiently elongated and extended you will have gained the first step in the development of personality, namely Harmony – in other words, you are completely and absolutely satisfied with yourself. If you were a nut before, you will never know it now.

The next great thing to be acquired is optimism, cheerfulness, the absence of all worry. It is a scientific fact that worry has a physical effect upon the body, clogging up the oesophagus and filling the primary ducts with mud. Cheerfulness, on the other hand, loosens up the whole anatomy by allowing a freer play to the bones. Begin each day with a smile. When you rise in the morning, throw open your window wide and smile out of it. Don’t mind whom you hit with it. When you descend to the breakfast table try to smile at your food, or even break into a pleasant laugh at the sight of it. When you start off to your place of business, enter your street car in a bright and pleasant way, paying your fare to the conductor with a winsome willingness. When you go into your office, remove your coat and rubbers with a pretty little touch of bonhommie. Ask the janitor, or the night watchman, how he has slept. Greet your stenographer with a smile. Open your correspondence with another smile, and when you answer it, try to put into what you write just the little touch of friendly cheerfulness that will win your correspondent’s heart. It is amazing how a little touch of personal affection will brighten up the dull routine of business correspondence like a grain of gold in the sand.

Don’t sign yourself “Yours truly,” but in some such way as “Yours for optimism,” or “Yours for a hundred per cent cheerfulness.” But I will show you what I mean in a more extended way by relating to you the amazing – but well-authenticated – story of the rise and success of Edward Beanhead.

The Remarkable Case of Edward Beanhead
An Amazing Story of Success

In presenting in support of what has been written in the preceding paragraphs the instance of Edward Beanhead, I may say that I have no doubt whatever of the authenticity of the story. It is too well attested to admit of doubt. I have seen this story of the rise of Edward Beanhead (under his own and other names) printed in so many journals that it must be true; the more so as the photograph of Beanhead is reproduced beside the story, and in many cases the editor gives a personal guarantee that the story is true. In other cases readers who doubt are invited to cut out a coupon which will bring them a free booklet that will give them a course on Leadership.

Another proof of the truth of the story is that Edward Beanhead’s salary is often inserted and printed right across the page. I forget what it is; in fact, it is not always the same, but it fills all the available space.

In many cases Beanhead in his photograph is depicted as actually pointing at his salary with one finger and saying, “Do you want to earn this?”

Skeptical readers may suggest that Edward must have owed his start in life to early advantages of birth and wealth: he may have been a prince. This is not so. Beanhead had no birth and no wealth. Accounts differ as to where he was born. Some of the documents, as reproduced in the best advertising pages, represent him as a bright little farm boy from Keokuk, Iowa. It is well known, of course, that most railroad presidents and heads of colleges come from there. Pictures are numerous which show Beanhead barefooted and with a five-cent straw hat, standing in what looks like a trout stream. There is a legend “From Farm Yard to Manager’s Desk.” Another school of writers, however, shows Edward as beginning his career in a great city, running errands – at an admirable speed and labeled “Earning his first dime.”

All this, however, is a matter of controversy. The only thing of which we can be certain is that Edward Beanhead, as a youth just verging into manhood, was occupying a simple station as some sort of business clerk. Here came the turning point of his life. By a happy accident Edward came across a little booklet entitled Tutankhamen is a Dead One. What are you? Learn personal efficiency in six lessons. Write to the Nut University. Post Office Box 6, Canal Street, Buffalo.

From this time on Beanhead’s spare minutes were spent in study. We have in proof of this the familiar illustration in which Edward is seen on a high stool, in his office at lunch hour, eating a bun with one hand and studying a book on personality in the other, while at the side, inserted in a sort of little cloud, one can see Edward’s two office companions playing craps with two young negroes. The picture is now rather rare, the little vignette of the crap game having proved rather too attractive for certain minds: in fact some people quite mistook the legend “Do you want to make money fast?”

Beanhead took the entire course, occupying five weeks and covering Personality, Magnetism, Efficiency, Dynamic Potency, the Science of Power, and Essentials of Leadership.

By the end of his course Edward had reached certain major conclusions. He now saw that Personality is Power; that Optimism opens Opportunity; and that Magnetism Makes Money. He also realized that Harmony makes for Happiness, and that Worry would merely carry his waste products into his ducts and unfit him for success.

Armed with these propositions, Edward Beanhead entered his office after his five weeks’ course a new man.

Instead of greeting his employer with a cold “Good Morning,” as many employees are apt to do, Edward asked his superior how he had slept.

Now notice how the little things count. It so happened that his employer hadn’t slept decently for ten years; and yet no employee had ever asked him about it. Naturally he “reacted” at once. Edward reacted back and in a few minutes they were in close confabulation. Beanhead suggested to his employer that perhaps his ducts were clogged with albuminous litter. The senior man gravely answered that in that case he had better raise Edward’s salary. Beanhead acquiesced with the sole proviso that in that case he should be allowed to organize his employer’s business so as to put it on a strategic footing. Now observe again how things count. It so happened that this man, although carrying on a business which extended over six states and out into the ocean, had never thought of organizing it; and he didn’t even know what a strategic footing was. The result was a second increase of salary within twenty-four hours.

In the weeks that followed Edward Beanhead, now seated in a commodious office with flat-top desk and a view of the ocean and a range of mountains, entirely reorganized the firm’s business. His method was simple. The employees were submitted to a ruthless brain-test which eliminated most of them. The business itself was then plotted out on a chart so designed as to show at a glance all the places where the firm did no business. Banks in which the firm had no money were marked with a cross. By these and other devices Edward rapidly placed the business on a new footing, stopping all the leaks, focusing it to a point, driving it deep into the ground, giving it room to expand, and steering it through the rocks. The situation is perhaps more easily understood by stating that henceforth the motto of the business became “Service.”

The natural upshot of it was that before long Edward Beanhead’s employer summoned him up to his office and informed him that he was getting old (he was seven weeks older than when we began with him), and that he was now prepared to retire to a monastery or to a golf club, and that if Edward wanted the business he could have it.

Hence at the end we see Edward Beanhead sitting beside his desk, half revolved in a revolving chair and with a beautiful stenographer within easy touch. There are two little placards nailed up, one on each side of his head bearing the legends “Efficiency” and “Service.”

And one wonders where are those fellows who were playing craps with the negroes.

The Success of Great Men

It is very difficult to leave this topic of success without saying something about the success of great men; indeed there is no reason why I should. I wonder if it has ever occurred to the reader to ask why there are so few great men and why so few men succeed in lifting themselves above the average level. Perhaps it hasn’t. But if he did ask why we cannot all raise ourselves above the average, the answer would be, very simply, that we all can if we try.

This is a thing that we realize at once when we study the careers of great men. But to study them properly we must not turn to the dull pages of the college histories. There only a very limited and partial account of the great is found. To get the real facts we must open the advertising pages of the illustrated magazines, and we can see at a glance that they tell us vital things never touched upon by the standard histories.

For example, it is very doubtful whether Bancroft ever knew that George Washington was in the habit of taking four deep breaths just before eating. If he did he never mentions it. Nor does he make any reference to the fact that Benjamin Franklin once said that no perfect breakfast food had as yet been found (that, of course was in his day: it has been found since, as we shall see).

In the same way Lord Macaulay, a man otherwise well informed, does not seem to know that Oliver Cromwell once said “The Secret of making money lies in Scientific Investment.” Nor was Shakespeare aware that the cloak or mantle which Julius Caesar wore on the day he overcame the Nervii and which he wore when he was stabbed by his assassins was undoubtedly made by the famous Knit-Knot process, now so widely known.

One asks in vain, what kind of suspenders did Henry of Navarre use? What was it that Charlemagne used to say about carrying a camera with you during a vacation in the Adirondacks? What sort of exercise did Queen Elizabeth take for ten minutes every morning? In what attitude was Lord Bacon standing when he said “Mr. Business Man, why not use a fountain pen?”

But in recent times all these fascinating things are being solved for us by the painstaking researches of the advertising experts. We are getting to know things about our great men that we never knew before – intimate, personal things that we never knew before.

And of all the historical characters whose careers are being thus illuminated there is one who stands out conspicuously above all others – The Emperor Napoleon. This great man enjoys, in the success movement, an eminence over all others. It is the aim of everybody to be a Napoleon in his own particular line of activity and a great many are succeeding. You can see their pictures any day.

There are at least thirty-seven Napoleons now doing business. There is a “Napoleon of Billiards” and a “Napoleon of Water Polo,” and a “Napoleon of the Rubber Shoe Industry”; and there is also a man who is the “Napoleon of Pants Designers,” and another who is the “Napoleon of the Ladies Shirtwaist Business”; there is a dog who is the Napoleon of Airedale Terriers, and there is a cow who is the Napoleon of Holstein milk-givers.

In short it is becoming a very important thing to learn how to be a Napoleon. You have only to turn over the back pages of any of our greatest journals, the serious pages where they teach people how to live and how to sell things – to see little pictures of Napoleon inserted everywhere. Sometimes there is just his head under his hat: sometimes a full length picture to show his hands clasped behind his back. And in each case there is some little motto that Napoleon said or some statement about his habits. From across the years and over the wastes of the South Atlantic Napoleon is still teaching us how to live and how to sell things.

From these statements thus printed I have pieced together a composite picture of Napoleon in which is shown those little personal things that made him what he was.

Anybody who wants to be a Napoleon has only to imitate these things. I admit that they are a little complicated. But even Napoleon couldn’t have learned them all at once. He must have picked them bit by bit.

In the first place the great Emperor was an early riser. The hour of three in the morning saw him in the saddle or at his desk. “Early rising,” he once said when taking a well known breakfast food, “not only peptonizes the stomach but with the aid of a simple remedy obtainable at all drug stores restores tone and vigor to the lost digestion.”

Napoleon also sat up late. He never sought his couch till three in the morning. “The later the hour,” he once said, in referring to a new patent oil lamp, “the better the brain.”

It was the practice of Napoleon to chew his food twenty minutes before swallowing it. Eating a sirloin steak took him all day. Napoleon was in the habit of eating standing up. He also ate lying down. He could even sit and eat.

While talking the great Emperor habitually held his mouth firmly shut.

Napoleon always wore wool next to his skin. He once said in an interview which he seems to have given to a well known firm of woollen manufacturers in Paterson, New Jersey, “There is nothing like wool.”

In the same way he always said, “There is nothing like a delicious cup of Ozo when exhausted from the pulpit and the platform.”

Napoleon was passionately fond of walking: also he never walked. Napoleon drank, but always with the strictest avidity.

Napoleon made little use of tobacco except in the form of snuff, or cigars or cut plug.

During his exile at St. Helena, Napoleon is reported to have said,

“If I had taken a course in Personal Leadership, I should not have landed here.”

TOC     INDEX

The Human Mind
Up to Date

Note: The discussion which follows below is intended to be merely a portion, or half portion, of a Manual of the New Mentality. The work when finished will comprise twenty instalments which may be read either singly or all at the same time. The final edition will be bound in half-calf for ordinary readers, with a university edition for scholars (complete calf), and for the rich an édition de luxe sold at an addition de luxe.

The object of the entire work – I need hardly say – will not be to make money, but to perform a service to the community. To make this certain, the word service will be stamped in gilt letters on each volume of a special or “service edition” of the book – sold to servants.

THE MIND WAVE

One of the most cheering things about this good, gay world in which we are at present living is the recent pleasing progress of the human mind. For ever so many centuries the human mind had lain more or less dormant. It was known that it was there. But just where it was and what it did and how it did it was a matter on which nothing, if anything, was known.

Within recent years all this has changed. A great wave of mind culture has swept over the community. People who never had any before now have little else.

It is generally admitted that the human mind was first discovered about four years ago by a brilliant writer in one of the Sunday journals. His article “Have We a Subconscious Ego?” was immediately followed by a striking discussion under the title “Are We Top Side Up?” This brought forth a whole series of popular articles and books under such titles as Willing and Being, How to Think, Existence as a Mode of Thought, The Super Self, and such special technical studies as The Mentality of the Hen and the Thought Process of the Potato.

This movement, once started, has spread in every direction. All our best magazines are now full of mind. In every direction one sees references to psychoanalysis, auto-suggestion, hypnosis, hypnoosis, psychiatry, inebriety, and things never thought of a little while ago. Will power is being openly sold by correspondence at about fifty cents a kilowatt. College professors of psychology are wearing overcoats lined with fur, and riding in little coupé cars like doctors. The poor are studying the psychology of wealth, and the rich are studying the psychology of poverty. Memory has been reduced to a system. A good memory is now sold for fifty cents.

Everybody’s mind is now analyzed. People who used to be content with the humblest of plain thinking, or with none at all, now resolve themselves into “reflexes” and “complexes” and “impulses.” Some of our brightest people are kleptomaniacs, paranoiacs, agoraphobists, and dolomites. A lot of our best friends turn out to be subnormal and not worth knowing. Some of the biggest business men have failed in the intelligence test and have been ruined. A lot of our criminals turn out not to be criminals at all, but merely to have a reaction for another person’s money.

Still more gratifying is the fact that we are now able to locate with something like certainty where the mind is. And it appears that it is away down – in fact, is sinking into a bottomless abyss. What we took for the mind is only an insignificant part of it, a poor glimmer of intelligence, a rush light floating on the surface of an unknown depth. Underneath the mind lurks the subconscious, and away down under this again, the subliminal, and under that is the primitive complex, and farther down, fifty feet in the mud, is the cosmic intelligence. This late item, cosmic intelligence, is thought by some people to be found in Buddhism, and other people say that it is seen in Walt Whitman, and in Dante at his best. It may also be connected with music.

But what is now an assured fact is that, while human beings have only just begun to learn about these things, the animals have known about them and been using them for years. It seems that the caterpillar doesn’t think at all! He gave it up long ago; he merely “reacts.” The common ant (formica americana) instead of working all the time, as we thought it did, does not work at all. It merely has a community complex in the lobes of one of its feet. What we took to be the play of the young lamb (lambens piccola) is simply a chemical movement of its tail under the influence of one or more stimuli.

In short, the whole mental world has been thrown into the greatest excitement. Everybody is “reacting” on everybody else. Mind waves and brain storms blow about like sand in the Sahara. Things good and bad come at us like an infection. We live in deadly fear that we may catch bolshevism, as we might a cold. Everything rushes at us in “waves.” A New York chauffeur chokes his employer, and it is called a “crime wave.” The man is rushed off to a rest house to have his complex removed, while the people leave the city in the flood. Then they hear that a repentant burglar has given a million dollars to Trinity Church, and that a moral wave is flooding over the city; and they come back.

In this disturbed state nobody’s mind can act alone. Everybody has to be in it with a lot of others. Family love is replaced by Big Brother Movements and Little Sister Agitations, and a grown-up man subscribes twenty-five cents and wears a pink ribbon to help him to be kind to his own mother.

THE OUTBREAK OF PSYCHOLOGY

Prominent among all these phenomena is the great movement which is putting psychology into the front rank of human activities. In earlier days this science was kept strictly confined to the colleges. It was taught by an ancient professor in a skull cap, with a white beard which reached to the foot of his waistcoat. It had no particular connection with anything at all, and did no visible harm to those who studied it. It explained the difference between a “sensation” and a “perception” and between an “idea” and a “notion.” As a college subject, it was principally taken as a qualification for the football team, and thus ranked side by side with architecture, religious knowledge and the Portuguese Ballad. Some of the greatest players on the Harvard and Yale teams knew little else.

All this changed. As a part of the new research, it is found that psychology can be used not only for the purpose of football, but for almost anything in life. There is now not only psychology in the academic or college sense, but also a Psychology of Business, a Psychology of Education, a Psychology of Salesmanship, a Psychology of Religion, a Psychology of Boxing, a Psychology of Investment, and a Psychology of Playing the Banjo. In sort, everybody has his. There is the psychology of the criminal, the psychology of the politician, and a psychology of the infant. For almost every juncture of life we now call in the services of an expert psychologist as naturally as we send for an emergency plumber. In all our great cities there are already, or soon will be, signs that read “Psychologist – Open Day and Night.”

The real meaning of this is found in the fact that we are now able to use psychology as a guide or test in a thousand and one practical matters. In the old days there was no way of knowing what a man could do except by trying him out. Now we don’t have to do this at all. We merely measure the shape of his head and see whether, by native intelligence he can, immediately and offhand, pronounce TH backward, or count the scales of a goldfish. This method has been applied for many years in the appointment of generals in the Chinese army, but with us it is new.

THE INTELLIGENCE TEST

In other words, the intelligence test has come to us as one of the first fruits of the new psychology. In practically every walk of life, this bright little device is now being introduced as a means of finding out what people don’t know, and for what particular business they are specially unfitted. Many persons, it now appears, go through life without being able to distinguish colours, or to arrange equilateral triangles into a tetrahedron, or to say the alphabet backwards. Indeed, some persons of this sort have in the past gone clear through and got away with it. They could hardly do so now. And yet incompetent persons of this kind used often to occupy positions of trust, and even to handle money.

Let us see then what the intelligence test means.

If we wish to realize how slipshod is the thinking of persons in apparently sound mental condition, we have only to ask any man of our acquaintance how much is 13 times 147. The large probability is that he doesn’t know. Or let us ask any casual acquaintance how many cubic centimeters there are in the Woolworth Building, and his estimate will be found to be absurdly incorrect. The man, in other words, lacks observation. His mind has never been trained to form an accurate judgment.

Compare with this the operation of the trained, keener mind such as is being fashioned by the new psychology. This man, or shall we say this mind, for he deserves to be called it, walks down the street with his eye alert and his brain active. He notes the cubic contents of the buildings that he sees. He can tell you if you ask him (or even if you don’t) the numbers of the taxicabs which he has passed, or overtaken, in his walk. He can tell you what proportion of red-haired men have passed him in a given time; how many steps he has taken in going a hundred yards; and how many yards he has walked in a given number of steps.

In other words, the man is a thinker. For such a man the intelligence test has no terrors. I questioned a man of this sort the other day. I said, “You have been in such and such an apartment building, have you not?” He answered, with characteristic activity of mind, “Yes.” “And did you on entering such and such a hall in the building observe such and such a goldfish in such and such a bowl?” Judge my surprise when he told me that he had not only observed it, but had counted its scales and given it a peanut. My readers, moreover, will readily believe me when I say that the man in question is the head of one of the biggest corporations in the city. No one else could have done it.

But for persons who lack the proper training and habits of observation the intelligence test acts as a ruthless exterminator of incompetence. The point of it is, I repeat, that it is aimed not at eliciting the things which, from the very routine of our life itself, we are certain we know, but at those things which we ought to know but don’t.

Here are a few little samples of what I mean, taken from the actual test questions used by one of our leading practical psychologists:

INTELLIGENCE TEST
FOR BANK MANAGERS

1. Can you knit?

2. Name your favourite flower.

3. Which is the larger end of a safety pin?

4. How many wheels has a Pullman car?

5. If a spider wants to walk from the top corner of a room to the bottom corner farthest away, will he follow the angular diameter of the floor, or will his path be an obese tabloid?

It is the last question, I may say, which generally gets them. Already four of the principal bank managers in New York have lost their positions over it.

Let us put beside this from the same source another interesting set of questions:

INTELLIGENCE TEST
FOR HOSPITAL NURSES

1. What is the difference between a Federal Reserve note and a Federal Reserve Bank note?

2. Suppose that a general buoyancy had led you to expand beyond what you considered prudent, and you felt that you must deflate, what would you take in first?

I may say that of seventeen trained nurses only one was able to answer these questions, especially No. 2, without wandering from the essential meaning; even the odd one hardly counted, as she turned out to be engaged to a bank teller.

Still more striking is the application of the intelligence test to the plain manual occupations. The worker fulfils, let us admit, his routine duty. But we have to ask, is this all that we have a right to demand from him? No. If the man is to be really competent, his mind ought to have a reach and an outlook which go beyond the mechanical operations of his job. I give an example:

INTELLIGENCE TEST
FOR MARINE ENGINEERS

1. Are you inclined to sympathize with Schiaparelli’s estimate of Dante’s Divina Commedia?

2. Luigi Pulci, it has been said, voices the last strains of the age of the troubadours. Do you get this?

3. Alfieri must always be regarded rather as the last of the cinquecentisti than as the first of the moderns. How do you stand on that?

Let us put beside this as an interesting parallel the following:

INTELLIGENCE TESTS
FOR PROFESSORS
OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

1. How much pressure per square inch of surface do you think a safe load to carry?

2. Suppose that, just as you were getting to work, you got trouble somewhere in your flow of gas, so that that set up a back-firing in your tubes, would you attribute this to a defect in your feed?

3. Suppose that you were going along late at night at moderate speed, and properly lighted up, and you saw a red light directly in front of you, would you stop or go right on?

From all of which it appears that by means of the Intelligence Test we have now an infallible means of knowing just what a man amounts to. If we want to know whether or not an applicant is suited for a job we have only to send him to the laboratory of a practicing psychologist, and we can find out in fifteen minutes all about him. How vastly superior this is to the old and cumbersome methods of inquiring into a young man’s schooling, and into his family, and reading personal letters of recommendation, can hardly be exaggerated. Let me quote as a typical example the case which I have just mentioned, that of letters of recommendation. Compare the old style and the new.

Old-fashioned Letter of Recommendation Given to a Young Man Seeking a Position in the Milling Business.

To Messrs. Smith, Brown & Co.

Dear Sirs,

I should like to recommend to you very cordially my young friend Mr. O’Hagan. I have known him since his boyhood, and can assure you that he is an estimable young man who has had a good schooling and is willing to work. When I add that he was raised right here in Jefferson County, and that his mother was one of the McGerrigles, I feel sure that you will look after him.

We have had an open fall here, but a good spell of cold has set in since New Year’s.

Very faithfully,

_______

New-Fashioned Letter of Estimation as Supplied by a Psychological Laboratory Expert

To Messrs. Smith, Brown & Co.

Dear Sirs,

This certifies that I have carefully examined Mr. O’Hagan in my laboratory for fifteen minutes and submitted him to various measurements and tests, with a view to estimating his fitness for the Milling Business. He measures 198 centimeters from end to end, of which his head represents 7.1 per cent. We regard this as too large a proportion of head for a miller. His angle of vision is 47, which is more than he will need in your business. We applied various stimuli to the lobes of his neck and got very little reaction from him. We regret to say that he does not know what 17 times 19 is; and we further found that, after being in our laboratory for fifteen minutes, he had failed to notice the number of panes in the windows.

On the whole, we think him better suited for social service or university work or for the church than for a position of responsibility.

Very truly,

_______

P.S. We enclose our statement of account for 17 tests at $5.00 per test.

The value of the system, however, does not stop even at this point. It is proving itself an invaluable aid in weeding out incompetent men who have perhaps escaped detection for many years. For example, a firm in Kansas were anxious to judge of the selling power of their salesmen. An intelligence test applied to their staff showed that not a single one knew how to sell anything. The firm had been misled for years by the mere fact that these men were successfully placing orders. A furniture factory in Grand Rapids submitted seventy-one of their employees to the test to see what they knew about furniture: it appeared that they knew nothing about it. One of the Kalamazoo Celery companies, anxious to develop the Psychology of Growing Celery, instituted a searching test of their gardeners. It appeared that only four of them had ever heard of psychology and only one of them could spell it. Yet here were men who had been professing to grow celery for twenty years. Instances such as these show how far from perfect is our industrial system. Nor will it ever be improved until sweeping intelligence tests and wholesale dismissals have put it on a new basis.

THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF THE ANIMAL MIND

The sad truth is that as yet most of us do not know how to think. We think we think, but we don’t.

Nor can we begin thinking until we are prepared to begin all over again and build up our thought-process from its basis up. Herein lies the peculiar importance of Animal Psychology in the new wave of mentality.

Already the ground has been broken. Careful investigations of the thought-complex of the hen, the worm, and the bee have revealed to the world something of the wonderful mentality that was formerly rudely classed as “instinct.” We now know that the bee could not construct her honeycomb in the particular form which she uses had she not some knowledge, however modest, of the mathematical law of the maximum cubic content. Where she got it we do not as yet know. But we hope to find out. Our psychological investigators are sitting among the bees, following the hens, and associating with the worms, and adding daily to our store of knowledge.

My own researches in this direction are not of wide extent. But I have endeavoured to fit myself for discussing the subject by undertaking the study of one particular animal. I make here no claim to originality of method, and readily admit that my researches are based upon – I may say, are imitated from – the best models of work in this direction. I selected as my subject the common Hoopoo, partly because no one had investigated the Hoopoo before, and partly because good fortune threw the opportunity in my way.

In other words, the observations which I have carried on in regard to the mentality and habits of the Hoopoo fall within that large portion of the new mentality which deals with the mind of animals. I should be ungrateful if I did not express my obligation to the authors of The Play of Animals, The Behaviour of the Toad, The Love Affairs of the Lobster, and other well-known manuals of this class. But, so far as I am aware, I am the first to subject the Hoopoo to the same minute scrutiny which has been so successfully applied to the bee, the garden worm, and the iguanadon.

My acquaintance with the Hoopoo herself I owe to the fortunate fact that beside my house is an empty brick yard devoid of grass, occupied only with sand, litter, and broken stone – in short, a tempting spot for the entomologist.

It was while sitting on a brick in the empty brickyard, occupied, I fear, with nothing better than counting the grains of sand in a wagon load that had been dumped upon the ground, that I first saw the Hoopoo. She was making her way in the leisurely fashion that is characteristic of her, from one tiny pebble to another, daintily crossing the minute rivulets and ravines of the broken soil with that charm which is all hers. The glorious occasion was not to be lost. As hastily as I could, I made my way back to the house to bring my notebook, my pencil – without which my notebook could be but an aggravation – and my lens. Alas! by the time I had returned the Hoopoo had disappeared. I resolved henceforth to be of a greater prudence. Blaming myself for my lack of preparedness, I took care next night to sleep with my lens in bed with me so as to be ready at the earliest dawn to proceed to the brickyard.

The first beams of day saw me seated upon the same brick, my lens ready at hand, my notebook on my knee and my pencil poised in the air. But alas! my hopes were destined to be dashed to the ground. The Hoopoo did not appear.

The entomologist, however, must be patient. For five successive mornings I found myself seated on the brick in eager expectation. No result. But on the sixth morning there flashed through my mind one of those gleams of inductive reasoning which make the entomologist what he is. It occurred to me with such force as to make me wonder why it had not occurred to me with such force before, that on the first occasion I had seen the Hoopoo at ten o’clock in the morning. On all the other occasions I had sat on the brick at four in the morning. The inference was obvious. The Hoopoo does not get up until ten.

To wait until ten o’clock was the work of a moment. With renewed expectation, I found myself seated on the brick at the very moment when the shadow thrown by the morning sun from behind the chimney of a nearby factory indicated to me that it was ten o’clock. With a beating heart I watched the shadow steal across the ground. Alas! I was doomed again to failure. Ten o’clock came and passed and no sign of the Hoopoo greeted my anxious eye. I was just about to leave the place in despair and to select for my researches some animal less erratic than the Hoopoo, such as the horse, the boa-constrictor, or the common kangaroo, when a thought flashed through my mind calculated to turn my despair into a renewed anticipation. Six days – so it now suddenly occurred to me – had elapsed. One more would make seven. Seven days in a week. The inexorable logic was complete. The Hoopoo must appear once a week. The day of her first appearance had been Sunday. Tomorrow she would come again.

The reader may imagine in what an agony of expectation I waited till next day. Spasms went through me when I thought of what the morrow might or might not bring. But this time I was not doomed to disappointment. Seated on my brick at the precise hour of ten, and watching the moving shadow, I became suddenly aware that the Hoopoo had appeared and was moving daintily over the dusty ground. There was no doubt of her identity. My eye dwelt with delight on the beautiful luster of her carapace and the curvical appearance of her snortex. Her antennae gracefully swept the air before her while the fibulae with which her feet were shielded traced a feathery pattern in the dust. Hastily taking out my stop-watch, I timed her. She was moving at the rate of the tenth part of a centimeter in the twentieth of a second. Her general direction was north-north-west. But here entered an astounding particularity which I am as yet unable to explain. The direction in which the Hoopoo was moving was exactly reversed from that of the previous week.

I determined now to test the intelligence of the Hoopoo. Taking a small piece of stick, I placed it directly across her path. She stepped over it. I now supported the same piece of stick by elevating it, still lying in the Hoopoo’s path, on two small pebbles. She went under it. I next placed both stick and stones together so as to form what must have appeared a formidable barrier directly in her path. She went around it. I now varied my experiment. With the blade of my knife I dug, directly in the path of the moving animal, hole which must have appeared to her a considerable cavity. She jumped across it.

I need not, however, recite in detail the series of experiments which I carried out on this and the following Sunday mornings. I tested the Hoopoo in accordance with all the latest intelligence tests of animal life. And in every test she acquitted herself not only with credit but with distinction. I lifted her up with blades of grass, carried her to a distance of fifty yards and set her down again, to see if she could walk home (which she did), and fed her with minute particles of farraginous oatcake soaked in champagne. The result of my experiments show her to be right up in the front class of animal psychology, along with the ant, the bee, and the filipino.

In short if I wished to summarize the results of my scientific labours on the Hoopoo and to set them down as an addition to human knowledge, on a par with most of our new discoveries in regard to the behaviour and psychology of animals, I should formulate them as follows:

1.  When the Hoopoo is unable to step over anything, she walks round it.

2.  The Hoopoo will drink water when she has to, but only when she has to, but she will drink champagne whether she has to or not.

3.  The religious belief of the Hoopoo is dim.

Had the Hoopoo lived a great career would have opened up in front of her. Alas! she did not. An attempt to see whether the Hoopoo could eat gravel proved disastrous. But she at least lived long enough to add one more brilliant page to the growing literature of insect life.

I cannot but feel a sense of personal loss as I sit now in the solitude of the sunlit brickyard, listening to the hum of the zocataquil and the drone of the probiscus and the sharp staccato note of the jimjam.

THE HUMAN MEMORY

Try My System and You will never Forget it

But I turn not without a feeling of reluctance from the memory of the Hoopoo and the subject of animal psychology to another aspect of the human mind now very much in the foreground of interest. I refer to Memory.

I gather from the back pages of the magazines, which are the only ones that I ever read, that there seems to be a great demand for the strengthening of the human memory. A great many “systems of memory” are now being placed upon the market, and these systems, I am delighted to find, involve no strain upon the brain, can be acquired at an expenditure of only four minutes’ time each day, resemble play rather than work, and are forwarded to any part of the United States or Canada for fifty cents.

Persons who are not satisfied with the treatment may write and say so if they don’t forget to do so. In short any one who cares to have it, can now acquire a memory as prehensile as a monkey’s tail.

This is indeed a boon. After all, what is so distressing as a failing memory? Any reader of this book can tell for himself whether he is in the first stage of the collapse of memory by asking himself whether he has any difficulty in recalling the names of the people he meets on the street. Does the reader find himself greeted two or three times a week and compelled to say:

“Excuse me, I seem to know your face, and there’s something familiar about the droop of your head, and the silly expression of your features and that asinine way in which you lean forward on your feet but I can’t recall your name.”

That however is only the first stage. A little later on, unless the memory is attended to, and toned up by a system, it goes into a further lapse in which the victim thus accosted on the street is only able to answer:

“Excuse me. I can’t recall your name. I don’t remember your face. I never saw your clothes. I don’t recollect your voice. If I ever saw you I have forgotten it. If I ever knew you, it has left no impression. Tell me frankly, are you one of my relations or just one of my best friends?”

After which it is very humiliating to have the stranger remind him of the simple fact that he was at the Schenectady High School with him only thirty-five years ago.

But the loss of memory as to names and faces is only a part of the evil. Many people find that as they grow older they lose their memory for words, for passages from books, for pieces of poetry familiar since childhood. The reader may test his own power of memory by completing if he can the following:

“The boy stood on the burning deck

Whence——”

Let us ask “whence what?” and “in what direction?”, “why was the deck burning?” and “why had the boy selected it for standing on?” Or this again:

“Under the spreading chestnut tree,

The village smithy stands,

The smith——”

Now then, quite frankly, what about the Smith? Can you give any idea of his personal appearance. What about his hands – eh what?

I may say at once that any reader who finds himself unable to recall poems of this class, or to name the branches of the Amazon, or to remember who it was that borrowed a dollar from him at bridge, is in a bad way and had better take treatment at once.

It is to meet this very kind of difficulty that I have been working out a system of memory. As yet it is only in a fragmentary shape, but even as it is, it may be found of use for certain purposes.

I will take a very familiar and very important case – the question of how to remember the delegates at a convention. All of us nowadays have to attend conventions of one kind or another – conventions of Furniture Men, or Rubber Men, or Stone Men, or Cement Men, Gas Men, Air Men – any kind of men. And at every convention the delegate from Grand Rapids, Michigan, looks exactly like the delegate from Miami, Florida, and from Iksquak, Ungava. Is there, one asks, any way by which one can remember the name of a peculiar delegate? Yes, I think, it can be done.

In my system in such a problem as this we proceed on the method of Infinite Verification. Put in simple language this means that if you say a thing over often enough presently you may remember it. Thus if a delegate is introduced to you under the name of Mr. Louis Barker of Owen Sound, Ontario, as soon as he has been presented you must say:

“Pardon me, I am not sure that I have the name right?”

“Louis Barker.”

“Ah, thank you, Mr. Barker, and from where did you say?”

“From Owen Sound.”

“Oh, yes – and I don’t know if I got your Christian name?”

“Louis.”

“Oh, certainly, and what did you say was your surname?”

“Barker.”

“Yes, exactly, and from what town do you come, Mr. Barker?”

“From Owen Sound.”

“Ah, to be sure and you said it was in Alberta.”

“No, in Ontario.”

“In Ontario! Of course, how stupid of me, and – pardon me, I want to get it right – did you say that your name was Lloyd or Tomlinson? For the moment I can’t remember which.”

When you hear two or more people going through this kind of conversation you may be sure that they are memory experts, and that they are paying fifty cents a week for memory lessons – or they ought to.

At any rate there is no doubt that if that kind of question and answer is repeated often enough you will presently retain with absolute distinctness the recollection that the man’s name is Louis Barker – either that or William Baker.

And just at the time when you have got this established he himself will turn to you and say:

“Excuse me, I am afraid I am rather stupid, but did you say that your name was Edward Peterson or Lionel Jennings?”

It has to be observed however that even when this much has been accomplished you still may not be able to remember the delegate’s face. That is another question. Science has not yet gone far enough to tell us whether it is possible to remember delegates’ faces at conventions.

Such cases, however, are relatively simple. I turn to the more difficult problem of how to remember telephone numbers. Everybody knows how provoking it is when we cannot remember whether our best friend’s telephone number is 4821 or 4281 – or just possibly 8241, or even 8421 – with a faint suspicion that it may be 2841 or – stop a bit – 2481. It seems a shame to remember it so nearly as that – in fact, within a few thousands – and yet not get it.

The best solution, no doubt, is to associate only with people who have reasonable telephone numbers such as 9999 or 0000. Failing that, one must fall back on some kind of mnemonic device. Now in the case of numbers a great deal can be done by what we call technically the principle of association. This means that, after all, everything must in a way be like something else, and that even the oddest collection of figures are connected by some link or association with others more simple.

For example, a friend of mine told me that he had great difficulty in remembering his telephone number which was 2937-J. I drew his attention to the simple fact that 29 is only one short of thirty and that 37 is only three short of forty and that J is the next letter before K. After that the thing was absurdly easy.

A similar difficulty presented itself in another case where the telephone number was 4754. But after turning it over in my mind I realized that 47 is the highest prime number above 41 and that 54 would be the next if it were 53 instead of 54. Add to this that the number 4754 itself is nothing other than the square root of 22,600,516 and the problem is solved.

It may be objected that this form of memory work is open only to people of a mathematic mind – such as actuaries, astronomers, and the employees of a cash register company. Other people may prefer a form of association dealing rather with facts than with figures. In this connection I may quote the case of a man whose telephone number was 1066 and who was able to remember it by noticing that it represents the date of the Norman Conquest. This is capable of a wide application. If your telephone number is 2986 connect it at once with the fall of the Ming dynasty in China; if it is 3843, that is obviously the date of the death of Amenhotep the First and so on. In short, whatever your number is you have but to look it up in a book of history, connect an event with it, learn the event, memorize the date, and the thing is done. In such a case be careful not to say to the operator: “Give me the landing of the Pilgrim fathers, Uptown-W.”

Here is a more intricate problem in which the student of memory may surprise his friends with the brilliance of his performance – I refer to the power to memorize a long and disconnected series of names. The best illustration or at least the most familiar, is the series of the names of the Presidents of the United States in order of office.

When we apply the principle of association to this, what appears an almost insuperable task is easily overcome. Take the first link in the chain. We want to remember that after Washington comes Adams. Can it be done? Yes, by association. We connect with the word Washington anything that it suggests, and then something that that suggests, and so on till we happen to get to Adams—

Washington evidently suggests washing.

Washing evidently suggests laundry.

Laundry evidently suggests the Chinese.

The Chinese evidently suggest missionaries.

Missionaries evidently suggest the Bible.

The Bible begins with Adam.

How ridiculously simple!

In conclusion I may say that if any reader of this book will send me fifty cents, I will either (a) forward to him by post my entire system of memory, or (b) send him back his fifty cents, or (c) keep his fifty cents and say nothing about it. If his memory is so weak as to need a system he will have forgotten his fifty cents anyway.

TOC     INDEX

The Human Body –
Its Care and Prevention

Having put the human mind where it belongs, or at least placed it where it can do no harm, we shall proceed in the present chapter to deal with the human body in her various aspects. Most readers will admit – except those who are complete nuts – that, with the single exception of the mind and the soul, there is nothing so important as the body. If we had no body it is doubtful if we could get along. Without the body most of us, if not all of us, would feel lost. Life itself would lose much of its elasticity, and even the most optimistic would be oppressed with a sense of emptiness.

Under such circumstances it is obvious that the care and use of the body is a matter of prime importance. We must study the question of how we are to treat it. What will be the best food to give it? What would it like to eat? Does it care for fruit and nuts? Are eggs good for it? In short, the thoughtful man when he sits down to eat will not merely consider his own personal likes and dislikes, but will remember that he must look after his body.

The same is true of exercise. The wise man when he goes out for a walk will take his body along with him. Air is good for it: and he will see to it that his body is always properly warmed, housed, and cleaned. It is not too much to say that the proper care of the body has a close connection with the health.

To maintain this care there is needed a continued and anxious personal attention. The thing must not be left to subordinates. The man of sense will keep up a minute and unceasing examination of his skin, his hair, and his whole exterior. If he drops a hair he should pick it up at once: one of the follicles at its base may have given way or perhaps the fall of the hair may mean that he is in the incipient stage of scatalosis, or mange. If so, he ought to inform himself of it without delay.

Nor is it only the external aspect of the body that should be an object of continuous attention. The same thing is true of the interior, or what we may call medically, the inside. The prudent man especially as he reaches middle life, will keep a watchful eye turned on his inside. Are his ducts functioning? How is his great colon? And the shorter, or semi-colon, what about that? Is there an easy flow of nitric acid from the oesophagus to the proscenium? If not, what is stopping it: has perhaps a lot of sand or mud made its way into the auditorium? Are the sebaceous glands in what one might call efficient working condition, and are the valves of the liver revolving as they ought to? Are the eyes opening and shutting properly, and is the lower jaw swinging on its hinges as it should? In short, the man of discretion will go over himself each day and tap himself with a small hammer to see that his body is functioning as it ought to.

This care of the body and, particularly this attention to food, is a thing of very recent growth. It belongs only with the era in which we live and with the development of the advertising sections of the metropolitan press and with the invention of scenic advertising along the lines of our great railways. It is amazing how careless our ancestors were in this respect. The early pioneers who cut down the forests and settled the farm lands of North America never seem to have taken any exercise. They knew nothing of the value of deep breathing or of the advantage of lifting the left knee up to the chest five times every morning before breakfast.

As to food, the mental state of our ancestors was appalling. They were ignorant of vitamines, calories, and of the proper proportion of ferruginous and diaphanous elements in diurnal diet. They ate pancakes, oatcakes, johnnycakes, and other albuminous integers without realizing that in so doing they were increasing their consumption of protein without any corresponding balance of nitrogen. They seem to have eaten meats, pies, ham sandwiches, doughnuts, and dog biscuits under the silly impression that such things are food. We have only to open a modern scientific book on Diet and What it Does to Us to realize that they are not. These things may satisfy the appetite and distend the stomach and create a distressing hallucination of happiness, but they are not food. In the true sense, food will be found to consist of certain chemical products including nitrogen, carbon (such as common coal), cement, glue, and other lifegiving elements. To all of these we now give the name vitamines, to indicate that without them life is not possible, or, if possible at all, is too dull to count. But to get at the root of the matter we must turn back to the beginning of our analysis and must proceed to build up a science of food.

THE SCIENCE OF FOOD

The first thing we have to do is to obtain a scientific view of the nature of food and to answer the question why do we eat and what will happen if we don’t. Most people have never stopped to ask themselves why they eat and could not give a satisfactory reason why they do so. From the medical point of view the problem is not so simple as it sounds, but we may, in an approximate way, answer the question by saying that if we did not eat we should lose tone and elasticity, there would be a lowering of buoyancy, our blood would slacken, our stomach would sink, and our clothes would come unbuttoned. Granted then that we are satisfied with the answer to our first question and admit, perhaps regretfully, that we must eat, we are confronted with the second inquiry, how much should we eat and when have we eaten enough? Here again science is able to give us a definite answer. There are certain plain and obvious symptoms which indicate to the trained eye that we have eaten enough. The distention of the stomach, as notified by the stretching and cracking of the skin, the bulging of the eyes, and the inability to move the jaws, should warn us that it is time to rise from the table – if we can. Some specialists, however, hold that even when this stage has been reached a more complete repletion can still be secured by the infiltration of buckwheat pancakes and maple syrup. This, however, is a technical matter of secondary importance. The main factor is that after a certain point is reached a general feeling of compactness, of solidification, of unification of the whole body sets in and informs us that if we like we can stop eating without harm.

This much established, we pass to the much more delicate inquiry what can we eat and, if we do, how can we digest it? This inquiry we cannot undertake, however, until we are prepared to understand what it is that happens, medically and scientifically, to our food. The process runs thus. The food is first introduced into the mouth, where it is thrown violently back and forward, beating with great force against the cheeks: by this means it is folded into a ball and thrown to the oesophagus, which catches it, spins it round, and hurls it with a splash into the stomach. In this organ it is further pounded, pulverized, kicked, and bruised. Reduced thus into its elements, the food is divided, some of it passes into the liver, some into the heart, some into the eyes, causing them to bulge, while some again goes back into the face, causing it to swell and expand until its temperature reaches the boiling point and is carried off in the form of steam. The food not thus used is thrown by the stomach into the tetrahedron and disappears.

So far so good. We have now to ask what particular substances are those which present to us the proper food values. Science tells us that food consists of the following things: the class of substances called proteins, such as ordinary paste, glue (as found on the back of postage stamps), shoeblacking, including tan-polish, etc., etc.; the whole class known as carbons, such as common coal, burnt sticks, lampblack, and so on; a number of gases, to include nitrogen, hydrogen, sulphuric acid as found in eggs, and so forth. In addition to these principal articles of diet, the body needs, if it is to maintain a perfect health, a certain quantity of phosphorus, lime, old iron, sugar, gin, cement, rust, beans, mud, and other bone-making elements.

COMPUTATION BY CALORIES

For a perfect science of food we need, however, more than a mere list of the food ingredients. We must have some form of relative measurement of computation. Modern science supplies this in the form of the calory, one of the newest and brightest discoveries in the art of eating. A calory (which is derived from the Greek calico, I eat) means the amount of units of heat which a food constituent imparts to the body. Thus when we eat a pound of beefsteak we are aware of a growing sensation of heat; on eating a second pound we are hotter still; on eating the third pound our latent heat, if it were not carried off in the form of a cloud rising from the face, would result in serious inconvenience and perhaps in a liquefaction of the kidneys. In other words, we should be at the boiling point.

Experience shows that a pound of beefsteak contains 800 calories; a pound of sausages contains 1600 calories; while coal tar, although it is nearly 500 times sweeter than sugar, contains no calories at all. This is why we do not eat coal tar. On the other hand, various articles of diet which are very commonly neglected are very rich in calories: of these we may mention Brazil nuts, popcorn, timothy hay, spinach, raw oats, and grass seed.

We are now in a position to indicate the general tenor of a balanced diet. We may set it down somewhat as follows:

BREAKFAST MENU

(For an adult)

100 calories of nitrogen dioxide

100 calories (ten pounds) of popcorn

100 calories (one packet) of bird seed.

It will be found that any adult in good condition who eats this breakfast will rise from it with a sense of lightness and volubility quite lacking after his usual diet.

BREAKFAST MENU

(For a child)

100 calories of hay

1 pint of sour milk (very rich and swarming with vitamines)

2 pounds of beefsteak (high value in carbohydrates)

1 cake of soap.

Let us try a slight variation.

AVIATOR’S BREAKFAST

(Before Flying)

Hydrogen (400 calories)

Popcorn (half a bushel)

AVIATOR’S DINNER

(After Flying)

1 pound of cement

3 calories of iron

1 can of stewed lead
with perhaps a crab-apple.

Anybody with a constructive mind will readily see how easy and simple it becomes, when once we have a proper knowledge of food values, to put together a suitable diet or menu for any kind of occasion. It is needless to multiply examples. But a few typical illustrations may serve to develop our meaning to the saturation point. Thus:

MENU FOR ANNUAL LUNCHEON
OF AN ARTISTS’ LEAGUE

Hors d’Oeuvre  – | Air
Soup  – | Nitrogen
Fish  – | Gasoline
Pièce de Résistance  – | 100 Cal. Spinach
Dessert  – | More Spinach

Having now arranged a perfect diet adaptable to all places and times, our next concern is with the problem of how to digest it. Can we do it? We can. Modern science is able to state confidently that food if properly combined and put into the body can be digested: in fact, this is one of the great triumphs of modern science.

In past ages, though it was not known at the time, many of the principal troubles of the world arose from indigestion. We read of the deep melancholy of Dante and of how he would sit brooding for hours. This was indigestion. If Dante had taken a few calories of liquid air and a plate of popcorn every morning he would never have felt this. We read of the terrible restlessness all over Europe which led to the first Crusade: again indigestion; if Peter the Hermit and his followers had known how to take a few suitable exercises on the floor of the bathroom every morning they would never have started for Jerusalem.

In other words, the secret of digestion lies in exercise; not taken in the rude fashion of earlier times on horseback and with hounds and in such ways, but taken on the floor of the bathroom while lying on the stomach. We now know – everybody knows who reads in the press – that exercise of this kind can be so contrived as to be a form of play, of mere skittishness. The person exercising jumps out of his bed of a morning, rushes to the bathroom, throws himself on the floor, and in ten minutes of playfulness sets himself up in energy for the day. Without wishing to injure the sale of any of the numerous methods of exercise already on the market, I venture here to put in my own system, merely as a sample, more or less typical, of what is being achieved in this respect.

DAILY EXERCISE
ON THE FLOOR

In taking these exercises the operator should be dressed in pyjamas and the exercises should be performed on the floor of a bathroom. This last is a point of especial importance. The floor of the bathroom – according to all published directions – is the only safe place in which to take these exercises. They should not be taken on the floor of a ball room, nor on the table of a dining room.

COURSE NO. I.

This course is specially designed for persons in middle life anxious to get rid of obesity, melancholy, and taciturnity.

Movement No. 1. Standing on the ball of the left foot, wave the right foot three times smartly around the head, at the same time shouting, Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah!

Movement No. 2. Do it again.

Movement No. 3. Again.

Movement No. 4. Once more, this time shouting Ha! Ha! Ha! as the foot whirls round the head.

Movement No. 5. Standing in an easy attitude, pass the right arm below and behind the right knee so as to bring it round above and beyond the left shoulder, at the same time rapidly revolving the body to the right and elevating the left foot so as to pivot on the right heel.

Movement No. 6. Keep on spinning.

Movement No. 7. Reverse.

Movement No. 8. Go into low gear.

Movement No. 9. Stop.

Movement No. 10. Turn a couple of handsprings downstairs and sit down to breakfast.

Ten minutes of this kind of play taken every day will keep obesity at arm’s length indefinitely.

COURSE NO. II.

(For Business Men.)

This course is so designed that it can be taken in the office itself at intervals between signing checks, closing deals, and taking in money. There is no need, in short, for the business man to get out of his swivel chair while doing these movements.

Movement No. 1. Move the ears gently back and forward.

Movement No. 2. Light a large cigar and breathe very deeply in such a way as alternately to draw the smoke into the cavity of the mouth and expel it.

Movement No. 3. While still continuing No. 2, place the feet upon a stool or chair within easy distance, fold the hands across the stomach, and close the eyes.

Movement No. 4. Keep on.

Movement No. 5. Let the cigar fall sideways into an ashtray, place the head in a drooping position, draw a handkerchief over the cranium and remain in this posture for half an hour.

Movement No. 6. Pretend to snore.

Movement No. 7. Come smartly to an attitude of alacrity, remove the handkerchief, pick the cigar up out of the ashtray, whirl round three times on the swivel chair, ring for the stenographer, and start a new deal, at the same time moving the ears back and forward with rapidity.

—

So much then for our ideas of what human food ought to be and what it ought to contain. Let us now ask – because we must keep on asking something – is it possible to obtain any simple prepared food which contains all the required ingredients in exactly the right proportion, and has such a food ever been discovered? We answer it is and it has. This marvelous achievement of science was consummated in the discovery of Humpo, the perfect breakfast food obtainable at all grocers. I do not know whether our readers have ever heard of Humpo. They may have lived so far out of the main current of modern thought that they know nothing of it. But at least they have read in the advertising pages of the press of various preparations similar yet inferior. By the way, all readers should be cautioned never to accept these inferior preparations. No matter what persuasion or blandishment may be used, they should answer, “No, I want Humpo.” They must never accept the statement that any preparation is equal to it. To any such insinuation they must say with the utmost firmness, “I insist on Humpo.”

Students of this subject know how long and how eagerly the world had sought a perfect breakfast food. Benjamin Franklin is said to have said that if there had been a perfect breakfast food there would have been no Declaration of Independence. Napoleon at St. Helena often remarked that with a perfect breakfast food he would have won the battle of Waterloo; and Abraham Lincoln in his droll way once said that if he had a perfect breakfast food he wouldn’t take any breakfast.

But for years the greatest scientists worked in vain. Sir Humphry Davy, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley were compelled to abandon the problem. It remained for Dr. Oscar P. Kloonspotz to solve it. The picture of Dr. Kloonspotz may be seen in the advertising pages of any illustrated periodical. He is depicted in what is evidently his laboratory, shrouded by huge glass retorts, crucibles, test scales, and little heaps of various grains. The intensity of the expression of the doctor’s face shows that at the moment when they photographed him he was in the very act of discovering Humpo.

It was his task to prepare a food product containing exactly the right amount of starch, mud, and phosphorus to supply the great life-giving elements with just enough amygdaloid to make it palatable. As soon as he had done this Dr. Kloonspotz – rightly called the Wizard of Food – gave his preparation to the world. It may be now had anywhere, put up in a sealed package, and sold for a nominal sum payable merely in money.

GREAT MOMENTS
IN THE HISTORY
OF HUMAN WELFARE.

The Discovery of “Balso” by the Wizard of the Adirondacks.

Undoubtedly the discovery of Humpo marked an era in human history. In fact, Dr. Kloonspotz, who is modesty itself, is reported to have said (his words are printed on the package): “a perfect breakfast means a perfect day.”

The only other achievement in the history of human welfare that can be compared with the compounding of Humpo is the story of the discovery of Balso. What Humpo does for the well body, Balso does for the sick. The problem in this case was to find, not a substance which would maintain the body in health, but a remedy which should heal and restore the body in any and every form of illness. By this time no doubt all the world knows the story. Everybody who reads is familiar with the picture of the individual whom I designate the Wizard of the Adirondacks. This venerable man, looking like Father Time, wearing a flowing beard and dressed in a bath towel, is seen on the outside of the packet of Balso and elsewhere while engaged in stirring the contents of a huge iron pot. All around him is a setting of pine trees and rock in the fastnesses of the mountains. The whole scene breathes an aroma of the woods and of the life-giving balsam which must exist there. As the steam rises from the pot we realize that the Wizard is in the act of discovering his great remedy. The mind is almost staggered at the thought.

The remedy once found, the next problem was to give it an appropriate name. Such a name ought to be at once scientific and scholarly, and yet short enough to be cheap to print, and calculated to convey a certain hint, but not too much, of its possible connection with the balsam tree. With characteristic ingenuity the Wizard himself, after deep thought, invented the name Balso, under which the great remedy has since become famous all the world over. Readers, by the way, are warned that anything that is called something else is a different thing, and should be avoided like the pest. Unscrupulous dealers – and we know what they are – may try to sell us preparations purporting to be equal in curative property. But the reader has only to understand what Balso does to realize that there can be only one thing like it.

A word as to the properties of Balso. Let it first be distinctly understood that Balso has no connection whatever with the remedies and the treatments of the medical colleges. It stands on a much higher authority. The original secret of Balso comes from the Dog Rib Indians. It was perhaps known also to the Flat Heads and the Snub-Nosed Piutes and other great aborigines. Possibly the Hottentots used it. At any rate Balso is a “simple,” and when we say that we reach our readers where they live.

The extraordinary advantage of Balso lies in the wide range of its use. In the first place, it undoubtedly heals all forms of bone disease when rubbed on the bones. For all internal complaints – especially those indicated by a sinking or depressed feeling, or a forlorn sensation, or by an inability to earn money – Balso effects an immediate cure. In these cases it is taken internally, by the pint. For diseases of the hair, such as complete baldness or lethargy of the scalp, a smart rubbing of Balso will work wonders; while for infantile complaints, such as croup, whoop, paresis, and so forth, the child should be rubbed with Balso and laid upon a shelf.

It is curious to think that if the Dog Rib Indians had all died, and if there had been no conservation of the great forests – but after all why think it? The essential thing is that some day the jealousy and envy of the colleges will give way and this great remedy will come into its own.

—

THE SECRETS
OF LONGEVITY
AND PERPETUAL YOUTH

Our readers – those of them who have arrived at this point of our discussion, and we are really not concerned with the others – will naturally interpose and say, “You have told us how the body may be sustained, renovated, and upholstered by means of systematic diet and exercise, and how it can be restored from vital or wasting disease, such as baldness, mange, and sinking of the stomach. What we wish to know is how long can life be thus sustained and prolonged.” If they do ask this our readers will receive a shock of surprise – in fact, we have been keeping this shock for them – when we say that there is no reason why they should not live as long as they care to. (This offer is restricted, of course, to readers of these pages; others must die as usual.) In other words, we must now know so much about longevity that we have practically arrived at the secret of living forever – or at any rate until death.

It may be of interest to show the way in which modern science has arrived at this conclusion. In the first place a great many actual cases of longevity have been examined and useful conclusions drawn from each. I will quote a few cases here – merely a few among thousands – such as help toward deductions in regard to the possibilities of old age. They are taken, as appears from the form in which they are written, from the columns of the daily papers, but each case has also been certified to either by a local minister of the Gospel or a notary public, or by a duly qualified hotelkeeper.

Case No. 1. (as reported in the Daily Annalist, Cedar Corners, Iowa.) “William Waterson celebrated his hundred and first birthday at his residence here at Cedar Corners. The old gentleman is still hale and hearty and celebrated the day by splitting two cords of wood. Mr. Waterson has been a water drinker all his life, having never tasted alcoholic spirits or tobacco.” The inference here is obvious. Mr. Waterson’s life has been preserved for the plain and evident reason that he drinks only water and never smokes. If he touches whiskey or cigarettes it will be all over with him.

We put beside this, however, a rather puzzling item which appears in the Weekly News and Intelligencer, Georgina Township, Ontario.

“Mr. Edward Easiest celebrated his one hundred and first birthday here at the home of his son surrounded by his grandchildren in the presence of a representative of the Weekly Intelligencer devoutly giving thanks to the Lord for his continued health and strength. Mr. Easiest has been a heavy smoker all his days and still relishes his glass of hot toddy compounded of rum, spices, and sugar.”

Good old man! Can we blame him? And in any case it is clear that he owes his life to rum and tobacco. Indeed, what looks simple at first begins to appear more complicated. Compare this:

“Jarrets’ Corners, N. Y. Cornelia Cleopatra Washington (coloured) celebrated here her one hundred and tenth birthday yesterday. She remembers George Washington as a child.” Plain enough she lived so long because she was coloured. There seems no other reason.

Llanfydd, Wales (From the Llanfydd Fyddist.)

“Mrs. Llewellyn Owen, a resident of this town, celebrated her one hundred and fifth birthday yesterday. Mrs. Owen, who has lived in Wales since her childhood, a hundred and ten years ago, still retains all her faculties and maintains a keen interest in English politics, especially in the doings of Lloyd George whom she remembers a hundred years ago as a pupil in her father’s school. Mrs. Owen talks interestingly of the great fire of London (which she remembers as a girl) and of the sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers, many of whom she knew. She doubts whether the Cabinet of the Labour Party in England contains men of the same caliber as the greatest men in history.”

In this case without a doubt Mrs. Owen owes her life to her interest in English politics. Indeed one observes many cases of this sort.

From examples such as these we see at once that there are certain things which conduce to perpetual youth, such as drinking nothing else throughout life but water, or nothing but rum as the case may be. Total abstinence from tobacco undoubtedly prolongs life and so does excessive smoking. But modern science has recently recognized that in the main what we call old age is a condition brought on by an insufficiency of sour milk in the system. The discoveries of Dr. Menschnikoff have shown that sour milk is full of minute polyglots which, when let loose in the human body, effect a general restoration by removing all waste. It is now proven beyond doubt that anybody who takes a gallon of sour milk night and morning can live forever. The only question is – Is it worth it?

TOC     INDEX

The Perfect Salesman

A Complete Guide to Business

I admit at the outset that I know nothing direct, personal or immediate about business. I have never been in it. If I were told tomorrow to go out and make $100,000 I should scarcely know how to do it. If anybody showed me a man on the street and told me to sell him a municipal six per cent bond I shouldn’t know how to begin: I wouldn’t know how to “approach” him, or how to hold his interest, or how to make him forget his troubles, or how to clinch him, or strike him to the earth at the final moment.

As to borrowing money – which is one of the great essentials of business – I simply couldn’t do it. As soon as I got across the steps of the bank I should get afraid – scared that they would throw me out. I know, of course, from reading about it that this is mere silliness, that the bankers are there simply waiting to lend money – just crazy to lend it. All you have to do is to invite the general manager out to lunch and tell him that you want half a million dollars to float a big proposition (you don’t tell him what it is – you just say that you’ll let him know later) and the manager, so I gather, will be simply wild to lend you the money. All this I pick up from the conversations which I overhear at my club from men who float things. But I couldn’t do it myself: there’s an art in it: to borrow money, big money, you have to wear your clothes in a certain way, walk in a certain way, and have about you an air of solemnity and majesty – something like the atmosphere of a Gothic cathedral. Small men like me and you, my dear reader, especially you, can’t do it. We feel mean about it: and when we get the money, even if it is only ten dollars, we give ourselves away at once by wanting to hustle away with it too fast. The really big man in this kind of thing can borrow half a million, button it up in his chest, and then draw on his gloves and talk easily about the League of Nations and the prospect of rain. I admit I couldn’t do it. If I ever got that half a million dollars, I’d beat it out of the bank as fast as a cat going over a fence.

So, as I say, I make no pretensions to being a business man or to knowing anything about business. But I have a huge admiration for it, especially for big business, for the men at the top. They say that the whole railway business of this continent centres really in four men; and they say, too, that the whole money power of New York is really held by about six men; the entire forests of this country are practically owned by three men; the whole of South America, though it doesn’t know it, is controlled by less than five men; and the Atlantic Ocean is now to all intents and purposes in the hands of a little international group of not more than seven and less than eight.

Think what it would mean to be one of those eight, or one of that four, or even, one or two of that three! There must be a tremendous fascination about it, to be in this kind of really Big Business: to sit at a desk and feel one’s great brain slowly revolving on its axis; to know that one’s capacious mind was majestically turning round and round, and to observe one’s ponderous intellect moving irresistibly up and down.

We cannot wonder, when we reflect on this, that all the world nowadays is drawn by the fascination of business. It is not the money that people want: I will acquit humanity of that: few people care for money for its own sake: it is the thought of what can be done with the money. “Oh, if I only had a million dollars!” I heard a woman say the other day on the platform of a social service meeting. And I could guess just what she meant – that she would quit work and go to the South Sea Islands and play mah jong and smoke opium. I’ve had the same idea again and again.

SALESMANSHIP
AND THE PERFECT SALESMAN

The most essential feature of modern business is, I imagine, salesmanship. My readers may not appreciate this at once – they seldom seem to get anything readily – and so I will explain some of the reasons which lead me to think so. Without salesmanship we could not sell anything. If we could not sell anything we might as well not make anything, because if we made things and couldn’t sell them it would be as bad as if we sold things and couldn’t make them.

Hence the most terrible danger that the world can face is that everybody will be buying things and nobody able to sell them. This danger of not selling anything, which used to threaten the world with disaster only a short time ago, is now being removed. Salesmanship, my readers will be glad to learn – at least, if the miserable creatures ever get thrilled at anything – is being reduced to a science. A great number of Manuals of Salesmanship are now being placed within reach of everybody and from these we can gather the essentials of the subject.

In the small space which it is here feasible to devote to the subject it is not possible to treat in an adequate way such a vast and important subject as modern salesmanship. For complete information recourse should be had to any one of the many manuals to which I refer and which can be had at a trifling sum, such as ten dollars, or even more. But we may indicate here a few of the principal points of salesmanship.

PERSONALITY OF THE SALESMAN

It is essential that the salesman should have charm. If he wishes to sell anything – let us say lead pipe for use in sewers and house drains – he will find that what he needs most in selling is personal charm, a sort of indefinable manner, with just that little touch of noblesse which suggests the easy camaraderie of the menagerie. In other words, he must diffuse wherever he goes, in selling sewer pipes, a sense of sunshine which makes the world seem a little brighter when he is gone.

In person the perfect salesman should be rather tall with a figure which suggests, to his customers, the outline of the Venus de Milo. According to the manuals of salesmanship he can get this figure by taking exercises every morning on the floor of his hotel bedroom. But the discussion of that point has been undertaken already. Let us suppose him then with the characteristic figure of a Venus de Milo, or if one will of a Paduan Mercury, or of a Bologna sausage. We come, in any case, to the all important points of dress.

HOW SHALL
THE PERFECT SALESMAN DRESS?

Every manual on the subject emphasizes the large importance of dress for the salesman. Indeed there is probably nothing which has a greater bearing on success and failure in the salesman than his dress. The well dressed man – in selling, let us say, municipal bonds, has an initial advantage over the man who comes into his customer’s store in tattered rags, with his toes protruding from his boots, unshaved and with a general air of want and misery stamped all over him. Customers are quick to notice these little things. But let the salesman turn up in an appropriate costume, bright and neat from head to foot and bringing with him something of the gladness of the early spring and the singing bird and the customer is immediately impressed in his favour.

One asks, what then should be the costume of the perfect salesman? It is not an easy question to answer. Obviously his costume must vary with the season and with the weather and with the time of day. One might suggest, however, that on rising in the morning the salesman should throw round him a light peignoir of yellow silk or a figured kimono slashed from the hips with pink insertions and brought round in a bold sweep to the small of the back. This should be worn during the morning toilet while putting the hair up in its combs, while adjusting the dickie and easing the suspenders. If breakfast is taken in the bedroom the liver and bacon may be eaten in this costume.

Breakfast over, the great moment approaches for the perfect salesman to get out upon the street. Here the daintiest care must be selected in choosing his dress. And here we may interpose at once a piece of plain and vigorous advice: the simplest is the best. The salesman makes a great mistake who comes into his customer’s premises covered with jewellery, with earrings in his ears and expensive bracelets on his feet and ankles. Nor should there be in the salesman’s dress anything the least suggestive of immodesty. No salesman should ever appear with bare arms, or with his waistcoat cut so low as to suggest impropriety. Some salesmen, especially in the hardware business, are tempted to appear with bare arms, but they ought not to do it. For evening wear and for social recreation the case is different. When work is over the salesman in returning to his hotel may very properly throw on a georgette camisole open at the throat or a lace fichu with ear-flaps of perforated celluloid. But the salesman should remember that for the hours of business anything in the way of a luxurious or suggestive costume should be avoided. Unfortunately this is not always done. I have myself again and again noticed salesmen, especially in the hardware business where they take their coats off, to be wearing a suit calculated to reveal their figure round the hips and the lower part of the back in an immodest way.

All this kind of thing should be avoided. The salesman should select from his wardrobe (or from his straw valise) a suit of plain severe design, attractive and yet simple, good and yet bad, long and at the same time short, in other words, something that is expensive but cheap.

He should button this up in some simple way with just a plain clasp at the throat, agate perhaps or onyx, and then, having buttoned up all his buttons, but, mark me, not until then, he should go out upon the street prepared to do business.

Let any of my readers who doubts the importance of dress – and some of them are nuts enough to doubt anything – consider the following little anecdote of salesmanship. It is one that I selected from among the many little anecdotes of the sort which are always inserted in the manuals.

ANECDOTE
OF THE ILL-DRESSED SALESMAN

“A salesman in the middle west, whom we will call Mr. Blank, called upon a merchant, whom we will call Mr. Nut, and finding no difficulty in approaching him started in to show him his line with every hope of selling him. It should be explained that the line which Mr. Blank carried consisted of haberdashery, gents furnishings and cut-to-fit suits. Mr. Nut was evidently delighted with the samples and already a big pile of neckties, gents collarings, gents shirtings and gents sockings was stacked up on the counter and an order form for $375.50 all ready to sign, when Mr. Nut noticed the salesman’s own costume. Mr. Blank, who was a careless man in regard to dress though otherwise a man of intelligence, was wearing a low crowned Derby hat with a scooping brim over his ears, a celluloid collar and a dickie that was too small for him. His coat sleeves came only a little way below his elbows and plainly showed his cuffs, fastened with long steel clips to his undershirt. In other words, the man somehow lacked class. Mr. Nut put down his pen. ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Blank,’ he said, ‘I can’t buy from you. Your line is all right but you lack something, I can’t just say what, but if I had to give it a name I should call it tone.’ Blank, however, who was a man of resource, at once realized his error. ‘One moment, Mr. Nut,’ he said, ‘don’t refuse this order too soon.’ With that he gathered up his valise and his samples and retreated to the back of the store behind a screen. In a few minutes he reappeared dressed in his own samples. The merchant, delighted in the change in Mr. Blank’s appearance, kissed him and signed the order.”

APPROACHING THE PROSPECT

So much for the salesman’s dress, a matter of great importance but still only a preliminary to our discussion. Let us suppose then our salesman, fully dressed, his buttons all adjusted and drawing well, his suspenders regulated and his dickie set well in place. His next task is to “approach” his customer.

All those who understand salesmanship are well aware this is the really vital matter. Everything depends on it. And nevertheless “approaching” the merchant is a thing of great difficulty. The merchant, if we may believe our best books on salesmanship, is as wary as a mountain antelope. At the least alarm he will leap from his counter ten feet in the air and rush to the top of his attic floor: or perhaps he will make a dive into his cellar where he will burrow his way among barrels and boxes and become completely hidden. In such a case he can only be dug out with a spade. Some merchants are even crafty enough to have an assistant or sentinel posted in such a way as to give the alarm of the salesman’s approach.

How then can the salesman manage to get his interview with the merchant or, to use a technical term, to get next to his prospect? The answer is that he must “stalk” his prospect as the hunter stalks the mountain goat or the wild hog. Dressed in a becoming way he must circulate outside his prospect’s premises, occasionally taking a peep at him through the window and perhaps imitating the song of a bird or the gentle cooing of a dove. Pleased with the soft note of the bird’s song the prospect will presently be seen to relax into a smile. Now is the moment for the salesman to act. He enters the place boldly and says with a winning frankness, “Mr. Nut, you thought it was a bird. It was not. It was I. I am here to show you my line.”

If the salesman has chosen his moment rightly he will win. The merchant, once decoyed into looking at the line, is easily landed. On the other hand, the prospect may refuse even now to see the salesman and the attack must begin again. This difficulty of getting the merchant to see the salesman even when close beside him and the way in which it can be overcome by perseverance is well illustrated by a striking little anecdote which I quote from a recent book on salesmanship. The work, I may say, is authoritative, having been written by a man with over thirty years of experience in selling hardware and perfumes in the middle southwest.

ANECDOTE
OF THE INVISIBLE MERCHANT

“A salesman whom we will call Mr. M. —” I should perhaps explain here the M. is not really his name but just an ingenious way of indicating him – “while travelling in the interests of perfume in the middle southwest came to a town which we designate T. where he was most anxious to see a prospect whom we will speak of as P. Entering P.’s premises one morning M. asked if he could see P. P. refused. M. went out of the store and waited at the door until P. emerged at the noon hour. As soon as P. emerged M. politely asked if he could see him. P. refused to be seen. M. waited till night and then presented himself at P.’s residence. ‘Mr. P.,’ said M., ‘can I see you?’ ‘No,’ said P., ‘you can’t.’ This sort of thing went on for several days, during which M. presented himself continually before P. who as continually refused to see him. M. was almost in despair—”

Perhaps I may interrupt this little story a moment to beg my readers not to be too much oppressed by M.’s despair. In these anecdotes the salesmen are always in despair at the lowest point of the story. But it is only a sign that the clouds are breaking. I will beg my readers then – if the poor simps have been getting depressed – to cheer up and hear what follows:

“M., we say, was almost in despair when an idea occurred to him. He knew that Mr. P. was a very religious man and always attended divine worship (church) every Sunday. Disguising himself, therefore, to look like one of the apostles, M. seated himself at one side of Mr. P.’s pew. Mr. P. mistaking him for St. Matthew, was easily induced, during the sermon, to look over M.’s line of perfume.”

The above anecdote incidentally raises the important question how frank should the salesman be with his prospect. Should he go to the length of telling the truth? An answer to this is that frankness will be found to be the best policy. We will illustrate it with a little story taken from the experience of a young salesman travelling in the north southwest in the interest of brushes, face powder and toilet notions.

ANECDOTE
OF THE TRUTHFUL SALESMAN

“A young salesman, whom we will indicate as Mr. Asterisk, travelling ‘in’ brushes and toilet supplies, was one day showing his line to Mr. Stroke, a drug merchant of a town in the east north southwest. Picking up one of the sample brushes, Mr. S. said to the salesman, ‘That’s an excellent brush.’ Mr. A. answered, ‘No, I’m sorry to say it is not. Its bristles fall out easily and the wood is not really rosewood but a cheap imitation.’ Mr. S. was so pleased with the young man’s candour that he said, ‘Mr. A. it is not often I meet a salesman as candid as you are. If you will show me the rest of your line I shall be delighted to fill out a first class order.’ ‘Mr. S.,’ answered Mr. A., ‘I’m sorry to say that the whole line is as rotten as that brush.’ More delighted than ever Mr. S., who was a widower, invited Mr. A. to his house where he met Mr. S.’s grown-up daughter who kept house for him. The two young people immediately fell in love and were married, Mr. A. moving into the house and taking over the business while Mr. S., now without a home, went out selling brushes.”

While we are speaking of the approach of the prospect it may be well to remind our readers very clearly – for the poor guys don’t seem to get anything unless we make it clear – that a prospect otherwise invisible may be approached and seen by utilizing his fondness for amusements or sport. Many a man who is adamant at his place of business is mud on a golf course. The sternest and hardest of merchants may turn out to be an enthusiastic angler, or even a fisherman. The salesman who takes care to saunter into the store with a dead catfish in his pocket will meet with a cordial reception; and a conversation pleasantly initiated over the catfish and its habits may end in a handsome order. At other times it is even possible to follow the prospect out to his golf course or to track him out to the trout streams and round him up in the woods. In this case salesmanship takes on a close analogy with out-of-door hunting, the search for the prospect, the stalking of the prospect and the final encounter being very similar to accounts of the stalking of big game.

I append here an illustrative anecdote. As a matter of fact it was written not in reference to salesmanship but as an account of hunting the Wallaboo or Great Hog in the uplands of East Africa. But anybody familiar with stories of salesmanship will see at once that it fits both cases. I have merely altered the wording a little just at the end.

ANECDOTE OF A HOG

“I had been credibly informed,” says the writer, “that there was at least a sporting chance of getting in touch with the Great Hog at his drinking time—”

It will be observed that, apart from the capital letters, this is almost exactly the remark that a salesman often makes.

“The natives of the place told me that the Hog could probably be found soon after daylight at a stream about ten miles away where the brute was accustomed to drink and to catch fish. I, therefore, rose early, rode through the thick squab which covered the upland and reached the stream, or nullah, just after daybreak. There I concealed myself in a thick gob of fuz.

“I had not long to wait. The Great Hog soon appeared sniffing the air and snorting at the prospect of a drink. Extending himself prone on the bank with his snout in the water and his huge hind-quarters in the air, the Hog presented an ideal mark for the sportsman. I rose from my thicket, rifle in hand, and said, ‘Mr. A. I have followed you out to this trout stream in the hope of getting a chance to show you my line. If you have a few minutes at your disposal I shall be glad to show you some samples. If you don’t care to buy anything, I can assure you that it will be a pleasure to show my line.’”

The text seems to go a little wrong here but we can make it all right by reverting to the original which says—

“After letting him have it thus I had no trouble in hauling the Great Hog up the bank, where I skinned him.”

Just one other question may be mentioned before we pass on from this fascinating topic of salesmanship. Should a salesman accept presents, especially presents from ladies? On the whole we think not. It is a delicate problem and one which every young salesman must think out for himself. But the salesman should always remember that a firm refusal if made in a gracious and winning manner is not calculated to give offence. If after concluding his business the salesman finds that the merchant endeavours to slip a bracelet or a pair of earrings into his hand, the salesman should say, “I can’t take it, old top, I really can’t,” then kiss the merchant on the forehead and withdraw.

A present from a lady should be returned with a neat little note so framed as to avoid all offence and yet letting the donor realize clearly that the salesman is not that kind of man.

Let us turn now from the problem of salesmanship to the equally important field of advertising.

THE WHOLE ART OF ADVERTISING

I suppose it is no exaggeration to say that salesmanship and advertising are the two most important things in the world. One of the biggest advertising men in the country is reported as saying the other day in his big way, “Where would the world be without advertising?” The more you think of this expression (which only a big man could have expressed) the more you are struck with the truth of it. Indeed it has just exactly that pith, that pep, that punch, which all good advertising ought to have. It sets you wondering right away as to what advertising really is, as to what constitutes good and bad advertising and how the world got on during the dull centuries which did not advertise.

As a matter of fact the world got on very badly. This may be understood when we realize what the world was like before advertising existed. Christopher Columbus, we are told, spent eighteen years vainly trying to persuade the sovereigns of Europe to discover America. Under present conditions all he would have needed to do would have been to circulate among the Kings a form letter with the heading DO YOU WANT A CONTINENT? or put a picture of himself on the paper with one hand extended towards a cloud in the sky and the legend This Man Discovers Continents: or better still, put up picture placards showing the American Marines at Target Practice in the Matamoras Bay, Mexico.

In other words, advertising has now been reduced to a science, thus taking its place alongside chemistry, salesmanship, dynamics, comparative religion, nursing, astronomy, poultry and other college subjects. It has become the subject of so many manuals and guide books that nothing is easier than to give a brief résumé of the general principles of advertising.

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. It is carried on by means of printed notices, signboards, placards and above all, owing to the simplicity of the human mind, by pictures. It consists of commands, exhortations, adjurations, summonses, directions, and other authoritative appeals. The first essential of a good advertisement or notice is that it must be brief. In the earlier days of advertising this was not understood. When first the railways were built in England and signs were put up to indicate dangerous crossings they were written in small writing and read as follows:

“Any person or persons proposing to cross this railway track at this point at a time when a train or trains may be approaching is or are warned that if he or she does it, he or they are in danger of coming into collision with it or them.”

This was found ineffective. In America the simpler plan was adopted of putting up a notice:

LOOK OUT FOR THE CARS

Even this was presently found to be too long and was replaced by a simple sign LOOK OUT. And perhaps LOOK would be enough.

Next to brevity the thing demanded in a good advertisement is that it should be as peremptory as possible. Fifty years ago such notices were to be seen as the following:

“No person or persons can be permitted to enter these premises unless he or it enters in the course of some definite transaction pertaining to the business of the company.”

This was presently replaced by the sign “No admission except on business.” But how much superior is the up-to-date printed notice KEEP OUT.

This shows us that every good advertisement must be as personal as possible. It should begin This is You! or Listen, you poor Simp. Or it should ask some direct question such as: Do you ever take a Bath! What would you do if your wife ran away! and so forth.

When once the general principles of advertising language are grasped it is not difficult to convert ordinary common English into first class advertising prose. I will give you a few examples which will show at once the enormous gain in emphasis, force and directness which is imparted to a passage in literature when it is turned into advertising. Take first a few stanzas from Longfellow written, presumably, with a view to stir the reader into noble activity, but unfortunately expressed in a tone that verges on drowsiness.

“Tell me not in mournful numbers

Life is but an empty dream,

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

“Life is real, life is earnest,

And the grave is not its goal.

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

“Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate,

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labour and to wait.”

In a way this is not half bad. There is a certain life to it. But it fails to bring up the idea of the need for immediate effort with sufficient prominence. Compare the advertising counterpart:

Young Man, This is You! Do you want to remain all your life on a low salary! If not why not be up and doing! Still achieving, still pursuing! We can show you how. Why not take a correspondence course! Our curriculum includes engineering, poultry, mind reading, oratory, cost accounting and religion. Don’t wait. Start achieving now!

Or take another example from the same poet, the opening lines, I believe, of the poem called “Evangeline.”

“This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks

Stand like Druids of old with beards that rest on their bosoms. . . .”

This poem, which was not without merit in its original form, is now immensely improved when used as material for the tourists advertisements.

Mr. Business Man! Do you ever take a vacation? What about the Annapolis Valley for the year’s outing? Why not visit the “forest primeval” where you may stand buried in reverie under the “murmuring pines and the hemlocks” or emerging enjoy as fine a meal for a dollar as you will get anywhere. Why not dream yourself back into the days of the coureurs des bois and the belted and plumed seigneurs within easy reach of a garage and with first class plumbing all through the house. Why not bring along the wife and take her into the heart of the primeval forest.

The next example is taken from Shakespeare. Originally it formed part of Hamlet’s soliloquy on death, but nearly every line of this passage has been transposed and improved by the modern advertiser.

“To be or not to be, that is the question.

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them!”

The advertiser expresses the same thought with much greater point.

Do you feel only Half Alive? Are you aware of a heavy sensation after eating and a sense of inflation after drinking a cup of tea! If so, why not “take arms against a sea of troubles.” Do you know that Calcul, taken as one pill a day, will restore tone and vigour to the system, effecting an immediate restoration of the tissues and rebuilding the bones. Remember the name, Calcul!

My readers will long since have suspected – if the poor simps are sharp enough ever to suspect anything – that advertising, as we have been seeing again and again, is superior to reality. And this is indeed the case. By the time the advertiser has finished with his exhortations and his glowing descriptions and his pictures he has created a world far brighter than the poor place in which we live.

Who would not wish to be transported to the bright glad world of the painted advertisement and there live forever; there to watch the glistening limousine roll on its distended tires (guaranteed for 20,000 miles) in front of the Georgian residence the shingles of which can be laid by two men in one morning and are really cheaper than the best Italian tiles. See the faultless youth (whose suit, please note it, is marked down to $29.50 but will only stay down till Saturday – you can’t keep a suit like that down). Watch him as he stands on the clipped green lawn. (The seed of that lawn, can you believe it?, is actually sold for only 50 cents a packet and you can have some.) Observe the gladsome girl beside him. Don’t you wish you knew her? Do you know why she is gladsome? It is because her digestion is kept in such extraordinary order by taking one Calcul pill a day. I suppose that you are aware that those glistening brown leather shoes that she wears combine style, elegance and comfort in a way that gives ease to the foot and allows free play to the bones of the thorax: if you don’t know that you need only consult the little dotted diagram in the corner of the picture showing the human foot anatomically with bones of the thorax moving freely in the fibula: and to think that that shoe can be had everywhere at $15.75!

In short, if you will take a comprehensive glance at the red and white house and the green lawn and the glistening motor car and the aspect of young love in the foreground you will realize that advertising is just one more item added to the Pictured Vision of Unreality, better than life itself.

TOC     INDEX

Romances of Business

Note: Business having become the most important thing in life it is quite clear that it is destined to swallow up the feeble things that we used to call literature and art. They must accommodate themselves or die. The two little romances that follow here are intended to show how this accommodation may be effected.

It is now an open secret among all those who have anything to do with the making of the magazines that the advertising pages have come to be more interesting than the rest of the text. They are written by more highly trained and highly paid people, they are better illustrated and carry all through a higher interest, more punch – in short, any business man turns to the advertising pages first, and only when he has exhausted them does he fall back on the duller pages of romance and fiction which fill up the middle of the magazine. The situation is one which threatens our literature, and I think the time has come when our story writers must create a new interest.

It seems to me that this can best be done by borrowing from the advertising pages the glow of idealization which we have seen them to possess and at the same time that exactness of information as to costumes, materials and prices in which they excel. Out of this a new school of fiction may evolve such stories as:

Alfred of the Advertisements

A Romance of the Back Pages

—

The earliest recollections of Alfred Ellicott, whose life forms the subject of this chronicle, were of his family home in New England on the banks of the Stickemupabit, a stream noted today for its attraction to tourists, being within easy motor ride from both New York and Boston and reached also by the Boston and Maine Railway, whose admirable dining car service makes access to the district and egress from it a sustained pleasure and which welcomes any complaint from its patrons in regard to the incivility of its employees. Here Alfred passed his boyhood. The house in which he lived was a typical colonial mansion, known in the neighbourhood as “The Ads”: It was built in the colonial style (See booklet) with a tall portico and wide sloping roof shingled everywhere with the new LAY-EASY shingles, the principal advantage in which is represented by reducing labour cost, two men being able easily to lay three squares (30 x 10 ft.) in one morning. In fact these are the shingles of which Mr. P. O. Woodhead (see insert) the well-known builder of Potsdam, New Hampshire, has said in his impressive way “They reduce cost.”

Here Alfred spent a solitary boyhood, his time spent largely in reverie and day dreams. When not able to sleep naturally he found that two grains of sleep-tight inhaled up his nose brought on a delightful slumber from which he awoke completely refreshed at fifty cents a packet.

It was when Alfred had reached the age of nineteen years that Lovely Louisa, a distant relative, came to live at The Ads. The girl had been left an orphan, by the death of parents who had not known that ten minutes’ exercise on the PRAKTO System done on the floor of their bedroom would have preserved the lives of both of them. She had moreover been rendered penniless by the folly of a guardian who had never understood that investment is now a science that can be learned in seven lessons post paid by applying at once.

Penniless as she was Lovely Louisa on her arrival at The Ads made an instant impression on the young and susceptible heart of Alfred. When she alighted from a motor car the tyres of which were guaranteed to carry her 20,000 miles and which rolled with excellent softness over the driveway which had been treated with ASPALTOMIX which can be laid on by a child, the young girl presented a picture that charmed the eye. She was wearing one of the new BERSAGLIERI tailored suits which combine smartness with comfort and which have the special advantage that they come in all sizes and can be fitted not only to a frame as slender as Lovely Louisa’s but also on ladies of fuller figure. A set of measurements and directions being given with each suit we may be sure that Louisa had such a set with her when she alighted. She wore her suit under one of the new Fascisti hats which kill at a hundred yards and over a pair of tall tan boots which combine grace with comfort by being designed by an expert to fit easily on the instep and to move in harmony with the bones on the anthrax. Under her suit, again – far under – Louisa wore one of this year’s SKINFIT combinations which was imported directly from Lyons and without which no lady should be. When we say that the girl in alighting made a picture that would have pleased the eye of a hermit or a lobster or an undergraduate, we are not overstating it.

Alfred who was wearing one of the new NOW-OR-NEVER tailored grey suits over brown boots as he stepped forth to meet the girl, felt that his heart was no longer in his own keeping.

During the days which followed the youthful Alfred became the constant companion and, in addition, the guide and mentor of the lovely girl. Himself a keen golfer he had soon initiated his beautiful cousin into the mysteries of golf, and taught her to appreciate a good elastic ball such as the 1924 SMACKO of which the outer case is guaranteed never to chip or crumble. Under the same tutelage the mysteries of MAH JONG, an excellent set of which has now been placed on the market direct from China (remember the words direct from China), afforded the young people a fascinating refuge from thought.

It was a great pleasure to Alfred during these sweet hours of companionship to watch the gradual unfolding of the girl’s mind. To help it to unfold the young man purchased and read out loud to Louisa a correspondence course in Political Economy and Municipal Taxation, such as would enable the girl to fill a position of trust as tax-assessor, municipal expert, or consulting town engineer. Together also they read over a course on Cost Accounting and Overhead Reckoning by which Louisa would have fitted at any moment to act as an insurance appraiser or to take over bankrupt stock. Then with every day the girl acquired new power of mind and a wider outlook. Indeed as Prof. O. J. Hootch, D.F., organizer of the World’s Correspondence School in Room 6 Avenue 4718 Omaha, says: “Outlook means look out.”

We need not denote in full the blissful but anxious days during which Alfred, conscious of his love, hung suspended between hopes and fears. We will only say that the suspenders that he used were of the new HAUL-OVER type with the central pulley adjusted to the play of his shoulders. No doubt this delicate adjustment helped the young man through the most troubled period of life, keeping his shoulders flat and putting no pressure on his abdomen. In short they are the very braces which Mr. J. O. P. Bughouse of Wichita, Kansas, whose picture is usually annexed, has said – “They are the only ones I ever use!”

During this enchanted period of courtship Alfred contrived in various ways to convey the feelings which he dared not utter. Knowing that flowers can now be sent by telegraphic order to any address he had them expressed to Louisa from all parts of the country. These orders which were received at any hour of the day or night were filled under the direction of a staff of trained experts on whose taste and discretion the customer may place the utmost reliance. In short it is of these orders that the well-known florist Mr. J. Q. W. Mud of Wastabula, Wash., has said, in that terse language which he uses “Let us send them.” In addition to the flowers Alfred also sent seeds, bulbs, and shoots for which the charge is exactly the same and no greater.

The inevitable time drew near when Alfred of The Ads felt that he must know his fate and must hazard all on an avowal of his love. For this however he had prepared himself. He had overcome the natural diffidence of youth by purchasing and perusing a little manual called Why be Diffident, Self Confidence Acquired By A New System Of Treatment in two lessons at Fifty cents each. Alfred in sending for this little book enclosed U. S. Postage Stamps but it is important to notice that bills, express orders or any form of legal tender are similarly accepted for it.

Nor was lovely Louisa unprepared. She too had studied a little manual entitled What a young girl ought to know, and she knew it.

The fateful moment came. Kneeling on one knee in front of Louisa – a thing which he was enabled to do without risk by wearing NEVER CREASE trousers – Alfred declared his love in a few easy sentences selected from his manual. The deep blush which coloured the face of the lovely Louisa was answer enough. Alfred rose to his feet with an easy movement of his suspenders and clasped the girl to his heart.

There is no need here to describe the charming home wedding with which the marriage of Alfred and Louisa was celebrated at The Ads. The good old place was cleaned and redecorated from cellar to basement, Alfred using for this purpose the new PNEUMO-WHEEZE Vacuum Cleaner, which can be had on free trial for ten days and which is guaranteed to remove dust from every corner and crevice. It is of this cleaner that Mr. X. Q. Overhead, himself a T. Q. of Yale, the well-known expert has said “They are the Best Cleaner That I Know.”

The catering was placed in the hands of a catering firm. The invitations were printed and issued by an invitation firm. The officiating clergyman was engaged on a simple basis of cost plus. Louisa looked charming in a wedding gown which could have been returned without charge if not satisfactory. Alfred’s costume was guaranteed by the maker himself. And as the happy pair sank back luxuriously on the seat of the landau (a shock absorber with every car) Alfred placed his arm twice round Louisa’s waist and murmured, “It pays to Advertise.”

Tom Lachford, Promoter

A Story which carries with it what is called an Atmosphere of Business and which may safely be read without loss of efficiency.

—

In the little factory town of Smudgeville the five o’clock whistles blew. The machines stopped. The steam died. The hands quit. The doors closed. The factories shut. Work was over.

Seth Lachford shut the door of the tumbledown place that was called Lachford’s Works, and went and sat on a pile of shingles, thinking of his overhead costs. The Lachford business was so undermined by overhead that with any further depression it would go up altogether.

All around Seth as he sat were the great piles of crumbled grey dust that represented his five years’ efforts to make cement. The old Lachford farm on the outskirts of the factory town had been all torn up and scarred with the fruitless attempt.

As Seth sat there, one might have looked twice, or even three times, at the man without noticing anything especial about him. But if one looked four times one observed more than one has remarked in three times. The face and the attitude were those of a man who had failed. But there was something, too, in the hard-bitten, tight-lipped, close-nipped, short-necked appearance of the man that showed that in his case failure, after all, meant little more than lack of success.

Seth Lachford rose, painfully, from the bunch of shingles, locked the door of the mean place that he called his Works, and walked across the lot to the house he called his home, where the woman he called his wife was cooking supper for the things he called his children.

“Things any better today?” she queried.

Seth head-shook dejectedly.

“Are your overhead expenses per unit of output still disproportionate to the selling cost of the product?” asked the sad-eyed woman as she helped her husband to the fried potatoes.

“Yes, Min,” desponded Seth, “The capital cost of operation shows an ascending curve right along.”

“I see,” said Min, thoughtfully, as she poured out molasses for the children, “and each further increment of outlay merely agglomerates your differential.”

“It does,” said Seth.

There was a silence and Seth rose.

“Where y’ going?” throbbed his wife.

“Out to sit on the shingles,” Seth glumped, “and think about my overhead and my differential cost.”

“All right,” said Min; then, suddenly, her face sanguinated, “Oh Seth,” she said, “I forgot, there’s a letter from brother Tom. He’ll be here in the morning, and he says he can straighten everything out.”

II

Next morning Tom Lachford, promoter, blew into Smudgeville, and together Tom and Seth walked round the “plant” and looked at the crumbling piles of grey dust.

The brothers were a contrast – Seth bent and hesitant, Tom square-built, bull-chested, ox-necked, box-jawed, pop-eyed, in short, a hundred and fifty per cent American all through.

“See here, Seth,” said Tom, “you’ve tried five years to make cement and you’ve failed?”

Seth desponded assent.

“You’ve crushed up all the rocks on the old place, and you’ve nothing for it but these piles of dirt.”

Seth ingurgitated but without speaking.

“Well, look here,” Tom went on, “I’ve got an idea and it’s a big thing. If we can pull it off and bring it down, I believe we can put it over.”

“What y’ going to do?” asked Seth.

“Going to make a fortune out of this dirt. But, first of all, I want a thousand dollars cash.”

“I haven’t got it,” exhaled Seth, “and the bank won’t lend it. I’ve tried them.”

“Pshaw!” said Tom, “show me the way to that bank. I’ll get it.”

Tom Lachford walked straight to the Smudgeville First National Bank, straight into it, and straight through it to the manager’s room. There was something compelling about the man, something dynamic in the way he sat down, and something almost titanic or teutonic in the way he laid his hat on the table.

“See here, Mr. Beanhead,” he said. “I want the loan of a thousand dollars.”

The manager spasmed. “On what security?” he winced.

“None,” said Lachford.

The manager brightened.

“You offer no collateral at all?” he said.

“Not a cent,” said Tom, “except my personality.”

“Good!” said the banker, delighted. “You shall have it. The personal element, Mr. Lachford, has become the ne plus ultra of business. I recognize in you one of those full-blooded, high-pepped, long-sighted, wide-eyed men who are entitled to bank loans. This bank will back you.”

III

That night Seth and Min and Tom sat in consultation over their buttermilk and pancakes at the supper table.

“What do you mean to do with the money, Tom?” asked Min.

Tom buttermilked a minute, and then, “Going to get a gang of men and treat that dirt.”

“Treat it?”

“Yes, treat it; run it into vats and out again, sluice it, pulverize it, sling it round – anything—”

Seth stopped pancaking and earlifted.

“What’s that for?” he exuded.

“I’ll tell you,” said Tom, “I’m going to raise bonds on it and float a company and make a clean up.”

“But it’s only dirt!” said Seth, “somehow we failed every time to make it harden into cement.”

“I don’t want cement,” said the promoter. “Dirt’ll do. Here’s the idea, I’m going to give it a name – something high-sounding, see! Something that seems to mean value. Did you ever hear of Molybdenum? Well, what is it? You don’t know. Or carborundum or tellurium – you don’t know what they are. The public don’t know what they are. But they mean money. Find a deposit of any of them and your fortune’s made.”

Seth headnodded silent.

“I’ll have an assayer come,” Tom went on, “and make an assay of all that dirt and crushed rock. That’s only for appearance, of course I don’t care what he calls it. I’ll give it a name that sounds good and announce it as a big discovery. See? The name I’ve settled on is palladium. We’ll announce a find of palladium, and form a company to work it.”

Min looked up from the little pile of children’s clothing that she was sewing. “Issuing common stock,” she said, as she bit off a piece of thread, “on a basis of prospective earnings capitalized.”

“But what then?” said Seth. “If we sell the stock and it’s no good?”

“We don’t need to worry. We sell it and then we clear out.”

“Where to?”

The sad-eyed woman looked up from the little garment in her lap.

“Havana,” she said.

IV

Within a week it was known all over Smudgeville that heavy deposits of palladium had been found on the old Lachford place. Gangs of men were at work. Derricks, cranes, vats, and sluices rose all over the place. Little crowds of people stood round to watch. The palladium was put into a converter and carried from there to a container from which it passed to a disturber. It was then put into a hopper. “What is it?” asked the people. “Palladium,” was the answer. The Smudgeville Intelligence explained that palladium was a graminiferous amygdaloid and that its calcareous properties rendered it of great commercial value. It was practically impervious to collusion which made it a high soporific.

An assayer was brought, a real one, and he walked round over the Lachford place and carried off samples. The promoter let all the town know that the assayer had been on the property. But the report of the analysis of the dirt Tom Lachford showed to no one. He shoved it into the drawer of the kitchen dresser unopened. It was the assayer he wanted, not the report.

Then Tom Lachford called again upon the banker.

“Mr. Beanhead,” he said, “my brother and I have made a find of igniferous palladium. It runs at least 48 per cent to the kilowatt and we want to raise money for incorporation and material.”

“Mr. Lachford,” said the banker, “I congratulate you on your discovery. I recognize in you one of those wide-visioned, broad-sighted, frog-eyed men that make this country what it is. How much money do you want?”

“Ten thousand dollars,” said Tom.

V

That evening when Tom came home he told Seth and Min that he had arranged the incorporation at thirty thousand dollars and was going to order ten thousand dollars’ worth of machinery.

“What machinery?” asked his brother.

“Any machinery,” said the promoter, “it doesn’t matter: as long as it’s bulky.”

“The mere assemblage and erection of machinery,” added Min thoughtfully as she helped the brothers to fried eggplant, “conveys to the investor a guarantee of bona fides.”

But after supper Seth Lachford went to the kitchen dresser and took out of it the assayer’s report upon the dirt, that lay in an envelope unopened. He ripped open the envelope and for a long while stood looking at the document with a frown upon his face. “I’ll not sell stuff like that,” he muttered. “No, sir, I’ll go broke before I’ll sell it.” Then he went out in the gathering dusk and walked among the piles of dirt, kicking it with his feet and picking it up in his hands.

When Seth Lachford came back to the kitchen where Tom and Min sat shucking butternuts there was resolution in his face.

“Tom,” he said, “when you sell out this company what do you expect to get?”

Tom looked up, stopped shucking. “Thirty thousand dollars at par,” he said. “Ten thousand each for you and me and Min: perhaps a lot more.”

“You’ll sell it to people here in town?”

“Easy,” said Tom. “There are enough suckers right here to buy it all.”

“And what do they get?”

“That’s their lookout,” shrugged Tom. “They can sell again if they’re quick enough.”

“But sooner or later?”

“Oh, sooner or later someone gets stung. But it’s not going to be us.”

Seth sat silent a while.

“And if we let go of it now,” he asked, “where are we?”

“We owe the bank $15,000, and we’re ruined.”

Seth looked Tom right in the face. Dynamic as he was, the younger Lachford’s face fell.

“See here, Tom,” evolved Seth slowly, “I’ll not sell those shares.”

The brothers sat looking at each other, their faces working.

“If you don’t,” said Tom, “it’s ruin.”

“I’ll meet it,” said Seth, his face still working.

“If you do,” said Tom, his face stopping working, “you’ll meet it in the penitentiary.”

“Tom,” said Seth, “there’s been Lachfords on this place for four generations, and never a thief among them.”

VI

For two weeks after that the work at the palladium deposits went on, and the Lachfords walked around the plant, avoiding each other – Tom keen and restless, Seth moody, his eyes ever on the dirt.

Only once Tom spoke to Seth. “The brokers have placed the first lot of my shares at par,” he said, “and they can sell more, they say. They can’t list them but they’ll sell them on the curb. Give me your shares now and Min’s and we’ll sell them and get out.”

Seth turned on his heel and, without a word, went to the house.

He called his wife aside. He took out the assayer’s paper, opened it, and spread it out before her. “Tom says he’ll sell your shares for ten thousand dollars, Min. Are you going to sell off that stuff,” and he tapped the paper fiercely, “to your friends and neighbours, people of your own town?”

Min looked at the document. The chemical analysis was beyond her grasp, but the single item at the bottom, “estimated commercial value,” was plain enough even for a child.

“No, Seth!” she said, “I can’t do it. It ain’t right.”

“Look, Min,” Seth went on, “I want my name to stand right in this town. If Tom tries to sell out those shares, could you get ten thousand dollars from your folks and buy them?”

“I might,” said Min, “I doubt Pa could raise it, but if you want it, Seth, I’ll try.”

VII

The next day Min started off to her folks in Pennsylvania to raise ten thousand dollars, and on the same morning the shares of Amalgamated Palladium Limited went on the local exchange as a curb security, and there was great excitement in financial circles in Smudgeville. The shares opened at eighty, rose straight to par, reacted to fifty, sank down to twenty, lay there gasping and then jumped to par again in four hops. At 2 p.m. they were reported as restless; at 3 buoyant, and at closing time strong with an undercurrent of weakness.

That night Tom Lachford packed his grip to leave by the midnight express, bound towards Havana.

“I’m off, Seth,” he said; “say goodby to Min when she comes back. If you’re wise you’ll get quick. The shares will break tomorrow and then—”

“I’m not quitting, Tom,” said Seth; “goodby.”

VIII

Min came back two days later.

“I got the money, Seth,” she said. “Pa raised it partly on the steers and the rest on a mortgage.”

“Too late, I guess, Min,” said Seth. “The shares went to five hundred yesterday, and this morning they’re holding out for a thousand dollars a share.”

IX

It was a week later that Tom Lachford sat in the Colorado Claro Hotel at Havana with a cocktail in front of him, and $4,000 in Cuban money to his credit. And it was there he got a copy of a home paper sent him by mail. He opened it with trembling hands, looking for Seth’s ruin. And instead of it he saw a big headline saying that Amalgamated Palladium was selling at two thousand a share, and his hands trembled more. Last of all he read a two-column account of the discovery of graphite on the Lachford place, and he shook like a leaf all over.

Meantime Min and Seth were sitting over their buttermilk in the kitchen living-room, adding up figures.

“I can’t cipher it out,” said Seth, “but it’s millions all right.”

“And what is the stuff anyways,” asked Min, “if it ain’t palladium?”

“Graphite, it’s called,” said Seth. “Always noticed those black streaks in the crushings. I guess that’s it. I’m glad I didn’t sell. If I could have bought back those shares. I meant to give them to Tom, didn’t I, Min?”

“Oh, certainly,” said Min, “so did I: and I’m glad too we didn’t sell. I felt bad about it all along, Seth, and when I saw that assayer’s paper where it said ‘commercial value ten thousand dollars a ton’ a light broke in on me and I saw it wasn’t right. But I still don’t see why those shares jumped up that way.”

“The damn fool assayer. He must have put some New York guys wise to it. They were just waiting for us, likely. I doubt, Min, whether those New York financiers are quite as easy as they make out in the story papers.”

“That’s so,” subsided Min. “And where Tom was a bum promoter, Seth was wrong in underestimating the commercial value of scientific analysis applied to the basic data of modern business.”

Our Business Benefactors

An After-Dinner Symposium,
as Reported by the Humblest of the Guests

—

“No,” said Mr. Spugg, the host of the party, as he held one hand on the stem of his port wine glass and kept his second after-dinner cigar in the fingers of the other, “no Sir, I never could do fractions.”

He looked round the table with a sort of pride. All the other men, except myself, grunted assent. “And what’s more,” added Spugg, “I’ve never felt the need of them to this day.” There was a chorus of approval. Spugg of course is a big man, one of the biggest men in rubber, so they say, on the continent. There were other big men present at the dinner too. There was a big shirt man, and a big fruit man and a man at the end of the table that I had frequently heard referred to as the Napoleon of frozen meat. In fact, as has been indicated in earlier pages of this book, in such a gathering as this there were certain to be several Napoleons present – who were spoken of as “regular Napoleons,” “perfect Napoleons” and so on. They are always found in any business gathering. There were some “revolutionists” present also; one man was pointed out to me as having revolutionized the dried apple business: another had revolutionized the sale of weatherproof paint, and a third was “working up a revolution” in eggs. In short they were a typical group of what are now called “big” men – men who do “big” things. They were not “thinkers.” They were men who don’t need to think. So it is naturally most impressive to hear these men say that they had never done fractions in their lives. If big men like them have no use for fractions what earthly good are fractions anyway? But what interested me most was to hear the “big men” talk of the “side lines,” the things that they carried on as mere appendages to the main interests of their business lives.

“How’s that University of yours getting on, Spugg?” asked the big pulp man. “Better,” said Spugg, “We’ve got a business man at the head of it at last and he’s putting it on business lines. We expect that our next balance sheet will make a pretty good showing.”

“That’s good,” said the other. Then they both fell silent to listen to the Napoleon of frozen meat who was talking, so I gathered presently, about the church that he “controlled.”

“He had,” the Napoleon was saying “no pep, no punch. Sunday after Sunday it was the same thing – every sermon, you know, just so much straight Theology. Well, you see, a congregation won’t stand for Theology today. They want something up-to-date. Two or three times I got hold of the old fellow and I said to him, ‘can’t you take up something that will let the people get away a little further from religion.’ But he couldn’t. It wasn’t in him.”

“Couldn’t you retire him?” asked one of the listeners.

“Not so very easily. We had no written contract, you know, just the old fashioned appointment by letter – (it was forty years ago when they put him in) and all the original letter said, was, ‘as long as it shall please God to bless his ministration,’ – Well, I began to say what can you do with that? Our lawyers admitted that they couldn’t make sense of it.

“Then there was all the trouble about the churchyard,” – went on the big man, pausing to light a new cigar. “You remember that churchyard that there was all round our church with the willow trees and the gravestone and the old slabs laid flat right in the grass?”

Several men nodded.

“Well you know, that sort of thing is a pretty poor ad. for a church. The stones were old, half crumbling and there wasn’t a willow tree in the lot in decent shape. Of course we wanted to level it all out, clean out the old monuments, cut out the trees and turf it neatly, put a good gravel motor drive in a crescent right through it. Well, the old fellow stood out against it and without his consent, so our lawyers said, we ran a certain risk in removing the dead. There is some old law it seems against ‘breaking the repose of the dead.’ It has no application I understand to an up-to-date cemetery. But it applies here. So we were stuck. Meantime the churchyard was doing us harm: a congregation don’t want to drive their cars among graves over grass. The broken stone will blow a tire as quick as anything.”

“Well, what did you do?” asked Spugg. “Oh we got him out all right,” the big man went on. “We managed to get him in a corner on the pension question and he let us have his resignation.” “And who have you got now?” “We’ve got an A. 1 man, all right. He was with the Presbyterians (though I think he’d been an Anglican for a while before that) but we went straight after him, met him at his own figure and signed him.”

“What are you giving him?” asked Spugg. “Fifteen Thousand,” said the Napoleon, puffing at his cigar. “You can’t get them for less, or not good ones. They simply won’t come: They know what they’re worth. There’s an insurance company that would take our man at fifteen thousand tomorrow.”

“He’s pretty good, is he?” asked one of the men.

“Absolutely first class. He’s the best publicity man I ever saw in a pulpit. You’ve seen that big sign he’s put up, with great gilt letters – just where the old willow with the sundial under it used to be. Every week there’s the topic of the discourse in big lettering so that people can read it from their cars: and those are the people, mind you, that we’re going after. Under the old fellow we had, I suppose, the poorest congregation in the city. A church can’t get very far with them.”

There was a general growl of agreement.

“And every Sunday some new up-to-date subject, not theology you know but something that will hold and interest the people. Last Sunday, for example, he preached on the Holy Land (he was there for the Standard Oil people six or seven years ago). And he showed it all so vividly (we’ve fixed a moving picture machine where the font used to be), with the borings that they’re making for oil near Damascus, and the new derricks at the Sea of Galilee. It was wonderful.”

“But that’s a pretty heavy sum to pay him,” one of the guests said, “I don’t see how your funds can meet that.”

“Just the other way,” said the big man, “we make on it. With a live man like that you get it all back. Last Sabbath day our offertory alone broke even with the week’s expenses: that will show you the class of people that we’re attracting.”

“That’s certainly pretty good,” assented several of the men.

“Yes and more than that. Take the overhead. Now, in the old fashioned church the overhead was everything. Light and power alone were among the biggest items that they thought about. Well, we’ve changed all that. You can’t exactly cut out the overhead altogether in running a church, but you can reduce it to a point where it doesn’t matter. And what we find is that with plenty of current receipts from Social entertainments – concerts and lotteries and dances and so on, we don’t have to worry about the questions of light and power at all. In fact we never think of it.”

The speaker paused. And the host took occasion of the pause to start the port wine moving round and to beckon to the butler for more cigars. Whereupon the general talk broke out again and the purely spiritual tone of the conversation was lost.

But I couldn’t help revolving in mind as I presently wended my way home, the wonderful things that the Big Business men are doing for our Colleges and Churches.

TOC     INDEX

The Perfect Lover’s Guide

How to Select a Mate,
on Sea or on Shore

Our progress through the Garden of Folly having led us to view the follies of the mind and body, of failure and success, we are now brought in sight of the supremest folly of all, the most ancient and the most modern, the folly of love. We suppose that even the dullest of our readers – and we are speaking with emphasis – will sit up here and give evidence of something approaching to an intelligent interest. Indeed we may say that we have been induced to make up this part of our enquiry in response to a wide public demand – the only reason, by the way, which induces us to do anything. We therefore propose to construct in condensed form a sort of Lover’s Guide or Manual of Love.

PREFACE

On the Importance
of Selecting a Wife

Few people appreciate at its true importance the selection of a wife. One has only to look at other men’s wives to realize how carelessly they have been selected. A great many of them are too small, others are too large. Others again, while suitable as to size are of poor quality. With others the colouring is imperfect, or easily washed out. In short if a man desires to select a wife of the right size and shape, of good colour and wearing quality, one that is washable and will not bleach out in the sun, he must be willing to devote time and study to the question. Many a young man admits after marriage with regret that he has selected his wife too rashly: that if he had used an intelligence test on her he would never have taken her: that he thought she knew things that she doesn’t know: that her sense of humour is away below his standard: that she can’t play poker – and that he would like another pick.

For such young men there is no hope to be given. Their choice is made. But those whose selection is still to be taken we would advise to be warned in time and to study the whole problem of selecting a wife with the care that it deserves.

AT WHAT AGE SHOULD A MAN MARRY

Our first enquiry, then, is the age at which a man ought to turn his thoughts towards marriage? The law of the State of New York, and of many other states, and the common law of England on which these laws are based, all assign as the age of marriage fourteen years for a man and twelve years for a woman. But we are against this. We have a feeling that it is too soon. A man of fourteen still lacks something in breadth – and even in height. We doubt if his character has reached the maturity that it will have at sixty. Similarly a woman of twelve is still in a way – indeed in a whole lot of ways – undeveloped, she has scarcely seen enough of life to be able to select a mate with the same certainty with which the shipping companies pick them. We are informed, it is true, that the Hindoo women are married at twelve years of age. But on this point we can only refer our readers to the Hindoo edition of our manual. Western women, at twelve, are not yet formed. The wise young man will wait until they get bigger. Anyone who wants one of those little wee Hindoos is welcome to her.

At what age, then, should a young girl or a young man begin to think of marriage? We are not prepared to indicate any precise moment in life. But there will come a time in the life of any of them at which new aspirations and new wants will turn their thoughts towards marriage. When a young girl begins to feel that she wants a house of her own – a large one – with a butler and a chauffeur, and two motor cars and a box at the Opera, then the time has come when she must seek a husband. Her father will never give her these things. So too with the young man. The time comes when his surroundings begin to pall on him – when he ceases to care to spend his evenings with billiard markers, prize fighters and dog fanciers: when he begins to want to pass his time with some companion softer than a prize fighter and dearer – if it is possible – than a dog fancier – then, we say, and we say it emphatically, the young man ought to get married.

WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE OUGHT TO KNOW

But stop! Before the young man, or the young woman, can take any steps in the direction of marriage they must first fit themselves for it. All the manuals on the subject are united on this. Young people must not be hurried into matrimony until they have an adequate knowledge of a great many things that it will be essential for them to know in married life. Most important is it that our young people should have a proper acquaintance with the laws of health, a knowledge in short, of their own bodies. The young men and women of our present generation – in spite of the existence of the admirable little manuals of Dr. Snide, Dr. Snoop and others – are painfully ignorant of their own bodies. We ourselves met a girl the other day – a great big one, not a little Hindoo – who didn’t know where her oesophagus was. Apparently she had been going round with her oesophagus for twenty years and didn’t know that she had one. Enquiry showed that she was also ignorant of her diaphragm and what it did for her, and knew nothing of her cerebellum except that it was part of her foot.

This girl, charming as she appeared externally – we went no further than that – was obviously unfitted for matrimony. Indeed we should strongly advise every young lover to see to it that no girl, suffering from ignorance of this sort, is wished upon him. The lover should first elicit by a little gentle questioning just what is the state of knowledge of his prospective bride. He may frame his questions with a tenderness calculated to allay any possible alarm: such as: “Whisper to me, darling, what do you take to be the primary functions of the liver?” or, “Tell me, dearest, what are the premonitory symptoms of coagulation of the head?”

If the anxious lover does not feel in himself the ability to elicit or to impart this knowledge without help he may very properly call to his aid the services of an examination paper as set in any medical college. In this he need only insert a few suitable terms of endearment and the aim is achieved at once. His questionnaire, for example, might take this form:

1. Indicate as briefly as possible, darling, the location and functions of the sebaceous glands.

2. Tell me, in your own bright way, the names of the bones of the head, and then give me a kiss.

3. What do you take to be the premonitory symptoms, sweetheart, of locomotor ataxia and what would my darling do if I got it?

But it would be greatly to be preferred that no such test would be necessary. We should advise for every young girl who is thinking of marriage a proper course of preparation. We would suggest that she read first of all Gray’s Anatomy, supplementing it with Archibald on the Diseases of the Bones: to this she might add Adami on Pathology, Todd on Parasitology and any standard text on locomotor ataxia. If in addition to this the girl has learned something of sanitation, of the elements of sewerage and the disposal of garbage, she then becomes one with whom any young man should be proud to share his home – especially the cellar and the plumbing.

Nor should the youth himself be ignorant. His body of course he must know from A to Z. He should be able to tell offhand, how many toes he has, the location of his ears, the number of vertebrae in his spine, the measurement of his facial angle, the spanal content of his skull and the width of his mouth. These things go without saying. But in addition to this no young man should hurry into marriage without some acquaintance with the world and especially with business and money. We met a young man the other day – we are always meeting them when we least expect it – hoping to get married shortly and yet absolutely ignorant of the Federal Reserve system, and the composition of Index Numbers and the rise and fall of the exchanges. We at once put in his hands Gustav Kassel’s Arithmetic of the Exchanges and Professor J. M. Keynes’s Incubation of a Monetary Standard. We were just in time. He decided not to get married.

COURTSHIP,
ITS CONDUCT AND ITS ETIQUETTE

But let us suppose these preliminary difficulties overcome. Imagine our young people as having reached the age of marriage and properly equipped with the necessary knowledge for the marriage state. What Next?

There follows then the period of love and courtship, admittedly the most blissful phase of human existence. The young lover though he has selected his mate has not yet ventured to declare himself. He is filled with hopes and fears, with alternating exaltation and despair. At one moment he is in the heights: at another he is in the depths. He goes away up and then away down. He oscillates to and fro, at one instant he is hurled forward, at another he is shot backward. At times again he is whirled sideways and thrown edgeways or left sticking wrong side up. How must the lover conduct himself during this period of violent emotion? How must his time be spent? What can he do to absorb the terrific shocks which come at him one after the other?

We have no hesitation in answering this enquiry. All the authorities on the subject are agreed upon the point. The young lover must spend his time in immediate communion with nature. Fleeing the crowded haunts of man he must go and bury himself in the forest; there in the heart of the woods he must lie prone upon his back looking upwards at the sky and thinking what a worm he is. Or he must climb to the height of the mountains and stand upon a dizzy crag letting the wind blow through his hair. While doing this he must reflect how little it would matter if the wind blew him into fragments and carried him away. In all weathers he must sally forth. He must let the storm buffet him. He must let the rain beat upon his brow. He must take crack after crack of lightning right on his neck.

Just why he must do these things we are not prepared to say. But we know that only in this way can the lover get himself into that attitude of humility and ecstasy which can make him worthy of his adored.

This course of conduct having been admitted, by generations of poets and lovers, to be absolutely compulsory, we venture in our manual to simplify it a little by reducing it to a routine. In this way the young lover who might have had some doubts as to where and how to begin can undertake his duties in a systematic way.

SCHEDULE OF THE PERFECT LOVER’S DAY

5.30 Dawn | Rise from a sleepless night.
6.00 | Lave himself in a running brook, or if this is not possible, put his head under a tap.
6.30-7.30 | Crag work on the hills.
8.00 | Push aside his untasted breakfast.
8.30-12.00 | Lie on stomach in long grass in meadow, poring on a book.

12 Noon

Returning for a moment to busy haunt of man or crowded mart (that is to say, going downtown) catch sight, on the street for a moment, of adored object, and at once

12.30 | beat it for the woods

12.30 till dark:

In the woods; alone with nature: penetrating to the heart of the woods, go and sit in frog pond, making a sound like a frog.

8.30-9.30

For one brief hour be with adored object: the outside world will see him nothing but a gentleman friend taking a lady friend for a ride on a street car: but really the buffeting and the oscillating and side-swinging is going on all the time just the same.

10 p.m. | A dash for the open. Get out under the stars. Count them. Wonder whether they are looking down on her also.
12 Midnight | Retire to sleepless night but before starting it, throw the casement wide and let the cool night wind slap the face.

We not only assert but we are willing to guarantee that this line of activity, systematically kept up for a month, will maintain the lover in the condition proper to his business. He will be brought nearer and nearer to the point at which he will stake his all on a proposal of marriage.

But meantime before we permit him to take this last step it is proper to consider the conduct of the object of his affections. What is she doing? How does she take it? Is she swinging back and forward and up and down and being impelled sideways in the same way as the young lover? Not quite.

For the young girl the first dawn of love is a period of doubt, of hesitating, of gentle fluttering to and fro. She needs guidance. Like a dove about to spread its wings on a far flight, she would fain ask herself whither this flight must lead. What sort of a flight is it going to be?

Nor is she willing to confess to herself that love has yet come to her? She does not know whether what she feels is love, or is something else. Her soul shrinks from the final avowal.

In this position, the girl needs beyond everything else, advice. And fortunately for her she can get it. In earlier times she was left to commune with her soul in the dark. Now she isn’t. All she has to do is to write to any reputable Saturday afternoon edition of a first-class paper and she can get advice and information suited to every stage of her incipient courtship. Each letter in which her timid soul reveals itself will be not only answered, but answered in print in a way calculated to gratify her whole circle of friends.

We need hardly say, therefore, that in preparing our manual we have devoted very especially attention to correspondence of this sort. We have endeavoured to reduce it like everything else to a systematic or general form, to make it as it were a type or pattern, from which the young girl seeking our aid (and we welcome her with open arms when she does it) may find complete guidance.

We append here one little series from the many samples of correspondence that might be offered. The details vary but the essential ideas are always the same. And we draw attention especially to the way in which the tender hesitating nature of the young girl is brought, under our guidance, to a full knowledge of herself. In fact, what we couldn’t teach her isn’t worth knowing.

THE TANGLED PROBLEMS OF LOVE

As straightened out in the Correspondence department of our manual

Letter No. 1
From our correspondent, Miss Lucinda Lovelorn, to ourselves. By the way, we named her. We know how to pick the names every time.

Two days ago I was introduced by a gentleman friend to a gentleman in a street car. Yesterday I met this second gentleman on the street and he asked me if I would walk with him afternoons. I do not know yet whether I love him as I have only seen him on a street car. Perhaps you can tell me whether it would be right for me to walk with him afternoons and whether there would be anything unladylike in my doing so. If I walk with him is it proper to walk on the left side of a gentleman or does the lady walk on the right side.

Letter No. 2
From ourselves to Lucinda

Yes, we think you may safely accept the invitation to walk with your new friend afternoons. Whether you walk on his left side or his right will depend on circumstances. If he has lost his left eye you walk on his right side, otherwise you have your pick of sides.

But remember, Lucinda, that you must let him see from your manner at the very first that your feeling for him is purely one of wholesome camaraderie and nothing further. Without being cold to him, put into your manner just that little touch of hauteur and that suspicion of eloignement that will let him realize that you are a lady.

In other words we mean don’t let him start anything. Do you get us?

Letter No. 3
From Lucinda to us

The gentleman friend with which I have been talking afternoons asked me if he might call mornings and also take me out nights. I do not know whether I love him yet although he is a good dresser. Will it be all right if I let him take me pictures nights. Till now whenever gentleman friends have taken me places evenings Mother has been along. If I go with this party pictures do you think that I compromise myself and if it was you would you have mother along.

Letter No. 4
From us to Lucinda

We have thought over your sweet letter very deeply, dear Lucinda, because we realize how perplexed and troubled you are. On the whole we think that you may now safely go out at night with your new friend but remember that in granting him this privilege you must let him know that you have in no way ceased to be a lady. It would be necessary for you to resist in a dignified way any undue advances that he may make. We would suggest that you carry a tack hammer along with you and if your new friend starts anything let him have it on the bean. And by the way let us know what he does about the advances. We are always interested in that sort of thing.

We note further, that you ask whether, if it was we, we should want your mother along. No, dear, we wouldn’t.

Letter No. 5
From Lucinda to us

Since I wrote you last the gentleman friend of which I spoke took me out twice nights. I do not know whether I love him dearly yet but he is to have an increase of salary from his firm because he is an A. 1. salesman. The last time we went out he asked me if I liked lobsters because if I did he knew where they had a good lobster place but I said no because I thought that a party respects a girl more if she refuses lobsters gentlemen. All the time we were out he behaved just like a perfect gentleman and didn’t do anything. Do you think that if he asks me again it would be all right to let him give me lobsters nights?

Letter No. 6
From us to Lucinda

We are glad to learn that your evening outing with your friend was so successful. And it is nice to think that he did not make any wrong advances at all, but behaved like a perfect gentleman.

But when it comes to this lobster stuff, you touch on something that we know and on which we speak with the greatest firmness. It is not proper for you to accept a lobster unless you have reason to believe that in giving it he is asking you to share his life.

The time has come for you, dear little girl, to be very firm. You must ask your gentleman friend to come home with you to your house and meet your mother. If he is a man, he will do it. But if he shrinks from it and offers you a lobster instead then it is clear that he has been trifling with your heart – and you must let him go. You will suffer a little mal de coeur but so you would if you took the lobster. On the other hand if your firmness wins, you gain a husband and a home.

Hence our advice is – go to it, Lucinda.

—

After we have carried on and concluded a correspondence such as this it is always a delight for us to receive a final letter, effervescent in happiness, stating that the proposal has been made and accepted and asking what presents and how many presents a girl may accept from a gentleman to whom she is engaged.

And, what is always a strange reflection to us, is, that this gentleman friend with the lobsters is the very same person as the young lover beating it up and down in the woods – the same person, only seen in different aspects.

THE PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE

But we are running on a little too fast. We have run clear over the proposal of marriage, the most important, the most thrilling item of the whole manual of love.

In what way, we are asking and we ask back, should a proposal of marriage be made. Now we readily admit that the proposal of marriage is most frequently made by direct speech, in short by word of mouth. This may have certain advantages in the way of directness, rapidity and ease of ratification. But we cannot but feel that it lacks much in symmetry, harmony, and all-round completeness. We therefore favour entirely the proposal of marriage by means of a written letter. This allows the lover to state his feelings so definitely and so finally that a refusal becomes difficult if not impossible.

For such a letter, however, it is not wise to rely upon the unaided imagination. Here again the use of a systematized form is greatly to be preferred. The general requirements for such a letter we are prepared to state in the following terms, which are based we may say on some of the greatest current authorities.

“In the perfect letter of proposal the young lover should first of all dwell upon the depth and sincerity of his love. He should express at the same time his esteem and appreciation of the family into which he hopes to have the honour of entering. And in conclusion in a manly and frank way he should say something about his own position in life and his prospects.”

On this basis we venture to suggest the following form:

Dear Miss Blank Blank:

Ever since I first had the honour of meeting you beside the sawdust pile behind the sawmill at the Y.M.C.A. picnic on the 18th June, Ult. I have realized that I entertain for you a feeling which is different from any feeling which I have hitherto entertained for anyone for whom I have entertained a feeling. Your coming into my life has brought something into my life which was not in my life before you brought it into my life. I cannot hope in any way to be worthy of you and the more I think of you the more I despise myself and realize that till I met you I had been moving steadily down, but that after I met you I went up and I think that with your help I could keep on going up and staying up. Since I met you I have also had the pleasure of meeting your mother and your father and I have learned to love and honour them. I think your father is too cute for anything. Didn’t he look just killing in that little velvet smoking jacket the other evening? My feelings toward your mother are also a matter which I think should give me an added claim to your favourable consideration. I myself never had a mother. But now that I have seen yours I am, in a way, glad.

My prospects in life are such as will at least enable me to maintain you as well as you are maintained now. My salary while not large will suffice to support you and to dress you in part at least which is all I dare ask at present. At my uncle’s death I expect to inherit a very comfortable personal fortune and it is clear therefore that in order to be in a satisfactory situation I have only to poison my uncle.

On all these grounds I venture to ask your hand in marriage and to request the favour of a reply at your early convenience to B. 606, Station B.

It is hardly necessary for us to indicate the correct form in which an answer to such a letter of proposal should be framed. The training in business correspondence now given to all young girls in our secondary schools makes such a composition a matter of extreme ease. But we might merely suggest that the normal and usual answer in the best circles runs as follows:

Dear Sir:

Yours of the 18th instant to hand and contents noted and in reply would say that I accept your proposal F.O.B. this city, and will take delivery of goods at any time. Love and kisses from your loving

Lucinda

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE

While we were discussing above the question of what young people ought to know in regard to their oesophagi and so forth, it occurred to us that we might append to this discussion a further treatment of the physiology of love. We said nothing about it at the moment but we went on thinking about it. The topic sounded daring but that wasn’t really the aspect of it that we had in mind. Our notion was, and is, to use it in a literary way for the general brightening of fiction. It seemed to us that modern fiction already owed much to the physiologist and might with advantage go still further in the same direction.

We were first led to think of this from perusing an up-to-date crime-story in which we noticed the following physiological changes to take place in the sleuth hound’s face, all in five minutes.

To begin with:

An impassive mask covered it.

Then, A quick suspicion chased itself across it,

"  An intense determination hardened it,

"  A bead of moisture appeared upon it,

"  A smile passed over it,

"  A gleam of intelligence shot across it,

"  A look of perplexity furrowed it,

"  A sudden flash of triumph lighted it up,

And then,

The impassive mask fell on it again.

These rapid changes of the face are evidently connected with the pursuit of crime. If anybody wants to go in for a life of crime – on either side, for it or against it – he has to learn to use his face in this way. He must be able to harden it, relax it, expand it at will and, if need be, to drop a mask right over it – like putting it into a garage.

But it is quite different, we have observed with the love story, the seat of which seems to be in the stomach. In the same romance in which the sleuth hound worked his face, we noticed that a similar lot of physiological disturbances were set up at intervals in the heroine. In her case, however, the symptoms did not sweep over her face, which was needed for other purposes. They were internal. They began as soon as she met the hero, and anyone will easily recognize in them the progress and the fate of love.

The series ran like this:

A new gladness ran through her.

. . . . . . . .

A thrill coursed through her.

. . . . . . . .

Something woke up within her that had been dead.

. . . . . . . .

A great yearning welled up within her.

. . . . . . . .

Something seemed to go out from her that was not of her nor to her.

. . . . . . . .

Everything sank within her.

. . . . . . . .

This last symptom is naturally so serious that it ends the book. Indeed we notice that when things sink inside the heroine it means that something vital has come unhooked.

Quite different is the case of the hero – the strong man. With him the operation of the story is all done seemingly with strings, with stretching and tension. He gets “taut,” or he gets “rigid,” his muscles “tighten into steel bands,” – in fact you could easily run a sewing machine off him.

Now there is no doubt that these physiological descriptions are admirable in their realism. The only trouble is that they don’t go far enough. It has seemed to us that, with the help of a good text book an excellent literary effect could be obtained by heightening this physiological colouring and letting it be quite clear just what is happening, anatomically and biologically, to the characters in the story. To illustrate this we append here a sample of such a romance. The story is called Physiological Philip and it tells of nothing more unusual than the meeting of two lovers in a lane. But slight as it is it will do to convey our idea.

PHYSIOLOGICAL PHILIP

A Tale of the Text Book

Philip Heatherhead – whom we designate Physiological Philip – as he strolled down the lane in the glory of early June, presented a splendid picture of young manhood. By this we mean that his bony framework was longer than the average and that instead of walking like an ape he stood erect with his skull balanced on his spinal column in a way rarely excelled even in a museum. The young man appeared in the full glory of perfect health: or shall we say, to be more exact, that his temperature was 98, his respiration normal, his skin entirely free from mange, erysipelas and prickly heat.

As Physiological Philip walked thus down the lane, listening to the singing of a blithesome bird – occasioned, though he did not suspect it, by a chemical reaction inside the bird’s abdomen – a sense of gladness seemed to fill him. Of course what really was happening was that in the splendid shape in which Philip was his whole system was feeling the stimulus of an intermolecular diffusion of inspired oxygen. That was why he was full.

At a turn of the path Philip suddenly became aware of a young girl advancing to meet him. Her spinal column, though shorter than his, was elongated and erect, and Philip saw at once that she was not a chimpanzee. She wore no hat and the thick capillary growth which covered her cranium waved in the sunlight and fell low over her eye-sockets. The elasticity of her step revealed not the slightest trace of appendicitis or locomotor ataxia, while all thought of eczema, measles or spotty discoloration of the cuticle was precluded by the smoothness and homogeneity of her skin.

At the sight of Philip the subcutaneous pigmentation of the girl’s face underwent an intensification. At the same time the beating of the young man’s heart produced in his countenance also a temporary inflammation due to an under-oxydization of the tissues of his face.

They met, and their hands instinctively clasped, by an interadjustment of the bones known only in mankind and the higher apes but not seen in the dog.

For a moment the two lovers, for such their physiological symptoms, though in themselves not dangerous provided a proper treatment were applied without delay, proclaimed them, were unable to find words. This, however, did not indicate (see Barker on the Nervous System) an inhibition of the metabolism of the brain but rather a peculiar condition of the mucous membrane of the lip, not in itself serious.

Philip found words first. He naturally would, owing to the fact that in the male, as Darwin first noticed, the control of the nerve ganglions is more rigid than in the female.

“I am so glad you’ve come,” he said. The words were simple (indeed he could hardly have made them simpler unless by inserting the preposition “that” and restoring the auxiliary from its abbreviated form.) But simple as they were, they thrilled the young girl to the heart – obviously by setting up the form of nerve disturbance which Huxley has so admirably described in his discussion of the effect of external stimuli on the decomposition of food.

“I couldn’t stay away,” she murmured.

The text is here a little perplexing. No doubt the girl refers to some inhibition in her feet, involving an inability to use the great Toe. It is an obscure malady and Sir William Osler inclined to ascribe it to excessive alcoholism. But she may have had it. Unfortunately the current of the romance moves on too fast to allow investigation.

Philip reached out and drew the girl towards him.

“Then my answer is Yes,” he cried, jubilantly. To do this he inhaled deeply and then ejected the entire contents of his lungs with a sudden impetus. In the dog, this produces barking. (See Sir Michael Foster on Animal Physiology.)

“It is!” she murmured.

Philip drew the girl’s form towards him till he had it close to his own form, and parallel to it, both remaining perpendicular, and then bending the upper vertebrae of his spinal column forwards and sideways he introduced his face into a close proximity with hers. In this attitude, difficult to sustain for a prolonged period, he brought his upper and lower lips together, protruded them forward, and placed them softly against hers in a movement seen also in the orang-outang but never in the hippopotamus.

And with this kiss the affianced lovers wandered back hand in hand up the lane, the bird upon the bough singing more blithely than ever – owing possibly to the increased distention of its diaphragm.

TOC     INDEX

The Restoration of Whiskers

A Neglected Factor
in the Decline of Knowledge

There comes a time in the life of western civilization when it is the duty of every well-wisher of the world to speak out what is in his mind. Such a time is now. The growth of the clean-shaving habit in this epoch is becoming everywhere a serious national menace. The loss of dignity and prestige, the decline of respect towards the aged, the notable change in the character and calibre of our legislators, college presidents and ministers of the gospel, is, and are, assuming proportions which urgently demand concerted national action.

The writer of this article stood recently upon the corner of Broadway and Forty Second Street in New York – that is to say I stood there myself – let there be no concealment in this thing – stood there and counted the clean-shaven men who passed and the men with whiskers. Out of the first half million counted only 4.19 men per cent. had whiskers.

(The man that I counted as .19 had just a little fringe of fluff, so to speak, on his cheeks. It was hard to class him. So I called him .19).

The same calculation may be made with the same results in any of the great eastern cities. It is not till one passes a line drawn through Fargo, Omaha, and Galveston that whiskers reach 15 per cent. And this 15 per cent line is moving westward! Ten years ago it was at Decatur, Illinois. It is not there now! In another ten years the line will have reached the Rocky Mountains. In twenty years the entire nation will be clean-shaven.

The moment to act is now. It is time for the people to pause and realize what whiskers have meant to human civilization.

We turn to the records of history; Adam – he had a dark brown beard slightly pointed; Noah – he had a long white beard that reached his waist. Imagine Noah clean-shaven and with his eyebrows darkened with black dye, and with little beady eyes looking down under a straw hat! You can’t? Of course not. And yet that man saved our whole race.

Nestor and Aristotle had white beards. Socrates’ whiskers covered so much of his face that you could hardly see him through them. Caesar had a rough red beard. The Vikings had long side moustaches. So had Buffalo Bill, and Charles the Second, and Bret Harte. Grant and Lee wore beards. But these great precedents are being disregarded. All the dignitaries and leaders of today are fashioning themselves into the likeness of schoolboys.

Take the typical case of the college presidents. A generation ago the college president had a flowing white beard. It was part of his equipment. I remember well the venerable gentleman who was the head of the University when I received my degree thirty something years ago. I shall always recall the profound respect that the students felt towards him. Yet it was not what the man said: it was the way in which he laid his snow white whiskers on his reading desk. This lent profundity to all his thought. It was, I think, in the year 1892 that the president of a western college shaved off his whiskers and threw them in the Mississippi. The fatal idea spread. President after president was tempted by it. Then at this very juncture the invention of the safety razor – removing all danger to human life from the process of shaving – brought a clean shave within the reach even of the most cautious. The president of the modern college and his senior professors are not to be distinguished from their first year students. Remove the whiskers and you remove the man. The whole stature and appearance of him shrink: his shoulders contract: his frame diminishes: his little bowler hat swallows and envelops his trivial skull.

The loss of scholarship is irreparable. Is it any wonder that Greek is dead, that Latin is dying and that the old time learning of the colleges gives place to a mere mechanical routine.

But most deplorable of all is the damage that is being done to imaginative literature. Here, for example, are a few quotations selected, quite at random, from the great literature of the past to show the close interdependence of personality and whiskers:

“The Duke remained seated in deep thought, passing his luxuriant beard slowly through his fingers.”

(Ouida.)

Imagine what an impressive thing that must have been. The Duke could take his beard and let it trickle slowly through his fingers like rippling silk. No wonder that the Duke could think, when he could do that!

But all that can remain of that sort of passage in the books of today would run,

“The Duke remained seated in deep thought, passing his fingers aimlessly through the air a foot from his face, as if seeking, groping for something that he could not find.”

Here again is a selection from the poet Gray’s magnificent description of a Welsh bard.

“All loose his hoary hair, his beard

Streamed like a meteor to the troubled wind.”

– Gray, The Bard.

The splendid picture – the bard standing in the wind with the sparks flying from his whiskers in all directions – is gone.

Or again, take Longfellow – the opening lines of Evangeline.

“This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks

“Stand like Druids of old with beards that rest on their bosoms.”

What a pity to have to change this to read:

“This is the forest primeval, the round smooth trunk of the gum tree

“Looks like a college professor divested entirely of whiskers.”

In place of these noble pictures of the past we have nothing but the smooth-shaven hero of modern fiction, with his soopy-looking face, hardly to be distinguished from a girl’s. He may be seen on the cover of any of our monthly magazines. What can he do? He can “press his clean-shaven face close, close to hers.” One admits, of course, that he has a certain advantage here. If he had whiskers he couldn’t get nearly as close to her. But can he let his beard stream like a meteor to the wind with sparks of phosphorus flying off it in all directions? Can he “pass his beard through his hand?” No. Can he stand like a Druid of old? He can’t.

As yet, happily, there are certain domains of our national life to which the prevailing degeneracy has not penetrated. The stage, the moving picture and the grand opera still hold their own. The stage villain still has his black beard. The Southern colonel still retains his mustachios. The scholar, the wise man and the magician of the moving picture keeps his black skull cap and his long white beard. The Wagnerian opera is as hirsute as ever. And those who have been privileged to see the pretty little operetta that Reginald de Koven left behind him, will have been pleased to note that Rip Van Winkle has a beard like an Ostermoor mattress reaching to his ears.

But can the stage stand alone? It can not. Something must be done. . . .

Fortunately for our civilization the best section of the public is already becoming alarmed. An effort is being made. A number of big, warm-hearted men, and a quantity of great big warm-blooded women are banding themselves together. This is a good sign. Whenever they do this – and it is what they always do – one feels that as soon as a sufficient number are all banded together something will be done.

As far as the United States is concerned to my mind there is only one possible remedy – an amendment to the Constitution. Something, of course, might be done with magic lantern slides, or with moving pictures, or by taking up subscriptions. But these things demand money and time. Amending the Constitution does not. Experience is showing that it is a very, very simple thing, demanding only a little good will and forbearance as to which amendment gets through first. It is only fair that certain amendments now under discussion should have precedence. The proposal sent up from Kansas for amending the Constitution so as to improve the breed of steers in the West, and the Illinois amendment for shortening the distance between Chicago and the sea, are both admirable. But when these are carried an amendment in regard to the restoration of whiskers should be the earliest of our national cares. Individual freedom has its limits.

It is not true that a man’s whiskers are his own. It is not true that he has the right to remove them. John Stuart Mill thought so. But Mill was wrong. Every individual is but a part of society; and if his station is such that a flowing white beard is demanded by it, his duty is obvious. No one would wish to carry too far the supremacy of the State. But a constitutional provision of a temperate character imposing compulsory white beards on college presidents, ministers, poets, ambassadors and grand opera singers would take rank at once as equal in common sense and general utility with some of the most notable amendments to the Constitution of this Country.

TOC     INDEX

Then and Now

The College News of Forty Years Ago and the College News of Today

MEDICALS TAKE A NIGHT OFF

(As reported forty years ago)

Last night the students of the Medical Faculty took a night off and held their annual parade of the town. Forming up on the campus outside the windows of the dissecting room, the “Meds” moved in a compact body down College Avenue. Policeman McKonicky, who tried to stop them at the corner of Main Street, was knocked senseless and was deposited by two of the boys down the coal chute of the First National Bank. After upsetting a horse-car, the driver of which sustained certain injuries by inadvertently falling under the horse, the boys proceeded to the corner of Main and First Streets where speeches were made exalting the progress of the Medical School, and where two more policemen were knocked senseless. The procession moved uptown again towards the president’s residence carrying with it the front door of the First Baptist Church. After setting fire to the president’s house the students adjourned to the campus where they started a bonfire in which, unfortunately, one or two bystanders were accidentally burned about the feet, hands, head, and body. The arrival of a body of mounted police supported by a couple of squadrons of cavalry brought the evening to a close.

President Foible, on being interviewed this morning, stated that the damages to his house were quite insignificant, amounting to little more than the destruction of his furniture. The police who were unfortunately injured in their attempt to interfere with the students are reported as doing nicely. The driver of the street-car will be at work again in a week, and a cheerful tone pervades the whole college. The president further stated that the relations between the students and the town had never been better.

MEDICALS TAKE A NIGHT OFF

(As reported today)

Last night the students at the Medical Faculty took a night off from their arduous labours and were the guests of the Ladies’ Reception Committee at the Y.W.C.A. building on Third Street. After the singing of a few of the better-known medical hymns and after being treated to a harmonium solo in B flat by the organist of the Insane Asylum, the students listened with evident enjoyment to a talk by the Rev. Mr. Week of the First Baptist Church on the subject “Where is Hell? Is it Here?” After the pastor had said everything that could be said on this interesting topic, each student was given a dish of ice cream and a doughnut. The president of the college in thanking the ladies of the Y.W.C.A. for their cordial reception said that he was sure the students would now return to their studies with renewed eagerness. After singing “Rock me to Sleep, Mother,” the gathering broke up at nine-thirty.

PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY MEETS

(As it used to forty years ago)

Last night the Philosophical Society held the third of its bi-weekly beer parties in the supper room of the men’s residence. After the reading of the minutes, coupled with the drinking of beer, followed by the usual routine of drinking the health of the outgoing officers of the week and the toast of welcome to the officers of the week following, the Chairman invited the members to fill their glasses and listen, if they cared to, to a paper by Mr. Easy on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Mr. Easy, while expressing his regret that he had not had time to prepare a paper on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, delivered in place of it an excellent rendition of Bret Harte’s “Heathen Chinee.” At the close of the recitation the Chairman announced that the debate which had been announced on the topic Are Mathematical Judgments Synthetically a Priori had been abandoned owing to the fact that the topic involved more preparation than the members of the society were prepared to give to it. He suggested instead that the society, after filling its glasses, should invite Mr. Freak of the senior class to give his imitation of two cats quarreling on a roof. The invitation was followed by similar exercises and the meeting was sustained to a late hour, those of the members who went home leaving at about two a.m.

PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY MEETS

(As it does today)

Last night a very pleasing meeting of the Philosophical Society was held in the parlour of the Women’s Residence in the Martha Washington Building. Professor Strong in opening the meeting, said that she was glad to see among the members of the society a very creditable number of men, if she might use the phrase. She said no professor could feel that her work was satisfactory unless she could attract a certain number of men students. The professor then read her paper on the Sociological Elimination of the Delinquent. As the paper only lasted an hour and a half it was listened to in a luxury of enjoyment. The professor then having thrown the meeting open to questions, and a question having been asked, she very kindly spoke for another hour. At the close of the address a vote was taken on the resolution That the Humbler Classes of Society Ought to be Chloroformed, and was carried unanimously.

DISCIPLINE COMMITTEE REPORTS

(As it reported forty years ago)

The report is published this morning of the semi-annual meeting of the Discipline Committee of the Faculty of the College. This committee, consisting of the senior professors of the Faculty, was established, as readers will recall, about two years ago with the object of elevating the moral tone of the student body by expulsion, fines and the application of the criminal law. The Chairman reported that the committee had every reason to be gratified with the progress made during the period of its existence. The number of cases of suspension of students from lectures had increased under the operation of the committee by forty per cent; students warned, by sixty per cent; students found guilty of drunkenness, by seventy per cent; and students expelled for unbecoming and insubordinate conduct, ninety-five per cent. The report enumerates a new schedule of fines calculating to raise still higher the discipline of the institution, and recommends hereafter that every student guilty of striking or kicking a professor be brought before the committee and warned. The committee adds a further recommendation to the effect that measures be taken to let the student body understand that their presence at the University can only be tolerated within reasonable limits.

STUDENT CONTROL COMMITTEE REPORTS

(As it reports today)

The report is published this morning of the semi-annual meeting of the Students’ Control Committee at the University. This Committee, as readers will recall, was established about two years ago with a view to raising the academic standard of the college. It is empowered not only to institute inquiries as to the capacity of the professors, but to recommend the expulsion of those of them who seem to the students’ committee to be lacking in personality, or deficient in pep. The opening pages of the report deal with the case of the president of the college. A sub-committee, appointed from among the fourth year students in accountancy, have been sitting on the case of the president for six weeks. Their report is in the main favourable, and their decision is that he may stay. But the sub-committee pass severe strictures on his home life, and recommend that he has too many children for him to be able to give full attention to his college work, and suggests a change in the future.

The committee accepts and adopts the recommendation of the second year class in philosophy who report that the professor’s lectures are over their heads, and ask for his dismissal. A similar request comes from the third year students in mathematics who report that the professor’s lectures are below their standards.

The committee has received and laid upon the table the report of the fourth year class in commerce to the effect that they have thus far failed to understand any of the lectures that were ever given them, and ask that they be given their degrees and let go. The committee acknowledges in its report the gratifying statement made by the chairman of the Trustees in his annual report to the effect that student control marks another milestone on the arduous path that it is leading the college to its ultimate end.

TOC     INDEX

Little Glimpses
of the Future in America

I

The Final Solution
of the Transportation Problem

(An Extract from the
New York Daily press of 1930)

RESUMPTION
OF THE MAIL COACH SERVICE

We are happy to announce to our readers that the mail coach service between New York City and Philadelphia, which has been temporarily suspended since 1840, is to be resumed this week. By a fortunate chance the well-known and highly popular coach, the Martin Van Buren, has been discovered still in her yard, where she was placed when she was set aside pending the experimental use of the railway, which has proved such a costly failure. Under the new arrangement, passengers booked for Philadelphia are guaranteed of departure and arrival at the hour specified. Subject only to the hazards of the weather, the Martin Van Buren will leave her place of departure (The Andrew Jackson Hostelry, corner of Wall Street and the Albany Post Road) at or about daybreak on the morning of every Monday. This commodious coach has accommodation for ten inside and ten outside passengers. There is ample accommodation in the boot for all parcels and personal luggage. Passengers desirous of putting luggage in the boot, however, are requested to come to the booking office three days in advance to effect the necessary signature of vouchers, and to take the necessary oaths of allegiance and citizenship.

In order to avoid the present delays in the operation of the tunnel traffic, the Van Buren will be taken across the river on a barge. Passengers may keep their seats during the transit, or, for a small extra fee, may be carried across (if the wind serves) in a hoy. The Van Buren will proceed at full speed across New Jersey. Absolutely no stops will be made except for the change of horses, for meals, and for the night.

When the moon serves, the Van Buren will continue her journey, still at full speed, until 9 p.m. She will arrive in Philadelphia, barring being struck by lightning, on the afternoon of the third day out of New York. The greatest satisfaction is expressed everywhere in business circles over the prospect of the speed and certainty offered by the new service. A peculiar and pathetic interest attaches to the fact that the four horses which drew the Van Buren on her last trip out of New York are all dead.

Other similar ones, however, have been secured from the hansom cab service of Fifth Avenue. Many of those who have seen the new team declare that it is hard to believe that they are not the original horses.

II

Form of Application to be Used in the Not-Very-Far Future in Trying to Secure a Hotel Room

(1)  Letter from the Applicant.

The Management,

The Soakus Hotel,

New York.

Dear Sirs:

I beg to apply for a room, to be available for my use one month from the present date and usable for one day. I am a young man of good habits, a Presbyterian, a graduate of Harvard and a non-smoker. If you will see fit, Sirs, to trust me with a room I shall do my utmost to occupy it in a way entirely to your satisfaction. My testimonials are enclosed herewith.

Very faithfully,

Edward Eatanything

(2)  Testimonial from the President of Harvard.

The Management,

The Soakus Hotel,

New York.

Dear Sirs:

This is to certify that Mr. Edward Eatanything attended the undergraduate course at Harvard for a number of years and obtained the Baccalaureate degree in Arts. His course included English Literature Courses 1, 2 and 6, Mathematics 4 and 5, and Latin 6 and 8. I consider him in every way fitted to occupy your room.

Very faithfully,

——— ———,

President,
Harvard University.

(3)  From the Pastor of the Broad Street Second Baptist Church.

The Management,

The Soakus Hotel,

New York.

Dear Sirs:

My young friend, Mr. Edward Eatanything, informs me that he is an applicant for a position as a roomer under your management. He was for over four years a member of my congregation and I have great pleasure in testifying that the level of his spiritual life is so high that you can with safety place him even on the top floor of your hotel.

Very faithfully,

——— ———,

Pastor.

(4)  Certificate from the Metropolitan Emergency Guarantee and Insurance Company.

To Whom it May Concern:

Mr. E. Eatanything is insured in and by this company in compensation for all possible accidents resulting from rooming in a hotel. Any management permitting him to occupy a room is hereby assured that the Metropolitan Guarantee Company will see that he leaves the room, either alive or dead, at daybreak of the day following his occupancy.

(5)  Answer from the Soakus Hotel Company.

Mr. Eatanything.

Dear Sir:

We have much pleasure in informing you that your application for a room has been accepted by the Board of Pardons of this hotel and ratified by the Conciliation Council of the Waiters’ Union. The room will be ready for your occupancy at midnight of the day mentioned and you are requested to leave it at or before daybreak. An extra charge will be made for sleeping in the bed, or for the use of the window.

III

List of Honour, Pullman Company Announcement for March, 1930.

At a meeting of the Directorate of the Pullman Car Company, lower berths were awarded as follows for the month of March. The names mentioned below have been placed in order of merit. Here follow after the custom of the epoch the full honour roll of those to whom lower berths have been given.

IV

If the Immigration Laws Keep on Improving.

(Extract from an article in a National Encyclopedia of 1975, entitled – Deportation, Rise and Growth of)

The practice of deportation first originated in the years of the Great War, during which the United States, aided by the Serbians, the Siamese, and other allies, conquered Germany. It was first applied to the Reds or Radicals. It proved an immediate success. The demand at once arose for the deportation of other classes of the community. The deportation of the Socialists and the Syndicalists was carried out in the years 1925-1930. The next deportation was that of the entire population of Paterson, New Jersey. A slight opposition was raised in the press at the time, but the improved appearance of the city of Paterson after the inhabitants were removed silenced complaint.

The decade following witnessed the deportation of the Osteopathists, the Chiropodists and the Homeopathists. The movement now assumed a racial or ethnographic character. In spite of furious opposition it was decided to deport the Irish and to insist on their living in Ireland. The claim of the Irish that they were law-abiding citizens threw the case into the Supreme Court where, after the dynamiting of three of the justices, the survivors held that the plea of the Irish was good. A similar claim raised by the Greek fruit sellers (see under Peanuts) was held void. The movement now assumed a distinctly religious character. The deportation of the Presbyterians may be said to have marked an epoch. All those who witnessed their departure from New York harbour, when a hundred pipers played Lochaber No More upon a hundred sets of bagpipes, felt that they never wanted to go through such an experience again (see under Music, Definition of). This deportation was followed by that of the Mayflower Society, the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, the Mexican War Veterans, and other bodies whose existence had become a national danger. Of late years the deportation movement has undergone a marked decline. The new sense of emptiness and space is inducing a feeling of loneliness throughout North America. Open regret is now expressed at certain of the deportations. It is widely felt that it was a mistake to send the Grand Opera Artists, the Choral Societies and other harmless bodies out of the country. It is expected that the present decade will witness a turn of the tide (see under Tide).

V

The Socialization of the Church

(A paragraph taken from any local paper in any Country Town in the year 1930)

The Vaudeville and Minstrel Show put on at the Fourth Street Church last night was in every sense a marked success. The occasion proved that the choice of the new pastor is indeed an admirable one. We have never, even at the Gaiety Theatre, seen better black-face work than that of the Rev. Mr. Hopgood last night, while his buck-and-wing dancing is better than that of any spiritual worker seen among us for a decade. Several of the elders and church-wardens as end-men almost rivalled the honours of Mr. Hopgood. The dancing of the ladies of the congregation, who formed the chorus, particularly pleased us. Altogether we felt the Chairman was quite justified in his boast that the Modern Church has put the saloon out of business.

VI

If the “British Lecturer” Habit Grows

(Items from a New York Daily of 1933)

King George V lectured to a fair-sized audience at the Princess Theatre yesterday afternoon. The King’s delivery is quite good and the comments on his personality are quite encouraging. Interviewed at the Biltmore today, King George expressed his surprise and pleasure at the size of America for which he prophesies a bright future.

—

Binghamton, N. Y., May 2. Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Georges Clemenceau have made a favourable impression here with their Readings from the Treaty of Versailles.

—

The British Ambassador has been accepted for the summer season work of the Orpheum Circuit. His platform work in his first appearance at Mauch Chunk, Pa., is pronounced decidedly good. His work will do much to create a better feeling between Singapore and Siam.

TOC     INDEX

My Unposted Correspondence

It is an old adage that second thoughts are best. This is especially true when second thoughts are fortified by the inertia of a lazy disposition, averse to trouble.

Like many other people, I find myself constantly impelled to write letters upon sudden impulse, or at least to frame them in my mind. But whether written or only “framed” – a much more agreeable process – somehow they never get posted.

These letters are addressed, for example, to the Directors of Theatres to tell them that their place is a fire-trap, and that I, for one, never propose to enter it again, and that, therefore, such poor profit as they are able to make must henceforth be made without me. But on second thoughts – after all, what if the place is a fire-trap, why bother? Let the other people burn. And, anyway, I rather think they are to have a musical revue there the week after next which I might like to see. Better chance it.

Another set of letters are framed to the Immigration Authorities in the United States, to tell them that I cannot consent to this everlasting questioning at the border. If the thing persists, I tell them frankly I must stop coming and going into their country. Indeed, I find that this is the general view of people, of both nations who come and go across the Canadian border. I have listened to conversations in the smoking end of the Pullman car which would make the President of the United States shake in his shoes. Once or twice I have almost written a strong letter. Nothing stopped me except the fear that they might take me at my word and keep me out.

But at other times the letters are not only “framed” but all written and signed, and only held back through the momentary difficulty of finding an envelope.

Witness this example:

Letter of Protest
to the Light, Heat, and Power Company.

Sirs,

Your account for $41.85 just received this morning convinces me you are a pack of robbers. This bill which professes to represent an unpaid account for three month is incorrect. I paid you before. I know I did. The mere fact that I have got no receipt or anything of that sort is neither here nor there. I know I paid you because I have a distinct feeling that I have paid you.

This is a feeling which you ought to respect. My wife also remembers distinctly that she paid your collection man, or at any rate a collection man, at the door. And, anyway, look at the account itself. It is absolutely preposterous; six dollars for cooking-gas in one month! It can’t be. We live plainly and, by Heaven, you couldn’t use six dollars’ worth of heat on all that we eat in a month if you tried. Then look at this charge for electric lighting. What is all this stuff about Kilowatts? I never had any Kilowatts from you. And you have charged me apparently for thousands of them. My strong conviction is that that man of yours who reads the meter is a hired scoundrel.

In any case let me tell you this quite firmly. I will not pay this bill. If need be, I will go to prison for it for ten years. But I won’t pay. Remember also that you cannot tyrannize over me as easily as you think. I have powerful friends. I know the cashier in one of our biggest banks, and a friend of mine knows the mayor quite intimately and calls him Charlie. You may find that if you lay a hand on me you are up against a body of public opinion that will shipwreck your company.

Yours savagely, ———

By the time this letter has been written and my wife has made a copy of it – so that when legal proceedings begin we can read it out to the whole court – it is dinner-time, and too late to bother to post the letter; in addition to which there don’t seem to be any envelopes in the whole blessed house. After dinner I forget about it, and next morning when I see the letter lying on my table I begin to have doubts about the whole thing. After all, what’s the good of a lot of fuss? The light company are scoundrels, but the way to deal with scoundrels is to be broad-minded. Furthermore, are they scoundrels? I’m not so sure on reflection that the collector was theirs, after all. I seem to remember that he was collecting for the home for the blind. And that big charge for the gas might be connected in a way with our having left the cooking stove burning all night once or twice by accident. And, after all, I have no receipts. Oh, pshaw! Let the thing go. The company, if they only knew it, have had a mighty narrow escape. After this I will keep receipts, check the meter myself, lie in wait for them, and then, when they least think of it, overwhelm with an action for criminal conspiracy. But meanwhile let it go. Here is the letter which I actually posted:

The Light, Heat, and Power Company.

Dear Sirs,

Enclosed, with apologies, my cheque for $41.85.

Very sincerely, ———

I suppose there are people in the company’s office who open letters like that every month without realizing the wealth of invective that lies behind them.

Let me turn to a similar example:

Letter to the Head Office
of the Railway Company
in regard to the loss of my umbrella.

Here is a letter which speaks for itself. I have written it at least twenty times. So has everybody. But I have never yet posted it. Nevertheless, let the Railway Company be careful. The letter runs thus:

Dear Sirs,

I write to the Head Office of your Company because I have failed to get plain simple justice from any of your hired officials. Last week I left my umbrella in one of your Pullman cars. The name of the car, I regret to say, I cannot remember; but it was either Belgravia, or Ashdown, or some name of that sort. The names of all your cars, I may say, sound alike to me; and, anyway, you cannot expect me to remember them. Very good. I left my umbrella in this car. I want it back. It is not the value of the umbrella that I care about. What I really mean is that it’s not the value of it, but the price of it. The thing concerned is matter of general principle; and when you hit me on a general principle you hit me where I live.

It will be not at all difficult for you to locate my umbrella, as it was left on the car between New York and Boston one day early last week. Up to the present time I have been unable to get any satisfaction whatever from your officials. I have been told that your district superintendent in New York is carrying an umbrella that is either mine or somebody’s. May I add in conclusion that if I do not receive prompt satisfaction in this matter, I shall refer it to my solicitor?

I am yours, sir,
etc., etc. ———

Please note the very firm and decisive ending of this letter to the Railway Company. I am sure that, had it been sent, they would have been compelled to take action. It was only prevented being sent by my finding my umbrella under the hall table.

Another impulse from which often springs my unposted correspondence is an access of sudden philanthropy. Every time I hear that ten thousand Chinese have been drowned in a flood of the Hoang-Ho River I dash off a letter with a cheque in it for fifty dollars and the signature “Friend of China.” But before it is posted I recall the fact that after all there are a terrible lot of Chinamen in the world – four billion, is it? Or is that the issue of German marks per day? Anyway there are so many that if they don’t get drowned, what are they to do? Better wait for the next flood, anyway. So the letter is never sent.

But second thoughts dull the edge of philanthropy every time. Indeed, sometimes the current of good deeds gets turned from its channel in the very process of giving. As witness this letter of a type that I am sure is quite familiar:

Sudden Access of Philanthropy
after hearing a Missionary Appeal.

The Reverend John Jungletalk.

Dear Sir,

Enclosed please find my cheque for a hundred dollars ($100.00) – one hundred dollars!

You do not know me, but I listened, sir, this morning to your sermon on behalf of the Tabloid Negroes of Tanganyika. I do not quite grasp where these negroes live, but your account of their condition has touched me to the quick. I am immensely moved by that story of yours about the old negro woman who wanted to hear a gramophone before she died or to die after hearing a gramophone (I forget for the moment which). These people you told us of are in a deplorable condition. They are without Bibles, have no books, no soap, no hot water (I think you said hot water) – in fact they are in a bad way. And on the top of all this I gather that unscrupulous traders have come into the country and are selling rum and whisky to the natives for a few cents a bottle. This is terrible. In fact, sir, I find that as I write this letter I am inclined instead of sending you the hundred dollars to offer the higher sacrifice of personal service. I gather that you are to sail in a few weeks’ time, going from here to San Francisco and there by steamer, to wherever it is that the Tabloid negroes live. I am more than half inclined to come along. If you can collect enough money for the two of us I will gladly do so. Meantime I will hold back the cheque of which I spoke.

Very sincerely in the spirit,

————

P.S.—That whisky you spoke of – is it Scotch or Irish?

I might have included above the letters which I (don’t) write about the scorching of motors along my street – the other streets matter less – letters complaining that there are too many Flag Days, letters on Daylight Saving, Street Cleaning, Fly Killing, the League of Nations – in fact, it’s endless.

TOC     INDEX

Letters to the New Rulers
of the World

To the Secretary
of the League of Nations

Respected Sir,

I have learned, as has everybody here in my home town, with unconcealed delight, of this new convention, that you have just concluded in regard to the Kalmuk Hinterland of the Oxus district. As we understand it here in our town, this convention will establish a distinct modus vivendi as between Monoglian Kalmuks and the Tartarian Honeysuckles. It will set up a new sphere of influence, the boundaries of which we are as yet unable to trace on the railway and steamship map of the world in our new Union Depot, but which we feel assured will extend at least fifty miles in either direction and will stop only when it has to. As citizens of a great country it fills us with a new pride in this nation to reflect that the whole of this hinterland, both back and front, will now be thrown open to be proselytyzed, Christianized, and internationalized, penetrated and fumigated under the mandate of this country.

What you have done, sir, is a big thing, and when we realize that it has taken only six years for you to do it, we are filled with enthusiasm as to what you are destined to do. Nor has this been the sole result of your years of labour. The citizens of our town have followed with a fascinated interest each stage of your achievements. Your handling of the claims of Formosa to a share in the control of the Ho-han Canal was masterly. On the news that you had succeeded in submitting to arbitration the claims of the Dutch bondholders of the Peking-Hankow railway, our citizens turned out and held a torchlight procession on the Main Street. When the word came that you had successfully arranged a status quo on the backwaters of the Upper Congo, there was an enthusiasm and excitement upon our streets such as we have not seen since the silver election in 1896.

Under the circumstances, therefore, respected sir, I am certain that you will not mind a few words – I will not say of protest – but of friendly criticism. We readily admit in our town all that you have done for us. You have lifted us, as we fully recognize, into what is a larger atmosphere. When we look back to the narrow horizon of politics as they were in this town (you will recall our sending Alderman McGinnis and the Johnson boys to the penitentiary) we stand appalled. It is a splendid thing to think that our politics now turn upon the larger and bigger issues of the world, such as the Kalmuks, the Kolchuks and the internationalization of the Gulf of Kamchatka. It would have done you good, sir, could you have listened to the masterly debate at our Mechanics’ Institute last week on the establishment of a six-nation control over the trolley line from Jerusalem and Jericho.

But, sir, to be very frank – there is a certain apprehension in our town that this thing is being pushed just a little too far. We are willing to be as international as anybody. Our citizens can breathe as large an atmosphere as the Kalmuks or the Cambodians or any of them. But what begins to worry us is whether these other people are going to be international too. We feel somehow that your League ought, if we may use a metaphor, to play a little bit nearer home, not all the games but at least some of them. There are a lot of things in this town that we think might properly claim your attention. I don’t know whether you are aware of the state of our sewers and the need for practically ripping up the Main Street and relaying them. Here is a thing in which we think the Kalmuks might care to help us out. Also if you would discuss with the Cambodians of the Sumatra Hinterland the question of their taking a hand in the irrigation of Murphy’s flats (just the other side, you remember of where the old Murphy homestead was) it might make for good feeling all around.

Put very briefly, sir, our one criticism of your achievements – and it is only said in the kindest possible way – is that your League is all right, but somehow the gate receipts of it seem to go in the wrong direction.

—

To a Disconsolate King

My dear Charles Mary Augustus Felix Sigismund:

You will pardon me, I hope, this brief method of address. For the moment, I cannot recall the rest of your names.

I need hardly say how delighted and honoured I was to receive a letter from you written all in your own hand and spelt, as I saw at once, without help. It was perhaps wrong of you to pay insufficient postage on it. But I do not forget that you were once a king and cannot at once get over it. You write in what are evidently wretchedly low spirits. You say that you are living in Schlitzen-Bad-unter-Wein (if I get you right), in the simplest conceivable way. You have laid aside your royal title and are living incognito as the Hereditary Count in and of Salzensplitz. You have only a single valet and no retinue. You lunch, you tell me, very plainly each day upon a pint of Rheinwein and an egg, and at dinner you have merely a chop or a cutlet and a couple of quarts of Rudesberger. You retire to bed, it seems, after a plain supper – a forkful of macaroni, I think you said, with about half a tumbler of old Schnapps. Of all the thousands who fed at your table in the days of your kingship, none, you say, care now to share your simple fare. This is too bad. If they had you and your little table in New York, they could give you the choice of a line-up of friends that would reach from the Winter Garden to the Battery. But that is by the way.

The point is that you are singularly disconsolate. You tell me that at times you have thought of suicide. At other times you have almost made up your mind to work. Both of these things are bad, and I beg of you, my dear Sigismund, that before adopting either of these alternatives you will listen to a little quiet advice and will sit tight in Schlitzen-Bad-unter-Wein till things brighten up a bit. Unless I much mistake, my dear Charles Mary Felix, the world has not finished with you yet, nor won’t have for a long time to come. It turns out, I am sorry to say, that the world is still an infinitely sillier place than we had imagined. You remember that morning when you ran away from your hereditary principality, concealed in a packing case and covered up with a load of hay. All the world roared with laughter at the ignominy and cowardice of your flight. You seemed all of a sudden changed into a comic figure. Your silly little dignity, the uniforms that you wore and that you changed twenty times a day, the medals which you bestowed upon yourself, the Insignia of the Duck’s Feather which you yourself instituted – all these things became suddenly laughable. We thought that Europe had become sensible and rational, and was done with the absurdity of autocratic kings.

I tell you frankly, Charles Mary Felix, you and your silly baubles had been no sooner swept into the little heap, than a thousand new kinds of folly sprang up to replace you. The merry Checkoslovak and the Unredeemed Italian ran up a bill of taxes for peaceful citizens like myself to pay. I have contributed my share to expeditions to Kieff, to Baku, and to Teheran and to Timbuctoo. General Choodenstitch is conducting huge operations against General Gorfinski in Esthonia, and I can’t even remember which is my general and where Esthonia is. I have occupied Anatolia, and I don’t want it. I have got an international gendarmerie in Albania that I think are a pack of bums, eating their heads off at my expense. As to Bulgaria, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, I believe I voice the sentiments of millions of free-born income-tax payers when I say, take them, Charles Felix; they are all yours.

The time is coming, I am certain, when a new pack of fools will come and hunt you up in your exile at Schlitzen-Bad-unter-Wein, clap a Field Marshal’s uniform on you, put you in a bomb-proof motor car and rush you back to your hereditary palace. They will announce that you have performed prodigies of personal bravery. You will wear again your twenty uniforms a day. You will give twenty-five cents to a blind beggar and be called the father of your people.

I give you notice, Mary Augustus, that when this happens, I shall not lift a finger to stop it. For it appears that our poor humanity, its head still singing with the cruel buffeting of the war, is incapable of moving forward, and can only stagger round in a circle.

—

To a Plumber

My very dear Sir,

It is now four hours since you have been sitting under the sink in my kitchen, smoking. You have turned off the water in the basement of my house and you have made the space under the sink dry and comfortable and you are sitting there. I understand that you are waiting for the return of your fellow plumber who has gone away to bring back a bigger wrench than the one that you have with you.

The moment is therefore opportune for me to write these few lines which I shall presently place in an envelope and deliver to you on your departure.

I do not wish in any way to seem to reflect upon the apparent dilatoriness with which your work has been done. I am certain that is only apparent and not real. I pass over the fact that my house has now for two weeks been without an adequate water-supply. I do not resent it that you have spent each morning for a fortnight in my kitchen. I am not insensible, sir, to the charm of your presence there under the sink and I recognize the stimulus which it affords to the intellectual life of my cook. I am quite aware, sir, that all of these things are outside of the legitimate scope of complaint. For I understand that they are imposed upon you by your order. It is the command, I believe, of your local union that you must not use a wrench without sending for an assistant: it is an order of your federated brotherhood that you must not handle a screwdriver except in the presence of a carpenter and before witnesses: and it is the positive command of the international order to which you belong that you must not finish any job until it has been declared finishable by a majority vote of the qualified plumbers of your district. These things, no doubt, make for the gayety and variety of industry but interpose, I fear, a check upon the rapidity of your operations.

But what I have wanted to say to you, good sir, is this. You find yourself in possession of what used to be called in the middle ages a Mystery – something which you can do and which other people can’t. And you are working your mystery for all it is worth. Indeed I am inclined to think that you are working it for rather more than it is worth.

I think it only fair to tell you that a movement is now on foot which may jeopardize your existence. A number of our national universities have already opened departments of Plumbing which threaten to bring your mysterious knowledge within reach even of the most educated. Some of the brightest scientific minds of the country are applying themselves to find out just how you do it. I have myself already listened to a course of six speculative lectures on the theory of the kitchen tap, in which the lecturer was bold enough to say that the time is soon coming when it will be known, absolutely and positively, to the scientific world how to put on a washer. Already, sir, pamphlets are being freely circulated dealing with the origin and nature of the hot water furnace. It has been already discovered that the water moves to and fro in the pipes of the furnace with sufficient regularity and continuity of movement to render it capable of reduction to a scientific law. We shall know before long just what it is you do to the thing to stop it from sizzling.

You perceive then, my dear sir, that the moment is one which ought to give you room for anxious thought. You are perhaps not aware that a book has already been published under the ominous title Every Man His Own Plumber. It has been suppressed, very rightly, by the United States Government as tending to subvert society and reduce it to a pulp. But it at least foreshadows, sir, the grim possibilities of the future.

May I in conclusion make a personal request. If you have any friends who are in the bell-hanging business, or the electrical repair industry, or the broken window monopoly, or the loose-chair-leg combine, will you kindly show them this letter.

—

To a Hotel Manager

Noble and Exalted Sir,

I am well aware as I stand before you at the desk of your rotunda, of what a worm I am. There is, as far as I can see it, no reasonable excuse for my existence. I have so it appears, “no reservation,” and yet I have had the impertinence to come here and to sue for a room. The contempt with which you gaze upon me is only too well justified. It is of no use for me to plead that I did not know that I was coming and that my journey to your city was entirely unpremeditated. All this only indicates, as you justly express by the look upon your face, an ill-regulated life unfit for your consideration.

I am well aware, sir, that I ought to have written to you four months ago and entered myself upon your waiting list for accommodation: and I know that even in that case my chance of obtaining a room would have had to depend upon my continued merit of good conduct.

You inform me that if I lean up against this desk until one o’clock there is a possibility that a gentleman may vacate room 4601. This is glad news indeed. I shall stand here with pleasure and I am sure that you will not consider me disqualified if I stand first upon one leg and then upon the other. It is a habit that I have acquired in such hotels as yours.

Meantime, my dear sir, I should like, while I lean against the desk, to set down upon paper in a few words just what I think of you. I cannot help but contrast you, sir, with the old time “Proprietor” whom you have replaced. The change, I do not doubt, is altogether salutary: and yet in certain aspects I cannot but regret it. The old-time “hotel man” was accustomed to meet me with an outstretched hand and a genial smile. He greeted me by my name and though I knew that he had read it on my valise my gratification was none the less. A room? Why, that man could find me a room if I turned up at midnight in the middle of a Grand Army Convention. A room! Why, the mere suggestion of my not getting a room filled him with distress. Sooner than see me sleepless he would put me in with two commercial men from the west (perfect gentlemen, as he himself informed me); he would put me, along with four others, on the billiard table; establish me behind a screen in a quiet corner of a corridor; or stop, rather, than see me suffer, he would offer (it was a safe thing) to turn out of his own room. As to a bath neither he nor I ever thought of it.

Observe that this man’s hotel was very different from yours. In it was no palm room filled with rubber trees and resonant with the music of a Hungarian Orchestra: no Peacock corridor in which the Dangerous Débutante in the drooping hat shoots languorous glances at the passer-by. In point of pleasure and relaxation in his hotel there was nothing, other than the bar. That was the sole resort – a quiet place below the stairs with a sanded floor and a long counter. And here it was that we stood in friendly converse, drinking whiskey and water while the chief clerk was “fixing me up” for a room. In those brave days we drank whiskey and water right after breakfast. We were supposed to need it.

Now, sir, I admit that you and your kind have made wonderful changes in our hotels. You have filled them with music and palm trees and débutantes. You have taught our people to drink English tea at five o’clock in the afternoon; you have borrowed the Café Chantant of the French and combined it with the grill room of the British. You have introduced afternoon dances and midnight suppers and you have gathered about you – I admit it and I thank you for it – all the prettiest women in New York to decorate your corridors.

You have become, and in a certain sense you are entitled to be, one of the New Rulers of the World. But this I ask. Do not push your sovereignty too far. If you do, there will be the inevitable reaction and revolution. A movement will be put on foot to build in your city a few hotels of the by-gone type of the old days when the guests were guests indeed and the kindly publican their host: a hotel with only one bath for every twenty-five guests: with dinner served only in the main dining room when the bell rings: without a single rubber tree in the whole extent of it – but, and this is the essential point – with something of the old fashioned courtesy and kindliness and quiet which you are banishing from your palatial doors.

What! The gentleman has vacated room 4601? Ah! a gentleman indeed! Quick, give me the pen and let me sign. I take back all that I have written. And by the way, which is the way to the lunch room where the Syrian dancing girls are? I shall want to eat there.

—

To a Prohibitionist

My dear Sir:

Before I begin this letter let me explain that, of course, I am myself a believer in prohibition. I think that water, especially clear, cold water – I don’t care for muddy water – is a beautiful drink. I had a glass of it the other day, and it seemed wonderfully limpid and transparent – almost like gin.

Moreover, in the town in which I live, my friends and I have seen prohibition in actual operation, and we are all enthusiastic over it. Crime is lessening every day. Murder is becoming almost unknown. Not a single one of my friends was murdered all last summer. The sale of boys’ boots had increased a hundred per cent. Some of the boys here have no less than eight or ten pairs. Bank deposits are rising. Credit is expanding, and work is almost ceasing.

These are very gratifying things, and when we look back upon the old days, my friends and I wonder how we could have led the life that we did. I remember that very often in the middle of the morning we used deliberately to go out from our business and drink a glass of lager beer. Why we did this I cannot now conceive. Beer, sir, as you yourself are aware contains neither proteids nor albumen. It has less nitrogen in it than common starch, and is not nearly so rich in effervescent hydrogen as ordinary baking soda: in short, its food value is not to be compared with tan bark or with common mucilage. Nowadays, if I find that I flag at all in morning work, I take a little nip of baking soda and a couple of licks of mucilage and in a moment I am willing and anxious to work again.

I remember, too, that in the old times in the winter evenings we used to sit around the fire in one another’s houses smoking and drinking hot toddy. No doubt you remember the awful stuff. We generally used to make ours with Bourbon whiskey and hot water, with just a dash of rum, with half a dozen lumps of white sugar in it, and with nutmeg powdered over the top. I think we used to put a curled slice of lemon peel into the rotten stuff and then served it in a tall tumbler with a long spoon in it. We used to sit and sup this beastly mixture all evening and carry on a perfectly aimless conversation with no selected subject of discussion, and with absolutely no attempt to improve our minds at all.

As things are now I have entirely cut all such idle acquaintanceship and such waste of time. I like to come home after my work and, after drinking four or five glasses of water, spend the evening with some good book of statistics, improving myself. I am then ready to converse, should an occasion arise, in such a way as to put conversation where it ought to be.

You will, therefore, readily understand that all my friends and I are enthusiastic over prohibition. If you were to ask us to go back to things as they were (but please do not do so), we should vote against it by a majority of easily two hundred per cent. It is on this account, with all the more confidence, that I am able to draw your attention to one or two points, in themselves very small things, in which we think that the present régime might be amended.

The first of these is the mere percentage, as it is commonly called, of the beer that is permitted to be sold. This is evidently a matter of very secondary concern and one on which no one would wish to dogmatize. But my friends and I feel that this percentage might profitably be placed at about, say, in rough numbers – twenty per cent. We should feel that at twenty per cent. we were getting a more adequate return upon the money expended. At the same time we lay no great stress on the particular figure itself. Twenty, thirty, or possibly still better, forty per cent. would prove quite acceptable to us.

Another point is the abolition of the bar. Here we are all agreed. The bar is done with forever. We never want to see it back. But we do feel that if we could have some quiet place where one could purchase beverages of the kind I have described, some plain room with tables and a seat or two and possibly a free lunch counter and a weighing machine, we should feel better able to carry out the general purport of the prohibition idea. There are several of my friends who have not been weighed since the first of July of 1919, and are suffering grave inconvenience thereby.

I do not suggest that such a place should be allowed to operate after the old unrestrained fashion of the bars that kept open practically all night. It should be placed under sharp regulation. My friends and I feel that any such place should be rigidly closed at two o’clock a.m. with perhaps special facilities for access at a later hour to the weighing machine and the lunch counter. These, however, are mere details of organization which, as we see it, do not in the least impair the general principle.

As to whiskey and the stronger spirits, we feel that there is not a single word to be said for them. My friends and I are convinced that the use of these things as a beverage is deleterious to the last degree. We unite in declaring that they should be regarded as medicine and as medicine only. Two or three small incidents have occurred among us lately which have corroborated our opinion upon this point. Not very long ago one of my friends was taken, just outside of my door, with a very sharp pain, or stitch, in his side. For the moment I was at a loss what to do when it occurred to me that possibly a medicinal application of whiskey might prove effective. I took him into my house and administered it at once and was delighted to observe the colour come back into his cheeks. It was some hours before I was enabled to remove him: but I finally ventured to put him into a hack, crosswise on the two seats, and the poor fellow was, I believe, safely placed against his own door by the hackman without further mishap.

Such incidents as this have convinced us that the sale of whiskey should be rigidly restricted to those who need it at the time when they need it, and in the quantity that they happen to need.

These suggestions, my dear sir, are intended merely as suggestions, as mere adumbrations of possible modifications of the present system. We understand that there is some talk of reconsidering and redrafting the eighteenth amendment to the constitution. If this is so, I think it would be well to embody these suggestions in the new amendment. I am certain that upon these terms the Supreme Court of the United States would have no trouble with its interpretation.

—

To a Spiritualist

Dear Friend and Brother in the Darkness,

I sent you last week a thought wave or movement of the ether. But it has apparently not reached you. I willed it in your direction and it seemed at the time to be moving toward you with gratifying rapidity. But I fear that it has gone clean past you. I am not however surprised or discouraged at this. In the little Spiritualistic circle to which I belong we have already learned to take the failures with the successes. We directed last week a thought wave at Senator Lodge but we have no reason to think that it hit him. The week before we had sent one, with special force, at Mr. Mackenzie King and there is no sign that it struck him. Our medium, Miss Mutt, tells us that very often a thought wave becomes supercharged and loses touch with the etherical vibrations and we all think this very likely. So I am not discouraged that my little message of congratulation and suggestion has gone astray. If I only had you near me I could get the message into you in a moment by putting the tips of my fingers on your cranium and willing it into you. But as I cannot do that I hope you will not mind if I have recourse to pen and ink.

What I want to say to you first of all is to congratulate you upon the splendid work that you have been doing in the world during the last few years. Until your recent activities began things were getting into a dreadful condition. Belief in everything seemed to be dying out. All idea of a material hell had had to be abandoned and there seemed nothing left. But now all that has been completely changed and I am sure that the little circle to which I belong is only one among thousands that are bringing hope and light to a world that was growing dark.

I am sure that you will be glad to learn that in our little circle our experiments have been singularly successful. We began in the very simplest way because Miss Mutt, our medium, said that it was better to begin with simple things so as to find out whether our members offered an easy mark to the ether waves sent from the Other Side, and they did. As our first experiment we all sat around a table with our fingers just barely touching it. We all had our eyes bandaged except Miss Mutt and we put the light out in the room to avoid the cross vibrations.

We were all delighted to find that the table at once began lifting its legs in the air and making raps on the floor and presently it ran right around the room and then climbed up the wall. Miss Mutt had to coax it down again. This of course is only a very simple thing and Miss Mutt, our medium, explained it all very clearly by telling us that the table had moved out of the subliminal plane and had got into a plane of its own. But at first it seemed quite surprising.

After that we went on to quite a lot of other experiments and sent telepathic messages clear out into space beyond the stars, and produced actual bodies and raised the dead and things like that. These are only little things, of course, and to you I am sure they sound nothing. But I can’t tell you how these simple little experiments pleased and delighted us.

Our séances in our little circle have now taken a more or less regular form. We meet on Tuesday evenings at 8 and first we have coffee and then Miss Mutt goes into a trance and calls up for us the spirits of any of the great people in history. The members generally vote as to who is to be called up but if there is any dispute the hostess of the evening decides what spirit is to come. We have had Machiavelli and Queen Elizabeth and a Roman Emperor who was awfully good though I forget his name for the minute. Machiavelli gave us a most interesting talk on the tariff and made it as clear as anything. He said that where he is they understand all about it. At nine o’clock Miss Mutt comes out of the trance and we have cake and ice cream and arrange where the next meeting is to be.

So I need hardly tell you that in our little circle we appreciate very much indeed the sort of work that you and other leaders are doing. Miss Mutt our medium says that it will be splendid when you yourself are on the Other Side. We shall send a wave at you right away.

I am sure then that you will not take amiss the very few words of criticism that I feel inclined to add to my letter. Perhaps I should not exactly call it criticism so much as suggestion as to how things might be made better still. As things are now we have all felt a certain amount of disappointment at what seems to be the low mental standard of the spirits that talk to us. Machiavelli for instance seemed to get all mixed up about what ad valorem duties meant and when McSmiley, one of our members who is in the wool trade, asked him about schedule K, he seemed to get quite angry and he said that where he was there was no schedule K. Miss Mutt, our medium, reminded us afterward that Machiavelli had died of softening of the brain so I suppose that accounts for it. But I never knew that George Washington’s brain had softened too before he died and that poor Longfellow had had it very badly – indeed apparently for years.

I think Sir that it will help along séances like ours immensely if you could manage to do something to keep up the education of the spirits. Miss Mutt says that they have books on the other side just as we do here. But one wonders if they read them. I suppose that in a sense they must get fearfully restless rushing round in the void, and it must be hard for them to sit down quietly and pick up a book. But I do believe that if they could be persuaded to do so, it would be a splendid thing for them. Perhaps too they could be taught to play bridge, or to knit. But I think that something really ought to be done to brighten up their minds a little. McSmiley left our little group after the Machiavelli evening because he said the spirits were just a pack of dubs. We all felt that this was wrong but we decided at once to send out a thought wave at you and ask about it. I am so sorry that nothing seems to have hit you.

TOC     INDEX

Winnowed Wisdom

(1926)

~

Author’s Preface

The Outlines of Everything

A Preface to the Outlines
Volume One – The Outline of Shakespeare
Volume Two – The Outline of Evolution

Volume Three – The Business Outline of Astronomy

Volume Four – Outline of Recent Advances in Science

Brotherly Love Among the Nations

The Next War
International Amenities
French Politics for Beginners
The Mother of Parliaments
New Light from New Minds
An Advance Cable Service
Back from Europe

Studies in the Newer Culture

A Little Study in Culture from Below Up
The Crossword Puzzle Craze
Information While You Eat
The Children’s Column
Old Proverbs Made New

In the Good Old Summertime

The Merry Month of May
How We Kept Mother’s Birthday
Summer Sorrows of the Super-Rich
How My Wife and I Built Our Home for $4.90
The Everlasting Angler
Have We Got the Year Backwards?
Our Summer Convention

Travel and Movement

All Aboard for Europe
The Gasoline Goodbye
Complete Guide and History of the South
The Give and Take of Travel

Great National Problems

The Laundry Problem
The Questionnaire Nuisance
This Expiring World
Are We Fascinated with Crime?

Round Our City

At the Ladies Culture Club
Our Own Business Barometer
My Pink Suit
Why I Left Our Social Workers’ Guild

The Christmas Ghost

Author’s Preface

An Appeal to the Average Man

It is the especial aim of this book to make an appeal to the average man. To do this the better, I have made a study of the census of the United States and of the census of Canada, in order to find out who and what the average man is.

In point of residence, it seems only logical to suppose that the average man lives at the centre of population, in other words, in the United States he lives at Honkville, Indiana, and in Canada at Red Hat, Saskatchewan.

In the matter of height the average man is five feet, eight inches, decimal four one seven, and in avoirdupois weight he represents 139 pounds, two ounces, and three pennyweights. Eight-tenths of his head is covered with hair and his whiskers if spread over his face could cover it to the extent of one-tenth of an inch. This ought to be a promising sign to a reader.

The average man goes to church six times a year and has attended Sunday School for two afternoons and can sing half a hymn.

Although it thus appears that the average man is rather weak on religion, in point of morals the fellow is decidedly strong. He has spent only one week of his whole life in the penitentiary. Taking an average of theft and dividing it by the population it appears that he has stolen only two dollars and a quarter. And he never tells a lie except where there is some definite material advantage.

The average man is not, by statistics, a great traveller. The poor fellow has been only sixty-two miles away from his own home. He owns nine-tenths of a Ford car, punctures a tire once every twenty-two days, and spends, in the course of his whole life, a month and a half underneath his car.

The education of the average man cost $350. But it didn’t get him far. He stopped – according to the educational statistics – within one year of being ready for a college. Most of the things he learned had no meaning for him. He gave up algebra without yet knowing what it was about.

By the time I had got to this point of the investigation I began to realize what a poor shrimp the average man is. Think of him with his mean stature and his little chin and his Ford car and his fear of the dark and his home in Honkville, Indiana, or Red Hat, Saskatchewan. And think of his limited little mind! The average man, it seems, never forms an opinion for himself. The poor nut can’t do it. He just follows the opinions of other men.

I would like ever so much to start a movement for getting above the average. Surely if we all try hard, we can all lift ourselves up high above the average. It looks a little difficult mathematically, but that’s nothing.

Think how fine it would be to get away from the average – to mingle with men seven feet high and women six feet round; to consort with people who wouldn’t tell a lie except for big money, and to have friends who could solve cross-word puzzles without having to buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica!

But the only trouble with such a movement is that if I did really start it, and if I could, with great labour and persuasion, get it going and it began to succeed, then who would come flocking into it but the darned little average man himself. As long as it was unsuccessful, he’d keep out of it. But let it once succeed and in he’d come. That’s exactly his dirty little nature.

In short, now that I think of it I am not so keen on appealing to the Average Man. Nothing ever does appeal to him, until it has made a terrible hit somewhere else.

I had just brought my investigation to this point when I realized that I had forgotten about the average woman. What about her? Where does she come out?

So I picked up the census volumes again and took another little run through them.

The average woman, it seems, does not live at Honkville, Indiana, or at Red Hat, Saskatchewan. The percentage of women in the population being much greater in the eastern part of the country, the average woman lives one hundred and five miles east of the average man. But she is getting nearer to him every day. Oh, yes, she is after him, all right!

It is also clear that the average woman is about half an inch taller than the average man. Women, taken individually, are no doubt not so tall as men, but, on the average, a woman is just a little taller. Men will find it a little difficult to understand how this can be, but any woman can see it at once.

In point of personal appearance, it may be estimated that women, taken as an average, wear their hair just below their shirt collar and have their skirts, at an average, always two inches higher than they were a year before.

The average woman gets married at twenty-seven, has two children and a quarter, and is divorced once in every eight years.

In morals the average woman is away ahead of the man. Everybody knows this in a general way, but it is very pleasing to see it corroborated by cold, hard statistics.

The man as we have seen above, spends a week in the penitentiary. But the woman is there only half a day. In her whole life she consumes only one and a half gills of whiskey, but, on the other hand, she eats, according to the director of the census, four tons of candy. She is devoted to her two and a quarter children, but she makes more fuss over the quarter of a child than she does over the two whole ones.

In point of intellect, the average woman cannot reason and cannot think. But she can argue. The average woman, according to the educational section of the census, only got as far in arithmetic as improper fractions. Those stopped her.

And yet, take her as she is – even with her hair bobbed round her ears and her skirt higher than it was, and her inability to add or to reason – she is all right. The average man comes out of the investigation as a poor insignificant shrimp. But with the average woman, the more you think about her, the better she appears.

Perhaps on second thoughts I might dedicate this book to the Average Woman. But then, unfortunately, the Average Woman reads nothing – or nothing except love stories.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

McGill University

1926

TOC     INDEX

The Outlines of Everything
Designed for Busy People
at Their Busiest

A Preface to the Outlines

Within recent years it is becoming clear that a university is now a superfluous institution. College teaching is being replaced by such excellent little manuals as the “Fireside University Series,” the “World’s Tiniest Books,” the “Boys Own Comic Sections,” and the “Little Folks Spherical Trigonometry.” Thanks to books such as these no young man in any station of life need suffer from an unsatisfied desire for learning. He can get rid of it in a day. In the same way any business man who wishes to follow the main currents of history, philosophy and radio-activity may do so while changing his shirt for dinner.

The world’s knowledge is thus reduced to a very short compass. But I doubt if even now it is sufficiently concentrated. Even the briefest outlines yet produced are too long for the modern business man. We have to remember that the man is busy. And when not busy he is tired. He has no time to go wading through five whole pages of print just to find out when Greece rose and fell. It has got to fall quicker than that if it wants to reach him. As to reading up a long account, with diagrams, of how the protozoa differentiated itself during the twenty million years of the pleistocene era into the first invertebrate, the thing is out of the question. The man hasn’t got twenty million years. The whole process is too long. We need something shorter, snappier, something that brings more immediate results.

From this point of view I have prepared a set of Outlines of Everything covering the whole field of science and literature. Each section is so written as to give the busy man enough and just exactly enough of each of the higher branches of learning. At the moment when he has had enough, I stop. The reader can judge for himself with what accuracy the point of complete satiety has been calculated.

TOC     INDEX

Volume One –
The Outline of Shakespeare

Designed to make Research Students in Fifteen Minutes. A Ph.D. degree granted immediately after reading it.

Life of Shakespeare.

We do not know when Shaksper was born nor where he was born. But he is dead.

From internal evidence taken off his works after his death we know that he followed for a time the profession of a lawyer, a sailor and a scrivener and he was also an actor, a bartender and an ostler. His wide experience of men and manners was probably gained while a bartender. (Compare: Henry V, Act V, Scene 2. “Say now, gentlemen, what shall yours be?”)

But the technical knowledge which is evident upon every page shows also the intellectual training of a lawyer. (Compare: Macbeth, Act VI, Scene 4. “What is there in it for me?”) At the same time we are reminded by many passages of Shakspere’s intimate knowledge of the sea. (Romeo and Juliet. Act VIII, Scene 14. “How is her head now, nurse?”)

We know, from his use of English, that Shagsper had no college education.

His Probable Probabilities

As an actor Shicksper, according to the current legend, was of no great talent. He is said to have acted the part of a ghost and he also probably took parts as Enter a citizen, a Tucket sounds, a Dog barks, or a Bell is heard within. (Note. We ourselves also have been a Tucket, a Bell, a Dog and so forth in our college dramatics days. Ed.)

In regard to the personality of Shakespere, or what we might call in the language of the day Shakespere the Man, we cannot do better than to quote the following excellent analysis done, we think, by Professor Gilbert Murray, though we believe that Brander Matthews helped him a little on the side.

“Shakespere was probably a genial man who probably liked his friends and probably spent a good deal of time in probable social intercourse. He was probably good tempered and easy going with very likely a bad temper. We know that he drank (Compare: Titus Andronicus, Act I, Scene I. “What is there to drink?”), but most likely not to excess. (Compare: King Lear, Act II, Scene I. “Stop!” and see also Macbeth, Act X, Scene 20. “Hold! Enough!”) Shakespere was probably fond of children and most likely of dogs, but we don’t know how he stood on porcupines.

“We imagine Shakespeare sitting among his cronies in Mitre Tavern, joining in the chorus of their probable songs, and draining a probable glass of ale, or at times falling into reverie in which the majestic pageant of Julius Caesar passes across his brooding mind.”

To this excellent analysis we will only add. We can also imagine him sitting anywhere else we like – that in fact is the chief charm of Shakesperian criticism.

The one certain thing which we know about Shakespere is that in his will he left his second best bed to his wife.

Since the death of S. his native town – either Stratford upon Avon or somewhere else – has become a hallowed spot for the educated tourist. It is strange to stand today in the quiet street of the little town and to think that here Shakespeare actually lived – either here or elsewhere – and that England’s noblest bard once mused among these willows – or others.

Works of Shakespeare

Our first mention must be of the Sonnets, written probably, according to Professor Matthews, during Shakesbur’s life and not after his death. There is a haunting beauty about these sonnets which prevents us from remembering what they are about. But for the busy man of today it is enough to mention, “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” “Rock Me to Sleep Mother,” “Hark, Hark the Dogs do Bark.” Oh, yes, quite enough. It will get past him every time.

The Historical Plays

Among the greatest of Shakespeare’s achievements are his historical plays – Henry I, Henry II, Henry III, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Henry VII and Henry VIII. It is thought that Shakespeare was engaged on a play dealing with Henry IX when he died. It is said to have been his opinion that having struck a good thing he had better stay with it.

There is doubt as to authorship of part, or all, of some of these historical plays. In the case of Henry V, for example, it is held by the best critics that the opening scene (100 lines) was done by Ben Jonson. Then Shakespeare wrote 200 lines (all but half a line in the middle) which undoubtedly is Marlowe’s.

Then Jonson, with a little help from Fletcher, wrote 100 lines. After that Shakespear, Massinger and Marlowe put in 10 lines each. But from this point the authorship is confused, each sticking in what he could.

But we ourselves are under no misapprehension as to what is Shakespeare’s and what is not. There is a touch which we recognize every time. When we see the real Shakespeare, we know it. Thus, whenever it says “A Tucket Sounds, Enter Gloucester with Ho Boes,” we know that Shakespeare, and only Shakespeare, could have thought of that. In fact Shakespeare could bring in things that were all his own, such as: “Enter Cambridge followed by An Axe.” “Enter Oxford followed by a Link.” His lesser collaborators could never get the same niceness of touch. Thus, when we read, “Enter the Earl of Richmond followed by a pup,” we realize that it is poor work.

Another way in which we are able to test whether or not a historical play is from Shakespeare’s own pen is by the mode of address used by the characters. They are made to call one another by place designations instead of by their real names. “What says our brother France?” or “Well, Belgium, how looks it to you?” “Speak on, good Burgundy, our ears are yours.” We ourselves have tried to imitate this but could never quite get it; our attempt to call our friends “Apartment B, the Grosvenor,” and to say “Go to it, the Marlborough, Top Floor No. 6” has practically ended in failure.

The Great Tragedies

Every educated person should carry in his mind an outline idea of the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. This outline when reduced to what is actually remembered by playgoers and students is not difficult to acquire. Sample:

Hamlet (not to be confused with Omelette which was written by Voltaire). Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, lived among priceless scenery and was all dressed in black velvet. He was deeply melancholy. Either because he was mad, or because he was not, Hamlet killed his uncle and destroyed various other people whose names one does not recall.

The shock of this drove Ophelia to drown herself, but oddly enough when she threw herself in the water she floated, and went down the river singing and shouting. In the end Hamlet killed Laertes and himself, and others leaped into his grave until it was quite full when the play ends. People who possess this accurate recollection rightly consider themselves superior to others.

Shakespeare
and Comparative Literature

Modern scholarship has added greatly to the interest in Shakespeare’s work by investigating the sources from which he took his plays. It appears that in practically all cases they were old stuff already. Hamlet quite evidently can be traced to an old Babylonian play called Humlid and this itself is perhaps only a version of a Hindoo tragedy, The Life of William Johnson.

The play of Lear was very likely taken by S. from the old Chinese drama of Li-Po, while Macbeth, under the skilled investigation of modern scholars, shows distinct traces of a Scottish origin.

In effect, Shakespeare, instead of sitting down and making up a play out of his head, appears to have rummaged among sagas, myths, legends, archives and folk lore, much of which must have taken him years to find.

Personal Appearance

In person Shakespeare is generally represented as having a pointed beard and bobbed hair, with a bald forehead, large wide eyes, a salient nose, a retreating chin and a general expression of vacuity, verging on imbecility.

Summary

The following characteristics of Shakespeare’s work should be memorized – majesty, sublimity, grace, harmony, altitude, also scope, range, reach, together with grasp, comprehension, force and light, heat and power.

Conclusion: Shakespeare is a very good writer.

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Volume Two –
The Outline of Evolution

Specially Revised to Suit Everybody, and Particularly Adapted for the Schools of Tennessee.

It seems that recently there has been a lot of new trouble about the theory of evolution in the schools. Either the theory is being taught all wrong or else there is something the matter with it. For years it had seemed as if the doctrine of Evolution was so universally accepted as to lose all its charm. It was running as a close second to Spherical Trigonometry and Comparative Religion and there was no more excitement about it than there is over Anthropology.

Then suddenly something seems to have happened. A boy in a Kansas public school threw down his book and said that the next time he was called a protozoon he’d quit the class. A parent in Ostaboola, Oklahoma, wrote to the local school board to say that for anyone to teach his children that they were descended from monkeys cast a doubt upon himself which he found intolerable. After that the wave of protest swept through the colleges.

The students marched in processions carrying banners with the motto “Are we baboons? Rah, Rah, Apes!” The Rotary Clubs of town after town voted by a standing vote that they were unable to support (or to understand) the doctrine of biological biogenesis, and they wanted it taken away.

The Woman’s Culture Club of Winona, Utah, moved that the name of Charles Darwin be changed in the text books of the state to that of W. J. Bryan. The Anti-Saloon League voted that the amount of Darwinianism that should be licensed in the schools should not be more than one-half of one per cent.

It is to meet this difficult situation that the present outline of Evolution has been prepared. It is intended so to revise and modify the rigid character of the theory as to make it acceptable to everybody.

The obvious beginning of the matter is to present the theory of evolution as it stood before the trouble began in Tennessee. Each of us at that time carried in his head an outline, a little bit hazy, but still usable, of the Doctrine of Evolution as we remembered it from our college training.

Outline of Evolution
as Dimly Recalled from College Education

We are all descended from monkeys. This descent, however, took place a long time ago and there is no shame in it now. It happened two or three thousand years ago and must have been after and not before the Trojan war.

We have to remember also that there are several kinds of monkeys. There is the ordinary monkey seen in the street with the hand organ (communis monacus), the baboon, the giboon (not Edward,) the bright, merry, little chimpanzee, and the hairy ourang-outang with the long arms. Ours is probably the hairy ourang-outang.

But the monkey business is only part of it. At an earlier stage men were not even that. They probably began as worms. From that they worked up to being oysters; after that they were fish, then snakes, then birds, then flying squirrels, and at last monkeys.

The same kind of change passed over all the animals. All the animals are descended from one another. The horse is really a bird, and is the same animal as the crow. The differences between them are purely superficial. If a crow had two more feet and no feathers it would be a horse except for its size.

The whole of these changes were brought about by what is called the Survival of the Fittest. The crookedest snake outlived the others. Each creature had to adapt itself or bust.

The giraffe lengthened its neck. The stork went in for long legs. The hedgehog developed prickles. The skunk struck out an independent line of its own. Hence the animals that we see about us – as the skunk, the toad, the octopus, and the canary – are a highly selected lot.

This wonderful theory was discovered by Charles Darwin. After a five-year voyage in the Beagle as a naturalist in the Southern Seas, Darwin returned to England and wrote a book called Sartor Resartus which definitely established the descent of mankind from the avoirdupois apes.

One must admit that in this form the theory does not seem calculated to give any great offence to anybody. One must therefore suppose that the whole of the present bitter controversy arose out of what Darwin himself must have written. But this is obviously not so. I have not actually before me the text of Darwin’s own writings, but I recall the general run of what he wrote with sufficient accuracy to reproduce it here.

DARWIN’S OWN STATEMENT

Personal Recollection
of the Work of the Great Naturalist

“On the Antilles the common crow, or decapod, has two feet while in the Galapagos Islands it has a third. This third foot, however, does not appear to be used for locomotion, but merely for conversation. Dr. Anderson of H.M.S. Unspeakable during his visit to the Galapagos Islands in 1834 saw two crows sitting on a tree. One was, apparently, larger than the other. Dr. Anderson also saw a lizard at Guayaquil in Ecuador which had lost one toe. In fact, he had quite a good time.

“It would be too much to say that the crow and the lizard are the same bird. But there seems little doubt that the apex cervicus of the lizard is of the same structure as the rudimentary dorsal fin of the crow. I put forward this statement however with the modesty which it deserves and am only led to it with deep reluctance and with a full sense of its fatal character.

“I may say that I myself while off the Oesophagus Islands in H.M.S. Impossible in the year 1835 saw a flock of birds of the kind called by the sailors “bum-birds,” which alighted on the masts and held on by their feet. In fact, I saw a lot of interesting things like that.

“While I was in the Beagle, I recall that on one occasion we landed on the Marquesas Islands where our captain and his party were entertained by the chief on hams and yams. After the feast a group of native women performed a hula-hula dance during which I wandered out into the woods and secured a fine collection of toads.

“On the next island – while the captain and his officers were watching a hitchi-kitchi dance – I picked up some admirable specimens of lizards and was fortunate enough to bring back a pocketful of potato bugs.”

After reading this plain account as quoted, or at least as remembered, direct from Darwin, one must admit that there is no reason to try to rob him of his discoveries.

But to make the case still plainer, let us set alongside of this a clear simple statement of the Theory of Evolution as it is now held by the scientists in our colleges. I have before me the enunciation of the doctrine as stated at the request of the press by a distinguished biologist during the height of the present controversy. What he says runs, as follows – or very nearly as follows:

“All controversy apart, we must at least admit the existence of a continuous morphological protoplasmic differentiation—”

That seems to me a fair, manly statement of a plain fact.

“Cytology is still in its infancy—”

This is too bad, but it will grow.

“But at least it involves the admission of a primitive conformity which removes any a priori difficulty in the way of evolution.”

So there we are. After that one would think that the Tennessee schools would have no further difficulty about the thing.

The Time of Evolution

But even if we reach a definite conclusion as to the nature of the process by which life gradually appeared and assumed higher and higher forms, the question still remains – over how great a period did the process last? What time element must be interposed? In other words as Henri Bergson once stated it with a characteristic flash of genius, “How long did it take?”

The earlier estimates of evolutionary scientists placed the age of man at about 500,000 years. This was ridiculously low. You can’t evolve any kind of real man in that time. Huxley boldly raised the figures to 1,000,000. Lord Kelvin, amid unusual applause, put it up to 2,000,000 years. The cheers had hardly died away when Sir Ray Lankester disturbed the whole universe by declaring that man was 4,000,000 years old. Two years later a professor of the Smithsonian Institute raised it to 5,000,000. This estimate was seen and raised to 10,000,000 years. This again was raised from year to year amid universal enthusiasm.

The latest advices are that a student in Schenectady Technical High School places the age of man at 100,000,000 years. For a rough working estimate, therefore, the business man will not be far wrong in assuming (for practical purposes) that the age of man is anything from 100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. Night watchmen are perhaps a little older.

Postscript:
Up-to-Date Corrections
of the Darwinian Theory

A still more cheerful light is thrown on the evolution controversy by the fact that modern biologists do not entirely hold with the theory of Charles Darwin. I find on inquiry that they are prepared to amend his evolution doctrine in a variety of points.

It seems that Darwin laid too much stress on what he called natural selection and the survival of the fittest. The modern biologist attaches no importance to either of these. It seems also that Darwin overestimated very much the part played by heredity. He was moreover mistaken in his idea of the changes of the species. It is probable, too, that his notion of a monkey is inadequate. It is doubtful also whether Darwin ever actually sailed on the Beagle. He may have been in the Phineas Q. Fletcher of Duluth. Nor is it certain that his name was Darwin.

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Volume Three –
The Business Outline of Astronomy

The world or universe in which we do our business consists of an infinite number, perhaps a hundred billion, perhaps not, of blazing stars accompanied by comets, dark planets, asteroids, asterisks, meteors, meteorites and dust clouds whirling in vast circles in all directions and at all velocities. How many of these bodies are habitable and fit for business we do not know.

The light emitted from these stars comes from distances so vast that most of it is not here yet. But owing to the great distance involved the light from the stars is of no commercial value. One has only to stand and look up at the sky on a clear starlight night to realize that the stars are of no use.

Practically all our efficient light, heat and power comes from the sun. Small though the sun is, it gives out an intense heat. The business man may form some idea of its intensity by imagining the entire lighting system of any two great American cities grouped into a single bulb; it would be but little superior to the sun.

The earth revolves around the sun and at the same time revolves on its own axis, the period of its revolution and the rising and setting of the sun being regulated at Washington, D.C. Some years ago the United States government decided to make time uniform and adopted the system of standard time; an agitation is now on foot – in Tennessee – for the lengthening of the year.

The moon, situated quite close to the earth but of no value, revolves around the earth and can be distinctly seen on a clear night outside the city limits. During a temporary breakdown of the lighting plant in New York city a few years ago the moon was quite plainly seen moving past the tower of the Metropolitan Life building. It cleared the Flatiron building by a narrow margin. Those who saw it reported it as somewhat round but not well shaped, and emitting an inferior light which showed that it was probably out of order.

The planets, like the earth, move around the sun. Some of them are so far away as to be of no consequence and, like the stars, may be dismissed. But one or two are so close to the earth that they may turn out to be fit for business. The planet Mars is of special interest inasmuch as its surface shows traces of what are evidently canals which come together at junction points where there must be hotels. It has been frequently proposed to interest enough capital to signal to Mars, and it is ingeniously suggested that the signals be sent in six languages.

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Volume Four –
Outline of Recent Advances in Science

Specially Designed for Members of Women’s Culture Clubs, and Representing Exactly the Quantity of Information Carried Away From Lectures on Scientific Progress

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: Einstein himself is not what one would call a handsome man. When seen by members of the Fortnightly Women’s Scientific Society in Boston he was pronounced by many of them to be quite insignificant in appearance. Some thought, however, that he had a certain air of distinction, something which they found it hard to explain but which they felt. It is certain that Einstein knows nothing of dress. His clothes appear as if taken out of the rag bag, and it is reported by two ladies who heard him speak at the University of Pennsylvania on the measurement of rays of light that he wore an absolutely atrocious red tie. It is declared to be a matter of wonder that no one has ever told him; and it is suggested that some one ought to take hold of him.

Einstein is not married. It has been reported, by members of the Trenton (New Jersey) Five O’clock Astronomical Investigation Club that there is a romance in his life. He is thought to have been thrown over by a girl who had a lot of money when he was a poor student, and it was this that turned his mind to physics. It is held that things work that way. Whether married or not he certainly behaved himself like a perfect gentleman at all the clubs where he spoke. He drinks nothing but black coffee.

Einstein’s theories seem to have made a great stir.

Madame Curie’s Discoveries in Radio-Activity: Madame Curie may be a great scientist but it is doubted whether she is a likeable woman or a woman who could make a home. Two members of the Omaha Woman’s Astronomical and Physical Afternoon Tea Society heard her when she spoke in Washington on the Radiation of Gamma Particles from Helium. They say that they had some difficulty in following her. They say she was wearing just a plain coat and skirt but had quite a good French blouse which certainly had style to it. But they think that she lacks charm.

Rutherford’s Researches in the Atomic Theory: Ernest Rutherford, or rather Sir Ernest Rutherford as it is right to call him because he was made a knight a few years ago for something he did with molecules, is a strikingly handsome man in early middle age. Some people might consider him as beginning to get old but that depends on the point of view. If you consider a man of fifty an old man then Sir Ernest is old. But the assertion is made by many members of various societies that in their opinion a man is at his best at fifty. Members who take that point of view would be interested in Rutherford. He has eyes of just that pale steely blue which suggest to members something powerful and strong, though members are unable to name it. Certainly he made a perfectly wonderful impression on The Ladies Chemico-Physical Research and Amusement Society in Toronto, when he was there with that large British body.

Members of clubs meeting Sir Ernest should remember that he won the Nobel Prize and that it is not awarded for character but is spelled differently.

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Brotherly Love
Among the Nations

The Next War

From everything which I read in the press, I feel certain that it is coming. There doesn’t seem the slightest doubt about it. It may not come for a month and it might be a year in coming, but there is no doubt the Next War is already looming in sight. I have gathered together all the documents that prove it – interviews and discussions with the leading men concerned in it, who simply must know what they are talking about. Let me lay some of them before the reader and he can see for himself, on the very best authority, the situation that confronts us:

DOCUMENT NO. 1

The Alignment in the Next War

New York, July 25: Colonel The Honourable Fizzle Bangspark of the British General Army Staff, who arrived in New York on the Megalomania, expressed his views to the representatives of the press on the prospects of the Next War. The Colonel is confident that in the Next War, which he thinks may begin at any time, it is most likely the alignment will be that of Great Britain, France, and the United States against Germany and Russia.

But he may think it equally likely that it may be fought as between Great Britain, Russia, and Germany against France, the United States, and Portugal. Colonel Bangspark states, however, that though the war is certain the exact alignment of the nations will be very difficult to foresee.

He thinks it possible that England and Switzerland, if they get a good opportunity, may unite against France and Scotland. But it is altogether likely that in a war of magnitude, such as Colonel Bangspark hopes to see, the United States and China will insist on coming in, either on one side or the other. “If they do,” continued Colonel Bankspark, “it will be hard to keep them out.”

The distinguished officer considers it difficult to say what part Japan will play in the Next War, but he is sure that it will get into it somewhere. When asked about the part that would be played by the races of Africa in the coming conflict, Colonel Bangspark expressed a certain amount of doubt. “It is hard to say,” he stated, “whether they can get in in time. They number of course a great many millions, but the question really turns on whether they have had a training sufficient to let them in. As yet their armies would be hardly destructive enough, and it would be very poor policy to let them in if they do not turn out to be deadly enough when they get in.

“The black,” said the colonel, “is a good fellow and I like him. If he were put under first class European officers, he might prove fairly murderous. But I am not as yet prepared to say that we can make a profitable use of him in the Next War.”

Asked if the Chinese would play a large part in the coming struggle, the distinguished officer again hesitated. “The Chinaman,” he claims, “has not yet had enough contact with European civilizations. The Chinaman is by nature a pacifist and it will be hard to get him away from the idea of peace.”

Asked finally if the South Sea Islanders would be in the struggle, Colonel Bangspark spoke warmly and emphatically in their favour. “They will be in it from the start,” he said. “I know the Polynesians well, having helped to organize native troops in the Marquesas Islands where I was quartered at Popo Popo for two years, and in the Friendly Islands and in the Society Islands and in the Paradise Group, where I was the first man to introduce gunpowder.

“The Marquesas Islander,” the colonel went on, “is a splendid fellow. In many ways he is ahead of us Europeans. His work with the blowpipe and the poison dart antedates the use of poison in European warfare and compares favourably with the best work of our scientific colleges.”

When questioned as to which side the Marquesas Islanders would come in on, the colonel stated that he did not regard that as a matter of prime importance. He was convinced, however, that a place would be found for them and he hoped to see them in the front trenches (on one side or the other) on the first day.

Colonel Bangspark expressed himself as delighted with all that he has seen on this side of the water. He says that he was immensely pleased with the powder works on the Hudson, and though he had not yet seen the powder works on the Potomac, he was convinced that they were just as delightful.

The colonel, whose sojourn in our country is to last for some weeks, will shortly leave New York to visit the powder works at South Chicago. He is accompanied on his journey by his wife and little daughter, both of whom he expects will be blown up in the Next War.

DOCUMENT NO. 2

The Peril From The Air

New York, July 25: General de Rochambeau-Lafayette, Director-in-Chief of the French Aerial forces, was interviewed yesterday at the Ritzmore Hotel as to the prospects of world peace. The General, whose full name is the Marquis de Rochambeau-Lafayette de Liancourt de la Rochefoucauld, belongs to the old noblesse of France, and is a cultivated French gentleman of the old school. He is himself a veteran of seven wars and is decorated with the croix militaire, the croix de guerre, the nom de plume, and the cri de Paris.

The Next War will, the count thinks, be opened, if not preceded, by the bombing of New York from the air. The hotels, which the count considers comfortable and luxurious above anything in Europe, will probably be blown up on the first day. The Metropolitan Museum of Art which General de Rochambeau visited yesterday and which he regards as equal to anything in the south of France, would undoubtedly afford an admirable target for a bomb.

The general expressed his unbounded astonishment at the size and beauty of the Pennsylvania and the Grand Central stations. Both, he said, would be blown up immediately. No air squadron could afford to neglect them.

“And your great mercantile houses,” the count continued enthusiastically, “are admirable. Combining as they do, a wide superficies with an outline sufficiently a pic to make it an excellent point de mire, they could undoubtedly be lifted into the air at one bombing.”

DOCUMENT NO. 3

The Coming Conflict On The Sea

New York, July 25: Admirable Breezy, who represents the jolliest type of the hearty British sailor and who makes a delightful impression everywhere, is of the opinion that the Next War will be fought not only on land but on the sea and in the sky and also under the sea.

“It will be fought all over the shop,” said the Admirable, “but I do trust that the navy will have its fair share.” The big battleship, he says, is after all the great arm of defence. “We are carrying guns now forty feet long and with an effective range of twenty-five miles.” “Give me a gun ten feet longer,” said the Admirable, “and I will stand off New York and knock down your bally city for you.”

He offered further, if given a gun sixty feet long, to reach Philadelphia, and that if he were given the right gun platform he could perhaps hit Pittsburgh.

“I don’t despair even of Chicago,” said the Admirable. “We are moving forward in naval gunnery every year. It is merely a matter of size, length, and range. I could almost promise you that in ten years I could have a smack at St. Louis and Omaha. Canada, unfortunately, will mostly be on our side; otherwise, one might have had a bang at Winnipeg.”

Admirable Breezy said that while he was warmly in favour of peace, he felt that a sea war between England and the United States would certainly make for good fellowship and mutual understanding between the two navies. “We don’t know one another,” he complained, “and under present circumstances I don’t see how we can. But if our fellows could have a smack at your fellows, it would make for a good understanding of all round.”

The Admiral is to speak in Carnegie Hall tonight on “What England Owes to the United States.” A large attendance (of financial men) is expected.

DOCUMENT NO. 4

The New Chemical Terror

New York, July 26: Professor Gottlos Schwefeldampf, the distinguished German chemist, who is at the head of the German Kriegschemiefabrik at Stinken in Bavaria, arrived in New York yesterday on the Hydrophobia and is at the Belmore Hotel. The professor, who is a man somewhat below middle stature, is extremely short-sighted, and is at present confined to his room from the effects of a fall down the elevator. He speaks with the greatest optimism on the prospects of chemical warfare.

He considers that it has a wonderful future before it. “In the last war,” he declared, sitting up in bed as much as a rheumatic infliction of long standing enabled him to do, “we were only beginning. We have developed now a gas which will easily obliterate the population of a whole town. It is a gas which is particularly destructive in the case of children, but which gives also very promising results with adults.”

The professor spoke to the members of the press of the efficiency of this new discovery. Half a pint of the gas let loose in the room, he said, would easily have annihilated the eight representatives of the press who were present with him. He regretted that unfortunately he had none of the gas in a condition for instant use.

“But we shall not rely alone on gas,” continued Professor Schwefeldampf. “In the Next War we expect to make a generous use of poison. Our poison factories are developing methods whereby we can poison the crops in the ground a hundred miles away. If our present efforts reach a happy conclusion, we shall be able to poison the livestock of an entire country. I need not dilate,” he said, “on the favourable results of this—”

The Professor was interrupted by a violent fit of coughing, after which he sank back so exhausted that the members of the press were unable to prod any more copy out of him and left.

There! That’s about the picture, not a bit exaggerated, of where we are letting this poor old world drift to. Can we manage, my dear people, to do something to stir up a little brotherly love all round? We ought to do it even if we have to send hundreds of people to jail to get it. As for me, I intend to start towards it right away. The very next time I see on the street a Russian Bolshevik with black whiskers like an eclipse of the sun, I shall go right up to him and kiss him and say, “Come, Clarence, let us forget the past and begin again.”

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International Amenities

Can We Wonder that
It’s Hard to Keep Friends?

I have been much impressed lately by the way in which the habit of “scathing denunciation,” back and forward across the Atlantic, is growing in the press. Every time when international news gets a little slack somebody lands off a steamer and says something about British Education or about American women that sets the whole press into a flame. The people who say the things are of no possible importance. They are for the most part people of whom nobody ever heard before and never will again. But that doesn’t matter. The newly arrived visitor stands up on the deck of his steamer, gets the reporters all grouped around him in a ring and then begins to “denounce.” As a result next morning the newspapers of the entire continent carry news items such as the following, and the public seethes with indignation.

Denounces American Education

New York, April—:

“Mr. Farquhar McSquirt, who holds a high position in the Kindergarten Department of the Scottish Orphans Asylums at Dumfoolish, landed yesterday from the Aquitania on a tour of inspection of the American and Canadian schools and at once uttered a scathing denunciation of education on this continent. He considers that the whole educational system of America is punk. He admits that a great many pupils attend school on this continent but denies that they learn a thing. He considers that the average boy of twelve in the Orkney Islands knows more than a graduate of Harvard and Yale. The American student, he says, has never learned to think; whereas the Scottish boy begins to think very soon after he learns to talk. Mr. McSquirt considers that the principal cause of the defect of American education is the utter lack of qualified teachers. He claims that the average American school teacher is a complete nut. Few of them stay more than ten years in the profession whereas in Scotland the average period is well over fifty years.”

As soon as this kind of thing has been spilt all over the map of North America, the next thing to do is to mop it up. The newspapers send out enquiries to ten heads of ten great universities, and they all answer that while they have not the pleasure of knowing Mr. McSquirt personally – which means that they hope they never will know him – they emphatically deny his strictures on our education. They claim that the average American boy, while he may not have such long ears as a Scotch boy, is more receptive. He may not know as much as a Scottish student but what he knows he has digested, a thing the Scottish student has little chance to do. After this the public is soothed and the affair dies down.

Of course it must not be supposed that these “denunciations” are all in one direction. I don’t mean for a moment that they are always directed against this continent. Not at all. That merely depends on which direction the traveller is going in. If he is headed the other way and is standing on British soil the denunciation is turned around and it runs something after this fashion.

Denounces Oxford

London, April—:

“Mr. Phineas Q. Cactus, T.Q., P.F., Principal of the Texas Normal Institute for Feeble Minded Navajo Indians, has just attracted wide attention here by a letter to the Morning Post in which he utters a scathing denunciation of the University of Oxford. He claims that at Oxford a student learns nothing. He admits that they go there and they stay there, but he says that during the whole time in Oxford no student ever thinks. In the schools of Texas no student is admitted unless he has passed an examination in thinking and during his entire course thinking is made compulsory at every step. Principal Cactus considers that Oxford dulls a man’s mind. He says that after a course at Oxford the student is fit for nothing except the Church or the bar or the House of Lords. He claims that the average Oxford professor would make but a poor showing as a cowboy in Texas.”

Education is a splendid topic for this kind of business. But perhaps an even better one is found in getting after our women and girls and denouncing them across the Atlantic. This is always good for ten days excitement. The sample press notice is as follows:

Denouncing American Girls

New York, April—:

“Lady Violet Longshanks, a direct descendant of Edward I, in the male line, landed yesterday morning in New York from the Rule Britannia. Lady Violet has at once excited widespread comment by an interview which she gave on the dock to a representative of the press. Her ladyship, who represents the haut ton of the oldest noblesse and who is absolutely carte blanche, gave expression to a scathing denunciation of the American girl. She declares that the American girl of today is without manners. No American girl, the Countess claims, knows how to enter a room, still less how to get out of one. The American girl, according to Lady V. does not know how to use her voice, still less how to use her feet. At the same time the countess expressed herself fascinated with the size of the United States which she considers is undoubtedly a country of the future. Lady V. thinks it probable that many of the shortcomings of the American girl may be due to her habit of chewing tobacco.”

And so, of course, as soon as Lady V. has said all this it has to be “mopped up” just like the other stuff. The press sends people to interview five heads of five women’s colleges and they all declare that the American girl is as gentle as a lamb, and that if Lady V. really gets to know the American girl she will find that the American girl can use her feet, and will. As to the question of chewing tobacco they need only say that perhaps Lady V. is unaware that in all the first class women’s colleges chewing tobacco is expressly forbidden not only on the campus, but in the bedrooms.

This reassures the public and gradually the trouble subsides and everybody cools off and the American girl gets right back to where she was. And then some American lady takes a trip over to England and starts the whole trouble again in a reversed direction, like this:

Denounces English Girls

London, April—:

“Mrs. Potter Pancake of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, President of the American Women’s International Friendship League, has just jarred English society off its hinges by a sweeping condemnation, handed out from the window of her hotel, directed against English girls. Mrs. Pancake claims that the English girl is absolutely without grace and that her movements are inferior to those of a horse. Mrs. Pancake states further that the English girl moves like an alligator and is unable to sit down. She considers that these defects are mainly caused by drinking gin in inordinate quantities.”

Whereupon trouble breaks out all over the British press from Cornwall to the Orkney Islands. The Archbishop of Canterbury is consulted and issues a statement to the effect that in his opinion the English girl is more graceful than a cow and that he has yet to see an English girl of the cultivated class take what he considers too much gin. This eases things up a bit, and the good effect is presently reinforced by a letter to the Times from the professor of Arthopedic Surgery at the Royal College of Physicians who says that he has made anthropometric measurements of over a thousand English girls and that their shapes suit him down to the ground. After that the trouble blows over and international friendship is just getting settled again and there is every prospect of the payment of the British debt and the scrapping of both navies and the rise of the pound sterling away over par, when someone starts it all off again with this:

Thinks Americans Crooked

“Mr. Joseph Squidge, M.P. Labour member for the mining district of Hiddaway-under-the-Sea, has just returned from a three weeks tour of America. Mr. Squidge, who visited the entire United States from New York to Yonkers, has just given an interview to the local paper at Hiddaway in which he says that public honesty is extinct in America. He considers that the entire population of the United States, not excepting the criminal classes, is crooked. He says that in America a man’s word is never taken and that even in hotels a guest is required to sign his name.”

This of course is too much – more than any decent people can stand, and as a consequence some one is at once sent over to England, either by accident or by design with the result that in a week or two the whole American press carries a despatch as follows:

Thinks British Dishonest

New York, April—:

“Edward Angle Eye, a journalist representing five thousand American Farmers Newspapers, has just cabled from London to Coffin Creek, Idaho, to say that the British are all liars. He says that with the possible exception of the Prince of Wales and Queen Mary, it is impossible to trust anybody in the British Isles. Public morality, he claims, has reached its lowest ebb and is washing away. He attributes the trouble to the large influx of Chinese in London.”

And after that, can you wonder if we find it a little hard to keep peace and good will across the Atlantic.

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French Politics for Beginners

As Explained in a Series of Cables From our Own Special Correspondent in Paris

Paris, 10.30 a.m.

Nothing this morning intimated the imminence of a cabinet crisis. The sky was of spotless serenity, and the whole aspect of the city one of brightness and gayety. The hotels were full of tourists, the shops were crowded, the fountains were running, Punch and Judy was playing in the Champs Elysées, and the French franc which had shown signs of restlessness the day before had passed a quiet night.

The Chamber of Deputies, however, had hardly met at 10 o’clock in the Palais Bourbon when Mr. Painlevé rose in his seat and asked the premier if he knew what time it was. Mr. Briand replied that his watch had stopped. Mr. Painlevé rushing on to the floor in front of the tribune, demanded from the chamber whether a man whose watch had stopped was fit to be the premier of France. Instantly the chamber was in an uproar. Shouts of “A Bas, Briand!” – were mingled with cries of “Attaboy, Aristide!”

Mr. Briand, who preserved throughout the most complete calm, then asked for a vote of the chamber. The vote at once showed that not only was the whole of the Left side against Mr. Briand but also a bit of the Center and the East and South and some of the North-West. Mr. Briand immediately resigned and the great government which had presided over the destiny of France and weathered every storm for six days, went out of office.

Paris, 12.30 p.m.

It has now been learned that on the news of Mr. Briand’s resignation the President of the Republic summoned Mr. Painlevé to the Palace of the Elysées and asked him if he could form a cabinet. On Mr. Painlevé asking for time the President said that he could have twenty minutes. Mr. Painlevé drove at once to the Chamber of Deputies and, crossing the floor of the house where Mr. Briand sat, kissed him on both cheeks and asked him if he would join his government. Mr. Briand, having thrown his arms around Mr. Painlevé, announced his willingness to join him. Within a few moments the chamber was informed of the formation of the Painlevé-Briand ministry, the news being greeted with acclamation.

The Painlevé-Briand Ministry

The president of the session having announced a ten minutes adjournment to allow the new ministry to make a budget, it became clear that the Painlevé-Briand ministry would find itself in a position of great strength. It will have the support of the whole radical bloc, together with a chunk of Socialists and about half a bloc of conservatives. No French government, for the last six months, has been in such a position of power. Briand, it is said with great satisfaction, will be virtually a dictator over the destinies of France. As soon as the news was disseminated on the Bourse the franc humped itself up two and a half points.

Paris, 11.45 a.m.

Mr. Briand and Mr. Painlevé, entering the chamber with their arms round one another’s waists, read out their budget to a breathless house. The aim of the new government will be to put the finances of France on a basis of absolute stability. To do this they will at once borrow 4,000,000,000 francs. The loan, however, will be offset and made good by a credit with the Bank of France, which will then float a loan with the public, who will then be authorized, by a decree, to borrow from the bank. The entire credit thus created will be added up and declared extinguished. The announcement of the budget policy was received with a salvo of enthusiasm, the entire left embracing the whole of the right.

Fall of the Government

Paris, 12.30 p.m.

The Briand-Painlevé government has fallen. Entrenched in power as it seemed behind a solid parliamentary support, it fell suddenly and unexpectedly on an interpellation during the budget debate. Mr. Raymond Poincaré, who is generally regarded as the master mind of French politics, rose during the discussion of budget and asked whether the government intended to retain the tax on beer. On Mr. Briand’s saying that it was proposed to keep this tax, Mr. Poincaré declared that the true national policy would be to let the Germans drink enough beer to pay taxes for both nations. If they couldn’t do it they should be made to. The whole chamber seethed with enthusiasm, during which Mr. Briand and Mr. Painlevé announced that their government was at an end. The president of the chamber, calling for order amid the tumult, asked if there was any gentleman present who could form a new government. Mr. Poincaré offered to do so if the president would let him talk with Mr. Painlevé and Mr. Briand outside for a few minutes. The permission being given the three statesmen shortly afterward reentered the chamber and announced that they had succeeded in combining themselves into a ministry to be called the Poincaré-Painlevé-Briand Ministry.

Poincaré-Painlevé-Briand Ministry

Mr. Poincaré said, however, that they would only do this if they could be assured of a block behind them. If there was no block they wouldn’t be a ministry. The enthusiasm of the Left together with part of the Right and a little bit of the Top, made it clear that the new ministry will receive an ample support. An adjournment was made with universal congratulations.

Fall of the French Ministry

Paris, 3.30

The new French government, which was formed by Mr. Poincaré with the support of Mr. Painlevé and Mr. Briand fell right after lunch. Details are yet lacking. Apparently it came into the chamber after lunch and fell. There is a general consternation. The Bourse is wildly excited and all the exchanges reacted sharply. It is said that the Governor of the Bank of France will be arrested and perhaps the Archbishop of Paris. It is whispered that the fall of the ministry was occasioned by Mr. Joseph Caillaux, who seated himself in the chamber and looked at the ministry with that inscrutable look which he has, till it fell.

The Caillaux-Poincaré-Painlevé-Briand Ministry

Paris, 4.15 p.m.

A certain measure of calm has been restored in Paris by the announcement that an entirely new ministry has been formed by the union of Mr. Caillaux – Mr. Poincaré – Mr. Painlevé and Mr. Briand. In a statement to the press Mr. Briand said that the old government had outlived its usefulness and that he welcomed the addition of Mr. Caillaux. A new budget would be made at once and would constitute, he said, the best budget of the last three weeks. This budget, which will absolutely ensure the stability of French finance will be based on a vote of National Credit supported by a Universal Loan and guaranteed by a Public Debt. Mr. Caillaux, whose financial genius never shone more brightly, is working out a tax, to replace the proposed capital levy and the income tax, and to be called the Tax on Somebody Else.

It is said in well-informed circles that if the government can be widened to include a royalist element and to take in a few communists and a bloc of socialists, its success will be assured. If it can then pursue a policy which will be sufficiently clerical and conservative while at the same time strongly socialist, with a touch of opportunism, it may last till Saturday.

Meantime the theatres are all open, work is plentiful, everybody is happy, Paris is bright with spring flowers, the hotels are full of Americans dripping with money, the new fashions are said to be simply charming, the skirts don’t reach anywhere, the watering places are wetter than ever – so what does a little thing like a government matter?

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The Mother of Parliaments

But What Has Lately
Gone Wrong with Mother?

“The House of Commons,” says the well known Guide Book to London of Today, “not inaptly called the Mother of Parliaments, is undoubtedly the most august, as it is the most venerable, of the great representative assemblies of the world. It is with something like awe that we penetrate into the stillness of Westminster Palace, and find ourselves presently looking down from our privileged place in the gallery upon the earnest group of men whose measured tones and dignified formalities are deciding the fate of an empire.”

That is what the Guide Book has been saying about the House of Commons for some two hundred years. But in reading over the press reports of the debates of the House within the last year or so as they come across the Atlantic, one is inclined to wonder whether the cold dignity of the dear old place is not getting a little thawed out in the warm times in which we live.

The proceedings in the later days sound a little too suggestive of the Cowboys Convention of Montana, or the meeting of the Literary Philosophical Society of Dawson City, Yukon.

Take in illustration the following report of the proceedings of one day some months ago, taken verbatim from the London Times and the London Morning Post or the Labour Herald – I forget which. At any rate, those who read the debates of the house will recognize it at once as genuine.

“The House of Commons resumed its session yesterday at three o’clock. The Prime Minister in rising from the Treasury Benches to present his bill for the introduction of Buckwheat into the Tanganyika district of Uganda, stated that he would like first to refer to the fact that some member of the House had just thrown a banana at the Speaker. He would ask members to realize that throwing bananas at the Speaker impeded the business of the House. He would go so far as to say that it was bad manners.

“At the word ‘manners’ the House broke into an uproar. Cries arose from the labour benches, ‘Manners! Yah! Manners!’

“Lady Luster at once leapt to her feet and said that there were members in the House whose manners were not fit for a stable.

“Joseph Dockside, M.P. for the Buckingham Palace district, asked if she meant him. Lady Luster called out that she did. The Speaker rose to a ruling against personal mention quoting a precedent under Henry VIII. But another banana hit him and he sat down.

“Mr. Dockside began to cry. He asked the House if it was fair to let an idle woman like Lady Luster tell him that he had no manners. He was only a poor man and had no schooling, and how could he even get a chance to pick up manners, even fit for a stable. Here he broke into sobs again while the labour benches resounded with the cries of ‘Shame!’ and the blowing of horns.

“Lady Luster then said that she had gone too far. She would take back the word stable. She meant ‘Garage.’

“The Speaker, quoting a precedent from Edward the Confessor, said that the debate might go on – a pineapple hitting him in the waistcoat just before, and as, he sat down.

“The Prime Minister then said that as quiet had been restored (loud cries of ‘Rah! Rah! Quiet!,’) he would resume his speech on the proposal of the government to subsidize the growing buckwheat – and, he would add, buckoats – in the Tanganyika district.

“At this point he was interrupted by Colonel MacAlpin MacFoozle, independent member for the East Riding of the West Hebrides. The Colonel wanted to know how the Prime Minister could speak of Tanganyika if he was fully aware of the condition of Scotland. Did he know of the present distress among the crofters? Was he aware of what was happening to the Scottish gillies, and the laddies and collies?

“Did he know that three more men had left the Hebrides? The Colonel, who spoke with violent passion, to the great delight of the House, said that he didn’t give a curse for buckwheat or for Tanganyika and that personally he could lick the whole cabinet.

“At this, loud shouts of ‘Attaboy! You’re the hot stuff,’ were mingled with cries of ‘Put him out!’ Lady Luster called out that if the Scots would quit drinking Scotch whiskey they would all save enough money to leave Scotland.

“For the moment, the transaction of public business was seriously threatened when Lord Pintop Daffodil rose and asked the Speaker’s leave to tell a funny story. Lord Pintop, who is rapidly gaining the reputation of being the third funniest member of the House, was greeted with encouraging laughter and applause.

“The Speaker having ruled that a funny story had been told under Queen Anne, Lord Pintop then related a story of how a Pullman car passenger was put off at Buffalo by the porter. The House, which is easily moved from anger to merriment and which enjoys nothing (except its lunch) so much as a good joke, was convulsed with laughter.

“The Speaker, in thanking the honourable member for the story, said that he believed that it was the same story as was told under Queen Anne.

“The Prime Minister then said he would resume his speech on buckwheat. He was about to do so when Mr. Ilyitch Halfoff, member for the Russian district of Westminster, said that he would like first to rise and present a resolution for the immediate introduction of communism into England. The House was in a turmoil in a minute.

“Cries of ‘Russia for ever!’ were mixed with the singing of the ‘Marseillaise’ and the countersinging of ‘Scots Whoo Hoo!’ It was said afterwards that the singing was the best ever heard in the House this month.

“At this point in the debate the yeoman usher of the Black Stick rushed into the House and called – ‘Hurry out, boys, there is a circus procession coming down Whitehall!’ The whole House rushed out in a body, only the speaker remaining behind for one minute to adjourn the session.”

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New Light from New Minds

A Study in International Interviews

People who read the newspapers regularly must have noticed that the reported Interviews are getting to be much brighter and more interesting than they used to be. Till recently, when the press interviewed travellers, distinguished visitors and political emissaries, they talked to each of them about his own particular line of life and the things about which he was supposed to know something. The result was fearful dullness. A director of the Bank of England was interviewed about currency, an actor was interviewed about the stage and a bishop about religion. As a consequence every one of them got prosy and unintelligible.

Nowadays the thing is done in exactly the other way. Each distinguished visitor is asked questions about something that is outside of his own line of life. A vaudeville comedian gives his impressions of French politics and an English bishop gives his views of women’s skirts. The result is a freshness and a charm which lends a new attraction to our newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. Here are a few examples taken from the current press and drawn, as appears at once, indifferently from England and America.

Ball Player Visits St. Paul’s

London, Friday: Ed Lanigan, star outfielder and manager of the Tuscaloosa Base Ball Nine, passed through London this morning and expressed himself as delighted with it. After he had had a run round town, Ed gave his views, on some of the things he had seen, to a crowd of assembled admirers at the Hotel Cecil. “What did you think of St. Paul’s, Ed?” asked one of the boys. “It’s certainly big stuff,” said Ed, “and it gets me. Those old geysers certainly knew how to build. And I want to tell you boys that there’s something about that building that you don’t get everyday. I doubt if there are a dozen men in New York today who could duplicate it.”

“How does the political situation in England strike you,” he was next queried. “Fine!” answered the big man. “They’ve sure got a lot of taxes here. But then mind you there’s a lot of wealth too. Of course things are pretty bad, but you’ve got to remember they were bad before, and anyway they’re not so bad.”

Movie Star Sees Riviera

Menton, Monday: Gus Phinn, the well-known movie star who is said to command a salary of anywhere from half a million dollars, was a recent visitor at Menton. Gus is enthusiastic over the Mediterranean sea. “I want to tell you right now,” he said to a representative of the press, “that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Mediterranean.” “What did you specially notice about it, Gus?” asked the pressman. “Why, what gets me hardest is the colour of the water. Say, I don’t think you can beat that blue anywhere. You might try but you can’t do it.” “Do you think,” asked another of the group, “that the tone of English Social Life is deteriorating?” “No, I don’t,” Gus replied. “I think the tone is good. I think it A.1.”

“What about the relations of England and France, Gus?” was another question. “They’re all right,” the star answered. “We met a lot of French boys on the boat and certainly nicer boys you wouldn’t want to meet. Well, they’re gentlemen that’s what they are. The French are gentlemen.”

“What about Germans, Gus?” one of the reporters ventured.

“All right!” answered the movie man heartily. “We had a German at our table in the hotel and they’re all right. Mind you I think we were perfectly right in crushing them because they needed to be crushed. But they’re all right.”

Copper King Looks at Oxford

Oxford, Tuesday: E. J. Slagg, the multimillionaire owner of mines and president of Slagg Consolidated Copper, visited Oxford yesterday and was shown round the colleges. The big copper man whose quiet taciturnity and power of silence has made him the terror of the stock exchange, looked about him at everything with the same keen shrewdness with which he detects a vein of copper under a hundred feet of trap rock. Only now and then he darted a shrewd question or let fall a short comment.

“This place,” he said, “is old.” On the threshold of the Bodleian Library he paused a moment as if rapidly measuring the contents with his eye. “Mostly books?” he asked. The copper king also paused a moment before the monument erected to the memory of Latimer and Ridley. “What’s the idea?” he asked.

But – as I said up above this new and brilliant flood of light is not only turned on Europe. By a similar process it is let loose on the American continent too.

British Lord Sees Jersey Tugs

New York, Wednesday: Lord Tinklepin who arrived from England on the Aquitania yesterday was taken for a trip up and down the harbor in a fast tug. His lordship expressed himself as amazed at the commerce of New York. “I had no idea of it,” he said. Passing by one of the car ferries of the Erie Railway, Lord Tinklepin expressed the keenest interest.

“What the devil is that?” he asked. On being told what it was, the distinguished visitor who is well known for his interest in physical science, at once asked “Why doesn’t it upset?”

Lady Visitor Discusses American Banking

New York, Thursday: Lady Mary Messabout, President of the Women’s Federation for Universal Mutual Understanding, was shown round financial New York yesterday as the guest of the Bankers Association. Lady Mary expressed the greatest wonder at the Sub-Treasury of the United States. “Is it possible” she said, “that it’s full of money?” Lady Mary was questioned by representatives of the press as to her opinion of the American banking system. “It is really excellent,” she answered, “so little delay and such civility everywhere.” “Do you think,” – it was asked by a member of the press – “that the deflation of American currency would check the expansion of business.” “Oh, I hope not,” Lady Mary answered warmly, “surely it would never do that.”

French Baron Visits West

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Friday: The Baron de Vieux Château, who is visiting Saskatchewan with a view to seeing whether the richer parts of Canada would be suited for the poorer class of Frenchmen, was taken yesterday on a tour of inspection of the grain elevators of Saskatoon. “But they are marvellous!” the Baron said to a member of the press on his return to his hotel. “They seem to me absolutely – how shall I say it – enormous.” In further discussion the Baron said the whole system of distributing the wheat seemed to him excellent. When asked what his impression of the Farmer’s Cooperative movement was, the distinguished visitor again spoke with enthusiasm. “But your farmers,” he said, “they are wonderful! What courage! What tenacity! To have come here and stayed here! It is wonderful.”

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An Advance Cable Service

International News
a Month Ahead

It has recently become the habit to send out and circulate all sorts of special information in the form of “services.” The schools of commerce send out “financial services” with a forecast of business conditions six months before they happen and sometimes even six months before they don’t happen. The departments of agriculture send out crop reports even before the grain is planted. The meteorologists keep at least a fortnight ahead of the weather. Political forecasts are now ready for all the elections up to 1928. The hard winter that is going to begin about Xmas time has been definitely prophesied, in fact promised by the squirrels, the groundhogs and the makers of fur garments and by the West Indian Steamship agents.

It has occurred to me that a useful extension might be made to these “services” by adding an Advance European Cable Service. By this means all readers of newspapers, instead of having to read the cables day by day, could get them in a lump a month at a time. Anybody who has studied the newspapers of the last three or four years recognises at once that the cables run in a regular round, quite easy to prophesy. In the modest little attempt appended below, I have endeavoured to put in merely the ordinary routine of European public life for one month without prophesying anything of an exceptional or extreme character.

German Revolution Coming

Berlin, Monday 1: A monarchical wave is reported as having swept over Germany. The wildest excitement prevails. A hundred persons were trampled to death in Berlin the other day. The return of His Imperial Majesty the Kaiser is expected at any moment.

And Going

Berlin, Tuesday 2: A republican wave has swept over Germany in the place of the monarchical wave of yesterday. Another hundred people were trampled to death. William Hohenzollern is reported as still at Doorn in Holland.

And Has Gone

Berlin, Wednesday 3: Germany is quiet. Christmas shopping is beginning already. Everywhere there is cheerfulness and optimism. Nobody was trampled to death all day.

Frenzied Finance in France

Paris, Thursday 4: Following on the sensational statement of Monsieur Caillaux that France would pay her debts to the last penny, the wildest excitement prevailed on the Bourse. The franc which had been fairly steady all yesterday, rose to its feet, and staggered right across the street where it collapsed in a heap. Gloom prevails in financial circles.

Paris, Friday 5: Monsieur Caillaux has issued a supplementary statement to the effect that France will pay all her debts but it may take her a million years to do it. This assurance has restored universal confidence and Monsieur Caillaux is hailed everywhere as having redeemed the honour and credit of France. A tremendous ovation was given him today when eating a sandwich at the lunch counter. It is now said that Caillaux, who is recognised everywhere as the financial saviour of France, is working out a plan for wiping out the whole debt of France by borrowing it from England.

Home Life in England

London, Saturday 6: England is face to face with a coal strike of such magnitude that in twenty-four hours every fire in England will go out. If the transport workers and the public house keepers join the strike the whole industrial life of the nation will come to a full stop. Meantime the Archbishop of Canterbury says that if he can’t get a satchelful of nut coal tonight he must close the cathedral.

London, Monday 8: The coal strike was called off at five minutes before midnight – one of the closest shaves of a total collapse of England that has been reported in the last six months. Meantime with cloudless skies and bright sunshine the whole attention of the nation today is riveted on the champion football game between the Huddersfield and Hopton-under-Lime. The Archbishop of Canterbury will kick off the ball.

Italian Upheaval Heaving Up

Rome Tuesday 9: The Italian Fascisti have broken loose again. Yesterday a man climbed up to the top of the Duomo at Milan and waved a black shirt, shouting EVIVA ITALIA! The whole nation is in a ferment. Anything may happen.

Rome, Wednesday 10: It is all right. It transpires that the shirt was not black, it was merely very dirty.

Austria in Chaos

Vienna, Thursday 11: Mr. Edward Edelstein, vice-president of the Canned Soup Company of Paterson, New Jersey who is making a ten day tour in central Europe to study business conditions, describes the situation of Austria as one of utter chaos. Trade is absolutely stagnant. Business is almost extinct while the currency is in entire confusion. In Vienna unemployment is everywhere, even the rich are eating in soup kitchens; the theatres are closed and social life is paralyzed.

Complete Revival of Austria

Vienna, Friday 12: Mr. John Smithers of Smitherstown, who is taking a five days vacation in Europe reports that the economic situation of Austria has been reestablished on a sound basis. The restoration of the currency this morning by the establishment of a new and easier mark, is working wonders. The factories are running on full time, the shops are crowded with visitors, the hotels are bursting with guests and the theatres are offering Shakespeare, Grand Opera, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Vienna, Saturday 5: Austria has collapsed again.

Dear Old Russia

Petrograd (otherwise Leningrad or Trotskiville), Monday 15: Reports from the Caucasus say that Red forces made a drive at the Caucasians yesterday. The latter just got out of the road in time.

Tuesday 16: Word has been received that the Reds made a fierce drive at Semipalatinsk. They only got half of it.

Wednesday 17: Wireless despatches say that the Reds are preparing for a drive against the Persians. Most of the Persians have already climbed up Mount Ararat.

Thursday 18: It is reported that the Council of Workmen’s Soviets of Moscow have passed a resolution declaring that universal peace has come.

International Goodwill

Tokyo, Friday 19: Viscount Itch is reported in the Japanese Daily Hootch as saying that the time has come when Japan can not tolerate the existence of the United States on the other side of the Pacific. It will have to be moved. Wild excitement prevailed after the delivery of the speech. Enormous crowds paraded the streets of Tokyo, shouting “Down with America!” An American missionary was chased into a Chinese restaurant.

Tokyo, Saturday 20: Viscount Itch has issued a statement to the effect that Japan and the United States are sisters. Wild enthusiasm prevails. Great crowds are parading the streets, shouting “Attaboi Coolidji!” The missionary has come down again.

Yokohama, Monday 22: The business section of Yokohama was destroyed yesterday by an earthquake.

Yokohama, Tuesday 23: The business section of Yokohama has been propped up again and nailed into position.

From the Far Away South Seas

London, Wednesday 24: Cable advices received via Fiji and Melbourne report the Marquesas Islanders in a plebiscite have voted for prohibition, direct legislation, proportional representation and the abolition of cannibalism. Some more votes will be taken next week.

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Back from Europe

The Reaction of Travel
on the Human Mind

There comes a time every year when all the hundreds of thousands of people who have been over to Europe on a summer tour get back again. It is very generally supposed that a tour of this kind ought to have a broadening effect on the mind, and this idea is vigorously propagated by the hotel companies at Schlitz, Bitz, Biarritz, and picturesque places of that sort.

It is not for me to combat this idea. But I do know that in certain cases at least a trip to Europe sets up a distinct disturbance of the intellect. Some of these afflictions are so well defined that they could almost be definitely classified as diseases. I will quote only a few among the many examples that might be given.

I

Aristocropsis, or Weakening of the Brain from Contact with the British Aristocracy

There seems to be no doubt that a sudden contact with the titled classes disturbs the nerve cells or ganglions of the traveler from America, and brings on a temporary enfeeblement of mind. It is generally harmless, especially as it is usually accompanied by an extreme optimism and an exaggerated sense of importance.

Specimen Case. Winter conversation of Mr. John W. Axman, retired hardware millionaire of Fargo, Dakota, in regard to his visit to England.

“I don’t know whether I told you that I saw a good deal of the Duke of Dumpshire while I was in England. In fact, I went to see him at his seat – all these dukes have seats, you know. You can say what you like about the British aristocrats, but when you meet one like the Duke of Dumpshire, they are all right. Why, he was just as simple as you or me, or simpler. When he met me, he said, ‘How are you?’ Just like that.

“And then he said, ‘You must be hungry. Come along and let’s see if we can find some cold beef.’ Just as easy as that. And then he said to a butler or someone, ‘Go and see if you can find some cold beef.’ And presently the butler came back and said, ‘There’s some cold beef on the table, Sir,’ and the Duke said, ‘All right, let’s go and eat it.’ And he went and sat right down in front of the beef and ate it. Just as you or I would.

“All the time we were eating it, the Duke was talking and laughing. He’s got a great sense of humour, the Duke has. After he’d finished the beef, he said, ‘Well, that was a darn good piece of beef!’ and of course we both roared. The Duke’s keen on politics, too – right up to date about everything. ‘Let’s see,’ he said, ‘who’s your President now?’ In fact, he’s just as keen as mustard, and looks far ahead too. ‘France,’ he said to me, ‘is in for a hell of a time.’”

II

Nuttolingualism, or Loss of One’s Own Language after Three Weeks across the Sea

Specimen No. 1. Verbatim statement of Mr. Phin Gulch, college student from Umskegee College, Oklahoma, made immediately on his return from a three weeks athletic tour in England with Oklahoma Olympic Aggregation. “England certainly is a ripping place. The chaps we met were simply topping. Of course here and there we met a bounder, but on the whole one was treated absolutely top hole.”

Specimen No. 2. Information in regard to French restaurants supplied by Miss Phoebe McGinn, winner of the Beauty Contest Ticket to Europe and Back from Boom City, Montana. “The Paris restaurants are just charming and ever so cheap if you know where to go. There was one we used to go to in a little rue close to the gare where we got our dejeuner with croissants and cafe au lait for soixante-quinze centimes.

“Of course we used to give the garcon another quinze centimes as a pourboire. And after dejeuner we’d sit there half the matinee and read the journaux and watch the people go past in the rue. Always, when we left, the garcon would say, ‘Au revoir.’ Regular French, you know.”

III

Megalogastria, or Desire to Talk about Food

Specimen Case. Mr. Hefty Undercut, of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, retired hotel man, talks on European culture.

“I don’t mind admitting that the English seem to me away ahead of us. They’re further on. They know how to do things better. Now you take beefsteak. They cut it half as thick again as we do, and put it right on a grid over hot coals. They keep the juice in it. Or take a mutton chop. The way they cook them over there, you can eat two pounds to one that you eat here. You see they’re an older people than we are.

“Or take sausages – when I travel I like to observe everything; it makes you broader; – and I’ve noticed their sausages are softer than ours, more flavouring to them. Or take one of those big deep meat pies – why, they eat those big pies at midnight. You can do it there. The climate’s right for it.

“And, as I say, when I travel I go around noticing everything and sizing everything up – the meat, the lobsters, the kind of soup they have, everything. You see, over there there’s very little sunlight and the air is heavy and you eat six times a day. It’s a great place.”

IV

Introspexosis, or Seeing in Other People What is Really in Yourself

It appears that many people when they travel really see nothing at all except the reflection of their own ideas. They think that what they are interested in is uppermost everywhere. They might just as well stay at home and use a looking glass. Take in witness:

The evidence of Mr. Soggie Spinnage, Secretary of the Vegetarian Society of North, Central, and South America, as given after his return from a propaganda tour in England:

“Oh, there’s no doubt the vegetarian movement is spreading in England. We saw it everywhere. At Plymouth a man came right up to me and he said, ‘Oh, my dear Brother, I wish we had a thousand men here like you. Go back,’ he said, ‘go back and bring over a thousand others.’ And wherever I spoke I met with such enthusiasm.

“I spoke, I remember, in Tooting-on-the-Hump – it’s within half an hour of London itself. And when I looked into their dear faces and told them about the celery in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and about the big cabbages in the South Chicago mud flats, they just came flocking about me! ‘Go back,’ they said, ‘go back and send those over.’

“I heard a man in a restaurant one day say to the waiter, ‘Just fetch me a boiled cabbage. I want nothing else.’ I went right up to him, and I took his hand and I said, ‘Oh, my dear friend, I have come all the way from America just to hear that.’ And he said, ‘Go back, he said, ‘go back and tell them that you’ve heard it.’

“Why, when you go to England you just see vegetables, vegetables, everywhere. I hardly seemed to see anything else. They say even the King eats vegetables now. And they say the Bishop of London only eats beans. I heard someone say that the Bishop seemed full of beans all the time.

“Really I felt that the cause was just gaining and growing all the time. When I came to leave, a little group of friends come down to the steamer to say good-bye. ‘Go back,’ they said, ‘go back and send someone else.’

“That seemed to be the feeling everywhere.”

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Studies in the Newer Culture

A Little Study in Culture
from Below Up

About fifteen years ago somebody invented the word Attaboy. At first it was used only by the urchins on the baseball bleachers. Presently it was used by the college students. After that it was taken up by business men, lawyers, judges and congressmen and it spread all over the world.

It was said that when King George of England welcomed home General Allenby after his conquest of Palestine, he put his hands on Allenby’s shoulders and said with deep feeling, “Attaboy!”

The General, profoundly touched, was heard to murmur in return, “Some King, what!”

This story may or may not be true. It is possible that King George used merely some such dignified English phrase as “Not half bad at all!” But the story at any rate illustrates the tremendous change that has been creeping over our language.

I am not here referring to the use of slang. That of course is as old as language itself. The man who uses a slang word and, let us say, calls a man’s hat his “lid” or calls a woman a “skirt,” is unconscious of using a metaphor and of trying to be funny or peculiar. But the man who uses attaboy language in speech or writing is really trying to say something; he really thinks he is using English. It is not merely the words that he uses but the way in which he uses them.

Let me give you an instance – that is much quicker business than trying to explain the whole thing in a methodical fashion.

Attaboy Letter of Invitation

Here, for example – to illustrate the old style of writing and speaking – is a letter which I received almost thirty years ago inviting me to attend a gathering of my college class. In point of dignity and good form the letter speaks for itself.

Toronto, Feb. 1st, 1896.

Dear Sir:

I beg to inform you that a reunion of the graduating class of 1891 will be held on the 5th of February in the form of a dinner at the Queen’s Hotel. The guest of honour on the occasion will be Professor Baxter, who has kindly consented to deliver an address to the class. It is confidently expected that all the members of the class will take this opportunity to renew old friendships. The price of the dinner, including wines, will be seventy-five cents. May I ask you to send a reply at your earliest convenience.

With sincere personal regards,

I have the honour to be

And to remain being,

Yours very faithfully,

John Smith.

Now it happened that just the other day I received a letter from the same old classmate inviting me to attend a similar gathering of the class – thirty years later. But here is how he has expressed the invitation—

Mr. He-Man from College!

This is You!

Say! what do you think? The real old He-Boys of 1891 are going to gather in for a feed at the Queen’s on February 5th. Songs! Speeches! Fireworks! And who do you think is going to be the main Big Talk! You’d never guess – why old Prof Baxter – old nutsey Baxter! Come and hear him. Come along right now! The whole feed – songs, fun and smokes included – is only six bucks. So get down in your pants and fork them out.

Yours, Attaboy! Hooroo!

Rev. John Smith,

(Canon of the Cathedral)

An Attaboy Dictionary

Let it be noted that the great point of the Attaboy system is the terrific desire for emphasis. A man is not called a man. He is called a he-man. Even that is not enough. He has to be 100 per cent he-man. And in extreme cases he must be called a “100 per cent, full blooded, bull-chested, big-headed, great-hearted man,” – all of this to replace the simple old-fashioned word gentleman.

Indeed, one could write quite a little dictionary of Attaboy terms like this—

Gentleman – (See above.)

Lady – a big-hearted, wide-eyed, warm-chested woman, a hundred per cent soul, and built square.

Friend – a he-man with a hand-grip and a jaw that means that as soon as you see him in front of you, you know that he is back of you.

Senator – far-sighted, frog-eyed, nation-making he-man.

Criminal – no such word. Try “hold-up man” – “yegg” – “thug” – “expert safe-cracker,” etc., etc., etc.

In the same way when the attaboy language turns from the nouns to the verbs there has to be the same vital emphasis. The fatal step was taken when someone invented the word punch. Since then every form of action has to be described as if it occurred with a direct physical shock. A speaker has got to hit his audience with a punch, he must lift them, throw them, in short fairly kick them out of the room.

A book is said to be arresting, gripping, compelling. It has got to hold the reader down so that he can’t get up. A preacher has got to be vital, dynamic; he must put his sermon over; he must pitch it at the audience; in short, preaching becomes a form of baseball with the clergyman in the box.

In other words the whole of our life and thought has got to be restated in terms of moving things, in terms of electricity, radio and all the crackling physical apparatus of the world in which we live.

Macaulay and Gibbon in Attaboy

It is quite clear that if this attaboy tendency goes on all the books of the past will have to be rewritten or nobody will understand them. Somebody will have to re-edit them so as to put into them the necessary “pep” and “punch” to make them readable by the next generation.

We can imagine how completely unintelligible will be the stately pages of such dignified writers as Macaulay or Gibbon. Here, for example, is a specimen of the way in which Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire will be revised. I take as an illustration a well-known passage describing the action of a heroic matron of Rome in rallying the wavering citizens after a retreat. It runs:

“A Roman matron of imposing appearance and striking countenance stepped forth before the hesitating citizens—”

Translation:

“A pre-war blonde who was evidently a real peach skipped out in front of the bunch—”

“At the sight of her the citizens paused—”

Translation:

“As soon as they put their lamps on her all the guys stood still—”

“Reluctant cries of admiration arose from the crowd—”

“‘Some doll!’ said the boys.”

“‘Cowards!’ she exclaimed.”

“‘You big stiffs,’ she snorted.”

“‘And would you leave the defence of your homes at such a time as this!’”

“‘Do you mean to say that you are going to fly the coop?’”

“‘To your posts all of you!’ she cried.”

“‘Beat it,’ she honked.”

“Inspired by her courage the citizens with shouts of ‘Long Live Sempronia!’ rushed to the ramparts.”

“Full of pep they all shouted, ‘Attaboy, Lizzie!’ and skipped up the ladders.”

Rome was Saved

Epitaph on an Attaboy

Even the epitaphs on the grave stones will have to be altered. The old style used to run, “Here lies the body of John Smith, who was born on February 1, 1802 and departed this life on December 1, 1861. He was a loving son, a fond parent, a devoted husband and a patriotic citizen. This stone has been erected by his mourning widow to commemorate his many virtues and in the expectation of his resurrection.”

But that kind of thing will have to be replaced by an epitaph with more “punch” in it, something more “gripping,” more compelling. Try this:

“Mr. Passerby! Stop! This is for you – you careless HOG.

“Read it.

“Here lies a cuckoo, John Smith, one of the real boys. He opened his lamps first on February 1, 1802. He stepped off the big plank into the dark stuff on December 1, 1861 – But when the big Horn calls ‘ALL UP,’ oh, say, ATTABOY!”

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The Crossword Puzzle Craze

“I beg your pardon,” said a man sitting opposite to me in the smoking end of a Pullman car. “Do you happen to know the name of an Arabian Feudal Ruler in five letters?”

“Yes,” I said, “a sheik.”

He wrote down the word in a notebook that was spread out upon his knee. Then he said,

“And what’s the Hottentot house on the move in five letters?”

“A Kraal,” I answered.

“Oh – yes, Kraal!” he said. “I could only think of a bungalow; and here’s another that’s a regular bowler, what is an extinct graminiferous lizard in thirteen letters?”

“Ichthyosaurus,” I said.

“How’s that?” he asked. “My, I wish I’d had a college education – let me write it down – wait now – I-c-h-t – say, I believe it’s going to get it – yes, sir, it’s getting it – By Gee! It’s got it. It all fits in now except there’s a dirty little hitch in this corner. Say, could there be any word in three letters that would be e-k-e?”

“Yes,” I said, “‘eke,’ it means ‘also.’”

“Then I’ve got the whole thing – just in time – here’s my station. Say, I’m ever so much obliged. I guess I will have one on the wife when I show her this. That’s a peach, that ichthy-what d’ye call it. Good-bye.”

He left me and I knew that I had been dealing with another of the new victims of the crossword puzzle mania. I knew that as soon as he got into his house he would work the ichthyosaurus on his wife; indeed he would probably find her seated with a paper and pencil trying to figure out whether the Icelandish skol will fit in with a form of religion called “Tosh.” The thing generally runs in families.

This crossword puzzle is said to have originated in Tibet. From there it was transferred to the Mongolians who introduced it to the Hairy Ainus of Japan, who were delighted with it, as they naturally would be. From them it crossed the ocean to the Siwash Indians who passed it on to the Dog Ribs and to the Flat Heads, and in this way it got to the American Colleges.

The mania has now assumed international dimensions. It is estimated that if the crossword puzzle solvers were stood up in line (either horizontally or vertically, they wouldn’t care which), they would reach half way to Havana. Some might even get there.

But the greatest thing about the crossword puzzle is the way in which it is brightening up our language. Old words that had been forgotten for five hundred years are being polished up as bright as new. A man no longer says, “Good morning. How are you?” he says, “Good morn. How fare you?” And the other man answers that he feels yardly and eke his wife, especially as they expect eft soon to take a holy day and make a cast to Atlantic City.

Before this thing began there were lots of people so ignorant that they didn’t know what “Yost” meant, or what a “farrago” is, or which part of a dog is its “withers.” Now these are family words. Anyone would say quite naturally, “Just give that dog a kick in the farrago and put him out.”

I notice especially the general improvement in exact knowledge for the names of animals and parts of animals. Who used to know what a marsupial was? Who could have told where the dewlap of an ox is? How many people had heard of the carapace of the mud turtle, or knew how to give a proper name to the east ear of an elephant?

Many crossword puzzle experts go further. When engaged in conversation they don’t even need to use the very words they mean. They merely indicate them in crossword puzzle fashion and the expert listening to them can solve their conversation at once. Here is a sample of the new—

Crossword Puzzle Conversation

“Good morning, Short-for-Peter.”

“Hullo, Diminutive-of-William. How do you experience-a-sensation in four letters this morning?”

“Worse than a word in four letters rhyming with bell and tell.”

“Oh, I am sorry to hear it. What is the substance, body or cubic content of space in six letters with you?”

“Cold in the bronchial tunnels, passages, or English name for a subway.”

“Possessing or exhibiting grace with the personal adjective! Who is treating you?”

“Only the woman in four letters bound to me by law for life!”

“Indeed! Surely you ought not to be an adverb in three letters in this weather.”

“No, I ought to be a preposition in two. But I have to go to my effort, energy or mental or bodily exertion undertaken for gain in four letters.”

“Well, take good care of yourself. Good remain with you as a form of exclamation used in parting in seven letters.”

There are evidently large possibilities in this form of speech. I think that a lot of our literature could be brightened up with the words of romance and mystery by putting it into crossword puzzle language.

Crossword Poetry

Even our poetry would be none the worse for it. Here, for example, is a once familiar bit of Longfellow’s verse turned into this kind of dialect:

Under the spreading chestnut tree, The village smithy remains erect, upright or in a vertical position common to man and the apes but not seen in other animals,

The smith, a mighty man, is a personal pronoun

With large and sinuous extremities of his limbs in four letters,

And the muscles of his brawny arms

Are as strong as a company of musicians.

Admirable! Isn’t it? It only needs a little industry and we can have the whole of our classical literature translated in this way.

But unfortunately the results of the new craze are not always so happy. I heard last week of a rather distressing case of the ill effects of puzzle solving. A man of my acquaintance was at an evening party where they were solving crossword puzzles and he was brought, with the rest of the company, to an absolute full stop by one item: what would you rather be out of than in, in twelve letters? The thing absolutely beat him.

He thought of it all night but with no result. He was still thinking of it as he drove his car downtown next morning. In his absolute preoccupation he ran into a man on the street and shook him up quite badly. He was arrested and tried for criminal negligence.

The judge said to him: “I regret very much to have to impose a prison sentence on a man of your standing. But criminal negligence cannot be tolerated. I sentence you to six months in the penitentiary.”

On this the puzzle-solver threw up his hands with an exclamation of joy and cried, “Penitentiary, of course, penitentiary! Now I’ve got it!”

He was scribbling on a little bit of paper when they led him away.

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Information While You Eat

Some Reflections
on the Joys of the Luncheon Clubs

Now that the bright tints of autumn are appearing on the trees, the season for the luncheon clubs is opening up again. Personally I think our luncheon clubs are one of the most agreeable features of modern city life. I have belonged to several luncheon clubs in our town ever since they started, and I never miss a lunch.

When I look back to the time when men used to be satisfied to sit down all alone in front of a beefsteak and a bottle of Budweiser with only just some apple pie and a cup of coffee and a cigar after it, and without singing a note all through – I don’t see how we did it. Now, if I can’t sing a little as I eat, and call “hear, hear” every now and then, I don’t feel as if I could digest properly. So when I offer a few suggestions about our luncheon clubs, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am not criticizing but merely pointing out how we can make them brighter and better still.

Take the singing. After all, quite frankly, do we need to sing at lunch? Our clubs – and, I think, the clubs in most other towns, too – generally sing very slow, dragging melodies such as, “The . . . day . . . is . . . past, . . . the . . . sun . . . is . . . set. . . .” The effect of that kind of tune as intoned by a hundred men with a pound and a quarter beefsteak adjusted in each of them (125 lbs. total dead-weight of music) is, very frankly mournful. It sounds to me like the last of the Tasmanian Islanders leaving home.

Or else we sing Negro melodies. But why should we? Or we sing “Annie Laurie.” Who was she, anyway? In fact, to be quite candid, I can eat lunch splendidly without asking to be carried back to Tennessee, or offering to lay down and die, either on the banks of the Doon or anywhere else.

Without the singing there could be a pleasant atmosphere of quiet which is now missing.

Take as another slight point of criticism the chairman’s speech, introducing the speaker. There I do think a decided improvement could be made by cutting out the chairman’s remarks altogether. They are misleading. He doesn’t state things as they are. He always says:

“Today we are to have a rare treat in listening to Mr. Nut. I need not offer any introduction to this audience for a man like Mr. Nut. When we learned that Mr. Nut was to address us, we felt that the club was fortunate indeed.”

Now if the man told the truth what he would say would be this:

“Gentlemen, I am sorry to announce that the only speaker we have been able to secure for today is this poor simp who is sitting beside me, Mr. Nut. You never heard of him before, gentlemen, but then neither did your committee. But we have hunted everywhere for a speaker, and we simply can’t get any except this guy that you see here. He is going to talk to you on ‘Our Trade Relations with Nicaragua.’

“I am well aware, gentlemen, that this subject seems utterly without interest. But it appears to be the only subject about which this poor shrimp knows anything. So I won’t say any more – I’ll let you judge for yourselves what you are going to get. Mr. Nut.”

Then, of course, there is the vital question of whether, after all, a luncheon club needs to listen to speeches. Could it not perhaps fulfill its functions just as well if there was no address at all? The trouble is that one never gets time to study up the question beforehand and the recollection that is carried away by what the speaker said is too vague to be of any use.

I will give as an example my own recollection, as far as it goes, of the address that we had at our club last week, to which I have just referred, on the subject of our “Trade Relations with Nicaragua.”

Let me say at the start that I am not quite clear whether it was Nicaragua or Nigeria. The chairman seemed to say Nicaragua, but I understood the speaker once or twice to say Nigeria.

I tried to find out afterwards from other members of the club whether it was Nigeria or Nicaragua. But they didn’t seem to care. They hear so many people lecture on so many queer places that it runs off them like water. Only a few meetings before they had heard a man talk on “Six Weeks in Bangkok,” and right after that another man on “Seven Weeks in Pongo Pongo” and the very next week after that the address was called “Eight Weeks in Itchi-Itchi.”

But let it go at Nicaragua, because it is really just about the same. Before the speaker began to say anything about Nicaragua itself, or Nigeria itself as the case may be, he went through a sort of introduction. All the speakers seem to go over about the same ground in beginning. I tried to write this particular introduction down from memory but I am not sure that I have it correctly. It seemed to run as follows:

“I feel very much honoured in being asked to address this club. It is an honour to address this club. And I feel that addressing this club is an honour. When I was invited to address this club I tried to think what I could address this club about. In fact I felt very much like the old darky. This old darky—” Here follows the story of an old darky, which has been told to our club already by six explorers, seven professors, and two clergymen.

It will just about stand repeating in print, but not quite. We always know that when the speaker looks round and says, “There was an old darky—” we are going to get it again. Some of the members can still laugh at it.

But even leaving out the introduction, there are other troubles. The addresses are, no doubt, full of information. But you can’t get it. There’s too much of it. You can’t hold it. Here is what I got, listening as hard as I could, from the address of which I am speaking.

“Probably very few of us realize what a vast country Nicaragua, or Nigeria, is. It extends from latitude (I didn’t catch it) to latitude – I’m not quite sure, and it contains a quarter of a million or half a billion square miles. The principal product is either logwood or dogwood – it may have been deadwood. Sugar either grows excellently or doesn’t grow at all – I didn’t quite catch which.

“The inhabitants are either the mildest or the wildest race known on the globe. They are polygamous and sell their wives freely to travelers for a few glass beads (we all heard that as plainly as anything). The whole of the interior of Nigeria or Nicaragua is dense mud. All that Nicaragua or Nigeria needs is richer soil, a better climate, a decent population, money, civilization, women, and enterprise.”

So upon the whole, I am much inclined to doubt whether the speeches are worth while. It is so hard to carry away anything.

And anyway, having speeches means getting too big a crowd. A hundred men is too many. A group of fifty would be far better.

As a matter of fact, a more compact luncheon of, say, twenty would be better still. Twenty men around a table can all converse, they can feel themselves in actual personal contact with one another. With twenty men, or say, fifteen men, you feel you are among a group of friends. In fact, I am not sure but what ten, or eight, would be a cosier crowd still.

You get eight or six men together and you can really exchange ideas. You get a real mental friction with six men that you can’t get with a large number. And moreover with six, or four, men sitting down like this day after day you get to know one another and in point of service and comfort there is no comparison.

You can have a luncheon served for four, or three, men that is really worth eating. As a matter of fact, if it comes to that, two is a better number still.

Indeed the more I think of it the better I like two – myself and a darned good waiter.

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The Children’s Column

As Brought Up to Date

I suppose that everybody who reads the newspapers is aware of the change that is coming over the thing called the Children’s Column, or the Children’s Corner, or the Children’s Page. Forty years ago it was made up of such things as letters to little boys about how to keep white mice, and letters to little girls about making crochet work in six stitches. But now, what with the radio and progress and the general rapid movement of the age, it is quite different. Here are some samples that are meant to illustrate the change.

Anno Domini 1880

Letter to little Willie Weakhead
telling him how to make a Rabbit Hutch.

Dear Willie:

So you want to know how to make a rabbit hutch for your white rabbit? Well, it is not very difficult if you will follow the directions carefully. Get from the nearest joiner a large empty box and some boards about 4 inches wide. (You know what an inch is, do you not?) Then lay the boards across the open side of the box with a space of about two inches between each and nail them in this position. Good nails can be bought in any drugstore but see that you are given ones with good points on them.

If you find it hard to nail on the boards, get your father or your uncle to help you. Be careful in using the hammer not to hit yourself on the thumb, as a blow with a hammer on the thumb is painful and is often followed by a blow on the fingers. Remember, if it starts to rain while you are working on your hutch, come in out of the wet.

Let us know how you get on and whether your bunnies like their new home.

Yours etc.

Uncle Toby (Editor:

Children’s Column)

But contrast with this the modern thing which in these days of radio and modern science has taken the place of the rabbit hutch correspondence.

Anno Domini 1926

Letter from the Editor to little Willie Wisebean, grandson of the above, in regard to the difficulties which he is finding with his radio apparatus.

Dear Willie:

You write that the other night in attempting to call up Arizona KQW on your radio, you found an inordinate amount of static on your antennae. We quite agree with you that the trouble was perhaps due to purely atmospheric conditions causing a fall in the potential. You can easily find out if this is the case by calculating the differential wave length shown by your variometer.

As you rightly say your apparatus may have been put out of order by your allowing your father and your grandfather into your workshop. If you are wise you will keep them out. As you say yourself, they are too old to learn and they may meet some injury in handling your machine. You say that your grandfather used to be very fond of carpentry and once made a rabbit hutch. Why not let him set to work now and make a rabbit hutch to put your father in?

By the way, if it turns out that your trouble is in your magnetic coils, we advise you not to try to remedy them but to buy new ones. You can get excellent coils from Messrs. Grabb and Gettit, for $100 a coil, or even more. On this your father might come in useful. With thanks for your interesting letter,

Professor I. Knowit, Ph.D. T.K., D.F.

Oxon, Harvard, Oklahoma.

Or let us turn to another part of the same field – the feminine side. The change is even more striking. Compare the two following letters to the Lady Editor, making enquiries in each case about the way to arrange a children’s party for little girls.

Anno Domini 1880

Letter to Dollie Dollhouse, aged 14, who has asked for advice about a party.

Dear Dollie:

I am so glad to hear that you are going to give a party to your little girl friends for your fourteenth birthday. Of course you must have strawberries, great big luscious ones with lots of cream all over them. And of course you must have a lovely big cake, with icing all over the top of it, and you must put fourteen candles on it. Do you see the idea of the candles, dear? No, perhaps not at first, but if you will think a minute you will see it. It means that you are fourteen years old and that there is a candle for every year. Isn’t it a pretty thought, once you understand it? I got it out of an old Norwegian book of fairy stories and thought it so sweet.

You had better not try to light the candles yourself, but get your papa or your mama to come and do it, if they do not like to, then send for a man from the hardware store.

You say that after all the girls have eaten all they can you would like to have some games and ask what you can play. There are really such a lot of games that it is hard to advise, but among the best of the new games is one called Hunt the Slipper, which I am sure you would like. All that you need for playing it with is an old slipper, one without any tacks sticking out of it being the best. One of the girls sits on the slipper and then the player who is chosen to begin has to go round and roll over all the girls and see where the slipper is. You see it is quite a clever game and can easily be learned in half an hour. But remember that your play must never be rough. In rolling over the girls pick them up by the feet and roll them over in a ladylike way.

After the game if you can get your papa to come into the room and read a selection of poetry, such as a couple of cantos from Paradise Lost, the girls will go away delighted.

With best love and good wishes
for your party,

Aunt Agatha

Lady Editor Children’s Column.

Here is the other sample which is the same thing, brought up to date.

Anno Domini 1926

Letter to Flossie Fitz Clippit, aged 14, granddaughter of Dollie Dollhouse, in answer to her request for advice about a party.

Dear Flossie:

The right number of covers for a luncheon to your girl friends is certainly eight. Ten, as you yourself seem to think, is too large a number to be cosy, while eight gives exactly the feeling of cameraderie without too much formality. Six, on the other hand, is a little too intime, while seven rather carries the idea of oddity, of something a little louche, or at least gauche, if not hootch.

For table decorations I find it hard to advise you, as I do not know the tinting of your room, nor the draperies or the shape and shade of your table and the complexion of your butler. But if not unsuitable for some special reason what do you say to great bunches of scarlet ilex thrown all over the table? Either that or large masses of wisteria and big bunches of Timothy hay?

I don’t think that if I were you I would serve cocktails before lunch, as some of your friends might have views about it, but a delicious coupe can be made by mixing half a bottle of old rum with shredded wheat and then soaking it in gin.

For the menu, you will want something light and dainty, appealing rather by its exquisite taste than by sheer quantity. What do you say to beginning with a canapé of paté de fois gras, followed by a puré of mushrooms and leading up to a broiled lobster followed by a porterhouse beefsteak. I think that is the kind of thing your little friends would like. And if you have after it a soufflé, and a few quarts of ice cream with angel cake it will be found quite enough.

I quite sympathize with what you say about not wanting your mother. There is no doubt that the presence of a mother at any kind of entertainment gives a touch of coldness, a lack of affection. Your father, of course, is quite impossible; though I think it would be all right to let him shake hands with the girls as they pass out. At a recent luncheon where I was present I saw both the father and the mother brought into the drawing room for a few moments and introduced to the guests. The effect was really very sweet, with quite an old world touch to it. But I would not try to imitate it if I were you. Better be content with having the butler take up half a gallon of the coupe to your father in his library.

You will of course want to know about cigarettes. I should particularly recommend the new Egyptian Dingos, or, if you have not yet tried them, the new Peruvian Guanos. They seem to be the last word in tobacco.

With regards and good wishes,

Man-Lady Editor

Children’s Adult Column.

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Old Proverbs Made New

It has occurred to me that somebody in one of the English departments of our colleges ought to get busy and re-write our national proverbs. They are all out of date. They don’t fit any longer. Indeed, many of them are precisely the converse of existing facts.

Our proverbs have come down to us from the days of long ago; days when the world was very primitive and very simple and very different; when people never moved more than a mile and a half from home and were all afraid of the dark; and when wisdom was handed out by old men with white whiskers called prophets, every one of whom would be “retired” nowadays by any first class board of trustees as past the age-limit of common sense.

But in those days all the things that were said by these wise old men, who had never seen a motor car, were gathered up and called proverbs and repeated by all the common people as the last words of wisdom. The result is that even today we still go on repeating them, without realizing how hopelessly they are off the track.

Take as a first sample the proverb that is perhaps the best known in our language:

Birds of a Feather Flock Together

But they don’t. Ask any first class naturalist. If the wise old men had taken another look they would have seen that the last thing birds ever want to do is to flock together. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they keep away from their own species, and only flock when it is absolutely necessary. So much for the birds. But the proverb is really supposed to refer to people and then it is wrong again. People “of a feather” do not flock together. Tall men fall in love with little women. A girl with a beautiful fair skin and red hair marries a man who looks like a reformed orang-outang. A clergyman makes a friend of an auctioneer and a banker would rather spend a day with an Adirondack fishing guide than with a whole vaultful of bankers. Burglars during the daytime go and swim in the Y.M.C.A. pool. Forgers in their off time sing in the choir, and choirmasters when they are not singing shoot craps.

In short, there is nothing in the proverb whatsoever. It ought to be revised under the modern conditions to read:

Birds of any particular feather and persons of any particular character or occupation show upon the whole a disposition rather to seek out something dissimilar to their own appearance and nature to consort with something homologous to their own essential entity.

In that shape one has a neat workable proverb. Try another:

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss

Entirely wrong again. This was supposed to show that a young man who wandered from home never got on in the world. In very ancient days it was true. The young man who stayed at home and worked hard and tilled the ground and goaded oxen with a long stick like a lance found himself as he grew old a man of property, owning four goats and a sow. The son who wandered forth in the world was either killed by the cannibals or crawled home years afterwards doubled up with rheumatism. So the old men made the proverb. But nowadays it is exactly wrong. It is the rolling stone that gathers the moss. It is the ambitious boy from Honkville, Indiana, who trudges off to the city leaving his elder brother in the barnyard and who later makes a fortune and founds a university. While his elder brother still has only the old farm with three cows and a couple of pigs, he has a whole department of agriculture with great sheds-full of Tamworth hogs and a professor to every six of them.

In short, in modern life it is the rolling stone that gathers the moss. And the geologists – outside of Tennessee – say that the moss on the actual stone was first started in exactly the same way. It was the rolling of the stone that smashed up the earth and made the moss grow.

Take another proverb:

All is not Gold that Glitters

How perfectly ridiculous! Everybody in the days in which we live knows – even a child knows – that all is gold that glitters. Put on clothes enough, appearance enough and you will be accepted anywhere. Just do a little glittering and everybody will think you are gold. Make a show, be a humbug, and you will succeed so fast that presently, being very wealthy and prominent, you will really think yourself a person of great merit and intellect. In other words, the glitter makes the gold. That is all there is to it. Gold is really one of the most useless of all material objects. Even now we have found no real use for it, except to fill our teeth. Any other employment of it is just glitter. So the proverb might be revised to read:

Every thing or person may be said to stand in high esteem and to pass at a high value provided that it or he makes a sufficient show, glitter, or appearance, the estimation being in inverse ratio to the true quantitative measurement of the reality of it, them or her. That makes a neat workable proverb, expressed with up-to-date accuracy.

Or here is another famous proverb that is exactly the contrary of truth:

People Who Live in Glass Houses
Ought Not to Throw Stones

Not at all. They are the very people who ought to throw stones and to keep on throwing them all the time. They ought to keep up such a fusillade of stones from their glass house that no one can get near it.

Or if the proverb is taken to mean that people who have faults of their own ought not to talk of other people’s faults, it is equally mistaken. They ought to talk of other people’s faults all the time so as to keep attention away from their own.

But the list of proverbs is so long that it is impossible to do more than make a casual mention of a few others.

One Swallow Does Not Make a Summer

Perhaps not. But there are ever so many occasions when one swallow – just one single swallow – is better than nothing to drink at all. And if you get enough of them they do make a summer.

Charity Begins at Home

Perfectly ridiculous. Watch any modern city householder when a beggar comes to his door. Charity begins with the Federated Charities Office, or with the Out of Work Mission, or with the City Hall, or if need be, with the Police Court – in short, anywhere but at home. Our whole effort is now to keep charity as far from home as possible.

It is a Wise Child that knows its Own Father

Not at all. Alter this and make it read: It is a very silly boy who isn’t on to his old man.

Even a Worm Will Turn at Last

Wrong. It turns at once, immediately. It never waits.

A Bird in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush

Yes, but a bird in a good restaurant is worth ten of either of them.

There – that’s enough. Any reader of this book may go on having fun with the other proverbs. I give them to him.

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In the Good Old Summertime

The Merry Month of May

As Treated in the Bygone Almanacs

The part of the year known in ballad poetry as the Good Old Summer Time begins with what is popularly called the Merry Month of May. The winter is then over except in the city of Quebec, in Butte, Montana, and in the Back Bay regions of Boston. The gathering warmth of the sun calls all nature to life.

The Heavens in May

In the older almanacs of the kind that used to be made for farmers, the first items under this month always dealt with the aspect of the heavens. The farmer was told that in May the sun, passing out of the sign of Taurus, moved into the constellation of Gemini; that the apparent declination of the sun was 15 degrees and 4 minutes and that the neap tides fell on the thirteenth and twenty-seventh of the month. He was also informed that Mars and Mercury during May are both in opposition and that Sirius is the dog star.

In the city this information is now useless. Nobody can see the heavens even if he wants to; the open space between the skyscrapers formerly called the sky is now filled with electric lights, pictures of motor wheels turning round, and men eating breakfast food with a moving spoon.

We doubt also if the up-to-date farmer is really concerned with the Zodiac. We will therefore only say that in this month if the farmer will on any clear night ascend to the cupola of his pergola with his binoculars and with his radio plugs in his ears and his insulators on his feet and view the heavens from midnight till three in the morning, he will run a first-class chance of getting pneumonia.

The Garden in May

For those to whom gardening – even in the limited restrictions of a city back yard – is a hobby and a passion, the month of May is the most enticing month of the year. It seems strange to think that so many men with a back yard at their disposal – a back yard, let us say, twenty feet by fifteen – should nevertheless spend the long evenings and the Saturday afternoons of the month of May striding up and down the golf links or wandering along a trout stream. How much better to be out in the back yard with a spade and hoe, pickaxe and sledge hammer and a little dynamite preparing the exuberant soil for the luxuriant crop.

In the amateur garden in the back yard no great technical knowledge is needed. Our citizen gardener who wishes to begin should go out into his back yard and having stripped himself to his waist, all but his undershirt, should proceed first to dig out his ground.

He must excavate a hole ten by fifteen, by ten by two; of course, the hole won’t be as big as that, but it will seem to be. He must carefully remove on his back all large boulders, volcanic rocks, and other accumulated débris. These if he likes he may fashion tastefully into a rockery or a rookery, or also, if he likes, he may throw them over the fence into his neighbour’s back yard. He must then proceed to fill the hole half full of sweet-smelling fertilizer.

This will almost complete his first evening’s work. In fact, he will be just about filling in his stuff when the other men come past on their way home from golf. He will then finish his task by putting back a fourth of the soil, which he will carefully pulverize by lying down and rolling in it. After this he can then take a bath (or two baths) and go to bed.

The ground thus carefully prepared, the amateur gardener should wait a day or so and then, proceeding to his back yard, should draw on his overalls up to his neck and proceed to plant his bulbs and seeds.

The tulip is a favourite flower for early planting owing to its fine raucous appearance. Excellent tulip bulbs may be had of any florist for one dollar, which with proper care will turn into a flower worth thirty cents. The dahlia, the most handsome of the ganglions, almost repays cultivation, presenting a splendid carboniferous appearance with unsurpassed efflorescence. The potato is not bad, either.

When the garden plot is all filled up with buried bulbs and seeds, the gardener should roll the dirt down flat, by rolling it, and then for the rest of the month of May, sit and look at it.

A Cool Drink for May

The month of May is the time of year when dandelion wine, owing to the presence of dandelions, is perhaps easier to make than at any other time. An excellent recipe is as follows:

1.  Pluck, or pick, a small basketful of dandelion heads.

2.  Add to them a quart of water and leave the mixture to stand for five minutes.

3.  Pour off the water, remove the dandelions, and add as flavouring a quart of 1872 champagne.

4.  Drink it.

The Countryside in May

It is in the month of May that the countryside, for the true lover of nature, is at its best. For one who knows by name and can distinguish and classify the flora of the lanes and fields, a country walk among the opening buds is a scene of unalloyed joy. The tiny hibiscus is seen peeping out from under the grass while everywhere in the spring air is the sweet scent of the ornithorhynchus and the megalotherium. One should watch in this month for the first shoots of the spigot, while the trained eye will easily distinguish the lambswart, the dogsfoot, and the cowslip.

Nor are the birds, for any one who knows their names, less interesting than the flowers. The corvex americanus is building its nest in the tall timber. The sharp whistling notes of the ilex and the pulex and the index are heard in the meadows, while the marshes are loud with the song of the ranunculus. But of course for those who do not know these names nothing is happening except that a lot of birds are singing and the grass is growing. That, of course, is quite worthless and uninteresting.

Great Events in May

May 1. Birth of Shakespeare.

May 5. End of the Trojan war.

May 10. Beginning of the Trojan war.

May 15. Birth of Shakespeare.

May 20. Shakespeare born.

May 25. Trojan war ends again.

May 30. Death of Shakespeare and beginning of the Trojan war.

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How We Kept
Mother’s Birthday

As Related by
a Member of the Family

Of all the different ideas that have been started lately, I think that the very best is the notion of celebrating once a year “Mother’s Day.” I don’t wonder that May the eleventh is becoming such a popular date all over America and I am sure the idea will spread to England too.

It is especially in a big family like ours that such an idea takes hold. So we decided to have a special celebration of Mother’s Day. We thought it a fine idea. It made us all realize how much Mother had done for us for years, and all the efforts and sacrifice that she had made for our sake.

So we decided that we’d make it a great day, a holiday for all the family, and do everything we could to make Mother happy. Father decided to take a holiday from his office, so as to help in celebrating the day, and my sister Anne and I stayed home from college classes, and Mary and my brother Will stayed home from High School.

It was our plan to make it a day just like Xmas or any big holiday, and so we decided to decorate the house with flowers and with mottoes over the mantelpieces, and all that kind of thing. We got Mother to make mottoes and arrange the decorations, because she always does it at Xmas.

The two girls thought it would be a nice thing to dress in our very best for such a big occasion, and so they both got new hats. Mother trimmed both the hats, and they looked fine, and Father had bought four-in-hand silk ties for himself and us boys as a souvenir of the day to remember Mother by. We were going to get Mother a new hat too, but it turned out that she seemed to really like her old grey bonnet better than a new one, and both the girls said that it was awfully becoming to her.

Well, after breakfast we had it arranged as a surprise for Mother that we would hire a motor car and take her for a beautiful drive away into the country. Mother is hardly ever able to have a treat like that, because we can only afford to keep one maid, and so Mother is busy in the house nearly all the time. And of course the country is so lovely now that it would be just grand for her to have a lovely morning, driving for miles and miles.

But on the very morning of the day we changed the plan a little bit, because it occurred to Father that a thing it would be better to do even than to take Mother for a motor drive would be to take her fishing. Father said that as the car was hired and paid for, we might just as well use it for a drive up into hills where the streams are. As Father said, if you just go out driving without any object, you have a sense of aimlessness, if you are going to fish, there is a definite purpose in front of you to heighten the enjoyment.

So we all felt it would be nicer for Mother to have a definite purpose; and anyway, it turned out that Father had just got a new rod the day before, which made the idea of fishing all the more appropriate, and he said that Mother could use it if she wanted to; in fact, he said it was practically for her, only Mother said she would much rather watch him fish and not to try to fish herself.

So we got everything arranged for the trip, and we got Mother to cut up some sandwiches and make a sort of lunch in case we got hungry, though of course we were to come back home again to a big dinner in the middle of the day, just like Xmas or New Year’s Day. Mother packed it all up in a basket for us ready to go in the motor.

Well, when the car came to the door, it turned out that there hardly seemed as much room in it as we had supposed, because we hadn’t reckoned on Father’s fishing basket and the rods and the lunch, and it was plain enough that we couldn’t all get in.

Father said not to mind him, he said that he could just as well stay at home, and that he was sure that he could put in the time working in the garden; he said that there was a lot of rough dirty work that he could do, like digging a trench for the garbage, that would save hiring a man, and so he said he’d stay home; he said that we were not to let the fact of his not having had a real holiday for three years stand in our way; he wanted us to go right ahead and be happy and have a big day, and not to mind him. He said that he could plug away all day, and in fact he said he’d been a fool to think there’d be any holiday for him.

But of course we all felt that it would never do to let Father stay home, especially as we knew he would make trouble if he did. The two girls Anna and Mary, would gladly have stayed and helped the maid get dinner, only it seemed such a pity to, on a lovely day like this, having their new hats. But they both said that Mother had only to say the word, and they’d gladly stay home and work. Will and I would have dropped out, but unfortunately we wouldn’t have been any use in getting the dinner.

So in the end it was decided that Mother would stay home and just have a lovely restful day round the house, and get the dinner. It turned out anyway that Mother doesn’t care for fishing, and also it was just a little bit cold and fresh out of doors, though it was lovely and sunny, and Father was rather afraid that Mother might take cold if she came.

He said he would never forgive himself if he dragged Mother round the country and let her take a severe cold at a time when she might be having a beautiful rest. He said it was our duty to try and let Mother get all the rest and quiet that she could, after all that she had done for all of us, and he said that that was principally why he had fallen in with this idea of a fishing trip, so as to give Mother a little quiet. He said that young people seldom realize how much quiet means to people who are getting old. As to himself, he could still stand the racket, but he was glad to shelter Mother from it.

So we all drove away with three cheers for Mother, and Mother stood and watched us from the verandah for as long as she could see us, and Father waved his hand back to her every few minutes till he hit his hand on the back edge of the car, and then said that he didn’t think that Mother could see us any longer.

Well – we had the loveliest day up among the hills that you could possibly imagine, and Father caught such big specimens that he felt sure that Mother couldn’t have landed them anyway, if she had been fishing for them, and Will and I fished too, though we didn’t get so many as Father, and the two girls met quite a lot of people that they knew as we drove along, and there were some young men friends of theirs that they met along the stream and talked to, and so we all had a splendid time.

It was quite late when we got back, nearly seven o’clock in the evening, but Mother had guessed that we would be late, so she had kept back the dinner so as to have it just nicely ready and hot for us. Only first she had to get towels and soap for Father and clean things for him to put on, because he always gets so messed up with fishing, and that kept Mother busy for a little while, that and helping the girls get ready.

But at last everything was ready, and we sat down to the grandest kind of dinner – roast turkey and all sorts of things like on Xmas Day. Mother had to get up and down a good bit during the meal fetching things back and forward, but at the end Father noticed it and said she simply mustn’t do it, that he wanted her to spare herself, and he got up and fetched the walnuts over from the sideboard himself.

The dinner lasted a long while, and was great fun, and when it was over all of us wanted to help clear the things up and wash the dishes, only Mother said that she would really much rather do it, and so we let her, because we wanted just for once to humour her.

It was quite late when it was all over, and when we all kissed Mother before going to bed, she said it had been the most wonderful day in her life, and I think there were tears in her eyes. So we all felt awfully repaid for all that we had done.

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Summer Sorrows
of the Super-Rich

In the course of each summer it is my privilege to do some visiting in the class of the super-rich. By this I mean the class of people who have huge estates at such fashionable places as Nagahucket, and Dogblastit, and up near Lake Owatawetness, where the country is so beautifully wild that it costs a thousand dollars an acre.

Even people who had never had the opportunity of moving about way up in this class know more or less the sort of establishment I mean. When you visit one of these houses you always pass a “lodge” with a bright bed of flowers in front of it, which is a sign that the house itself is now only three miles away.

Later on the symptoms begin to multiply. You see a log cabin summer-house made to imitate a settler’s home and built out of cedar imported from the Fiji Islands. Then presently there is a dear little waterfall and a dam of great slabs of rock, built for only a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and supplying electric light worth forty cents an evening.

After that you pass Scotch gardeners planting out little fir trees and go through a zone of woodsmen cutting birch billets for open fires, and chauffeurs, resting, and there you are all of a sudden in front of Dogblastit House, standing beside its own lake, with its own mountains and ten thousand acres of the finest natural woods ever staged by landscape gardeners.

Now would you think that the people who live in these great places are happy? They are not. They have troubles of which you and I and the ordinary people never dream. They come out of the wilderness to rough it, and to snatch a brief four months’ vacation between the strain of the Riviera and the pressure of New York, and then right in the happiest season of the summer, they come up against desperate problems.

The particular ones that follow were related to me at Dogblastit. But I gather that the same difficulties are met in all establishments of the sort. They are discussed in all the conversation among hosts and guests, just as we discussed them last summer around the birch fires in the lounge at Dogblastit.

Problem No. 1:

What to do to amuse the butler in the evening? It seems that he doesn’t play bridge. The butler who was here last year was always quite content if he could be provided with a game of bridge, and except for a run to New York now and then and a trip to see his brother in Vancouver in the middle of the summer, he stayed on the place without a break and seemed quite satisfied.

But the new man Jennings doesn’t care for cards. He says quite frankly that it is not a matter of conscience and that he doesn’t mind cards in the house, but they simply don’t interest him. So what can one do?

Problem No. 2:

How to get the chauffeur’s collars starched? It appears that there have been very great difficulties at Dogblastit about this. It is very hard to get the kind of gloss that Ransome likes on his collars. There is, of course, an electric laundry in the basement of Dogblastit itself, but unfortunately the laundry maids who do all the work in it will not undertake any collars over eleven inches long. They say they simply won’t undertake them.

The experiment was made of bringing up a laundress from Boston, but it was found that she wouldn’t undertake to starch anything at such a high altitude. She can only do her work at from 500 to 800 feet above sea level. Beyond that, she said, she could do nothing.

They tried also sending Ransome’s collars by express to New York, but this was quite unsatisfactory, because the express people threw them about so roughly. More than once they were seen actually throwing the packet of Ransome’s collars right from the platform of Dogblastit station into the express car. The only feasible thing up to now has been to have Ransome take one of the cars and drive his collars either to New York or to Philadelphia. The objection is that it takes up so much of his time, especially as he always likes to drive his boots over to Burlington, Vermont, once a week, where he can get them properly treated.

Problem No. 3:

What to get for the cook to read on Sunday? The trouble is, she doesn’t care for fiction. She evidently is a woman of literary culture, because she said one day that she had read the whole of Shakespeare and thought it very good. In the library of Dogblastit itself, which is a really beautiful room done in Japanese oak with leaded windows to represent the reading room of a settler’s cabin, there are practically no books that suit the cook. In fact, there is nothing but the Blue Book (one needs that to look up people in) and the Pink Book and the Red Book, and of course the Automobile Road Book and then some Guide Books such as The Perfect Bartender, and the Gentleman’s Cellar and Cocktails for all Occasions.

Beyond that there are, of course, all the new books – the new fiction – because there is a standing order with Spentano to send up fifty pounds of new fiction by express once a week. None of the guests of the house ever care to read any book more than three weeks old, as they are quite worthless for conversation.

An order was sent to Boston for the Harvard Classics but the cook says she doesn’t care for the way they are selected. The only compromise so far is to get her books about the South Seas. She says she is just crazy over the South Sea literature. So we have given her Six Weeks in the Marquesas Islands and Four Days in Fiji, Half Hours in Hoo-Poo. But all that will only last her less than seven weeks, and after that we don’t know what to do.

Problem No. 4:

What to do with the governess when she is not working? This has proved up to the present a quite insoluble problem. It is so hard to know just what to do with Mademoiselle after she has finished governing the children. We can’t, so it is felt, have her in the drawing room and yet what can one do with her? We have tried shutting her up in the garage, but that is dull. In open weather we can lock her out on the piazza, but she is apt to get from there into the billiard room where the guests are. The only plan seems to be to give her somewhere a cosy, little wee room for herself, either at the back of the ash-house, or else underneath the laundry.

—

The problems I have named are the principal ones – the ones that always recur in any large house of real class and standing. But there are a lot of others as well that I need not treat in detail. For example, there is the difficult question of how to keep Robert, the under-gardener, out of the kitchen. Robert would never have been engaged if it had been known that he was a dangerous man. But this was only reported by the house-keeper after Robert had been brought up and had been in the house a week. When you bring a man up you can’t bring him down.

And who is it that is stealing all the jewelry? We don’t like to make any fuss or disturbance. But another diamond ring went last night and one feels that something ought to be done.

My visits with my fashionable friends have been so much disturbed by perpetual conversation on these problems that I have decided to give them up altogether and to get back into my own class of society. I have some friends, real ones, who have a wooden house on an island where there is no electric light within twenty miles and where they use rainwater out of a barrel.

They have coal-oil lanterns to see by; they wear flannel collars and they pass the soap from one room to another as it is needed. The men cut the firewood, as required, and never keep more than half an hour’s supply on hand, and the girls do all the work because help can’t be got and they know ten different ways of cooking canned salmon.

I am going back there. For me that is the only real old summer stuff that is worth while. I was brought up on it and have never grown out of it. Anybody who likes may have my room and my tiled bath at Dogblastit.

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How My Wife and I
Built Our Home for $4.90

Related in the Manner of the Best Models in the Magazines

I was leaning up against the mantelpiece in a lounge suit which I had made out of old ice bags, and Beryl, my wife, was seated at my feet on a low Louis Quinze tabouret which she had made out of a Finnan Haddie fishbox, when the idea of a bungalow came to both of us at the same time.

“It would be just lovely if we could do it!” exclaimed Beryl, coiling herself around my knee.

“Why not!” I replied, lifting her up a little by the ear. “With your exquisite taste—”

“And with your knowledge of material,” added Beryl, giving me a tiny pinch on the leg – “Oh, I am sure we could do it! One reads so much in all the magazines about people making summer bungalows and furnishing them for next to nothing. Oh, do let us try, Dogyard!”

We talked over our project all night, and the next morning we sallied forth to try to find a site for our new home. As Beryl (who was brimming over with fun as the result of talking all night) put it, “The first thing is to get the ground.”

Here fortune favoured us. We had hardly got to the edge of the town when Beryl suddenly exclaimed, “Oh look, Dog-yard, look, there’s exactly the site!” It was a piece of wasteland on the edge of a gully with a brickyard on one side of it and a gravel pit on the other. It had no trees on it, and it was covered with ragged heaps of tin cans, old newspapers, and stones, and a litter of broken lumber.

Beryl’s quick eye saw the possibilities of the situation at once. “Oh, Dogyard!” she exclaimed, “isn’t it just sweet?” We can clear away all this litter and plant a catalpa tree to hide the brickyard and a hedge of copernicus or nux vomica to hide the gravel pit, and some bright flowers to hide the hedge. I wish I had brought some catalpa seed. They grow so quickly.”

“We’d better at least wait,” I said, “till we have bought the ground.”

And here a sudden piece of good fortune awaited us. It so happened that the owner of the lot was on the spot at the time – he was seated on a stone whittling a stick while we were talking, and presented himself to us. After a short discussion he agreed to sell us the ground for one dollar in cash and fifty cents on a three years’ mortgage. The deed of sale was written out on the spot and stamped with a two-cent stamp, and the owner of the lot took his departure with every expression of good will. And the magic sense of being owners of our own ground rendered us both jubilant.

That evening Beryl, seated on her little stool at my feet, took a pencil and paper and set down triumphantly a statement of the cost of our bungalow up to date. I introduce it here as a help to readers who may hope to follow in our footsteps:

Ground site | $1.50
Stamp for mortgage | $0.02
Car fare | $0.10
Total: | $1.62

I checked over Beryl’s arithmetic twice and found it strictly correct.

Next morning we commenced work in earnest. While Beryl cleared away the cans and litter, I set to work with spade and shovel excavating our cellar and digging out the foundations. And here I must admit that I had no light task. I can only warn those who wish to follow in our footsteps that they must be prepared to face hard work.

Owing perhaps to my inexperience, it took me the whole of the morning to dig out a cellar forty feet long and twenty feet wide. Beryl, who had meantime cleaned up the lot, stacked the lumber, lifted away the stones and planted fifty yards of hedge, was inclined to be a little impatient. But I reminded her that a contractor working with a gang of men and two or three teams of horses would have taken a whole week to do what I did in one morning.

I admitted that my work was not equal to the best records as related in the weekly home journals, where I have often computed that they move 100,000 cubic feet of earth in one paragraph, but at least I was doing my best. Beryl, whose disappointment never lasts, was all smiles again in a moment, and rewarded me by throwing herself around my neck and giving me a hug.

That afternoon I gathered up all the big stones and built them into walls around the cellar with partition walls across it, dividing it into rooms and compartments. I leveled the floor and packed it tight with sand and gravel and dug a drain ten feet deep from the cellar to the gully about thirty feet away.

There being still a good hour or so of daylight left, I dug a cistern four feet wide and twenty feet deep. I was looking round for something more to dig by moonlight, but Beryl put her foot down (on my head while I was in the drain) and forbade me to work any more for fear I might be fatigued.

Next morning we were able to begin our building in good earnest. On our way we stopped at the fifteen-cent store for necessary supplies, and bought one hammer, fifteen cents; a saw, fifteen cents; half a gallon of nails, fifteen cents; a crane, fifteen cents; a derrick for hoisting, fifteen cents; and a needle and thread, for sewing on the roof, fifteen cents.

As an advice to young builders, I may say that I doubt if we were quite wise in all our purchases. The fifteen-cent derrick is too light for the work, and the extra expenditure for the heavier kind (the twenty-five-cent crane) would have been justified. The difference in cost is only (approximately) ten cents, and the efficiency of the big crane is far greater.

On arriving at our ground we were delighted to find that our masonry was well set and the walls firm and solid, while the catalpa trees were well above the ground and growing rapidly. We set to work at once to build in earnest.

We had already decided to utilize for our bungalow the waste material which lay on our lot. I drew Beryl’s attention to the fact that if a proper use were made of the material wasted in building there would be no need to buy any material at all. “The elimination of waste,” I explained, “by the utilization of all by-products before they have time to go by, is the central principle of modern industrial organization.”

But observing that Beryl had ceased to listen to me, I drew on my carpenter’s apron which I had made out of a piece of tar-paper, and set to work. My first care was to gather up all the loose lumber that lay upon and around our ground site, and saw it up into neatly squared pieces about twenty feet long. Out of these I made the joints, the studding, the partitions, rafters, and so on, which formed the frame of the house.

Putting up the house took practically the whole morning. Beryl, who had slipped on a potato bag over her dress, assisted me by holding up the side of the house while I nailed on the top.

By the end of the afternoon we had completed the sides of our house, which we made out of old newspaper soaked in glue and rolled flat. The next day we put on the roof, which was made of tin cans cut open and pounded flat.

For our hardwood floors, mantels, etc., we were fortunate in finding a pile of hardwood on a neighbouring lot which had apparently been overlooked, and which we carried over proudly to our bungalow after dark. That same night we carried over jubilantly some rustic furniture which we had found, quite neglected, lying in a nearby cottage, the lock of which oddly enough, was opened quite easily with the key of Beryl’s suitcase.

The rest of our furniture – plain tables, dressers, etc. – I was able to make from ordinary pine lumber which I obtained by knocking down a board fence upon an adjacent lot. In short, the reader is able to picture our bungalow after a week of labour, complete in every respect and only awaiting our occupation on the next day.

Seated that evening in our boarding house, with Beryl coiled around me, I calculated the entire cost of our enterprise – including ground site, lumber, derricks, cranes, glue, string, tin-tacks and other materials – as four dollars and ninety cents.

In return for it we had a pretty seven-roomed house, artistic in every respect, with living-room, bed-rooms, a boudoir, a den, a snuggery, a doggery – in short, the bungalow of which so many young people have dreamed.

Seated together that evening, Beryl and I were full of plans for the future. We both have a passionate love of animals and, like all country-bred people, a longing for the life of a farm. So we had long since decided to keep poultry. We planned to begin in a small way, and had brought home that evening from the fifteen-cent store a day-old chicken, such as are now so widely sold.

We put him in a basket beside the radiator in a little flannel coat that Beryl had made for him, and we fed him with a warm mash made of breakfast food and gravel. Our printed directions that we got with him told us that a fowl eats two ounces of grain per day and on that should lay five eggs in a week. I was easily able to prove to Beryl by a little plain arithmetic that if we fed this fellow 4 ounces a day he would lay 10 eggs in a week, or at 8 ounces per day he would lay 29 eggs in a week.

Beryl, who was seized at once with a characteristic fit of enthusiasm, suggested that we stick 16 ounces a day into him and begin right now. I had to remind her laughingly that at 8 ounces a day the fellow would probably be working up to a capacity, and carrying what we call in business his peak load. “The essential factor in modern business,” I told her, “is to load yourself up to the peak and stay there.”

In short, there was no end to our rosy dreams. In our fancy we saw ourselves in our bungalow, surrounded by hens, bees, cows and dogs, with hogs and goats nestling against our feet. Unfortunately our dreams were destined to be shattered. Up to this point our experience with building our bungalow had followed along after all the best models, and had even eclipsed them. But from now on we met a series of disasters of which we had had no warning. It is a pity that I cannot leave our story at this point.

On arriving at our bungalow next day we found notices posted up forbidding all trespassers, and two sour-looking men in possession. We learned that our title to the ground site was worthless, as the man from whom we had bought it had been apparently a mere passer-by. It appeared also that a neighbouring contractor was making serious difficulties about our use of his material. It was divulged further that we had been mistaken in thinking that we had taken our rustic furniture from an empty cottage. There were people living in it, but they happened to be asleep when Beryl moved the furniture.

As for our hen – there is no doubt that keeping fowls is enormously profitable. It must be so, when one considers the millions of eggs consumed every day. But it demands an unremitting attention and above all – memory. If you own a hen you must never forget it – you must keep on saying to yourself – “How is my hen?” This was our trouble. Beryl and I were so preoccupied with our accumulated disaster, that we left our one-day-old chick behind the radiator and never thought of him for three weeks. He was then gone. We prefer to think he flew away.

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The Everlasting Angler

The fishing season is now well under way. Will soon be with us. For lovers of fishing this remark is true all the year round. It has seemed to me that it might be of use to set down a few of the more familiar fish stories that are needed by any one wanting to qualify as an angler. There is no copyright on these stories, since Methuselah first told them, and anybody who wishes may learn them by heart and make free use of them.

I will begin with the simplest and best known. Everybody who goes fishing has heard it, and told it a thousand times. It is called:

I

The Story of the Fish That Was Lost

The circumstances under which the story is best told are these. The fisherman returns after his day’s outing with his two friends whom he has taken out for the day, to his summer cottage. They carry with them their rods, their landing net and the paraphernalia of their profession. The fisherman carries also on a string a dirty looking collection of little fish, called by courtesy the “Catch.” None of these little fish really measures more than about seven and a half inches long and four inches round the chest. The fisherman’s wife and his wife’s sister and the young lady who is staying with them come running to meet the fishing party, giving cries of admiration as they get a sight of the catch. In reality they would refuse to buy those fish from a butcher at a cent and a half a pound. But they fall into ecstasies and they cry, “Oh aren’t they beauties! Look at this big one!” The “big one” is about eight inches long. It looked good when they caught it but it has been shrinking ever since and it looks now as if it had died of consumption. Then it is that the fisherman says, in a voice in which regret is mingled with animation:

“Yes, but say, you ought to have seen the one that we lost. We had hardly let down our lines—”

It may be interjected here that all fishermen ought to realize that the moment of danger is just when you let down your line. That is the moment when the fish will put up all kinds of games on you, such as rushing at you in a compact mass so fast that you can’t take them in, or selecting the largest of their number to snatch away one of your rods.

“We had hardly let down our lines,” says the fishermen – “when Tom got a perfect monster. That fish would have weighed five pounds – wouldn’t it, Tom—”

“Easily,” says Tom.

“Well, Tom started to haul him in and he yelled to Ted and me to get the landing net ready and we had him right up to the boat,” “Right up to the very boat,” repeat Tom and Edward sadly. “When the damn line broke and biff! away he went. Say! he must have been two feet long, easily two feet!”

“Did you see him?” asks the young lady who is staying with them. This of course she has no right to ask. It’s not a fair question. Among people who go fishing it is ruled out. You may ask if a fish pulled hard, and how much it weighed but you must not ask whether anybody saw the fish. “We could see where he was,” says Tom.

Then they go on up to the house carrying the “string” or “catch” and all three saying at intervals – “Say! if we had only landed that big fellow!”

By the time this anecdote has ripened for winter use, the fish will have been drawn actually into the boat (thus settling all questions of seeing it) and will there have knocked Edward senseless, and then leaped over the gunwale.

II

Story of the Extraordinary Bait

This is a more advanced form of fishing story. It is told by fishermen for fishermen. It is the sort of thing they relate to one another when fishing out of a motor boat on a lake, when there has been a slight pause in their activity and when the fish for a little while – say for two hours, have stopped biting. So the fishermen talk and discuss the ways and means of their craft. Somebody says that grasshoppers make good bait: and somebody else asks whether any of them have ever tried Lake Erie soft shell crabs as bait, and then one – whoever is lucky enough to get in first – tells the good old bait story.

“The queerest bait I ever saw used,” he says, shifting his pipe to the other side of his mouth, “was one day when I was fishing up in one of the lakes back in Maine. We’d got to the spot and got all ready when we suddenly discovered that we’d forgotten the bait—”

At this point any one of the listeners is entitled by custom to put in the old joke about not forgetting the whiskey—

“Well there was no use going ashore. We couldn’t have got any worms. It was too early for frogs, and it was ten miles to row back home. We tried chunks of meat from our lunch, but nothing doing! Well, then, just for fun I cut a white bone button off my pants and put it on the hook. Say! you ought to have seen those fish go for it. We caught, oh, easily twenty, yes thirty – in half an hour. We only quit after we’d cut off all our buttons and our pants were falling off us! Say, hold on boys, I believe I’ve got a nibble! Sit steady!”

Getting a nibble of course will set up an excitement in any fishing party that puts an end to all story telling. After they have got straight again and the nibble has turned out to be “the bottom” as all nibbles are – the moment would be fitting for anyone of them to tell the famous story called:

III

Beginner’s Luck,
or the Wonderful Catch
Made by the Narrator’s Wife’s Lady Friend

“Talking of that big catch that you made with the pants button,” says another of the anglers, who really means that he is going to talk of something else – “reminds me of a queer thing I saw myself. We’d gone out fishing for pickerel, ‘dorés,’ they call them up there in the lake of Two Mountains. We had a couple of big row boats and we’d taken my wife and the ladies along – I think there were eight of us, or nine perhaps. Anyway it doesn’t matter. Well, there was a young lady there from Dayton, Ohio, and she’d never fished before. In fact she’d never been in a boat before. I don’t believe she’d ever been near the water before.”

All experienced listeners know now what is coming. They realize the geographical position of Dayton, Ohio, far from the water and shut in everywhere by land. Any prudent fish would make a sneak for shelter if he knew that a young lady from Dayton, Ohio, was after him.

“Well, this girl got an idea that she’d like to fish and we’d rigged up a line for her, just tied on to a cedar pole that we’d cut in the bush. Do you know you’d hardly believe that that girl had hardly got her line into the water when she got a monster. We yelled to her to play it or she’d lose it, but she just heaved it up into the air and right into the boat. She caught seventeen, or twenty-seven, I forget which, one after the other, while the rest of us got nothing. And the fun of it was she didn’t know anything about fishing; she just threw the fish up into the air and into the boat. Next day we got her a decent rod with a reel and gave her a lesson or two and then she didn’t catch any.”

I may say with truth that I have heard this particular story told not only about a girl from Dayton, Ohio, but about a girl from Kansas, a young lady just out from England, about a girl fresh from Paris, and about another girl, not fresh – the daughter of a minister. In fact if I wished to make sure of a real catch, I would select a girl fresh from Paris or New York and cut off some of my buttons, or hers, and start to fish.

IV

The Story of What Was Found in the Fish

The stories however do not end with the mere catching of the fish. There is another familiar line of anecdote that comes in when the fish are to be cleaned and cooked. The fishermen have landed on the rocky shore beside the rushing waterfall and are cleaning their fish to cook them for the midday meal. There is an obstinate superstition that fish cooked thus taste better than first class kippered herring put up in a tin in Aberdeen where they know how. They don’t, but it is an honourable fiction and reflects credit on humanity. What is more, all the fishing party compete eagerly for the job of cutting the inside out of the dead fish. In a restaurant they are content to leave that to anybody sunk low enough and unhappy enough to have to do it. But in the woods they fight for the job.

So it happens that presently one of the workers holds up some filthy specimen of something in his hand and says “Look at that! See what I took out of the trout! Unless I mistake it is part of a deer’s ear. The deer must have stooped over the stream to drink and the trout bit his ear off.”

At which somebody says – whoever gets it in first – says,

“It’s amazing what you find in fish. I remember once trolling for trout, the big trout, up in Lake Simcoe and just off Eight Mile Point we caught a regular whopper. We had no scales but he weighed easily twenty pounds. We cut him open on the shore afterwards, and say, would you believe it, that fish had inside him a brass buckle – the whole of it – and part of a tennis shoe, and a rain check from a baseball game, and seventy-five cents in change. It seems hard to account for it, unless perhaps he’d been swimming round some summer hotel.”

These stories, I repeat, may now be properly narrated in the summer fishing season. But of course, as all fishermen know, the true time to tell them is round the winter fire, with a glass of something warm within easy reach, at a time when statements cannot be checked, when weights and measures must not be challenged and when fish grow to their full size and their true beauty. It is such stories as these, whether told in summer or in winter, that the immemorial craft of the angler owes something of its continued charm.

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Have We Got
the Year Backwards?

Is Not Autumn Spring?

Once a year with unfailing regularity there comes round a season known as Autumn. For a good many hundred years the poets have been busy with this season as they have with all the others. Around each of them they have created a legend. And the legends are mostly untrue and need correcting.

For example, in spring there is supposed to be a tremendous gayety let loose. The young lamb is said to skip and play; and the young man’s fancy is supposed to turn towards thoughts of love. Anybody who has seen a young lamb humped up and shivering in April rain for want of an overcoat knows just how false this lamb idea is; and anybody who has seen a young man of today getting smoothed up for a winter evening party knows just when the real season of the lovers comes.

There are hawthorns in blossom in the lanes in the spring, and in the winter there are rubber trees in the restaurants with no blossoms at all. But the rubber tree sees more of love in one evening than the hawthorn does in its whole life.

The same kind of myth has gathered round the summer. The poets have described it as rich, luscious, glorious, crowned with flowers and drowsy with the hum of the bee. In reality, summer is the dead time. It is the time of the sweltering heat and the breathless nights, when people sleep upside-down with their feet on the rail of the bed; when there is no one in the city but the farmers and no one on the farms but the city people; in short when life is all disturbed, deranged, and out of sorts; when it is too hot to think, too late to begin anything, and too early to start something; when intellect dies, oratory is dumb, and national problems slumber. At such a time there is nothing of current interest except the expeditions to the North Pole and the rescue parties sent out to drag away the explorers.

Then comes autumn. The poet describes it as the decline of the year. The leaf withers. The russet woods shiver in the moaning wind. The poet on his lonely autumn walk talks with the shepherd on the mutability of life and all is sadness.

Now it occurs to me all this stuff about Autumn, as applied here and now, is nonsense. No doubt it was all true when men lived in woods and caves, shivered in the rain, and counted the days until the return of the sun. But in our own time the thing doesn’t fit at all. Autumn is the real beginning of the year, the new start after the dead season. Witness, in illustration, some of the glad signs that mark the oncoming of the Autumn season.

The Return of the Oyster:

I can imagine no more pleasing sight to the true lover of nature than the first oyster peeping out of its half shell. How dainty is its colouring! How softly it seems to lie upon its little dish! All through the dull, dead summer it has been asleep in its bed of mud, but now Nature has burst forth again and the oyster is back with us.

The Young Lamb:

And alongside of the oyster, look who is here too! The lamb, not the poor ungainly thing that humped up itself in the springtime in a feeble attempt to jump, but the true lamb, valued at a dollar a portion, and eaten along with autumn cauliflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, and October asparagus. With what eager eyes it is regarded by the people who have spent the summer in the country where there are no fresh meat and no vegetables. For the true aspect of the bounty of Nature, give me every time the sight of a butcher shop in autumn, with the pink lobsters nestling in the white celery, pure as snow. When the poet wanted inspiration he went and talked with a shepherd. I’d rather talk with a chef.

And the flowers! Ah, there now is something worth seeing. Look at these autumn chrysanthemums right out of the hothouses, and the gladioluses, or the gladiolalula – if that is the right plural. Even the beautiful big blue violets will soon be with us, at five dollars a bunch.

And no wonder we need the flowers, for with autumn the glad season of happiness is beginning again. Witness as the principal sign of it—

The Re-opening of the Vaudeville Season:

All through the dull dead summer we have not seen a single “act.” We were away from town, or it was too hot, or the theatres in our vicinity were closed.

But now we are all back in our seats again watching The Seven Sisters – can they really be sisters – pounding out music from wine glasses, from sticks of wood, from cowbells – from anything they have handy. Here are again the two wonderful trapeze performers who hurl themselves through the air. So far we have never seen them break their necks. But, courage, a new season is beginning.

Here is the Magician with his cards, and the Strong Man with his dumb-bells, and the Trained Dog that actually sits on a stool. They are all back with us for the opening of another happy season.

The only trouble is to find time to go to see them. So many things are starting up into life all at once in this glad moment of the year. Not only Vaudeville is beginning but Football has opened up again. Here we are crowded into the stadiums – or rather, the stadiora – in tens of thousands, covered with college colours and chrysanthemums, in the bright autumn sunshine, with splendid seats only a quarter of a mile from the game.

Football having started means, of course, that the colleges are all reopening and when that happens we can feel our intellectual life that has been dormant in the dead heat of summer, come back again with a throb. Soon we shall be going again to popular lectures on Social Dynamics, and Intellectual Hydraulics – the kind of thing that brings learning right to the people and leaves it there.

And not only the colleges. The clubs – culture and brotherhood clubs – are all beginning a new season. There are the men’s luncheon and speaking clubs and the Ladies Fortnightly, and the Morning Musical, all starting in at once. All through the summer we have never heard a single address. Now in one week we can hear a talk on Mexican Folk Music, or on Two Weeks in Mongolia, or Ten Years in Sing Sing.

The new life is on the move. The dead leaves have been swept up and burnt. The trees no longer spoil the view. The motoring is fine. If the poet on his Autumn walk, sunk in reverie, gets in the way, let him look out or we’ll sink him where he’ll never come back.

Autumn, crowned with its wreath of celery and lobsters, is with us again!

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Our Summer Convention

As Described by One of Its Members

Our summer convention – the first annual convention of Peanut Men – has just been concluded and has been such a success that I feel I’d like to set down a little account of it in print.

The way it began was that a few of us – all peanut men – got talking together about every other business except ours having conventions and ours not being represented in this way at all. Everybody knows there are now conventions of the electrical men and the pulp and paper men, and even of professors and psychologists and chiropodists. And as everybody knows, too, these conventions are not merely for business and social purposes, but they are educative as well. People who go to a convention and listen to the papers that are read will learn things about their own business that they never would have thought of.

Anyway, we got together and formed an association and elected officers – a Grandmaster of the Nuts, and a Grand Kernel, and seven Chief Shucks and a lot of lesser ones – and decided to hold a convention. We restricted the membership – because that is always found best in conventions – and made it open only to sellers, roasters, buyers, importers and consumers of peanuts. Others might come as friends but they couldn’t appear as Nuts. To make the thing social it was agreed that members might bring their wives, as many as they liked.

We thought first of New York or Chicago as the place for us, but they always seemed too crowded. Then we thought of Montreal and a whole lot of members were all for it, partly because of the beautiful summer climate. But our final choice was Lake Owatawetness in the mountains.

It was a great sight the day we opened up the convention. We had flags across the street and big streamers with Welcome to the Nuts and things like that on them and all the delegates rode in open hacks and pinned on each was a big badge with the words I Am a Complete Nut. Underneath this motto was his name and his town and his height and weight and his religion and his age.

Well, we all went to the town hall and we had an address of welcome from the Grand Master. They said that it was one of the best addresses ever heard in the town hall and lasted just over two hours. Personally I can’t speak for it because I slipped out of the hall a little after it began. I had an idea that I would just ease off a little the first morning and wait till the afternoon to begin the real educative stuff in earnest. There were two other fellows who slipped out about the same time that I did and so we went down to the lake and decided we’d hire a boat and go down the lake fishing so as to be ready for the solid work of the afternoon. One of the fellows was from Wichita, Kansas, and was a Presbyterian and weighed 168 pounds, and the other was from Owen Sound, Ontario, not classified, and weighed 178 pounds and was five feet, nine and a half inches high.

We took some lunch with us so as not to need to get back till two, when the first big conference opened. We had a printed program with us and it showed that at the two o’clock session there was to be a paper read on The Application of Thermodynamics to the Roasting of Peanuts and we all agreed that we wouldn’t miss it for anything.

Well, we went clear down the lake to where we understood the best fishing was and it was a longer row than we thought. We didn’t really start fishing till noon – not counting one or two spots where we just fished for twenty minutes or so to see if any fish were there but there weren’t. After we got to the right place we didn’t get a bite at all, which made us want to stay on a while, though it was getting near the time to go back, because it seemed a shame to quit before the fish began to bite, and we were just thinking of leaving when a Methodist from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who was nearby, caught a black bass, a real peach. There seemed to be a good many other boats coming down, too, and quite near us there was a Catholic delegate from Syracuse (five feet, eight inches) who caught a catfish and two Episcopalians (150 pounds each) from Burlington, Vermont, who seemed to be getting bites all the time.

So we decided to stay. We didn’t get so many fish but we all agreed that an afternoon on the water for health’s sake was a fine thing to put a man into shape for the convention work. We knew that in the evening Professor Pip of the State Agricultural College was to read a paper on The Embryology of the Nut and we wanted to be right on deck for that.

Rowing back just before supper time some one of us happened to mention cards, just casually, and the delegate from Owen Sound who was unclassified asked me if I ever played poker. I told him that I had played it, once or twice, not so much for any money that might be in it, but just for the game itself, as you might say. The man from Wichita said that he had played it that way, too, and that if you took it like that it was a fine game: in fact for a quiet evening’s amusement there was nothing like it. We all three agreed that if it hadn’t been for wanting to hear Professor Pip’s talk on The Embryology of the Peanut we could have had quite a little game, a three-handed game, or, perhaps, get in one or two of the other boys after supper in one of the rooms.

Anyway, after supper we went upstairs and began throwing down hands just to see what would turn up while we were waiting for the lecture time and the first thing we knew we got seated round the table and started playing and it seemed a pity to quit and go to the lecture. For my part I didn’t care so much because I am not so much interested in The Embryology of the Nut as in the selling of it.

Later on I saw a delegate (from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a Universal Christian, six feet high) who said that he had spoken with a man who had heard the lecture and that it was fine. It appears there was only a small turn-out, smaller even than in the afternoon, but those who were there and stayed – some couldn’t stay – said that it was all right. They said it was too long – a lecture is apt to be too long, and that the professor spoke pretty low, in fact you couldn’t exactly hear him, and that you couldn’t understand the subject matter but the lecture itself was good. It was all right.

By the next morning we had the convention pretty well in full swing and you could see that the crowd were getting to know one another. This second morning was to be the big morning of the convention because the state governor was to give an address and everybody felt that it was a great honour to have him come. They had put up a sort of arch for him to drive under, with a motto Welcome You Big Nut. They say the governor was awfully pleased with it and still more when they made him a Chief Grand Nut at the morning ceremony.

I didn’t hear his address myself, not more than a few sentences. I couldn’t stay. He had just begun a survey of the history of the development of the arable land of the state (he had it all in his hand and was reading it) when I had to go. I had said something to some of the boys the night before about golf – and it appeared that the privileges of Watawetness Golf Club had been extended to us – and I felt that I mustn’t go back on it. It was disappointing, but there was no use worrying over it.

They said the governor’s address was great. It was too long, everybody admitted, and a few took exception to it because it was not exactly connected with the convention, and some criticized it because it was the same address that he had given to the Skiers and Snowshoemen Convention last February. But still it was good.

Playing golf cut me clean out of the afternoon session, too, as I didn’t get back till it must have been started. In this session the programme was to divide the convention up into little groups for intensive study of the peanuts, organized by Miss Mutt of the Botany Section of the State Teachers Association. Each study group was to take some topic under a special speaker and exhaust it. But quite a lot of the delegates had gone fishing, and some were playing pool and some were scattered round. It seems they couldn’t make up the groups except just the speaker in each group and Miss Mutt herself of course. So Miss Mutt gave them a talk on the Botany of Selling Peanuts. They said it was fine. It was too long, they thought, and would have been much better, ever so much better, if it had been shorter – quite short; but it was good.

That night was the big banquet. The governor stayed for it, and there was to be his speech and the Secretary of Agriculture and speeches from the Grand Master, and from Clergymen, and Teachers. In fact it looked pretty good and from all I heard it was considered a big success. The only thing against it was that some of the delegates had brought in some stuff into the hotel (I don’t know where they got it from), and a lot of them were slipping out of the banquet room and slipping up to the rooms where they had this stuff.

Some didn’t come down. They said quite a lot didn’t come down. I went up there for a while but I didn’t stay long, or not so very long, and when I got back to the door of the banquet room, one of the guests, a minister, was talking on the moral aspect of Importing Peanuts. So I didn’t stay, as I am more interested in the selling aspect.

The next morning I left early. There was to be another whole day and some mighty interesting papers to be read. But I felt I would be needed badly in my business at this time; in fact I felt pretty keen to get back to it. I saw many other delegates come away on the same train, a lot of them. They had taken off their badges, so I couldn’t tell their names and their religions but they all agreed that the convention had been a wonderful success and a great educative influence in our business.

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Travel and Movement

All Aboard for Europe

Some Humble Advice for Travellers

Every summer thousands and thousands of our people in America go across to Europe. They say that about fifty thousand people leave on the steamers every week. It’s either fifty thousand or five hundred thousand, or five thousand – I forget which. Anyway, there are a great many people travelling every year.

Some of them go because they need a change of air; some to improve their minds; some because they were tired of making money, and others because they were tired of not making money. And some again go to see Europe, before it all falls to pieces: and others go simply and plainly for a vacation because they want for a few weeks to be really happy.

It is especially for this last class that these few words of advice are written. If you want to be happy when you start off on a sea voyage you have got to be prepared to face a lot of disillusionment. You are going to find all through the trip the most striking difference between travel as it is pictured in the Guide Book and travel as it is in fact.

The difference begins at the very moment of embarkation. Here is what is said in the attractive Steamship Guide Book – done up in colours with a picture of two girls walking on a promenade deck, and swaying in the wind like rushes, while a young man goes past in flannels and a straw hat.

“What,” asks the Guide Book, “is more delightful than the embarkation on an Atlantic voyage? The size of the great steamer, its spotless decks, its commodious cabins, its luxurious saloon and its cozy library, thrill us with a sense of pleasure to come. As we step on board and look about us at the dancing waters of the harbor ruffled under the breeze from the open sea beyond, we feel that now at least we are entering on the realization of our dreams.”

Yes. Exactly. Only unfortunately, my dear reader, it is just at the very moment of embarkation that you are certain to discover that your black valise is missing. Your steamer trunk is there all right in your stateroom and the brown valise and the paper parcel that your aunt has asked you to deliver in Aberdeen when you land at Liverpool. But the black valise apparently is clean gone.

You certainly had it in the Pullman car and your sister remembers seeing it in the taxicab – but where is it? Talk about embarkation on the ruffled harbor and the unrealized dream! Who can think of these things with a valise missing and the huge whistle of the steamer booming out the time of departure?

No use asking that man in uniform; apparently he’s only one of the officers. Don’t try to fight your way up to the bridge and challenge the captain. He doesn’t know. Round the purser there are twenty people in the same condition as yourself, over one thing or another, all trying to get at him and bite him. There seem to be lots of stewards running up and down, but all they can do is ask you what number is your stateroom and say that the valise ought to be there. A conspiracy, evidently, the whole thing.

The result is that you are fussing up and down for half an hour and when at last the valise is found (in the next stateroom, owing to the simple fact that you wrote the wrong number on it), you are already far out at sea and have never seen the embarkation at all.

Never mind, there’s lots of the trip left yet. After all, listen to what the Guide Book says about our first morning at sea—

“There is an extraordinary exhilaration,” it prattles on, “about the first day at sea. From the lofty deck of the great liner our eye sweeps the limitless expanse. All about is the blue of the Atlantic, ruffled with the zephyrs of a summer morning. We walk the deck with a sense of resilience, a fullness of life unknown to the dweller upon terra firma, or stand gazing in dreamy reverie at the eternal ocean.”

Oh, we do, do we? But I guess not. On our first morning at sea we have too much else to think of, even in the calmest weather, than mere reverie on the ocean. What is troubling us, is the question of deck chairs – how do we get one? – are they free, or do we have to pay? – and if we pay now, do we have to tip the man? – and which man is it that gives out our chairs? – and if we want to get our chairs next to Mr. Snyder from Pittsburgh, whom do we see about it?

There is room enough in this problem to keep us busy all morning; and even when we have got it straight, we start all over again with the question of what we do to get the seat that we want at the table. We would like to get ourselves and Mr. Snyder and Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins from Alberta all at the same table. Somebody has said to somebody that there’s a steward giving out seats or going to give out seats somewhere in one of the saloons or somewhere. That’s enough for us. That keeps us hot and busy all morning.

And you will find, alas my dear reader, that no matter what the Guide Book says about it, that kind of worry is going to haunt you all the way. When you have done with the valises and the deck chairs and the seats at the table you still have plenty of other problems to fret over, such as—

The English customs officers – what do they do? Do they examine everything? Will they say anything about those canvas slippers that your aunt has asked you to deliver to her cousin in Nottingham (close to London)? If you explain that she made the slippers, does that make any difference? Or, at any rate, can you say to the man, “Oh very well, I’ll send them back to America rather than pay a cent on them?” In short, the English customs officers – what do they do? Travelers lie awake at night and think of that.

And along with that—

At what hour will you land at Liverpool and will you be able to get the 11.30 train to London or will you have to wait for the 12.30? That’s an excellent one. Many travellers have thought so hard about that and talked so much about it on deck, that they never even noticed the blue of the sea, and the rush of the flying fish or the great dolphins that flopped up beside the ship.

But even allowing that you can perhaps get a train – some train – from Liverpool, more intense worries set in as we near the other side.

The question of letters, telegrams and marconigrams. When the purser says that he has no messages for you and no letters for you, is he not perhaps getting your name wrong. He may have made a mistake. Might it not be better to go to him again (the fourth time) and ask him whether he has got your name quite right? By all means, and let Mr. Snyder go too, and you can both stand in line at the purser’s window and fret it out together and thus never see the Norwegian sailing ship under full canvas two hundred yards away.

But there is worse yet—

The ocean is crossed, the trials are over and the land is in sight. And again the little Guide Book breaks out in ingenuous joy!

“Land in sight! With what a thrill we go forward to the front of the ship and look ahead to catch a glimpse of the white cliffs of old England rising from the sea. All the romance of history and of exploration rises to the mind with this first view of the old land. We stand gazing forward, as might have stood a Columbus or a Cabot filled with the mystery of the New Land.”

Do we? No, we don’t. We’ve no time for it. As a matter of fact, we don’t get any such first glimpse at all. We are down below, wrestling with the problem of how much we ought to tip the bath room steward. Is eight shillings what he gets, or is six enough? We feel we need information, light, knowledge. We must try to find Mr. Snyder and learn what he thinks the bathroom steward ought to get.

And then, somehow, before we know it, and while we are still worrying and fretting over stewards and tips and baggage, our voyage is all over – the time is gone – and we are saying goodbye to the passengers and Mr. Snyder and Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins of Alberta, and the stewards and the purser – noble fellows they all seem now. But we have a queer sense of loss and disillusionment as if our voyage had not yet begun, and a strange longing that we might have it all over again and this time know enough not to spoil it with our poor meaningless worries.

My friend, this is a parable. As is the Atlantic voyage, so is our little pilgrimage in life, a brief transit in the sunshine from shore to shore, whose short days are all too often marred by the mean disputes and the poor worries that in the end signify nothing. While there is still time, let us look about us to the horizon.

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The Gasoline Goodbye

And What Would Have Happened to the Big Moments of History If the Motor Had Taken a Hand in Them

In the days before the motor car, when a man said goodbye he shook hands and he was gone. If he was to ride on horseback, he made a brief farewell to each person present, shook hands, leaped upon his horse and was off.

Now that the motor car has come into use as the general instrument of visiting, this no longer happens. The people say goodbye, get into their motor car, and are not gone. They make an affectionate farewell and then sit looking out of their glass windows, while the car goes “Phut, phut – bang,” – and sticks there.

The more dramatic the goodbye, the more touching the farewell, the more determined the car always is to say “Phut, phut – bang,” and refuse to move.

Witness the familiar scene of the goodbye of the Joneses to the Smiths at 6 p.m. on any Sunday evening at any rural place where city people spend their vacation. The Joneses have motored over in their own car – a real peach, tin all over – and have spent Sunday afternoon with the Smiths, who have a cottage for the summer which they call OPEN HOUSE, and where they take care that nobody gets in at meal times.

When the time has come for the Joneses to go, they all mingle up in a group with the Smiths and everybody says goodbye to everybody else, and shakes hands with each one, and they all say, “Well, we certainly had a grand time.” Then they all climb into the car with Mr. Jones himself at the wheel and they put their heads out of the windows and they say, “Well, goodbye, goodbye!” and wave their hands.

And then the car goes – “Whr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r – phut, bang!”

A wisp of thin blue smoke rolls away and when it has gone the Joneses are seen sitting there, absolutely still. The car hasn’t moved an inch.

Jones at the wheel sticks his head down among the grips and clutches and says – “I guess she is a little cold,” and the Smiths say – “Yes, it often takes a little time to start them.” Then there’s a pause and nothing seems to be happening and then very suddenly and cheerfully the engine of the car starts making a loud—

“Pur-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!”

On this, all the Joneses and all the Smiths break out into goodbyes again. All talking together:

“Well, come back soon – We certainly will – We sure had a great time – Remember us all to Alf – We certainly will – You certainly have a nice cottage here – We certainly enjoyed that lemonade – well – goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!”

And then the car goes – “Whir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r – phut, bang!”

And there is another puff of blue smoke, and when it clears away, what is behind it? Why, the Joneses, right there in their car.

When the machine goes “bang!” all the Joneses in the car and all the Smiths standing beside the road are knocked into silence for a few seconds. Then Jones mutters – “Seems to be something wrong with the ignition” – and somebody else says – “She doesn’t seem to be feeding right” – and there’s a little chorus of – “Oh, she is just a little cold, they take a little warming up” – “she’ll start in a minute.”

And then again the machine begins, this time at a terrific speed, about a million revolutions to the minute—

“Whir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-R-R!”

At this happy sound the goodbyes break out all over again in a chorus.

“Goodbye – Look after yourselves – Tell Min we’ll see her Friday – goodbye – We certainly had a—”

“Bang!”

All stopped again.

This time Jones is determined that when the engine starts he’ll keep it started. There shall be no false alarms this time. “Let her get going good,” some of them advise him. And so when the engine next starts Jones doesn’t throw in his clutch but just lets her go on humming and roaring till everybody feels assured that this time the start is actually going to happen and the goodbyes erupt all over again.

The noise gets louder and louder, the conversation rises into shouts mixed with the “phut, phut, phut” of the machine, and then all of a sudden there’s a tremendous “bang!” and a volume of blue smoke and when it clears away – where are the Joneses?

Gone – clean gone, they seem to have vanished off the earth! At last you catch a glimpse of their car already two hundred yards away, disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

“They’re off!” murmur the Smiths, and the painful scene is over . . .

Thinking over all this, I cannot but reflect how fortunate it has been for mankind that the motor car was not invented earlier in our history. So many of the great dramas of history have turned upon farewells and departures that some of the most romantic pages of the past would have been spoiled if there had been any gasoline in them.

Take for example the familiar case of Napoleon saying goodbye to his officers and soldiers at Fontainebleau before going into exile. The fallen emperor stood beside the steed he was about to mount, turned a moment and addressed to his devoted comrades words that still echo in the ears of France. But suppose that he had said the same thing while seated in a little one-seater car with his head stuck out of the window. How inadequate it would have sounded:

“Farewell, my brave comrades – phut, phut – together we shared the labour and the burden of a hundred campaigns – phut, bang, phut – we must forget that we have conquered Europe – whir-r-r, phut – that our eagles have flown over every capital – bang – I leave you now for exile, but my heart forever will remain – whir-r-r, phut – buried in the soil of France, bang!”

Or take as a similar case in point the famous farewell to the nation spoken by George Washington as his last service to the republic that he had created.

General Washington, supposing there had been gasoline in those days, would have been reported as leaning out from the window of his sedan car and speaking as follows:

“Let America cultivate and preserve the friendship of the world – phut, phut – let us have peace and friendship with all – whir-r-r – and entangling alliances with none – bang! I have grown old in the service of this country and there is something wrong with my ignition. To each and all of you I bid now a last farewell—”

“Whir-r-r—”

“Farewell!”

“Phut, phut, phut, phut.”

“Farewell!”

“Bang!”

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Complete Guide
and History of the South

Based on the Best Models of Traveler’s Impressions

In setting down here my impression of Southern life, Southern character, Southern industry, and what I am led to call the soul of the Southern people, I am compelled to admit that these impressions are necessarily incomplete. The time at my disposal – twenty-four hours less fifteen minutes while I was shaving – was, as I myself felt, inadequate for the purpose.

I could have spent double, nay treble, nay quadruple the time in the South with profit, and could have secured twice, nay three times, nay four times as many impressions. At the same time I may say in apology that my impressions, such as they are, are based on the very best models of travelers’ impressions which are published in such floods by visitors to this continent.

To one who has the eye to see it, the journey south from New York to Washington, which may be called the capital of the United States, is filled with interest. The broad farm lands of New Jersey, the view of the city of Philadelphia, and the crossing of the spacious waters of the Susquehanna, offer a picture well worth carrying away. Unfortunately I did not see it. It was night when I went through. But I read about it in the railroad folder next morning.

After passing Washington the traveler finds himself in the country of the Civil War, where the landscape recalls at every turn the great struggle of sixty years ago. Here is the Acquia Creek and here is Fredericksburg, the scene of one of the most disastrous defeats of the northern armies. I missed it, I am sorry to say. I was eating lunch and didn’t see it. But the porter told me that we had passed Fredericksburg.

It is however with a certain thrill that one finds oneself passing Richmond, the home of the Lost Cause, where there still lingers all the romance and glory that once was. Unluckily our train didn’t go by Richmond but straight south via Lynchburg Junction. But if it had I might have seen it.

As one continues the journey southward, one realizes that one is in the South. The conviction was gradually borne in on me as I kept going south that I was getting South. It is an impression, I believe, which all travelers have noted in proportion as they proceed south.

I could not help saying to myself, “I am now in the South.” It is a feeling I have never had in the North. As I looked from the train window I could not resist remarking, “So this is the South.” I have every reason to believe that it was.

One becomes conscious of a difference of life, of atmosphere, of the character of the people. The typical Southerner is courteous, chivalrous, with an old-world air about him. I noted that on asking one of my fellow travelers for a match he responded, “I am deeply sorry, I fear I have none. I had a match in my other pants yesterday, but I left them at home. Perhaps I could go back and get them.”

Another gentleman in the smoking room of whom I ventured to ask the time replied, “I am deeply sorry, I have no watch. But if you will wait till we get to the next station, I will get out and buy a clock and let you know.” I thanked him, but thought it the part of good taste to refuse his offer.

Every day one hears everywhere reminiscences and talk of the Civil War. Nearly everybody with whom I fell into conversation – and I kept falling into it – had something to say or to recall about the days of Lee and Jackson and of what I may call the Southern Confederacy.

One old gentleman told me that he remembered the war as if it were yesterday, having participated in a number of the great episodes of the struggle. He told me that after General Lee had been killed at Gettysburg, Andrew Jackson was almost in despair; and yet had the Southerners only known it, there was at the time only a thin screen of two hundred thousand union troops between them and Washington.

In the light of these conversations and reminiscences it was interesting presently to find oneself in Georgia and to realize that one was traversing the ground of Sherman’s famous march to the sea. Unluckily for me, it was night when we went through, but I knew where we were because during a temporary stoppage of the train, I put my head out of the curtains and said to the porter, “Where are we?” and he answered “Georgia.” As I looked out into the profound darkness that enveloped us, I realized as never before the difficulty of Sherman’s task.

At this point, perhaps it may be well to say something of the women of the South, a topic without which no impression would be worth publishing. The Southern women, one finds, are distinguished everywhere by their dignity and reserve. (Two women came into the Pullman car where I was, and when I offered one of them an apple she wouldn’t take it.) But they possess at the same time a charm and graciousness that is all their own. (When I said to the other woman that it was a good deal warmer than it had been she smiled and said that it certainly was.)

The Southern woman is essentially womanly and yet entirely able to look after herself. (These two went right into the dining car by themselves without waiting for me or seeming to want me.) Of the beauty of the Southern type there can be no doubt. (I saw a girl with bobbed hair on the platform at Danville, but when I waved to her even her hair would not wave.)

On the morning following we found ourselves approaching Birmingham, Alabama. On looking at it out of the car window, I saw at once that Birmingham contains a population of 200,000 inhabitants, having grown greatly in the last decade; that the town boasts not less than sixteen churches and several large hotels of the modern type.

I saw also that it is rapidly becoming a seat of manufacture, possessing in 1921 not less than 14,000 spindles, while its blast furnaces bid fair to rival those of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Hangkow, China; I noticed that the leading denomination is Methodist, both white and coloured, but the Roman Catholic, the Episcopalian and other churches are also represented. The town, as I saw at a glance, enjoys exceptional educational opportunities, the enrollment of pupils in the high schools numbering half a million.

The impression which I carried away from Birmingham enabled me to form some idea (that is all I ever get) of the new economic growth of the South. Everywhere one sees evidence of the fertility of the soil and the relative ease of sustenance. (I saw a man buy a whole bunch of bananas and eat them right in the car.) The growth of wealth is remarkable. (I noticed a man hand out a fifty-dollar bill in the dining car and get change as if it were nothing.)

I had originally intended to devote my time after leaving Birmingham to the investigation and analysis of the soul of the South, for which I had reserved four hours. Unfortunately I was not able to do so. I got called in to join a poker game in the drawing room and it lasted all the way to New Orleans.

But even in the imperfect form in which I have been able to put together these memoirs of travel I feel on looking over them that they are all right, or at least as good as the sort of stuff that is handed out every month in the magazines.

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The Give and Take
of Travel

A Study in Petty Larceny,
Pro and Con

I have recently noted among my possessions a narrow black comb and a flat brown hairbrush. I imagine they must belong to the Pullman Car Company. As I have three of the Company’s brushes and combs already, I shall be glad to hand these back at any time when the company cares to send for them.

I have also a copy of the New Testament in plain good print which is marked “put here by the Gibbons” and which I believe I got from either the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal or the Biltmore in New York. I do not know any of the Gibbons. But the hotel may have the book at any time, as I have finished with it. I will bring it to them.

On the other hand, I shall be very greatly obliged if the man who has my winter overshoes (left on the Twentieth Century Limited) will let me have them back again. As the winter is soon coming I shall need them. If he will leave them at any agreed spot three miles from a town I will undertake not to prosecute him.

I mention these matters not so much for their own sake as because they form a part of the system of give and take which plays a considerable part in my existence.

Like many people who have to travel a great deal I get absent-minded about it. I move to and fro among trains and hotels shepherded by red-caps and escorted by bell boys. I have been in so many hotels that they all look alike. If there is a difference in the faces of the hotel clerks I can’t see it. If there is any way of distinguishing one waiter from another I don’t know it. There is the same underground barber surrounded by white marble and carrying on the same conversation all the way from Halifax to Los Angeles. In short I have been in so many towns that I never know where I am.

Under these circumstances a man of careless disposition and absent mind easily annexes and easily loses small items of property. In a Pullman car there is no difficulty whatever, if one has the disposition for it, in saying to a man sitting beside you, “Good morning, sir. It looks like a beautiful day,” and then reaching over and packing his hair brush into your valise. If he is the right kind of man he will never notice it, or at best he will say in return, “A beautiful morning,” and then take away your necktie.

There is, let it be noticed, all the difference in the world between this process and petty larceny.

The thing I mean couldn’t possibly be done by a thief. He wouldn’t have the nerve, the quiet assurance, the manner. It is the absolute innocence of the thing that does it. For example, if a man offers me a cigarette I find that I take his cigarette case and put it in my pocket. When I rise from my hotel dinner I carry away the napkin. When I leave my hotel room I always take away the key.

There is no real sense in this: I have more hotel keys than I can use as it is. But the fault is partly with our hotels. So many of them put up a little notice beside the door that reads, “Have You Forgotten Anything?” When ever I see this I stand in thought a minute and then it occurs to me, “Why of course, the Key!” and I take it with me.

I am aware that there is a class of persons – women mostly – who carry away spoons and other things deliberately as souvenirs. But I disclaim all connection with that kind of thing. That is not what I meant at all.

I would never take a valuable spoon, unless I happened to be using it at the table to open the back of my watch, or something of the sort. But when I sign my name on the hotel book I keep the pen. Similarly and in all fairness, I give up my own fountain pen to the telegraph clerk. The theory works both ways.

As a rule, there is nothing more in all this than a harmless give and take, a sort of profit and loss account to which any traveler easily becomes accustomed. But at the same time one should be careful. The theory may go a little too far. I remember not long ago coming home from a theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, with a lady’s white silk scarf about my neck.

I had no notion how it got to be there. Whether the woman had carelessly wrapped it about my neck in mistake for her own, or whether I had unwound it off her, I cannot say. But I regret the incident and will gladly put the scarf back on her neck at any time. I will also take this occasion to express my regret for the pair of boots which I put on in a Pullman car in Syracuse in the dark of a winter morning.

There is a special arrangement on the New York Central whereby at Syracuse passengers making connections for the South are allowed to get up at four and dress while the others are still asleep. There are signs put up adjuring everybody to keep as quiet as possible. Naturally, these passengers get the best of everything and, within limits, it is fair enough as they have to get up so early. But the boots of which I speak outclass anything I ever bought for myself and I am sorry about them.

Our American railways have very wisely taken firm grounds on this problem of property mislaid or exchanged or lost on the Pullman cars. As everybody knows when one of our trains reaches a depot the passengers leave it with as mad a haste as if it were full of smallpox. In fact, they are all lined up at the door like cattle in a pen ready to break loose before the train stops. What happens to the car itself afterwards they don’t care. It is only known to those who have left a hair brush in the car and tried to find it.

But in reality, the car is instantly rushed off to a siding, its number-placard taken out of the window so that it cannot be distinguished, after which a vacuum cleaner is turned on and sucks up any loose property that is left in it. Meantime the porter has avoided all detection by an instantaneous change of costume in which he appears disguised as a member of the Pittsburgh Yacht Club. If he could be caught at this time his pockets would be found to be full of fountain pens, rings and current magazines.

I do not mean to imply for a moment that our railways are acting in a dishonest way in the matter. On the contrary, they have no intention of keeping or annexing their passengers’ property. But very naturally they do not want a lot of random people rummaging through their cars. They endeavour, however, through their central offices to make as fair a division of the lost-and-found property as they can. Anyone applying in the proper way can have some of it. I have always found in this respect the greatest readiness to give me a fair share of everything.

A few months ago for example I had occasion to send to the Canadian National Railway a telegram which read, “Have left grey fedora hat with black band on your Toronto-Chicago train.” Within an hour I got back a message, “Your grey fedora hat being sent you from Windsor, Ontario.” And a little later on the same day I received another message which read, “Sending grey hat from Chicago,” and an hour after that “Gray hat found at Sheboygan, Michigan.”

Indeed, I think I am not exaggerating when I say that any of our great Canadian and American Railways will send you anything of that sort if you telegraph for it. In my own case the theory has become a regular practice. I telegraph to the New York Central, “Please forward me spring overcoat in a light grey or fawn,” and they send it immediately; or I call up the Canadian Pacific on the telephone and ask them if they can let me have a pair of tan boots and if possible a suit of golf clothes.

I have found that our leading hotels are even more punctilious in respect to their things than the railways. It is now hardly safe to attempt to leave in their rooms anything that one doesn’t want. Last month, having cut my razor strop so badly that it was of no further use, I was foolish enough to leave it hanging in a room in the Biltmore Hotel in New York. On my return home I got a letter which read: “Dear Sir: We beg to inform you that you have left your razor strop in room 2216. We have had your strop packed in excelsior packing and await your instructions in regard to it.”

I telegraphed back, “Please keep razor strop. You may have it.” After which in due course I got a further letter which said, “We are pleased to inform you that the razor strop which you so generously gave to this Company has been laid before our board of directors who have directed us to express their delight and appreciation at your generous gift. Any time you want a room and bath let us know.”

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Great National Problems

The Laundry Problem

A Yearning for the Good Old Days of the Humble Washerwoman

A long time ago, thirty or forty years ago, there used to exist a humble being called a Washerwoman. It was her simple function to appear at intervals with a huge basket, carry away soiled clothes, and bring them back as snow-white linen.

The washerwoman is gone now. Her place is taken by the Amalgamated Laundry Company. She is gone but I want her back.

The washerwoman, in fact and fiction, was supposed to represent the bottom of everything. She could just manage to exist. She was the last word. Now the Amalgamated Laundry Company uses hydro-electric power, has an office like a bank, and delivers its goods out of a huge hearse driven by a chauffeur in livery. But I want that humble woman back.

In the old days any woman deserted and abandoned in the world took in washing. When all else failed there was at least that. Any woman who wanted to show her independent spirit and force of character threatened to take in washing. It was the last resort of a noble mind. In many of the great works of fiction the heroine’s mother almost took in washing.

Women whose ancestry went back to the crusades very nearly, though never quite, started to wash when the discovery of the missing will saved them from the suds. But nowadays if a woman exclaimed, “What shall I do? I am alone in the world! I will open an Amalgamated Laundry!” – it would not sound the same.

The operation of the old system – as I recall it from the days of forty years ago – was very simple. The washerwoman used to call and take away my shirt and my collar and while she washed them I wore my other shirt and my other collar. When she came back we changed over. She always had one and I had one. In those days any young man in a fair position needed two shirts.

Where the poor washerwoman was hopelessly simple was that she never destroyed or injured the shirt. She never even thought to bite a piece out with her teeth. When she brought it back it looked softer and better than ever. It never occurred to her to tear out one of the sleeves. If she broke out a button in washing, she humbly sewed it on again.

When she ironed the shirt it never occurred to the simple soul to burn a brown mark right across it. The woman lacked imagination. In other words, modern industrialism was in its infancy.

I have never witnessed at first hand the processes of a modern incorporated laundry company using up-to-date machinery. But I can easily construct in my imagination a vision of what is done when a package of washing is received. The shirts are first sorted out and taken to an expert who rapidly sprinkles them with sulphuric acid.

Then they go to the colouring room where they are dipped in a solution of yellow stain. From this they pass to the machine-gun room where holes are shot in them and from there by an automatic carrier to the hydraulic tearing room where the sleeves are torn out. After that they are squeezed absolutely flat under enormous pressure which puts them into such a shape that the buttons can all be ripped up at a single scrape by an expert button ripper.

The last process is altogether handwork and accounts, I am informed, for the heavy cost. A good button-ripper with an expert knowledge of the breaking strain of material, easily earns fifty dollars a day. But the work is very exacting, as not a single button is expected to escape his eye. Of late the big laundries are employing new chemical methods, such as mustard gas, tear bombs, and star shells.

Collars, I understand, are treated in the same way, though the process varies a little according as the aim is to produce the Fuzzled Edge Finish or the Split Side Slit. The general idea, of course, in any first class laundry, is to see that no shirt or collar ever comes back twice. If it should happen to do so, it is sent at once to the Final Destruction Department, who put gun cotton under it and blow it into six bits. It is then labelled “damaged” and sent home in a special conveyance with an attendant in the morning.

Had the poor washerwoman kept a machine-gun and a little dynamite, she could have made a fortune. But she didn’t know it. In the old days a washerwoman washed a shirt for ten-twelfths of a cent – or ten cents a dozen pieces. The best laundries, those which deny all admission to their offices and send back their laundry under an armed guard, now charge one dollar to wash a shirt, with a special rate of twelve dollars a dozen.

On the same scale the washerwoman’s wages would be multiplied by a hundred and twenty. She really represented in value an income of fifty dollars a year. Had it been known, she could have been incorporated and dividends picked off her like huckleberries.

Now that I think of it, she was worth even more than that. With the modern laundry a shirt may be worn twice, for one day each time. After that it is blown up. And it costs four dollars to buy a new one. In the old days a shirt lasted till a man outgrew it. As a man approached middle life he found, with a certain satisfaction, that he had outgrown his shirt. He had to spend seventy-five cents on a new one, and that one lasted till he was buried in it.

Had some poor woman only known enough to pick up one of these shirts and bite the neck out of it, she might have started something really big.

But even when all this has been said there remains more yet. In the old days if you had a complaint to make to the washerwoman you said it to her straight out. She was there. And she heard the complaint and sneaked away with tears in her eyes to her humble home where she read the Bible and drank gin.

But now if you have a complaint to make to an Amalgamated Laundry Corporation, you can’t find it. There is no use complaining to the chauffeur in livery. He never saw a shirt in his life.

There is no use going to the office. All you find there are groups of lady employees sheltered behind a cast-iron grating. They never saw your shirt. Don’t ask them. They have their office work and in the evening they take extension lectures on the modern drama. They wouldn’t know a shirt if they saw it.

Nor can you write to the company. I speak here of what I know for I have tried to lay a complaint before a laundry company in writing, and I know the futility of it. Here is the letter I wrote:

To the Board of Directors,

The Amalgamated Universal Laundry Company

Gentlemen:

I wish you would try to be a little more careful with my shirt. I mean the pink one. I think you put a little more starch in the neck the last time than you intended and it all seems stuck together.

Very faithfully yours,

————

But the only answer I got was a communication in the following terms:

Dear Sir,

Folio 110,615. Department 0412. Received February 19th, 9.26 A.M. Read March 19th, 8.23 A.M. Sent down April 19th 4.01 A.M. Sent up May 19th 2 A.M.

We beg to inform you that your communication as above will be laid before the shareholders at the next general meeting. In answering kindly indicate folio, department, street, age and occupation. No complaints received under names or in words.

Yours,

Folio 0016.

After that I felt it was hopeless to go on. My only chance for the future is that I may get to know some beautiful rich woman and perhaps her husband will run away and leave her weeping and penniless and drinking gin, and then I will appear in the doorway and will say, “Dry your tears, dear, dear friend; there is prosperity for you yet; you shall wash my shirt.”

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The Questionnaire Nuisance

A Plan to Curb Zealous Investigators in Their Thirst for Knowledge

Everybody who manages an office or carries on a profession or teaches in a college, is getting to be familiar with the thing called “questionnaire.” It is a sheet of questions or inquiries sent round broadcast and supposed to deal with some kind of social investigation. Some of these questions come direct from the insane asylums, but others purport to come from students, investigators, and social workers. But wherever they come from, they are rapidly developing into a first class national nuisance.

Here for example on my desk is a letter which reads:

“I am a graduate of the Myopia Woman’s College of Agricultural Technology, and I am making a special investigation of the government ownership of cold storage plants. Will you please write me the history of any three governments which you know to possess cold storage plants? Will you also let me have your opinion on coldness, on storage, and on plants?”

Here is another one that came in by the same mail:

“I am a social worker in Nut College, Nutwood on the Hum, and am making out a chart or diagram to show whether the length of the human ear is receding or going right ahead. Will you kindly measure your ears and let me know about their growth? Keep me advised if they start.”

Along with these are letters asking me to give my opinion, with reasons, whether or not elected aldermen are more crooked than aldermen not even fit to be elected; asking where I stand on the short ballot and what I think of prison reform and the union of the Presbyterian churches.

I have come to the conclusion that something decisive has got to be done about these questionnaires; so I have decided in the interests of myself and other sufferers to write out a model answer for one of them and afterwards to let that answer suffice for all the others. Here is the one that I have selected for answering. I didn’t make it up. It is the genuine article, as anyone used to these things will recognize at once.

It runs as follows:

“Dear Sir:

“I am an American college student and I have been selected along with Mr. John Q. Beanhead of the class of 1926, of whom you may have heard, to represent the Bohunk Agriculture College in the forthcoming debate against Skidoo Academy. Our subject of debate is to be on the question: Resolved, that the United States should adopt a parliamentary system of government. Knowing that you have the knowledge of these problems, and trusting that you will be pleased to answer at once, I have selected the following questions which I hope will not take too much of your valuable time to answer:

“1. How does the efficiency of the British government compare with that of the United States?

“2. Do you think the minority has too much power in the United States?

“3. What is your opinion of a democracy?

“4. What is a responsible government?

“5. How would the adoption of the British system affect our Supreme Court?

“I will sincerely appreciate any further suggestions which you may care to make in answer to these questions or concerning any advantage or defect of either system, or any other system.

“Yours truly.

“O. Y. KNOTT.”

The answer which I prepared for Mr. Knott reads as follows:

“Dear Sir:

“As soon as I heard from your letter that the big debate is on between Bohunk and Skidoo, I was thrilled with excitement. Can we win it? Can we put enough international energy behind you and Mr. Beanhead (Do I know of him? How can you ask it?) to drive the thing through? I want to say at once that in this business you are to regard my own time as absolutely valueless. I may tell you frankly that from now until the big debate is pulled off I purpose to lay aside every other concern in life and devote myself to your service. I couldn’t possibly answer your question in any other way.

“So now let me turn to your actual questions. You ask first, ‘How does the efficiency of the British government compare with that of the United States?’

“Here is a nice, straightforward, manly question. You won’t object if my answer is of rather extended length, and you must not mind if it takes me a week to get it ready for you. I shall not only have to handle a good deal of historical material, but I also propose to cable to Mr. Stanley Baldwin and ask him how the efficiency of his government is standing right now.

“Your next question asks whether the minority has too much power in the United States. Again a wonderfully shrewd inquiry. How do you manage to think of these things? Has it too much power? Let me think a little. In order to answer your question, I’m afraid I shall have to read over the history of the United States from the Declaration of Independence.

“You ask next, What is my opinion of a democracy? This I can answer briefly. It is the form of government under which you are permitted to live.

“Your next question is, ‘What is a responsible government?’ I admit the keenness of the inquiry. It is amazing the way you get to the centre of things. But I am not prepared. Give me a month on this, if you possibly can.

“Your last question (for the present) reads ‘How would the adoption of the British System affect our Supreme Court?’ Here again I can hardly answer without perhaps fatiguing you with details. But I will write to Justice Taft and to Lord Reading and while we are waiting for their answers perhaps you would care to send me along a few more questions. I can be working on them in my spare time.”

I had written the above letter and then on second thoughts I decided not to send it. What would be the use? The kind of young man who sends out the questionnaires is quite impervious to satire.

The only thing to do is to try to form a league of grown-up people who refuse to be investigated. I propose to be the first in it. Henceforth I will answer no questions except to the census taker and the income tax man.

If any college girl is investigating the upward trend of mortality among mules or the downward movement of morality among humans, she need not come to me. If any young man is making a chart or diagram or a graph to show the per capita increase of crime let him go to the penitentiary. My door henceforth is closed.

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This Expiring World

I have just been reading in the press the agonizing statement that there are only 4,000,000,000,000 cords of pulp wood left in the world, and that in another fifty years it will be all gone. After that there will be no pulp. Who is it that is consuming all this pulp, I do not know. I am sure that in my own home, apart from a little at breakfast, we don’t use any.

But the main point is that in fifty years it will all be finished. In fifty years from now, where there used to be great forests of pulp-trees reaching to the furthest horizon, there will be nothing but a sweep of bare rolling rocks, lifeless and untenanted, where nothing will be heard except the mournful cry of the waterfowl circling in the empty sky over what was once the forests of North America.

Or no – I forgot. It seems that there will be no waterfowl either. In the very same newspaper I read that the waterfowl of America are disappearing so fast that in another forty years they will be extinct. Parts of the country that only a few years ago were literally black with black duck, teal, ptarmigan, and pemmican now scarcely support one flamingo to the square mile. In another generation the whole continent will have turned into farms, fields, motor roads, and the motor cars will have penetrated everywhere.

Motor cars, did I say? I fear I am in error there again. In forty years there will be no motor cars. Gasoline, it is certain, is running out. Professor Glumb of Midnight, Alaska, has just made a calculation to show that at the rate at which we are using up the world’s gasoline, the supply will end in forty years.

He warns us that even now there are only 4,000,000,000,000,000 gallons in sight. There may be just a little more, he thinks, under the Red Sea; he has not been down, but he doubts if there are more than a couple of million billion gallons. In a little time it will be all gone. The motor cars will stand packed in rows and it won’t be possible to move them an inch.

And what is worse, it won’t be any use trying to substitute coal. There won’t be any. It is to run out the year before gasoline. Our reckless use of it all through the nineteenth century has brought us to the point where there are only 10,000,000,000,000 tons left. Assuming that we go on consuming it, even at our present rate, the last clinkers will be raked out of the last furnace in 1964. After that the furnace man will simply draw his salary and sit in the cellar: there won’t be a thing for him to do.

At first some of the scientists – such as Professor Hoopitup of Joy College – were inclined to think that electricity might take the place of coal as a source of power, heat, light, and food. But it appears not. The electricity is nearly all gone. Already the Chicago drainage canal has lowered Niagara Falls the tenth of an inch, and in places where there was once the white foaming cataract leaping in a sheet of water a foot thick, there is now only eleven inches and nine-tenths.

We may perhaps last on a little longer if we dam the St. Lawrence, and dam the drainage canal, and dam the Hudson – in short, if we dam the whole continent up and down. But the end is in sight. In another forty years the last kilowatt of electricity will have been consumed, and the electric apparatus will be put in a museum, and exhibited as a relic of the past to the children of the future.

Children? No, no, I forgot. It is hardly likely there will be any, forty years hence. The children are disappearing as rapidly as the gasoline and the waterfowl. It is estimated that the increase of the birth rate on this continent is steadily falling. A few years ago it was 40 per thousand, then it sank to 20, then it passed to 10, and now it is down to decimal four something. If this means anything it means that today we have an average of a thousand adults to decimal four something of a child. The human race on this continent is coming to a full stop.

Moreover, the same fate that is happening to gasoline and coal seems to be overtaking the things of the mind. It is, for example, a subject of universal remark that statesmen seem to be dying out. There may be a few very old statesmen still staggering round, but as a class they are done. In the same way there are no orators: they’re gone. And everybody knows that there is hardly such a thing left now as a gentleman of the old school. I think that one was seen a month or so ago somewhere in a marsh in Virginia. But that’s about the last. In short, civility is dead, polite culture is gone, and manners are almost extinct.

On the other side of the account I can find nothing conspicuous except the very notable increase of the criminal class. It has recently been calculated by Professor Crook (graduate of Harvard and Sing Sing) that within forty years every other man will belong to the criminal class; and even the man who isn’t the other man will be pretty tough himself.

In other words, the outlook is bad. As I see it, there is nothing for it but to enjoy ourselves while we can. The wise man will go out, while it is still possible, and get some pulp and a pint of gasoline and a chunk of coal and have a big time.

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Are We Fascinated
with Crime?

Most readers will agree with me that of late the newspapers have been fine reading. First there was the account of the new murder in Cleveland where the body was sent away by express. Then there was the story of the bob-haired bandit – it didn’t say whether man or woman – who held up an entire subway station and got clean away with the iron ticket office. There was the man who killed his mother-in-law and refused to give any reason, and the high-school girl of fifteen who shot the teacher because he tried to teach her algebra. Along with this there were two kidnappings, three disappearances of reputable citizens, two degeneracies and a little sprinkling of bank robberies and train wrecking in Arkansas. Take it all in all it made the morning paper well worth reading. With a sheet of news like that the trip on the street car to one’s work passes like a moment.

There were of course the foreign murders, too. But I generally keep them for my lunch hour. I find it hard to get up the same interest when they murder Turks and Finns and Letts as when you have the thing right at home. One body packed in a trunk in Cleveland and sent by express is better to me than a whole car-load lot of Letts. I get more out of it. But taking them all together and adding up the home and foreign crimes I found that yesterday’s paper was thirty per cent straight criminality. That I think is about a record and will compare very favourably with Soviet Russia or with the Dark Ages. Indeed I doubt if the Dark Ages, even in equatorial Africa, had anything on us in point of interest in crime.

My first feeling over this record was one of pride. But afterwards on reflection I began to feel a little bit disturbed about it, and to wonder whether as a race and a generation we are not getting morbidly fascinated with crime, and liable to suffer for it?

Our newspapers are filled with bandits, safe breakers, home wreckers, crooks, policemen and penitentiaries. The stories that sell best are stories in which there is murder right straight off on the first page. The sneaking fascination of the daring criminal has put the soldier and the patriot nowhere. Stories of brave men who give their lives for their country are now written only for children. Grown up people read about daring criminals, who talk worse English than the first year class at a college and call a trust company a “crib” and a bank manager a “stiff.” That is the kind of literature that is making Shakespeare and Milton and Emerson sound like a lecture on anthropology.

If a rich man is killed by his chauffeur in Tampa, Florida, and his body hidden in the gasoline tank, why should you and I worry? We don’t live in Tampa and we have no chauffeur and gasoline is too expensive for us to waste like that.

Yet a whole continent will have to sit up and read a column of news about such a simple little event as that.

I suppose that in a sense this hideous interest in crime and its punishment is as old as humanity. It must have created quite a stir when Cain killed Abel. On our own continent our oldest knowledge of manners and customs is the story of the Indian’s delight in torture, feebly paralleled by the Puritan’s pleasure in throwing rotten eggs at a sinner in the stocks. In what are now called the “good old times” in England, say about the time of the Tudors, people used to tramp long distances with a “lunch” in their pockets to go and see a man burnt in a sheet of white flame. One reads stories of people taking little children to executions and holding them up to see. Even when the days of the burning were over people still gathered in crowds of a morning round Newgate jail in London to see the hangings. Rare sport it must have been. For a specially good show they were there the night before, sitting up all night to hold the good places.

In what we call the civilized countries mankind has forbidden itself the pleasure of inflicting tortures and watching executions. But we are breaking out in a new spot. The same evil instinct finds another vent. Since we are not allowed any longer to go to executions and to take a personal part in crimes we like to read about them. And the vast apparatus of our press and our telegraph can give us opportunities in this direction of which our ancestors never dreamed. Think what could have been made by a first class New York newspaper organization, and by the moving picture people, of the burning of Latimer and Ridley? It seems like a lost opportunity.

Under our conditions we don’t have to confine ourselves, as the man of two centuries ago did, to the crimes of our own neighbourhood. We can gather them in from all the world. He had to be content with a hanging every now and then. We can have a dozen or two every day, and if we care to count Finns and Letts, easily a hundred.

But the moralist – that’s me – is bound to ask where is it leading us? What is the result of it on our minds and characters, this everlasting dwelling on crime. Somebody wrote long ago that—

Vice is a monster of such hideous mien,

That to be hated needs but to be seen,

But too oft seen, familiar with her face

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

The same is true of crime. The everlasting depiction and perusal of it corrupts the mind – not yours of course, my dear reader, because you are strong minded. But it corrupts the feeble mind. Personally I admit that I found myself reflecting on the man that killed his mother-in-law and gave no reason and wondering perhaps – but let it go.

Everybody knows that this North American Continent – the people of the United States, the Canadians, the Mexicans and the Eskimos – is undergoing a wave of crime such as was never known before. Some people attribute this to one thing, some to another. Some say it is because of the decline of Presbyterianism, and some say it is an effect of motor cars. But my own idea is that the chief cause of it is crime literature, crime news and universal outbreak of crime interest.

One naturally asks what are we going to do about it? Many people would immediately suggest that the first thing to be done is to amend the federal constitution of the United States so as to forbid all morbid interest in crime; and then to pass a series of state statutes for hanging anybody who takes too much interest in hanging.

I don’t think that the evil can be cured that way. That is a method of doing things that has worn pretty thin. In the United States and Canada we have got so many prohibitive and preventive statutes already that we are in danger of all being in jail before we are done with it. The only remedy is the slow but efficacious force of public opinion of what used to be called, in days before legislatures made statutes, the working of the spirit.

For social evils the first remedy is a social consciousness of the evil. If the community becomes conscious of its unwholesome morbid interest in crime, that already will start the cure. Sensible persons here and there will begin to take the mote – or the motor – out of their own eye – as a first step toward taking the beam out of their neighbours. Newspapers and magazine makers and moving picture makers have no innate desire to foist crime news on the public. They are probably sick of it. Left to themselves they would rather go fishing or dig in the garden. The notion that a newspaper reporter is half brother to the criminal is erroneous. In point of news, and amusements and pictures, the public always gets what the public wants. This is a pity, but it is so.

There is no need for anybody to start a “national movement” in this matter. Personally I refuse to join in it. I have been dragged into too many already – swatting flies, and going to see mother on May 11th, and never spitting except at home – my time is all taken up with them.

But anybody can start a movement by beginning with himself. That’s what I mean to do. Henceforth it is of no use for a newspaper editor to hand me out stories of crime and violence. I’m done with them. I want to read the quiet stuff – about how the autumn hoe crop is looking, and about the latest lectures on paleontology and how cold it has turned at Nome in Alaska. That kind of thing improves the human mind and does nothing but good.

—

But before I do start, I’d just like to have one little peep at that news I see in today’s paper about the man who murdered the barber in Evansville because he was too slow in shaving him. That sounds good, but after that I’m done.

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Round Our City

At the Ladies Culture Club

A Lecture on
The Fourth Dimension

It has become a fixed understanding that with each approaching winter there begins the open season for the various Ladies Culture Clubs. I suppose that this kind of club exists in everybody else’s town just as it does in mine. We have one in my town that meets at eleven (every other Tuesday), has just a small cup of coffee and just a tiny sandwich, hears an hour’s talk, usually on music or art, and then goes home.

Then there’s one that meets at lunch, every second Thursday and every third Tuesday, quite informally, just eats a tiny beefsteak with a nice dish of apple pie after it and listens to a speech on national affairs, excluding of course all reference to political parties or politics, or public opinion, and all references to actual individuals or actual facts.

After that there’s a club, mostly of older women, which meets at three (without refreshments till after) and discusses social problems such as how to keep younger women in hand. This club meets every first Monday in the month unless it falls at the beginning of a week.

But the club that has most interested me recently is the Ladies Culture Club because I had the honour of visiting it a little while ago. The club was founded two winters ago – as was explained to me over the ice cream by the president – with the idea that it is a pity that women know so little of science and that nowadays science is really becoming a quite important thing, and when you think of radio and electrons and atoms and things like that one ought to know something about them for fear of your feeling ignorant.

So when the club was founded it was made absolutely and exclusively a woman’s club, men taking no part in it whatever, except that men are invited to be the speakers and to sit on the platform and attend the meetings.

The day I was there the meeting was held in the ballroom of the new Grand Palaver hotel, because that is a simple place suitable for science. There were no decorations except flowers and no music except a Hungarian orchestra which stopped the moment the lecture began. This is a rule of the club.

The attendance was so large that several of the ladies remarked with pride that it would hardly have been possible to get an equal number of men to come at three o’clock in the afternoon to listen to a lecture on Four Dimensional Space.

The great mass of members were seated in chairs on the floor of the ballroom with a certain number of men here and there among them; but they were a peculiar kind of men. The president and a group of ladies were on a raised platform and they had in the middle of them Professor Droon who was to lecture on Four Dimensional Space. In front of him they had put a little table with a glass and water, enough water to last a camel for a four days’ trip. Behind Professor Droon was a barricade of chairs and plants with spikes. He couldn’t escape.

The President rose and made the regulation announcement that there were a good many members who had not yet paid their fees this season and it was desirable that they should do so owing to the high cost of bringing lecturers to the club.

She then picked up a piece of paper and read from it as follows:

“The Pythagorean philosophers as well as Philolans and Hicetus of Syracuse conceived of space as immaterial. The Alexandrine geometers substituted a conception of rigid coordinates which has dominated all scientific thinking until our own day. I will now introduce Professor Droon who will address the members on Four Dimensional Space if the ladies near the doorway will kindly occupy the chairs which are still empty at the front.”

Professor Droon, rising behind the water jug, requested the audience in a low voice to dismiss from their minds all preconceived notions of the spatial content of the universe. When they had done this, he asked them in a whisper to disregard the familiar postulate in regard to parallel lines. Indeed, it would be far better, he murmured, if they dismissed all thought of lines as such and substituted the idea of motion through a series of loci conceived as instantaneous in time.

After this he drank half the water and started.

In the address which followed and which lasted for one hour and forty minutes, it was clear that the audience were held in rapt attention. They never removed their eyes from the lecturer’s face and remained soundless except that there was a certain amount of interested whispering each time he drank water.

When he mentioned that Euclid, the geometrician, was married four times there were distinct signs of amusement. There was a sigh of commiseration when he said that Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier just as he was solving a problem in mechanics. And when he mentioned the name of Christopher Columbus there was obvious and general satisfaction.

In fact, the audience followed the lecture word for word. And when at length the professor asked in a whisper whether we could any longer maintain the conception of a discrete universe absolute in time and drank the rest of the water and sat down, the audience knew that it was the end of the lecture and there was a distinct wave of applause.

The comments of the audience as they flowed out of the hall showed how interested they had been. I heard one lady remark that Professor Droon had what she would call a sympathetic face; another said, yes, except that his ears stuck out too far.

Another said that she had heard that he was a very difficult man to live with; and another said that she imagined that all scientists must be because she had a friend who knew a lady who had lived in the same house all one winter with the Marconis and very often Marconi wouldn’t eat. There was a good deal of comment on the way the professor’s tie was up near his ear and a general feeling that he probably needed looking after.

There was a notice at the door where we went out which said that the next lecture would be by Professor Floyd of the college department of botany on The Morphology of Gymnosperms. They say there will be a big attendance again.

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Our Own Business Barometer

For Use in Stock Exchanges
and Stock Yards

Recently, with the assistance of a group of experts, I have been going into the statistical forecast business.

I have been led to do this by noticing how popular this kind of thing has come to be. All over the country there are banks and trust companies, and statistical bureaus and college departments that send out surveys of business conditions and prophecies of what good business is going to do. In any good high school the senior commercial class is prepared to work out a chart showing what “world conditions” are going to be next month.

I note that this kind of literature is having a wonderful popularity. Many people are so busy nowadays that they have hardly time to read even the latest crime news, such as how the bob-eared bandit held up the Grand Central Station and got away with the entire Information Stand. But they can always find a few leisure moments for reading about the probable effect of the failure of the Siamese rice crop on the motor car industry.

In other words, this kind of literature has come to stay. There is henceforth a regular demand for a wide-eyed, clear-sighted survey of the business field. It is for this reason that I have been led to go into it and with the aid of experts am prepared to offer for the use of business men a brief survey of the prospects of the globe for next month.

We decided, naturally, to begin with the discussion of export wheat. It is the custom of all survey makers to start with the wheat situation and we follow their example. We find that advices from Argentine, from Turkestan and from Simcoe County, Ontario, indicate that the wheat situation is easier than it was. My experts place the Russian output at about half a billion poods while the Egyptian crop is not likely to fall below two hundred million quids. Add to this a Chinese autumn production of at least a million chunks and a first impression is one of exuberance if not hilarity.

But other factors are less reassuring.

There is a visible supply of 10,000,000 bushels of wheat in the elevators at the head of the Great Lakes and 10,000,000 bushels in transit to Liverpool, but on the other hand the Japanese consumption of wheat bread has fallen 3.6 per cent in the last month and the Chinese will hardly touch it.

Disturbed political conditions in the Argentine republic may result in the cessation of Argentine export but on the other hand improved conditions in Soviet Russia may result in the liberation of the Russian supply. The wheat crop in Hindoostan is said to be in serious danger of destruction from rust but as against that the wheat crop in Persia looks great. Speculative buying on the European exchanges may force the price up but on the other hand speculative selling may force it down. Our expert opinion therefore is that we don’t know. Wheat may go up in price; but it may not.

General business conditions, in our opinion, show distinct signs of improvement but they also show unmistakable signs of getting worse. There were 2,100 business failures reported last month in the United States and Canada. But in a way that’s nothing. There are a great many people who deserve to fail. Bank deposits, however, increased from $21,161,482,936.84 to $22,668,931,056.48, or something like that; we are speaking only from memory.

Sterling exchange in New York opened for the month at $4.84, rose sharply to $4.84 26/32, reacted to $4.83 and then moved steadily up to $4.89. Why it did this we have been unable to find out.

Meantime the Brazilian revolution has focused financial attention on the milreis. As far as we can understand what the milreis did, it seems to have risen upwards, fallen down, lain flat, tried to get up, failed, raised itself again and then flopped. Our experts are not prepared to give any opinion as to what the milreis will do next. Some people think this is a good time to buy it, but if it was ours we should sell it. We wouldn’t want it round the place.

The movement of prices has been in various directions, some up, some down and some sideways. There was a five per cent drop in Portland cement, and a ten per cent fall in pig iron. But we ourselves are not using any just now and were more affected by the rise of 2 cents a gallon in gasoline which hit us hard and shortened our investigations by about ten miles a day.

During the same period under consideration there have been strikes, lockouts, earthquakes, cloudbursts, insurrections and other disturbing conditions beyond even the power of a senior commercial class to calculate.

Taking all these factors into consideration our conclusion upon the whole is that we don’t know what business is going to do next month, and we don’t believe that anyone else does. It is our humble opinion that a problem which contains among its factors the weather, earthquakes, snowstorms, revolutions, insurrections, labour, the tariff, the wishes and desires of one and three quarter billions of human beings and the legislation of over a thousand legislatures is a little beyond us.

We will go a little further. We incline to believe, and our experts agree with us (they are paid to), that all this business barometer, statistical forecast stuff means nothing more than the age-long desire of the human race for prophecies. There is no doubt people like to listen to a good prophecy. Children have their fortunes read in the leaves of tea-cups. Servant girls pay a quarter to have a Negress do it with a pack of cards. And cultivated people pay five dollars to get a divination from a Persian astrologer hailing from East Thirteenth Street, New York.

And so the business man has started up his own particular form of divination in his new statistical forecast. Our advice to our business clients (as we do not propose to stay in the forecast business) is this. If you want a really good forecast don’t bother with all the statistics and the index numbers and the averages. Go and get your fortune told in the good old-fashioned way in words of this sort:

“There is a fair woman coming into your life and there is also a dark woman. One of them will bring you great happiness but beware of the other. You are going to strike a great opportunity of getting rich; but you are also in danger of getting poor. You have nerve but you lack confidence, but if you will cherish your belief in yourself you will never know what a boob you really are. One dollar.”

That is the kind of forecast that has been going since the days of the Pharaohs and is still the best known. Stick to it.

TOC     INDEX

My Pink Suit

A Study on
the New Fashions for Men

This morning I put on my pink suit for the first time, and I must say it looked too cute for anything. I felt of course that it was an innovation and a great change, but I was glad to be in it.

I suppose everybody has been reading all about the new fashions for men and how over in London and Paris all the men are wearing suits of pink and sky blue and chrome yellow. All the London and Paris papers that I have seen say that the new suits are a great success and that the idea is all the rage. But, as I say, everybody knows about that and I don’t need to explain it. I only wanted to talk about my own suit.

I had it made out of pink georgette undershot with a deep magenta and crossed with an invisible slate blue so that the material shimmers in the light with different colours, and when I walk up and down in front of a long mirror (I bought the mirror at the same time as the suit), the colours run up and down my back in ripples of moving light. The magenta colour seems to suit my figure, though several of my very best friends say that personally they think that they prefer the slate.

I had two or three men over in the morning to sit up in my room and watch me walk up and down in front of the glass. Of course, ordinarily at that time of the day they would be at their business, but I just telephoned over to them and told them that my new suit was such a darling that they simply must come over and see it. So they came over and we just sat around while I put on one part of the suit after another and showed it off in the long glass.

They all agreed that the colour was lovely and they said they were just crazy to get a suit like mine. One said that he thought that for himself the colour might be a little young and that for his age he would rather have a bottle green or a peacock blue – something a little older, but I told him that I was quite sure he could wear anything just as young as anybody. In fact, I know a man who is past sixty, who can wear pink for evening wear, and who looks just as young in it as anybody else would.

Perhaps I should explain, as I know a lot of my friends would like to know about it, just how I had my suit cut. The coat is made rather full at the chest and then brought in at the waist line and cut out again very full about the hips with gores and with ruffled insertions of pleated chiffon at the point where the back falls to the hips.

It has a ruching round the neck and is wattled around the collar with an accordion frill brought round just below the ears and then thrown back so as to show the back of the neck. Some of my friends thought that instead of a ruching they would rather have had a little frill of lace so cut as to show the throat. But I doubt whether, with my throat, this would be so good.

The buttons are in a large size of mother-of-pearl and are carried in a bold line edgeways from the shoulder to the waist with two more buttons larger still, behind at the place where the back dips in above the hips.

Everybody agreed that the buttons are very bold, but they thought that they would be quieter on the street than in the house.

The waistcoat is cut very simply and snugly so as to show the curve of the stomach as far as possible. It has just one little pink bow at the bottom, but beyond that it is quite plain. One or two of my friends thought that it might be a little too severe, but most of us agreed that though it might seem severe indoors it wouldn’t be so at all out of doors, especially on high ground.

The trousers are cut very snug around the line of the hips with gored insertion at each side so as to give free play for leaping or jumping and then are flared out to the knee where they are quite full and wide. They end, absolutely, only a little way below the knee and of course they need to be worn over clocked stockings or else I have to have my legs tattooed. They seem terribly short when I put them on, but everybody says that it is the length they are wearing in Paris and in London and that some of the men are even cutting off their trousers half way between the waistcoat and the knee.

I must say that I felt a little strange in my pink suit when I went out presently on the street in it. One of the men asked me to lunch with him, so I went out in my suit with just a little straw hat, half-size, and a bunch of violets in the lapel of my coat. I felt quite shy at first and quite different from my usual self, and I think I even blushed when some one came across to my table at lunch and told me he had never seen me look so well.

I went over to my office in the afternoon and the very first person who came in to do business with me said he was delighted with my suit, and so we sat and talked about it for a long time and he told me of an awfully good shirtmaker that he could recommend if I wanted to get some of the shirts they are wearing. He said that over in London they are all going in for fancy shirts to match the new suits and that the colours they wear are the most daring you can imagine. He told me that a friend of his, quite an elderly man, had just got back from the other side wearing a canary-colored shirt with pussy willow tassels round his neck, and that it was really quite becoming.

Other people came into my office later in the day and we did nothing but talk about the new styles and how delicious it is going to be for men to dress in all the colours they like to wear.

On my way home in the street car which was rather crowded, a man got up and gave me his seat, and of course I thanked him with a smile that showed all my teeth, but I didn’t speak to him because I wasn’t sure whether I ought to speak to strangers in my pink suit.

Well, when I got home I first stood and looked at myself in the long glass for quite a while. And then – I don’t know just why – I went and took off my new pink costume and put on the old grey suit that I had worn the day before. It was made, as far as I remember, about two and a half, or else four and a half, years ago.

It has no ruching, crocheting, or insertions in it, and it isn’t flared or gored or pleated, and it doesn’t sweep boldly round the hips or the neck or anywhere. It has a bulge here and there where I have sat on it or knelt in it or hung it on the electric light. The pockets of it stick out a good deal from having been filled up with pipes and tins of tobacco and fishing tackle. There is more or less ink on it, but nothing that really injures it for use.

Somehow I think I’ll go back to it.

TOC     INDEX

Why I Left
Our Social Workers’ Guild

We recently started in our town – as I suppose most people would have started in most towns – an organization called the Social Workers’ Guild. Our idea was that we would try to do good in the community around us. We would send children from the slums down to the sea, and bring children up from the sea to go to college. Wherever we find a poor widow living in a basement with a string of children and a new baby appearing every year, we would turn up on the threshold with a great basketful of toys. If the plumber was out of work and nearly in despair, just then one of our agents would drop a broken furnace in his lap. Anybody who has ever felt the fascination of that kind of thing, knows just what I mean.

And the best of it all was that all the cost of doing good was to be met by the proceeds of entertainments and amusements organized by the Guild, so that really we gave our money without knowing it and had all the fun thrown in.

I don’t want to say a single word against the general idea of such Social Guilds as ours. They are certainly very noble in intention. But as I have been led to terminate absolutely and forever my own membership of the Guild, I will explain the reason for my doing so by publishing my correspondence with Mr. J. Brazil Nut, the secretary of the league, or rather the series of letters sent by Mr. Brazil Nut to me.

Letter No. 1

Dear Sir,

I beg to inform you that the Committee of the Guild has discovered a very distressing case of a family who came here from Cyprus two years ago and are anxious to return home but are unable to do so. At the present time they are living in a small apartment of which we need only to say that not a single window faces the south, that there is no elevator although the place is three stories high, and that the condition of the front steps is deplorable and the door bell apparently permanently out of order. The landlord, we regret to say, stubbornly refuses to knock the place down.

The father of the family is a good workman and only too willing to work. His trade is that of a camel driver and hitherto he has been unable to find a camel. But he says that if money could be found he would go back to Cyprus where he knows of a camel.

Our Committee considering the case a deserving one, has decided to hold a dance in the Social Workers’ Hall on Saturday evening next. It is proposed to engage Bimbasti’s orchestra and, in view of the distressing nature of the case, to serve a light supper for which tables may be reserved by telephone. The price of the tickets, of which I am venturing to send you two, will be $10.00 each, the ticket carrying with it the privilege of eating supper, or of leaving without eating it, as may be preferred.

Yours very faithfully,

J. Brazil Nut

Secretary of the S.W.G.

Letter No. 2

Dear Sir,

I have much pleasure in thanking you for your very generous subscription for two tickets for the dance and supper given last week by the Guild in aid of a distressed family from Cyprus, and informing you that the affair was organized and carried through with great success and with great enjoyment by all concerned. Some fifty couples participated in the dancing, and the whole, or at least seventy-five per cent, of the supper was eaten on the spot.

Unfortunately the expenses of the affair proved more heavy than was expected. Taking into account the fee for Bimbasti’s orchestra and the cost of bunting, flowers and supper, our Committee is faced with a deficit of about five hundred dollars. Some of the ladies of the Committee have proposed that we give the entire deficit to the family from Cyprus, or perhaps try to buy them a camel with it.

But the general feeling is in favour of carrying the deficit forward and wiping it out by an informal vaudeville entertainment to be held in the Hall of the Guild next Saturday evening. In view of the high cost of the talent to be engaged we have decided to place the tickets at $25.00 or three for $100.00. I am venturing to send you five, which you are at entire liberty to keep, and send me the money, or, if you prefer to do so, you may return the tickets with the money.

Meantime I regret to say that our field committee has reported one or two more very distressing cases. We have on our hands the case of a man, a master mechanic, by trade a maker of blow torches, who appears hopelessly addicted to drink. The man himself confesses that he is quite unable to get along without alcohol. Our workers find it extremely difficult, under present conditions, to get him any. But they think, and the man himself agrees, that if they could give this man a sea trip to South America he would need no alcohol at least until his return. Our Committee are also anxious to obtain funds to buy a wooden leg, for a professional beggar who needs it in his business. It seems that he has inadvertently lost the leg he had. A week ago after his work he put his leg into his valise and carried it home as usual. But there in some way it disappeared.

It is now proposed that all these cases shall be collectively disposed of by our special vaudeville entertainment, and I trust that you will undertake to take at least five tickets.

Very faithfully,

J. Brazil Nut

Secretary of the S.W.G.

Letter No. 3

Dear Sir,

In thanking you for your very generous subscription for five tickets for the Guild Vaudeville entertainment of last Saturday which you were not able to attend, I desire to inform you that the performance was an unqualified success. Although slightly delayed in starting and not beginning until a quarter to eleven and briefly interrupted later on by the going out of the electric lights for half an hour, the whole affair was most enjoyable. The amateur performance of our treasurer Mr. Jones with the dumb-bells – quite as heavy as anything seen on the stage – was voted extraordinary and the Social Guild Girls Christian Chorus might have been mistaken for regular music hall work.

Unfortunately the paid numbers cost us heavily and out of all proportion to our receipts. I regret to say that we are face to face with a deficit of some two thousand dollars.

In order to avoid the heavy personal assessment represented by this sum, our committee now proposes to hold, three weeks from today, an indoor Kermesse or Bazaar to last for three days. It is suggested that we engage the armories building and have the floor divided up into booths with little streets in between, with a restaurant and dance floor. The Kermesse will undertake the sale of a great variety of goods which will be purchased in advance by funds advanced by various members of the Guild who have been elected Patrons and Associate Patrons. It is understood that any Associate Patron may advance $1,000, receiving it back out of the profits, while a Patron has the privilege of advancing $2,000. I am glad to inform you that you have been elected unanimously to be a patron.

Our needs of the profits of this Kermesse are all the greater insomuch as the cases reported by our field workers increase in numbers and in gravity. We have before us the cast of a family from Honolulu who have recently arrived here and are sorry that they came. They think they would like to go to Tugugigalpa in Honduras – either there or Winnipeg. We have also a skilled mechanic, very deserving, whose trade was making eye-pieces for the periscopes of German submarines and who is unable to find work.

But we look confidently to the success of our forthcoming Kermesse to put everything on a new footing.

Very faithfully yours,

J. Brazil Nut

Letter No. 4

Dear Sir,

In writing to inform you of the disastrous failure of the Kermesse, held by this Guild, for which your name was put down as a Patron, we feel it only proper to say that the failure was due to no lack of interest or enthusiasm on the part of our members. The careful revision of our accounts by experts seems to show that the financial failure arose very largely from the fact that the articles disposed of were sold at a much lower price than what was paid for them. Some of our best experts agree that this would involve a loss of money. But others note that we lost money also from the fact that we had to pay for rent, for heat, for light as well as for illumination and warmth.

But all agree that there need have been no loss if the premises had been bigger, the restaurant larger, the music louder, the crowds greater and the deficit heavier. I am now laying before our committee a plan for holding a Winter Festival which is to last one month. It will be held in one of the larger hotels, the entire building being taken over for our purpose. We shall also take over one of the railway stations and probably one of the abattoirs and two or three of the larger provision houses.

As before we are nominating patrons who are entitled to underwrite, or subscribe, or guarantee, any sum over $50,000 which they feel disposed to offer. All such sums will be paid back on the last day of the festival.

Yours very faithfully,

J. Brazil Nut

Letter No. 5

(This time from the Honorary President of the Society – Mr. Tridout Solidhead, one of our leading business men.)

Dear Sir,

In refusing to accept your very generous resignation from the Social Workers Guild, I beg to inform you that we have decided to suspend for the present the plan of a winter festival proposed by Mr. Brazil Nut. Instead of this we are accepting the resignation of Mr. Nut from his position of secretary and we are proposing to give him a gold watch with a chain and padlock as a mark of our esteem. The presentation will be made at a dinner which will be given to Mr. Nut before he is taken away to where he is going. I am sure that you will be delighted to subscribe to the dinner (25 cents) and to the cost of the watch (10 cents per member).

Our new committee have looked into some of our urgent field cases and disposed of them. It appears that the family from Cyprus were alluding to Cyprus, Ohio, and we have invited them to walk there. The man from Honolulu we are having taught by a Negro to play the Hawaiian ukelele, and we have got for the man with the wooden leg a situation as a timber cruiser with a lumber company.

We have meantime put the question of the back deficit into the hands of a group of business men. They propose to wipe it out by holding a small entertainment at which (by a special license from the municipality) they will operate a roulette table, and a faro bank, with the sale of cold drinks, selected by a business committee, on the side. They are now looking for a suitable place, about twelve by fifteen, to hold this entertainment in.

Meantime we trust you will reconsider your resignation. We are having this matter of a public charity looked into by some of our best business men. Already they incline to the idea that if it is carried on in the right spirit and with proper energy and self-sacrifice, there may be money in it.

Very sincerely,

A. Tridout Solidhead

TOC     INDEX

The Christmas Ghost

Unemployment
in One of Our Oldest Industries

The other night I was sitting up late – away after nine o’clock – thinking about Christmas because it was getting near at hand. And, like everybody else who muses on that subject, I was thinking of the great changes that have taken place in regard to Christmas. I was contrasting Christmas in the old country house of a century ago, with the fires roaring up the chimneys, and Christmas in the modern apartment on the ninth floor with the gasoline generator turned on for the maid’s bath.

I was thinking of the old stage coach on the snowy road with its roof piled high with Christmas turkeys and a rosy-faced “guard” blowing on a keybugle and the passengers getting down every mile or so at a crooked inn to drink hot spiced ale – and I was comparing all that with the upper berth No. 6, car 220, train No. 53.

I was thinking of the Christmas landscape of long ago when night settled down upon it with the twinkle of light from the houses miles apart among the spruce trees, and contrasting the scene with the glare of motor lights upon the highways of today. I was thinking of the lonely highwayman shivering round with his clumsy pistols, and comparing the poor fellow’s efforts with the high class bandits of today blowing up a steel express car with nitroglycerine and disappearing in a roar of gasoline explosions.

In other words I was contrasting yesterday and today. And on the whole yesterday seemed all to the good.

Nor was it only the warmth and romance and snugness of the old Christmas that seemed superior to our days, but Christmas carried with it then a special kind of thrill with its queer terrors, its empty heaths, its lonely graveyards, and its house that stood alone in a wood, haunted.

And thinking of that it occurred to me how completely the ghost business seems to be dying out of our Christmas literature. Not so very long ago there couldn’t be a decent Christmas story or Christmas adventure without a ghost in it, whereas nowadays—

And just at that moment I looked and saw that there was a ghost in the room.

I can’t imagine how he got in, but there he was, sitting in the other easy chair in the dark corner away from the firelight. He had on my own dressing gown and one saw but little of his face.

“Are you a ghost?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “worse luck, I am.”

I noticed as he spoke that he seemed to wave and shiver as if he were made of smoke. I couldn’t help but pity the poor fellow, he seemed so immaterial.

“Do you mind,” he went on, in the same dejected tone, “if I sit here and haunt you for a while?”

“By all means,” I said, “please do.”

“Thanks,” he answered, “I haven’t had anything decent to work on for years and years. This is Christmas eve, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, “Christmas Eve.”

“Used to be my busiest night,” the ghost complained, “best night of the whole year – and now – say,” he said, “would you believe it! I went down this evening to that dinner dance they have at the Ritz Carlton and I thought I’d haunt it – thought I’d stand behind one of the tables as a silent spectre, the way I used to in King George III’s time—”

“Well?” I said.

“They put me out!” groaned the ghost, “the head waiter came up to me and said that he didn’t allow silent spectres in the dining room. I was put out.” He groaned again.

“You seem,” I said, “rather down on your luck?”

“Can you wonder?” said the ghost, and another shiver rippled up and down him. “I can’t get anything to do. Talk of the unemployed – listen!” he went on, speaking with something like animation, “let me tell you the story of my life—”

“Can you make it short?” I said.

“I’ll try. A hundred years ago—”

“Oh, I say!” I protested.

“I committed a terrible crime, a murder on the highway—”

“You’d get six months for that nowadays,” I said.

“I was never detected. An innocent man was hanged. I died but I couldn’t rest. I haunted the house beside the highway where the murder had been done. It had happened on Christmas Eve, and so, every year on that night—”

“I know,” I interrupted, “you were heard dragging round a chain and moaning and that sort of thing; I’ve often read about it.”

“Precisely,” said the ghost, “and for about eighty years it worked out admirably. People became afraid, the house was deserted, trees and shrubs grew thick around it, the wind whistled through its empty chimneys and its broken windows, and at night the lonely wayfarer went shuddering past and heard with terror the sound of a cry scarce human, while a cold sweat—”

“Quite so,” I said, “a cold sweat. And what next?”

“The days of the motor car came and they paved the highways and knocked down the house and built a big garage there, with electricity as bright as day. You can’t haunt a garage, can you? I tried to stick on and do a little groaning, but nobody seemed to pay attention; and anyway, I got nervous about the gasoline. I’m too immaterial to be round where there’s gasoline. A fellow would blow up, wouldn’t he?”

“He might,” I said, “so what happened?”

“Well, one day somebody in the garage actually saw me and he threw a monkey wrench at me and told me to get to hell out of the garage. So I went.”

“And after that?”

“I haunted round; I’ve kept on haunting round, but it’s no good, there’s nothing in it. Houses, hotels, I’ve tried it all. Once I thought that if I couldn’t make a hit any other way, at least I could haunt children. You remember how little children used to live in terror of ghosts and see them in the dark corners of their bedrooms? Well, I admit it was a low down thing to do, but I tried that.”

“And it didn’t work?”

“Work! I should say not. I went one night to a bedroom where a couple of little boys were sleeping and I started in with a few groans and then half materialized myself, so that I could just be seen. One of the kids sat up in bed and nudged the other and said, ‘Say! I do believe there’s a ghost in the room!’ And the other said, ‘Hold on; don’t scare him. Let’s get the radio set and see if it’ll go right through him.’

“They both hopped out of bed as brisk as bees and one called downstairs, ‘Dad, we’ve got a ghost up here! We don’t know whether he’s just an emanation or partially material. We’re going to stick the radio into him – ’ Believe me,” continued the ghost, “that was all I waited to hear. Electricity just knocks me edgeways.”

He shuddered. Then he went on.

“Well it’s been like that ever since – nowhere to go and nothing to haunt. I’ve tried all the big hotels, railway stations, everywhere. Once I tried to haunt a Pullman car, but I had hardly started before I observed a notice, ‘Quiet is requested for those already retired,’ and I had to quit.”

“Well, then,” I said, “why don’t you just get immaterial or dematerial or whatever you call it, and keep so? Why not go away wherever you belong and stay there?”

“That’s the worst of it,” answered the ghost, “they won’t let us. They haul us back. These spiritualists have learned the trick of it and they just summon us up any time they like. They get a dollar apiece for each materialization, but what do we get?”

The ghost paused and a sort of spasm went all through him. “Gol darn it,” he exclaimed, “they’re at me now. There’s a group of fools somewhere sitting round a table at a Christmas Eve party and they’re calling up a ghost just for fun – a darned poor notion of fun, I call it – I’d like to – like to—”

But his voice trailed off. He seemed to collapse as he sat and my dressing gown fell on the floor. And at that moment I heard the ringing of the bells that meant that it was Christmas midnight, and I knew that the poor fellow had been dragged off to work.

TOC     INDEX

Short Circuits

(1928)

~

Short Circuits in the Social Current

Old Junk and New Money
“Speaking of India—”
How to Borrow Money
Life’s Minor Contradictions
A Great Life in Our Midst
The Perfect Gift
Scenery and Signboards
The Life of John Mutation Smith
Inference as an Art
Our Get-Together Movement

Short Circuits in the Open Air

A Lesson on the Links
The Family at Football
Life in the Open

Save Me from My Friends

—From My Friend the Deadbeat
—From My Friend the Reporter
—From My Friend with a Speech to Make
—From My Friend the Guide

People We Know

The Man in the Pullman Car
The Criminal by Proxy
The People Just Back from Europe
The Man with the Adventure Story

Short Circuits in Education

A Year at College
The Unintelligence Test
Easy Ways to Success
Fun as an Aid to Business
The Stamp-Album World

Short Circuits by Radio and Cinema

If Only We Had the Radio Sooner
What the Radio Overheard
One Crowded Quarter Second
Done into Movies

Short Circuits in International Relations

Things I Hardly Dare Whisper
Hands Across the Sea
If They Go On Swimming
If Mussolini Comes
This World Championship Stuff
Get Off the Earth

Bygone Currents

The Lost World of Yesterday
Come Back to School
The Fall Fair and the Autumn Exposition
Extinct Monsters
The Passing of the Back Yard

Short Circuits in Current Literature

The Literary Sensations of 1929
Children’s Poetry Revised
Illustrations I Can Do Without
Our Summer Pets
The Old Men’s Page
A Guide to the Underworld
Love Me, Love My Letters
With the Authorities
Literature and the Eighteenth Amendment
The Hunt for a Heroine
Bed-time Stories for Grown-Up People
Softening the Stories for the Children
The Great Detective

The Epilogue of this Book:

An Elegy Near a City Freight Yard

Short Circuits
in the Social Current

Old Junk and New Money

A Little Study in the Latest Antiques

I went the other day into the beautiful home of my two good friends, the Hespeler-Hyphen-Joneses, and I paused a moment, as my eye fell on the tall clock that stood in the hall.

“Ah,” said Hespeler-Hyphen-Jones, “I see you are looking at the clock – a beautiful thing, isn’t it? – a genuine antique.”

“Does it go?” I asked.

“Good gracious, no!” exclaimed my two friends. “But isn’t it a beautiful thing!”

“Did it ever go?”

“I doubt it,” said Hespeler-Hyphen-Jones. “The works, of course, are by Salvolatile – one of the really great clockmakers, you know. But I don’t know whether the works ever went. That, I believe, is one way in which you can always tell a Salvolatile. If it’s a genuine Salvolatile, it won’t go.”

“In any case,” I said, “it has no hands.”

“Oh, dear, no,” said Mrs. Jones. “It never had, as far as we know. We picked it up in such a queer little shop in Amalfi and the man assured us that it never had had any hands. He guaranteed it. That’s one of the things, you know, that you can tell by. Charles and I were terribly keen about clocks at that time and really studied them, and the books all agreed that no genuine Salvolatile has any hands.”

“And was the side broken, too, when you got it,” I asked.

“Ah, no,” said my friend. “We had that done by an expert in New York after we got back. Isn’t it exquisitely done? You see, he has made the break to look exactly as if some one had rolled the clock over and stamped on it. Every genuine Salvolatile is said to have been stamped upon like that.

“Of course, our break is only imitation, but it’s extremely well done, isn’t it? We go to Ferrugi’s, that little place on Fourth Avenue, you know, for everything that we want broken. They have a splendid man there. He can break anything.”

“Really!” I said.

“Yes, and the day when we wanted the clock done, Charles and I went down to see him do it. It was really quite wonderful, wasn’t it, Charles?”

“Yes, indeed. The man laid the clock on the floor and turned it on its side and then stood looking at it intently, and walking round and round it and murmuring in Italian as if he were swearing at it. Then he jumped in the air and came down on it with both feet.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“Yes, and with such wonderful accuracy. Our friend Mr. Appin-Hyphen-Smith – the great expert, you know – was looking at our clock last week and he said it was marvelous, hardly to be distinguished from a genuine fractura.”

“But he did say, didn’t he, dear,” said Mrs. Jones, “that the better way is to throw a clock out of a fourth story window? You see, that was the height of the Italian houses in the Thirteenth Century – is it the Thirteenth Century I mean, Charles?”

“Yes,” said Charles.

“Do you know, the other day I made the silliest mistake about a spoon. I thought it was a Twelfth Century spoon and said so and in reality it was only Eleven and a half. Wasn’t it, Charles?”

“Yes,” said Charles.

“But do come into the drawing room and have some tea. And, by the way, since you are interested in antiques, do look please at my teapot.”

“It looks an excellent teapot,” I said, feeling it with my hand, “and it must have been very expensive, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, not that one,” interposed Mr. Hespeler-Hyphen-Jones. “That is nothing. We got that here in New York at Hoffany’s – to make tea in. It is made of solid silver, of course, and all that, but even Hoffany’s admitted that it was made in America and was probably not more than a year or so old and had never been used by anybody else. In fact, they couldn’t guarantee it in any way.”

“Oh, I see,” I said.

“But let me pour you out tea from it and then do look at the perfect darling beside it. Oh, don’t touch it, please, it won’t stand up.”

“Won’t stand up?” I said.

“No,” said Hespeler-Jones, “that’s one of the tests. We know from that that it is genuine Swaatsmaacher. None of them stand up.”

“Where did you buy it?” I asked, “here?”

“Oh, heavens, no, you couldn’t buy a thing like that here! As a matter of fact, we picked it up in a little gin shop in Obehellandam in Holland. Do you know Obehellandam?”

“I don’t,” I said.

“It’s just the dearest little place, nothing but little wee smelly shops filled with most delightful things – all antique, everything broken. They guarantee that there is nothing in the shop that wasn’t smashed at least a hundred years ago.”

“You don’t use the teapot to make tea,” I said.

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Hespeler-Jones as she handed me a cup of tea from the New York teapot. “I don’t think you could. It leaks.”

“That again is a thing,” said her husband, “that the experts always look for in a Swaatsmaacher. If it doesn’t leak, it’s probably just a faked-up thing not twenty years old.”

“Is it silver?” I asked.

“Ah, no. That’s another test,” said Mrs. Jones. “The real Swaatsmaachers were always made of pewter bound with barrel-iron off the gin barrels. They try to imitate it now by using silver, but they can’t get it.”

“No, the silver won’t take the tarnish,” interjected her husband. “You see, it’s the same way with ever so many of the old things. They rust and rot in a way that you simply cannot imitate. I have an old drinking horn that I’ll show you presently – Ninth Century, isn’t it, dear? – that is all coated inside with the most beautiful green slime, absolutely impossible to reproduce.”

“Is it?” I said.

“Yes, I took it to Squeeziou’s, the Italian place in London. (They are the great experts on horns, you know; they can tell exactly the country and the breed of cow.) And they told me that they had tried in vain to reproduce that peculiar and beautiful rot. One of their head men said that he thought that this horn had probably been taken from a dead cow that had been buried for fifty years. That’s what gives it its value, you know.”

“You didn’t buy it in London, did you?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” answered Hespeler-Jones. “London is perfectly impossible – just as hopeless as New York. You can’t buy anything real there at all.”

“Then where do you get all your things?” I asked, as I looked round at the collection of junk in the room.

“Oh, we pick them up here and there,” said Mrs. Jones. “Just in any out-of-the-way corners. That little stool we found at the back of a cow stable in Loch Aberlocherty. They were actually using it for milking. And the two others – aren’t they beautiful? though really it’s quite wrong to have two chairs alike in the same room – came from the back of a tiny little whiskey shop in Galway. Such a delight of an old Irishman sold them to us and he admitted that he himself had no idea how old they were. They might, he said, be Fifteenth Century, or they might not.

“But, oh, Charles,” my hostess interrupted herself to say, “I’ve just had a letter from Jane (Jane is my sister, you know) that is terribly exciting. She’s found a table at a tiny place in Brittany that she thinks would exactly do in our card room. She says that it’s utterly unlike anything else in the room and has quite obviously no connection with cards. But let me read what she says – let me see, yes, here’s where it begins:

“‘. . . a perfectly sweet little table. It probably had four legs originally and even now has two which, I am told, is a great find, as most people have to be content with one. The man explained that it could either be leaned up against the wall or else suspended from the ceiling on a silver chain. One of the boards of the top is gone, but I am told that that is of no consequence, as all the best specimens of Brittany tables have at least one board out.’

“Doesn’t that sound fascinating, Charles? Do send Jane a cable at once not to miss it.”

—

And when I took my leave a little later, I realized once and for all that the antique business is not for me.

TOC     INDEX

“Speaking of India—”

What to Do When Your Husband Tells in Company His Same Old Story

I was at a dinner party the other night at which one of the guests, as guests generally do, began to tell an old story of his, already known to us all.

“What you say of India,” he said, “reminds me of a rather remarkable experience of mine in California—”

“Oh, James,” interrupted his wife, “please don’t tell that old story over again.”

The narrator, a modest man, blushed and came to a stop. There was a painful silence which lasted for some moments. Then somebody said, “Speaking of Mayor Thompson of Chicago—” and the party went on again.

—

But the incident left behind it a problem in my mind. Should a wife, or should a wife not, interrupt her husband to stop him telling one of his wearisome old stories. . . .

If the husband could speak (most husbands are inarticulate) he could certainly put up a good defence. He could say:

“My dear Martha, you think this is an old story. But if you knew some of the ones that will be told by the other men if I don’t tell this, you’d think it brand new. You think the story wearisome for you. But their wives think their stories wearisome for them. All the stories we are all going to tell tonight are old. Of course they are. What do you think we are – Shakespeare? We can’t sit here and make up new stories. If we could, we’d black our faces, call ourselves coons and draw a hundred dollars a night in a New York Revue.

“Moreover – listen to this as a second point. An old story has certain great advantages over a new one. There’s no strain in listening to it. You know just when it is all coming, and you can slip in an extra oyster and bite off an extra piece of celery in between the sentences, take a drink of dry ginger ale and be all set for the big laugh at the end.

“And get this also – if you don’t have stories at a dinner table somebody will start Statistics. And Statistics are worse than stories in the ratio of eight to one. There is, you must remember, a certain type of man, who goes round filling himself up with facts. He knows how many miles of railway track there are in the United States and the number of illiterates in Oklahoma. At any dinner party this man may be there: if he is, conversation turns into a lecture. Worse still there may be two of these men. If there are, conversation becomes an argument.”

—

Now, this is the worst of all. Argument at a dinner party ruins the whole evening for everybody. One man says something – let us say – about the Civil War – and some one else contradicts him. – “You’ll pardon me——” he says, and they’re off. They start politely. In two minutes they are speaking with warmth. In four minutes they hate one another worse than hell. First they ask themselves to pardon one another. Then they begin referring one another to books. – “Pardon me,” says one, “if you consult any history of the war, you’ll see that Lincoln never meant to set free the slaves.” – “Excuse me,” says the other, “if you consult any biography of Lincoln you’ll see that he did. . . .”

Now you notice that this point about Abraham Lincoln can’t be settled without at least a year’s work in a library – and not even then.

So the argument gets warmer. The opponents refer one another to books, then they tell one another to go to Washington and hunt it up for themselves. Finally they tell one another to go to hell.

Meantime there is a maid behind one of them trying to give him a creamed celery out of a dish which he keeps knocking over, and a maid pouring hot asparagus with drawn butter over the other one’s shirt front.

And the dinner party is a failure. Those two men will carry their quarrel right on after the men are left alone; they’ll fetch it up to the library, they’ll keep it all through bridge and take it home with them.

Think how much softer and easier if some one had said, “Talking about California, reminds me of an episode in India.” . . . How quietly the asparagus would have circulated then.

—

And there is more to it than that. There is, it seems to me, a sort of humble pathos surrounding the gentle story teller wanting to get his little anecdote in, and generally having to try several times for an opening.

He begins among the oysters.

“Speaking of India——” he says. But a wave of general conversation washes over him.

Somewhere in the middle of the fish, there is a lull in the talk and again he says – “Speaking of India——” “Now you really must have some of that fish,” interrupts his hostess. And a burst of talk about fish blows his topic into nothingness. He tries next at the roast. “Speaking of India——” he says, and a maid drops gravy over him.

And at last, at the happy last, he gets a real chance. – “Speaking of India,” he says, and then his wife breaks in with “Oh! James!”

—

Madam, do you think it’s fair? It is, of course, a great trial for a brilliant woman like you to have to drag around a husband like him. Of course he’s a dud. You ought really to have married either Bernard Shaw or Mussolini.

But you didn’t. You just married an ordinary plain man like the rest of us, with no particular aspirations to be a humorists, or a raconteur, or a diseuse, or anything of the sort: anxious just to take some little part in the talk about him.

So, next time, when he begins “Speaking of India——” won’t you let us hear what it was that happened there?

TOC     INDEX

How to Borrow Money

The Process Is Quite Easy,
Provided You Borrow Enough

Have you ever, dear readers, had occasion to borrow money? Have you ever borrowed ten dollars under a rigorous promise of your word of honour as a Christian to pay it back on your next salary day? Have you ever borrowed as much as a million at a time?

If you have done these things, you cannot have failed to notice how much easier it is to borrow ten thousand dollars than ten, how much easier still to borrow a hundred thousand, and that when you come at last to raising an international loan of a hundred million the thing loses all difficulty.

Here below are the little scenes that take place on the occasion of an ascending series of loans.

TABLEAU NO. I

The Scene in Which Hardup Jones Borrows Ten Dollars till the First of Next Month from His Friend, Canny Smith

“Say, look here, old man, I was wondering whether perhaps you wouldn’t mind letting me have ten dollars till the end of the month——”

“Ten dollars!!!”

“Oh, I could give it back all right, for dead sure, just the minute I get my salary.”

“Ten dollars!!!”

“You see, I’ve got into an awful tangle – I owe seven and a half on my board, and she said yesterday she’d have to have it. And I couldn’t pay my laundry last week, so he said he wouldn’t leave it, and I got this cursed suit on the installment plan and they said they’d seize my trunk, and——”

“Say, but Gol darn it, I lent you five dollars, don’t you remember, last November, and you swore you’d pay it back on the first and I never got it till away after New Year’s——”

“I know, I know. But this is absolutely sure. So help me, I’ll pay it right on the first, the minute I get my check.”

“Yes, but you won’t——”

“No, I swear I will——”

And after about half an hour of expostulations and protests of this sort, having pledged his soul, his body, and his honour, the borrower at last gets his ten dollars.

TABLEAU NO. II

The Scene in Which Mr. McDuff of the McDuff Hardware Store in Central City (pop. 3,862) Borrows $1,000 from the Local Bank

The second degree in borrowing is represented by this scene in which Mr. John McDuff, of McDuff Bros. Hardware Store (Everything in Hardware), calls on the local bank manager with a view to getting $1,000 to carry the business forward for one month till the farmers’ spring payments begin to come in.

Mr. McDuff is told by one of the (two) juniors in the bank to wait – the manager is engaged for the moment.

The manager in reality is in his inner office, sorting out trout flies. But he knows what McDuff wants and he means to make him wait for it and suffer for it.

When at last McDuff does get in, the manager is very cold and formal.

“Sit down, Mr. McDuff,” he says. When they go fishing together, the manager always calls McDuff “John.” But this is different. McDuff is here to borrow money. And borrowing money in Central City is a criminal act.

“I came in about that loan,” says McDuff.

The manager looks into a ledger.

“You’re overdrawn seventeen dollars right now,” he says.

“I know, but I’ll be getting my accounts in any time after the first.”

Then follows a string of severe questions. What are McDuff’s daily receipts? What is his overhead? What is his underfoot? Is he a church-goer? Does he believe in a future life?

And at last even when the manager finally consents to lend the thousand dollars (he always meant to do it), he begins tagging on conditions:

“You’ll have to get your partner to sign.”

“All right.”

“And you’d better get your wife to sign.”

“All right.”

“And your mother, she might as well sign too——”

There are more signatures on a country bank note for one month than on a Locarno treaty.

And at last McDuff, of Everything in Hardware, having pledged his receipts, his premises, his credit, his honour, his wife, and his mother – gets away with the thousand dollars.

TABLEAU NO. III

How Mr. P. O. Pingpoint, of the Great Financial House of Pingpoint, Pingpong and Company, New York and London, Borrows a Million Dollars before Lunch

Here the scene is laid in a fitting setting. Mr. Pingpoint is shown into the sumptuous head office of the president of the First National Bank.

“Ah, good morning,” says the president as he rises to greet Mr. Pingpoint, “I was expecting you. Our general manager told me that you were going to be good enough to call in. Won’t you take this larger chair? – you’ll find it easier.”

“Ah, thank you. You’re very comfortable here.”

“Yes, we rather think this a pleasant room. And our board room, we think, is even better. Won’t you let me show you our board room?”

“Oh, thanks, I’m afraid I hardly have the time. I just came in for a minute to complete our loan of a million dollars.”

“Yes, our executive Vice-President said that you are good enough to come to us. It is very kind of you, I’m sure.”

“Oh, not at all.”

“And you are quite sure that a million is all that you care to take? We shall be delighted, you know, if you will take a million and a half.”

“Oh, scarcely. A million, I think, will be ample just now; we can come back, of course, if we want more.”

“Oh, certainly, certainly.”

“And do you want us to give any security, or anything of that sort?”

“Oh, no, quite unnecessary.”

“And is there anything you want me to sign while I am here?”

“Oh, no, nothing, the clerks will attend to all that.”

“Well, thanks, then, I needn’t keep you any longer.”

“But won’t you let me drive you up town? My car is just outside. Or, better still, if you are free, won’t you come and eat some lunch with me at the club?”

“Well, thanks, yes, you’re really extremely kind.”

And with this, quite painlessly and easily, the million dollars has changed hands.

But even that is not the last degree. Eclipsing that sort of thing, both in case and in splendor, is the international loan, as seen in——

TABLEAU NO. IV

The Scenes Which Accompany the Flotation of an Anglo-French Loan in the American Market, of a Hundred Million Dollars, by the Right Hon. Samuel Rothstein of England and the Vicomte Baton Rouge de Chauve Souris of France

This occurrence is best followed as it appears in its triumphant progress in the American press.

New York, Friday – An enthusiastic reception was given yesterday to the Right Hon. Mr. Samuel Rothstein, of the British Cabinet, and to the Vicomte de Chauve Souris, French plenipotentiary, on their landing from the Stacquitania. It is understood that they will borrow $100,000,000. The distinguished visitors expect to stay only a few days.

New York, Saturday – An elaborate reception was given last evening in the home of Mrs. Bildermont to the Right Hon. Samuel Rothstein and the Baron de Chauve Souris. It is understood that they are borrowing a hundred million dollars.

New York, Monday – The Baron de Chauve Souris and the Right Hon. Samuel Rothstein were notable figures in the Fifth Avenue church parade yesterday. It is understood that they will borrow a hundred million dollars.

New York, Tuesday – The Baron de Chauve Souris and the Right Hon. Samuel Rothstein attended a baseball game at the Polo Grounds. It is understood that they will borrow a hundred million dollars.

New York, Wednesday – At a ball given by Mr. and Mrs. Ashcoop-Vandermore for the distinguished English and French plenipotentiaries, Mr. Samuel Rothstein and the Baron de Chauve Souris, it was definitely stated that the loan which they are financing will be limited to a hundred million dollars.

New York (Wall Street), Thursday – The loan of $100,000,000 was subscribed this morning at eleven o’clock in five minutes. The Right Hon. Mr. Rothstein and the Baron Baton Rouge de Chauve Souris left America at twelve noon, taking the money with them. Both plenipotentiaries expressed their delight with America.

“It is,” said the Baron – “how do you call it? – a cinch.”

EPILOGUE

And yet, six months later, what happened? Who paid and who didn’t?

Hardup Jones paid $5.40 within a month, $3.00 the next month and the remaining one dollar and sixty cents two weeks later.

McDuff Bros. met their note and went fishing with the manager like old friends.

The Pingpoint Syndicate blew up and failed for ten million dollars.

And the international loan got mixed up with a lot of others, was funded, equated, spread out over fifty years, capitalized, funded again – in short, it passed beyond all recognition.

And the moral is, when you borrow, borrow a whole lot.

TOC     INDEX

Life’s Minor Contradictions

The Difference Between
Things as They Are
and as They Seem

Isn’t it funny how different people and things are when you know them from what you think they are when you don’t know them?

For instance, everybody knows how much all distinguished people differ in their private lives from what they appear to the public. We all get used to being told in the papers such things as that in his private life Signor Mussolini is the very gentlest of men, spending his time by preference among children and dolls; that in his private life Dean Inge, the “gloomy Dean” of St. Paul’s Cathedral, is hilariously merry; and that Mr. Chesterton, fat though he appears in public, is in private life quite thin.

I myself had the pleasure not long ago of meeting the famous Mr. Sandpile, at that time reputed to be the most powerful man in America, and giving public exhibitions of muscular strength of a most amazing character. I was surprised to find that in his private life Sandpile was not a strong man at all, but quite feeble. “Would you mind,” he said to me, “handing me that jug? It’s too heavy for me to lift.”

In the same way, I recall on one occasion walking down a street in an English seaport town late one night with Admiral Beatty – I think it was Admiral Beatty, either Beatty or Jellicoe. “Would you mind,” he said, “letting me walk behind you? I’m afraid of the dark.” “You mean of course,” I said, “only in your private life.” “Certainly,” he answered. “I don’t mind it a damn in daylight.”

Few people know that Mr. Henry Ford cannot drive a motor car, that Mr. Rockefeller never has any money, and that Thomas Edison has never been able to knit.

But lately I have been noticing that these contradictions extend also to institutions and things in general. Take for instance, a circus. In past generations it was supposed by many of the best supposers that circus people were about as tough an “aggregation” as it was possible to aggredge. But not at all. Quite the other way.

Not long ago a circus came to our town and I had the pleasure of spending some time with one of the clowns – he was studying for a Ph.D. in private life – and of getting a good deal of information from him as to what a modern circus is like when seen from the inside.

I expressed my astonishment that he should be a clown and also a Philosophy student. “Not at all,” he said, “there’s nothing unusual about that. As a matter of fact, four of our clowns are in philosophy, and the ringmaster himself is studying palaeontology, though he is still some distance from it. Nearly all our clowns are college men: they seem specially fitted for it somehow.

“And most of our trapeze ladies are college girls. You can tell a college girl on a trapeze at any time. You must come over and see us,” he added, “we are having a little sort of gathering on Sunday afternoon – one of our Fortnightly Teas. We generally have a little reading and discussions. We take up some author or period and some one reads a paper on it. This afternoon we are to discuss the Italian Renaissance and the bandmaster is to deal with Benvenuto Cellini.

“We have a welfare Society, and a Luncheon Club, and our Big Sister Movement. As to drunkenness,” he added, “the other day some one brought in a bottle of Ontario four per cent beer and our manager was terribly distressed about it. He gave it to the kangaroo.”

It seems impossible to doubt the truth of his words, especially when we corroborate them with similar disclosures about other institutions.

Take, for example, some information which I recently received in regard to cowboys from a man who had just made a tour in the West.

“You are quite mistaken,” he told me, “in imagining that the western cowboy is the kind of ‘bad man,’ all dressed up in leather fringes, that you read about in the half-dime novels. As a matter of fact, most of the cowboys nowadays are college men. There seems to be something in a college training which fits a man for cattle.

“They are principally law students. Few of the cowboys of today undertake to ride, for of course they don’t need to. They mostly use cars in going after the cattle, and many of them, for that matter, can’t drive a car. They have chauffeurs. And in any case, the cattle of today are very quiet and seldom move faster than a walk or a run.

“The cowboy has naturally long since discarded his peculiar dress and wears just a plain lounge suit with a thin duster and motor goggles. Of course, they change for dinner at night, especially when invited out to dine with the Indians, or at one of the section men’s clubs beside the railway track. But you ought to go out and see them for yourself.”

I admitted that I ought.

Meantime I notice the same kind of contradiction in another set of institutions, but this time turned the other way around. I’ll give as an example of it the newspaper account of the entertainment (it is an annual affair) that was given in our town the other night under the auspices of the Girls’ Uplift Society in aid of the Rescue Fund for Sunken Delinquents.

“The Revue put on last week by the Girls’ Uplift Society in the Basement of the Seventh Avenue Social Centre certainly outclassed any of the previous performances of the Society. The chorus dancing of the Rescue Squad was pronounced worthy of the Midnight Follies of the metropolis itself, and the pastor in his remarks spoke especially of the trapeze work of the Mothers’ Aid.

“The pastor drew attention, however, to the fact that this year more than ever there had been complaints about the young ladies bringing flasks to their dressing rooms. He himself – he admitted it reluctantly – had not seen any of these flasks and could not speak of the contents. But the janitor had picked up twenty-six. He himself, however, had looked all round the basement, but had failed to find any.

“He deplored also the increasing prevalence of smoking at the performances. He himself saw no harm in a good cigar, for himself, especially in a well-seasoned twenty-five-cent dark Habanana, which he said beat Virgyptian tobacco hands down. But he looked on a cigarette as a mighty poor smoke.”

When we add to the disclosures of this sort such minor and obvious facts as that nowadays sailors can’t swim, and clergymen swear, and brewers don’t drink, and actors can’t act – we have to admit that we live in a changing world.

TOC     INDEX

A Great Life in Our Midst

Joe Brown,
Champion Pie Eater

One’s first impressions of Joe Brown, champion pie-eater, is that of a quiet, unassuming man, of a stature in no way out of the common, and having a frank, offhand manner that puts one at once at one’s ease.

“Sit right down,” he said to the group of us (we were reporting for the press), and he waved his hand towards the rocking-chairs on the veranda. “Sit right down. Warm, ain’t it?”

The words were simple, but spoken with a heartiness and good will that made one at once feel at home. It seemed hard to believe that this was actually the man who had eaten more pie, more consecutive pie, than any other man alive – still alive.

“Well, Joe,” we said, getting out our notebooks and pencils, “what about this pie?”

Mr. Brown laughed, with that pleasant, easy laugh of his, which makes one feel entirely reassured.

“I rather supposed you boys were going to talk about the pie,” he said.

“Well,” we admitted, “all the world is talking about it, Joe. Coming right on top of the news that a man has played golf continually for twenty-four hours and that a woman in Indiana shucked peas for three days, and that the huckleberry record has been broken, that a man in Medicine Hat, Alberta, stood on one leg for seven hours, and that the champion fat boy of Iowa passed four hundred pounds last week, this pie stuff of yours seems to be going over pretty big.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Brown, quietly, “there are big things being done today certainly, and I’m glad to be in it. And yet I don’t feel as if I had done anything so very much after all.”

“Oh, come, Joe,” we expostulated, “in New York they are saying that your pie act is about the biggest endurance stunt of the month. It puts you, or it ought to, right in the first rank of the big men today.”

“Well,” said the champion modestly, “I’m afraid I can’t take too much credit for it. I just did my best, that was all. I wasn’t going to let it beat me, and so I just put into it every ounce of pep, or pepsin, that I had.”

“What first turned you to eating pie, Joe?” asked one of the boys.

“It’s hard to say,” he answered. “I think I just took to it naturally. Even as a little fellow, before I understood anything about it, I was fond of pie and liked to see how much I could eat.”

“How did it feel when you ate the first slice in the championship?” asked one of the boys.

“No,” broke in another, “tell us about your training, Joe – how did you go at that?” “No,” said a third, “tell us what was the most trying moment of the whole contest.”

The great man laughed. “I’m afraid you boys are asking a whole lot of questions altogether,” he said. “But the main facts are simple enough, and, as I see it, nothing so very much to boast about.

“As for the championship contest,” he continued, and a look of quiet earnestness came over his face as he spoke, “I can only say, boys, that I’m glad it’s over. It was a strain, a great strain. I’ll never forget how I felt as we passed the twentieth slice and then the thirtieth and then the fortieth. I said to myself, ‘Surely this can’t last; there must come a time when it just can’t go on.’ Something seemed to make me understand that.

“I’d run into a burst of speed from the twentieth up to the thirtieth, with a stroke of two bites to the second, but I saw I couldn’t hold the pace; I slowed it down to four bites in five seconds and just hung on to that, till I heard the big shout that told me I had won. After that, I guess I pretty well keeled over. I was all in.”

“Were you laid out for long?” some one asked.

“No, just for two or three minutes. Then I went home, had a bath and a rub-down, and got something to eat, and then I felt dandy.”

“Is it true you’re to go over to the other side, Joe?” asked one of the boys.

“I don’t quite know. My manager wants me to go over to England and eat pie there. There are some first-class men in England, so they tell me, that one would be proud to eat against.”

“What about France, Joe?”

“Yes, France, too. The French have got some good men and some fine men. And their technique is better than ours. They’re quicker. They’ve done more so far in jaw movement than we have. If I eat a Frenchman, my only advantage, if I have any at all, will be in endurance.”

“Aren’t the pie-eating rules in France different, Joe?” asked one of us.

“They were,” said the champion. “The French used to allow drinking – up to six gallons – during the contest. As you know, we don’t. But now that we have got the International Pie-Eating Association, we expect to have a set of rules the same for everybody.”

“Where will you train if you go?” the champion was next asked.

“Most likely,” he said, “I’ll train at the lunch counters in New York and some of the big cities. But the station restaurants are good too; and I may tackle the cafeterias in some of the big hotels. Anywhere, in short, where I can get speed and atmosphere.”

“When do you leave for the other side?” we asked.

“Oh, I can’t get away just yet. I have to get my films ready for the moving picture people. I’m eating for them four or five hours a day now, and we’re trying out the high-speed pictures.”

“What about lectures?”

“Yes, I believe I’m going to give a tour starting next month and going right to the Coast, lecturing on ‘Eating in Relation to Food.’”

“Doing anything for the schools, Joe?” some one questioned.

“Yes, I think I’m going to give a talk in a lot of the public schools.”

“What about?”

“It will be on ‘Food in Relation to Eating,’ so you see I can’t get away to Europe for a while yet.”

We sat thus for over half an hour chatting with this latest and in some ways most interesting of the world’s new champions. It seemed wonderful in talking with him to think of the improved attitude of the human race. The old-fashioned interest in wars, battles, economics, and industry is now obviously passing away. It is being replaced by the more human, more vital interests of eating pie, standing on one leg, and shucking huckleberries.

Looking thus at Mr. Joe Brown, we felt ourselves in the presence of a typical man of the new age.

Presently, however, the champion seemed to show signs of a slight weariness.

“Boys,” he said, “I guess you’ll have to excuse me. I’m beginning to feel kind of hungry. I think I’ll go inside and get something to eat.”

“What do you generally take as your ordinary diet, Joe?” we asked.

“Pie,” he answered.

TOC     INDEX

The Perfect Gift

A Little Study
in the Art of Tasteful Giving

It so happened that a little while ago I was placed under a very considerable obligation to my friend and neighbour MacPherson, and I determined to make him a suitable gift as a small return for his kindness. As it was near Xmas, the idea of a Xmas present seemed both obvious and appropriate.

Now I am one of those who believe that the selection of a gift is not a matter to be lightly undertaken. The mere expenditure of money is of itself nothing; among people who are fairly well-to-do, it is even less. What is needed in a gift is some peculiar appropriateness of time and circumstance, some aptness in the present that shows to the recipient that the donor has not only spent his money, but has also devoted his best thought to the affair in hand. This lends a peculiar kindliness to the deed.

It was while I was busied with reflections of this sort that I realized that I had left the Xmas season go by. I determined to give MacPherson his present at New Year’s.

Meantime, it was a source of gratification to me to observe that the excellent fellow’s friendliness was in no way altered by the fact that I had given him nothing at Xmas. His greeting, whenever we met upon the street, was as hearty and as unconstrained as ever. It was a further source of gratification to me to reflect that his New Year’s pleasure would be heightened by the receipt of the well-selected gift that I determined to bestow upon him on that date.

I have always had a peculiar feeling towards the advent of a New Year. It seems to me to be a time peculiarly suited to the renewal of old friendships, the confirmation of existing affections, and the strengthening of unbroken ties.

A present at the New Year carries for me this meaning; and it becomes doubly appropriate when accompanied by some well-selected message, some few but eloquent words that convey to the recipient even more than does the gift itself the sentiments of the donor. Such a message, neatly written upon a suitable card or framed perhaps into a neat turn of verse, is something long to be remembered when the gift itself is laid aside.

It was while I was thinking of this message that New Year’s Day went past.

The chagrin with which I presently realized this fact soon passed away. After all, there is something slightly banal or ordinary in making gifts at a season of the year when all the world is doing so. For at such a time benevolence becomes a trade and charity itself a tax. I, therefore, decided to defer my gift till the middle of January. This slight lapse of time beyond the so-called holiday season would give, it seemed to me, an added touch of good taste.

This decision, of course, now gave me plenty of time to look about me, to consider more carefully MacPherson’s tastes and to suit my gift to his peculiar predilections. The excellent fellow meanwhile continued on a footing of undisturbed friendliness that made it a source of constant satisfaction to me to reflect on the future gratification that I proposed to confer on him.

But at this point certain unforeseen difficulties arose in the selection of my present. I had practically decided upon a gold watch, the inside of which should contain a brief inscription, either in English or Latin, or perhaps Gaelic, as appropriate to MacPherson’s nationality. Indeed, I had virtually decided on Gaelic as having perhaps a richer flavour, an undertone of something not found in the Latin tongue. Such Gaelic phrases as “Hoot, man” or “Come Awa’ Wie Ye” or “Just a Wee Doch-an-Dorris” have a special appeal of their own.

My intentions in this direction were frustrated. It so happened that in a company where we were both present MacPherson drew forth a gold watch from his pocket for our inspection. “I don’t know,” he said, “whether I have showed any of you the watch given to me on New Year’s as the outgoing President of the Caledonian Curling Club.” “What is the inscription on the back?” asked one of the company. “It is Gaelic,” said MacPherson, “and it reads: ‘Hoot, man, come awa’ wi’ ye, and hae a wee doch-an-dorris.’”

I had the same ill-luck, also, with my selection of a fishing-rod, an admirable thing in split bamboo, such as might appeal to the heart of an angler. I had practically bought it and the shopman was about to wrap it up when I was compelled, by a casual remark on his part, to reconsider my purchase. “It is a beautiful rod,” he said; “we just sent a mate to it, almost identical, up to the St. Moritz Country Club. They are giving it as a presentation to Mr. MacPherson, their secretary.”

It is quite obvious that a present cannot, among people of taste, be allowed to duplicate something also given. I found it necessary therefore to pause and to make inquiries as best I might in regard to MacPherson’s belongings. I found him so singularly well equipped that it was difficult to find any article with which he was not already supplied.

It was while I was making these investigations that the middle of January went by.

This, however, proved to be a very fortunate thing. For I discovered that my friend’s birthday was to come on the twenty-eighth of February. This would not only afford me a singularly happy occasion for the presentation I wished to make, but would allow me also six weeks of undisturbed reflection.

During this period, however, a further difficulty opened in front of me. I had not up to this point considered what a singularly difficult problem is presented to the donor of a present in the matter of the price that is to be expended on his gift to the recipient. To expend too lavish a sum smacks of vulgarity and display; too small a price betrays the parsimonious thought. I therefore considered it wise to decide beforehand exactly what price would best suit the requirements of perfect taste. My gift could then be adapted to that.

The result of very serious calculation led me therefore to believe that the sum of thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents would coincide to a nicety with the dictates both of generosity and of restraint. I decided on that. But to my chagrin I found that apparently no object presented itself for my selection that corresponded to that amount. The price of $37.50 was exactly the cost of an electric train, but neither that nor a wicker perambulator (also $37.50) seemed appropriate.

So serious was this new dilemma that MacPherson’s birthday came and went while I was struggling with it. The good fellow even invited me on that occasion to a champagne supper at his house, still innocently unaware of how narrowly he had escaped my benefaction.

Meantime, I am waiting for Easter, a season of the year when the bestowal of a gift is accompanied by a feeling of peculiar reverence and piety. My present intention is to give MacPherson a present at Easter. And perhaps I will; on the other hand, perhaps not. I have become so accustomed to being in a state of pleasant expectation over MacPherson’s present that I hate to terminate the sensation.

And after all, I am not really so very much concerned about it. MacPherson is only one of a long list of people to whom during the past thirty or forty years I have been intending to give appropriate presents. If these lines should meet the eye, or the eyes, of any of them, will they kindly take the will for the deed?

Or, better still, will they please go down to the fifteen-cent store and pick out anything that they like and charge it to me?

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Scenery and Signboards

A Vision of Travel
from New York to Washington

Passing through the tunnels and leaving behind us the surging metropolis of New York, we find ourselves traversing the flat, marshy land of Eastern New Jersey, where ONE HUNDRED ROOMS EACH WITH A BATH can be had from $1.50 up. The scenery is not without its charm, the sunken valley of the Hackensack and the Passaic, the waving rushes and meandering streams, suggest to the poetic mind, WHY NOT TRY GRIP-TIGHT GARTERS?

The ground rises, a varied growth of elm and oak replaces the lowland flats, and we find ourselves in the rich farm land of New Jersey filled with FLUID BEEF, which acts directly on the liver. Here HUMPO may be had for breakfast, and mixed with a little VITAMINGO will probably prolong our life for twenty years.

Nor need we do anything further than – seated just where we are in our luxurious club-car – merely remember the name HUMPO, which in any case comes on every packet and without which the packet is not genuine. Indeed, a simple way is to ask the porter to be good enough to remember HUMPO.

But stop – in our absorption in the view of HUMPO, we have lost an opportunity to BUILD OUR OWN HOME by merely paying a hundred dollars down.

—

We are passing now through historic country. We do not need our guide-book to tell us that it is through this beautiful farm district of New Jersey that Washington advanced, slowly driving the English before him. He made his way between a big CONDENSED MILK board and a UNIQUE RADIO SET FOR 238 DOLLARS. He picked his steps with evident caution, avoiding COATS AND PANTS FOR MEN OF ALL SIZES, for his trained strategic eye detected an opening between CHOW CHOW PICKLES and MALTED EXTRACT OF CODFISH.

This gap had apparently been overlooked by General Howe, and Washington threw himself into it; a notice on a large board, erected evidently by some historical society, shows that he probably enabled himself to do this by taking exercises on the floor of his bedroom for not more than ten minutes every morning with the new MUSSELBILD APPARATUS, which would have been sent to Washington by mail on receipt of a money-order or which he could have obtained from his local dealer.

The interesting fact in this connection is that the British General Howe, had he known it, could also have secured a MUSSELBILD from his local dealer, as they are handled in all parts of the country. Had Howe done this and had they both used the SLIDE-EASY SUSPENDERS that are on each side of the line of the American advance, the struggle of the Revolution might have moved up and down without the slightest friction and with no sense of fatigue.

But look, our train is moving into Trenton, one of the most historic spots in America, where we realize with a thrill by looking out the window that if we need a slight tonic we can secure it from any local dealer for nineteen cents. Our swiftly moving train is now rushing along the shores of the Delaware, and we can see the very spot where Washington and his men crossed in the rude December of 1777; we can shrewdly guess from the notices that have been reared to mark the spot that they used NON-SKID CHAINS, which prevented them from skidding or slipping, and that they had at least an opportunity to reserve rooms with or without baths on the American plan.

We realize as our train rushes forward that we are approaching Philadelphia; rooms with baths, breakfast foods, pills, and non-skid garters multiply on every hand. If we decide to buy a COMPLETE NOBBY SUIT, with an extra pair of pants, we are going to have an opportunity to get it. Or should we need, in order to view the historic spots of interest connected with America’s first capital, a SIT-SOFT COLLAR, there are men here, local dealers, who will be glad to sell it to us.

—

We have rushed past the city of the great Franklin (inventor, no doubt, of the Franklin shoe, the Franklin underwear, and the Franklin adjustable monkey-wrench for stout women), and are now speeding through the open country again. Here for a short time the scenery becomes somewhat monotonous: there is nothing on either hand but deep green woods, open meadows filled with hay (of what brand and whether good for breakfast we are not informed), and the rolling hills and shaded valleys of the Appalachian slope.

Now and then in the distance we catch a glimpse of the sea – unadvertised, it appears, and put to no use whatever. We cross on an endless bridge the broad flood of the Susquehanna, an unused river, so far as we can judge, lying in the gloomy sunshine with no touch of colour more brilliant than the mere blue of the sky or the poor green of the woods.

—

The scene improves as we go forward. The notices of the boards are at a little distance now and we cannot read the words, but the pictures still appear. We are passing through a country of bulls. This is, this must be – Washington! With our faces eagerly set to the window, we draw near to the National Capital; the speed of the train somewhat confuses and blurs our vision and mixes the imagery of the scenery together.

But we infer even from our hurried view of the outskirts of the capital that if any bull wants silk hosiery that neither rips nor tears, he is exactly in the right place for it; and that Washington is exactly in the centre of the yeast district, the canned soup area, that all the great modern medical inventions such as HUMPO, JUMPO, and ANTIWHEEZE are sold there, and that we can get all the soap we want; – in short, look about us – here are Rooms with Beds at $1.50! Meals à la carte, Suspenders, Garters, Ice Cream in the Block, Radios, Gramophones, Elixers of Life, Funeral Directors Open All Night, Real Estate, Bungalows, Breakfast Foods——

In truth – this is America indeed.

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The Life of
John Mutation Smith

How a Typical Citizen of Today Moves Through His Existence

John Mutation Smith was one of the Smiths of Mutation, Massachusetts. His family had come over there about three hundred years ago from England. His grandfather had married Abigail Price, of Price’s Corners; and so had his great-grandfather; in fact most of the Mutation Smiths had been marrying Abigail Prices for three hundred years.

All of which is immaterial to the present discussion, and is only mentioned by accident. The real point is that John Mutation Smith himself differs from those who preceded him, like any other typical citizen of our own time, and this is the account in brief of his life.

John Smith was born in Boston and in Philadelphia. He was never quite certain on the point, because he was born at about the time when his father and his second wife (he was her first husband; she had as yet never married when she married him) moved from an apartment in Boston to the same apartment in Philadelphia. Young Smith’s memories often clung fondly to this house where he was born – or rather, would have done so except that they had torn it down a little later to put up a garage.

But at any rate Smith’s parents didn’t remain long in this dear old home. They lived for a while in Binghamton, N.Y., and in Oneonta, N.Y., and in Akron, O. Smith often used to look back with longing as he grew older to the dear old homestead in Oneonta where six months of recollections twined themselves around his heart.

The little playmates of those days endeared themselves to him forever – except for the fact that he ceased to remember which were in Oneonta and which in Binghamton and which in Akron. And he forgot their names. Also their faces. But their memory he never lost. As a matter of fact, he met one of them years after selling real estate out in Fargo, North Dakota – at least, it must have been one of his childhood’s playmates because the man in question had lived in Oneonta (either Oneonta or Onondaga) at the very time when Mutation Smith was either in Oneonta or Akron. Things like that forge a link between grown men not easily broken – except that Smith never saw this man again, because he was on his way to Vancouver, B.C.

Smith always remembered the little red school house where he first went to school, though he could never be certain where it was. He recalled too how the patriotic little fellows used to hoist the flag in front of the school on the great days of the year. Only he was never quite sure what flag it was, because for a while his father had worked up in Orangeville (Province of Quebec or Manitoba), and it may have been there. They used to have patriotic speeches and patriotic readings (directed either for or against the United States, Smith never could remember which) on Washington’s birthday or Queen Victoria’s.

As a matter of fact, it seems that Mutation Smith’s father took out papers when he got his job in Canada that made him British, but when he lost his job he took back his papers and got new old ones again; and then it looked as if he would get a job in Mexico, and he took out Mexican ones. So young Smith grew up patriotic, if nothing else. He always said that he was all for his country. Just let him take one look at his papers, he said, to see which it was and he was all for it.

So much was he inclined that way at college and at his lodge meetings, later on, he used to be able to recite “Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled!” with tears in his eyes; and also “The Watch on the Rhine,” and “Gunga Din,” and “Rise, Japan!” and “Lie Down, China” – all, I say, with tears in his eyes.

But I am anticipating. Smith’s father’s work in Canada and in Mexico enabled him to get an American education. He went to Cornell University, which became for him for the rest of his life “his dear old Alma Mater.” He felt, as most of the Cornell men feel, that his college days there marked an epoch in his life. He seemed, as it were, to go in a boy, and to come out a man. And yet he was not there very long; ten days in fact. There was something wrong with his credit in certain subjects that was not sufficient and the Dean had to remove him. But when they put him out he was a man. The college had done that to him, whether it liked it or not.

Smith always looked back fondly to dear old Cornell. He used to say that there was something in its wonderful situation, overlooking the waters of the Potomac, that appealed to every fibre in him.

After Cornell, Smith was at the University of Chicago for a term. This, too, he said, made another man of him. After that, he was for two terms at the University of Virginia, a place whose influence and whose beautiful natural site and buildings, laid out, as Smith himself loved to recall, by Stonewall Jefferson himself, made him for the rest of his life a different man; in other words, he came out different from what he would have been if he had stayed the same as he would have been if he had not got different.

Smith’s credit in various subjects being insufficient at Virginia, as they had been at Cornell and Chicago, the Dean removed him. This led to his brief stay at Dartmouth, without which – so at least he himself thought – his development would not have been what it was.

Smith went from Dartmouth to the Massachusetts Tech at Boston, as he wanted to get a glimpse of practical mechanical science. He got it and moved to Johns Hopkins to get an inkling of the latest work in astrophysics. He got it and left in two weeks, taking it with him.

Mutation Smith thus became a typical college man of today. All through his maturer life, he used to love to talk, often through tears, of his Alma Maters – or rather of his Almas Mater, which is the proper plural. He said a college man should stick up for his Alma Maters, and whenever there was any call for funds for endowment or re-endowment of any of his colleges, Smith often subscribed as much as five dollars at a time.

Meantime Mutation Smith, now mature, rendered a different man five times from what he had been, passed from college into life itself. And now for the first time women came into his life. That is to say, up to now women had never come into it. They had merely moved through it like fish through the meshes of a net. Now they came and stayed.

Smith’s experience with them was very different from the life story of his forbears in Massachusetts in this respect. Take the typical case of his grandfather, John Mayflower Smith. He never “met” Abigail Price, who became his wife, because he didn’t need to “meet” her. When he was seven years old, he gave Abigail an oyster-shell. After that he made no sign for four years: but Abigail kept the shell.

When he was eleven years old, he gave her a “conversation lozenge,” which had a motto written on it in red poison – “If you love me as I love you, no knife can cut our love in two.” Abigail kept the lozenge all her life. When John Smith was eighteen, he went with Abigail to a “tea social,” in the schoolhouse – and took her home all alone in broad daylight, the whole four hundred yards to her house. After that, of course, he had to marry her.

They were engaged for two years, during which time Smith went to see Abigail every Sunday from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., spending most of his time standing with her father looking at the pig-pen. They were both twenty when they were married. They had eight children four boys called John and four girls called Abigail.

John was a good husband to Abigail. He took her once to the Falls and once to Boston. And one day, when she was crying over something, they say he walked right across the room and kissed her. After he died, Abigail never married, but spent the rest of her life talking about him.

But of course none of this kind of thing would apply to John Mutation Smith, the one under discussion. He belonged not to that age, but to this. I have said that women never came into John Mutation Smith’s life until after his college days, never in any serious way. There was, of course, a certain element in his life, as in that of the young men of today, that suggested the possibility of love. There was, for example, little Janey Doodoo, whom he knew in his first year at college.

He used to take little Janey out in his Ford, and kiss her – a few dozen times at a time – and squeeze her up to about a pressure of eight pounds to the square inch. And Janey would wind herself around him and stroke his hair back and push his ears up and turn his collar crooked. But it was just a boy and girl affair. At least, that was all it seemed, to look at it – just a boy and a girl.

Then there were Nettie Nitty and Nina Nohow and Posie Possum – all girls at college. John took them out sometimes for the afternoon, sometimes for the evening – sometimes, even to the town soda-fountain. Smith used to love to look back later on to this first dawning awakening of affection with the first six girls that he ever loved. There is nothing so beautiful in life as love’s young dream, and when it comes six abreast, it is overwhelming.

Still, after all, it amounted to but little. It cost next to nothing, involved no legal consequences, no action in the courts, no mental collapse, and no question of the penitentiary – in short, it was not love.

Reality only came to John Smith in this respect after he left college and went out into the world. It was here, right out in the world, that he married Abigail Price. It was the first time either of the young people had ever been married. They lived in a tiny apartment and sang and laughed and were happy all day long, for the whole ten days of their marriage.

They might have stayed married ever so long, only John’s boss – he had gone into the flour and feed business – wanted him to move to Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Abigail didn’t like the name.

So they parted, still friends, while there was yet time. John Smith used to look back to those bright earlier days of the first marriage he ever made with a sigh of regret. Certain things, he used to say, seem only to come once in life; and a first marriage is one of them.

In Ypsilanti, John married Mrs. Thompson – Bessie Thompson. That was, as nearly as he could remember, her name; but it may have been Jessie. The marriage turned out to be an error, a fatal error, one of those life errors that we make in love. Within a month each realized that he, or she, didn’t love her, or him. John found himself staring at the blank wall – it seems the only thing to do in that case – and realizing that his life was wrecked.

Mrs. Thompson stared at the other wall.

They parted. And for a long, long time, nearly a year, John Smith remained unmarried. His heart, he said, was numb. He drove out a little in a buggy with one of the local girls. But his heart was numb all the time they were out.

John’s business in the flour and feed failed. So he moved away and opened a drug store in Montpelier, Vermont, and then closed the drug store and went into the wholesale and retail cigar business in Topeka, Kansas. And after that he was for a while up in Canada in real estate in Saskatoon, and after that he went into the school book business on Commission in Bangor, Maine, with a side line of patent ginger ale bottle tops.

John always said that he felt the full charm of business life – the joy that so many have felt in founding a business and seeing it grow and expand for perhaps three or four months, before it collapses.

During all these years of his business life, Mutation Smith was married – in fact, several times. But there were no children. The rules of the apartments where they lived never permitted it – except in Saskatoon, but then there were no apartments in Saskatoon.

In the end, John began to grow old. He would sit for hours in the chimney corner, or rather in the gas grate, musing on his past life, thinking of all his birthplaces, and all his playmates, and of each of his first loves, and of the dear old town, each of the dear old towns, where the old crowd, all the old crowds, could be pictured waiting to welcome him – if he could only sort them out in his mind.

And thinking thus, I imagine that John Mutation Smith, child and citizen of our time, often grew thoroughly sick of the time in which he lived.

Meantime in the merely worldly sense Smith had accumulated a very fair competence. He had done well out of his failures at Ypsilanti and two or three other places, he had had a disastrous fire in Topeka on which he had cleaned up a good deal, and he had incurred a total bankruptcy in Saskatoon that had put him on his feet.

But his heart was sad. He often asked himself what his life had amounted to anyway, and it didn’t add up to much.

And now I hear, quite recently – or perhaps I have imagined – a strange thing about John Mutation Smith, namely, that he is about to make a new move in life.

It seems that he met again the other day Abigail Price – the same one of long ago. And Abigail, like all the Abigails, has waited and has never married again.

And they are going to be remarried and are going to go back and settle again in Mutation, Massachusetts, where nothing ever changes. They have bought a frame house with walnut trees in front of it. They are old people now, of course, nearly thirty-six both of them, but it’s a large house, such a large house, and there are no rules against children within fifty miles. So perhaps you can’t tell.

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Inference as an Art

How Even an Amateur May Forge a Chain of Logic

I suppose that there is nothing so fascinating to the human intellect as the following out of a close chain of reasoning – the kind of thing that is called in the detective stories “an inexorable concatenation of logic.” Perhaps it is the detective story that has made this kind of thing so fashionable in our generation.

Personally I must say that I like now and then to try my hand at such an exercise, and to see what conclusions I can draw in regard to the casual people whom I meet or see – a stranger observed on a train or a random passenger on a street-car. No doubt I am not alone in this. I imagine that the attempt to unravel the mystery of our fellow-men in this fashion is a favourite pastime with many of us.

I lay no claim to any particular skill in observation or reasoning power. But I may at least say that interest and industry have brought to me what might seem a rather surprising measure of success; so much so that at times I find myself “arguing out” the person whom I see with results that presently justify each separate stage of my reasoning.

—

I had, no later than last week, a curious illustration of this. It happened that I was on a train, in a chair-car, going north from my own city for a vacation in the woods. At such-and-such a station – the name is of no consequence; if necessary, though, I could furnish it upon request – there entered into the train a party of five persons. I set myself to observe them quietly from behind my newspaper.

It was at once evident that they all knew one another. The fact that they got on the train together, that they were all talking together, and that one, the senior of the party, held the tickets for all, justified this first step of reasoning.

Of the party themselves the oldest was a man of about thirty-five to forty years, the next a lady perhaps a little younger, then a girl in her teens, and finally two little boys dressed almost alike. Here then was a second problem – what was the connection or relationship between them? I set myself to thinking it out. Under what circumstances does a man carry with him two little boys in similar suits? Why should a woman say to a man, “Have you got the children’s hold-all?” Hold-what? And why were they holding it?

The explanation came upon me, as such things often do, with a sudden flash. The five persons were a family! The man was the father, the lady was his wife, and the two little boys, identical in dress, strongly alike in features, were brothers!!

Another conclusion followed almost immediately. They were starting on a summer vacation – the man, for instance, was carrying what I recognized to be a fishing-rod, the girl in her teens had under her arm a tennis racket in a case, and the porter had carried in for them a long leather bag with wooden sticks protruding over the top, which a little close reasoning showed to be golf clubs!

This neat piece of deduction carried with it quite naturally a further conclusion. This was to the effect that their vacation was to be spent on or near (or under) the water. The two little boys each had with him a toy yacht. These, I argued, would only float on water, and hence in the mountains or on a farm would be of no purpose. In addition to this, each child had on its head a sailor hat with the legend H.M.S. Resolute. If not water, the boys would hardly have been named after a ship.

The reader might ask at this point, how can I speak with such confidence of child, of children, of a girl in her teens? How could I know that they were children? I answer very simply that I could not and did not know it. I argued it only as a fair inference from their appearance.

On the basis thus laid down, I was able next to name to myself the exact destination of my unknown acquaintances. At the end of the line is a well-known summer resort, situated beside a lake. The train was to go to this point as its terminus and it was to stop nowhere else in between. Therefore the passengers were going to this station. This was but logic.

I now set myself to see what further information I could piece together in regard to the personality, etc., of the group under observation. Here I must admit that my conclusions were halting and more slowly formed. Yet bit by bit I made progress. I observed that the lady presently took out a newspaper, and holding it right side up, remained for some time with her eyes fixed upon it. I inferred from this that she could read and write.

Meantime a similar observation of her husband convinced me that he was a lawyer. He sat for some time reading, or at least observing, a volume which bore the title “Law Reports,” from his pocket there protruded a newspaper or journal with the heading in capitals “CANADA LEGAL TIMES,” and he carried with him a bag of the kind commonly known as a brief-case. The inference was that he was either a lawyer or a liar.

So far, then, my conclusions were that the party consisted of a well-to-do lawyer and his wife (well-to-do because they rode on the train instead of walking) going on, or proceeding on, a vacation to, or in, the water.

The next step was to try to work out their names. This I admit is a far more difficult process. Whether a name can actually be transferred from mind to mind by intense concentration of thought is an open question. Perhaps it can and perhaps it can’t. At any rate, in this case I failed entirely, in spite of sitting with my mind intensely concentrated (till aroused by the conductor).

But where internal reasoning fails, observation may succeed. And so it proved. By keeping my ears open, instead of my mind, I was soon able to educe that the man’s name was Henry. I argued this from the fact that his wife said, “When are we supposed to get in, Henry?” and a little later, “You sent a telegram, didn’t you, Henry?”

The man’s answer, “Yes,” could be construed as an admission that his name was Henry.

The wife’s name, I divined, or at least diagnosed, to be either Bessie or Mum. The man addressed her as Bessie, the children Mum. Later on it occurred to me that the word Mum was a short, or abbreviated, form of Mother. Very shortly afterwards, also, I was able to reason that the man’s name was Henry Williams. Stamped in black letters on the end of one of his valises was the legend H. Williams. Could anything be more convincing?

—

Indeed, just as I concluded this chain of reasoning, I realized that I knew them. . . . In fact, the man came across the car and sat down beside me.

“How are you?” he said. “Off on a vacation to the lake, I suppose? I’m just taking Bessie and the kids up there for a fortnight.”

Then I realized that of course he was Henry Williams. I’ve known him and Bessie Williams for about sixteen years. In fact, I think that one of the little boys, I forgot which, is my godson.

—

The trouble is that I am often so tied up in these chains of logic that I get tangled.

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Our Get-Together Movement

The Way We Have Organized to “Get Together” in Our Town

I want to tell about the Get-Together Movement we’ve been carrying on in our town, because I think it will be a help to people to get together in other towns.

The way it began was this. For some time past some of us had been feeling that we didn’t get together enough. Whether it was from lack of opportunity or from lack of initiative, I don’t know. But the fact was that we weren’t getting together. So some of us began to think of how we could manage to get together better.

So the idea came up that a good way to start a movement in that direction would be to hold a lunch as a start. We thought if we could get together at a lunch it might serve as a beginning. So we began with a lunch.

Or rather, I should say that before we had the lunch a few of us got together at breakfast to work up the lunch. I don’t know whose idea it first was, but at any rate a little group of us went and had breakfast at one of the hotels. We just had a plain breakfast – just cereals and grapefruit and eggs and bacon and a choice of steak – in fact, just the things they either had on the bill of fare or could get on half an hour’s notice. It was quite informal. We put one of ourselves in the chair, as president, and had no speeches or anything of the sort except that the president said a few words, mainly about getting together and one or two about how the other men just added a word or two about how we hadn’t been getting together in the past and hoping that in the future things would be different and we would get together.

It was felt at the same time that the purpose of the club should be service, and it was decided that a good form of service would be to eat lunch.

So the lunch came off soon after and was an unqualified success in every way. The president explained the aim of the organization, and a simple outline of a constitution was drawn up. For the use of others I append here the two or three principal clauses:

Air of the organization— To get together.

Means to be taken to accomplish it— By coming together.

Purpose of the organization— Service.

Means of effecting it— By cultivating in the members a sense of service.

Politics of the organization— None.

Religion of the members— None.

Ideas represented— None.

Education and other tests for membership— None.

Fees, outside of food— Nothing.

The constitution was voted with a great deal of enthusiasm. When the lunch broke up, it was felt that a real start had been made.

Well, having the lunch encouraged us to go right on, and so the next thing we had was a dinner. There was a feeling that you can get men together at a dinner where they sit together in a way in which you can’t unless you do.

Of course, it took a good deal of work to get the dinner, a lot of spade work and team work. It’s always that way. But at last we got over a hundred pledged to eat dinner and ventured to pull it off.

It certainly was a big success. It was quite informal. We just held it in one of the big hotels, taking the ordinary table d’hôte dinner that the hotel served that night and letting the members just come in and sit down and start eating when they liked and get up and leave just when they wanted to.

There were no speeches – just the president and one or two gave ten minutes’ talk on service and community feeling. The president said that the way to get these was by getting together: he said that we had already done a lot just by sheer ground work and he wanted us all to hang right on and stick to it and see it through.

Well, since then we’ve been keeping the lunches and dinners going pretty regularly. And as a result we feel that we are beginning to know one another. I sat next to a man the other night whom I don’t suppose I would have ever got to know if I hadn’t sat next to him. We both remarked upon it. In fact, I don’t think there’s any better way to get next to a man than by sitting next to him when he’s eating. You get a community feeling out of it. This man – I forget his name – said so too.

But we’ve cut out the local speakers. Somehow our members don’t care to listen to one another. They all seem to feel that you get more community feeling, a far better sense of genuine fellowship, from an outsider. So we take our speakers now from a good way off.

And we’ve certainly had some wonderful talks. One of the first – I think the man was a professor – was a great talk; it was on “How to Be 100 Per Cent Yourself”; and there was another on “How to Get 100 Per Cent Outside Yourself”; and others on “How to Think 100 Per Cent” and on “How to Be 100 Per Cent Awake.”

There’s no doubt the organization has done a whole lot towards bringing us all together. When the members meet on the street, they always say, “Good morning!” or “How are you?” or something of that sort, or even stop for a second and say, “Well, how’s it going?” or “How’s the boy?”

In fact, you can generally tell the members of our organization on the street just by the look on their faces. I heard a man say the other day that he’d know them a mile off.

So what we feel is that there must be men of the same stamp as ourselves in other towns. We ought to know them and they ought to know us. Let’s start something to get together.

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Short Circuits
in the Open Air

A Lesson on the Links

The Application
of Mathematics to Golf

It is only quite recently that I have taken up golf. In fact, I have only played for three or four years, and seldom more than ten games in a week or at most four in a day. I have only had a proper golf vest for two years: I only bought a “spoon” this year and I am not going to get Scotch socks till next year.

In short, I am still a beginner. I have once, it is true, had the distinction of “making a hole in one,” in other words of hitting the ball into the pot, or can, or receptacle, in one shot. That is to say, after I had hit, a ball was found in the can and my ball was not found. It is what we call circumstantial evidence – the same thing that people are hanged for.

Under such circumstances I should have little to teach to anybody about golf. But it has occurred to me that from a certain angle my opinions may be of value. I at least bring to bear on the game all the resources of a trained mind and all the equipment of a complete education.

In particular I may be able to help the ordinary golfer – or “goofer” – others prefer “gopher” – by showing him something of the application of mathematics to golf.

Many a player is perhaps needlessly discouraged by not being able to calculate properly the chances and probabilities of progress in the game. Take, for example, the simple problem of “going round in bogey.” The ordinary average player such as I am now becoming – something between a beginner and an expert – necessarily wonders to himself “Shall I ever be able to go around in bogey; will the time ever come when I shall make not one hole in bogey, but all the holes?”

To this, according to my calculations, the answer is overwhelmingly “yes.” The thing is a mere matter of time and patience.

Let me explain for the few people who never play golf (such as night watchmen, night clerks in hotels, night operators, astronomers and negroes), that “bogey” is an imaginary player who does each hole at golf in the fewest strokes that a first-class player with ordinary luck ought to need for that hole.

Now an ordinary player finds it quite usual to do one hole out of the nine “in bogey,” – as we golfers, or rather, “us goofers,” call it – but he wonders whether it will ever be his fate to do all the nine holes of the course in bogey. To which we answer again with absolute assurance, he will.

The thing is a simple instance of what is called the mathematical theory of probability. If a player usually and generally makes one hole in bogey, or comes close to it, his chance of making any one particular hole in bogey is one in nine. Let us say, for easier calculation, that it is one in ten. When he makes it, his chance of doing the same with the next hole is also one in ten; therefore, taken from the start his chance of making the two holes successively in bogey is one-tenth of a tenth chance. In other words it is one in a hundred.

The reader sees already how encouraging the calculation is. Here is at last something definite about his progress. Let us carry it further. His chance of making three holes in bogey one after the other will be one in a thousand, his chance of four one in ten thousand and his chance of making the whole round in bogey will be exactly one in 1,000,000,000 – that is one in a billion games.

In other words, all he has to do is to keep right on. But for how long? he asks. How long will it take, playing the ordinary number of games in a month, to play a billion? Will it take several years? Yes, it will.

An ordinary player plays about 100 games in a year, and will therefore play a billion games in exactly 10,000,000 years. That gives us precisely the time it will need for persons like the reader and myself to go round in bogey.

Even this calculation needs a little revision. We have to allow for the fact that in 10,000,000 years the shrinking of the earth’s crust, the diminishing heat of the sun and the general slackening down of the whole solar system, together with the passing of eclipses, comets and showers of meteors, may put us off our game.

In fact, I doubt if we shall ever get around in bogey.

—

Let us try something else. Here is a very interesting calculation in regard to “allowing for the wind.”

I have noticed that a great many golf players of my own particular class are always preoccupied with the question of “allowing for the wind.” My friend, Amphibius Jones, for example, just before driving always murmurs something, as if in prayer, about “allowing for the wind.” After driving he says with a sigh, “I didn’t allow for the wind.” In fact, all through my class there is a general feeling that our game is practically ruined by the wind. We ought really to play in the middle of the desert of Sahara where there isn’t any.

It occurred to me that it might be interesting to reduce to a formula the effect exercised by the resistance of the wind on a moving golf ball. For example, in our game of last Wednesday, Jones in his drive struck the ball with what he assures me was his full force, hitting in with absolute accuracy, as he himself admits, fair in the centre, and he himself feeling, on his own assertion, absolutely fit, his eye being (a very necessary thing with Jones), absolutely “in,” and he also having on his proper sweater – a further necessary condition of first-class play. Under all the favourable circumstances the ball only advanced fifty yards! It was evident at once that it was a simple matter of the wind: the wind, which was of that treacherous character which blows over the links unnoticed, had impinged full upon the ball, pressed it backward and forced it to the earth.

Here then is a neat subject of calculation. Granted that Jones – as measured on a hitting machine the week the circus was here – can hit two tons and that this whole force was pressed against a golf ball only one inch and a quarter in diameter. What happens? My reader will remember that the superficial area of such a golf ball is 3.1415 times 5/4 square inches multiplied by 4, or, more simply, 4PR^2. And all of this driven forward with the power of 4,000 pounds to the inch!

In short, taking Jones’s statement at their face value the ball would have traveled, had it not been for the wind, no less than 6 1/2 miles.

I give the next calculation of even more acute current interest. It is in regard to “moving the head.” How often is an admirable stroke at golf spoiled by moving the head! I have seen members of our golf club sit silent and glum all evening, murmuring from time to time, “I moved my head.” When Jones and I play together I often hit the ball sideways into the vegetable garden from which no ball returns (they have one of these on every links; it is a Scottish invention). And whenever I do so Jones always says, “You moved your head.” In return when he drives his ball away up into air and down again ten yards in front of him, I always retaliate by saying, “You moved your head, old man.”

In short, if absolute immobility of the head could be achieved the major problem of golf would be solved.

Let us put the theory mathematically. The head, poised on the neck, has a circumferential sweep or orbit of about two inches, not counting the rolling of the eyes. The circumferential sweep of a golf ball is based on a radius of 250 yards, or a circumference of about 1,600 yards, which is very nearly equal to a mile. Inside this circumference is an area of 27,878,400 square feet, the whole of which is controlled by a tiny movement of the human neck. In other words, if a player were to wiggle his neck even 1/190 of an inch the amount of ground on which the ball might falsely alight would be half a million square feet. If at the same time he multiplies the effect by rolling his eyes, the ball might alight anywhere.

I feel certain that after reading this any sensible player will keep his head still.

A further calculation remains – and one perhaps of even greater practical interest than the ones above.

Everybody who plays golf is well aware that on some days he plays better than on others. Question – how often does a man really play his game?

I take the case of Amphibius Jones. There are certain days, when he is, as he admits himself, “put off his game” by not having on his proper golf vest. On other days the light puts him off his game; at other times the dark; so, too, the heat; or again the cold. He is often put off his game because he has been up too late the night before; or similarly because he has been to bed too early the night before; the barking of a dog always puts him off his game; so do children; or adults, or women. Bad news disturbs his game; so does good; so also does the absence of news.

All of this may be expressed mathematically by a very simple application of the theory of permutations and probability; let us say that there are altogether fifty forms of disturbance any one of which puts Jones off his game. Each one of these disturbances happens, say, once in ten days. What chance is there that a day will come when not a single one of them occurs? The formula is a little complicated but mathematicians will recognize the answer at once as x/1 + x^2/1 . . . xn/1. In fact, that is exactly how often Jones plays at his best; x/1 + x^2/1 . . . xn/1 worked out in time and reckoning four games to the week and allowing for leap years and solar eclipses, it comes to about once in 2,930,000 years.

And from watching Jones play I think that this is about right.

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The Family at Football

Showing How the Great College Championship Game of the Season Was Variously Reported

The Official Report

(More or less like this)

Williamson got the ball and opened up with a low kick down field against the wind. Smith punted. Jones fumbled. Brown fell down. Robertson got up. Peterson tackled low. Johnson kicked high. Thompson touched down. Jackson converted. Quarter time. Jones kicked. Diplock ran four yards. Brown was put off. Thompson came on. . . . Yards. . . . More yards . . . half time . . . quarter kick . . . punt . . . yards . . . points . . . GAME.

As Seen from the Stadium Benches, Row 4, by Miss Flossie Fitzclippet Brown, and Reported to Her Girl Friend in Conversation.

Certainly it was a wonderful game. I had on my wine-colored dress and the hat to match, and it was cold enough so that you could wear fur around your neck. That’s one of the great things about football games, you can wear fur. That’s why they play so late in the season, at least so some of the boys said. Most of the girls had on cloth coats, so of course you don’t see as much colour as at a ball game in the summer. But the two teams wore bright-colored sweaters.

One side – I think it was our side – had bright blue, and the other side were in dark red. But they are not a bit careful of their suits when they play and some of them got into a frightful mess from falling down by accident on the ground. But when they get too dirty the umpire turns them out of the game and takes on a man with a new sweater. The boys explained it all to me.

But I really know a lot about the game because my brother Ted plays on the team. They give another touch of colour by having some of the boys stand along the edge of the ground with bright bathrobes on. The umpires have on white sweaters and there are people called referees and they wear long white coats to give a touch of light.

The game was terribly exciting. The side that I think was our side were all kicking the ball one way and the other side the other way. Jack was sitting on one side of me and Bruce on the other and they explained everything so clearly – all about the yards and the different points – that I could understand practically all of it very soon after it had happened. Sometimes, of course, only the referee understands and the scoring has to be done on a special board at the end of the field so as to add it up. But I could tell which was our side all the time even when they changed courts after each rubber.

I saw ever so many people that we knew there because where we were in the grandstand, by standing up and looking round you could see practically everybody. I thought a great many of the hats perfectly sweet. They seem to be wearing softer colours this autumn. I saw one hat of Valencia blue felt that was just a dream.

Papa and Uncle Peter were there, but I don’t think they saw us. They seemed to be looking at the game all the time.

It got tremendously exciting toward the end. Both sides were exactly even with the same number of sets and the boys explained to me that it was just a question now which side could knock down the referee and sit on him. No doubt it sounds brutal, but really when you are there you get so excited that you forget. Again and again as he slipped in and out putting the ball into position, they nearly got him, but each time he slipped out.

Just at the end it got so exciting – I don’t know what it was – something to do with yards, that I stood right up on the seat. So did a lot of the girls. Jack and Bruce had to hold me by the ankles or I might have fallen.

And in the end, I think that the side that I think was our side won the whole game! Wasn’t that splendid?

Oh, football is just delicious.

As Reported by Mr. Edward Chunk Brown, Senior, Father of Miss Flossie Fitzclippet Brown, over the Coffee and Cigars at His Dinner Table that Evening.

You didn’t see the big game today? You certainly missed it. My boy Ted was playing in it. You ought to have been there. Ted was playing in the forward line, and I must say Ted put up a great game. I tell you, this college football is about as fine and manly a sport as you can get.

Look at Ted. Why, Ted was just a little shrimp till I got him started into football at the prep (I was always keen on the game. My brother and I both played on the college team in 1895, though Peter wasn’t what you’d call really first class). Well, look at Ted now. Why, he’s heavier than I was myself.

Yes, sir, that was a great game today. At one time they broke right through the centre and they’d have got clear away with it but for a tackle that my boy Ted made – one of the best tackles I ever saw, at least in the game today. Of course, they do less running than we did, but Ted got in one pretty good run today. Ted’s quick on his feet, and what’s more, Ted can use his head. Now there was one time today when Ted – Ted – Ted – Ted – Ted.

As Reported by Miss Mary Deepheart Brown, Elder Sister of Miss Flossie Fitzclippet Brown and Daughter Of Edward Chunk Brown, Senior, in a Confidential Letter to One of Her Six Only Friends.

I must tell you all about the perfectly wonderful football game last Saturday. I hadn’t seen Ernest for three days and I was afraid that something had happened or that I had said something, because once before Ernest said that something I said had made him feel just terrible for days and days till he knew that I hadn’t said what I said.

And then I got a note from Ernest to ask me if he might take me to the game, and so I knew it was all right. Papa said, at first, that he would come with us, but I was so afraid that it might mean a chill, that I got Flossie to get Mother to get Ted to get Uncle Peter to take him.

Anyway, it meant that I went with Ernest by ourselves and there was no one else there, and we had awfully good seats, right up at the back in a corner. There was a post partly in front of us, but it didn’t prevent us from seeing anything.

All through the first half of the game – football games are divided into three or four halves of about five minutes each – Ernest kept looking into my face in the strangest way. I felt that he had something that he wanted to say, and I looked back at him to try to read in his face what it was, but of course Ernest has the kind of face that is hard to read even when you look right into it.

Once Ernest seemed to be just going to say something, but at that very minute, there was a lot of shouting and yelling, something must have happened, I think, to do with the football. But presently, in the second half when the game was less exciting, because I think that both sides were exactly even or something, and the time nearly all gone, Ernest quite all of a sudden, put out his hand and took mine and said that there was nobody in the world who meant to him what I did and that ever since he had known me he cared for nothing except me, and that the law office are now giving him over four hundred dollars a month and that if I wouldn’t marry him he would give up the law altogether and take the first boat to Costa Rica.

And I said I didn’t know what father would say and Ernest said he didn’t care a damn what father would say (Ernest is so manly in the way he talks) and he offered to break my father’s neck for me if I liked. So I said that I hadn’t ever meant to get married but to be some sort of sister, but that if he liked, I would get married this time for his sake. And just then one of the caretakers came to tell us that the game was over and the people had gone and they wanted to sweep up the seats. So we went home together.

I think football is a perfectly wonderful game.

As Reported by Peter Hasbin Brown, Brother of Edward, Senior, and Uncle of Flossie, Mary and Ted.

Yes, I saw the game today. Pretty rotten. Ed’s boy Ted was playing, and so I went with Ed and his little boy, Billie, to see the game. I hadn’t seen a game since 1900, but of course Ed and I both played on the college team, though Ed was no good. As I see it, they’ve pretty well spoiled the old game. There doesn’t seem to be a rule that they haven’t changed. Why, nowadays you can hardly understand it. In my time, of course, the game was far more exciting.

Well, for one thing, the fellows could kick further, and the men were heavier and could shove harder and run faster. Now the whole game seems just dead. My nephew, Ted, has the makings of a good player in him; he plays something of the kind of game I did. I’ve told him a lot of things. But you take all these rules about yards, and downs and offside play, it’s all changed; a man can’t understand them. I sat next to my little nephew Billie – he’s Ed’s son, he’s eight – and I said, “Can you understand it, Billie?” and he said, “Not quite, Uncle Peter.”

There you are, he couldn’t understand it, and I said, “It was a darned sight better game thirty years ago, Billie,” and he said, “Was it, Uncle Peter?” He’s a bright kid.

But the way they have the game now, there is no interest in it. There was a whole lot of shouting and yelling, but no enthusiasm. A lot of them were waving their hats and hooting till they were hoarse, but there was no enthusiasm. When I used to play and some one would shout from the touch line (we used to stand right around the game then), “Go it, Pete!” well, that was enthusiasm. You don’t get that now.

Oh, no, the game is gone to hell.

As Reported by Billie Comingup Brown, Aged 8, Younger Son of Edward Brown, Senior.

Gee! It was wonderful! Gee!

By Mrs. Uptown Brown – Otherwise “Mother” – Parent of Flossie, Mary, Ted, and Billie, and Wife of Edward Chunk Brown, Senior.

No, please don’t go yet. We’ve plenty of time for another rubber. They’re all at the football game. My little boy Ted is playing, and my two little girls are there, too. Now, do stay! And won’t you have another whiskey and soda?

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Life in the Open

Reflections Vouchsafed to Me by My Hostess in the Wilderness

“Yes, we come up every Fall,” she said. “We’re both so passionately fond of the open air. Ransome, will you close that window. There’s a draft.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the butler.

“And we love to do everything for ourselves. Ransome, will you please pass me that ash-tray from across the table?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the butler.

“And we live here quite without form or ceremony – that’s what makes it so nice, it’s all so simple. Gwendoline, you may put on the finger-bowls, and tell William to serve the coffee in the cardroom. . . .”

So I knew then that I was getting an opportunity to observe at first hand the life in the open, the simple life, right in the wilderness, of which my richer friends have so often spoken to me.

—

“We like, you know, the roughness of it,” my hostess went on after we were seated over our coffee – “the journey up and everything. Of course, it’s not quite so rough to come up now as it used to be, now that they have built the new motor highway. This time we were able to bring up both the town cars, and before that it was always a question just what we could bring up.

“I do think the big closed cars are so much nicer when one is roughing it – Gwendoline, will you pass the cigarettes, please? – they keep the air out so much better, and our new one, perhaps you noticed it, is the kind in which you can draw the curtains and arrange it something like a drawing-room on a train. We are able to come up at night in it. I always think it much nicer – don’t you? – to come up through the mountains at night. One sleeps better than in the day.”

—

There was a little pause, during which two noiseless maids removed the coffee cups and a noiseless man in a semi-feudal dress brought in picture-book logs for a fire six feet wide.

“Of course, it is not all so easy,” continued my hostess. “The food up here is always such a question. Of course, we can always get meat from the village – there is quite a village now, you know, though when my husband first came up twenty years ago there was nothing – and we can get milk and eggs and vegetables from the farmers, and, of course, the men bring in fish all the time, and our gardener manages now to raise a good deal of fruit under glass, but beyond that it is very difficult to get anything.

“Only yesterday, for example, the housekeeper came to tell me that we had not enough broilers for lunch; somebody had made a silly mistake and we were one short. We had to send Alfred (he drives fastest) back to the city with the big car to get one. Even then, lunch was half an hour late. Things like that happen all the time. One has to learn to be philosophical.

“But surely it is worth it – isn’t it? – for the pleasure of being up here in the wilderness, so far away from everything and everybody. I sometimes feel up here as if one were cut off from the whole world – William, will you turn on the radio?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the footman.

“I think it’s the municipal elections and, of course, my husband is tremendously interested. His company has been trying to get better city government for so long; they need pure government because of their franchises, and it has been costing them a tremendous lot of money to get it. What do you say, William, not working? Then will you please ask Jones to tell the electricians to look at it?”

—

My hostess smoked her cigarette in silence for a minute or two, while her attentive eye followed the maids as they moved about the room, picking up coffee cups and ash-trays and bringing cigarettes. “Gwendoline,” she said, “I think you had better tell James to give us more furnace heat and see that there are fires in the upper bedrooms tonight. It’s turning a little chilly.”

“I always like,” she continued, turning to me again, “to see to everything myself. It takes trouble, but it’s the only way. But, I beg your pardon, you were asking me something. Fishing! Oh, yes, there is the most glorious fishing up here. I must tell Gwendoline to tell Mrs. Edwards to see that they give you fish at breakfast. It’s just an ideal fishing country, my husband says. We send William out every morning, and sometimes William and Ransome both. Often, so my husband tells me, when the weather is really clear he has William up and out by four o’clock – my husband is so fond of early rising, though he can’t get up now himself the way he used to – but he always likes to get William and Ransome out early.

“They bring back the most beautiful fish. Trout? Yes, I think so. I don’t precisely know because, of course, I never go myself, but I think trout and sea-bass and finnan haddie – they keep us beautifully supplied. Was that finnan haddie that you caught this morning, William?”

“Doré, ma’am.”

“Oh, yes, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am, just the same.”

“Thank you, William, you can take the glasses; we’re done with them. You see, William knows all about fish, as he comes from Newfoundland, do you not, William?”

“No, ma’am, Saskatchewan.”

“Some place of the sort, so I thought.”

—

“What do you say – our amusements here? Oh, we simply don’t have any. We have always both felt that up here in this beautiful air (that French window at the end of the room needs closing, Ransome) it is amusement enough just to be alive. So we have never bothered to think about amusements. Of course, my husband had the billiard-room built because that is really his one pastime, and this card-room because it is mine, and we put in the tennis courts, though it was hard to do, so as to have them for the children. But that is all. We have the golf links, of course – perhaps you noticed them as you came up.

“It was really quite a triumph for my husband making the course here. He did every bit of it himself. At one time he had nearly two hundred Italians working. My husband, as you know, is terribly energetic; I often call him a dynamo. The summer when he was building the golf course he never seemed to stop; always sitting with his cigar in his mouth first under a tree on one side, looking at his Italians, and then on the other side – in fact, he was always somewhere. I used to wonder how he could keep it up.

—

“But I am sorry,” concluded my hostess, “I am afraid it is time I was ordering you all off to bed. We keep such early hours here that we go to bed at midnight.

“But perhaps you’d rather stay up a little and play billiards or cards, and there are always one or two of the servants up – at any rate till about three, and then, I think, my husband is sending William fishing. Good night.”

TOC     INDEX

Save Me
from My Friends

—From My Friend
the Deadbeat

He has about him such a simple and appealing way, so friendly and so flattering and so humble. And each time I know that it is another ten dollars that he wants, just that, only that – not my affection nor my converse – just ten dollars. Yet he gets it – each time for the last time – he gets it.

—

Sometimes he meets me in the street, always on a fine day, a fine warm day with a touch of the springtime, or the summertime, or the soft touch of autumn or the sunny exhilaration of winter in the air. He would never stop me in the rain, or the sleet. He comes, by instinct, with the sunshine. And his manner, so cheery – the spring tulips are not in it with him.

“And how,” he asks, “is your little boy?”

I swallow the bait at once. “Fine,” I answer, “he was not so well last week, but since Tuesday he’s in great shape.”

“That’s good, that’s good,” says my deadbeat friend, literally beaming with pleasure.

It seems impossible to doubt his affectionate concern.

“By the way,” he continues, as if in a mere train of thought incidental to his pleasure over my little boy’s health, “I’m glad I ran into you this morning. It just happens that today I’m rather squeezed – in fact, I’m in a corner——”

I recognize the situation at once. I realize that my friend’s troubles always take the form of an angular imprisonment. That corner – you’d think that he would learn to keep out in the open! But no, apparently he gets squeezed, shoved, pushed – all those things happen to him – and as a result of the squeezing and shoving and pushing he gets into a corner.

Picture then the situation? Here’s a man in a corner, a man with an affectionate regard for my little son, and ten dollars will take him out of that corner. Refuse him? Quite impossible.

And after all perhaps it’s worth it. If all my friends would greet me with the same winning friendliness and the same solicitude, I think I’d gladly invest ten dollars in each of them.

—

Unfortunately, however, being pushed into a corner is not the worst thing that happens to my friend. Sometimes apparently the ground opens under him and he falls into a hole. “Old man,” he pleads, “I’m in a hole – till Tuesday.” I note that there is always a termination of his sufferings in sight. By some incurable optimism, he really thinks so.

However deep the hole – and at times it is described, so to speak, as a hell of a hole – he will be out of it by Tuesday. And better than that, by next month at the latest, any next month, he expects to “see daylight.” This expectation, I know, he has cherished for years. Just what the daylight is, what form it takes, I don’t know. But my friend confidently expects to see it.

A man, then, who is sunk in a deep hole, but who expects daylight next Tuesday – certainly that’s worth ten dollars.

—

Sometimes I meet him with other people. And if I do I know that he is some one’s guest. If he is in a club, some one has brought him there. If he is at the theatre, some one has paid for his seat. If he is at a concert, some one has given him a ticket.

And wherever he is, whatever he regards, always the same enthusiastic appreciation. Not for him to criticize! Not for him to find the company dull, or the music poor, or the play inferior. Everything is first rate always; for he is being treated, being paid for, and has lost the right to be disagreeable.

—

I have often wondered how it must feel to be such a man. Staggering along in life, in holes and pitfalls, beaming on surly acquaintances, cherishing the make-believe illusion of a friendship that he sold for twenty dollars long ago; homeless himself – for he lives nowhere – yet entering with admiring words the homes of others. “This is a charming room!” he says. Any room is charming to him, where there is a free seat, and the chance of lingering to a meal. How does it feel, I wonder, to be him?

But notice the queer thing about it. Never mind his motives, or why he does it, but just take the fact. How amiable he is! What an uncomplaining companion! What a fund of appreciation of our lightest jests, what a wealth of sympathy – in words, at any rate – with our most superficial sorrow.

Judge him just as an appearance, and what a man! What a heart!

—

Thinking thus of my friend, the deadbeat, I sometimes apply the same reasoning to the rest of us. How agreeable we are when we are forced to be. You, my dear reader, in the presence of your employer, how bright you are, how good-tempered. When you wish to tell something, or to get something, how easy and accommodating you are, how free from irritation. In other words, each of us, when we want something, instinctively takes on a pleasant bearing. And perhaps if we keep it up it sinks into our character and what was make-believe becomes reality.

—

So let it be, or rather so let it might have been, with my poor friend, the deadbeat.

Might have been, I say, for just of late, just within the last couple of months, a great change has come over him.

It appears that two months ago he saw daylight – actually saw it. What caused it I don’t know, but the first shape it took was a suit of new raiment, a stylish coat, a cane with a gold head, a hat in the latest fashion; and on this followed a suite of rooms in a first-class hotel, and membership, revived I know not how, in one of the most exclusive clubs.

What the source of this restored fortune may be I do not know, but of the existence of the change there seems no doubt.

Nor is the change limited to these externals only. It goes deeper than that. When I talk with my friend on the street now – which is rare, for he no longer lingers in the sunshine – he does not ask after my little boy. He has no time. He is too busy telling me of the house that he is building in the most secluded of the suburbs; he is too much occupied with explaining how rotten was the play he saw (from a box for which he paid) last night; how inferior the music and how poor the food at this or that reception.

And of my lost ten dollars, and my twenty, and the two fifteens and the big hole that cost me fifty – not a word. He has no thought of repayment. It has all passed from his mind. And after all, why should he repay? I realize that the repayment lay in his humble manner, in his gentle flattering interest, and in the pathos of his make-believe solicitude.

I must wait till perhaps he will have burned up his new daylight. And meantime I must keep a ten-dollar bill warm in my pocket for him.

TOC     INDEX

—From My Friend
the Reporter

He came up to me on the platform just after I had finished giving my address, his notebook open in his hand.

“Would you mind,” he said, “just telling me the main points of your speech? I didn’t get to hear it.”

“You weren’t at the lecture?”

“No,” he answered, pausing to sharpen his pencil, “I was at the hockey game.”

“Reporting it?”

“No, I don’t report that sort of thing. I only do the lectures and the highbrow stuff. Say, it was a great game. What did you say the lecture was about?”

“It was called ‘The Triumphal Progress of Science.’”

“On science, eh?” he said, writing rapidly as he spoke.

“Yes,” I answered, “on science.”

He paused.

“How do you spell ‘triumphal,’” he asked; “is it a ph or an f?”

I told him.

“And now,” he went on, “what was the principal idea, just the main thing, don’t you know, of your address?”

“I was speaking,” I said, “of our advanced knowledge of radiating emanations and the light it throws on the theory of atomic structure.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, “till I get that. Is it r-a-d-i-a-t-i-n-g? . . . the light it throws, eh? . . . good. . . . I guess I got that.”

He prepared to shut his little book.

“Have you ever been here before?”

“No,” I said, “it’s my first time.”

“Are you staying in the new hotel?”

“Yes.”

“How do you like it?”

“It’s very comfortable,” I said.

He reopened his book and scribbled fast.

“Did you see the big new abattoir they are putting in?”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t hear of it.”

“It’s the third biggest north of Philadelphia. What do you think of it?”

“I didn’t see it,” I said.

He wrote a little and then paused.

“What do you think,” he asked, “of this big mix-up in the city council?”

“I didn’t hear of it,” I said.

“Do you think that the aldermen are crooked?”

“I don’t know anything about these aldermen,” I said.

“No,” he answered, “perhaps not, but wouldn’t you think it likely that they’d be crooked?”

“They often are crooked enough,” I admitted, “in fact, very often a pack of bums.”

“Eh, what’s that, a pack of bums? That’s good, that’s great” – he was all enthusiasm now – “that’s the kind of stuff, you know, that our paper likes to get. You see, so often you go and take a lecture and there’s nothing said at all – nothing like that, don’t you see? And there’s no way to make anything out of it. . . . But with this I can feature it up fine. ‘A pack of bums!’ Good. Do you suppose they took a pretty big graft out of building the abattoir?”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “that I don’t know anything about it.”

“But say,” he pleaded, “you’d think it likely that they did?”

“No, no,” I repeated, “I don’t know anything about it.”

“All right,” he said reluctantly, “I guess I’ll have to leave that out. Well, much obliged. I hope you come again. Good night.”

And the next morning as I was borne away from that city in the train I read his report in the paper, headed up with appropriate capitals and subheadings:

THINKS ALDERMEN PACK OF BUMS

Distinguished Lecturer Talks on Christian Science

“The distinguished visitor,” so ran his report, “gave an interesting talk on Christian Science in the auditorium of the Y.M.C.A. before a capacity audience. He said that we were living in an age of radio and that in his opinion the aldermen of the city were a pack of bums. The lecturer discussed very fully the structure of anatomy which he said had emanated out of radio. He expressed his desire to hazard no opinion about the question of graft in regard to the new abattoir which he considers the finest that he has seen at any of his lectures. The address, which was freely punctuated with applause, was followed with keen attention, and the wish was freely expressed at the close that the lecturer might give it in other cities.”

—

There! That’s the way he does it, as all of us who deal with him are only too well aware.

And am I resentful? I should say not. Didn’t he say that there was a “capacity audience” when really there were only sixty-eight people; didn’t he “punctuate the lecture with applause,” and “animate it with keen attention”? . . . What more can a lecturer want? And as to the aldermen and the graft and the heading up, that’s our fault, not his. We want that sort of thing in our morning paper, and he gives it to us.

And with it, as his own share, a broad and kindly human indifference that never means to offend.

Let him trudge off into the night with his little book and pencil and his uncomplaining industry and take my blessing with him.

TOC     INDEX

—From My Friend
with a Speech to Make

“They’ve invited me to attend this darned banquet next month,” said Robinson. “They want me to propose the toast to Our Country. I suppose it’s easy enough, eh?”

He spoke with an affectation of indifference, but I knew what he was feeling underneath.

“I suppose,” he went on, “all I have to do is to get up and jolly them along for fifteen minutes, eh?”

“That’s all,” I answered, “just jolly them along.”

—

I met him again a week later.

“They’ve got me down for this banquet on the 12th,” he said. “They want me to propose Our Country.”

“Do they?” I said.

“Yes, and I was thinking that perhaps a good idea might be to say something about the history of the country, don’t you think?”

So then I knew that Robinson had got to the stage of looking up the encyclopedia.

“A good idea,” I answered.

“I thought,” he continued, “that I’d trace it down from early times and show the way it has come on. How do you think that would go?”

“I think,” I said, “that that would go as far as you like.”

—

“Don’t you think,” asked Robinson, a few days later, “that it might be a good idea to work in Christopher Columbus – something about Columbus having been the first to dine on this continent, something about his dining à la carte, or à la chart – you see, ‘carte’ and ‘chart’ – if I can just work it in. Don’t you think?”

“I think,” I told him, “that if you can only work it in, it will make a tremendous hit.”

That afternoon I saw him in the Public Library taking out the Life of Christopher Columbus.

—

I happened to meet Robinson a few days later out in the country on a Sunday walk.

“They’ve got me down to speak at this big dinner on the 12th,” he said.

“Oh, yes.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any difficulty about doing a thing of that sort, is there?”

“None whatever,” I answered.

From the look on his face, I could realize the stage of anxiety he had reached.

“I didn’t know,” I said, “that you were in the habit of walking out here?”

“I don’t,” he answered, “not usually. But I thought with this speech to make next Tuesday week, I’d take long walks so as to be able to think over a few ideas. Don’t you think that’s a good plan?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “fine! How far do you walk each time?”

“Oh, about ten or twelve miles.”

“Yes,” I said, “that ought to do it.”

I watched him disappear a little later along the side of a meadow, seeing neither the dandelions nor the daisies, but with his mind riveted on Christopher Columbus, and murmuring in his fancy, “Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen——”

Such shipwreck does the prospect of a “Pleasant Evening” make of the human mind.

—

“I was thinking,” he said on the following Saturday, “that a fellow might get off something about the future of the country, eh?”

“An excellent idea!” I assured him.

—

“You weren’t at church,” I said to Robinson, “on Sunday——”

“No,” he answered, “I have been working on this damn speech for this damn banquet; I’ve got to follow right after the damn toastmaster. Gad! I’ve got to think up some damn thing or other to say between now and Tuesday.”

—

On Monday, Robinson was not at his office. I understood that he was working at his speech. I saw the banquet announced in the newspapers that day and noticed that there were to be fifteen speakers.

—

On Thursday morning I called up Robinson on the ’phone. “No,” he said, “I’m not coming downtown. They got me stung to speak at this cursed banquet tonight on Our Country. Gad, I don’t know what to say. I’ve had no time to study it up.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“Yes, and what I think I’ll do is, I’ll write the blasted thing out. It’s more certain that way, isn’t it?”

“Dead certain.”

—

That evening I called Robinson up again about seven-thirty to wish him success.

His voice sounded muffled.

“I’m not going,” he said, “I’ve caught a sort of a nasty chill. I think it’s perhaps a touch of bronchitis (here he coughed), or else it’s just a touch of lumbago or sciatica; in fact, I’m in pretty poor shape. I guess I’d better not go out tonight. My wife says I’d be crazy to go.”

“What about your speech?”

“I sent it over,” he answered, “Billy Jones is going to read it to the boys.”

—

Next day I naturally supposed that the episode of Robinson and his speech was all over.

It soon appeared that it was only beginning.

“Great heavens,” he said to me when we met that morning, “did you see the morning paper?”

“The Chinese massacres?” I asked.

“No, my speech, and Good Gad – Billy Jones! The paper hardly put in any of it, anyhow, and left out all the best parts, and what they did put in Billy Jones got all bashed up.”

“Bashed up?”

“Yes, look at this, where I said, ‘This country has a great destiny in front of it,’ Billy Jones put it, ‘This country has a great destitution in front of it.’ How the ——— could he have—”

I didn’t stop to hear any more.

—

Robinson is still talking, even after the lapse of months, of what he would have said if he had been able to go, of other ideas that came to him later, of jokes that he thought would have gone down well, of gags that he would have had half a mind to put in.

And he really thinks – or tries to – that his wife wouldn’t let him go to the banquet.

TOC     INDEX

—From My Friend
the Guide

Now that I am safely returned from my annual fishing and hunting trip into the northern woods, I wish to set down the truth about my friend “Ed” the guide.

I do not care to do this in the heart of the woods, nor on the edge of a waterfall, nor on the waters of a lonely lake. It might have hurt his feelings.

I class Ed as my friend because I call him “Ed”: if this doesn’t constitute friendship, what will? In other things we are not so much connected: in point of race Ed is half English, half French-Canadian, half Algonquin, and partly from the United States. I have heard him say, too, that his mother came from Germany. In fact, Ed is a melting pot.

The first thing I object to in Ed as a guide is that he never seemed to know his way. A guide ought to know that much anyway. “I’m not just sure,” he used to say, “which way we go here, but I guess this is the track. You just carry the canoe up this here hill and I’ll walk ahead and take a look.” Most of the time when we were on the march I carried the canoe and Ed “took a look” in various directions, strolling gently among the pine trees.

“You just start a fire,” he would say, “while I look and see if this is the lake where we fish after supper.”

I spent most of my time in carrying the canoe, lighting fires, and washing dishes. Ed mostly smoked and told stories of other men he had taken out.

“I took a gentleman out here last fall,” he said, “a mighty nice man of the name of Richardson, or Richards; you’d likely know him for he came from either New York or Cleveland. We caught a beauty right here above this fall, just as good as the big one you got just now. Well, sir, this Mr. Richardson he was so pleased when he seen that fish that he gave me a fishing rod. We was standing right here, with this Mr. Richardson right on that rock where you are, and I was here inside him like, and he got this big trout, all of three pounds, just like that big one you got.”

“Did he land it?” I asked, speaking through the noise of the water.

“I done it for him,” answered Ed, “just the way I landed yours. Well, sir, as I say, when Mr. Richardson seen that fish landed, he said, ‘Ed,’ says he, ‘that’s the biggest fish I ever caught or seen caught. I’m so pleased,’ he says, ‘I’m going to give you a rod.’”

Ed paused and shook off the bite of a fish that had bothered him. He could not-catch fish better than any one I ever saw.

“He had in his hand,” continued Ed, “one of them rods made of split wood, like the one you’re fishing with. ‘Here, Ed,’ he says, when he come off the rock, ‘take this here rod.’ I’ve got it still back home.”

After this, of course, there was nothing to do except give Ed my rod. I had to live up to the standard of Mr. Richardson.

—

I lost my best knife very shortly afterwards in the same way.

“That’s a dandy knife you’ve got there,” said Ed, “you can’t get them there up here. This Mr. Richardson I was talking about at the fall had a knife just the mate to that. We was sitting here one evening and he was peeling potatoes with this knife just the way you are. We’d had a dandy catch at the fall, just like what we got today, only today they run a little bigger, and Mr. Richardson was feeling pretty good after it. ‘Here, Ed,’ he says, says he, ‘take this knife for a reminder.’ I took it and kept it and I had it till I lost it just as we were starting on this trip. Yes, sir, he says, ‘Ed,’ says he, ‘take this knife.’”

—

It appeared that Mr. Richardson also got rid of his landing net on the trip. “Take it, Ed,” – these were the words he is reported to have used, “I shan’t be wanting it back in the city. You keep it.”

So my landing net followed Mr. Richardson’s.

—

As we moved towards home, I realized that bit by bit Richardson had parted with his equipment. “Take it, Ed,” were the words he generally used. Could I say less? My best rod, my net, two reels, my book of flies, were all gone when we were still a hundred miles from home on our way back. I estimated that at this point the year before Richardson had had no fishing tackle left. Then I realized with concern that from this point on Richardson had begun to lose his clothes.

“This Mr. Richardson,” said Ed, “had one of them fishing coats same as yours. They’re certainly a mighty handy coat. And on the way out of the woods – in fact, it was somewhere here – we’d been having mighty good sport, nearly as good as the sport you and I have had, and Mr. Richardson give me his coat. It seems he never wore it in the city. ‘Take it, Ed,’ says he, ‘I won’t be wearing it.’”

—

Next day, at a waterfall a few miles lower down, Ed indicated for me the very spot where Richardson had parted with his fishing cap.

Twenty miles below that is the spot, which I will show to any one for ten dollars a day, where Richardson gave away all his socks, his two red handkerchiefs, and his three extra shirts.

—

The crisis came that evening. As we sat by the fire Ed promised to show me next morning the very spot where Richardson gave him his boots. It seems that the exact spot can be located to a nicety. I lay awake thinking that night with the moonlight falling through the pine trees and the river singing in the silence, thinking of Richardson’s boots.

Dimly I began to remember that I had heard something about a man from my own town whose name actually was Richards, or Richardson, or something like it, and who died of pneumonia just on his return from a fishing trip.

—

That night I took action. In the silence of midnight, I rose from my grey blanket and stole off among the pine trees. I took nothing in the way of fishing equipment, but I had my boots on. I followed the down-way course of the river and two hours after daylight I struck a railway track and a train that took me home. I have my boots still.

But I often think of poor Richardson when the time came when he saw Ed looking at his fishing pants as he sharpened up a two-edged hunting knife.

TOC     INDEX

People We Know

The Man
in the Pullman Car

I had hardly had time to sit down in the smoking end of the Pullman car and to get my pipe alight before he spoke to me.

“Cold, isn’t it?” he said.

So I knew at once who he was: he was the Man in the Pullman Car – the Man who is always in the Pullman car, waiting to talk to me. I could see his railroad folders and his almanacs and his little “books of hundred facts” in a satchel that was open beside him. These are what he uses to gather the information that he expends on me.

If it had been at another time of year, instead of saying, “Cold, isn’t it?” the Pullman Man would have said, “Warm, ain’t it?” These are his only two greetings.

He gave a look out of the window.

“She’s losing time along here,” he said. This remark is just a part of his special and technical information about the train. The Man in the Pullman Car calls all trains by their numbers, calls all engineers “he,” knows when there is a flat wheel under the express car, knows by instinct when we come to a water tank, can distinguish a village in the pitch dark, and calls the conductor “Charley.” Travel, with him, takes on the air of a continued personal distinction.

The Pullman Man opened up a newspaper and lit a cigar.

“How do you think things will begin to shape for the election?”

This means, of course, the presidential election. After all, there is one every four years. For one whole year a man can say, “How do you like the election?” then for another year, “There don’t seem to be much talk of the next election yet.” And after that it’s only two years and the thing rushes to a vortex.

The Pullman Man doesn’t really want to know what I think about the election. He wants to tell me what he thinks about it, or rather, the whole truth about it, all of it personally guaranteed. He knows – doesn’t guess, he knows – the exact result: selection of the candidates, the making of the platform, and the precise means, known to him alone, by which the whole of New York State will be swept clean.

I could reveal all this if I like. But it would be unfair and might make nation-wide trouble.

Suffice it to say that the whole thing is not only certain, but it is guaranteed. The Man in the Pullman Car has offered to pay me, “cash down,” a hundred dollars if his forecast is not correct. Where it will be put down, I don’t know.

When the election had been reduced to a certainty, the Man in the Car asked me how the big fight suited me, and whether the races down at Jacksonville had suited me, and passed rapidly through a succession of fights, scraps, championships, world series, world’s record swims, high dives, flights, and oyster-eating contests. How he remembers all this, I can’t conceive. They ought to give courses in this kind of thing at the colleges.

But his range goes further than that.

He pointed to an item in his paper. “I see,” he said, “where this guy Mussolini is getting busy again.” Then he gave me a brief résumé of European world news. Mussolini, it appears, is a slick guy, but my acquaintance would not be surprised if presently Mussolini got it in the neck.

The King of Spain, nifty though he appears, may get it in the bean at any time; in fact, most of the remaining kings and potentates of Europe may get similar strokes on the bean, neck, or cocoanut any day – except King George, who is all right. What Europe really needs is the introduction of the municipal home rule that they have in my acquaintance’s own home town – I forget its name – in the Middle West.

The future of Europe, however, is not a topic of sufficient importance to hold a man’s interest very long. The whole place is so obviously doomed that unless it can retrace its steps, introduce the short ballot, with the Oregon system of the recall, the Illinois tax system, and Massachusetts primary law, it will slide over the abyss.

So he changed the topic.

“How did that last Atlantic flight suit you?” he asked. It is always his flattering assumption that the world’s events must be trimmed to suit my fancy.

Then he told me about the Atlantic, the real Atlantic, as gathered up into the little “books of handy facts” and absorbed by the Pullman Car Man.

Who could guess, for example, that the Atlantic is 3,160 miles across; that it is 210 feet deep in the shallowest place and 5,300 in the deepest; that if the entire population of the United States stood side by side and held hands, they would just nicely reach across it; that if the whole population of Trenton, New Jersey, or Akron, Ohio, stood on one another’s heads, they would just reach to the bottom of it?

You don’t get these things in a college education. Somehow they get left out of it. But now that the Atlantic has been flown across, it has been “put on the map,” and the Man in the Car has to have his vital facts about it.

We spent thus a pleasant half hour in discourse together. And then something occurred to spoil it.

Another Man came in.

Now conversation with the Man in the Pullman Car is all right and most agreeable, provided that he has the field to himself. The danger is that there may come in a man with the same equipment as himself, the same range of knowledge, who talks back at him. Then there is trouble – as happened on the day of which I speak.

The second man had hardly had time to unpack his grip and get out his almanacs and his railroad folders when his quick ear caught something.

“Mussolini,” he said, “him slick?” And then he proceeded to tell the exact length of time that Mussolini would last among really slick men. I think it was four minutes.

This inevitably suggested the presidential election of the present year: and it came out right away that the whole forecast that the first man had given me, and that he now repeated, was “bunk.” The second man, it seems, had just come from the whole of the South and most of the Middle West and the entire Atlantic Seaboard, and he was prepared not only to deny the forecast, but to back up the denial with cash down. I gathered that I was to hold stakes for the two of them, for about forty weeks, at the rate of $1,000 a side.

When I presently left them, they were still in angry dispute, offering a thousand dollars if the presidential election went the other way, guaranteeing that Mussolini would or would not be made King of Austria, putting up money that Erie, Pennsylvania, had more population than Burlington, Iowa, and that the distance across the Atlantic was more, or was less, than 3,000 miles.

I heard afterwards that the train ran off the track after the next station, and that the Pullman Car was rolled down the embankment.

But they probably never noticed it.

TOC     INDEX

The Criminal by Proxy

“Here’s a pretty slick one,” he said, looking up from his newspaper with a glitter of interest through his spectacles, “about this fellow who got away with the trust funds. Did you see it?”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t see it.”

We were seated side by side in chairs in the hotel rotunda. I didn’t know the man; I just happened to be sitting beside him.

“The way it was,” he continued, “this fellow seems to have got himself up like a clergyman, see, and then he came in and presented this check drawn on the Orphans’ Trust Fund and a letter with it. Of course, the letter was phoney and so was the check. But it was the get-up that fooled them. It seems he got away with a thousand dollars. Pretty slick trick, eh?”

“It certainly was,” I answered, “especially as it was orphans’ money.”

“Sure,” he rejoined, burying himself again in his paper.

Presently he looked up again.

“Here’s one about a fellow in Albany,” he said, “who worked one nearly as good, or perhaps better. He was a mighty smart customer! He came into this bank all dressed up in black and said his mother was dead and asked them to telegraph the bank in a place he called his home town, see, and get him money. Of course, he made out he was all broken up about his mother dying and they sent the message and in about half an hour they got what they thought was an answer saying to give him the money. You see, it wasn’t an answer at all! Just a message he got sent to them by a fake messenger boy.

“They give him the money all right, two hundred dollars, and he gets clear away before they get the real answer that the bank don’t know him. That was a good one, wasn’t it?”

“Excellent,” I said. “The man that did that must be a splendid fellow!”

“I’ll say so!” said my new acquaintance.

He sat quiet for a while absorbed in his paper, with little murmurs from time to time such as, “I see the guy in France who choked the two women got clean off.” “I see the boys who broke out at Atlanta aren’t caught yet.” “Well, sir, here’s a darned funny one about asphyxiating an old cashier with gas – ain’t that a peach?”

—

Presently he spoke again.

“What won’t these fellers think out next! Hear this. It’s from Cedar Springs, Vermont.

“‘Yesterday two men dressed as if for hunting and carrying double-barreled shot-guns and fishing-rods entered the Cedar Springs Central Bank during the noon hour. Their peculiar costume enabled them to approach the president and the cashier without suspicion and to cover them by laying down the guns across the counter. After securing some $10,000 in currency, they tied up the president and the cashier, shoved the money into a fishing-basket, locked the bank door on the outside, and sauntered off into the woods.’ That’s a good one, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” I said, and I added, “You seem a good deal interested in that sort of thing.”

“Well, I do,” he answered with a chuckle. “Perhaps I have more humour than most men. But at any rate I can’t help admiring the slickness with which these fellers seem to get away with it. It’s a caution the kind of dodges they think out. I like to read about them. I can almost forgive these fellows when the thing is ingenious enough. There’s an element in it you’ve got to admire.”

“In that case,” I said, “listen to this. I don’t think it’s in your paper. Mine’s a second edition. This only happened early this morning; in fact, I heard some one talking about it as I came down in the car.”

I read from the paper.

“‘Last night, under pretense of having come in response to a burglar protection automatic alarm,’ – that’s terribly clever, isn’t it? – ‘thieves gained access to a chemical warehouse——’”

“A chemical warehouse!” the man interrupted. “Well, well, I’m in that business myself.”

“‘In Madison Street.’”

“Gosh! that’s my street!”

“‘The watchmen of the building were under the impression that they were searching for burglars. The thieves successfully opened a large safe on the fifth floor in which valuable drugs——’”

My acquaintance seized the paper in excitement.

“What’s that, show it to me!” he cried. “Great Scott, that’s my warehouse! My heavens! they’ve got away with the stuff in my safe. The dirty hounds! Great Caesar, what are the police doing! They ought to be hanged for a thing like that! That’s criminal! Great Scott, that’s robbery, plain robbery! . . .”

He had risen, fairly hopping with anger and excitement, and left me to dash across the rotunda. When I last saw him he was careering round the hotel, shouting for a telephone to call up the central police station.

It occurred to me, as I laid down the paper, that the “slickness” of crime depends a good deal on the slant from which you see it.

TOC     INDEX

The People
Just Back from Europe

Who Never Should Have Left Home

“Yes,” said my hostess as she poured me out a cup of tea, “we’re back from Europe.”

“You were there some time, were you not?” I asked.

“We were on the Continent all summer,” she said; “we had a perfectly glorious time!”

“How did you like Paris?” I asked.

“Fine. There were some people from Kentucky in the same hotel with us – the Johnsons from Louisville, perhaps you know them – and we went round with them all the time; and of course we got to know a lot of other Americans through the steamship company and through the hotels and like that.”

“The French,” I said, “are so easy and agreeable to meet, are they not?”

“Oh, yes, indeed, we met people from all over – from Maine, and from Chicago and from the Middle West, and quite a lot of Southern people, too. In fact, we were quite a cosmopolitan crowd.”

“Very much so,” I said, “and did you see much of the monuments and the historical things around Paris?”

“Just about everything, I imagine,” my hostess replied with animation. “There was an American gentleman from Decatur, Indiana – I think he’s professor of French in the Baptist College there – and he took us all round and told us all about everything. He showed us Washington’s Monument in the big square and Benjamin Franklin and that tablet there is – perhaps you’ve seen it – to President McKinley – oh, yes, indeed, we saw everything.”

“Of course you saw the pictures——”

“Oh, certainly. There’s just a lovely picture done this year by a young girl from the art school in Omaha and they’ve got it hung up right there in the annual exhibition. We thought it the best thing there.”

“I’m sure you did,” I said, “and I suppose you liked the restaurants and the French cooking?”

“We did indeed, and, say, we found the cutest little place – it’s in the Roo something or other, near that big church where the American Legion went – and they have everything done in real American style. My husband said you couldn’t get a better steak in Chicago than what they had there, and they had pancakes and waffles with maple syrup. Really, as we all agreed, we might just as well have been at home.”

“But you didn’t stay in Paris in the hot weather, did you?”

“Oh, no, we took a trip to Switzerland. We drove in our own car all down the valley of that big river.”

“It’s beautiful country, isn’t it?” I said, “and the people are so interesting.”

“Yes, we were with some perfectly lovely people from Memphis, Tennessee – the Edwardses – perhaps you met them – and they had their car, too, and they had some friends (from Buffalo) staying at a place that’s just about halfway. And of course these friends introduced us to a lot of Americans that were staying there.”

“And did you like Switzerland?”

“Yes, ever so much – won’t you have some more tea? We found it so hard to get tea the way we like it, over in Europe. Oh, yes, we just loved Switzerland. We saw a ball game in Lucerne – or no, I’m wrong, it wasn’t in Switzerland that we saw the ball game. That was in Germany.”

“Oh, you went to Germany?”

“Indeed we did. I think we must have been all over it.”

“And did you get on all right with the Germans?”

“Oh, yes, indeed. We met some people in Berlin – the Phillipses – that actually came from the same town in Connecticut where my grandmother was raised. It just shows how small the world is.”

“It does, indeed,” I agreed.

“Oh, but Germany – they’re so up to date! It was there that they had the ball games, twice a week, and of course we took them all in. It was just like being back home. And then they had the radio and we listened in on a speech all the way from Philadelphia – just think of it; and they have our moving pictures and quite a lot of American newspapers. In fact, as Pa said, we might just as well have been sitting in New York.”

“Just as well. And where else did you go?”

“Oh, we were down in Italy for a while – at Rome and at Venice——”

“Venice is wonderful, isn’t it?”

“Yes, isn’t it? We were with some people there from Tallahassee, Florida, and they said – these people said – that really when you look at all the lagoons and marshes around where Venice is, it might as well be Tallahassee.”

“You didn’t go to Spain, I suppose.”

“No, we didn’t. In fact, we were pretty well warned not to. They say that in Spain it’s all Spanish and it’s very hard to get around; and so you don’t find anybody there. In fact, they told us that there was nobody at all in Spain last year.”

“Well,” I said, as I rose to take my leave, “I’m sure you’ve had a most interesting trip. I hope you’re going to make some use of it.”

“I certainly am,” replied the lady brightly, “I’m doing a paper for our Ladies’ Fortnightly Culture Club on the National Characteristics of the European Nations. I’ve got to have it ready on Friday so I guess I’ll have to hustle some.”

“You certainly will,” I murmured to myself as I went away.

TOC     INDEX

The Man
with the Adventure Story

“I had a pretty narrow shave the other day,” he said, as the little group settled themselves into the smoking end of the Pullman.

“Talking of shaves,” interrupted one of the others, “I wonder if any of you fellows have seen this new safety razor that you can sharpen without taking it to pieces? It’s certainly a peach. But I beg your pardon,” he added, “I’m interrupting you. . . .”

“It’s all right,” said the man. “I was just saying that I had a pretty narrow shave for my life the other day – in fact a matter of touch and go. I’d got off the train away up north at a flag station right out in the bush country where there’s such a lot of prospecting and so much talk of deposits of copper and nickel——”

“I see where International Nickel touched a hundred yesterday,” said another man, comfortably lighting his pipe.

“You don’t say so!” chorused three or four of them – and then there was a running series of remarks. “I think myself she’s good for 200 anyway.” – “There’s no limit to what they may get out of that.” – “I know a man, an engineer, who was all over that property long before they began to develop it and he said twenty years ago that there were millions there. . . .”

It took some time for this little chorus to die down. Then the Adventure Man began again.

“Well, I got off at this place – it was just getting dusk and I put on my snowshoes for what would be a five-mile tramp anyway, into the camp. I was to walk straight west along the trail and I knew that a man was to come out from the camp to pick me up part way, do you see, for I didn’t know just where the new camp was located. The trail struck off into the timber and for the first mile or so it went through big pine trees, thousands of them, all straight as a die, and just as silent and lonesome . . .”

“I’ve seen the time,” interrupted an old man in the corner who hadn’t spoken yet, “when you could buy all that pine you wanted at seven dollars, yes, sir, at seven dollars – right there at the saw mill, or they’d dress it for you at a dollar, and hemlock, the very best of it at three dollars. . . .”

“Not at three dollars!” said one of the listeners incredulously. “You mean three dollars a thousand feet?”

“Yes, sir, that’s what I do, three dollars a thousand, board measure.”

All men, at least all men who smoke in the end of a Pullman car know about the prices of lumber just as all women know about the prices of dress material. So there broke out another little chorus of interruption.

“Well, I paid forty-five dollars for hemlock when I built my garage.” “I can get all the hemlock I want at thirty.” “I’ve seen the time——” and so forth.

Till at last the old man in the corner brought the talk back onto the track by saying to the Adventure Man – “What was you saying about that cheap pine you seen up north?”

“I didn’t say it was cheap pine,” he answered, “I don’t know anything about that. I was only talking of a narrow escape I had a while back when I was prospecting up there and started to walk through the bush – this big pine bush – just about dark. I hadn’t got more than half a mile or so into it,” continued the speaker, warming at last to his narration as he felt his audience at last becoming silent, “before I began to feel something about the stillness that began to get me. It was all so quiet, no wind, the trees absolutely still, and the white snow with the night shadows falling on it – there was something spooky about it, something eerie——”

“Did you see where those fellows out on Lake Erie got lost on the ice?” cheerily interrupted a man who hadn’t spoken yet. “Certainly a corker, wasn’t it.”

“I mind the time,” said the old man in the corner, “when I’ve seen the whole of Lake Erie frozen across, right from Port Stanley over to Cleveland.”

“For the matter of that,” said another, “you take those big lakes up north, even the great big ones, they all freeze solid – Temagami and Mistassini – all of them.”

“They say they’ll have a hard time for ice this year, though,” said another man, shaking his head, “there were a lot of places where the cut was no good – couldn’t get more than eight inches or a foot.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the man who spoke just before. “Why use lake ice at all? You can get factory ice now nearly everywhere; in our business we’re putting in a frozen air plant that will cut out ice altogether.”

At this point, just providentially and without design, there fell a little pause and the Adventure Man got started again.

“Well, anyway,” he resumed, “I kept going through the bush as hard as I could peg, on my snowshoes, for I knew if I didn’t meet the other man before dark I couldn’t do it at all. You see after a while the trail wasn’t broken at all and it wasn’t blazed – it was just straight going in a compass line. . . .”

Some of the listeners nodded and grunted. The word “compass” caught their fancy for a moment.

“Well, I began to reckon by the distance I had gone that I must pretty soon meet this other man and just then I came to a spot where the trees thinned out a little so that there was a sort of open spot with the last of the daylight showing on it. And there I saw right bang in front of me, say fifty yards away, not one timber wolf but about a dozen of them. They were all packed together, and all working away at something that was lying in the snow. I stood stockstill in my tracks. I didn’t dare move. And then just for a minute I got a glimpse of what was lying in the snow, and I can tell you my blood just ran cold when I saw what it was that was attracting those wolves.”

The speaker stopped with a dramatic pause, challenging attention. Then he lit his pipe, quietly and firmly, to lend emphasis to what he was going to say. But he was too late.

“I see the Ontario government are going to raise the bounty on wolves,” said one of the others quietly.

“I don’t think they need to,” said another. “As a matter of fact the wolf’s pelt is quite worth while in itself. Of course there are some of the timber wolves that are apt to be in poor condition (I’m in the fur business) and you can’t use the pelt. But with others there’s good value in it.”

“They’re not in it with fox,” said a third man, and there was another chorus – “I’ve seen the time when black foxes were as thick——” “I tell you it’s all right if you can get them in the bush, but this fox farm industry is all off.” – “All off! Why, there was a fellow down home that got, for a single pair, a single pair mind you, two thousand dollars!”

It took some time for the speakers to remember the Adventure Man. But at last he managed to start again. “I knew it was my turn next,” he said. “I had no gun on me, but I had a sheath knife. I reached down quietly and I cut the thongs of the snowshoes. There was a big pine just beside me and by good luck a branch not more than seven or eight feet off the ground. I got all ready for a spring but just at that very moment . . .”

—

But just at that very moment the car conductor put his head in through the doorway—

“Ottawa! Ottawa!” he called. “All change, gentlemen.”

“Great Caesar!” exclaimed all the crowd at once. “Ottawa, already!!”

And with that they broke, scattered and dissolved.

But no doubt the Man with the Adventure Story is still telling it somewhere, somehow, to somebody.

TOC     INDEX

Short Circuits
in Education

A Year at College

As Revealed
in the Newer Comic Journalism

The discovery has recently been made that a college is a comic place. People who were never inside the gates of a university, and who think that a simultaneous equation is a medicine, now spend their time reading the new college comic magazines and building up from them their ideas of what college life is like. After they have read enough about it and seen enough pictures of it, they get crazy to go to the comic college.

Here is what it seems like to such readers:

A college itself is represented by the edge of a beautiful building with little clouds floating past it, and two college girls walking in front of it. One of the girls is called Tootsie and the other is called Maisie, and Tootsie is saying to Maisie:

“What is the name of your new fiancé?” and Maisie answering:

“I don’t know. I forgot to ask.”

If Tootsie and Maisie are not seen walking in front of the college, they are presented sitting up in one of the dormitory rooms. One of them at least always sits on the window-sill and she has a comb in one hand and a looking-glass in the other.

It is really the old picture of the sirens who sat on the rocks to coax Ulysses, but as the man who drew it never went to college, he doesn’t know that. And it doesn’t matter anyway. The sirens have got nothing on Tootsie and Maisie. They belong with the Nautch girls of Nautchia and the Hitchi-Kitchi girls of the Marquesas Islands. In fact they are all right – except for their passion for repeating little jokes.

“Why did you let Gussie kiss you last night?” asks Maisie.

“Because I didn’t know it was Gussie,” says Tootsie.

After which they go on combing their bobs and eating “fudge.” These are the standing occupations of a comic college girl.

If Tootsie and Maisie are not called by those names, they are designated Fitzie and Nessie or Totsie and Flotsie – or, in short, anything that suggests the Marquesas Islands.

Meanwhile, while Tootsie and Maisie are getting ready for their college day, we step across into one of the men’s dormitories just the other side of the little clouds, and here, seated also on window-sills are two “College Men” – Gussie and Eddie.

The comic college man has a face cut square, like a strawberry box, a shoulder like a right angle, and a coat shaped like the forty-fifth proposition in Euclid. His face is drawn in a few lines, with the brains left out, and if he ever knew algebra, he gives no sign of it. In short, he is a nut.

When we see them, Nut No. 1, Gussie, is seated on the window-sill playing a ukulele, and Nut No. 2 has his ukulele ready to play as soon as Gussie runs out of ideas and jokes. The college man sleeps with his ukulele.

Gussie and Eddie have apparently the same passion for little dialogue jokes as Tootsie and Maisie. These jokes, a generation ago, were put into the mouths of negroes and were called “coon jokes”; or else they were divided up between “Mike” and “Pat” and called “Irish humour”; but now they are known as “college wit,” and every man at college cracks one every ten minutes.

Consequently, when Gussie the Nut has finished his tune on the ukulele, he lays down the instrument and:

Gussie – “Have a cigarette, old man?”

Eddie – “What’s wrong with it?”

Then they take their flasks out of their hip pockets, have a drink, and hit up another tune on the ukulele. This is the way in which the comic college man prepares for his college day.

When the second tune is done and another joke cracked, Gussie and Eddie set out from their room to cross the campus and their walk is always timed so that as they come into one side of the picture, Tootsie and Maisie come into the other.

The campus is represented by two trees and one bird, and a piece of a college window and the edge of a professor’s gown, but away in the background are a group of little figures – nuts and sirens drawn very small – which are intended to indicate that something is going on. Most likely there is a college rush, because college life is so arranged that there are “rushes” and “pushes” and “hustles” going on from September to June.

Any one who studies the college in the comic papers knows that the session begins with the big “Freshman rush” that lasts two weeks and is followed by the “Sophomore push” that goes right on till the football “hustle” begins; after that there is the Christmas Rush and the New Year’s Hootch, and the “scram” and the “prom” and the “punch,” ending with the grand final “rush” at commencement time. All these keep poor nuts Gussie and Eddie pretty busy with their little ukuleles and their flasks, and Tootsie and Maisie hardly have time to keep their hair done.

When they meet in the morning on the campus, all their eight eyes (they have eight among them) are turned at the same sort of angle, four to meet four. This stands for “college love,” and it means that Gussie and Eddie have a “crush” on Tootsie and Maisie, and Tootsie and Maisie have a “smash” on Gussie and Eddie. College love is always pictured as a series of concussions.

When they go past one another, either set of two (whichever has the turn gets off a dialogue joke):

Maisie – “Don’t you think that Gussie looks awfully like Eddie?”

Tootsie – “He does. But Eddie doesn’t look a bit like Gussie.”

This joke was once considered one of the best in Alabama, but now it has been changed to a piece of college wit.

When they have finished their walk across the campus, Gussie and Eddie and Tootsie and Maisie next appear all seated in a terribly comical place called a classroom, taking part in a comical performance called a “recitation.” This is carried on under the guidance of a “professor” or “prof,” and everybody who reads the college press knows exactly what he looks like. He has a bald head and a face like a hard-boiled egg with the shell off, held upside down, and much the same expression as the map of Africa.

A recitation apparently consists of another set of “coon jokes” just like the ones used up in the dormitories. Thus:

Gussie (coming in late for the class) – “What is the Prof. talking about?”

Eddie – “I don’t know. He hasn’t said.”

All through the recitation and the dialogue, Tootsie and Maisie are shooting across the classroom at Gussie and Eddie appreciative smiles and glances that would knock a Marquesas Islander out of a bamboo tree at a hundred yards.

College love moves fast.

In fact, you can see it grow from day to day and from picture to picture. Here are Gussie and Eddie and Maisie and Tootsie at a college dance and Gussie is doing the fox-trot – or the dog-walk – with Tootsie and is saying:

Gussie – “What would you say if I asked leave to kiss you?”

Tootsie – “I’ll tell you afterwards.”

Or here they are similarly at an evening reception, or a college “crush,” or a “push,” or at a “prom,” and whatever they are doing the four are always shooting glances at one another and cracking off dialogue, and when night separates them Gussie and Eddie sit up on their window-sill and play the ukulele and drink out of their flasks, and Maisie and Tootsie eat fudge and comb their bobs.

Oh, there’s no doubt it is a great life, the college life. Ever so many people have said that the college “life” is better than the mere study, and I must say I think so too. Give me Tootsie and Maisie and Fitzie and Nessie all around me, and I’ll guarantee never to study again.

But meantime the pictures take on a cast that means that the year is drawing to a close. The dialogue jokes now have reference to the “exams,” and to Gussie and Eddie, the poor nuts, getting “ploughed,” or “flunked,” or “plunked,” or “dropped out,” or “let down,” or “tripped up” – or any of the other things that happen to nuts in comic colleges. Such as this:

Tootsie – “I heard Eddie will have to leave the college.”

Maisie – “No, the college will have to leave Eddie.”

Or else:

Maisie – “What degrees is Gussie going to take?”

Tootsie – “About ninety degrees Fahrenheit. He’s got to work in a coal mine.”

All this stands for final scholarship. With it are another set of little jokes that indicate the culmination and crown of college love.

Maisie – “Are you and Gussie engaged?”

Tootsie – “No, but he is.”

And then, just as we expected, there duly appears the presentation of the final comic event of Graduation Day, with Maisie and Tootsie in graduation gowns straight from the Marquesas Islands and the two nuts with high collars on (the kind they use in Spain to kill criminals) and flat mortarboards, and they are all going to get their degrees after all, and they are all going to get married, and play the ukulele and live happily ever afterwards.

It’s a great life, this college stuff.

So let us bless the new comic magazine, after all. It has performed once again the magic literary trick of making the picture better than the reality. I am all for it.

TOC     INDEX

The Unintelligence Test

What a Well-equipped Man
Ought to Know

A great American banker, speaking the other day in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (it was not his fault), talked of the requirements of modern banks and the type of man needed. “We don’t want,” he said, “young men who come to us thinking that they know it all; young men who have studied banking in a correspondence course and suppose that they understand it. We want men who will begin with us from the beginning. The less they know, the better.”

In the same way, one of our biggest railway men (290 pounds) is reported as saying recently: “We don’t want young men who know anything about a railroad when they come to us. I’d rather take in a boy who didn’t know one end of a box car from another, than a boy who had ‘studied railroading.’”

On the same topic, a leading steamship man spoke with something like heat, or at least, steam: “We can’t get the young men we want. They are not ignorant enough.”

And the president of a steel company: “They know too much. When I entered the steel business, I knew nothing. I couldn’t even add up a column of figures; I still can’t. How is it that we can get no young men like that today?”

In fact, in one shape or other, the same cry goes up all over the country.

—

So it occurred to me that it might be a good thing to try to meet this demand at the source and stop it. I have, therefore, opened a bureau – or rather I am just going to open a bureau – where young men properly disqualified may find unsuitable occupation.

My plan is something like this. First of all, I intend to sift out the candidates by a series of questionnaires. These are based on the different sets of questions that I see in all periodicals proposed as tests of how much people ought to know. The only difference is that my questions are a little more advanced, more technical. They will run something as follows:

EFFICIENCY QUESTIONNAIRE

How Many of the Following Questions Can You Answer?

Write Plainly. Use Ink. Enclose Ten Cents.

(1) Who is President of the United States?

(2) How many legs has a dog?

(3) What large country is situated between Canada and Mexico?

(4) What is the French for the following: adieu, omelette, pâté de foie gras?

(5) What relation is the Prince of Wales to his father, George V?

(6) How much is 1 and 1?

—

All the applicants will be put through a thorough drill on questions of this sort. If they show any signs of answering them, they are out of it at once and I go no further.

But if the candidates have been thus drilled and brought to a high pitch of equipment, there is just one other detail to which I shall attend before sending them out into the world. They must not ask for money. I notice that all the great authorities I have just quoted – the railway presidents, and the bankers, and so on – lay stress on this. Young men, they say, must not be anxious about their initial salary. They must start low.

My young men are going to start so low that they will be right down on their uppers.

—

Then when I get them into shape, I will send them out with letters of recommendation composed in the following fashion:

THE NEW EFFICIENCY

Sample Letter of Presentation
for Young Man Entering Bank

To the President,

The First, or Last, National Bank.

Dear Sir:

Allow me to present to you as an applicant for suitable employment my young friend, Mr. Edward Edwin Beanhead. He is anxious to fill a post in your bank. Mr. Beanhead assures me that he has never been inside a bank in his life, but thinks that he would know a bank if he saw it, and in any case would soon get to recognize one at sight. Mr. Beanhead knows absolutely nothing of money, has no knowledge of bookkeeping, and can not count. As to salary, just give him what he is worth, no more. I enclose a list of questions whose answers he doesn’t know.

P.S. Don’t let him into the safe, he couldn’t get out.

—

Letter of Commendation
for Young Man Entering a Railway

To the President of the American Pacific Railway (or, give it to the Ohio Central, or the Trans-Siberian if you can’t use it).

This is to commend to your consideration a young man filling all requirements for railroad services as laid down by yourself and others. He is anxious to enter the service of a railway – either steam or horse, he doesn’t care. I asked him if he knew one end of a box car from the other, and he answered, “Which end?” So I think he comes up to standard. But be careful not to run over him.

P.S. I can send his pedigree if you want it.

—

The recommendations of the bureau that I wish to establish will not be confined entirely to brain-workers. It will include also those without brains, who apply for positions not involving work. For example, I am prepared right at the start to offer an applicant for the post of night-watchman, as in the form letter below:

Messrs. Touch & Goe

Warehouse & Storage Agents.

Dear Sirs:

I recommend to you the bearer of this letter for the position of night-watchman. His special qualification is that he has no watch and falls asleep so early that he never sees night. But he has a quick native intelligence, and all you have to do is to teach him to read and write and give him something to keep him awake. Then show him the planet Jupiter and tell him to keep his eye on it, and he’ll watch for you as long as you like. You need pay him nothing for the first ten years. He doesn’t need to eat.

—

Of course, I’ve only just explained the system in mere outline. But I really think that once I get it going it will revolutionize our industry – a thing that has to be done about once every six months to keep it going.

TOC     INDEX

Easy Ways to Success

A Letter to a Parlour Bolshevik
Just out of College

My Dear Clarence:

I gather from your letter that you have just come out of college and are about to launch yourself upon the world. You rightly feel that there is something coming to you after your brilliant success at the university. The high rank which you took in English Composition, in Salesmanship, and in Comparative Religion ought, as you say to yourself, to open for you an easy road to success.

You draw my attention to the “mediocre caliber” – the words are yours – of the men who succeed in this unjust world. What, you ask, do they really amount to? Exactly. They don’t. Their so-called success, as you put it, is merely due to the accident and injustice of the capitalistic bourgeoisistic system under which the mass of the proletariat are exploited by the privileged classes who fatten on the poor.

And you want some of it yourself.

Precisely so, and as I am most anxious to help you, perhaps you will allow me to give you a few directions for exploiting the proletariat. It is terribly simple. I give you one of the very easiest, the most elementary, first.

HOW TO MAKE A FORTUNE
IN REAL ESTATE

Select a piece of ground anywhere close to a large city, and lying in the direction in which the city is about to grow. Avoid land where the city is not going to grow. In buying the land, be careful to pay for it only a very small sum. Sometimes real estate of this sort is bought for a song; so you may, if you like, see what you can do by singing.

After buying your land, hold it for at least three days. It is this careful holding of the land which makes the money. After holding it three days, mark it out into squares and sell it for building apartments on. Sell it for an enormous price.

Then buy another piece of land, hold it for three days, and sell it.

It’s wonderfully simple, isn’t it? Clarence? – only there is just one thing that perhaps I ought to mention. Be just a little careful about the land you buy. With your wonderful education, you are sure to know all about it, but you might just happen to make a mistake. And that would be too bad.

In fact, Clarence, on second thought, I don’t believe I’ll put you into real estate. It’s too tricky. I think you had better go into the stock market. There, of course, you are bound to succeed. As you yourself say in your letter, most of the so-called magnates in the so-called money market who are heralded as so-called kings of finance are really men of no real insight whatever. They merely fatten on the poor.

So if you want to fatten on the poor yourself a little bit, the directions are very simple. Try this method.

HOW TO MAKE MONEY
ON THE STOCK MARKET

Take any daily newspaper and turn to the stock exchange page. You will, after a little practice, easily recognize it by the fact that it is full of queer little figures. With your trained brain, you will soon learn to distinguish it from the cattle market page.

Having got the right page, look down the list of stocks and select one which is about to rise. When stocks rise slowly and gradually, others very sharply and suddenly. For your purpose, select a stock which is about to rise sharply. Estimate for yourself how much money you would like to make and divide this sum by the amount of increase which the stock is about to undergo. This calculation will give you the number of shares which you need to buy in order to obtain the amount of money which you need.

But stop, Clarence, I believe I am wrong again. I forgot that you haven’t got that $10,000 to start with; and you know how tight and selfish the so-called banks are with their so-called money.

Let’s try something else.

HOW TO MAKE A FORTUNE
IN A MERGER

Look carefully all around for two big enterprises that need merging and don’t know it. One good way is to get hold of two large railroads and join them into one small one. Another scheme is to go round and gather the whole of an industry into the hollow of your hand and then close it. And another is to lay pipe-lines to carry anything – any sort of product – to where it has never been carried and then open up the top end of the pipe-line.

All these things are so ridiculously and so selfishly simple that I share your feeling of indignation against the men who have made colossal fortunes (out of the poor) by doing them.

But I am afraid, Clarence, that we must try something else. All these things I have just named take such a lot of time; you’d be over thirty before you really got the world at your feet. We must find some quicker way of getting at the poor than that.

HOW TO SUCCEED
ON A CHICKEN FARM

Have you ever been attracted, as I have, Clarence, at the idea of getting back to the land, leading a real life close to nature, and at the same time not far from a savings bank?

Perhaps you have thought of chickens. In New York alone, one million of eggs are eaten for breakfast, and eggs cost five cents; one chicken lays 200 eggs a year; shake it up well and it will do even better; and it only eats – I forget how little – but say next to nothing. The profit on the thing is obvious, isn’t it, and colossal?

But I am afraid that you may object – I am sure that you will object – that the farm life is too deadening to your soul, not sufficiently intellectual. If so, what do you say to art or literature? There is an attraction for any one who is naturally a good penman in making a fortune out of writing.

HOW TO MAKE A FORTUNE
BY WRITING

If then you decide to make your success by writing, I should recommend to you to write poetry. A good market price for poetry is twenty-five cents a word, and a rapid writer like yourself ought to be able to write thirty words a minute; everything, of course, depends upon speed, but I think you may rate yourself at thirty words, or $7.50 a minute.

This, as you remark, is not much, and I admit that Mr. Ford and Mr. Rockefeller and others most unfairly get more than this and yet write very slowly. Nevertheless, accept the figures as they are; you will see that poetry works out at, say $45 an hour.

Assuming that poets, not being under union rules, work ten hours a day; this will give you $450 per diem. You object, no doubt, that, after all, this means a very laborious life, involving not only constant work but constant observation of nature, accurate records of weather and scenery, and so forth.

THE HIGH PROFITS
OF ART

This being so, you might be inclined, my dear Clarence, to consider some other branch of Art, equally exalted, but less laborious than writing poetry. What do you say to portrait-painting? After your first-year course in geometrical drawing and your diploma in advertising, I am sure you would find no trouble in painting a portrait.

A good portrait, with absolutely first-class colours, high-grade canvas, and a liberal coating of shellac on it, sells for $3,000. As against this, you must offset the cost of your canvas – at least $1; your paint – say three canfuls at fifty cents a gallon; your shellac, at fifty cents a pint; and your net return is cut down to $2,997.

BETTER WORK ON A FARM

In short, my dear Clarence, when I look around you, I find it very hard to give you any advice that can lift you out of your present perplexities. It seems that all the people who have succeeded in front of you have had some sort of advantage. Thomas Edison came along just when people began to need electric light; Henry Ford hit exactly the moment when motor cars were wanted.

Do you know, I think that perhaps, Clarence, the best thing for you to do is to try the old-fashioned plan of getting a job on a farm at $20 a month with your board, or starting as a schoolteacher at $40 a month? Has it ever occurred to you that that may be about your size? Your own city was advertising yesterday for twenty “good men on sewers.” Perhaps you would be a peach in a sewer. Go and try it. You’ll feel more contented anyway.

TOC     INDEX

Fun as an Aid to Business

Is a Sense Of Humour
a Financial Asset?

It is very commonly supposed that to laugh in adversity, to joke over poverty and, if need be, to chuckle in the penitentiary, is the mark of a fortunate and superior mind. But the question still remains whether the man who possesses a sense of humour is better off financially for having it. Does it help or hinder?

We always talk of “getting down to cold business,” “cutting out the funny stuff,” and of “quitting monkeying,” as if all laughter and fun and monkeys were contrary to the spirit of business. Nor is it regarded as a compliment to tell a man that his proposition is a joke and that his offer makes us laugh. Is not a young man in an office warned not to “get too fresh” and not to “try to get gay”? Indeed, is it not the man who has lost his job or whose business has failed who is invited to console himself with his sense of humour?

On the other hand, in the new realm of activity that is called Salesmanship, there seems to be a persistent idea that if you get a man sufficiently amused, you can sell him anything. One laugh and he is lost.

Now, I know nothing about Salesmanship. I don’t think I could even sell a copy of the Harvard Classics to a retired banker in Iowa. Nevertheless, I am given to understand that amusement is supposed to work somewhat as follows:

—

The Salesman enters the Business Man’s office and says to him:

“It is my intention to sell you one thousand hanks of No. 6 thread manufactured by the company that I represent.”

The Business Man snorts.

“Oh, I don’t want you to buy any now,” answers the Salesman. “Wait till I’ve told you that one about the traveling man and the college professor.”

Five minutes later the Business Man, suffocating with laughter, signs an order for not one thousand, but for five thousand, hanks of thread.

On the strength of this ancient and worn-out fiction, many an unhappy young man wanders round the country as a commercial traveler trying to be funny, to pass himself off as a merry dog so full of humour that he couldn’t be dishonest if he tried.

I think the whole idea is wrong. I find that the men who can sell me encyclopedias are the men who suggest that there is some strange, mysterious purpose in their personality. Such a man looks at me with penetrating power and says in a voice that Forbes Robertson might envy, “I have here an encyclopedia,” – and when he says it that way I am sunk.

It is just the same idea as with the Ancient Mariner, when he stopped the stranger and held him back even on his way to a wedding feast.

“He holds him with his skinny hand,

“He holds him with his glittering eye.”

Now, that ancient mariner if he went “on the road” would be worth fifty dollars a day.

I remember once having had a personal experience of the same thing – of the convincing power of earnestness rather than levity. It was late at night on a dark street. I was met and accosted by a gigantic man, very evidently from his build and from the accent of his speech, A Highlander. Like all Highlanders, he used the personal pronouns in a way unknown to other nations.

He took me by the coat.

“She will be Dougall McDougall!” he said, “and she will want ten cents to buy a drink.”

“Yes,” I answered, “and she will get it too.” And she did.

On the other hand, if that man had said, as most of my friends who meet me say, “I heard a rather funny story the other day, I wonder if you’ve heard it,” are not the chances, shall we say, that I would already have heard it?

But in one way a sense of humour can be of real use in modern business life. It can serve as a corrective of bunk about “service” and “helpfulness” – all the “brother-brother” stuff that is spreading like an infection today.

I don’t know who started this. I suppose in a sense we are all brothers. So are the monkeys. But the plain truth is that when a man is doing business, he is not trying to be a brother to anybody – except to himself.

Here are one or two samples of what I mean. I admit that I made them up because I found it a little quicker than looking up actual examples. I admit too that they may be a little exaggerated – though I doubt it – for to a considerable extent, the kind of thing that appears in all the advertising pages of the magazines is of this sort.

SAMPLE NO. 1

Letter from a Firm of Calciminers and House Painters Soliciting Business – or no, I beg their pardon – Offering Help.

MR. FELLOW CITIZEN:

“Is your Home a little dark and gloomy? Do you sometimes look at the blank walls in front of you? If so, let us help you. All we ask is to serve. We know your troubles so well, and feel that we can be of use. Have you ever thought of the effect of a sunset pink in your living-room? And your kitchen? Would you like us to tell you how a coating of thin sky blue – our own cobalt blue – brought happiness to one Home? We wonder if you would care to see our little booklet PAINT AND PUNK? We should so love to send it to you. May we? We only want to help lift a little bit of the burden?”

SAMPLE NO. 2

Here is another.

Letter from a firm of Patent Ice-Box Manufacturers offering to send up “their Mr. Smith” to my House.

DEAR MR. HOUSEOWNER:

“What about a new ice-box? The old one not working very well, eh? Well, then, suppose you let us send up our Mr. Smith to the House. Down here we call him ‘The man who knows about ice .’ Just remember that. He knows – and he wants to tell YOU.

“Won’t you let him come to you? Won’t you perhaps let him fetch along a sample of our new iceless ice-box and give a demonstration? Why not bring in the kiddies and let them see it all too? They’ll love our Mr. Smith. And he won’t try to rush you into buying anything, either. He’ll just tell you all you want to know in his own chatty, cheerful way.

“Your home will seem all the brighter when he comes. Service – that’s all he stands for, and, as he says himself, ‘an ice that will give to the consumer 100 per cent of satisfaction for a minimum of cost.’ That’s the way he talks. Just as clever as that.”

—

Now this kind of thing would be all right if it were sent out by the Life Boat Mission of the Salvation Army. But as addressed by one ordinary business person to another, it is heart-rending!

And yet, after all, it seems that the world likes a little bit of kindliness, the “touch of nature that makes the whole world kin”; and likes, by force of association, the person or the thing with which the kindliness is connected. Indeed, if a “sense of humour” means, as it should, something genial and kindly, something “human” in the best and largest sense, then perhaps it is, after all, one of the best “business assets” that a man can have.

In other words, the beginning part of this essay is all wrong.

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The Stamp-Album World

The Habitable Globe as Seen Through the Eyes of the Juvenile Collector

The Earth or Globe, on which we collect stamps, is organized by the International Postal Union, which divides it up into countries. The Postal Union turns on its axis every twenty-four hours, thus creating day and night.

The principal countries of the world are Cochin-China, the Gilbert Islands, Somali Land, the Gaboon, the Cameroons, Nankipu, Johore, and Whango-Whango. Alongside of these great stamp areas are others of less importance, whose stamps are seldom if ever worth more than four cents, such as the United States, Great Britain, Canada, France, etc.

Some of these countries, however, are of importance as exercising a control over the stamps of places of the first rank. Thus, England comes into prominence as having been recognized by the Postal Union as controlling Sarawak, Uganda, Inhambane, Irac, and other great centres. Similarly, the Philippine Islands, after centuries of misgovernment were transferred by the Postal Union to the United States and Portugal. The Portuguese, of no account in themselves, they are known, all over the world, as issuing stamps of Lorenço Marques.

The Stamp Book can teach us, among other things, the reason and origin of government and how it comes into being. Whenever a part of the earth contains a sufficient number of people to need stamps, the people all get together and join in forming a government the purpose of which is to issue stamps.

If the stamps are to have a man’s head as the design, the country is placed under a king, the person selected for the king having the kind of features needed for a stamp. The British Royal family makes such excellent stamps that it is thought that they will be kept at the head of Great Britain for a long time to come. On the other hand, the Emperor of Brazil had to be deposed in 1889, his whiskers being too large to go through the Post.

In other countries, it is decided that the Goddess of Liberty has a more beautiful face than a king, and so these countries are called republics and they elect a new stamp every few years. Sometimes, when a face design is wanted, a competition is held. Years ago the Goddess of Liberty came from Cedar Rapids High School, Iowa, and last year one was got from Bangor, Maine. But generally speaking, the Goddess of Liberty does not exist, but is just made up.

Any boy who is fortunate enough to possess a stamp album takes a new interest in geography and must often wish he could take a trip around the world. No doubt in his mind he often imagines such a voyage.

Sailing, let us say, from the harbor of New York (which is of no importance, as it issues no stamps), he passes after a few days’ sail the great islands Trinidad and Tobago, which issued their first stamps in 1881, and catches a glimpse of the coast of Dutch Guiana, which issues a half-gulden orange stamp of great beauty.

Striking westward across the Atlantic, he sees Teneriffe from the ocean (with a two-cent Spanish issue), and near it Funchal, whose stamps issued in 1892 carry a picture of the king of Portugal.

His journey now carries him southward past the Gold Coast, Ascension, Dahomey, Angola, Anjouan, Whango-Whango and other great world centres.

Rounding Africa, he catches sight of Madagascar (Republique Francaise, 10 centimes), Diego Suarez Djibouti, and some of the principal places in the world.

As he crosses the Indian Ocean, he finds himself, to his renewed enchantment, in the land of Oriental wealth, the Indies. Here he disembarks on the soil of India and visits the great centres of Ghopal, Bussahir, Chamba, Charkari, Nowanuggar, and Jaipur. Here his album leads him to the scene of the great battles fought by the British Military Postal Authorities (1 shilling, very rare) and Burmese Expeditionary Force.

Leaving on his left Macao and on his right the Caicos Islands, he reaches the territory of the Chinese Expeditionary Force Military Commissariat Postal Service and the area represented by the Japanese Interim arrangement for the Korean Postal Despatch.

Sailing on eastward across the Pacific, the traveler gets a glimpse of the Guam, Ding-Dong, Tahiti, Pingo-Pongo, and Houtchi-Koutchi Islands, and having thus seen the whole world, he passes through the Panama Canal and thus arrives at his home.

Nor is it only in geography that we find our minds illuminated by the study of our stamp book. It opens for us the pages of our history.

Consider, for example, the history of the British settlements in North America. At the end of what is called the colonial period in American history, there was great dissatisfaction over what was called the Stamp Act, which compelled all the people to use stamps made in England.

As a result, Thomas Jefferson designed the Declaration of Independence, which said, “When in the course of human events, a country gets large enough to have stamps of its own, it becomes a free and independent state and deserves to be recognized as such by the International Postal Union.”

Even the most recent history can be understood if examined in the light of the stamp album. Thus in the year 1914 there broke out what is called the Great War, which began between the German Imperial Field Kitchen and the French Commissariat Parcel Post.

Inevitably other countries were drawn in: first of all the British Expeditionary Force (one penny), and then the Austro-Hungarian K. and K. Post (20 Pfennig), and then the Italian Posta della Gherra and other powers. Presently the Canadian Expeditionary Force (two cents) joined in the World War, and the final advent of the United States Army Post (three cents) brought the struggle to its climax.

The final result of the war was the issuance of a five-cent stamp by the League of Nations.

One of the chief advantages of the stamp album is that it brings us to an intimate knowledge of some of the great men of the modern times whose faces and names are recognized by the Postal Union as official designs for stamps. Here is Prince Ferdinand of Lichtenstein, one of the chief sovereigns of the world; here General Bingerville of the Ivory Coast; and here Marshall Spudski of Polish Paraguay.

Some of the faces and names leave us perhaps in a little doubt, but a little imagination will always help us through. Here is a beautiful design of the Panama Canal Zone representing, we presume, Theodore Roosevelt wading across the Panama River and waving the Portuguese flag. Here is King Edward the Seventh, dictator of Nyassaland, eating a giraffe; and the great French soldier and statesman, Marshall Foch, sitting on a velocipede in Oubanguichari-Tchad in the North Central French Congo, Republique Francaise, ten centimes, poste militaire du Congo, 1915.

TOC     INDEX

Short Circuits
by Radio and Cinema

If Only We Had
the Radio Sooner

Broadcasting the Norman Conquest

The scene is laid in the castle of Count Guesshard de Discard of Normandy, one of the companions of William the Conqueror. It takes place in the “bower” of Lady Angela de Discard, a stone room with open slots for windows, rather inferior to a first-class cow-stable. There are tapestries blowing against the walls, sheepskin rugs on the floor and wooden stools. But in one corner of the room there stands a radio receiving apparatus, and on the wall is a telephone.

In the bower are Lady Angela de Discard and her daughter Margaret of the Rubber Neck.

Lady Angela speaks: I wonder when we shall have news from England and hear whether Cousin William has killed Cousin Harold.

Lady Margaret of the Rubber Neck: By my halidome, Mamma, I think there ought to be something on the radio this morning. Papa said that Cousin William and Cousin Harold had both agreed to get the broadcast on as early in the day as possible.

Lady Angela: Is it so, by Heaven! Then I pray you, by God’s grace, turn on the radio.

(Lady Margaret of the Rubber Neck goes to the radio and starts turning the dials. There ensues a strange sound as of some one singing and wailing, and the music of a harp.)

Lady Angela: Heaven’s grace!

Lady Margaret: I’m afraid, Mamma, it is one of those Welsh bards. I think he is singing the sorrows of his country. I must have got Plynlimmon or Anglesea by mistake.

Lady Angela: Heavens! Shut him off. I thought that Cousin Harold promised to have all the Welsh bards killed. I know that Cousin William, just as soon as he has killed Cousin Harold, means to kill the bards. Do try again. I am getting so interested to know whether your father gets killed or not.

(Lady Margaret tries again. There is this time a wild and confused rush of sound. She shuts off the radio at once.)

Lady Angela: Odds Bones! What’s that?

Lady Margaret: I’m so sorry, Mamma; I think it was a Scottish concert. I’m afraid I really don’t know from what station the battle is to come. You see, Cousin William and Cousin Harold were to select the ground after the landing.

Lady Angela: Then, for the love of Moses, call up on the telephone and find out.

Lady Margaret: I’m so sorry, Mamma. So help me, I never thought of it.

(Lady Margaret of the Rubber Neck goes to the telephone. As she talks, the answering voice of the operator can be heard, rather faintly in the room.)

Hello!

(Hello!)

Is that the Central?

(In truth, it is!)

Wilt thou kindly impart information touching a matter on which I am most anxious to receive intelligence?

(In certain truth I will an so be it is something of which this office hath any cognizance.)

You will certainly put me under a deep recognaissance.

(Speak on, then.)

I will.

(Do.)

That will I.

(What is it?)

It is this. I am most curious to know if any broadcast or general exfusion of intelligence is yet received of the expedition of Duke William of Normandy.

(Truly indeed, yes, by Heaven, certainly. Even now the exfusion is about to come over the radio.)

(Lady Margaret with a few words, not more than a hundred, of hasty thanks, hangs up the telephone and again turns on the radio.

This time a clear voice with a twentieth-century accent is heard beginning to announce.)

Announcer: Good morning, folks! Gee! You’re lucky to be on the air this morning. . . .

Lady Angela: Tune him a little more; I don’t get him.

Lady Margaret (fumbling with the radio): It’s because it’s an Announcer. I heard Father Anselm say that the announcers are born a thousand years ahead of their time, though how that can be I know not. In any case it is agreed, they say, that the Saxons are to have the broadcasting rights, and Cousin William is to have the moving pictures. Now, wait a minute—— Heaven’s grace, that’s that Welsh bard again.

Lady Angela: Silence him.

Lady Margaret: There, now, I’ve got it.

(The Radio begins to talk again. The voice that speaks is as of the twentieth century like the voice of one “announcing” a football game.)

Announcer: Now, folks, this is Senlac Hill, and we’re going to put a real battle on the air for you, and it’s going to be some battle. The principals are Harold, King of England – lift your helmet, Harold – and William, the Dook, or as some call him, the Duck, of Normandy. Both the boys are much of a size, both trained down to weight, and each has got with him as nice a little bunch of knights and archers as you’d see east of Pittsburgh. Umpires are: for Harold, the Reverend Allbald of the Soft Head, Archbishop of Canterbury; for William, Odo the Ten-Spot, Bishop of Bayeux. Side lines, Shorty Sigismund and Count Felix Marie du Paté de Foie Gras. Referee, King Swatitoff of Sweden, ex-Champion of the Scandinavian League. Battle called at exactly ten a.m. They’re off. The Norman boys make a rush for the hill. Harold’s centre forwards shoot arrows at them. William leads a rush at the right centre. Attaboy, William! That’s the stuff! Harold’s boys block the rush. Two Norman knights ruled off for interference. William hurls his mace. Forward pass. Ten-year penalty. Quarter time.

(The radio stops a minute.)

Lady Margaret: How terrifically exciting! Do you think we are winning?

Lady Angela: It’s very hard to tell. I’ve often heard your father say that in the first quarter of a battle they don’t really get warmed up.

(The radio starts.)

Announcer: Battle of Senlac. Second quarter. Change of ground. Duke William has won the west end. The Normans make a rush against the left centre. Hand-to-hand scrimmage with Harold’s front line. Many knights unhorsed and out of the game. Several men hurt on both sides. Count Guesshard de Discard receives a crack on the bean with a mace.

Lady Margaret: Oh, Mamma, papa got one on the bean.

Lady Angela (laughing): He certainly did. I can just see your papa’s face when some one landed him one!

Lady Margaret: What happens to you, Mamma, if papa gets knocked out?

Lady Angela: I believe that Cousin William has promised to give me to one of his knights. I don’t think it’s settled yet who gets me. They generally raffle, you know. But stop, we’re missing the battle!

(The radio continues.)

Announcer: Second half of the game. Both sides rested up during half time. Duke William attacks the centre. Man hurt. Battle stops, substitute replaces. Battle continues. William’s entire cavalry rides at the hill. Harold’s boys heaving rocks. Swatitoff, the referee, knocked down by the cavalry. Umpires whistle. General melee. Battle degenerating into a fight. William’s men ride off apparently in full flight. Norman boys retreating everywhere. Harold’s men rushing down hill at them. Battle all in Saxon’s favour. The noble Harold driving the foul Normans off the field. Listen, folks, and . . .

(At this moment something goes wrong with the radio. It sinks to a mere murmuring of squeaks.)

Lady Angela: The ungodly radio is off!

(Lady Margaret tries in vain to fix the radio. It won’t work. While she works at it a long time passes. It is not till she has sent for a Norman carpenter with a sledge-hammer and a crowbar that the radio works again. When it does it is late in the afternoon. Then at last it speaks . . .)

Announcer: Battle all over. The foul Saxon, Harold, lies dead across the fifty-yard line with his whole centre scrimmage dead round him. Spectators leaving in all directions in great haste. The noble William is everywhere victorious. Norman crowd invading the club house. Number of injured and dead knights being piled up at the side of the field. Among the dead are Count Roger the Sardine, Count Felix Marie de Paté de Foie Gras, the Seneschal Pilaffe de Volaille and Count Guesshard de Discard. . . .

Lady Margaret: Ah, do you hear that, Mamma? Odd’s life, papa’s killed. That must have been that smack on the bean. I had a notion that papa would get it, didn’t you?

Lady Angela (picking up a little steel mirror and adjusting her cap): Oh, I was sure of it. A juggler prophesied it to me last Whitsuntide. I wonder which of the knights Cousin William will give me to. . . .

TOC     INDEX

What the Radio Overheard

An Evening at Home
of the Uptown Browns

I

The scene is in the dining-room of the house of Mr. Uptown Brown. It is a large room with a mahogany table and a mahogany sideboard and all the things that ought to be in the dining-room of people called Uptown Brown.

In a corner is a radio machine of the best and newest type with leather armchairs beside it and on a little wooden seat printed papers with announcements and programs. The time is evening, an hour or so after dinner, and the people who appear are Miss Flossie Fitzclippet Brown, the Only Girl in All the World, and Mr. Edwin Overflow, the Only Man in the Universe. But they have not yet told this to one another.

Flossie (as they come to the dining-room): There’s nobody in here. Wouldn’t you like to come in, and I’ll show you our new radio?

Mr. Overflow (in a deep voice, charged with static): With pleasure.

Flossie: How dark it is! The switch is over there. Won’t you please push it on?

Mr. Overflow (with more static): With pleasure.

Flossie: Now sit here and make yourself terribly comfy, and I’ll turn on the radio.

Mr. Overflow (speaking with a compressed voltage, which ought to warn any girl that there is something atmospheric doing): With pleasure.

Flossie (at the radio): Now wait a minute. I never can remember which way these silly dials go – let me see. Do you under stand how to do it, Mr. Overflow?

Mr. Overflow (at a pressure of 200 atmospheres to the inch): Not at all.

Flossie (fingering the dial): I think this is the one and I think you turn it so——

The Radio: SQUA-ARK——! ! !

Flossie (shutting it off): No, that’s wrong, I’m sure. I’ll try this other way.

Mr. Overflow (rising from his place and putting forward his antennae as if about to make a contact): Please don’t!

Flossie: Don’t what? (She turns off the dial.)

Mr. Overflow: Don’t turn on the radio. There’s something I want to say, something I’ve been trying to say all evening——

Flossie (who has been trying to make him say it all evening): To me?

Mr. Overflow: Yes, to you. Miss Brown—— (He stops with a static congestion in his feed pipe.)

Flossie: Yes?

Mr. Overflow: Miss Brown—— (He pauses; then with an effort he connects in on a better wave length.) Miss Brown, Flossie, ever since I’ve been coming to this house——

Flossie: I wonder if I can get Atlanta.

Mr. Overflow: Don’t.

The Radio (in agony): SQUA-ARK——

Mr. Overflow: Turn it off. Listen. Miss Brown – Flossie – ever since – that is to say – please don’t turn it on – Flossie – I only wanted to say – I love you. (He reaches out both his antennae.)

Flossie: Oh, Edwin! (They make a contact and are joined in a short circuit. Connected thus, they sit down beside the radio. Their hands are joined as they sit in close conversation. Not a sound comes from the radio. It is listening, and is having a good time all by itself.)

Flossie: But how can you really love me? You’ve only known me three weeks.

Edwin (speaking now with far less strain on his aerial, owing to the removal of all atmospheric disturbance): Three weeks and one day and four hours.

Flossie: Oh, Edwin, how can you remember?

Edwin: Remember – can I ever forget it? That first afternoon when I met you crossing the park – and——

Flossie: Oh, Edwin!

Edwin: Flossie!!

Ten minutes later Edwin is still saying – “And do you remember the day when I took you and your mother to the matinée?” And Flossie answers with a light laugh – “And mother would talk to you all the time.” – “Yes, I was wishing your mother was in Jericho!” – “How nice of you, dearest!!”

Twenty minutes later Flossie is saying – “Edwin, dear, I’m afraid we simply must go back to the drawing-room again. They’ll have finished their cards and mother will be wondering where we are. Wait a minute till I turn on the radio——”

The Radio: SQUA-ARK——

Flossie: Kiss me, darling. I’m so happy! And isn’t the radio just wonderful!

—

So they go upstairs to the drawing-room, and up there when they arrive there are two tables full of people playing bridge. At one of them Flossie’s mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Uptown Brown, and her father and two other people are playing and they have just thrown down their cards because their first rubber is over and Flossie goes up to her mother and kisses her and Flossie’s mother kisses her and says:

“Where have you been, darling?”

“Downstairs listening to the radio.”

“How is it working?”

“Perfectly.”

Flossie’s mother knows quite well where Flossie has been, and she wouldn’t have interrupted her for the world. But what she really means is, “Did you land him?” And when Flossie says, “Perfectly,” she knows that her mother knows and her mother knows she knows what she means.

At the other table, Flossie’s brother, Edward Wiseguy Brown, a college radio expert, is playing cards, with a cigarette permanently a part of his face, and he says without even turning his head round:

“What did you get, Floss?”

“Oh, I don’t know——”

“Atlanta?”

“I think it may have been.”

“Did you get Yomsk in Siberia?”

“Oh, gracious no!”

“Did you get anything worth while?”

“I don’t think so – that is——” and here she looks over at Edwin for a second and he happens to be looking at her and they both get extremely red, and the whole room gets charged with ecstatic electricity. In fact, it is a relief to everybody when Flossie’s father, Mr. Uptown Brown, rises and says to the other man at his table:

“Here, let these two young people take our places, Tommie, and you and I will drop out a bit.”

On which Mr. Uptown Brown and his heavy friend, Mr. Thomas Bung, rise with a deliberation appropriate to their dignity and weight, and Mr. Brown says:

“Come on down if you like and we’ll have a turn at the radio ourselves.”

His heavy friend, Mr. Bung, says:

“Well, I don’t mind if I do.”

Mrs. Uptown Brown glances across at her husband with a look that means, “Now what are you up to?” But she says nothing. She’s too happy about Flossie. Let him for once if he likes, she thinks – only don’t let him think that she’s deceived. But she can straighten that out afterwards, so she merely says, quite invitingly:

“Come along, then, and we’ll start a new rubber,” and makes a place beside her for Mr. Overflow. There he is to sit for the rest of his life.

II

So after Miss Flossie Fitzclippet Brown and Mr. Edwin Overflow had come back upstairs, engaged, from the mute vicinity of the radio, Mr. Uptown Brown and Mr. Thomas Bung, his heavy friend, went down to the dining-room.

Mr. Brown: It’s over here in the corner. Sit down, Tommie, in one of these big chairs while I turn on this damn thing. Have a cigar?

Mr. Bung: Well, I don’t mind. Had it long?

Mr. Brown: No, just got it. The children like it. Try one of these.

Mr. Bung: Thanks.

Mr. Brown: Now I don’t know how you found it upstairs, Tommie. It certainly seemed to me pretty dry.

Mr. Bung: It certainly did!

(They both chuckle. They know what’s coming.)

Mr. Brown: Well, what about a little Scotch, eh, Tommie, my boy? Wait till I turn on this machine, or, no, I’ll get the Scotch first.

(Mr. Uptown Brown takes a key out of his pocket and goes and opens up a little cupboard in the corner angle of the wall.)

Mr. Brown: I always keep it locked up over here. No use ringing for the servants. Bess can hear the bell from up there, you know, and she might get a little fussed up – say when, Tommie——

Mr. Bung (speaking in a low gurgling voice such as is produced from the larynx by Scotch and soda): Oh, no, no sense in making a fuss over these things. I’m always the same way at home, too. That’s damn good Scotch, Ed.

Mr. Brown: Yes, have some more. Or wait till I turn on this durn radio, otherwise Bess might—— Here, I think this is the dial you twist——

The Radio: SQUA-ARK——

Mr. Brown: No, that’s not it. I’ll get it in a minute. Now this is a Scotch, Tommie, that I can guarantee——

—

(And ten minutes later Mr. Edward Uptown Brown is still saying): Now this Scotch, Tommie, is a Scotch, that you won’t get a better Scotch – Scotch – Scotch.

And after a while – after a long while – with a sigh, Mr. Uptown Brown rises from his chair and he says:

“Well, Tommie, old horse, I’ll guess we’ll have to get back to the drawing-room, or Bess will be wondering where we are. Wait till I give this a whirl again.”

(He turns a dial.)

The Radio: SQUA-ARK——

Mr. Brown (turning it off instantly): Come along, Tommie, or say, what about another?

Mr. Bung: Yes, certainly, I’ll join you. A wonderful thing this radio, isn’t it?

—

And so when they do get up to the drawing-room, it is quite late and the cards are just about over. Eddie Brown Junior is adding up the score and he says without moving his face from his cigarette:

“What did you get, Dad?”

“Oh, nothing much.”

“Didn’t get Yomsk in Siberia?”

“No, I don’t think so, did we, Tommie?”

“I guess not. But what we got wasn’t so bad, either.”

“Was there much interference, Dad?”

Mr. Brown, drawn fatally on and still chuckling to his friend:

“Not a damn bit.”

Ominous words. Mrs. Brown gives one look at her husband. There will be plenty of interference later. He will get all the radio activity he wants a little later on.

—

Meantime the guests leave. Ed. Brown, Jr., radio expert, has risen from his chair and says to his friend, a fellow expert:

“Come on, Harry. It’s late enough now to be worth while. There won’t be much interference now. We’ll see if we can get Yomsk.”

Ted Brown and his friend, the two radio experts, go down to the dining-room. The house is quiet now. It is getting late.

Ted says:

“Now sit down here while I tune her up. I guess Dad’s been monkeying with it. Funny he can’t learn, isn’t it? (He begins twisting and turning the dials.)

“What I want to do is to try to get Yomsk, Siberia. The other night I was nearly sure I had Yomsk. There’s a sending station there now, but they’re not catalogued and it’s hard to tell. Ever try to get them?”

“No. Nearly got Teheran in Persia the other night. At least I think it was Teheran. I couldn’t be sure. It would be in Persia, I suppose.”

“Yes – now wait – I believe. I’ve got it.”

The Radio: SQUA-ARK——

Ted (shutting it off): Gosh, no – that’s only President Coolidge. Let’s try it this way.

The Radio: SQUA-ARK——

“Drat it, that’s a sacred concert. I thought they all quit at eleven. I’m sure that’s the number I used for Yomsk. Wait a minute.”

Ted turns at the dials. He and his friend sit in front of the machine in deep absorption. Ten minutes later Ted is still saying:

“No, cuss it – that’s only the Beethoven Sonata being played in the opera house in Chicago – try this.”

And the Radio Says: SQUA-ARK——

And Ted says:

“Darn it. That’s only Madame Galli Curci singing in St. Louis. I’ll just try once more for Yomsk and if we can’t get it, we’ll shut off for the night. There’s no sense bothering with these things near by.”

He tries once more.

And the Radio Says: SQUA-ARK——

And then he quits.

But far away in Yomsk, amid the snow, a grimy Bolshevik in a grimy café is singing an imitation American coon song. That’s what he wants to hear.

And as Ted reluctantly turns off the machine, he says:

“It’s a great thing, the radio, isn’t it?”

—

So Ted’s expert friend goes home, and Ted Brown himself goes to bed. The radio is silent and the house is still. The mystic currents move through the air, and Atlanta is whispering to Vancouver, and Helsingfors in Finland murmurs to the Hebrides. But not a sound of it comes to the darkened room. The house is still and the people are asleep and the radio machine is silent. Its programs and its announcements lie beside it on a little table, but from it there comes not a sound. The radio, hushed by the whispering currents, is asleep.

And the hours pass – till it is late, late – and then softly, oh, very softly, one of the dining-room windows pushes up – surely no one lifted it, it just moved up – and into the dark room there steps such a soft man, with a black cap on his head and he moves with a little spot of light in front of him that comes from such a soft little lamp that he holds in his hand, and in that half-light, you can see that he wears a dirty mask on a dirty face with two holes in it where his shadowed eyes are.

This man – do you guess it, perhaps? – is not a scientist come to fix the radio, but he is a burglar and he has come to unfix some of the property of Mr. Uptown Brown.

The burglar turns his light here and there about the room – and he turns it presently upon the radio. There is no surprise in his face when he looks at it. Oh, no. This man has already spent some time in Ossining, New York State, and he knows all about radio and how to work a radio magazine.

“Radio!” he murmurs.

Then he looks at the printed sheets that lie beside it with the announcements for the night. President Coolidge speaks in New York on the World Court. That must be over. The man sighs, with relief or otherwise. And then he looks – what is this that he sees? Madame Pallavicini is to sing at midnight in the cathedral in the City of Mexico – midnight, that would be now – and she is to sing – and as the man in the mask turns the spotlight on the print he sees that she is to sing the aria:

“Enter Thou Not Into Temptation.”

The burglar stands in front of the radio and there is stillness in the house. The man murmurs the title to himself.

Far away Madame Pallavicini in the midnight cathedral in the City of Mexico is singing, and the mystic currents are murmuring around the house, “Enter thou not into temptation.”

The burglar murmurs to himself, “Ah, shucks, I’ll chance it,” and puts his hand out towards the dials. Why? Well, perhaps he had taken music classes when he was at Ossining in New York State; perhaps he had an ear for music, or perhaps, if you like, some of the things they say in the story books about the burglar are true. Perhaps the sound of “Enter thou not into Temptation,” intoned in a cathedral at midnight, hits him harder than it does you or me.

At any rate, the man looked all about him, listened a moment, and then, with the hand of an expert, turned rapidly the dials of the radio. And with that, all the mystic waves of the night that had gathered in the great cathedral of the City of Mexico came rushing over the wires.

AND THE RADIO SAID: SQUA-ARK——

—

The sound of it rattled in the still house, the burglar heard a rattle at the lock of the front door and he knew what it meant. The Uptown Browns, like all sensible people of their class, pay part of the fee of a night watchman. As the night watchman entered the front door, the burglar, noiselessly as the mystic wave itself, moved out from the window. Madame Pallavicini and the whispering currents have done their work. He will not sin tonight.

TOC     INDEX

One Crowded
Quarter Second

How They Make Life Move
in the Movies

In real life, the process of turning tragedy into happiness, of alleviating a broken heart, of starting a new life, is the work of years and the slow effect of time. Even in a novel it can hardly be done under fifty pages. But in the movies they do it in exactly one quarter of a second.

The most beautiful thing about the movies is this rapid way in which, with a couple of flicks of the film, what looked like interminable sorrow destined to extend over years is changed into a “new life.”

No matter what awful things may happen to the people in the movies, the spectator need never despair. The movie man can fix them up all right at any moment in one turn of the machine.

The hero, for example, gets sent to the penitentiary for ten years. You see him arrested, you watch the trial (four seconds), the fruitless appeal to the governor (two seconds), and then you see him put behind the kind of prison bars, the toast-rack pattern, that they use in the movie for the penitentiary.

A turnkey with a sad face and slow mournful steps (he takes over five seconds) has locked the hero in. Great Heavens! ten years! to think that his young life – he is still only twenty-eight – is to waste away for ten years behind those stone walls; and then, just as you have hardly had time to finish thinking it – he’s out!

And quite simple the way they do it! Just a legend or title, or whatever they call it, thrown on the screen:

And So this Tried Soul Learns in Sorrow a New Peace

Yes, learns it and is out! Clear out of the penitentiary in a quarter of a second. Just by learning peace! I must say if I ever go in, I’ll learn pretty quickly.

Yes, there he is out again, and, what is luckier still, not a day older: still only twenty-eight. And he’s had time to shave in the quarter second while he was in there and looks pretty neat and handsome.

There he is in the same apartment and on the sofa beside him his wife – the very one that he sandbagged in a misunderstanding ten years ago is sitting and saying:

Perhaps We Didn’t Fully Understand One Another, Despard

and after that they fade out into one another’s faces and the screen remarks in conclusion:

Next Week Gerald Floyd and the Hourchi Houtchi Girls. Don’t Miss One of Them. The Duke and Duchess of York Boarding the Renown——

and that is a sign that these broken lives are now mended.

In any case, the mending of a broken life is a very simple matter in the movies. It’s a specialty that has been reduced to an art. If a movie character loses a husband or a wife, the loss is repaired in one-quarter of a second.

For example, here is a disconsolate movie widow – and how charming they look anyway: I’d like to buy a bag of them – you see her beside the grave, a saintly clergyman bending over to console her; the end of the long story of perhaps 4,000 feet of tragedy has come to this – this dull hopeless grief that finds no consolation.

No consolation! Just wait a minute and let that title writer get in his work. There you are:

And So this Poor Soul Finds in Love a New Balm that Heals the Wounds of the Past,

and you see her walking in a springtime garden (the season has changed in a quarter-second) and bending over her is a lover, evidently a husband – in fact, he must be, because there is a little wee child romping in the grass at their feet.

And the lover? Don’t you see it? That means then that you never go to the movies. Why, the lover is the saintly clergyman, the one who was in the graveyard. He fell in love with her, time passed, they had this child – there you are. And all in a quarter of a second.

But perhaps still more wonderful are the complete changes of character, mostly very favourable, that are packed into the quarter-second. A bad man turns into a good one; a depraved villain into a gentle soul; a she-hyena into a chastened woman.

The other day, for example, in a moving picture I saw a villain – a real villain – he was rich and he ground down the poor, he terrorized a little town with the brute power of money. When that power failed, he hired bandits to murder people because they were too virtuous to help him.

Then fate intervened. A dam broke. The Colorado River rolled right over the villain and drowned him. Forty thousand cubic feet of water fell on him. Then they picked him out, plastered with mud six inches deep. That, apparently was a pretty serious situation.

But, no, the fatal quarter-second got in its work. The title maker speaks:

And So this Hard Heart at Last Softens——

Presumably with the mud. At any rate, there he is, sitting on a sofa, NOT drowned – that was an error – with the heroine beside him and the mud all wiped off, and he is saying:

I See It Now. I Have Been a Bad Man

Personally, I had seen it quite a little time before. But at any rate his redemption, I am certain, was complete and final because the next thing said in the picture was:

Ottawa Ontario Lord Willingdon the Governor General Looks On at Skiing Contest Gathering the Rubber on the Congo

Oh, yes, he’s redeemed finally; the picture is over.

—

And I have wondered, too, whether something might not be done to apply this wonderful and happy system of transformations to some of the old masterpieces of the stage and literature. They are too sad. The tragedy is all right and very interesting, but it ought to be redeemed at the end by putting in a quarter-second of first-class movie work.

Take, for example, Hamlet. All the world knows how the sorrow accumulates. Hamlet’s father murdered, even before the play begins; his mother married to his uncle; Polonius stabbed; Ophelia drowned; Hamlet himself half crazy; his uncle killed; Yorick’s skull mislaid; Laertes about to kill Hamlet – in short, a quite serious situation.

But that wonderful quarter-second of the movies would straighten it all out. Try this, for example:

Yet Even Here Love Snatches this Wayward Soul from Fate——

And what do you see? Hamlet sitting beside Ophelia – she was not drowned, only got muddy and since has had time to wash – in the gardens of the Palace; and in another moment we find, smiling at them, his uncle, the King, no longer wicked; in fact, he says himself:

We Didn’t Understand One Another, Ham,

and near them, playing on the grass, the inevitable child, only this time it is Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s. And you realize that the murder and the poisoning was only a DREAM of one of the characters, and that since then a quarter-second has passed and life has moved on and everything is all right. And

Next Week Buggs and Juggs an All-screen Comedy Authorized by the Board of Censors of the Province Of Quebec,

and that wipes out all vestige of Hamlet.

—

But after all, if we call them moving pictures, it’s their business to move.

TOC     INDEX

Done into Movies

But Can You Recognize the Good Old Stories When They Get Them Done?

The other day I went to see a moving picture of “Treasure Island,” the late Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous story. It was really an excellent thing, absolutely thrilling all the way through.

But in putting the story into the movies they had had to make a few necessary adaptations and alterations. It seems that the public demands this. Moving picture producers have often explained to me that the public is very sensitive. There are subjects it doesn’t like and topics which it prefers to avoid. And there are other things it insists on having in every first-class moving picture.

So I found that “Treasure Island” had had to be changed a little. In the first place the scene was not laid on an island. If you put a thing on an island that cuts out motor cars and limits the scope of the plot. So the scene was laid in California. And there was no treasure, because treasure has been worked to death. Instead of treasure the plot was shifted to holding up a bank, which is more up to date. That of course cut out the pirates and the ship, but put in bandits and a motor car. Incidentally, all the stuff about “Yo Ho! and a Bottle of Rum!” had to go. Any references of this sort antagonize a great number of spectators and have the appearance of criticizing the existing institutions of the United States – which is madness.

There were certain changes also in the persons of the story. John Silver instead of having one leg has two, so as to be able to hop in and out of a motor car. Jim Hawkins, the boy narrator of Stevenson’s story, is changed into a girl. No moving picture is held to be complete unless a girl is brought into it. And Squire Trelawney, who is a middle-aged man in the written story, is made a young man. This allows for a proper ending by having the Squire marry Jim Hawkins.

Apart from these changes, the story is told with wonderful fidelity and accuracy. There is no doubt – indeed there could be no doubt – that the transformed story gains enormously from the few incidental alterations necessitated by the film.

Now this little incident has set me thinking over this process of adapting stories for the moving picture and admiring the way in which it was done. And so it chanced that just afterwards, by a fortunate coincidence, I got an opportunity of seeing something of the process itself. There happened to come into my hands the report made to one of the leading film companies by their expert writers on the prospects of adapting one or two well-known stories for moving picture presentation. I presume that it is no improper violation of confidence to present them here, especially as the stories mentioned are so familiar in their original forms as to be almost public property.

The first one is an expert report on the question of adapting the well-known story of Adam and Eve for the moving picture. It is as follows:

THE STORY OF ADAM AND EVE

Technical Report
on Its Adaptation for the Film

“We have looked over this MS. with reference to the question of adapting it to a scenario. We find the two principal characters finely and boldly drawn and both well up to the standard of the moving picture. The man Adam – Christian name only given in the MS. – appeals to us very strongly as a primitive but lovable nature. Adam has “pep” and we think that we could give him an act among the animals, involving the very best class of menagerie and trapeze work which would go over big.

“But we consider that Adam himself would get over better if he represented a more educated type and we wish therefore to make Adam a college man, preferably from a western university.

“We think similarly that the principal female character, Eve, would appeal more directly to the public if it was made clear that she was an independent woman with an avocation of her own. We propose to make her a college teacher of the out-of-door woodland dances now so popular in the leading women’s universities.

“It is better that Adam and Eve should not be married at the opening of the scenario but at the end after they have first found themselves and then found one another.

“We find the ‘Garden’ lonely and the lack of subordinate characters mystifying; we also find the multiplicity of animals difficult to explain without a special setting.

“We therefore propose to remove the scene to the Panama Canal Zone, where the animals are being recruited for a circus troupe. This will allow for mass scenes of Panaminos, Mesquito and other Indians, tourists, bootleggers and the United States navy, offering an environment of greater variety and more distinctive character than an empty garden.

“The snake we do not like. It is an animal difficult to train and lacking in docility. We propose instead to use a goat.”

REPORT NO. II

The story entitled
“The Merchant of Venice”

“The outline entitled ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ which comes to us with the signature, ‘W. Shakespeare,’ but with no further hint of the authorship, strikes us at once as a composition of great power. It is full of action. It has colour and force, and the leading characters are strongly marked.

“We wish to recommend its immediate adaptation for the film, but at the same time to propose a few incidental changes necessary to make it a success.

“In the first place the character, Shylock, must not be a Jew as this would needlessly antagonize a large section of the public. To avoid all offence it would be better to make him a Mexican.

“A further point to notice is that there are too many Italians in the piece and not enough Americans. It lacks patriotism. We would suggest that either the entire scene be removed to Venice, Illinois, or else that the principal characters such as Bassanio and Antonio be made American visitors to Venice and that for the Doge we substitute the consul general of the United States.

“We would like to replace Portia by one of our great criminal lawyers, leaving Portia as his stenographer.

“We think that the piece would gain in scenic quality by the introduction of a canal scene at night, by the drowning of one of the characters, perhaps several, in the Grand Canal at midnight and by the introduction of the Spanish Inquisition and the massacre of St. Bartholomew. These features would add historical interest, while the American character of the film could be stressed by the insert of a picture of the Supreme Court at Washington.”

TOC     INDEX

Short Circuits
in International Relations

Things I Hardly Dare Whisper

MORE REVELATIONS OF ANOTHER UNKNOWN EUROPEAN DIPLOMAT. BY AN UNDISCLOSED AUTHOR OF EUROPEAN DISREPUTATION.
TWO VOLUMES. TEN DOLLARS EACH, OR THE TWO FOR SEVEN-FIFTY.

As everybody knows, the recent craze for publishing diplomatic memoirs is exciting a storm of protest in the highest European circles. It is felt that it involves a dangerous leakage of political secrets. “We are leaking all over the place,” writes Lord Bulkhead. “It has got to stop.”

On the other hand, we cannot resist recommending to the reading public in the warmest terms the extraordinary and fascinating volumes announced above. It is no exaggeration to say that the publication of “Things I Hardly Dare Whisper” is calculated to arouse a whirlwind, the suction of which may carry down two or three of the principal governments of Europe.

The work is all the more intriguing in that the name of the author is buried in absolute secrecy. The publishers themselves are utterly unaware who wrote it. The authorship is variously attributed to Lord Balfour, ex-premier Poincaré, Lady Astor, Douglas Fairbanks, the Queen of Roumania, and Dorothy Gish. Miss Gish, however, on being approached, declared emphatically, “I didn’t write it: so there!” Monsieur Poincaré says that he not only didn’t write it, but he couldn’t write it.

Perhaps the principal feature of the book is the extraordinary boldness of its revelation. Conversations between persons of the very highest rank and the most conspicuous position are reported with a frankness that verges on brutality.

Take, for instance, the passage, one of the most notable in the volumes, in which the unknown author relates a conversation with a Most Exalted Personage.

“We were sitting together in the bar of the House of Lords,” he writes, “the Personage, as usual, sitting with his elbow on my shoulder and whispering into my ear so that Lord Snoop, the Master of the Buckhounds, and Lord Snipe, at that time in office as Black Stick in Waiting – or Yellow Stick in Hiding, I forget which – could not overhear our conversation, which The Royal Personage obviously regarded as for us alone.

“‘What do you think of Sir Jaugh Bohn?’ I asked. The Royal Personage looked carefully around and then whispered, ‘He’s a pup.’ I made a silent note of this for publication.

“‘And what is Your Personage’s opinion of the First Lord of the Admiralty?’ His Personage advanced his face closer and took hold of my ear with his hand so as to draw it towards him. ‘I consider the First Lord,’ he whispered, ‘as nothing better than a third-rate bum.’

“Realizing at once the high commercial value of these disclosures, I begged The Royal Personage to sit quiet a moment while I wrote them down.”

—

A similar frankness and daring is shown not only in the treatment of royalty itself, but in the confidential pen pictures given by the author of the leading statesmen of Europe.

“We were sitting on a bench in the sun,” he writes, “outside the modest little country home of Monsieur Clemenceau, whom I may designate the Old Tiger of France. The Old Tiger, who will be one hundred and six (if he lives long enough), had just spent a busy morning planting radishes. ‘What is your opinion of England?’ I asked of the Old Tiger. For a moment a flash of all his old impetuosity flashed out of the Old Tiger’s eyes. ‘It’s a hell of a place,’ he said.”

But perhaps to most readers the most engrossing chapters of the book are those which deal with the origin, or what the author cleverly calls the genesis, of the Great War. Many memoirs have already dealt intimately with this topic. The Kaiser, General Ludendorf, Lord Grey, and others have essayed to analyze the causes of the conflict. The Kaiser says that it was a world attack directed against himself personally.

Lord Grey, while speaking in a very guarded and moderate way, thinks that the war may have had something to do with England and Germany and possibly with France.

The statement is also made in various quarters that the war represented the eternal conflict of the Zeitgeist with the Zeitschrift. Indeed, a colonel of one of the negro regiments from the United States has said this was exactly his idea in going into it. No doubt it was this idea of a Zeitgeist which inflamed the minds of many of the young men at the time.

In other quarters, and especially in academic circles, the opinion is generally held that the war was a conflict of the Inevitable against the Inexhaustible.

It is all the more interesting to find that our present unknown author makes the astounding statement that he caused the war himself.

“It is strange to realize,” he writes, “that a few casual words dropped by myself in a drawing room in Buda-Pest probably occasioned the entire conflagration.” (It would not perhaps have been so strange if he had dropped them in a garage or somewhere where there was gasoline.)

“I was seated one evening talking with Prince Bughaus of Schlitz-im-Mein, himself of the immediate entourage of the Kaiser and intimate with every Chancellery in Europe. The Prince had been asking me confidentially what I thought Downing Street would do if the Quai d’Orsay lined up solidly with the Ball Platz and came down heavily on the Yildiz Kiosk. At that time (it was July of 1914), the whole atmosphere was tense with diplomatic electricity.

“Unfortunately, Prince Bughaus, who is a master of languages, was talking for greater secrecy in Chinese; and I misunderstood his reference to the Ball Platz and thought he was referring to the World’s Base Ball Series. ‘Everything is arranged,’ I said, ‘for the early autumn. And this time it will be a fight to a finish.’ The Prince repeated quietly (in Chinese), ‘A fight to a finish.’ But that night he telegraphed to Berlin that Germany’s only chance would be to anticipate her enemies by making war in August.

“The result of my casual remark is unfortunately only too well known.”

—

One must not, however, suppose that these delightful volumes are entirely occupied with the tragic, the somber, or the pompous side of life. The author enlivens his pages with a number of delightful anecdotes in regard to the great people with whom he has been in contact, which are quite as amusing as those in any similar book of memoirs today. For example, the following delicious story is related in connection with the same Prince Bughaus of Schlitz-im-Mein just mentioned.

“Bughaus, as his friends call him, is not only one of the most astute men of his time in the diplomatic world, but is decidedly one of the wittiest. Indeed, I have never known any one with such an instantaneous command of repartee.

“I was sitting with Bughaus and several of the corps diplomatique one evening in one of the best-known and most fashionable of the Buda-Pest Magyar restaurants, which perhaps I had better not name, inasmuch as naming it might give an idea which one I mean. The Prince summoned the head waiter to him and asked ‘How much are your cold partridges?’ ‘I am sorry, your Transparency,’ replied the man, ‘we haven’t any cold partridges.’ ‘In that case,’ replied the witty Prince, ‘we won’t have any cold partridges.’

“I need hardly say that the entire corps diplomatique broke out into hearty laughter. In fact, they nearly choked themselves.”

When we add that the two entire volumes are filled with material, grave and gay, on the same level as what we have already narrated, it will be understood that these volumes of confidential memoirs will challenge comparison with anything of the sort written in the last ten years.

TOC     INDEX

Hands Across the Sea

What Will Happen When America Has Removed All the European Art

It has been calculated that within the last twenty-five years over a billion dollars’ worth of Art Treasures have been removed from Europe to America. The purchases include a great number of pictures by the old masters – so great as to alarm the custodians of the Italian galleries – statues of the highest antiquity and many manuscripts of the masterpieces of literature. Already the question of moving entire buildings, such as Shakespeare’s cottage, etc., has been freely discussed.

It is clear that this movement once well started will know no limit save that of American wealth. And since American wealth has no limit, we shall some day find the journals of New York chronicling the completion of Art Removal something as follows:

FROM THE PRESS OF 1950

The successful removal of Buckingham Palace to its new site in Mauch Chunk, Pa., where it will serve as the home of the Rotary Club may be said to mark the end of the Art Removal Movement. American connoisseurs say that there is now little or nothing left that they care to take. A certain disappointment was expressed in Mauch Chunk art circles when it was found that the king was not included in the palace when brought over. But we have it on good authority that the club will make a further assessment on its members to buy the king if they want him.

It is of interest to look back over the successive phases of history which have thus reached their final culmination.

The removal of valuables from Europe to America seems to have originated with the purchase of pictures and works of art from the European Galleries. It was felt that America ought to have in its possession samples of the work of the great masters. No adverse comment was raised when a considerable number of paintings by Rubens, Titian, Velasquez and other masters were brought over to America. In the same way the original manuscripts of many great authors, Milton, Byron, Dickens, etc., were soon largely in American keeping. At the time it did not occur to the connoisseurs to buy the author himself.

It was soon found that other souvenirs of the past could be lifted and carried over to America as easily as paintings and manuscripts. We learn from old newspapers that it was about 1930 that removal of gravestones and monuments first began. An interesting item on this head may be here reproduced from what seems to have been a leading Texas newspaper in 1935.

“Our enterprising fellow-citizen, Mr. Phineas Q. Cactus, has succeeded in going all the art connoisseurs one better in the unique present which he has just made to this city. Mr. Cactus recently made a visit to the old country and was immensely impressed with some of the scenery which he considers little inferior to that of Texas. While inspecting the grazing lands of Lincolnshire he noticed particularly the little country churchyard, crowded with a jumble of graves and leaning tombstones, with great elms rising among them, and celebrated to all lovers of American poetry as the site of Gray’s famous ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard.’ Mr. Cactus has been enabled to buy the entire spot and is having it moved, trees and all, to Texas. In their new setting the graves, however, will be neatly laid out on a rectangular plan, the plots divided with little streets and avenues, properly numbered and the bygone tenants arranged alphabetically. It is felt that this noble gift will do much to stimulate interest in the study of the history of Texas.”

It appears probable that this unrivaled feat – successfully accomplished – gave the impetus to removal of land sites on a still more generous scale. The removal of the Battle of Hastings which was re-laid out beside West Chicago in 1940 was followed by the careful and methodical transfer of a selected number of battlefields from Europe to America. The Battle of Waterloo, for which the bidding was very keen, was finally purchased by the Ladies’ Country and Golf Club of Fargo, Dakota.

It seems to have been at this point that the first murmurs of disapprobation, if not of protest, were heard from the other side. The following letter, couched in a language perhaps a trifle too warm for the occasion, seems to have appeared in the London Spectator, at some time in the year 1945.

Editor, The Spectator,

Dear Sir:

On returning from a residence of several years in the East and paying a visit to the continent of Europe I noticed, sir, with a certain shock of surprise, sir, that the battle of Waterloo had been removed from its place. Without wishing, sir, to question the perfect legal right of the purchaser, sir, I cannot but express a feeling of regret. And when I add that I have looked all over for Blenheim, Jena, Austerlitz and other battles and cannot find them you will admit, sir, that the situation is one to which the attention of your paper ought to be called.

Yours, etc.,

Tobasco Pepper,

(Retired) Major. Indian Army.

—

Such excitement as may have been occasioned, however, by the removal of the battlefields was soon forgotten in the mingled wonder and congratulation which followed the transfer of the European landscape on a still larger scale. It was little thought that when the United States federal government accepted the ownership of the forest of Fontainebleau in return for the cancellation of the French debt that they meant to move it to America. The transfer, though vast in its totality, was simplicity itself in detail. Nothing was needed but to dig up the trees and replant them on this side of the water. As it costs only three dollars on the average to remove a tree and as it used to cost an American citizen about five dollars a tree to go over and look at it, the transaction is hugely profitable. The beautiful forest as replanted on the Hudson now reaches from Yonkers to South Troy, containing a gasoline station at every quarter mile.

—

It appears, however, that the proposal which has just been made in the legislature of Montana is destined, if carried out, to eclipse anything already accomplished. It has long been felt that there is an insufficient amount of scenic art among the Rocky Mountains. The tourist in that district finds himself with nothing to look at. It is proposed, therefore, to establish a special city – the site of which will be the famous Dead Dog’s Gulch – entirely composed of European churches of historic interest. The state has already options on several of these buildings now in America and will buy such few as are left in Europe. When the plan is completed the new city of Ecclesia, Mont., laid out in squares, will contain in one and the same municipality, the Church of Notre Dame, the Madeleine, the Mosque of St. Sofia, York Minster, the Vatican and numerous other interesting specimens. It is further proposed that the legislature shall, by a series of criminal statutes, create a religious atmosphere suitable to the city.

—

Vast as have been the operations thus undertaken in Art Removal it is as interesting as it is reassuring to realize that they have involved no loss of money. Indeed, a calculation just made by Professor Yidd of Columbia shows that there has been a considerable profit. Before the era of Art Removal about 333,000 Americans visited Europe every year and spent, on the average, about three thousand dollars each. This made a total of a billion dollars and represented the interest on $25,000,000,000. As there is now no reason to go to Europe, all the money, perhaps twice the amount spent on removing pictures, trees and churches, has been saved.

Nor is that the whole of the case. At present it is found that an increasing number of Europeans come over to America to see the former treasures of Europe. It was noted that on a single steamer last week there was a party of young Englishmen coming over to have a look at Westminster Abbey and a group of enthusiastic Scots anxious to see Edinburgh Castle.

The good work may be carried still further. They say there are some things worth taking in South America.

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If They Go On Swimming

A Forecast of the End of a New International Craze

Have you ever paused to think, my dear reader – or do you ever think? – of what will happen if the present swimming mania keeps up?

Only a little while ago it was looked upon as an impossible feat to swim through the Niagara Gorge. Then somebody swam it. Then somebody else swam it. And then everybody swam it – and the Niagara Gorge has become, more or less, a sort of bathing resort.

The next feat was the passage of the English Channel. It was called impossible. Then somebody swam it. Somebody else swam it. Everybody swam it. And look at it now – black with people.

After that came Catalina. It was declared an absolutely impossible swim. Somebody (already a forgotten hero) swam it. Then somebody else. Then more. And now parties swim across in dozens.

So let us look ahead, by imagining the press notices of the next few months and years and see where this swimming business is leading to. Here we have, for example, the beginning of the famous Bering Sea Contest of the summer of 1929. Thus:

WILL ATTEMPT BERING STRAIT

Nome, Alaska, June 1, 1929.—A daring, and perhaps a suicidal proposal is put forward by John Eiderduck, an Eskimo of upper Alaska, who will attempt to swim from America to Asia. The proposition is generally regarded here as little short of madness.

The distance along the line which Eiderduck has selected is a hundred miles, the entire course being broken by currents and tides of extraordinary ferocity. The course is also thickly strewn with floating ice and is exposed to the full fury of the sub-arctic gales.

Eiderduck, however, is a man of extraordinary physical strength and endurance, habituated to the water since his infancy. He proposes to smear himself a foot deep with seal blubber and to close up his eyes with ham fat.

Sea captains and others who know the straits well declare that Eiderduck cannot possibly swim it.

—

Nome, June 5, 1929.—John Eiderduck, covered with seal blubber and his eyes closed with ham fat, successfully accomplished today the feat of swimming from America to Asia. The swim occupied four days, one hour, and one minute. During the last fifty miles, Eiderduck was in a state of coma, and during the final ten miles he was practically dead, swimming in a purely mechanical way about ten feet under water.

Eiderduck landed at Chuk-Chuk in Northeastern Siberia, and had to be harpooned to lift him out of the water.

BERING SWIM REPEATED

Nome, June 10, 1929.—Peter Williams, a college student of the Aurora Borealis Agricultural College, Point Barrow, has duplicated, if not surpassed, the record swim of John Eiderduck. Leaving the American Coast on Monday evening, he landed in Siberia late on Wednesday afternoon, having swum the entire distance in a little less than three days. Peter reports a cold trip.

GIRL SWIMMER BREAKS BERING SEA RECORD

Nome, June 20, 1929.—Miss Ettie Underweight, a girl teacher in the Nome High School, swam from America to Asia, in two days and a half. Miss Underweight, who weighs only 95 pounds (troy weight), was accompanied by a boat from which she was given chocolates, cigarettes, candies, cigars, and chewing gum during her swim.

OCTOGENARIAN LADY MAKES INTERCONTINENTAL RECORD

Nome, Aug. 1, 1929.—Among the many persons who have swum from continent to continent during the past few weeks, the palm of victory is now universally awarded to Mrs. Martha McFooze, a Scottish lady who has been living as a missionary in Kamskatka, Asia, for over fifty years. Mrs. McFooze is eighty-four years of age and learned to swim only last summer. She made a remarkably good passage, leaving the Asia coast early on Wednesday and arriving in America late on Tuesday, thus making the trip in about one hour less than nothing, according to the standard time of both places.

Now that the Bering currents and the conditions of the swim are thoroughly understood, the transit is being made by hundreds of people every week.

—

But with the advent of the year 1930, a new excitement will break out:

WILL SWIM TO HAWAII

San Francisco, June 1, 1930.—Intense excitement is raging in San Francisco over the announcement that a local multimillionaire and enthusiast has offered a prize of twenty dollars for the first person who will swim from San Francisco to Hawaii. The feat is here regarded by all those who know the course as practically impossible, the distance of 2,095 miles being filled with currents running in all directions and infested with sharks, etc., etc., etc., etc. . . .

—

San Francisco, July 10, 1930.—Miss Lottie Lotsofit, a high-school girl of this city, has successfully completed the swim to Hawaii. The swim occupied exactly twenty days, Lottie keeping up an average speed of four miles an hour.

On her return here, a civic reception will be tendered to her and the prize of twenty dollars will be presented to her by the mayor.

—

And then after that, in the years from 1930 onward, the papers will be crowded with little swimming items from all over the world, thus:

SWIMMING IN ALL DIRECTIONS

Nagasaki, June 1, 1931.—The Reverend Josephus and Mrs. Hussel swam in today from the Philippines. They report a quiet passage.

—

Valparaiso, Chile, June 1, 1932.—Two high school girls from the Tacoma (Wash.) Academy swam in here by mistake. They were heading for London via Panama, but missed the entry to the canal in a mist. They report things quiet on the west coast of South America, but passed a school of school teachers swimming from Callao to Vancouver.

—

Hamburg, June 15, 1933 – Hans Hamfat of Hamburg completed today the first ocean swim attempted as a freight carrier. Hamfat, who weighs three hundred and fifty pounds, carried nearly half a ton of mixed cargo across from Norway at a rate that cut far below the ordinary freight charges. It is proposed to incorporate him and let him swim back and forward to America.

—

In other words, by that time this hurried and hustling world will have overdone and done to death the swimming business, as it does everything else. It will go the way of the 1897 bicycle and the 1912 tango and all the other hobbies of a restless generation.

Why can’t we take things a little quietly?

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If Mussolini Comes

What We Would Be Entitled to Conclude Would Occur

The glad news has gone abroad – or is it just a rumour? – that Signor Mussolini will shortly visit America.

“In a few months,” the great Italian patriot is reported as having said to the press, “I shall go out to America. As soon as I have completed the fascistification of Europe, I shall make the voyage. There are just a few more things here which I want to abolish and then I shall be ready to go over to America and see what needs abolishing over there.” After which Signor Mussolini threw the interviewer out of the window and turned eagerly to his desk.

There is no doubt that everybody has been immensely struck with the rise and growth of the Fascisti movement in Italy. They didn’t know at first what it was, but it pointed clearly to the fascistification of all Europe.

When Signor Mussolini stepped out from the ranks of the nation, everybody saw that he was a real man; and when he abolished the Italian Parliament and threatened to abolish the church and the labour unions and the king and the Socialists, and to sweep away the national debt, the taxes, together with the upper, lower, and middle classes, everybody realized that he had started something.

Add to this that the Fascist never shaves, that he doesn’t believe in democracy, that he won’t stand for any back-talk anybody and it is clear that the new doctrines will make a tremendous hit on this side of the water. Anybody who has to deal with taxi-cab drivers, hotel clerks, customs officials, and traffic cops, knows that we have our own Fascisti all around us already.

I can therefore imagine that if Signor Mussolini really does come and make a tour of this continent, there will break out a chorus of enthusiasm on the following model:

MUSSOLINI LANDS IN NEW YORK

New York, Monday — Signor Mussolini, the dictator of Italy, landed here this morning after having heaved the immigration officials into the outer harbor. Mussolini’s refusal to allow any of his baggage to be opened has delighted all the customs officials, while the fact that he openly carried a gallon of Chianti under his arm has at once won him the esteem of the Federal prohibition inspectors.

Mussolini expressed himself as delighted with New York. It needs nothing, he said, except to be knocked down and built over again. “Move it ten miles up the Hudson,” he exclaimed, “further from Philadelphia and nearer to Sing Sing, and it could be made a great city.”

Mussolini spoke briefly and modestly of American institutions, expressing the greatest admiration for everything about them, except such things as the constitution, liberty, equality, and democracy. “These, however,” he says, “are already passing and with an earnest patriotic effort can soon be got rid of altogether.” The local press is filled with eulogistic comments on Signor Mussolini. His refusal to pay his hotel bill was met with wide endorsement.

The illustrious Italian will leave at once for Washington, where he will inspect the government.

MUSSOLINI VISITS WASHINGTON

Washington, Tuesday — Signor Mussolini, the distinguished dictator of Italy and founder of the Fascisti movement, arrived in Washington at 10 o’clock this morning. He at once recommended the purification of the government by the abolition of both houses of Congress. The distinguished statesman was closeted with the President all afternoon in an earnest consideration of the abolition of the presidency. Meantime Signor Mussolini advocates that the Chief Justice and the other members of the Supreme Court be brought to trial at once, either for laesa majestas or under the Volstead Act (he doesn’t care which), and either executed or banished to Murray Bay.

Signor Mussolini considers that government in this country is lacking in emotional appeal. He recommends that as an inauguration of the new method of heroic government, every Monday be declared a day of National Rejoicing, followed by Tuesday as a day of National Weeping, with Wednesday as Patriotic Feast Day, and Thursday as a Grand General Clambake and Strawberry Festival.

He says that what our government needs is pep. Signor Mussolini, it is reported, will shortly visit the Middle West, traveling incognito as the Duke of Oklahoma with a view to introducing the aristocratic principle.

MUSSOLINI VISITS OTTAWA

Ottawa, Wednesday — Signor Mussolini yesterday paid a flying visit to Ottawa with a view to seeing how much of the government would need to be abolished at once and how much of it might be left over till next year. He expressed his regret that the Prime Minister is not wearing a black shirt and offered to lend him his other one. It is said that Mussolini will very likely advocate the entire abolition of the Prairie Provinces.

MUSSOLINI REFORMS BASEBALL

Chicago, Thursday — Signor Mussolini, during his visit to Chicago, witnessed a baseball game for the first time. The great Italian patriot expressed himself as delighted with the contest which he declares to be the nearest thing to the true Fascisti idea that he has seen in America.

He admired especially the rigidity and stringency of the rules, but questions whether there are enough of them. At present, he says, it would be possible to know all the rules, whereas in Italy the rules of any public game are kept secret. He was surprised to find that the umpire has no power of life and death over the players.

Signor Mussolini leaves at once in order to fill a lecture engagement at Harvard.

MUSSOLINI LECTURES AT HARVARD

Cambridge, Mass., Friday — Intense interest and enthusiasm are being shown for the lectures by Signor Mussolini given here at the invitation of Harvard University on the doctrine of force as a social factor. His statement that the public are just a pack of hogs has been received by the public with delight.

The business men whom Mussolini denounces as a set of crooks are flocking to hear him, while the society people are entranced with his theorem that society people have no brains. The clergy also are very much interested in his dictum that every clergyman is more or less a nut.

Meantime invitations to lecture are pouring in from all over the country. The public statement of the illustrious Italian that the Middle West is sunk in ignorance as deep as mud has led to enthusiastic calls to the Middle West. His grand slam on California has been made the occasion of an invitation to Leland Stanford University. His theory that the moving pictures are doing the work of the devil has prompted the offer of a contract from Hollywood, while his plain challenge, “To hell with radio,” is to be broadcast all over New York.

DEPARTURE OF MUSSOLINI

The Reverse Side of the Picture

The general wave of awakening in this country which has accompanied the progress of enthusiasm for the Fascisti movement is somewhat averted by the severe business depression which has overwhelmed the soap industry. Soap is said to be unsalable, and all coloured shirts are being exported to Ethiopia, while the barber shops are closing for lack of business.

These, however, are felt to be only the back eddies in the current of a great national movement.

Meantime, Mussolini having finished his gallon of Chianti, to his regret, is departing for Italy tomorrow.

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This World Championship Stuff

And Why I Am Out of It

Now that the World’s Baseball Series is again approaching and the World’s Prize Fight is over, the World’s Tennis Championship decided and the World Medal for Needlework awarded, it is the right moment for some one to call attention to the alarming growth of this World Stuff.

We are reaching a situation where nobody is satisfied with any form of achievement or competition or contest unless it takes in the whole world. In olden days, a man could make a reputation and feel a tremendous pride in himself even in a very restricted area.

I knew a man who lived and died respected because he had taken a prize as the second best checker-player in York County, Ontario.

I knew another man who was famous as the champion long distance jumper of Bellows Falls, Vt. But what would that man have thought if he could have read of a Million-Dollar World’s Jump jumped at Constantinople, by jumpers from the entire jumping world.

This world competition stuff takes all the joy out of the lesser and humbler things. I will give a very simple and personal example. A year or so ago I was getting quite stout, comfortably stout, and I was proud of it. But all my pleasure in the fact was ruined by a newspaper paragraph that read:

“WORLD’S CHAMPION STOUT BOY IN IOWA

“The State of Iowa has produced in Edward Aspiration Smith of Cedar Falls, Iowa, the World’s Champion stout boy. Ed, who was born and raised in this state, is only fifteen years old and weighs 420 pounds. He attended high school here for three years and weighed one hundred pounds more with each class he attended. This fall he was persuaded to enter the Fatness Contest organized at the fall fair at Indian’s Gulch, Iowa, open to all the world. Ed speaks very modestly of his success, which he attributes as much to his parents as to himself.”

After I read that I realized that there was no use in any efforts of mine. This infernal boy would beat me out any time. He can add ten pounds to my one easily. I don’t seem even to care about trying to be the stoutest man on my street with Ed Smith on the horizon.

All that I can do now is to content myself with reading of the increasing world triumph of Edward Aspiration Smith, of the medal he will win at the Pan-American Stoutness Contest at Washington, D.C.; of how the President will say to him, “Well, Ed, you certainly are stout”; and then he will go over to London and defeat all comers in the World’s Weigh-In and King George will say to him, “Well, Ed, you certainly are fat!”; and after that he will appear in Paris at the Concurrence Mondiale de la Grosseur and Monsieur Poincaré will say to him, “Eh bien, monsieur Ed, vous êtes certainement gros.”

And in the whole of Edward Aspiration Smith’s career the only part I can take will be to bet on him in each successive contest that he carries on. That is exactly where we are getting to, those of us who are not world people ourselves – the excluded two billion who don’t weigh 420 pounds, and can’t jump eight feet in the air, who can’t sing to 10,000 people, or pound anybody to a pulp in the presence of 120,000 others. We just bet. That’s us and that’s all that we amount to.

Today, for example, there is a World’s Horse running in a World Race in Cuba. I’m betting on that. And there’s a World Man swimming the Irish Channel – or, no, he’s drowned; but, anyway, there’s some man swimming some channel somewhere – a World Channel – he’s doing it for a World Belt or something. Anyway, I am betting on him. Why wouldn’t I? Personally, I couldn’t swim across the Lachine Canal. So all I can do is bet. You too.

There’s a slight consolation in the fact that these world people come to a natural end. Some one else out-worlds them. I know perfectly well that sooner or later Edward Aspiration Smith will run up against something a little stouter than himself. At the Pan-Continental World’s Entire Globe Million-Dollar Contest, Ed will be beaten out by a Chinese boy from Shantung, who can’t read or write, but weighs half a pound more than Ed. And that half pound will hurl Edward clean down to the bottom again, and people will look on him as quite thin and his book “How I Became Fat” will lose its sale entirely. Such is the poison of the World Stuff.

So it is coming about that we are getting to have a group of World People superior to the rest of ourselves. We sit and look on. The other day in a New York restaurant, they pointed out to me the World’s Most Highly Paid Plumber eating supper with the World’s Champion Baggage-Smasher, and there was a World’s Prize Lady Mannequin eating with them. Could I have had her with me? No. I was outclassed.

If this thing goes much further, I propose to start a society of World Assassinators and send them out. If I do, I warn such people as Mr. Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Fairbanks and Mr. Tunney and the Lady Mannequin, who got the World’s Beauty Prize, to look out. But, pshaw, what would be the use? Before my society was a month old, it would hold a competition and some one in it would take the World Prize for Assassination, and I would have to bet on him.

But I’d like at least to warn the public that some of the consequences of the world stuff are going to be as serious as they are unforeseen. Take the case of War – a thing in itself quite as unimportant to the world as Prize Fights or Tennis or Beauty Contests. We are in danger of losing it. Not so very long ago everybody was content, amply content, with a quiet little war between one or two nations, just doing the best they could without any outsiders.

Any one of us would, for example, have been satisfied with a select little war between the United States and England, fought out between ourselves with no interference. We might perhaps have allowed the French to look on or even to take a small part because they are old friends. But beyond that we never had any aspirations at all.

But look at the present situation. We are all so spoilt with the idea of a World War that we won’t be content with anything less. I talked the other day with an officer of very high rank in the American Army who expressed to me exactly what is felt in his profession about the outlook.

“You can’t blame us,” he said, “if we are discouraged. The prospect of war, that is, of a real war, a World War, seems most unpromising. Several times lately we could, of course, have had a war with Mexico. But our fellows say they simply wouldn’t fall for it. It’s not worth while. War with Japan used to sound inviting a few years ago. But after all, there are only about seventy million of them and one hundred and ten million of us, or one hundred and eighty million all together – bush league stuff!

“As for a World War,” he continued, “you just can’t get them to come in or at least to agree when it is to be. Some nations would like it to be before Christmas, and others want to wait till after New Year’s when the public are less preoccupied. The result is going to be that, first thing we know, we won’t get any war at all.”

—

There: That’s the situation as I see it, and the danger that prompts me to write this essay. After which, the only thing to do is to hand the manuscript to a World Organization to give it a World Printer.

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Get Off the Earth

Now That This Globe Is Used Up, Let’s Look for Another

I was having a talk the other day with McGinnis, the famous Frenchman who has just flown from Norway to Nigeria. I think it was he. Anyway, it was either McGinnis or else Raoul de la Robinette, the great American aviator, or the Italian, Schwarz. One mixes these flyers.

The point is that the flyer was complaining that, in the shape in which things are now, there is nowhere left to fly to. “Where can we go?” he asked. “You remember that last summer when Lindbergh and then Chamberlin and then Byrd and the others flew across the Atlantic Ocean, it created quite a stir. But how long did it last? Within a few months the newspapers carried headings such as “Chicago Girl Flies to France,” “Octogenarian Hops Atlantic” – that sort of thing.

“Presently it didn’t even amount to that. Here’s a paragraph, for example,” continued the aviator, “cut out of yesterday’s paper, that reads: ‘Concert Postponed. Madame Hoopitup, the Great Dutch Soprano, who was to have appeared in New York, will be unable to appear tonight owing to a severe cold. It is thought that she may have contracted this in her transatlantic jump. Her medical man, who flew at once from Ohdam to her assistance, has sent for her daughter, who is now flying to Rio to join her brother who will fly with her to her mother.’

“So you see there is nowhere to fly to. After the Atlantic, we soon used up the rest. Somebody flew across to Japan, but the Japanese got back at us at once. Then it was announced that the great Polish aviator, William Henry O’Heir, would fly from Warsaw to the desert of Gobi. And he had everything ready when just then a Mongolian flyer from Gobi landed in Warsaw.

“We’ve tried the poles and that’s nothing. There’s a restaurant now at each of them. In fact, there are no queer places left in the world any more. All the odd spots are gone. The Negus of Abyssinia is advertising for American bartenders. The Grand Llama of Tibet gave an interview on Mother’s Day on the dangers of cigarette-smoking. The Khan of Tartary has put in a golf course, and the Rajah of Sarawak is playing chess by radio with the Begum of Bhopal.

“What’s the good of flying? There’s nowhere to fly to.”

—

He ceased and left me. And hardly had he gone when I fell into the company of another distressed acquaintance whose principal interest in life till only recently has been radio and all that goes with it.

“I’m done with it,” he said. “There’s nowhere to talk to. Only a few years ago, it gave us a great thrill when New York actually talked to Chicago. Then we lengthened it out to San Francisco and Vancouver. Then there came a time – how childish it seems now – when people actually got excited because New York talked to London.

“It’s queer that no one foresaw what was bound to happen. The earth is only 25,000 miles round at the roundest. And it’s less if you just run round the top half of it. You can’t get more than 12,500 miles away from anybody if you try.

“When New York called up Rumbumabad in the Punjab, they were halfway round the world. And when London called up Dunedin, New Zealand, and Hammerfest, Norway, spoke to Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, the thing was over.

“There’s nowhere to talk to now. The only reason to talk now would be to hear what they say and think. And that’s nothing. They say and think just what we do. Nobody now is far enough away. Unless,” he concluded wistfully, “we can get off the earth!”

—

And a little later I met a third. “Business?” he said, “rotten. There’s nobody to sell to. I’ve just been through equatorial Africa selling cars – selling our new closed car with self-regulating refrigeration and a lion-catcher in front. But it’s no good. They’ve all got them. All the highways from Tanganyika to Lake Tchad are crowded with them. There’s no use inventing any more new devices. They just go all over the world in a day.

“And to think that when first I saw equatorial Africa thirty years ago, those people would buy glass beads and trade a chunk of ivory six feet long for a broken soda water bottle.

“But it’s no use. Nowadays everybody knows everything and everybody has everything, and you can’t sell anything. The only way to sell things now would be to get clear off the earth itself. There must be some new boobs somewhere.”

—

And so, too, the next one. “Travel,” he said. “Why should I? There’s nowhere to travel to. Every place has become just like every other place. Wherever you go you see big signs up with the words GARAGE and GASOLINE. The Chinese wear English golf suits, and the English wear Chinese pyjamas. There are no local manners and customs left. All the world eats French omelettes, chop suey, finnan haddie, and Chicago ham. Even the dervishes now have a room and a bath, and the Hottentots use safety razors. Travel is ended.”

And so it happened that just after I had listened to these different complaints, I read in the paper that paragraph that everybody saw the other day about the possibility of getting to the moon. It seems that Professor What’s-his-name – the great physicist of that big university – says that with modern explosives a huge cannon could easily fire people clear beyond the earth’s attraction and land them on the moon like mashie shots on a golf green.

That’s the thing for us. We’ve spoilt this poor old globe. We’ve got it all so explored and surveyed and exploited, so organized and so uniform, so entirely subdued to our use that the whole place is tame and wearisome. There are no rough spots left.

But think of the moon. With hardly enough atmosphere to breathe in, with great pits and caverns ten miles deep, with internal fires and external darkness, and with life primitive and hideous in the sunken crevasses.

What a place! What a romance, what a chance for inventions, and what a market.

Let us hop off for it, one by one. Go ahead, Colonel Lindbergh, you’re first.

Of course, we don’t come back. But who cares?

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Bygone Currents

The Lost World of Yesterday

A Pen Picture of the Vanished Past – the Horse and Buggy

You might see it in “Anno Domini 1880,” skimming along any country road, it or them, the Horse and Buggy. A fairy vehicle, it seemed, light and swift, so that the buckboard and the lumber wagon seemed at once hopelessly clumsy, slow, and inconvenient. It was the last word in ease.

It had a step to step in by, so that there was no need to throw oneself over the side, as in the lumber wagon. It had springs between the body – the chassis – and the axle, so that when the wheels hit a stone or bumped into a rut the light chassis oscillated in the air like a canary’s nest on a willow bough.

With the buckboard, each jolt was a collision, head-on and uncompromising; the lumber wagon had about as much give and take as a war chariot; the buggy danced upon its springs like a daffodil.

In front was a dashboard sheltering from the splash of mud, and folded into it, by a miracle of inventive ingenuity, a waterproof rug or cover for the knees. Behind the seat, by another stroke of invention, was a sort of locker or receptacle that would hold two quart bottles.

But the real point of the horse and buggy was their speed. Goodbye to the heavy lumber wagon left behind in the dusty road as we spin past on the green grass that edges the track; goodbye to the buckboard, once the dashing marvel of the corduroy road; goodbye to the hayrack and the horse-threshing-machine, and the other vehicles of the country highway. The buggy passes them as if they are standing still.

The horse and buggy had no speed indicator. But they could hit up seven miles an hour with ease, and make it ten if the horse ran away. There was no speed limit in terms of miles; the law forbade reckless driving, but seven miles an hour was all right anywhere, except only inside a village, or an incorporated town, or a municipality, or beside a church, where it fell to two, and up-hill, where it sank to one.

The horse and buggy used no gasoline. With them, there was no painful nuisance of filling the tank or cranking up. It wasn’t necessary. Just get the lantern and go out to the stable and slip the harness on the horse, bring him round to the trough and break the ice if it was winter, or if it was summer just pump a little till the pump started and fill up the trough, and then put the horse into the buggy and bring them round to the back door, and that was all.

A smart man could hitch in fifteen minutes. Even a child could do it all except the tail-strap.

When the horse and buggy skimmed along in 1880 in the hey-day of their popularity, there was in the buggy, typically, a lady and gentleman – I beg pardon, I am forgetting how to use my own original language – there was in it a “young feller and a girl.” He was taking her “out for a spin.” In 1880, to “spin” a girl was the sure way to win her.

The young feller wore his store clothes, gingerbread brown, and a black hat copied from the North American pirates, and the girl had on a coloured dress copied from the Algonquins. They didn’t take their fashions from France in 1880. They got them right here.

The spin in the horse and buggy as compared with the modern motor car – also called the automobile or the horseless carriage – was safety itself. The horse might dash into a snake fence and hurl the girl over it on to a pile of stones in the fence corner; but without damage – you couldn’t hurt those girls in 1880.

The horse might, of course, get a puncture by picking up a stone, but all you had to do was to speak softly to it, lift its leg, and kick it in the stomach. In a few minutes you were off again.

The young feller and the girl in the horse and buggy were making love. They didn’t know it, but they were. They thought that they were just out for a spin looking at the crops.

“Them oats,” he said, “of Bob Ames’s’s ain’t headin’ out the way they should.”

“No, indeed,” she answered, “they didn’t ought to be so green still.”

Both of them had been to school – in the red schoolhouse on the road itself; both of them could “speak grammar” if they tried to; but that would be affected. And when he said, “I ain’t seen no crops on the whole equally superior to them there,” the language had a home feeling about it that you don’t get in a spelling book.

Some of these young fellers of 1880 afterwards sat in legislatures, or preached from city pulpits, and became the nation builders of this continent. But when they gave up saying “this here” and “them there,” they had taken on something alien to their true selves – but did they ever really give it up? I doubt it. In the most plutocratic homes of the continent, when the English butler’s back is turned, your host may still say to you, “Try one of these here cigars.” And if you come from where he does, you will answer, “Yes, sir, they’re a good cigar, them.”

—

But I forgot the horse and buggy – they’re off and gone a quarter mile down the road; they’re passing through Riddel’s Bush on the hillside, and the swinging boughs and the green leaves nod over their heads. Not making love? I am not so sure of it. Look – the young feller has handed to the girl a “conversation lozenge,” a white, flat piece of peppermint candy with a motto on it in red poison: “If you love me as I love you no knife can cut our love in two.”

When that lozenge was passed from hand to hand in 1880, it was as full of meaning as when Morgan the Buccaneer handed a chip to his associate pirate, or the Turkish Sultan a bowstring to his Vizier. It spelt fate. And if the girl took it and ate it – I mean, “took and eat it” (I keep slipping up on this language) – then her fate was settled.

At the end of the vista of green trees, she could see already in her fancy the meeting-house and the minister and the stern paraphernalia of marriage as it was in 1880.

The horse and buggy have done their work. Turn them head home in the evening twilight.

TOC     INDEX

Come Back to School

And Let Us See
What the Dear Old Days Felt Like

A number of excellent people, as they pass from youth to middle age, begin to look back with regret to their days at school. The idea grows in their minds that their school days were the happiest period in their lives.

Many a prosperous business man pauses in the intervals of his lunch at the club, or stands a moment pensive on his golf course, to recall with wistful longing the days when he was a boy at school. “Yes, sir,” he says to himself or to his neighbour, “I didn’t know it at the time, but those certainly were happy days.” And his neighbour, between the puffs of a Havana cigar, agrees with him.

So let us see what it was really like.

Come back with me for one morning in school.

You, my good friend, prosperous business man and happy head of a household, you will be good enough to transport yourself in fancy back to your school days. Come along to school with me and let us see how you like it.

And by the way, hurry up! School begins at 9 a.m. and you have to be there. I know that you generally get to your office at nine, but then, if you don’t arrive there, nothing happens. This morning, if you are not there at nine, there’s going to be trouble.

A man nearly twice as high as you are and weighing three times as much will interview you about it. In proportion to your present size – that is, so as to reproduce your proper schoolboy impression – he would be eleven feet high and weigh half a ton. And his proposition to you would be that if you can’t come to school on time, you and he will have a few words to say about it.

However, luckily we needn’t worry this time. By good luck here we are at school right on time. But, say, for heaven’s sake! throw away that cigar! Have you forgotten that you can’t smoke in school!

Now you can stand up and pray for five minutes – that will do you a whole lot of good – and then we’ll go right into the arithmetic class.

Take your seat – yes, that little wooden bench; you don’t have a cushion – and let’s begin the arithmetic, the very same thing that you must have enjoyed so hugely in those old days you talk about.

First question for you:

John has 87 marbles, but he gives seven-ninths of them to Edwin, who in turn gives Arthur four-fifths of the difference between what he keeps and what John had at the start. How many marbles has Edwin?

What! You can’t answer it? But, my dear sir, that’s the kind of thing that your little son of ten is doing every day. What? You say you will get your stenographer to do it. Yes, but in school you don’t have a stenographer. Come along, try another.

Mary is twenty years old. Mary is twice as old as Anne was when Mary was as old as Anne is now. How old is Anne?

Stuck again? And yet you are so fond of explaining to the children at home what a whale you were in arithmetic. I’m afraid that your chance of getting out at four is beginning to look mighty poor. No game of golf for you today. Not if that man eleven feet high knows it.

Well, let the arithmetic go. Perhaps next time you see your children working out “homework” in a corner of the living room, you’ll be a little more compassionate. But just before we leave arithmetic, would you like to realize about how much of it you really have left? This – the following – is about your present size:

A and B play billiards. A, having made eleven points, gains three more. How many has he now?

Or perhaps you might even manage this:

A and B play bridge. A, having lost 67 cents, offers in payment one dollar. How much must B return to A in order to equate the difference?

So you can see just where you stand as compared with these wonderful children of ours. Let’s go on to the next class. Oh! you’d like to stop a few minutes and light a cigar! Can’t be done. Don’t you remember that in the dear old happy days, school never stopped. You’d like to telephone? You are not allowed to telephone. You’ve just remembered that you wanted to go down the street and buy some fishing tackle? Well, you can’t go down the street. Not till after four and perhaps not even then. Come on into the next class and let’s go on with the dear old happy days.

This time it is geography. We are going to learn the rivers of South America. Don’t you remember how fascinating it was?

Let’s begin now. Just say them over a few times – the Amazon with its branches, the Madeiro, the Puro, the Ukayale, the Ukuleke——

What? you’ve forgotten the first one already? Start again – the Madeiro, the Madingo, the Colorado Claro, the Hari Kari, the Berri-Berri.

Eh! how’s that? It just occurs to you that all these fool names are crazy and that there’s no sense in learning them. You can just as well tell your stenographer to call up the express company and ask them. Yes, but don’t you remember that in the dear old school days, you had to learn this kind of stuff by the yard? Never mind, we’ll let you off the remaining forty minutes of geography. Come along and let’s have a whirl at English literature.

Ah! now you really brighten up. It’s a favourite theory of yours that the literature class was a real treat, or at least that if you only had listened to your teacher properly, you would have got something for your whole life.

Let’s see. This is the class in English poetry and the children are to study Gray’s “Elegy.” Now sit tight in your seat and listen for the questions. First of all the teacher will read out a verse——

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike the inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

Now come the questions:

“Boast – first boy, how do you distinguish boast from boost?”

“Would it be an improvement, second boy, to say, ‘The boost of heraldry’? Distinguish this again, third boy, from ‘the booze of heraldry.’”

“Heraldry – fourth boy, what is Greek for this?”

“Now in the next line, fifth boy, ‘all that beauty.’ All what beauty? and in the line below, sixth boy, ‘lead but to’; explain the difference between but to and but in.”

“Now for the whole class – take your exercise books and write a life of the poet Gray, being particular to remember that his grandfather was born in Fareham, Hants, or perhaps in Epsom, Salts.”

Well, well! You can’t stand it any more! You want to break away and make a rush for your club. How cozy it will feel when you seat yourself opposite a large beefsteak and when you light up a cigar as huge and dark as the Amazon itself. How glad you are that the waiter will not suggest that he will cut you off five-eights of two-thirds of the steak and keep the rest warm for twice as many minutes as half the time needed to eat the remainder.

I tell you, sir, that as you sit there with your napkin to your chin and look at the spring sunlight on the young leaves, you have reason to feel happy that your school days are over. You are wondering whether you will take half an hour’s nap before you take the train to the golf club. And meantime the little boys are just going back to school, to give the Amazon another crack.

Won’t you henceforth, my dear sir, drop that stuff about the happy school days, and try to make it up to the little sufferers when the holidays begin again?

TOC     INDEX

The Fall Fair
and
the Autumn Exposition

A Comparison of Midgeville in 1880 and Midge City in 1928

Let us consider the 1928 season for the Fall Fairs. The first one opened up at Moose Factory, Hudson’s Bay (first turn to the left after Halifax), on August the first (close of the summer); and the last one is to be held at Bahia Todos los Santos (Lower California) on December the sixth (first day of autumn).

Meantime, though people fail to notice it, the Fall Fairs, like everything else in this world, have been undergoing a constant process of change and evolution. The man who first put a fat woman in a tent and called her a side-show was a real Christopher Columbus; and the genius who first arranged a (high) bicycle race in which one of the contestants could break his neck, was second only in influence to Thomas Edison.

If one wants the proof of it, let us turn back a moment and compare the Fall Fair as it was and the Autumn Exposition as it is. We can take as our basis of comparison the fair that was held in Midgeville in 1880 and the exposition that is to go on this autumn in Midge City. They are really the same place except that in such a long time changes have come. Where the Methodist church used to stand, there is now the Pandemonium Building; and on the corners where you used to go into a saloon to buy your drinks, you now go into a drug store.

FALL FAIR AT MIDGEVILLE

Anno Domini 1880

The Fall Fair at Midgeville was advertised by a distribution of circulars which lasted for about one afternoon. That is to say, a man drove out with a horse and buggy and a little packet of printed notices, which he handed out to each of the country stores that had a post office in it. He covered a radius of five miles in each direction, and beyond that the Fall Fair was just a rumour. The advertisements just said:

MIDGEVILLE FALL FAIR NEXT TUESDAY

—

Now compare what happens in 1928.

The Big Fall Show (The Autumn Exposition) at Midge City is preceded by a campaign of advertising which starts in the spring and never stops till the Big Show is pulled off in October. It is conducted by a publicity manager and a staff of college students who have taken a course of two semesters and a half on Fall Fair Advertising and it reaches all the way from the Middle West till the waves of it lap New York itself. It is done with placards such as

ARE YOU GOING TO MIDGE CITY?

But even that is rather inferior advertising. Much better is simply a placard

ARE YOU GOING?

That starts the people in New York thinking (a hard thing to do), and then later when they see in some other place a hundred miles away, another placard

MIDGE CITY! RAH! RAH!

they can hardly keep away from the Fall Fair.

—

THE AGRICULTURAL EXHIBIT

In the old days, at Midgeville in 1880, the main thing, in fact, the chief idea of the Fair, was the Agricultural Exhibit. It was placed in a long wooden shed and you didn’t need to ask where it was. You knew where it was as soon as you came within a hundred yards of it. You didn’t need to see it either. You would have known it was there in the dark. And you didn’t need to hear it. You just somehow were quite sure that this was it.

When you went in, you saw a huge hog in a pen and a farmer looking at the hog while the hog looked at the farmer. This was the farmer who had raised the hog and he had already looked at it all summer. But at present he is one of the judges of the Show and he is judging the hog. This is terribly hard to do because it is the only hog in the Show.

Next to that is a pen with a huge cow, and a farmer looking at the cow, and as they both have blue ribbons on, you know that they have taken the prize.

—

The whole Agricultural Exhibit was done that way. But compare:

MIDGE CITY AUTUMN EXPOSITION
THE BEAUTY SHOW

Do they have a show of fat hogs at the Midge City Autumn Exposition of today? Well, I should rather guess not! There is perhaps a shed somewhere away in the back of the place with a hog or two in it. But that is merely to draw off the farmers and keep them away from the Show.

The main big feature is the Beauty Show, at which the award is made as to which of the twelve girls is to have the honour of being “MISS MIDGE CITY,” and having her photograph in the papers all the way from Kansas City to Toronto. You don’t need to talk of fat hogs when you look at this contest. They are not in it with this. And the judges are not farmers. Any man capable of judging this contest wouldn’t stay on a farm a week.

Not that there was no variety at all in the Midgeville Fall Fair of 1880. It was understood even then that the human mind needs diversion and that the lighter shades must mingle with the graver side of life. No man can look at a hog all day without feeling the need of a change.

THE SIDE SHOWS IN 1880

That was why they all had a Flower Show in another shed, a smaller shed on the other side of the grounds from the Agricultural Hall. In this shed you could see the most beautiful sweet peas raised by Daisy Murchison, and the most wonderful chrysanthemums grown by Flossie Fitzgerald, the minister’s daughter: and, what was better still, Daisy and Flossie themselves looking at the flowers. So that wasn’t so bad.

But, as a matter of fact, there was even more excitement than that in 1880. There were always two or three other little tents with banners over them; on one of them was the legend

FAT WOMAN:
COME IN AND HAVE A LOOK

In 1880, everybody, it seems, was crazy to have a look at a fat woman. Now nobody cares. Thin women are all the rage, and a fat woman would starve to death in her tent.

But in 1880 there she was sitting on a little camp stool on a raised dais; she weighed 375 pounds and round her stood a little group of rural people, with their mouths open and a hush of awe upon them much like the attitude of people in the basilica of St. Peter’s at Rome.

The fat woman didn’t have to do anything or say anything; and the people didn’t say anything; they just looked at her. But even at that the morality of the whole thing was doubted; it was generally felt in 1880 that after a certain stage of fat a woman’s place was at home.

After you had seen the fat woman, there was still in 1880 the Living Skeleton, and the Albino Boy, and the Man Born Without Ears, and a few other diversions of that sort. In 1880, the line between horror and amusement was not carefully drawn.

—

THE SHOWS OF 1928

DESPERATE DEATH STUNTS BY DARE-DEVILS

But now in contrast with this the side-shows and side-lines of the Midge City Autumn Exposition of 1928. The side-shows have long since eaten up the show. In fact, nowadays they are the show. People don’t care any longer to see a hog stand still or a trotting horse trot. They come in the hope that one of the aviators will break his neck, or that the parachute man’s parachute will fail to open and that he will be dashed to pieces on the ground.

That, of course, is what all the wild advertising is aimed at; you see in the publicity publications, for instance:

DEATH-DEFYING DIVE BY DIVINE DIVER
and you will find that one big feature of the fair will be a dive by Señorita Marguerita Marcosa from a platform a hundred and fifty feet high, through flames of gasoline, onto a passing airplane, and from that to a parachute. If they could think of anything else to dive her through, they’d put her to it. The thing is to come as near to killing the Señorita as the law allows, with a half hope of the real thing. Hence all the fireworks, and the airplanes and speedway stuff.

Little do the people realize that the Señorita is really Daisy Murchison, the same girl who sold the flowers in 1880, or, if you like it, her daughter. But she learned calisthenics at the Midgeville High School, and now she’s doing stunts. They only call her Señorita because that sounds better in case she gets killed.

In any case, Daisy isn’t the only one taking a risk round the Midge City Autumn Exposition of 1928. The air is full of aviators leaping out of their machines, and women in mid-air hanging on to ropes with their teeth, and parachutes flying round like shingles on a windy day.

And the earth is as bad as the air. On the speedway there are motors and motorcycles whirling past at such a terrific rate that you have a fine chance any afternoon of the Fair to see a really terrible accident. Add to that the Human Fly crawling up the edge of the Midge City Pandemonium Building and killing himself (by statistics) one day in every twenty-five, and you see that the opportunity is excellent.

Altogether I don’t know which was best, the little old fair with the hogs and the flowers and Flossie Fitzgerald and the Fat Woman or the Big Show of 1928 with the noise and racket and sputtering fireworks and brain-curdling death stunts.

But I rather suspect that they are much the same thing. Human nature being still human nature, the people of 1880 probably got more or less the same feeling out of it all as we do now. But with that I leave it to the psychoanalysts.

TOC     INDEX

Extinct Monsters

All that Will Be Left of Our Household Pets in 1,000 Years

Trained observers, such as the readers of this book, who notice anything that comes under their eyes even at a distance of six inches, cannot have failed to realize that our household animals are doomed to extinction. “I doubt,” said an eminent social theorist the other day, himself one of the keenest of contemporary observers, “whether there are as many horses on Fifth Avenue as there are motor cars. Certainly there are none in the larger hotels.”

It is a subject of equally common remark that the dog is vanishing. Hydrophobia on the one hand and the motor truck on the other are breaking up the long-standing compact of friendship between man and the dog. “I doubt very much,” says a contemporary writer on social science, “if it is possible henceforth to raise pups on Fifth Avenue.”

In the same vein, a brilliant writer in a magazine of last month, in an article on The Passing of the Dog, declares that in a half hour’s walk in New York he did not pass a single dog.

Nor are the horse and the dog all. The decreasing numbers of the house-fly struck a first note of alarm last summer. The bat, once a familiar feature of the American home, is now seldom found except in an aviary. The moth can only be kept alive at an inordinate cost in camphor.

In short, it requires no great effort of the imagination to see that in a few more generations our household pets of the present will be the extinct monsters of the past. There will be nothing left of them except the kind of information that will be handed out somewhat after the following fashion:

I

THE HORSE

(As viewed in the light of extracts from the current press of the year 3000A.D.)

New York, Jan. 1, 3000 A.D. – Visitors to the Zoölogical Gardens (Extinct Animals Section) should not fail to take advantage of the unique opportunity now offered of seeing an actual living horse, perhaps the last specimen of its species. This interesting survival of a past age was found attached to what has been deciphered as a taxicab – itself a relic of unknown purpose – in the interior of China. Through the energies of the directors of our municipal museum, the animal was secured from its owners and flown yesterday to New York.

The horse is open to the public daily from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., and is attracting large crowds of sightseers. In shape, it resembles somewhat an earlier type of helicopter flying machine, the legs being pivoted at the corners, though seemingly in a position too rigid for successful flight.

Professor Plink, the famous authority on the zoölogical remains of the twentieth century, is of the opinion that the horse was unable to fly. “It is difficult,” he said, in a lecture delivered in the monkey-house of the Zoo last evening, “to conceive that the horse’s legs could make more than three revolutions to the second.”

The same authority explained that the horse was clearly distinct from the cow and the bull, there being features of difference easily recognizable by the expert.

It appears that the horse for many centuries was used by mankind as an engine of locomotion. When the animal was put into use, the pilot seated himself midway on its back, using his heels against its sides as a form of gear control. Contrary to many misleading historical references, no gasoline was put into the horse. A speed of three and even four miles an hour is said to have been maintained.

The last known use of the horse appears to have been in connection with the mounted policemen who were a familiar feature of civic life during the Age of Bandits in the earlier twentieth century. Experience showed that a policeman on the ground offered too easy a mark and could easily be teased or even kidnapped, whereas a policeman on horseback was elevated into a position of relative security.

Old prints of the period depict for us the mounted city police in their quaint uniforms asleep on their horses.

It is announced that the enterprising directors of our Metropolitan Museum may shortly be able to secure for us a perfect specimen of a cow, including the peculiar apparatus by which it produced gasoline.

II

THE DOG

(From a Young People’s Encyclopedia of Useful Knowledge, A.D. 4026)

The Dog (pronounced dog, or perhaps dorg; some authorities prefer dawg): An extinct carniverous mammalian quadruped of the late Grammoradial Age. It lived partly on human trousers and partly on refuse such as beefsteak, lamp chops, and deviled kidneys.

Owing to its savageness and ferocity, the Dog was in great demand with our ancestors. In the days when the habit of living was in single families in isolated houses, often separated from all other dwellings by iron railings, the dog was of the greatest value in keeping unsolicited visitors at a distance. (See under Book Agent and Canvasser; see also the article on Life Insurance.)

Of the various kinds or breeds of dogs thus maintained, we may mention the terrier, used for biting the ankles; the hound, used for pursuing pedestrians; the Bull Dog, for eating tramps; and the Lap Dog, for indoor biting. In addition to these, the Great Dane, used by the rich for biting the poor, may be mentioned along with the Mongrel, used by the poor for biting the rich.

From contemporary records we learn that persons who attached themselves to a Dog developed the greatest fidelity towards it, following it around all day, and walking great distances after it, often through broken country. Before the era of flying, it is said that Dog-Walking was a familiar pastime, every Dog permitting himself to be accompanied by one, two, or even more persons.

III

THE HOUSE-FLY

(From the Same Authority)

The House-Fly (not to be confused with the Bat, the Hornet, and other household pets of the same epoch) appears to have been a prime favourite with our ancestors. The bright, merry ways of the little fellow, his shiny coat, his glossy wings, and his large eyes twinkling with merriment, endeared him to the household. No household, in fact, was complete, at least in the bright season of summer without its complement of the cheery little fellows, buzzing against the window-panes, or sitting floating on the milk.

Fly-raising usually began in the spring. The careful housewife set out large cans filled with what was called at that epoch Garbage (see under Garbage in the Twentieth Century; see also under Salad, Mixed Grill, and Hash) placed in sunny corners and liberally coated with fly-eggs, collected by sweeping up the accumulated dust in the corners and angles of the room. A trained housekeeper thus raised anywhere from one to ten thousand flies in a season.

As recently as one hundred years ago, the fly needed, it would seem, but little sleep, and during the night would sit beside his master’s bed, ready to call him at the first light of dawn by a playful buzzing in his ear. Surly indeed was the sluggard who could resist the little fellow’s winsome invitation to come out and chase him on the lawn.

The care and raising of the Fly occupied a large part of the time of the women-folk of our ancestors. A Fly is reported to have been seen alive, sitting on one of the piles of a pier in the Hudson River, looking disconsolately at the water. Since that time the Fly is only found in the museum. There is a good Fly in the famous Morgan collection and there are two in the British Museum.

TOC     INDEX

The Passing
of the Back Yard

Another Social Revolution
Coming Straight at Us

“We have just found such a charming apartment, said my young friend Mrs. Fanlight. “John and I are perfectly fascinated with it. It’s wonderful.”

“Have you? Are you? Is it?” I answered.

“It has simply everything,” the young lady went on, “heated and lighted and all that, of course, and then an ice cupboard run by steam or something so that we don’t have to buy any ice.”

“It sounds delightful,” I said.

“Isn’t it? And there’s a patent kind of thing that washes the dishes, and an ironing board that falls down out of the wall, a place where the garbage burns itself up – in fact, there is absolutely everything.”

“And how,” I asked, “do you get from it to the Back Yard?”

“The Back Yard?”

“Yes, how do you manage? Do you go down steps, or in an elevator or what, to get to it?”

“Why, there isn’t any Back Yard. What on earth would we want that for?”

“But what about a rain-water barrel,” I persisted, “haven’t you got one?”

“Why, of course not.”

“But suppose you wanted to get some soft water to wash in – what do you do about it? And do you mean to say you have no ash heap? And where do you hang the clothes? How do you throw things away?”

“I think the janitor attends to all that. And of course the clothes are dried in the patent way by squirting water over them.”

“And where do the children play?”

“The children,” said Mrs. Fanlight, “why, there’s a community playroom in the apartment with mechanical rocking horses and with an imitation grass plot made of rubber. It’s perfectly wonderful.”

“I see,” I said, “and you don’t need a Back Yard any more.”

“We never thought about it,” she said.

And with that I left her, very sorrowful. For I realized that with the advance of the rapid age in which we live, another great social revolution is being noiselessly effected – the passing of the Back Yard.

—

Others have deplored the passing of this and of that which marks the transformation of our time. Tears have been shed over the passing of the stage coach, and the sailing ship, the passing of the West, and the Passing of the Third Floor Back.

Let it be for me to drop a tear over the ashes – no, into the ashes – of the Back Yard. With the advent of the Up-to-Date Apartment Castle, the Boulevard Movement, and the new cleanliness, this beautiful little area of secluded life is vanishing from our cities.

Let me, as a matter of useful historical record, set down what a Back Yard used to be like; or rather, perhaps it will serve the purpose better if I describe it as it will no doubt be written up in the Social Encyclopedias of a Hundred Years Hence, thus:

Back Yard (Old Eng.: Bugge Yearde. French, Yarde de Derrière. Ital. Yardo di Bacco). This name was given to an irregular space in the form of a rectangular parallelogram that was marked out behind the houses of the nineteenth century. The back yard was surrounded by a board fence intended for cats to sit on.

Along the base of the fence of a Back Yard extended a flower bed in which all the flowers had died and on which had fallen loose stones, half bricks, and other mineral refuse. The growth of burdocks among these still helped to preserve the name “flower bed” in domestic use. It is said that in the spring time of the year the owners of the Back Yards were often seen digging furiously among the burdock roots with a view to reviving the “flower bed.”

It was a frequent practice at such times to insert dahlia roots, gladiolus bulbs, and tulips. The digging, however, was all over by the end of May and nothing but the burdocks ever came up.

A Back Yard usually contained one tree, from which most of the larger branches had been sawed off square and which was said to be an apple tree. The apple tree was used for climbing, for clothes lines, for cat hunting, etc., etc. In the leafiest time of the year, by placing a broken chair at a suitable astronomical angle so as to allow the sun’s rays to be partially intercepted, a distinct sensation of shade was abtainable.

The rain-barrel (first introduced by the Romans) and the ashcan (introduced by Charlemagne) were familiar features of the Back Yard.

The principal inhabitants of the Back Yard were children, of whom there were still a great many in the large cities in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Anti-Child Law of the Apartment House Epoch is thought to have greatly assisted in the disappearance of city children.

The Back Yard was used by the children as a general playground, as a football field, as a golf course, as a hockey rink, and as a bowling alley. By an unwritten law of the period, the Rain-Barrel, the Ash-Heap, and the Apple Tree were regarded as the perquisites of children. By a pretty custom also, the children were permitted to smear their faces with the coal dust of the Ash-Heap, and to claim as treasure trove any article found in the Back Yard. The children were assisted in the Back Yard by a Dog (see article Dog), an animal now extinct.

The passing of the Back Yard is said to have brought a peculiar loneliness to the surviving city children. There is even a legend, sometimes whispered, that the souls of the little children who once played in the Lost Back Yard still haunt the sky-scraping apartments that have replaced their vanished playground. But this is probably not true. Their souls are nearer to the sky than that.

TOC     INDEX

Short Circuits
in Current Literature

The Literary Sensations
of 1929

A Confidential Guide
to the New Books

Now that the year 1928 is upon us – so far upon us – it is time for publishing houses to make their book announcements for 1929. As a result of inquiries made to a number of leading firms, therefore, I am able to make known to readers of this book that the literary output of the year now opening – in the publishing calendar – is likely to exceed in brilliance anything accomplished in the past.

The publishers themselves, usually so reticent about the merit of their own books, admit that they never saw a brighter prospect. In nearly every department of literature, from children’s books down to fundamentalism, the year promises extraordinary sensations.

For example, in the realm of children’s literature itself a special feature will be the addition of one more notable book to those written by mere children but read with delight by young and old. This little volume, entitled “Willie Nut: His Book,” will take its place at once not only in child literature, but in the literature of nuts. It is the work of one who is not merely a child, but who is, to all intents and purposes, a complete imbecile.

Willie Nut was discovered last year. In fact, I found him. The story of my discovery of Willie is quite simple, and may be related in a few words. I came across him in the course of an afternoon walk in the country. The child, whose home is of the humblest, was cutting wood in the yard with a bucksaw. Something in the extraordinary simplicity of the boy’s big face and the length of his ears attracted my attention. “Surely,” I said, half aloud to myself, “this boy must have written a book. He has all the marks of it.”

At the word “book,” I saw a big tear rise in the boy’s eye. “Oh, sir!” he said, “do you think you could possibly get a New York firm to publish it?” Then he added modestly as his head drooped over the saw, “I wrote it only for myself, sir, but if there is any money in publishing it, count me in.”

In a few hours I was speeding to New York with the bulky MS. (Willie wrote on wall paper) in my valise. The first publisher to whom I showed it declared it at once (without reading it) to be the most remarkable story of the century.

I must not anticipate the success of the book by quoting from it here. Suffice it to say that it contains simply the thoughts of a child, such as a child would think when thinking in its own childlike way. To that extent the book reproduces merely the work of the other child prodigies of 1927 and the years preceding. But the interesting point of difference is that Willie Nut is half-witted. The others were not even that.

This point is clearly established by the following sworn certificate which accompanies Willie’s work. It is from his pastor:

Certificate from Willie’s Pastor

I cheerfully certify that so far as I have observed him, Willie Nut has always appeared to me to be three-quarters deficient. I am delighted to learn that it has transpired that he possesses a literary genius of the highest order.

(Signed) (Rev.) Ebeneza Ebron.

Post Script. I think that seven-eights would be a more exact estimate.

—

Closely connected with this class of literature are the beautifully illustrated fairy-tales, which constitute a unique feature among the books of today. The only objection to these in the past has been that in the course of centuries the material has worn a little thin and the Old-World setting no longer appeals to the children of the present. In spite of the beautiful illustrations, they turn away from such ancient stories as The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood and Beauty and the Beast in search of a more modern environment.

To meet this difficulty, a leading New York house (who specially request me not to name them) will bring out an up-to-date volume of revised stories under the title of

FIFTH AVENUE FAIRY STORIES

The titles of the collection speak for themselves. Beauty and the Boost is a delightful story, modeled on an old favourite. A rich merchant of Oneonta, N.Y., sets out in his motor car on a journey to New York. His three daughters each ask for a present. The first one wishes a diamond sunburst, the second a fur coat, but the youngest and most beautiful asks her father merely to secure her a theatrical position on the stage. The merchant easily buys the diamond sunburst and the coat, but is in deep perplexity how to obtain the theatrical position. Pondering over this in his car, in a fit of abstraction he runs over a man on Fifth Avenue and is put in jail for damaging the sidewalk. His daughter, on hearing this, rushes to his side. In the police court, she sees the man whom he ran over, that is, over whom he ran. The latter falls in love with her and dismisses his complaint. In gratitude she accepts his hand and he turns out to be a theatrical producer.

—

Of equal merit, perhaps, is Jack the Joint-Killer. It appears that Jack, after having killed the Welsh giant with three heads, was engaged to enforce the Volstead Act. In doing this, he got acquainted with practically all the Joints in New York.

I leave to the reader’s own perusal The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood Alcohol, The Old Woman who lived in the Soo (on the Canadian side and unable to bring her children into the United States); Jack and the Bean Head, and many other charming old stories now at last presented in a readable form.

MORE ENGLISH REVELATIONS

Another welcome feature will be a further series of English biographies and memoirs, throwing into a stronger light than ever the Victorian Period. The tremendous success of the “Confidential Memoirs” of Lady C. and Mrs. A. and the “Diary” of Lord C. has encouraged other leaders of Society to follow in their tracks. The brilliant and vivacious Lady X (aged 70: said to be the most beautiful woman in England) will be first in the field. Her autobiography will contain the most astounding revelations. It appears that not only was Disraeli (of whose perfervid nature it might be expected) wildly in love with her, but also Mr. Gladstone and John Bright. Gladstone, it seems, was once indiscreet enough to write to her: “Dear Little Goo-Goo: Meet me tonight at half after midnight at the door of the House of Commons and come and eat supper at the Y.W.C.A. cafeteria. I will be wearing a pair of grey trousers with a wide check. A thousand kisses.”

Even more interesting is the political side of Lady X’s memoirs. The reader simply gasps for breath at the revelations that are made of the inner workings of English political life. It appears that the whole of Gladstone’s Egyptian policy was really based on conversation with Lady X across a tennis set. Lord Salisbury was sent to the Congress of Berlin because the Queen thought he looked better in a top hat than any other available person. Lord Randolph Churchill always carried peanuts in his pockets. Nor is the book, brilliant and witty as is every page of it, a work lacking in sound and serious thought. “It seems to me,” writes Lady X, “that America has a great future before it,” and again, “I fear that there is an essential difference between the Orientals and ourselves.”

But lack of space compels me to leave over for another time the further announcements of The Literary Sensations of the coming year.

TOC     INDEX

Children’s Poetry Revised

How the Dear Old Poems of Our Childhood Need to Be Brought up to Date

It has occurred to me that many of the beautiful old poems on which the present and preceding generations were brought up are in danger of passing into oblivion. The circumstances of this hurried, rapid age, filled with movement and crowded with mechanical devices, are rendering the older poetry quite unintelligible to the children of today.

For example, when “young Lochinvar had come out of the West” – we need to know at the start that this doesn’t mean the Middle West. We learn also that he came on a “steed.” What is a “steed”? Few children of today realize that the huge, clumsy animals that they see hauling the garbage wagons are “steeds.” They would much more likely think that if young Lochinvar had “a Steed,” it meant something the same as if he had a Chrysler or a Ford; in other words, he had a this year’s Steed.

Similarly when the poem says, “He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone” – the meaning is taken to be that he left in such a hurry that he didn’t go into the garage and get his brakes tightened up.

Or let us say that “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck.” Who cares? Certainly not a generation that thinks nothing of reading in its paper, “Boy Falls in Burning Aeroplane.”

It seems reasonable, therefore, that if the older poetry, the heritage of our race, is to remain, someone has got to revise it. I wish I could offer to do it myself. I fear that I can lay so little claim to being a professional poet that I must leave the task to more competent hands. But I might perhaps indicate by a few samples the ways in which the necessary changes might be made.

Sometimes a mere alteration of the title would do a lot. Thus the Charge of the Light Brigade might be, the Light Brigade C.O.D. or perhaps The Cash and Carry of the Light Brigade. Then there is that melodious masterpiece of Edgar Allan Poe, which should read henceforth “Quoth the Radio, Nevermore.”

But in other cases the poem has got to be overhauled throughout. There is something in the environment it represents that does not correspond to the life that the children see today. I’ll give an example. There was, when I was young, a poem that everybody knew and loved, that ran:

I remember, I remember

The house where I was born

And the little window where the sun

Came peeping in at morn.

Etc., etc., etc. . . .

I needn’t quote the rest of it. The essential thought is in the lines above. But alas! The poem is dropping out; It no longer fits. Here, however, is a revised version that may keep it going for years.

I wish I could remember

The house where I was born

And the little window where perhaps

The sun peeped in at morn.

But father can’t remember

And mother can’t recall

Where they lived in that December——

If it was a house at all.

It may have been a boarding-house

Or family hotel,

A flat or else a tenement.

It’s very hard to tell.

There is only one thing certain from my questioning as yet,

Wherever I was born, it was a matter of regret.

That, I think, reproduces more or less the spirit of the age. If some one would just put it into really good up-to-date poetry – without any rhyme in it, and with no marks of feet in it, and without putting it into lines – it might go into any present-day anthology.

But let me, in my own halting and imperfect way, try another one. There used to be – either for recitation or for singing – a very pathetic poem about a little girl begging her father to “come home.” The opening stanza ran:

Father, dear father, come home with me now;

The clock in the steeple strikes one.

You promised, dear father, that you would come home

As soon as your day’s work was done.

The scene, of course, was laid on the other side of the Eighteenth Amendment. The picture that went with the song showed, from the outside, a little tavern, or saloon, with curtained windows and a warm red light behind them. Out in the snow was the girl, singing. And father was in behind the red curtains. And he wouldn’t come out! That was the plot. Father’s idea was that he would stay right where he was – that it had Home beaten four ways.

Now all of that is changed. The little lighted tavern is gone. Father stays home, and the children of today have got to have the poem recast, so as to keep as much of the pathos as may be, but with the scene reversed. Here it is, incomplete, perhaps, but suggestive.

FATHER, DEAR FATHER, GO OUT

Oh, father, dear father, why won’t you go out?

Why sit here and spoil all the fun?

We took it for granted you’d beat it downtown

As soon as your dinner was done.

With you in the parlour, the boys are so glum,

No games and no laughter about.

Oh, father, you put the whole house on the bum,

Dear father, please, father, go out.

In some cases our old once favourite poems are based on the existence of institutions that are passing away and that are scarcely known to the children of today. A case in point is Longfellow’s Village Blacksmith. In this the poet tells us that under the spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands and adds that the children love to look in at the door and catch the sparks by the hatful.

All this, I fear, must be altered from top to bottom. There is no smithy now, and no horses to be shod and no sparks, and many children don’t ever wear hats. Even the old-fashioned sing-song rhyme gets tiresome to a modern ear. The whole poem must be recast to suit the times. I should propose putting it into what is called free verse, something as follows:

THE MAIN STREET GARAGE

FREE AIR

On the corner of the main street stands the principal garage.

The garage man is a man of singular muscular development.

Children coming home from school like to watch him punch the gasoline.

On Sunday he goes to church, whenever any of the cars of the congregation break down.

In this way he not only earns a night’s repose, but even now and then he can take a trip to New York, and go without repose for a whole night.

And with this I leave the topic for other pens and the idea for other minds. I am quite sure that if some one in one of the English departments of the colleges would take up this work, there might be a lot in it.

TOC     INDEX

Illustrations I Can Do Without

Some Gentle Suggestions for the Contemporary Illustrated Magazines

Have you ever noticed, my dear reader – but of course you have; you notice everything – how illustrations in the picture magazines always run to certain types? Somebody starts a particular line of picture and somebody else copies it, and so it goes on till it becomes a sort of type picture. Then the subscribers begin to look for it regularly and the editor feels that he must have it.

Here is a case in point, taken from the English illustrated weeklies, the high-class press that is put together “by gentlemen for gentlemen.”

Every week in every paper of this class you will see a photograph of a lady in a tweed suit sitting on a camp-stool, and beside her a gentleman in a tweed suit standing up and leaning on a stick. There are probably a lot of dogs around and the picture carries some such legend as the following:

With the Yardsborough Beagles:
Lady Vera de Verest and Mr. Robinson

Why it is always these two, I don’t know. You would think that Lord Vere de Verest ought to get in sometimes; and even Mrs. Robinson might have a look-in. But apparently not. Wherever they are, it is always Lady Vera de Verest and Mr. Robinson. That combination seems to have a sort of “class” to it.

And they always turn up in different places, according to the season, and the place always has a touch of the incomprehensible about it. For example, you see them in the same attitude with three or four dead partridges, or crows, lying in front of them and the legend:

With the Guns at Dumfoolish Castle:
Lady Vera de Verest and Mr. Robinson.

I’ve seen them depicted not only with the Beagles at Yardborough and with the guns at Dumfoolish, but with the pigeon-traps at Monte Carlo and with the Spitz in Spitzbergen.

I imagine that they must write letters such as:

My dear Lady Vera de Verest:

What do you say to a run over to Spain so as to get photographed with me and the bulls of Madrid? If you are on, bring your camp-stool and meet me there.

Mr. Robinson.

Or else, something of this sort:

Dear Mr. Robinson:

What do you say to our being photographed “with the snakes at Darjeeling”? If we go out to India, we could arrange our schedules to meet and be photographed on the way at least three times – “with the looters on the Riviera” and “with the plagues of Egypt.” So we should not miss a single week. Do come.

Vera.

—

I suppose that here too, as in all such cases, there is the usual tragic background of those left behind. I can imagine Lord Vere de Verest, the dignified gentleman whose home is thus made a mockery, walking across from De Vere Castle to the cottage where Mrs. Robinson lives, an open letter in his hand.

“Where are they now?” she queries gently, as he holds out the letter with a sob.

“With the snakes in Darjeeling,” he answers, as kindly as he can.

“And where do they appear next?” she murmurs, a note of pain in her voice in spite of herself.

“They are to be with the Hoodoos of Madagascar,” he groans.

“Edward,” she says, addressing him by his Christian name for the first time in fifty years and laying her hand on his coat sleeve, “don’t you think, dear, that we might do a little of this kind of thing ourselves? If the editors of the Stretch, and the Prattler, and the Outstander want pictures of this sort, let us see what we can do. There is a kind of little farmyard behind the cottage and I have a camera. Come out with me.”

And if the week after that the illustrated press carried a picture entitled “Lord Vere de Verest and Mrs. Robinson looking at a pigsty,” it would be at least as interesting as The Beagles and The Yaks and it might stop a lot of trouble.

—

Another form of magazine illustration that I can do without, or without which I can do, is the face, head, and shoulders of a man done in rather smudgy ink. It has written under it, “Colonel Robinson, the New Governor of the Virgin Islands,” or “Pilsudski, Dictator of Poland,” or perhaps “Executed last week at Sing Sing.” It doesn’t matter what is under it; it really is always the same picture.

Hitherto I used to wonder how this picture got into the magazines. Just by chance a few days ago in visiting the staff of a periodical, I found the explanation. I happened in the corridor of the building to get into conversation with the very man from whose face all the photographs are taken.

“You are quite right,” he said to me; “they are all the same picture. It saves such a lot of time and trouble. I am just going out now to get photographed as the ‘New Mikado of Japan’ and then the same picture will appear on another page as ‘Lloyd George, Reappointed Leader of the British Liberals,’ and on the back as ‘Mrs. Annie Besant, the Venerable Theosophist.’”

“Is it possible?” I said.

“Quite so. And by the way, how did you like that one of me last week called ‘The New Mayor of Miami.’ I thought it was a peach. And there was a dandy of me called ‘Yuan Chung Chow, Leader of the Cantonese Rebels’ and the same picture called ‘Admiral Ferguson, Who Will Fight Yuan Chung Chow——’”

“But stop,” I said, “doesn’t the public ever——”

“Nonsense!” said the man. “Why, the other day there were two pictures of me side by side – they just looked really the same. One was called ‘The Oldest Father-in-Law in Europe, Jean Jacques Dubois,’ and the other (used to illustrate an article on hold-ups) was labeled ‘Youngest Crook That Ever Stole a Hundred Thousand.’ People looked at the magazine and said what a kind face the old father-in-law had, and they looked on the other page and said that you could see it was a crook.

“Listen,” he continued, “you take this week’s magazine, and cover up the names and see if you distinguish which is the one called ‘Venerable Scientist Speaks’ and the one called ‘Will Serve Ten Years.’ Try to distinguish ‘Lady Chatelaine Entertains the Poor’ from ‘Arctic Explorer Returns Home’; try to separate out ‘Queen Mary Welcomes the Duke of York’ from ‘Boisterous Scene in a Viennese Beer Garden.’ You can’t. All the pictures in the magazine,” he went on with an excitement that was almost violent, “are just me. I’m Queen Mary, I’m Yuan Chung Chow, I’m——”

And just at that moment a man dressed in a sort of uniform stepped up to us in the corridor and said:

“Excuse me, sir. I had lost track of this gentleman. He’s under my charge. I hope he’s not been disturbing you.”

The man himself as he was led away was still saying, “I’m Queen Mary, I’m Thomas Edison, I’m Royal Birthday, I’m Admiral Ferguson.”

TOC     INDEX

Our Summer Pets

As Presented by Our Enthusiastic Nature Writers

I

THE HOUSE FLY

The house fly (fuscus domesticus) is at his very best during the months of August and September. It is then that his coat is at its glossiest and that his beautiful back plate, or caparace, shines with its highest luster. His lovely eyes also take on at this season (the love season of the fly) their deepest colour, while his soft vibrant note is tuned to the voice of nature itself.

At this time of year the fly-collector, or even the amateur, should have no difficulty in finding one or more perfect specimens of this magnificent multiped.

“Alone among the odiferous quadrumana or cephalopods,” writes an eminent buggist, “the fly seems capable of thriving wherever man can live and takes on with ease the environment of our civilization.”

Indeed, it appears that the house fly is found all over North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the nature student needs therefore no further apparatus for his study than to buy a house. A suitable house having been selected, he may put in one, two, or more flies with entire certainty of a good result.

Flies are not difficult to rear and feed and with a little care they will thrive well and even increase. A pan of milk set out overnight, or the remains of a tin of salmon set on a plate with a little marmalade, is as much as any fly asks or needs when in good health.

It is perhaps not generally known that the fly can be tamed. “During the past summer,” writes Mr. Summernut, one of the keenest of our nature students, “I succeeded, after several efforts, in taming a fly.

“When we became better acquainted he would light on the table beside me and nibble at the crumbs near my plate. Once while venturing too near the rim of my tumbler he fell into the milk. At other times he would actually alight on my shoulder and rub his cheek against mine.

“My house fly was at his friendliest during the drowsy hour of the morning just before the time came for my getting out of bed. One heard a gentle buzzing and there was the merry little fellow peeping over the edge of the coverlet, his big eyes sparkling with fun. He seemed to say ‘Peek-a-boo – time to get up!’ No use to wave him away.

“Back he came again with the same friendly buzz as if inviting me to hop out of bed and take a run on the lawn. The only thing to do was to take a towel with a knotted end and swat him over the head with it. This would deter the little fellow and I would then see him fly across to the window pane and sit rubbing his head with his hind leg as if discouraged.”

II

THE POTATO BUG

The potato bug (buggo Colorado) does best in a rich, sandy soil. It can be brought to its greatest natural perfection by planting within its easy reach a crop of potatoes either in rows or hills.

“It was my good fortune last summer,” says Professor Allgone, the famous author of “Parisites and Paris Green,” “to come into possession of a splendid pair of potato bugs, male and female.

“Both bugs were set out in the garden in a spot suitably chosen near a potato plant.

“To my great delight on visiting the garden on the third day, I found that the two young housekeepers had laid a rich nestful of eggs carefully set on the under side of a potato leaf. The joy of the parents reached its maximum when a few days later the eggs hatched into a group of tiny little buglets.

“Indeed, there is no telling to what height the ecstasy of the whole family might have gone had they not accidentally stumbled on some Paris Green carelessly left within their reach.”

III

THE MOSQUITO

With the exception of the house fly, the mosquito is perhaps the most widely disseminated of our domesticated insects. He is to be found almost anywhere on verandas, on upper and lower balconies, on front and back steps; but he is seen at his best when tucked away behind the little white bed curtains that are specially provided for him.

It is here that he can most successfully be brought to a hand-to-hand conflict, which is his delight.

A mosquito, as seen under a microscope, is, to the naturalist, an object of equal delight. His four pair of eyes with double refracting lenses from which the light glitters in all directions are equaled only by the great sweep of his gossamer wings and the beautiful articulation of his sixteen legs.

Most striking of all is his powerful bill, armed on each side with teeth, like a double crosscut saw, with which he bores through the cranium of his enemy. The mosquito knows no half measures. He is out for blood. Hence comes his high personal courage which enables him to attack single-handed and unsupported an opponent of twenty thousand times his own weight.

Odds are nothing to him. He rushes into battle singing as he goes, selects the stoutest of his enemies, and seizes him in a death grip in the fattest part of his neck. The British bull-dog and the American eagle are cowards beside the mosquito.

Protection against the assaults of the mosquito has always presented a serious problem to the settlers and campers in our summer wildernesses. But by the trained naturalist, or nature lover, the difficulty is easily overcome.

The naturalist before setting out on his study smears himself with ham fat and oil of citronella, over which he spreads a thin layer of beeswax and asafetida. He then sprays his clothes with coal oil and drapes himself from the head down in a long white net. Thus prepared the naturalist need fear nothing outside of Bengal.

It is a pity to think that the mosquito, like the house fly, is threatened with extinction. There are said to be only a few billion million left. Even these are going – falling victims to their own high courage in their fierce assaults against our civilization like the Crusaders dashing against the Saracens.

But no doubt the efforts of the new Mosquito Preservation Society, one of the latest of our animal philanthropy efforts, will induce the government to step in before it becomes too late. A suitable reservation of land as a Mosquito Park may preserve for our descendants a few thousand million specimens of what was once the dominant animal of North America.

IV

THE SKUNK

The skunk, who is a high favourite, very high, with the nature lover, is a short cylindrical animal with a leg at each corner.

The skunk is an object of great beauty. Its magnificent fur coat, dark black with two lengthwise stripes of white, is perhaps unexcelled among the fur-bearing or odoriferous animals. Why, then, in spite of the beauty of the skunk, do we not like him? We all know, but we don’t say.

The skunk is, by nature, a quiet, peace-loving, tame, and affectionate animal. He asks nothing more than to be near us. He does not bite, he cannot scratch, he makes no noise and only asks to be friends and to forget the past.

Why, then, do we not take him into our friendship?

The nature student who wishes to get into close contact with a skunk, and to see him at short range (his range is about nine feet and a half), must visit him in his own fastnesses in the northern wilds.

“I had the good luck last summer,” writes Mr. Sleepout, the distinguished nature student who spent seven weeks in the Adirondacks with no other food than a combination suit and a bow and arrow, “to meet a skunk face to face. He was a splendid fellow easily eighteen inches long, with a beautifully arching back and sweep of tail. I had full time to admire the dainty way in which his ears joined his head and his head ran into his neck and his neck ended in his body.

“Crawling cautiously towards him I was almost within touching distance when the beautiful creature elevated itself on its glorious hind legs, sniffed the air about me with its exquisite snout, and then beat it into the deep woods.”

TOC     INDEX

The Old Men’s Page

A Brand New Feature in Journalism

I observe that nowadays far too much of the space in the newspapers is given up to children and young people. Open almost any paper, published in any British or American city, and you may find a children’s page and a girls’ page and a women’s page – special columns for tiny tots, poetry by high-school girls, notes for boy scouts, fashion notes for young women, and radio hints for young men.

This thing is going too far – unless the old men get a chance. What the newspapers need now is a special page for old men. I am certain that it would make an enormous hit at once.

Let me try to put together a few samples of what ought to go on such a page. My talented readers can carry it on for themselves.

NOTES FOR OLD MEN SCOUTS

A general field meeting of the (newly established) Old Men Scouts will be held next Saturday. The scouts will assemble at the edge of the pine woods about seven miles out of town. Every scout will tell his chauffeur to have the car ready for an early start, not later than ten-thirty. The scout will see that the chauffeur brings a full kit of cooking utensils and supplies. A good chauffeur can easily carry 150 pounds and the scout will see that he does it.

Each scout is to have a heavy greatcoat and a thick rug and folding camp-chair strapped together in a bundle and will see to it personally that these are loaded on the chauffeur.

Each scout, in advancing into the woods, will carry his own walking stick and will smoke his own cigar.

In passing through the woods, the scout is expected to recognize any trees that he knows, such as pine trees, lilac trees, rubber trees, and so forth. If in any doubt of the nature or species of a tree, the scout may tell the chauffeur to climb it and see what it is.

The scouts will also recognize and remark any species or genera of birds that are sitting on the path which are familiar to them, such as tame canaries, parrots, partridges, cooked snipe, and spring chicken.

Having arrived at an open glade, the scouts will sit about on their camp-chairs, avoiding the damp, while the chauffeurs kindle a fire and prepare lunch. During this time the Scout Master, and other scouts in order of seniority, may relate stories of woodcraft, or, if they can’t think of any stories of woodcraft, they may tell any other kind that they know.

As exercise before lunch, the scouts may open the soda water bottles.

After lunch, each scout will place his rug and cushion under a suitable tree and smoke a cigar while listening in silence for any especial calls and wood notes of birds, bees, and insects, such as the cicada, the rickshaw, the gin-ricki, and others that he has learned to know. Should he see any insect whose call is not familiar to him, he should crawl after it and listen to it, or, if he prefers, tell his chauffeur to follow it up.

At 5 p.m., the scouts should reload the chauffeurs and themselves, and, when all are well loaded, drive to any country club for more stories of woodcraft.

—

Every old man – being really just a boy on a disguised form – is naturally interested in how to make things. One column in the old men’s page, therefore, ought to contain something in the way of

HINTS ON MECHANICS –
CARPENTRY FOR OLD MEN

How to Make a Rustic Table.—Get hold of any hard-working rustic and tell him to make a table.

To stain your table, when it is complete, a good method is to upset soda water on it.

How to Make a Camera Stand.—Put it right on the table. It will stand.

How to Tell the Time by the Sun.—First look at your watch and see what time it is. Then step out into the sunlight with your face towards the sun and hold the watch so that the hour hand points directly at the sun. This will be the time.

How to Make a Book-Case.—Call up any wood factory on the telephone and tell them to cut you some plain boards, suitable for making a book-case. Ask them next where you can get nails. Then send your chauffeur to bring the boards and nails. Then advertise for a carpenter.

—

No column of the sort which I am here proposing would be complete unless it contained some sort of correspondence. And here the topic that is opportune and welcome to the old, as well as the young, is the eternal subject of love. But it must be treated in a way to suit it to those whose hearts have passed the first mad impulses of unrestrained youth.

PROBLEMS OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Mr. Elder, Bachelor’s Court,
Lone Street:

I can quite understand your dilemma in regard to your cook. It is one that many a bachelor has had to face and to think out for himself, and I am sure that you will face it bravely and clearly.

You say that you do not know whether your cook loves you or not, and I gather that you do not give a hoot either way. But the point is that she has an excellent offer to be cook in an Old Man’s Home and you are likely to lose her. Your problem is whether to let her go and try to get another, or to marry her, or to move into the Home where she is going to cook.

—

Mr. Oldspark, Evergreen Alley,
Blossom Street:

It is very difficult indeed to advise you, especially as you are at an age (you tell me you are only 61) when your heart is apt to run away with you. You say that three young girls each want to marry you. You have been letting one of them drive you out in her car and she has a certain right to think you have given her encouragement.

On the other hand, one of the others has taken you to the matinée. In the case of the third, though you do not know her so well, you were told by some one at the golf club that she had said that you were “a perfect darling.”

You say that you are very fond of all three, but that you cannot tell whether what you feel is really love. It may be indigestion.

—

Mr. O. O. Overslow, Linger Lodge:

Your case is one in which it is difficult for an outsider to give advice. You say that you have been paying attention to a lady, of about your own age, for a little over thirty years. You have taken her to an evening church service each third Sunday for some years back, and you have, for nearly ten years now, sent her an Easter card and an April fool card. Her father, who is ninety-six, is distinctly favourable to your suit, but as he has lost most of his faculties, he may not know one suit from another.

You rightly feel that you ought to be cautious and not act hastily. You have fifteen thousand a year of your own, but you hate to part with any of it.

Your problem is, should you propose to her, or wait a little? My advice is by all means wait – keep on waiting – wait till her father is dead, and her mother is dead, and you are half dead – and then propose to her and wonder why you have spent your life waiting.

Don’t you remember – look back over thirty years and try to remember – that evening long ago when you stood with her on the bridge over the little river in the dusk of a summer evening, and so nearly, oh, so nearly, proposed to her? But you waited. You had only a thousand dollars a year then, so you waited.

And don’t you remember five years later on, that winter evening by the fireside when you were left alone with her for ten minutes, and again the words almost came to your lips. But you had only three thousand a year then, and you waited.

Oh, yes, my dear old friend, by all means keep on waiting. It is all that you are fit for.

—

J.J.X.—No, we don’t lend money to old men through this column.

TOC     INDEX

A Guide to the Underworld

A Little Unsocial Register
for the Use of Readers
of Up-to-Date Fiction

I am given to understand – from the best and latest fiction and from the movies – that there is a place called the Underworld. By this I don’t mean Hell; we know all about that, and all anxiety in regard to it has long since been removed except in the schools of Tennessee. No one outside of these schools, we understand, goes there now.

But the Underworld is quite different. Without it, our up-to-date fiction couldn’t last a day. Just where it is or how you get to it, I don’t know. But it is supposed to be filled with Apaches and Sleuths and Vampires and Master Criminals whose brains are so vast that they ramify over two continents.

Many people feel that if they could ever find this Underworld, they would leave home and never come back.

So let me set down here for persons interested a brief directory of the people of the Underworld put for convenience in the form of questions and answers. Any reader may test with these the extent of his knowledge of up-to-date fiction.

THE APACHE

Who is the most ordinary and frequent character found in stories of the Underworld?

A person called an Apache.

Right. What is he like?

Young, very pale, dressed with a black silk shirt around his abdomen, and smoking cigarettes at ten cents a package for fifteen hours a day.

Correct. What effect has this on his nervous system?

It works him up into a terrible state of irritability.

With what result?

This – that he would stick a knife into you in the dark if he had an opportunity.

Is there really anything terrible in this?

Nothing whatever. Of course an Apache would put a knife into you in the dark if he had a real chance. But then so would I. This distinction between people who would put knives into you and people who wouldn’t is quite false and misleading. Most people would put knives into most people.

Personally, I have the strongest inclination in the world to put a knife into whole classes of people: actors, story tellers, ugly women who talk about themselves, plumbers, public lecturers – quite a long list of them.

All quite true, and now tell me what is an Apache really like?

If one could see the Apache as he really is, he would turn out to be nothing more than a silly young simp who is, let us say, a plumber’s assistant by day, but can’t stay home at night.

Exactly. And now tell me who is the principal female character in the Underworld?

THE QUEEN OF GEHENNA

She is called, colloquially, the Queena Gehenna.

Tell me about her.

In every well regulated Underworld, there is always a lady designated by some such title as the Queena Gehenna. She is supposed to be the last word in vampires. Her beauty is supposed to be so alluring that she casts a spell for three or four blocks around. She would eat a man as quick as look at him.

Quite so. And does she really exist?

Oh, no. The Queena Gehenna is as much a myth as all the other characters of the Underworld. Her real name is Georgie Simpson, and she works as a cashier in a cafeteria and supports her mother. Georgie wouldn’t really eat a man at all, and you ought to see the nice letters she writes to her cousin Joe in Keokuk, Iowa.

As a matter of fact, you see plenty of Queens of Gehenna all over the place. But they are not really dangerous – not when you know them. It is only when they are put into fiction that they look like that.

Absolutely right. And now tell me – are there any other women in the Underworld?

Lots of them – they are called Women of the Street, Women of the Pavement, Women of the Basement, Women of the Subway, Women of the Underground Railway; in short, women who inhabit any place more than ten feet below the level of the soil.

True. And what do these women turn into when they get older?

Each of them turns into what is called an Old Crone – the name given in the Underworld to any woman of sixty. Old Crones are supposed to be found, like mushrooms, in any dark cellar or underground dwelling.

What do they live on?

They live on gin. They would eat, but they have no teeth, or at best only one. An Old Crone calls everybody “dearie,” but she would sell a human life, so it is always explained, for a drop of brandy, one drop. For a bottleful, she would sell a whole village. But after all, so would most of us. That’s nothing.

Is there any way to reach the heart of an Old Crone?

Yes. She seems scarcely human, but if you remind her of her Lost Daughter, she breaks down and tears of gin run from her eyes. She will then betray the entire Underworld.

Are there really any such persons as Old Crones?

No. The Old Crone, like all the rest of the people of the Underworld, is just a myth. Fetch her up into the sunlight, dress her in a black alpaca suit, wipe her eyes, and she could then be used to sit and take hat checks at a theatre with the best of them.

Very good. Now let me ask you a further question. The Underworld is full of mysteries. How do these get unraveled?

By means of a Sleuth.

What is that?

A Sleuth (plural Sleeth) is the name given in the Underworld to one who solves mysteries.

How does he do it?

The business of a Sleuth in the Underworld is to sit around apparently doing nothing, but in reality his brain is working with lightning rapidity. His favourite location is what is called a low drinking joint, and he sits there giving every sign of being drunk – lucky fellow – but he isn’t. It is the rule of the Underworld that the way to investigate or find out anything really complicated is to get extremely drunk and go and sit in a joint.

In the course of time, some one is sure to say something, or rather to let something slip, which gives the whole mystery away. It often happens that the Sleuth, in the course of business, gets badly beaten up; sometimes they merely knock him insensible (that never hurts him owing to the nature of his brain), but at other times they tie him hand and foot and throw him down a sewer, and it takes him nearly half an hour to crawl through.

All very correct. And now tell me, is there any Hero in a story that deals with the Underworld?

Oh, certainly a Hero. And a Heroine.

Never mind the Heroine – for a moment. Stick to the Hero. How can you distinguish him?

Very easily. He is always so completely disguised that you can tell him in a moment. Suppose, for example, you meet in the story a drunken sailor asleep on a bench and quite oblivious to the world – that’s the Hero. Suppose there comes in an aged man very much bent and with a white beard eighteen inches long – that’s the Hero. At any moment he can unbend himself and unbob his beard and there he is.

Is not the Hero in reality very strong and athletic?

Oh, very. He can, break an iron bar with his teeth, and he played end man on his college ping-pong team.

All quite right. And what is the Hero doing all through the story?

Looking for the Heroine.

Can he find her?

No. He always looks in exactly the wrong place. He enters one end of the Underground Cabaret at the very moment she goes out of the other.

Quite so.

And now what about the Heroine? How do you know her?

By her extraordinary innocence. She knows nothing. It is doubtful whether she knows that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third side, or how much 47 times 13 is.

And what is she doing in the story?

Hard to say. She just wandered in from her home.

Her home. Where was that?

The site is not indicated clearly. Somewhere among the Honeysuckles, apparently. It is also made clear that there are lilacs around the porch; and there is evidence that while the Heroine is lost in the Underworld, she still seems to hear the bees humming around the door of her mother’s home.

Did these bees sting her?

They should have.

And now, finally – does a story of the Underworld end happily?

Oh, always. The Sleuth tracks down the Master Criminal (himself a graduate of Oxford or Harvard) whose capacious brain has held all the tangled filaments of crime that kept the Underworld together. The Hero finds the Heroine just in time to save her from a fate worse than death (what it is, is not stated). The Old Crone turns out to be the mother of the Queena Gehenna, and the Queen is so affected that the shock knocks the henna out of her. She reforms, opens a Beauty Parlour, and there she is to this day.

TOC     INDEX

Love Me,
Love My Letters

The Use of Ink for the First Inklings of Love

There is a proverb which says a man is known by the company he keeps. There is a saying also that a man is best known by the song he sings. It is claimed, too, that people can always be distinguished by the books that they read, and by the pictures that they admire, and by the clothes that they wear.

All this may be true. But to my thinking, the truest test of character is found in the love letters that people write. Each different type of man or woman – including girls – has his, or her, perhaps their, own particular way of writing love letters.

As witness to which, let me submit to the reader’s judgment a carefully selected set of love letters present and past. I need hardly say that the letters are not imaginary, but that each of them is an actual sample taken right out of the post office – no, I don’t think I need to say it.

I
THE OLD-FASHIONED STYLE

Love letter of the year 1828 sent by messenger from Mr. Ardent Heartful, The Hall, Notts, England, to Miss Angela Blushanburn, The Shrubberies, Hops, Potts, Shrops, England, begging her acceptance of a fish:

“Respected Miss Angela:

“With the consent of your honoured father and your esteemed mother, I venture to send to you by the messenger who bears you this, a fish. It has, my respected Miss Angela, for some time been my most ardent desire that I might have the good fortune to present to you as the fruit of my own endeavours, a fish. It was this morning my good fortune to land while angling in the stream that traverses your property, with the consent of your father, a fish.

“In presenting for your consumption, with your parents’ consent, respected Miss Angela, this fish, may I say that the fate of this fish which will thus have the inestimable privilege of languishing upon your table conveys nothing but envy to one who, while what he feels cannot be spoken, still feels as deeply as should feel, if it does feel, this fish.

“With the expression of a perfect esteem for your father and mother, believe me,

Your devoted,

“Ardent Heartful.”

II
THE NEWER STYLE OF TODAY

Love letter composed by Professor Albertus Dignus, senior professor of English rhetoric and diction at the University, and famous as the most brilliant essayist outside of the staff of the London Times, to Miss Maisie Beatit of the chorus of the Follies-in-Transit company at Memphis, Tenn.:

“Cuckoo! my little peacherino, and how is she tonight? I wish she was right here, yum! yum! I got her tootsie weenie letter this morning. I hustled to the post office so fast to get it I nearly broke my slats. And so it really longs for me, does she? and did you really mean it? Well, you certainly look like a piece of chocolate to me! In fact, you’re some bird! You’re my baby all right,” – and so forth for three pages. After which, the professor turns back to work on his essay – “The Deterioration of the English Language Among the Coloured Races of Africa.”

III
TRULY RURAL

Passionate Love Letter from Mr. Ephraim Cloverseed, Arcadia Post Office, Vermont, to Miss Nettie Singer, also of Arcadia, but at present on the cash [register] in the Home Restaurant, 7860 Sixth Avenue, New York:

“Dear Nettie:

“There was a sharp frost last night which may do considerable harm to the fall wheat. Till last Tuesday there had not been no frost that you wouldn’t have noticed any. Some think we are in for a hard winter. Some think if it clears off a bit between this and New Year’s it may not be but some don’t. I seen a couple of crows in the pasture yesterday but you can’t always bank on that. I’ve been troubled again with my toe. But my rheumatism seems a whole lot better from that last stuff. My left leg has been pretty stiff again but the liniment has done my right arm good. Well, I will now close,

“Ephraim.”

IV
HYDRAULIC LOVE

Letter from Mr. Harry P. Smith, hydraulic engineer and surveyor, writing to Miss Georgia Sims, from Red Gulch Creek in the wilds of New Ontario. Everybody knows that Harry has been just crazy over Georgia for three years.

“Dear Georgia:

“We got in here through the bush yesterday and it certainly is a heck of a place to try to run a sight line in. The rock is mostly basaltic trap, but there are faults in it here and there that have been filled with alluvial deposit. It would be pretty hard to give you an estimate of the probable mineral content. But I should say you would have a fair chance of striking gas here if you went deep enough. But your overhead would be a whopper. Well, Georgia, I must now close.

“Harry.”

THE ANSWERS THEY GOT

The answer received by Mr. Ardent Heartful, Anno Domini, 1828:

“Sir Joshua and Lady Blushanburn present their compliments to Mr. Ardent Heartful and desire to thank him for the fish which Mr. Heartful has had the kindness to forward to their daughter and which they have greatly enjoyed. Sir Joshua and Lady Blushanburn will be pleased if Mr. Heartful will present himself in person for such further conversation in regard to this fish as connects it with his future intentions.”

—

WHAT THE PROFESSOR GOT

The answer from Miss Maisie Beatit of the Follies-in-Transit Company, Memphis, Tenn.:

“My dear Professor:

“It was with the most agreeable feelings of gratification that I received your letter this morning.

“The sentiments which you express and the very evident manifestation thus conveyed of your affection towards myself fill me, sir, with the most lively satisfaction. . . .” After which Maisie got tired of copying word after word of the Complete Letter-Writer and so she just added in her own style,

“Ain’t you the Kidder? Our next jump is Kansas City.

“Maisie.”

—

Womanly Epistle Sent From Postal Station B-28, New York, to Arcadia, P.O, Vermont

“Dear Ephraim:

“I was glad to get your letter. I was sorry to hear there has been so much frost. I was glad to hear there are still crows in the bush. I was sorry to hear your toe is no better. I was glad to hear your rheumatism is some better. I am glad your leg is nicely. I must now close.

“Nettie.”

—

The Answer from Miss Georgia Sims, Bloor Street, Toronto

She didn’t answer.

—

Little query for the reader just at the end. Which of these various couples will get married first and stay married longest. Quite right. You guessed it immediately. There’s no doubt about it, to persons of judgment in such things.

TOC     INDEX

With the Authorities

Showing How Easily They Excel at Their Own Games

I

A GAME OF BRIDGE WITH MR. HOYLE

The scene is at Mr. Hoyle’s house. Four people are at a card table. On a shelf nearby one can see the back of a book entitled “Hoyle’s Bridge, Whist, and Card Games. New Edition, Revised and Enlarged.”

One of the Players – Your turn to play, Mr. Hoyle.

Mr. Hoyle – Oh! I beg your pardon. I’m afraid I was dreaming – my turn, yes, of course. What did you say was trumps?

Mr. Hoyle’s Partner – Hearts.

Mr. Hoyle – Oh, yes. Hearts, of course. How stupid of me! Now let me see. (Mr. Hoyle begins murmuring, softly, to himself.) – The ace was played a little while ago – I’ve got the King – the Queen must be——

The Other Lady – Oh, Mr. Hoyle, you mustn’t talk like that. You’re telling everything. There is a rule against it.

Mr. Hoyle – Oh! I’m so sorry, of course, yes, a rule, a rule – certainly – I’ll just step over and look it up in my book to make sure——

The Other Man – Oh, don’t bother, Hoyle. It’s quite all right. Now go ahead and play, old man.

Mr. Hoyle – Ah! It’s me to play! I’m afraid I hadn’t understood. Let – me – see – me to play – hum – me to play——

Mr. Hoyle’s Partner – Yes, you to play. Don’t you see – I led the ace of clubs and he’s put on a spade——

Mr. Hoyle – A spade! But, excuse me, why doesn’t he play a club? I think there’s a rule in my book – one minute——

Mrs. Hoyle – Do sit down, William. Don’t you remember he has no clubs.

Mr. Hoyle – Ah! of course! no clubs, and so he can’t play a club: quite right. In that case – let me think—— (Mr. Hoyle sits and murmurs.) Let me think. (There is a long pause.)

Mr. Hoyle’s Partner (Very gently) – It’s your turn, you know, Mr. Hoyle.

Mr. Hoyle (With animation) – My turn, ah, yes, of course; I see, and my partner has led the ace of clubs – hearts are trumps. Aha! I have it. (Mr. Hoyle puts the ace of trumps on the other ace.) My trick, I think!

There is a general movement of consternation among the players.

The Other Three – Oh! Mr. Hoyle!

Mr. Hoyle (In surprise) – Didn’t I take it?

The Other Man – But don’t you see when you trumped your partner’s ace, you practically threw away a trick and——

Mr. Hoyle’s Partner – Yes, and I’m afraid that exactly loses us the rubber, doesn’t it?

The Other Man – Never mind, Hoyle, better luck next time. Let’s start another game.

Mr. Hoyle (Rising from the table) – Ah! no, I’m afraid I’d better stop now. I want to do some more work on my book this evening.

II

A LITTLE DINNER WITH MRS. BEATON

The Scene is in the Beatons’ House in the sitting-room. The two Beatons are waiting for dinner. Mrs. Beaton is seated at a side-table very busy with a litter of printer’s proofs. On the head of them one can read quite easily the title:

MRS. BEATON’S HOUSEHOLD COOKERY BOOK OF BRITISH, AMERICAN AND FOREIGN COOKING. NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION.
Specially recommended for the Household, for Hotels, Restaurants, Ships, Caravans, Picnics, etc., etc.

Mr. Beaton sits in a weary but resigned attitude. His newspaper has fallen from his hands.

Mrs. Beaton (Looking up and gazing in front of her with a dreamy expression) – Darling, how do you spell Crème de Strasbourg? Is it ou or just u?

Mr. Beaton – Ou, I think, is the French.

Mrs. Beaton – Aren’t you a pet? (There is another long silence while Mrs. Beaton works briskly at the papers. After a while she looks up and says:) Darling, which is a semicolon, the one with the little wiggle under it, or the one with just the two dots?

Mr. Beaton – I think the semicolon is what you mean by the little wiggle.

Mrs. Beaton – Well, listen, then, and do tell me which to use in this, because you’re so clever – aren’t you, pet? I’m talking about what-do-you-call-it – you know that long word that means when people do things in time——

Mr. Beaton – Punctuality?

Mrs. Beaton – Punctuality! aren’t you wonderful! Well, I’m talking about punctuality. (She reads from a proof.) “In the care of the Household, it is most important that everything should be done at its proper time. Dinner must never be kept waiting. Nothing contributes so much to the happiness of the household as promptness and regularity in the service of meals.” – Don’t you think that is rather nicely said, Edward?

Mr. Beaton – Very nice, I’m sure.

Mrs. Beaton (Continuing) – “To be kept waiting for dinner.” – Good gracious, what is that! (There is a sound like a minor explosion from the kitchen with a great hissing of grease. Mrs. Beaton rises and disappears for a moment. When she returns, she says quite tranquilly:) It’s all right. It was only Jane upset a lot of grease.

Mr. Beaton – Grease!

Mrs. Beaton – Grease or gravy, or something. She upset it on the cooking range.

Mr. Beaton – Whew! It smells awful. What is it?

Mrs. Beaton – Something she’s making from a recipe, I think. I’m not just sure what it was going to be, soup, or a soufflé, something with an S – I told her we’d eat anything with an S tonight, because I’m working on S at present. It does rather smell, doesn’t it? Now let me see where I am – sago, sandwich, soufflé—— You won’t mind dinner being a little late, my love!

Mr. Beaton (Mildly) – But it’s half an hour late already.

Mrs. Beaton – Is it possible! You poor lamb. You must be famished. I can’t think what Jane is doing. (She rings a bell and Jane, very slovenly and much smeared, appears in the doorway.) – Oh, Jane, don’t bother with the soup. Perhaps you can give it to the cat. Mr. Beaton is in a hurry, so you might serve the roast at once.

Jane – Why, ma’am, there isn’t any roast!

Mrs. Beaton – No roast!

Jane – No, ma’am. You didn’t order any.

Mrs. Beaton (Pleasantly) – Ah, no, of course not, the letter R! – we finished it yesterday, didn’t we, darling? How silly of me! And now, I remember, that thing with the S that fell into the fire, was the SPAGHETTI, of course, the SPAGHETTI——

Mr. Beaton (Hesitatingly) – Don’t you think then perhaps——

Mrs. Beaton – That you’d better go and dine at the club? I’m afraid so, my pet. It’s too bad. I’m afraid you’ve dined there every night for months, haven’t you? And I had so counted on giving you a nice little home dinner as a surprise. And, oh! darling, one minute before you go – is cuisine spelt with a q – or——

Mr. Beaton – With a cu, I think.

Mrs. Beaton – With a cu! Aren’t you a love! Don’t be late, darling. Goodbye.

III

A MASTER MIND OF MEMORY

The Little Home Scene That Ensues When He Loses His Little Chart

The scene is laid in the living-room of the home of the family of Mr. Mastermind, the great memory expert, the inventor of the famous Mastermind Chart. The Master Mind, wearing an overcoat and a hat, and evidently just ready to go out, is seen fussing about the room looking for something. Its Better Half is sitting in a rocking chair, knitting very placidly.

Mr. Mastermind – Now where the deuce have I put the confounded thing?

Mrs. Mastermind – What is it you’re looking for, dear?

Mr. Mastermind – My little what-d’ye-call-it.

Mrs. Mastermind – What do you mean?

Mr. Mastermind – Oh, you know – that little what’s-its-name.

Mrs. Mastermind – Oh, you mean your little square chart?

Mr. Mastermind – Yes, of course, I couldn’t think for the minute. My little square chart. The new edition. I can’t find it.

Mrs. Mastermind – Well, never mind it, dear. Go on out; I’ll find it before you come in.

Mr. Mastermind – No – but don’t you see? – I want to take it with me. I meant to put it into my pocket to show it to – er – what-d’you-call-him.

Mrs. Mastermind – To whom, dear?

Mr. Mastermind – To that man I’m going to see, don’t you know – down at the thing-ummey hotel.

Mrs. Mastermind (Still placidly knitting) – I’m really afraid that I don’t know what hotel you mean. You see, dear, you didn’t say you were going out at all.

Mr. Mastermind – Quite so. To tell the truth, I had forgotten – that is to say – I had made a new association of ideas with something, suggesting a still more powerful concatenation of thought.

Mrs. Mastermind – Well, shall I name over all the hotels and then you can remember?

Mr. Mastermind – No, no. Don’t try to. You’d probably fail. You see, my dear, if you had ever taken a course in my memory system I wouldn’t mind letting you try to name them, but as it is your sequence of ideas would break down. (Still hunting desperately among the things on the table and turning over the books and papers in disorder.) – Now, where the deuce is that little square chart? Where in Hades?

Mrs. Mastermind – Please, dear, don’t get excited.

Mr. Mastermind – Excited! I’m not in the least excited! One of the main factors in the perfection of memory is that the mind must be quite calm, otherwise—— (At this juncture Mr. Mastermind knocks over the little table.) – Oh, damnation!

Mrs. Mastermind – Please, dear, don’t swear – (Mrs. Mastermind starts to rise.) – let me help you.

Mr. Mastermind (Making a great effort at control, and desisting from his search so as to speak with calm) – No, thank you, don’t get up. I can find it. Meantime, as I say, I merely wanted it so as to bring it over to Mr. – Mr. – What’s-his-name? – I don’t recall it for the moment, but I can easily get it by setting up a perfectly simple chain of associations with the name itself. That kind of thing is really the essence of my system, and I do wish, dear, at some time when you are calmer, you’d start – under my guidance, of course – the first lessons of the method.

For example, I can easily recover this man’s name – memory is never lost, my dear, merely buried – by connecting it with the fact that he was a fellow-passenger with us on board the – what the deuce was the name of that infernal steamer?

Mrs. Mastermind – Which steamer, my love?

Mr. Mastermind – Oh, you know, that cussed steamer that we were on when we came from – from – oh, from those blasted Islands!

Mrs. Mastermind (Very gently) – I’m afraid I don’t remember it at all.

Mr. Mastermind (Beginning again his furious search) – I mean those blasted islands that you go to when you, don’t you know, when you’ve no time to go as far as the West – What-d’ye-call-’ems. People go there when they’ve got what’s-its-name. The air is full of what-d’ye-call-it. (Another little table is knocked over, and just at this moment there is heard a ring at the home door-bell.)

Mrs. Mastermind (Calling from her chair so as to be heard in the hall) – Jane, if you are anywhere there, would you please go to the door?

(There is a slight pause. Jane can be seen going past the door of the living-room in the hall. The outer door is heard to open, and Jane reappears with a gentleman visitor in tow.)

Jane (Announcing) – Mr. Smith.

Mrs. Mastermind (Rising from her chair) – Oh, Mr. Smith! We’re so glad to see you.

Mr. Mastermind (His face illuminated) – Smith! Ah! ha! ha! Of course! Smith!

Mr. Smith (Bowing over Mrs. Mastermind’s hand) – I thought I’d come across and call. I happen to be staying at the Royal Hotel.

Mr. Mastermind (Breaking out again) – The Royal Hotel! Ha! Ha! of course! Yes! The Royal Hotel!

Mr. Smith (Continuing) – . . . and I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you since we were fellow-passengers on the Queen Mary!

Mr. Mastermind – Yes! Yes! The Queen Mary. Of course! Q for Queen, and M for Mary!! Q and M being only three letters apart in a reverse direction. Ha!

Mr. Smith – But, of course, you left the Bahamas before I did.

Mr. Mastermind – The Bahamas! the Bahamas!

(Mr. Mastermind, now quite radiant, comes and shakes hands again and again with Mr. Smith, repeating “The Royal Hotel! The Queen Mary! The Bahamas!”) – What a perfect sequence! what a proof of the system!

Mr. Smith to Mr. Mastermind – I sent you over a note to ask if you wouldn’t come over. But I gathered that you didn’t receive it?

Mr. Mastermind – Yes, yes, I got it. But I was delayed. I was so anxious to take along in my pocket a copy of my new little square chart, my last one, SUPER-MEMORY AS A SYSTEM, that it kept me late. To tell the truth, I couldn’t find it. I was hunting it when you came in.

Mr. Smith – A little square chart?

Mr. Mastermind – Yes, yes, just a little——

Mr. Smith – But surely, isn’t that it? . . . not that pocket – the one sticking out of your inner pocket.

Mr. Mastermind (Drawing out the chart) – Why, of course, how ridiculous. I see! I have put on the wrong coat underneath the one I meant to wear; by accident I put it in the money pocket. How extraordinary. A chain of association! But do let’s sit down and talk over that fascinating voyage to the – the – the – Yokohama Islands.

IV
MR. HACKIT DECIDES TO SHAVE HIMSELF FOR SAFETY

The scene is laid in the principal bedroom in the residence of Mr. Hackit, inventor of the famous Autodoit Safety Razor. In one corner is a screen behind which can be heard at intervals the sound of running water. A lady, presumably Mrs. Hackit, is seated in a rocking-chair reading the morning paper. Mr. Hackit, as is at once apparent, is behind the screen.

Mr. Hackit’s Voice – Rot blast it!

(There is the sound of more rushing water; steam ascends above the screen. There is a clatter as of soap dishes, etc., falling around.)

Mr. Hackit’s Voice – Ding bust it!

Mrs. Hackit – Whatever is the matter, Alfred? Haven’t you finished washing yet?

Mr. Hackit’s Voice – Washing! I’m not wishing – I’m going to shave myself!

Mrs. Hackit (In obvious alarm) – To shave yourself! Oh! Alfred! For heaven’s sake, be careful!

Mr. Hackit’s voice – Nonsense! There’s not the slightest danger. With this new device of mine—— Wow!

Mrs. Hackit – What is it?

Mr. Hackit’s Voice – I nearly cut my finger! How on earth do you fix in this confounded blade?

Mrs. Hackit – Why, surely, Alfred, you must remember that. You take hold of the blade (B) between the finger (F) and thumb (T) and slide it gently into the grooves (G) and (G) till it comes fast across the frame (F). Surely that’s on all your directions?

Mr. Hackit’s Voice (Grudgingly) – I suppose it is. Anyway, I can’t do it.

(There is a tinkling clatter as of a razor-blade and its fastenings falling to the floor.) – Oh! drat the thing!

Mrs. Hackit – Wait a minute, Alfred, hand it to me over the top of the screen, and I’ll go and get the paper of directions.

Mr. Hackit’s Voice – No, no. I won’t try any more.

(There is a final splashing and gurgling of water, and then Mr. Hackit emerges from behind the screen. His face is covered with a luxuriant growth of beard and whiskers like those of a California Forty-niner. He says as he comes out:)

After all, why should I bother to start now? I never shaved in my life. I was just curious to see how the thing works.

V
PREDICTING WITH A GREAT PREDICTOR

Mr. Talkleton, the great predictor of business conditions, is seen in his inner office. Mr. Talkleton is known far and wide as the statistician who calculated the Japanese Chow crop of 1928 to within a bushel and who predicted the crisis of 1921 less than six months after it happened. He is seated at his desk. A litter of papers covered with figures lies all about him. The great man is absolutely absorbed in his work. His massive brain is motionless, poised over his task.

Near him at another desk is his stenographer with a telephone.

The telephone rings.

The Stenographer (Speaking into the telephone) – I’m so sorry you can’t speak to Mr. Talkleton this morning. He is making a forecast. (She rings off.)

Mr. Talkleton (Without moving his head) – How much is 6 times 7?

The Stenographer – I’ll look it up. (She takes down an encyclopedia and searches in it. Then she says:) Forty-eight.

Mr. Talkleton – Thank you.

(There is silence for a little time.)

Mr. Talkleton (Without moving his head) – How much is 8 and 17 and 4?

The Stenographer – 8 and 17 and 4? I’ll just work it out for you, Mr. Talkleton.

Mr. Talkleton – Thank you.

(The stenographer moves across to an adding machine and pounds at it furiously for two or three minutes. Then she draws a paper slip out of it and reads:) One hundred.

Mr. Talkleton (As before) – Thank you.

(The telephone rings again.)

The Stenographer – I’m sorry. Mr. Talkleton is busy. You want a forecast? Oh, yes, I’ll ask him. (She puts hand over the phone.) Mr. Talkleton, there is a lady wants a forecast on the peach crop for 1929. Shall I say yes?

Mr. Talkleton – Yes. Tell her we’ll have it today and get the office boy to predict it. Give him money to buy a couple of peaches to predict it with. Don’t disturb me again.

The Stenographer – Yes, Madame, we will make it for you today. Will you send a taxi and get it? Thank you.

(She rings off. There is another little silence.)

Mr. Talkleton – Add me up 4 and 6 and 3 and then subtract 3.

(There is a terrific clattering of the adding machine. The stenographer draws out the slip and announces:) Six plus four. . . . (Presently she says:) – What are you working on this morning, Mr. Talkleton?

Mr. Talkleton – It is a forecast of general business conditions for one year, and now will you kindly supply me with a few necessary data? The calculation is practically complete and I need only a few data which I find difficult to remember. How many ounces are there in a pound avoirdupois?

The Stenographer – Twenty.

Mr. Talkleton – Thank you. I never can remember it. And how many inches in a foot?

The Stenographer – I’ve got that somewhere in our files, Mr. Talkleton. I’ll look it up later.

Mr. Talkleton – Thank you – and let me have at the same time the number of gallons in a firkin, and the number of perches in a furlong. And now I think I’m ready. Will you take this dictation, please?

“I calculate from the data gathered from various indexes and reduced to a common basis that the general trend of business for the year will be upward and downward. There is every indication of a sharp decline in the percentage of the fall of values upwards. But there may be a sharp jolt sideways. In fact, the entire year 1927—”

The Stenographer – Which year, Mr. Talkleton?

Mr. Talkleton – 1927.

The Stenographer – Surely not 1927?

Mr. Tackleton – That’s the year I’m predicting on.

The Stenographer – Why, Mr. Talkleton, 1927 is over – months ago.

Mr. Talkleton (In alarm) – All over! I never noticed it. When did it end?

The Stenographer – Last December.

Mr. Talkleton (In despair) – Last December! And I’ve spent months and months on it!

The Stenographer – Oh, never mind, Mr. Talkleton. Call it 1928 – and I am certain it will be just as good as any other of your predictions.

Mr. Talkleton (Brightly and with renewed animation) – Will it? That’s fine. All right! Type it out while I get my hat and coat, and then fetch me my arithmetic primer, and the multiplication table, and we’ll go out to lunch.

TOC     INDEX

Literature and the
Eighteenth Amendment

I am privileged to make a unique announcement on behalf of the Mayor and Council of my place of residence, the City of Montreal. To be more exact, let me add that this announcement has not yet been sanctioned by the Mayor and Council, but I feel certain that as soon as they hear of it, they will be all for it.

It concerns, in a word, a proposal to extend to United States authors and playwrights an invitation to use the peculiar facilities enjoyed by the City of Montreal for the laying of plots, scenes, etc., and for the domicile of literary characters. Put quite simply, this new plan will restore to the American author the literary setting lost under the Eighteenth Amendment.

—

Ever since the Eighteenth Amendment was appended to the Constitution of the United States, writers of fiction, poetry, and the drama have found themselves under a handicap. In the stories of today they are unable to give their characters a drink. At first sight this seems nothing. But when we realize how much of our literature both in America and in England for centuries past has depended, rightly or wrongly, for conviviality on the drinking of toasts and healths, on wassail and on Xmas, on stirrup cups and Auld Lang Synes – we can see how hard it is, in literature, to do without it.

Let me illustrate:

I met casually the other day in New York a writer whom I knew to have been, only a few years ago, one of the most successful writers of fiction of our day. He looked despondent. And I was pained to notice that his clothes were ill kept and his appearance seedy.

“You look down on your luck, old man,” I said.

“I am,” he answered.

“Come along, then,” I said, “and have a chocolate ice-cream sundae to pick you up.”

A few minutes later we were standing beside the counter of a drug store with a smoking chocolate ice-cream sundae in our hands.

“That’s better,” said my friend, as he drained his sundae at one draught.

“Have another,” I suggested, “and then tell me of your troubles.”

Warmed and invigorated by the ice-cream, to which was presently added, on my proposal, a pint of buttermilk, my friend proceeded to explain.

“I can’t get used to this new situation,” he said. “You see all my stories are novels of today, with the plot laid in the present time – you understand?”

“Perfectly,” I said, “have some more buttermilk.”

“Thank you. Well, the trouble is, I can’t get used to the present situation at all. For instance, in my last novel (you haven’t seen it for the simple reason that I can’t sell it) I bring in a dinner party. In fact, I nearly always bring in a dinner party. It makes such a good setting, don’t you know.”

“Quite so,” I answered. “What about a quart of sour milk?”

“No, thanks,” he said, “not now, I want to keep my head clear. Well, I always used, as I say, to have descriptions of dinner parties, in which there were tables smothered with flowers, and glittering glass, and at which – let me see——”

Here he paused and pulled out some scraps of paper, evidently literary notes, from his pocket.

“Yes, at which, for example, ‘Meadows (that was always the butler) noiselessly passed the champagne’; in which ‘The conviviality of the party had now reached its height. Lord Dangerdog pledged his beautiful vis-à-vis in a brimming glass of champagne’; and in which ‘Lady Angela and the Duchess exchanged smiles over their claret’; and in which finally ‘the host instructed Meadows to bring up some of the port, the old port, from the dusty bin in the cellar where it had been first laid down by Winthrop Washington Beverly Robinson, his ancestor, in the year of the Declaration of Independence; a “noble port,” said Lord Dangerdog as he sipped the tawny wine with the air of a connoisseur. . . .’

“How’s that?” said my friend, breaking off in his reading.

“Excellent,” I answered, “and it is amazing how really dependent our literature used to be for its mirth and happiness on just that kind of thing.”

“Precisely,” he answered, “that is what I am finding. I can’t replace it. Here’s what I put into my new story (the one that I can’t sell) for the dinner party scene:

“‘As the pea soup circulated freely, a new animation seemed to come to the guests. Lord Dangerdog, already at his second plateful, smiled across at Lady Angela . . . while the young girl herself hid her blushing face in her soup to avoid the boldness of his eye.

“‘“Come,” said the host, turning to his English guest, “let me pledge you in another stick of celery,” and, suiting the action of the word, he held aloft a magnificent bunch of Kalamazoo celery, and with the words, “Let us eat to our English visitor,” he devoured the entire bunch in a single mouthful.

“‘Then beckoning to the noiseless butler to whom he passed at the same time the key of the cellar, “Meadows,” he said, “fetch me up some of the old soup: it’s in the fourth trough on the left.”’”

—

“There!” said my friend as he finished reading. “What do you think of it?”

“You’re quite right,” I said. “It hardly seems the same.”

—

Since then I have been looking more closely into this question of conviviality and literature. I find that drink of some kind is associated not only with scenes of gaiety, but with almost every aspect of literature. Take the familiar literary theme of the gradual ruin and downfall of a young man, happily married, and with all life before him.

In the stories of yesterday we used to read, for example:

“It was with a devastating sense of despair that Agatha watched her husband go to the sideboard and with a shaking hand pour himself out a glass of neat brandy, which he drained at a gulp . . .” etc., etc.

In an up-to-date story all that we can say is something of this sort:

“It was with a devastating sense of despair that Agatha realized that her husband was becoming addicted to consommé. She watched him as he surreptitiously drank a second ladleful of it, and asked herself what would happen if he took a tureenful.”

There is only one thing to be done. Move the stories and scenes up to the city of Montreal, where the old and familiar literary background still survives, where Xmas is Xmas, and a Party is a Party and not a Stuffing Match.

—

Let any writer of one-act plays in the United States consider, for instance, the brightness of such an opening as this:

Scene: The Bar of a Montreal hotel. There are present Lord Dangerdog, Lady Evelina, The Bishop of Labrador, General the Hon. Sir Evelyn Everhard.

The Bishop (Wiping his face) – What an excellent cocktail.

The General – Is it not, and so mild! It’s only American rum and absinthe, I believe.

Lady Evelina (Putting down twenty-five cents) – Mix the boys up another of those.

When Montreal offers a chance for a scene like this, what a shame to lay a plot in Indianapolis.

—

Now I am entitled, in fact, I am invited, by a hotel in Montreal to say that any American dramatists visiting it are entirely welcome to lay one-act plays in the bar-room. Another hotel also announces that authors may lay one-act plays in the bar or in the grill room and serve liquor to their characters at any time up to midnight.

And if any author has occasion to entertain his characters in a club – a real club, such, I have been told, as no longer exists in the United States – I invite him, as a personal matter, to put them into the University Club, Montreal, where they will find everything needed for the best class of fiction.

They will then be able to reinsert into their stories such little lost touches as:

“It was the habit of Sir John to drop into his club for a glass of sherry and bitters before driving home to dinner.”

There is so much more class in that than in saying that he generally stopped at a soda fountain for a pint of chocolate squash.

—

If the plan that I have outlined is carried through, the first train-load of American authors will probably be shipped in within a month. Scene-laying will begin at once. And next season’s crop of novels will begin:

“The sun was slowly setting on both sides of the St. Lawrence, illuminating with its dying beams the windows of the hotels and clubs of Montreal, in one of which, licensed to sell wine and beer up till midnight, a man and a woman——”

And the story is off to a good start and literature comes into its own again.

TOC     INDEX

The Hunt for a Heroine

How the Fiction Writer Struggles to Make an Attractive Woman

By a silly kind of convention, handed down from our great-grandfathers’ time, every work of fiction has to have in it the class of person known as a Heroine.

These heroines were found everywhere. You found them in stories of adventure, mixed up with pirates and heroic lieutenants in the navy, in stories of English country life where they lived in rectories or worked as governesses, or in historic and romantic novels where they rode on “palfreys” and had “varlets” to wait on them.

Nor was there any great trouble, in the literary sense, in creating them. The author merely described what he thought an attractive girl and let it go at that. He suited himself. Some writers, for example, liked them small; they preferred to make their heroine what they called a “sylph,” which meant a being so dainty and so frail that she could just about get around by herself and no more. This little “wee-wee” heroine used to “stamp her little foot imperiously” and “toss her little head disdainfully,” – in fact she had quite a lot of tricks like that and made a terrible hit.

But other writers liked the heroine to be what they called “divinely tall,” and “willowy.” She would just nicely get under a doorway, and was as thin and bendable as a stethoscope. But the idea was that if she ever “twined her arms about her lover,” – as she did on the last page of the book – it was a pretty high-class piece of twining.

But in those days the thing was simple. The circulation of books was limited. There was none of the world-wide appeal of today. Nowadays the author has to try to please, not some of the people, but all of the people. He has got to make a heroine to suit not merely his own taste but everybody’s. Otherwise there will be a lot of people who can’t read the story because they don’t like the heroine.

The result is that in the romances of today the heroine must not belong to any one type but to all of them at once. In a subtle way the writer must suggest to every reader the girl of his particular preference. This is very hard to do. Some writers can’t do it at all. But when it is really well done the resulting description of the up-to-date heroine sounds something such as the following pen portrait, taken, almost word for word, from one of the most popular novels of the year:

“Margaret Overproof was neither short nor tall. Her perfect figure, slender and at the same time fat, conveyed at times an impression of commanding height while at other times she looked sawed off. Her complexion, which was of the tint of a beautiful dull marble like the surface of a second-hand billiard ball, was shot at times with streaks of red and purple which almost suggested apoplexy. Her nose which was clear-cut and aquiline was at the same time daintily turned up at the end and then moved off sideways. A critic might have considered her mouth a trifle too wide and her lips a trifle too full, but on the other hand a horse buyer would have considered them all right. Her eyes were deep and mournful and lit with continuous merriment. Her graceful neck sloped away in all directions till it reached her bust, which stopped it.”

There! a reader who is not satisfied with Margaret would be pretty hard to please. But, by the way, her name ought not to be anything so simple as Margaret, if she is to be a heroine of today. In earlier times, say, a hundred years ago, the heroines were called by flowing classical names such as Dulcinea, Althusia, or Ambrosia. Then they went through a stage of being called by the simple old home names such as Margaret and Catherine and Mary Ann. They then passed through a period of cat-like nicknames, such as “Puss,” and “Dot,” “Kit,” and “Vi.”

But nowadays the favourite name for a heroine seems to be one of those dignified, double-gendered, half impossible designations that might mean either a girl or a man or a horse – as, for example, Joyce, Loïs, Dyce, or something of that sort.

—

Having got her described and named the next difficulty with the heroine is to dress her. This is the hardest of all. The novelist of two generations ago did it very simply. They always clothed their heroine in “old clinging stuff.” That was all. What it is or where you buy it, I don’t know. But the old-fashioned heroine always wore it on great occasions. If she was poor – a governess, for instance – she got it out of a box left her by her mother. If she was rich she went out and bought it and it was then called “priceless old clinging stuff.” And she made her appearance in it thus:

“As Margaret descended the broad stairways, dressed simply in beautiful old white clinging stuff which clung to her as she descended, all eyes turned to gaze at her in enraptured admiration. ‘Great Heavens,’ said the young Duke, ‘who is she?’”

But that won’t do now. These are the days of illustrated fashion magazines and the readers, the female readers at any rate, want to know what it was that she really had on, and won’t be put off any longer with that clinging stuff. Nor will it do to say that she was “dressed all in flaming red,” or that “she appeared dressed in opalescent pink, shot with blue,” or “half shot with something concealed below.” Even if her appearance was half shot, the reader wants to know all about it and where she got it.

Only women writers can really deal with this situation, and unfortunately, nine out of ten novels are written by men. All that a man can do is to reach out for a fashion magazine, snatch out a handful of technical terms and throw them at the heroine – thus:

“As Loïs gayly slid down the bannisters of the staircase, her appearance attracted all eyes. She wore a dainty georgette of limousine tucked over a brassière of deep blue and held in place with a ceinture of alligator hide with crystalline insertions. ‘Great Heavens,’ said the young Duke, ‘who is she?’”

—

With that, her figure and her name and her dress are fairly well settled. But worse remains – her mind? What is, what ought to be, the mind of an attractive woman? Should she know anything or just nothing?

The earlier writers were all for the nothing. With them the less the heroine knew the bigger hit she made. Witness this description taken right out of an old book, but easily recognizable.

“Caroline Cowslip had been brought up in the greatest simplicity. Reared in the seclusion of an old-fashioned rectory it was probable that she was more simple than any girl within a radius of ten miles. To this charm of a native simplicity was added a total lack of education and an entire absence of worldly knowledge. The father, the good old rector, had at last gone to his rest, leaving Caroline alone in the world.”

In these older books, the idea was that this kind of start would land Caroline in all kinds of interesting trouble.

But today this, too, is changed. The heroine can’t any longer be made ignorant because this gives offence to all women readers: on the other hand, it doesn’t do to have her know too much, or else the men object to her. The only way to get round it is for the author to keep on declaring that Loïs has a “limpid mind,” and to speak of “the girl’s clear intelligence” but not to let her work it too hard.

Here is something of the touch that is needed.

“Loïs sat silent, her hands clasped about her knee and her eyes half closed, while Dangerfield explained to her all the intricacies of the situation.

“‘I begin to see,’ she murmured.

“Dangerfield, relying always on the limpid intelligence of the girl’s limpid intellect, continued in the same quiet way to lay before her all the tangled factors in the weg of calculation which made up – what he was talking about.

“At the end he stopped – ‘And you can trust me?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ she murmured as she rose, ‘and now I must go home and think!’”

By that means, of course, she has it pretty well put all over Dangerfield and the reader too. In reality she is probably just about on the same level as Caroline. But when she says she must “go home and think,” let her go by all means. It is what she needs.

TOC     INDEX

Bed-time Stories
for Grown-Up People

With Apologies to
Our Best Children’s Writers

There has come into being lately a new and very charming school of literature which deals with the animals, not as they are but as they might be. Skinko the Skunk turns into a merry little companion, a little saucy at times but without malice. Warto the Toad sits complacently under a broad leaf, talking with Squirmo the Worm. Old Mr. Hawk hovers gently overhead looking kindly down and wondering whom to eat. The whole animal kingdom is thus suffused with such a soft and drowsy atmosphere that the little children lay their tired heads on the pillow and go to sleep dreaming of it.

Isn’t it beautiful? And what a pity it seems that we can’t do the same for grown-up life. The only part of our modern newspaper that breathes out this entrancing atmosphere of universal happiness is that little corner of the children’s page. All the rest of it is filled with battles and crimes, with murder and sudden death.

—

Come, let us see if we can’t do something to straighten this out. Let us take a piece of news out of a modern journal, the first to hand and the first random item we see, and try if we cannot rewrite it with the human breadth of kindliness of a bed-time story. Here, what is this? This looks like the kind of thing that we want:

DARING BURGLARY
IN RESIDENTIAL DISTRICT

DESPERATE CRIMINAL
DANGEROUSLY WOUNDED

Friday, April 1.—Last night at an advanced hour burglars broke into the cellars of the residence of Mr. Surplus Overall, the well-known stockbroker, and were in the act of ransacking the house when a sudden alarm brought the police to the scene. After a fusillade of shots had been exchanged the burglars made good their escape with the exception of one man who was desperately wounded in the fray and captured. The apparent motive was robbery.

—

But, dear me! that sounds altogether too harsh, too brutal! It is a criminal world indeed in which such things as that can happen. Let us see if we can rewrite it, so as to give it that soft and gentle touch of the bed-time story.

Try it like this:

Away down in the crowded part of the city lives Fuzzy the Burglar in a hole of his own that nobody else can find. He has an old fur coat with the fur nearly all eaten off of it and so he is called Fuzzy. He looks very different from Fatto the Capitalist whose sleek fur coat glistens and ripples as he walks, and very different from Stocko the Broker who is all covered with rich fur and silk lining from his neck to his feet and his paws.

But Fuzzy hardly ever sees these because he doesn’t get out by day but lies round in his hole and sleeps and only goes out at night. Fuzzy sees better at night. Sometimes he wanders at night away up into the part of the town where Fatto and Stocko live and where there are so many trees that it is like a wood. Often as he goes past their houses, Fuzzy’s quick nose catches delicious smells wafted from the kitchens and he knows that Fatto or Stocko is having a feast, with nuts and elderberry wine. My! how Fuzzy would like to be in that feast! Only of course he can’t be in it because Fatto and Stocko won’t let him come in.

In fact, in order to keep Fuzzy out they have Coppo the Cop walking up and down in the street outside, under the electric light, just to keep Fuzzy away:

Coppo likes to walk under the light because then everybody can see him and see what a sleek coat he has and how plump he is. Now and again Coppo will stand still and swing his arms so as to beat himself with his big paws: partly because it is cold and partly because his instinct tells him that that is good for his circulation. If Coppo didn’t beat his arms like this perhaps he wouldn’t have any circulation at all.

Now when Coppo stands on his beat he sees all the people that live along his street come home in their limousine cars, and of course he knows them all. And when he sees Stocko the Broker go by, he says to himself, “There’s Stocko coming home”; and he puts his paw up to his hat to show that he knows him. Then presently he sees Skin the Lawyer, and Scratchy the Notary drive home and at last he sees Clubbo, the Club man, come crawling home along the edge of the sidewalk, because it is Clubbo’s instinct not to trust the sidewalk in case it should rise up and hit him. And at last Coppo says, “They are all home.” And he goes and stands under the lamp and leans against the lamp post because he knows that that is good for his back. And he wishes that he was at home too. Away down in the deeper part of the city Coppo has a mate and a lot of little Coppos all round and plump like himself. But of course he can’t be at home with them because he has to stay under the lamp post and then if anything has happened he can run off as fast as he can on his fat legs to the Station House and say, “Something has happened!”

.  .  .  .  .

But all the time while Coppo is standing there he is really watching for Fuzzy the Burglar. And he says to himself, “I wonder where Fuzzy is tonight,” and, “I wonder what Fuzzy is doing?” He looks up and down the street and towards all the dark corners-and thinks “perhaps Fuzzy is in there.”

So presently, on the night we are going to talk about, Fuzzy came along the street, only he didn’t come along openly and heartily, like Fatto the Capitalist and Stocko the Broker. He came sneaking along and sneaking along and when he saw Coppo looking he stood quite still in the shadow and growled to himself and showed his teeth with all the fur on his old coat standing up with apprehension.

And presently when Coppo was looking the wrong way Fuzzy got right past him and into the little dark lane beside Stocko’s house. There he waited a little while to see that all was still and then he knelt down in the darkness beside one of the cellar windows and began scratching at it with his clever little paws till presently the windows pushed open and Fuzzy slipped quietly down into the cellar.

My! But it was dark down there! At first Fuzzy could hardly see anything at all but presently when his eyes began to get used to it he saw that he was in a room with a lot of coal in it. Fuzzy’s instinct told him that this must be the coal room with the coal for the furnace that keeps Stocko warm while he is eating nuts and drinking elderberry wine. Fuzzy knew that there must be a door somewhere and a flight of stairs to lead up into the house. So he crawled round quietly until he found the stairs and then he waited and waited and he pricked up his ears and he listened and listened, because he wanted to find out whether Stocko was asleep. If he was, then perhaps he might have left his big gold watch somewhere on a table, or perhaps he had left ten dollars on a chair, or perhaps his long slick fur coat was hanging in the hall.

Fuzzy thought of all these things as he sat there in the dark and he licked his chops when he pictured himself going home to his hole in the fur coat, with ten dollars in the pockets and the big gold watch and chain round his neck.

Only Fuzzy couldn’t be quite sure that Stocko was asleep! Sometimes he thought he heard him snoring and then he thought perhaps he heard him still moving about. So he waited and waited.

But Stocko wasn’t asleep. He was upstairs sitting in his dressing gown at his library table counting his money. He was counting it because he wasn’t quite sure whether he had made ten thousand dollars that day or ten thousand dollars and fifty cents; and he was sitting up to see which it was.

.  .  .  .  .

So at last Fuzzy made up his mind to crawl on up the stairs. In one hand he had a little wee light that he could shut on and off, and in his breast pocket was a cute little automatic pistol.

Fuzzy climbed higher and higher: and then just as he got near the top of the cellar stairs, he knocked against a lump of coal lying on the steps and away it went bump! bump! bump! all down the steps. And just at that minute Fuzzy heard a sharp wow! wow! wow! and he knew that dear little Helpup, Stocko’s fox terrier, had heard the noise and was trying to wake the house. Fuzzy would like to have taken his automatic pistol and made a hole through dear little Helpup from one end of him to the other. But he didn’t dare do it and so he turned and rushed down the stairs again and seemed to fall over everything and shouted, “Who’s there!” And somewhere in another set of rooms of the basement Booze the Butler woke up and began putting on his evening tie again and bells rang and the maids screamed and Fuzzy ran up and down among the coals trying to find the friendly window and he couldn’t.

Then Stocko put his head out of the window and shouted out to Coppo, “Hi, there! thieves! robbers!!” and Coppo who had hardly been asleep at all called out, “All right, sir,” and drew his big revolver and began firing it in all directions and hitting the houses and the trees and shooting at the people who put their heads out of windows.

And in less than no time other Coppos came running along, and then wagonfuls of them arrived with gongs and bells. And when poor Fuzzy came crawling out of the cellar window they all fired their guns at him as often as they could shoot, and one of them actually almost hit him in the foot and at any rate tore the heel of his old boot off.

.  .  .  .  .

So when the Cops at last got Fuzzy and put him in a wagon like a cage and sat in it with him, Fuzzy was quite sulky. At first he wouldn’t talk at all but all the Cops just laughed and one of them gave Fuzzy a drink of huckleberry tea that he had in a flask (because all Cops like huckleberry tea). So Fuzzy cheered up presently and when the Cops told him he would get two years in the Jug he didn’t mind so very much but he only laughed. Because the Cops really like Fuzzy and Fuzzy likes the Cops and they both think one another real men.

Only Fuzzy made up his mind that after this he would never, never speak to Helpup again.

TOC     INDEX

Softening the Stories
for the Children

But Don’t Do It:
They Prefer Them Rough

“What is the story that you are reading, Peggy?” I asked of a wide-eyed child of eight, who sat buried in a story book.

“Little Red Riding Hood,” she answered.

“Have you come to the part,” I asked, “where the grandmother gets eaten?”

“She didn’t get eaten!” the child protested in surprise.

“Yes – the wolf comes to her cottage and knocks at the door and she thinks that it is Little Red Riding Hood and opens the door and the wolf eats her.”

She shook her head.

“That’s not it at all in this book,” she said.

So I took a look at the page before her and I read:

“Then the wolf pushed open the door of the cottage and rushed in but the grandmother was not there as she happened not to be at home.”

Exactly! The grandmother, being a truly up-to-date grandmother, was probably out on the golf links, or playing bridge with a few other grandmothers like herself.

At any rate she was not there and so she escaped getting eaten by the wolf. In other words, Little Red Riding Hood, like all the good old stories that have come down from the bad old times, is having to give way to the tendencies of a human age. It is supposed to be too horrible for the children to read. The awful fate of the grandmother, chawed up by the wolf, or, no, swallowed whole like a Malpecque oyster, is too terrible for them to hear. So the story, like a hundred other stories and pictures, has got to be censored, reëdited, and incidentally, spoiled.

All of which rests on a fundamental error as to literature and as to children. There is no need to soften down a story for them. They like it rough.

“In the real story,” I said to the little girl, “the grandmother was at home, and the wolf rushed in and ate her in one mouthful!”

“Oh! that’s much better!” she exclaimed.

“And then, afterwards, when the hunters came in, they killed the wolf and cut his stomach open and the grandmother jumped out and was saved!”

“Oh, isn’t that splendid!” cried the child.

In other words, all the terror that grown-up people see in this sort of story is there for grown-up people only. The children look clean over it, or past it, or under it. In reality, the vision of the grandmother feebly defending herself against the savage beast, or perhaps leaping round the room to get away from him, and jumping on top of the grandfather’s clock – is either horrible, or weird, or pathetic, or even comic, as we may happen to see it. But to the children it is just a story – and a good one – that’s all.

And all the old stories are the same! Consider Jack the Giant-Killer. What a conglomeration of weeping and wailing, of people shut into low dungeons, of murder, of sudden death, of blood, and of horror! Jack, having inveigled an enormous giant into eating an enormous quantity of porridge, then rips him up the stomach with a huge sword! What a mess!

But it doesn’t disturb Jack or his young readers one iota. In fact, Jack is off at once with his young readers trailing eagerly after him, in order to cut off at one blow the three huge heads of a three-headed giant and make a worse mess still.

From the fairy stories and the giant stories the children presently pass on – quite unscathed as I see it – to the higher range of the blood-and-thunder stories of the pirates and the battles. Here again the reality, for the grown-up mind that can see it, is terrible and gruesome; but never so for the boys and girls who see in it only the pleasant adventure and bright diversity.

Take, for instance, this familiar scene as it appears and reappears in the history of Jack Daredevil, or Ned Fearnothing, or any of those noble boys who go to tea, in books, at the age of fourteen and retire, as admirals, at twenty-two.

“The fire from both ships was now becoming warm. A round shot tearing across the deck swept off four of our fellows. ‘Ha! ha!’ said Jack, as he turned towards Ned on the quarterdeck, ‘this bids fair to become lively.’”

It certainly did. In fact, it would be lively already if one stopped to think of the literal and anatomical meaning of a round shot – twenty-five pounds of red-hot iron – tearing through the vitals of four men. But the boy reader never gets it this way. What is said is, that four of our fellows were “swept off” – just that; merely “swept off” and that’s the way the child reader takes it. And when the pirates “leap on deck,” Jack himself “cuts down” four of them and Ned “cuts down” three. That’s all they do – “they cut they down”; they just “shorten them” so to speak.

Very similar in scope and method was the good old “half-dime novel,” written of the days of the “Prairie,” and the mountain trail, the Feathered Indian and the Leathered Scout. In these, unsuspecting strangers got scalped in what is now the main street of Denver – where they get skinned.

These stories used to open with a rush and kept in rapid oscillation all the time. In fact they began with the concussion of firearms.

“‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ Three shots rang out over the prairie and three feathered Indians bit the dust.”

It seemed always to be a favourite pastime of the Indians – “biting dust.”

In grim reality, to the grown-up mind, these were stories of terror – of midnight attack, of stealthy murder with a knife from without the folds of the tent, of sudden death in dark caverns, of pitiless enemies, and of cruel torture.

But not so to the youthful mind. He followed it all through quite gayly, sharing the high courage of his hero, Dick Danger the Dauntless. “I must say,” whispered Dick to Ned (this was when the Indians had them tied to a tree and were piling grass and sticks round it so as to burn them alive), “I must say, old man, things begin to look critical. Unless we can think of some way out of this fix, we are lost.”

Notice, please, this word “lost”: in reality they would be worse than lost. They’d be cooked. But in this class of literature the word “lost” is used to cover up a multitude of things. And, of course, Dick does think of a way out. It occurs to him that by moving his hands he can slip off the thongs that bind him, set Ned free, leap from the tree to the back of a horse, of two horses, and then by jumping over the edge of a chasm into the forest a thousand feet below, they can find themselves in what is called “comparative safety.” After which the story goes calmly on, oblivious of the horrible scene that nearly brought it to an end.

But as the modern parent and the modern teacher have grown alarmed, the art of story-telling for children has got to be softened down. There must be no more horror and blood and violent death. Away with the giants and the ogres! Let us have instead the stories of the animal kingdom in which Wee-Wee the Mouse has tea on a broad leaf with Goo-goo the Caterpillar, and in which Fuzzy the Skunk gives talks on animal life that would do for Zoölogy Class I at Harvard.

But do we – do they – can we escape after all from the cruel environment that makes up the life in which we live? Are the animals after all so much softer than the ogres, so much kinder than the pirates? When Slick the Cat crackles up the bones of Wee-Wee the Mouse, how does that stand! And when old Mr. Hawk hovers in the air watching for Cheep-cheep the chicken who tries in vain to hide under the grass, and calls for its lost mother – how is that for terror! To my thinking the timorous and imaginative child can get more real terror from the pictured anguish of a hunted animal than from the deaths of all the Welsh giants that ever lived on Plynlimmon.

The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.

How easily a child will cry over the story of a little boy lost, how easily at the tale of poverty and want, how inconsolably at death. Touch but ever so lightly these real springs of anguish and the ready tears will come. But at Red Riding Hood’s grandmother! Never! She didn’t die! She was merely eaten. And the sailors, and the pirates, and the Apache Indians! They don’t die, not in any real sense to the child. They are merely “swept off,” and “mowed down” – in fact, scattered like the pieces on an upset chessboard.

The moral of all which is, don’t worry about the apparent terror and bloodshed in the children’s books, the real children’s books. There is none there. It only represents the way in which little children, from generation to generation, learn in ways as painless as can be followed, the stern environment of life and death.

TOC     INDEX

The Great Detective

“Ha!” exclaimed the Great Detective, raising himself from the resilient sod on which he had lain prone for half an hour, “what have we here?”

As he spoke, he held up a blade of grass he had plucked.

“I see nothing,” said the Poor Nut.

“No, I suppose not,” said the Great Detective; after which he seated himself on a stone, took out his saxophone from its case, and for the next half hour was lost in the intricacies of Gounod’s “Sonata in Six Flats with a Basement.”

– Any Detective Story.

—

The publishers tell us that more than a thousand detective stories are sold every day – or is it every hour? It does not matter. The point is that a great many are sold all the time, and that there is no slackening of the appetite of the reading public for stories of mysterious crime.

It is not so much the crime itself that attracts as the unraveling of the mystery by the super-brain of the Great Detective, as silent as he is efficient. He speaks only about once a week. He seldom eats. He crawls around in the grass picking up clews. He sits upside down in his arm-chair forging his inexorable chain of logic.

But when he’s done with it, the insoluble mystery is solved, justice is done, the stolen jewels are restored, and the criminal is either hanged or pledges his word to go and settle on a ranch in Saskatchewan; after which the Great Detective takes a night off at the Grand Opera, the only thing that really reaches him.

The tempting point about a detective story – both for the writer and the reader – is that it is so beautifully easy to begin. All that is needed is to start off with a first-class murder.

Mr. Blankety Blank sat in his office in the drowsy hour of a Saturday afternoon. He was alone. Work was done for the day. The clerks were gone. The building, save for the janitor, who lived in the basement, was empty.

As he sat thus, gazing in a sort of reverie at the papers on the desk in front of him, his chin resting on his hand, his eyes closed and slumber stole upon him.

Quite so. Let him feel just as drowsy as ever he likes. The experienced reader knows that now is the very moment when he is about to get a crack on the nut. This drowsy gentleman, on the first page of the detective story, is not really one of the characters at all. He is cast for the melancholy part that will presently be called The Body. Some writers prefer to begin with The Body itself right away – after this fashion:

The Body was that of an elderly gentleman, upside down, but otherwise entirely dressed.

But it seems fairer to give the elderly gentleman a few minutes of life before knocking him on the head. As long as the reader knows that there is either a Body right away, or that there is going to be one, he is satisfied.

Sometimes a touch of terror is added by having the elderly gentleman killed in a country house at night. Most readers will agree that this is the better way to kill him.

Sir Charles Althorpe sat alone in his library at Althorpe Chase. It was late at night. The fire had burned low in the grate. Through the heavily curtained windows no sound came from outside. Save for the maids, who slept in a distant wing, and save for the butler, whose room was under the stairs, the Chase, at this time of the year, was empty. As Sir Charles sat thus in his arm-chair, his head gradually sank upon his chest and he dozed off into slumber.

Foolish man! Doesn’t he know that to doze off into slumber in an isolated country house, with the maids in a distant wing, is little short of madness? Apparently he doesn’t, and his fate, to the complete satisfaction of the reader, comes right at him.

Let it be noted that in thus setting the stage for a detective story, the Body selected is, in nine cases out of ten, that of an “elderly gentleman.” It would be cowardly to kill a woman, and even our grimmest writers hesitate to kill a child. But an “elderly gentleman” is all right, especially when “fully dressed” and half asleep. Somehow they seem to invite a knock on the head.

After such a beginning, the story ripples brightly along with the finding of the Body, and with the Inquest, and with the arrest of the janitor, or the butler, and the usual details of that sort.

Any trained reader knows when he sees that trick phrase, “save for the janitor, who lived in the basement,” or “save for the butler, whose room was under the stairs,” that the janitor and the butler are to be arrested at once.

Not that they really did commit the murder. We don’t believe they did. But they are suspected. And a good writer in the outset of a crime story throws suspicion around like pepper.

In fact, the janitor and the butler are not the only ones. There is also, in all the stories, a sort of Half Hero (he can’t be a whole hero, because that would interfere with the Great Detective), who is partly suspected, and sometimes even arrested. He is the young man who is either heir to the money in the story, or who had a “violent quarrel” with the Body, or who was seen “leaving the premises at a late hour” and refuses to say why.

Some writers are even mean enough to throw a little suspicion on the Heroine – the niece or ward of the elderly gentleman – a needless young woman dragged in by convention into this kind of novel. She gets suspected merely because she bought half a gallon of arsenic at the local chemist shop. They won’t believe her when she says, with tears in her eyes, that she wanted it to water the tulips with.

The Body being thus completely dead, Inspector Higginbottom of the local police having been called in, having questioned all the maids, and having announced himself “completely baffled,” the crime story is well set and the Great Detective is brought into it.

Here, at once, the writer is confronted with the problem of how to tell the story, and whether to write it as if it were told by the Great Detective himself. But the Great Detective is above that. For one thing, he’s too silent. And in any case, if he told the story himself, his modesty might hold him back from fully explaining how terribly clever he is, and how wonderful his deductions are.

So the nearly universal method has come to be that the story is told through the mouth of an Inferior Person, a friend and confidant of the Great Detective. This humble associate has the special function of being lost in admiration all the time.

In fact, this friend, taken at his own face value, must be regarded as a Poor Nut. Witness the way in which his brain breaks down utterly and is set going again by the Great Detective. The scene occurs when the Great Detective begins to observe all the things around the place that were overlooked by Inspector Higginbottom.

“But how,” I exclaimed, “how in the name of all that is incomprehensible, are you able to aver that the criminal wore rubbers?”

My friend smiled quietly.

“You observe,” he said, “that patch of fresh mud about ten feet square in front of the door of the house. If you would look, you will see that it has been freshly walked over by a man with rubbers on.”

I looked. The marks of the rubbers were there plain enough – at least a dozen of them.

“What a fool I was!“ I exclaimed. “But at least tell me how you were able to know the length of the criminal’s foot?”

My friend smiled again, his same inscrutable smile.

“By measuring the print of the rubber,” he answered quietly, “and then subtracting from it the thickness of the material multiplied by two.”

“Multiplied by two!” I exclaimed. “Why by two?”

“For the toe and the heel.”

“Idiot that I am,” I cried, “it all seems so plain when you explain it.”

In other words, the Poor Nut makes an admirable narrator. However much fogged the reader may get, he has at least the comfort of knowing that the Nut is far more fogged than he is. Indeed, the Nut may be said, in a way, to personify the ideal reader, that is to say the stupidest – the reader who is most completely bamboozled with the mystery, and yet intensely interested.

Such a reader has the support of knowing that the police are entirely “baffled” – that’s always the word for them; that the public are “mystified”; that the authorities are “alarmed”; the newspapers “in the dark”; and the Poor Nut, altogether up a tree. On those terms, the reader can enjoy his own ignorance to the full.

A first-class insoluble crime having thus been well started, and with the Poor Nut narrating it with his ingenuous interest, the next stage in the mechanism of the story is to bring out the personality of the Great Detective, and to show how terribly clever he is.

II

When a detective story gets well started – when the “body” has been duly found – and the “butler” or the “janitor” has been arrested – when the police have been completely “baffled” – then is the time when the Great Detective is brought in and gets to work.

But before he can work at all, or at least be made thoroughly satisfactory to the up-to-date reader, it is necessary to touch him up. He can be made extremely tall and extremely thin, or even “cadaverous.” Why a cadaverous man can solve a mystery better than a fat man it is hard to say; presumably the thinner a man is, the more acute is his mind. At any rate, the old school of writers preferred to have their detectives lean. This incidentally gave the detective a face “like a hawk,” the writer not realizing that a hawk is one of the stupidest of animals. A detective with a face like an orang-outang would beat it all to bits.

Indeed, the Great Detective’s face becomes even more important than his body. Here there is absolute unanimity. His face has to be “inscrutable.” Look at it though you will, you can never read it. Contrast it, for example, with the face of Inspector Higginbottom, of the local police force. Here is a face that can look “surprised,” or “relieved,” or, with great ease, “completely baffled.”

But the face of the Great Detective knows of no such changes. No wonder the Poor Nut, as we may call the person who is supposed to narrate the story, is completely mystified. From the face of the great man you can’t tell whether the cart in which they are driving jolts him or whether the food at the Inn gives him indigestion.

To the Great Detective’s face there used to be added the old-time expedient of not allowing him either to eat or drink. And when it was added that during this same period of about eight days the sleuth never slept, the reader could realize in what fine shape his brain would be for working out his “inexorable chain of logic.”

But nowadays this is changed. The Great Detective not only eats, but he eats well. Often he is presented as a connoisseur in food. Thus:

“Stop a bit,” thus speaks the Great Detective to the Poor Nut and Inspector Higginbottom, whom he is dragging around with him as usual; “we have half an hour before the train leaves Paddington. Let us have some dinner. I know an Italian restaurant near here where they serve frogs’ legs à la Marengo better than anywhere else in London.”

A few minutes later we were seated at one of the tables of a dingy little eating-place whose signboard with the words “Restauranto Italiano” led me to the deduction that it was an Italian restaurant. I was amazed to observe that my friend was evidently well known in the place, while his order for “three glasses of Chianti with two drops of vermicelli in each,” called for an obsequious bow from the appreciative padrone. I realized that this amazing man knew as much of the finesse of Italian wines as he did of playing the saxophone.

We may go further. In many up-to-date cases the detective not only gets plenty to eat, but a liberal allowance of strong drink. One generous British author of today is never tired of handing out to the Great Detective and his friends what he calls a “stiff whiskey and soda.” At all moments of crisis they get one.

For example, when they find the Body of Sir Charles Althorpe, late owner of Althorpe Chase, a terrible sight, lying on the floor of the library, what do they do? They reach at once to the sideboard and pour themselves out a “stiff whiskey and soda.” Or when the heroine learns that her guardian Sir Charles is dead and that she is his heiress and when she is about to faint, what do they do? They immediately pour “a stiff whiskey and soda” into her. It is certainly a great method.

But in the main we may say that all this stuff about eating and drinking has lost its importance. The great detective has to be made exceptional by some other method.

And here is where his music comes in. It transpires – not at once but in the first pause in the story – that this great man not only can solve a crime, but has the most extraordinary aptitude for music, especially for dreamy music of the most difficult kind. As soon as he is left in the Inn room with the Poor Nut out comes his saxophone and he tunes it up.

“What were you playing?” I asked, as my friend at last folded his beloved instrument into its case.

“Beethoven’s Sonata in Q,” he answered modestly.

“Good Heavens!” I exclaimed.

Another popular method of making the Great Detective a striking character is to show him as possessing a strange and varied range of knowledge. For example, the Poor Nut is talking with a third person, the Great Detective being apparently sunk in reveries. In the course of the conversation the name of Constantinople is mentioned.

I was hardly aware that my friend was hearing what was said.

He looked up quietly.

“Constantinople?” he said. “That was the capital of Turkey, was it not?”

I could not help marveling again how this strange being could have acquired his minute and varied knowledge.

The Great Detective’s personality having been thus arranged, he is brought along with the Poor Nut and Inspector Higginbottom to Althorpe Chase and it is now up to him to start to “solve” the mystery. Till a little while ago, the favourite way of having him do this was by means of tracks, footprints, and other traces. This method, which has now worn threadbare, had a tremendous vogue. According to it, the Great Detective never questioned anybody.

But his real work was done right at the scene of the crime, crawling round on the carpet of the library, and wriggling about on the grass outside. After he has got up after two days of crawling, with a broken blade of grass, he would sit down on a stone and play the saxophone and then announce that the mystery is solved and tell Inspector Higginbottom whom to arrest. That was all. He would not explain anything but what the Poor Nut, half crazy with mystification, begged him to do.

“The case,” he at last explained very airily, “has been a simple one, but not without its features of interest.”

“Simple!” I exclaimed.

“Precisely,” said he; “you see this blade of grass. You tell me that you see nothing. Look at it again under this lense. What do you see? The letters ACK clearly stamped, but in reverse, on the soft green of the grass. What do they mean?”

“Nothing,” I groaned.

“You are wrong,” he said, “they are the last three letters of the word DACK, the name of a well-known shoemaker in Market Croydon four miles west of the Chase.”

“Good Heavens,” I said.

“Now look at this soft piece of mud which I have baked and which carries a similar stamp – ILTON.”

“Ilton, Ilton,” I repeated, “I fear it means less than ever.”

“To you,” he said. “Because you do not observe. Did you never note that makers of trousers nowadays stamp their trouser buttons with their names. These letters are the concluding part of the name BILTON, one of the best-known tailors of Kings Croft, four miles east of the Chase.”

“Good Heavens!” I cried, “I begin to see.”

“Do you?” he said drily. “Then no doubt you can piece together the analysis. Our criminal is wearing a pair of trousers, bought in King’s Croft, and a shoe bought in Market Croydon. What do you infer as to where he lives?”

“Good Heavens,” I said, “I begin to see it!”

”Exactly,” said the Great Detective. “He lives halfway between the two!”

“At the Chase itself!” I cried. “What a fool I have been.”

“You have,” he answered quietly.

—

But unfortunately the public has begun to find this method of traces and tracks a “bit thick.” All these fond old literary fictions are crumbling away.

THE METHOD OF RECONDITE KNOWLEDGE

In fact, they are being very largely replaced by the newer and much more showy expedient that can be called the Method of Recondite Knowledge. The Great Detective is equipped with a sort of super-scientific knowledge of things, materials, substances, chemistry, actions, and reactions that would give him a Ph.D. degree in any school of applied science.

Some of the best detectives of the higher fiction of today even maintain a laboratory and a couple of assistants. When they have this, all they need is a little piece of dust or a couple of micrometer sections and the criminal is as good as caught.

Thus, let us suppose that in the present instance Sir Charles Althorpe has been done to death – as so many “elderly gentlemen” were in the fiction of twenty years ago – by the intrusion into his library of a sailor with a wooden leg newly landed from Java. Formerly the crime would have been traced by the top heaviness of his wooden leg – when the man drank beer at the Althorpe Arms, his elbow on the side away from his leg would have left an impression on the bar, similar to the one left where he climbed the window sill.

But in the newer type of story the few grains of dust found near the Body would turn out to be specks from the fibre of Java cocoanut, such as is seen only on the decks of ships newly arrived from Java, and on the clothes of the sailors.

But, by the one method or the other method, the “inexorable chain of logic” can be completed to the last link. The writer can’t go on forever; sooner or later he must own up and say who did it. After two hundred pages, he finds himself up against the brutal necessity of selecting his actual murderer.

So, now then, who did it? Which brings us to the final phase of the Detective Story. Who really killed Sir Charles?

III

THE TRAMP SOLUTION

According to one very simple expedient, the murder was not committed by any of the principal characters at all. It was committed by a tramp. It transpires that the tramp was passing the Chase late that night and was attracted by the light behind the curtain (as tramps are apt to be), and came and peered through the window (as tramps love to do), and when he saw Sir Charles asleep in his chair with the gold watch on the table beside him, he got one of those sudden impulses (such as tramps get when they see a gold watch), and, before he knew what he had done, he had lifted the window and slipped into the room.

Sir Charles woke – and there you are. All quite simple. Indeed, but for the telltale marks on the grass, or the telltale fibre on the carpet, or the telltale something, the murderer would never have been known.

And yet the solution seems paltry. It seems a shame to drag in the poor tattered creature at the very end and introduce and hang him all in one page.

So we have to look round for some other plan.

THE MURDER WAS COMMITTED BY SOMEBODY ELSE ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT

A solution, which is a prime favourite with at least one very distinguished contemporary author, is to have it turn out that the murderer has been committed by somebody else altogether different. In other words, it was committed by some casual person who just came into the story for about half a second.

Let us make up a simple example. At the Althorpe Arms Inn where the Great Detective and the Poor Nut are staying while they investigate the death of Sir Charles, we bring in, just for one minute, “a burly-looking man in a check suit drinking a glass of ale in the bar.” We ask him quite casually, if he can tell us anything about the state of the road to Farringham. He answers in a surly way that he’s a stranger to these parts and knows nothing of it. That’s all. He doesn’t come in any more till the very end.

But a really experienced reader ought to guess at once that he committed the murder. Look at it: he’s burly; and he’s surly; and he has a check suit; and he drinks ale; and he’s a stranger; that’s enough. Any good law court could hang him for that – in a detective story, anyway.

When at last the truth dawns on the Poor Nut.

“Great Heavens,” I exclaimed, “the man in the check suit?”

The Great Detective nodded.

“But how on earth!” I exclaimed, more mystified than ever, “were you ever led to suspect it?”

“From the very first,” said my friend, turning to Inspector Higginbottom, who nodded in confirmation, “we had a strong clew.”

“A clew!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, one of the checks on his coat had been cached.”

“Cashed,” I cried.

“You misunderstand me; not ‘cashed,’ CACHED. He had cut it out and hidden it. A man who cuts out part of his coat and hides it on the day after a crime is probably concealing something.”

“Great Heavens!” I exclaimed, “how obvious it sounds when you put it that way. To think that I never thought of it!”

THE SOLUTION OF THE THOROUGHLY DANGEROUS WOMAN

According to this method, the crime was committed by a thoroughly bad, thoroughly dangerous woman, generally half foreign – which is supposed to account for a lot. She has just come into the story casually – as a nurse, or as an assistant book-keeper, or, more usual and much better, as a “discarded flame” of somebody or other.

These discarded flames flicker all through detective literature as a terrible warning to persons of a fickle disposition. In any case, great reliance is placed on foreign blood as accounting for her. For Anglo-Saxon readers, if you put a proper quantity of foreign blood into a nurse and then discard her, that will do the trick every time.

To show how thoroughly bad she is, the Dangerous Woman used to be introduced by the writers of the Victorian age as smoking a cigarette. She also wore “high-heeled shoes and a skirt that reached barely to her ankles.” In our time, she would have to do a little better than that. In short, as the key to a murder, we must pass her by. She would get acquitted every time.

Let us try something else.

THE SOLUTION THAT THE MURDER WAS COMMITTED BY BLUE EDWARD

According to this explanation of the mysterious crime, it turns out, right at the end of the story, that the murder was not done by any of the people suspected – neither by the Butler, nor the Half Hero, nor the Tramp, nor the Dangerous Woman. Not at all. It was the work of one of the most audacious criminals ever heard of (except that the reader never heard of him till this second), the head and brain of a whole gang of criminals, ramifying all over Hades.

This head criminal generally goes under some such terrible name as Black Pete, or Yellow Charlie, or Blue Edward. As soon as his name is mentioned, then at once not only the Great Detective but everybody else knows all about him – except only the reader and the Nut, who is always used as a proxy for the reader in matters of astonishment or simplicity of mind.

At the very height of the chase, a new murder, that of a deputy police inspector (they come cheap; it’s not like killing one of the regular characters), is added to the main crime of killing Sir Charles. The manner of the murder – by means of a dropping bullet fired three miles away with its trajectory computed by algebra – has led to the arrest. The Great Detective, calculating back the path of the bullet, has ordered by telephone the arrest of a man three miles away. As the Detective, the Nut, and the police stand looking at the body of the murdered policeman, word comes from Scotland Yard that the arrest is made:

The Great Detective stood looking about him, quietly shaking his head. His eye rested a moment on the prostrate body of Sub-Inspector Bradshaw, then turned to scrutinize the neat hole drilled in the glass of the window.

“I see it all now,” he murmured. “I should have guessed it sooner. There is no doubt whose work this is.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Blue Edward,” he announced quietly.

“Blue Edward!” I exclaimed.

“Blue Edward,” he repeated.

“Blue Edward!” I reiterated, “but who then is Blue Edward?”

—

This, of course, is the very question that the reader is wanting to ask. Who on earth is Blue Edward? The question is answered at once by the Great Detective himself.

“The fact that you have never heard of Blue Edward merely shows the world that you have lived in. As a matter of fact, Blue Edward is the terror of four continents. We have traced him to Shanghai, only to find him in Madagascar. It was he who organized the terrible robbery at Irkutsk in which ten mujiks were blown up with a bottle of Epsom salts.

“It was Blue Edward who for years held the whole of Philadelphia in abject terror, and kept Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on the jump for even longer. At the head of a gang of criminals that ramifies all over the known globe, equipped with a scientific education that enables him to read and write and use a typewriter with the greatest ease, Blue Edward has practically held the police of the world at bay for years.

“I suspected his hand in this from the start. From the very outset, certain evidences pointed to the work of Blue Edward.”

After which all the police inspectors and spectators keep shaking their heads and murmuring, “Blue Edward, Blue Edward,” until the reader is sufficiently impressed.

IV

The writing of a detective story, without a doubt, gets harder and harder toward the end. It is not merely the difficulty of finding a suitable criminal; there is added the difficulty of knowing what to do with him. It is a tradition of three centuries of novel writing that a story ought to end happily. But in this case, how end up happily?

For example, here we have Blue Edward, caught at last, with handcuffs on his wrists – Blue Edward, the most dangerous criminal that ever interwove the underworld into a solid mesh; Blue Edward, who – well, in fact, the whole aim of the writer only a little while before was to show what a heller Blue Edward was. True, we never heard of him until near the end of the book, but when he did get in we were told that his Gang had ramified all the way from Sicily to Oklahoma. Now, what are we to do?

If it is not Blue Edward, then we’ve got to hang the Tramp – the poor tattered creature who fried potatoes by the hedge. But we are called upon to notice that now he has “a singularly vacant eye.” You can hardly hang a man with a vacant eye. It doesn’t do.

What if we send him to prison for life? But that’s pretty cold stuff, too – sitting looking at four stone walls with a vacant eye for forty years. In fact, the more we think of it, the less satisfied we are with hanging the Tramp. Personally I’d rather hang Meadows the Butler, as we first set out to do, or I’d hang the Nut or the Thoroughly Bad Woman, or any of them.

In the older fiction, they used to face this problem fairly and squarely. They hanged them – and apparently they liked it. But nowadays we can’t do it. We have lost the old-fashioned solid satisfaction in it, so we have to look round for another solution. Here is one, a very favourite one with our sensitive generation. If I had to give it a name, I would call it—

THE CRIMINAL WITH THE HACKING COUGH

The method of it is very simple. Blue Edward, or whoever is to be “it,” is duly caught. There’s no doubt of his guilt. But at the moment when the Great Detective and the Ignorant Police are examining him he develops a “hacking cough.” Indeed, as he starts to make his confession, he can hardly talk for hacks.

“Well,” says the criminal, looking round at the little group of police officers, “the game is up – hack! hack! – and I may as well make a clean breast of it – hack, hack, hack.”

Any trained reader when he hears these hacks knows exactly what they are to lead up to. The criminal, robust though he seemed only a chapter ago when he jumped through a three-story window after throttling Sub-Inspector Juggins half to death, is a dying man. He has got one of those terrible diseases known to fiction as a “mortal complaint.” It wouldn’t do to give it an exact name, or somebody might get busy and cure it. The symptoms are a hacking cough and a great mildness of manner, an absence of all profanity, and a tendency to call everybody “you gentlemen.” Those things spell finis.

In fact, all that is needed now is for the Great Detective himself to say, “Gentlemen” (they are all gentlemen at this stage of the story), “a higher conviction than any earthly law has, et cetera, et cetera.” With that, the curtain is dropped, and it is understood that the criminal made his exit the same night.

That’s better, decidedly better. And yet, lacking in cheerfulness, somehow.

—

It is just about as difficult to deal with the Thoroughly Bad Woman. The general procedure is to make her raise a terrible scene. When she is at last rounded up and caught, she doesn’t “go quietly” like the criminal with the hacking cough or the repentant tramp. Not at all. She raises — in fact, she is made to raise so much that the reader will be content to waive any prejudice about the disposition of criminals, to get her out of the story.

The woman’s face as Inspector Higginbottom snapped the handcuffs on her wrists was livid with fury.

“Gur-r-r-r-r-r” she hissed.

(This was her favourite exclamation and shows the high percentage of her foreign blood.)

“Gu-r-r-r-r! I hate you all. Do what you like with me. I would kill him again a thousand times, the old fool.”

She turned furiously towards my friend (the Great Detective).

“As for you,” she said, “I hate you. Gur-r-r! See, I spit at you. Gur-r-r-r!”

In that way, the Great Detective gets his, though, of course, his impassive face never showed a sign. Spitting on him doesn’t faze him. Then she turns on the Heroine and gives her what’s coming to her.

“And you! Gur-r-r! I despise you, with your baby face! Gur-r-r! And now you think you will marry him! I laugh at you! Ha! Ha! Hahula!”

And after that she turns on the Nut and gives him some, and then some for Inspector Higginbottom, and thus with three “Gur-r-r’s” for everybody and a “Ha! ha!” as a tiger, off she goes.

—

But, take it which way you will, the ending is never satisfactory. Not even the glad news that the Heroine sank into the Poor Nut’s arms, never to leave them again, can relieve the situation. Not even the knowledge that they erected a handsome memorial to Sir Charles, or that the Great Detective played the saxophone for a week can quite compensate us.

TOC     INDEX

Epilogue

The Epilogue
of this Book

If this book has in it any general theme, it is the contrast between yesterday and today, between today and tomorrow; the contrast between the life of the past and that of the future.

Nor is the contrast in the aspect of life alone. The circumstance and setting of even Death itself have altered. As witness, what here follows:

An Elegy Near a City Freight Yard

The descendants of the people who were chronicled by the poet Gray, in his immortal Elegy, more than a century and a half ago, came out, many of them, to America. They left the country for the city. They became a part of the vast unnumbered working population of the industrial centres of the American continent. They knew no longer the drooping elms and the yew tree’s shade where the turf heaved in many a moldering heap. And in their new environment the aspect and complexion even of Death for them was altered.

With it changed their Elegy and Epitaph: till now, with no thought of a parody, but only of adaptation, it may well run thus:

The factory whistles blow across the way,

Some cattle in a freight car still I see.

The employees have finished for the day,

And there is no one on the street but me.

Now they have lighted the electric light,

And all the people in the stores have gone,

Except the cop on duty for the night,

And round the corner p’rhaps a motor horn.

Save that from yonder little railway tower,

The Switchman now often is heard complain,

When some one in a motor at this hour

Compels him to lift up his gates again.

Here on the corner of this policeman’s beat,

A Funeral Parlour Open Day and Night,

Shows where the decent people of the street

Have one by one passed out of human sight.

No morning whistle blowing six o’clock,

No morning street car clattering down the track,

No morning milkman singing round the block,

Shall call them from their funeral parlour back.

For them no more the radiator coil

Shall warm the parlour for their coming home;

No busy wife put coffee on to boil,

Nor little folks turn on the gramophone.

Yet these were boys who once could hustle hard,

Full time and overtime for six days straight

They worked in factory or railroad yard,

Or poured their pig-iron into boiler plate.

Let not the people in the upper town,

The class of supercilious social pup,

The people on the boulevards look down

On what they did because they were hard up.

The social column, social graft and pull

And all the high-class beauty parlours do,

What does it come to when the time is full?

The crematorium awaits them too.

A bang-up funeral, a motor hearse,

A write-up in the papers, lots of space——

What good is that? These boys are none the worse

Because they only had this little place.

Some men more full of brains than you would think

Have passed perhaps this undertaker’s wicket,

Who might have been elected, but for drink,

To Congress on the Democratic ticket.

Here, say, was one who had the mental range,

But for the schooling he could not afford,

To make a fortune on the Stock Exchange,

As big a man perhaps as Henry Ford.

The trouble was they never went to school,

Or never got enough to make it tell,

Straight poverty just made each seem a fool,

And sort of paralyzed his brains as well.

Of course, you take it on the other hand,

The very ignorance that made them fail,

The very things they didn’t understand,

Combined, perhaps, to keep them out of jail.

—

I’d like to add my epitaph to theirs,

Just as Gray did with his to glory ’em,

And promise when I settle my affairs

To join them in their crematorium.

TOC     INDEX

The Iron Man
and the Tin Woman

With Other Such Futurities

(1929)

~

Pictures of the Bright Time to Come

The Iron Man and the Tin Woman
Further Progress in Specialization
When Social Regulation Is Complete
Isn’t It Just Wonderful?
The Last of the Rubber Necks
Athletics for 1950
The Criminal Face
Astronomical Alarms

Great Lives in Our Midst

Memoirs of an Iceman
The Memoirs of a Night Watchman
Confessions of a Super-Extra-Criminal
The Life of J. Correspondence Smith
Eddie the Bartender
Janus and the Janitor
The Intimate Disclosures of a Wronged Woman

Today and Tomorrow

Little Conversations of the Hour
Travel Is so Broadening
Tommy and Milly at the Farm
Life’s Little Inconsistencies
New Words – New Things
More Messages from Mars
Portents of the Future
Rural Urbanity

College Now and College Then

All Up!
Willie Nut Tries to Enter College
Graduation Day at the Barbers College
Correspondence Manual Number One

In the Golf Stream

The Golfomaniac
The Golfer’s Pocket Guide
The Golf Season in Retrospect

Futurity in Fiction

Long After Bedtime
The Newer Truthfulness
A Midsummer Detective Mystery
Little Lessons in Journalism
More Literary Scandals
Who Reads What
Overhauling the Encyclopedia
Jazzled Journalism
This Heart-to-Heart Stuff

Also:—

Forty Years of Billiards
The Hero of Home Week
Conversations I Can Do Without
Mr. Chairman, I Beg to Move—
Fifty Cents Worth

Pictures of the
Bright Time to Come

The Iron Man
and the Tin Woman

“Pardon me,” said the Iron Man to the Tin Woman, “I hope I don’t intrude.”

He spoke in the low deep tones of a phonograph. His well-oiled cylinders were working to perfection, and his voice was full and mellow. The revolutions of his epiglottis, running direct from its battery with a thermostatic control to register emotion, was steady and unchanged.

“Not at all,” said the Tin Woman, “pray come into the drawing-room.”

She was working at a higher revolution, but speaking evenly and clearly.

The Iron Man inclined himself fifteen degrees forward from his third section, recovered himself by his automatic internal plumb line, turned seventy-five degrees sideways and took four steps and a quarter, as dictated by his optometric control, to a chair where he turned one complete revolution and a quarter and sat down.

—

But, stop! It is necessary to interrupt the story a moment so as to explain to the reader what it is about.

Everybody has been struck by the invention of the Iron Man, the queer mechanical being recently fabricated in Germany and exhibited there and in the United States. He is called a Robot, but he might just as well be called a Macpherson.

The pictures of the Iron Man show him with a head like a stovepipe, and a body like a Quebec heater. He is cased in nickel, jointed in steel, and one kick from his pointed iron foot would scatter a whole football team.

In other words, he has us all beaten at the start.

The Iron Man talks with a phonograph drum, sees with high-power convex mirrors, and gets his energy from electricity stored inside of him at 2,000 volts.

The Iron Man, it seems, is able to walk. He can walk across the floor of a room, step up on a platform, bow and take his seat. In this one act he displaces all public chairmen, chancellors of universities, and heads of conferences.

He is able, if you put a speech into his stomach, to reel it off his chest without a single fault or error. In this he outclasses at once all public speakers, platform orators and after-dinner entertainers. He can not only make a speech, but while making it he can move up and down, saw his arms around in the air, and gyrate with his head. In other words, the Iron Man can act, and after this there is no more need for living actors to keep alive.

Consequently, the Iron Man will rapidly take over from us a large part of the activity of the world. Anybody of sufficient means will soon have an Iron Man made as a counterpart of himself. When he has anything to do peculiarly difficult or arduous or needing great nerve, he will let the Iron Man do it. For myself, I intend to have an Iron Man do all my golf for me, which will reopen at once the whole question of the local championship. That, however, is only a personal matter. The point is that each and all of us will very soon be making use of an Iron Man.

Equally is it evident that some one will now invent a Tin Woman. She will be made of softer metal outside, but just as hard inside, with eyes that revolve further sideways and a phonograph drum of double capacity to go two words to one from the Iron Man.

So these are the two beings that are going to replace us individually in the world, to do our work and leave us to play. The timid human race will shrink behind its metal substitute. And even such a thing as a proposal of marriage, arduous, nerve-racking, and disturbing – will be gladly handed over to the deputy.

With which, let us continue the story.

—

The Tin Woman moved sideways eighteen degrees as guided by the reflected rays from the Iron Man’s concave eye-pieces and adjusted herself at half a right angle, with her base on a sofa.

There was a pause. Both waited until the situation grew warm enough to raise their temperatures to the speaking point.

“I have come——” began the Iron Man in a low voice. Then there was a click in his throat and he paused. He was not yet warmed up.

The Tin Woman, under the impact of his phonograph, altered the angle of her neck.

“Yes——” she murmured. Her phonograph seemed to revolve, but almost without sound.

“I have come,” said the Iron Man again, this time in a firm strong voice, while the hum of his self-starter seemed to give him an air of confidence, “to ask you a question.”

The ophthalmic plates of the Tin Woman, delicate as gold leaf, had been so adjusted that the sound-unit of the word “question” would start something in her.

“It is so sudden——” she murmured.

The Iron Man made an upright move on his seat so that his body-cylinder was perpendicular to his disc.

“I want you to marry me,” he said. He had to say it. These were the last of the words that had been put into him. He had no more.

But it was enough.

The mistress of the Tin Woman, whom she here represented, had had her adjusted so that as soon as the word “marry” hit her, it would set her going.

“—Oh, John——” she gasped. She rose up on her spring legs and fell forward with her tin bodycase flat on the floor.

The Iron Man stooped his body to eighty-five degrees, picked her up with his magnetic clutch, and then placed his facial cylinder close against hers so that his magnetic lamps looked right into her.

He put one steel arm around her central feedpipe and for a moment put her under a pressure of two thousand volts.

But he spoke no word. He couldn’t. He had used up all his perforated strip of words.

He stood the Tin Woman up against the wall, revolved twice on his feet to get oriented, and then clumped off out of the house.

The proposal was over.

—

And a few minutes later the Man – the real man, if he can be called so – was telephoning to the Real Woman.

“Darling, I am so pleased. My Iron Man has just come home and as soon as I opened him I knew your answer——”

“I’m so happy, too,” she said, “I could hardly wait to unlock Lizzie. I nearly took a can-opener to her, and when I heard your voice, I nearly died with happiness.”

“And we won’t wait, will we?” continued the man. “Let’s have John and Lizzie go through the Church Service part of it right away——”

“Just as soon as I can get Lizzie a new tin skirt, from the hardware store,” said the woman.

—

And a week after, Iron John and Tin Lizzie were married by a Brass Clergyman and a Cast Iron Sexton, while a Metal Choir sang their cylinders loose with joy.

TOC     INDEX

Further Progress
in Specialization

In the old days, of say twenty years ago, when a man got sick he went to a doctor. The doctor looked at him, examined him, told him what was wrong with him, and gave him some medicine and told him to go to bed. The patient went to bed, took the medicine, and either got better or didn’t.

All of this was very primitive, and it is very gratifying to feel that we have got quite beyond it.

Now, of course, a consulting doctor first makes a diagnosis. The patient is then handed on to a “heart-man” for a heart test, and to a nerve man for a nerve test. Then if he has to be operated on, he is put to sleep by an anesthetist, and operated on by an operating surgeon, and waked up by a resurrectionist.

All that is excellent – couldn’t be better.

—

But just suppose that the other professions began to imitate it! And just suppose that the half professions that live in the reflection of the bigger ones start in on the same line!

We shall then witness little episodes in the routine of our lives such as that which follows:

“Mr. Follicle will see you now,” said the young lady attendant.

The patient entered the inner sanctum of Dr. Follicle, generally recognized as one of the greatest capillary experts in the profession. He carried after his name the degrees of Cap. D. from Harvard, Doc. Chev. from Paris, and was an Honorary Shampoo of half a dozen societies.

The expert ran his eye quickly over the face of the incoming patient. His trained gaze at once recognized a certain roughness in the skin, as if of a partial growth of hair just coming through the surface, which told the whole tale. He asked, however, a few questions as to personal history, parentage, profession, habits, whether sedentary or active, and so on, and then with a magnifying glass made a searching examination of the patient’s face.

He shook his head.

“I think,” he said, “there is no doubt about your trouble. You need a shave.”

The patient’s face fell a little at the abrupt, firm announcement. He knew well that it was the expert’s duty to state it to him flatly and fairly. He himself in his inner heart had known it before he had come in. But he had hoped against hope: perhaps he didn’t need it after all; perhaps he could wait; later on, perhaps, he would accept it. Thus he had argued to himself, refusing, as we all refuse, to face the cruel and inevitable fact.

“Could it be postponed for a day or so more?” he asked. “I have a good many things to do at the office.”

“My dear sir,” said the expert firmly, “I have told you emphatically that you need a shave. You may postpone it if you wish, but if you do I refuse to be responsible.”

The patient sighed.

“All right,” he said, “if I must, I must. After all, the sooner it’s done, the sooner it’s over. Go right ahead and shave me.”

The great expert smiled. “My dear sir,” he said, “I don’t shave you myself. I am only a consulting hairologist. I make my diagnosis, and I pass you on to expert hands.”

He pushed a bell.

“Miss Smith,” he said to the entering secretary, “please fill out a card for this gentleman for the Shaving Room. If Dr. Scrape is operating, get him to make the removal of the facial hair. Dr. Clicker will then run the clippers over his neck. Perhaps he had better go right to the Soaping Room from here; have him sent down fully soaped to Dr. Scrape.”

The young lady stepped close to the expert and said something in a lower tone, which the patient was not intended to hear.

“That’s unfortunate,” murmured the specialist. “It seems that we have no soapist available for at least an hour or so. Both our experts are busy – an emergency case that came in this morning, involving the complete removal of a full beard. Still, perhaps Dr. Scrape can arrange something for you. And now,” he continued, looking over some notes in front of him, “for the work around the ears, have you any preference for any one in particular? I mean any professional man of your own acquaintance whom you would like to call in?”

“Why, no,” said the patient, “can’t Dr. What’s-his-name do that, too?”

“He could,” said the consultant, “but only at a certain risk, which I hesitate to advise. Snipping the hair about and around the ears is recognized as a very delicate line of work, which is better confided to a specialist. In the old days in this line of work there were often some very distressing blunders and accidents due purely to lack of technique – severance of part of the ear, for example.”

“All right,” said the patient, “I’ll have a specialist.”

“Very good,” said the Hairologist, “now as to a shampoo – I think we had better wait till after the main work is over and then we will take special advice according to your condition. I am inclined to think that your constitution would stand an immediate shampoo. But I shouldn’t care to advise it without a heart test. Very often a premature shampoo in cold weather will set up a nasal trouble of a very distressing character. We had better wait and see how we come along.”

“All right,” said the patient.

“And now,” added the expert, more genially, “at the end of all of it, shall we say – a shine?”

“Oh, yes, certainly.”

“A shine, very good, and a brush-up? To include the hat? Yes, excellent. Miss Smith, will you conduct this gentleman to the Soaping Room?”

The patient hummed and hawed a little. “What about the fee?” he asked.

The consultant waved the question aside with dignity. “Pray do not trouble about that,” he said, “all that will be attended to in its place.”

—

And when the patient had passed through all the successive stages of the high-class expert work indicated, from the first soap to the last touch of powder, he came, at the end, with a sigh of relief, to the special shoe-shining seat and the familiar coloured boy on his knees waiting to begin. Here, at last, he thought, is something that hasn’t changed.

“Which foot?” asked the boy.

“How’s that?” asked the man. “Oh, it doesn’t matter – here, take the right.”

“You’ll have to go to the other chair,” said the boy, rising up from his knees. “I’m left-handed. I only do the left foot.”

TOC     INDEX

When Social Regulation
Is Complete

“My goodness!” said Edward to Angelina as they turned from the crowded street into the little shaded park. “That was a close shave!”

“What?” asked the girl. “I didn’t see.”

“Didn’t you? Why, it was the Inspector of Shoes. I was in such a tearing hurry this morning to get out and join you that I had no time to black my shoes properly. He passed us as close as that! Lucky shave, wasn’t it?”

“Hush,” whispered Angelina, “don’t speak just for a minute. I’m sure that man is watching us; don’t walk so close to me. I have an idea that he must be one of the new Preventive Officers against Premature Courtship.”

“Oh! That’s all right,” laughed Edward, “I have a license.”

“A license!” the girl exclaimed, putting her arm through his. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, to tell the truth,” explained Edward, “I only got it properly signed and visa’d yesterday. You see it had been reported that I went to your family’s house three evenings running and so I got a notice from the Visitors’ Department to ask whether I had a proper license. I had of course my general Suitable Acquaintance Tag, and I had paid my Callers’ Tax already, but it had been reported to the department that I’d been three evenings running to a house where there was an unmarried girl, and so of course they sent me a Summons.”

“Dear me!” sighed Angelina, “I suppose it’s wicked to say it, but sometimes it seems terrible to live in this age when everything is so regulated. Did you read that awfully clever novel that came out last week called ‘Wicked Days’ that told all about our great-grandfathers’ time when people used to just do almost as they liked?”

“No, the book was suppressed, you know, immediately. But I heard something of it.”

“It must have been awfully queer. Anybody could go round anywhere and visit any house they liked and actually, just think of it! – go and eat meals in other people’s houses and even in public restaurants without a Sanitary Inspector’s Certificate or anything!”

Edward shook his head. “Sounds a bit dangerous,” he said. “I’m not sure that I’d like it. Suppose, for instance, that somebody had a cold in the head, you might catch it. Or suppose you found yourself eating in a restaurant perhaps only six feet away from a person infected with an inferiority complex, it might get communicated to you.” He shivered.

“Let’s sit down,” said Angelina suddenly. “I want to go on talking, but I don’t feel like walking up and down all the time. Here’s a bench. I wonder if we are allowed to sit on it.”

“I’ve got a Sitting License for two in my pocket,” said Edward, “but I’m hanged if I know whether it’s been stamped.”

He took a little bit of government paper out of his pocket and they both scrutinized it.

“I’m afraid it’s not been stamped, dear,” said Angelina.

“Hush, hush,” said Edward apprehensively, “don’t say anything like that. Surely you know about the new Use-of-Endearing-Terms-in-Public-Places Act! For goodness’ sake, be careful!”

He shivered with renewed apprehension.

“Oh, hang it all, anyway,” said Angelina. “There’s a caretaker; ask him.”

“I can’t,” said Edward. “Don’t you see he’s got a Silence placard on him?”

“Then ask that policeman.”

“Ask the policeman! And get run into court for disturbing the police in the course of their duty! No, thank you!”

“Oh, Edward,” interrupted the girl, “of course we can sit down. Don’t you remember this is Wednesday morning and under the new decisions of the court people may sit in the parks at any time from 10 a.m. to 12 noon on Wednesdays.”

“Oh, come,” said Edward. “Hoorah! let’s sit down. Isn’t it fine to be free like this!”

They both sat on the bench under the trees. Angelina gave a sigh of relief.

“We were talking,” she said, “about how restricted everything is nowadays and I must say I don’t like it. I wonder how it all began.”

“I read a lot of the history of it,” said Edward, “when I was at college. This present Age of Restriction seems to have begun bit by bit; first one thing got regulated and then another. The more people got of it, the more they seemed to want.”

“How stupid!” said Angelina. She reached out and took his hand and then hurriedly dropped it. “Gracious!” she exclaimed, “I nearly forgot again.”

“It’s all right to take my hand. My new license covers it. Here, hold it if you like. You have to hold it palm up and only use one of yours and maintain a mean personal distance of three feet. But if you stick to that, it’s all right.”

Angelina took his hand again. “Go on with what you were saying,” she said, “about this Age of Restriction.”

“It began, I understand,” said the young man, “with the world war and after that it all came along with a rush. Everybody wanted Rules and Regulations for everybody else and everybody got what they wanted.”

“It’s all such a nuisance,” sighed Angelina. But – you were talking about your new license.”

“Yes. I got it made out and signed and counter-signed and visa’d, and it entitles me to the Privilege of Unlimited Courtship. It’s good till the 15th of next month.”

He spoke earnestly, turning towards her and moving to the very verge of the three-foot limit.

Angelina lowered her eyes.

“It entitles me among other things,” the young man went on ardently, “to propose marriage to you – provided, of course, that I comply with the Preliminary Regulations of Proposal of Marriage.”

The girl was still silent.

“I had first to notify the police that I meant to do it. That I have done. I have their consent.”

“I’m so glad,” murmured Angelina.

“Then I had to go before a Stipendiary Magistrate and make oath that I considered your mother fit to live with and that I would comply with the Family Sunday-Dinner Law. It all sounds complicated, but really, Angelina, it was quite simple. The Magistrate was awfully nice about it and passed me on to the Mental Board in less than half an hour. They decided I did not have Infantile Paralysis, like so many poor chaps whom you see being wheeled out in perambulators every day. Ever so many young men are like that now.”

“I wonder why!” said Angelina reflectively. “They never were in the old days.”

“No,” said Edward, “but they were worse. They were Disobedient Adults. But listen, Angelina, I have the full right to speak to you now and I want to ask you whether (provided your personal certificates are all in order) you will marry me——”

Angelina had raised her eyes and was about to speak when a policeman stepped up to where they sat.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, “I’ll have to ask you and the lady to step across to the police station.” He took out his watch as he spoke. “It is five minutes after twelve and you’ll have to answer to a charge of Unduly Restraining a Public Bench.”

Edward began to cry.

“Good Heavens!” Angelina exclaimed. “Do fetch a doctor. I’m afraid he’s got an attack of Infantile Paralysis. . . .”

“No, no,” sobbed Edward, “it’s not that. But it means that my proposal was made under illegal circumstances and it’s invalid and I’ll have to get a new license and try somebody else.”

“Fetch a perambulator,” said the girl. “He’s got it!”

TOC     INDEX

Isn’t It Just Wonderful?

Isn’t it just wonderful the way the invention of Radio has connected up the farthest parts of the earth? I was noticing the other day the reports in the newspapers of the messages sent back and forth between some celebrated explorer – I forget his name – who is flying around in African jungles, and the mayor of Chicago. I think it was Chicago; at any rate, it was the mayor of some great city. And the messages seemed to go back and forth as easily as if the two men had been side by side. I felt lost in wonder to think of the marvelousness and importance of it.

First of all, the explorer sent out by radio: “Greetings from Africa. I am flying over a field.”

And the mayor answered back: “Greetings from Africa received. Please accept greetings from all here. I am sitting in my office at my desk.”

Then back came the return message: “Accept cordial congratulations from Africa on sitting in your office. All here glad to know that all there are sitting there. Are flying low.”

And in return to that came the instantaneous reply: “Cordial congratulations on flying low. All here glad to know that you are there. Accept best wishes for being there. . . .”

Hardly had this information been conveyed across the atmospheric wilderness when the explorer, it seems, was able to get into contact with the mayor of San Francisco and radioed to him:

“Accept greetings from African regions to San Francisco. We are moving at about 75 miles an hour, warm sunshine.”

Back flashed the message: “Greetings received. Please accept greetings from San Francisco and congratulations on warm sunshine. We had a touch of rain last night.”

—

But it seems that these messages, important though they were, were only a few samples of the tremendously vital world information being carried back and forth by radio.

That very night, it appears, the President of Mexico “got” the city council of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and sent out the vital words:

“Greetings from Mexico City. I am sitting in my chair.”

And the answer came back by the very next ether wave:

“City Council Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, acknowledges greetings President Mexico. We are eating breakfast. Most of us are taking kippered herring.”

Prominent citizens of both places agreed that the interchange of these messages would do a tremendous lot in fomenting good relations between Saskatoon and Central America. As a matter of fact, the first message had hardly got through when the city clerk of Saskatoon received a radio call from the President of Honduras, which said:

“Please send us a message, too. We have a machine of our own, nearly all paid for. Honduras sends cordial congratulations to Saskatoon on being in Saskatchewan.”

The new international courtesy that governs these things prompted an immediate reply:

“City of Saskatoon and Province of Saskatchewan acknowledge cordial congratulations Republic of Honduras. We are having a hard winter.”

The answer, “Congratulations on hard winter,” got through within the same day.

—

I am told that there is no doubt that the interchange of this last set of messages will do a tremendous lot for trade between Saskatchewan and Honduras. The president has already got through a message, “If you want any logwood, teak, or first-class cordwood, let us have your order.”

As a matter of fact, these messages of greeting that are reported every day or so prove on inquiry to be only a very small part of the messages of the kind that are sent back and forth from one great world-center to the other, conveying thoughts of absolutely vital importance for the welfare of the world.

Through the kindness of one of the operating companies, I am able to reproduce brief abstracts of one or two of these, thus:

“From Habibullah Khan, Acting Khan of the Khannery of Kabul, Afghanistan, to Secretary of Junior League Convention of North America, Toronto, Canada. Ameer Afghanistan and entire army congratulate Junior League on election of Miss Posie Rosebud as associate vice-president. All here join in cordial greeting to all girls in your league and any other. In placing orders for muslin or native bead work, don’t forget our salesmen. We have had a warm winter.”

To this message the League was able to send back a direct, unrelayed radiogram straight to the city of Kabul – City Hall office, top floor, Ameer’s private room, where it was decoded and disintegrated into Afghani in four minutes, twenty-two seconds.

“Junior League President, officials and members send greetings Habibullah Khan, or any Acting Khan, or Half Khan. Congratulations Afghanistan on Khan and Khan on Afghanistan. Convey congratulations army. Don’t forget Toronto for winter sports.”

—

I am not just sure whether the next message is a genuine one. It was tucked away among a heap of them, and in appearance it looked like the others. Whether it is genuine or not, at any rate it represents the wide desire of congratulating everybody on everything that is making the fortune of the radio apparatus.

“Sultan of Borneo congratulates William Jones of Allegheny County, Ohio, on reported prize at County Fair for cabbage two feet in diameter. All here send greetings entire population Ohio.”

—

Sometimes – so the operators inform me – rather pathetic cases are found of people who would wish to get into radio touch but have no correspondent. The operators receive messages such as: “Arab Sheik, Southern Sahara, with second-hand radio set formerly belonging to Pilgrim, would like get into touch small American Republic or Large American Corporation owning radio machine view to interchange congratulations. Large business territory; good opportunity ivory or gin.”

Or this message, which lay near the other in the basket:

“Sultan of Somaliland; plain congratulation in any European language; no extra charge for atmospheric reports.”

—

Looking over messages of this sort the other day, I couldn’t help reflecting on what a pity it is that the world didn’t have the radio messages in the days of the great explorations and discoveries. How much more vivid the pages of our history would have been! I suppose most readers are aware that there is a scientific legend to the effect that radio was invented and actually used centuries ago by the great Italian scientist and painter, Leonardo da Vinci. Later on, so it was claimed, he deliberately broke the machine and the secret of the process was lost and not again discovered till the present day.

If this story is so, it lends an air of truth and genuineness to a message that I found inscribed, along with its appropriate answer, on an ancient parchment. The documents, which were dated “October, 1492,” had at least all the appearance of age. The message read:

“Cordial greetings from Christopher Columbus to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Have just discovered Japan.”

And the answer:

“King and Queen both here at breakfast in Escurial Palace, second piece of toast. Cordial greetings to everybody you discover. Your achievement greatest impetus onion trade.”

And yet, after all, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci knew what he was doing when he broke the machine.

TOC     INDEX

The Last
of the Rubber Necks

Around the World
in a Sight-Seeing Air Bus
in 1950

The Man at the Gangway. . . . All aboard, please, all aboard! Five Dollars for the Entire Trip! All aboard! Vacant seats still in the forward saloon, sir, yes, sir. Yes, ma’am, lunch is served on board. All in! All aboard! (Clang! Clang! The gates shut, the doors slide, the bell rings, the whistle blows. Whiz!! The air bus is off. . . .)

Voice of the Rubber Neck Announcer. . . . Now, then, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to cross the Atlantic Ocean. During the next half hour you will enjoy the unique sensation of being entirely out of sight of land. Looking now from either the side or rear windows of this saloon, and directing your gaze downwards, you will perceive the actual waters of the Atlantic, 3,000 feet below us. Looking closely, you will observe a ruffled or mottled appearance of the water. This is the waves. At the present time what used to be called a storm or gale is moving over the Atlantic. In the romantic days of our grandfathers the passage of the Atlantic demanded an entire week. . . .

Voice of the Attendant (interrupting as he passes through the car). . . . First Call for Lunch! Lunch served while passing over Europe. First Call for Lunch!

Announcer (continuing). . . . The celebrated Christopher Columbus, who was the first Italian to cross the Atlantic, is said to have taken more than a fortnight to make the transit. Looking below now, we can just catch a distant glimpse of the Azores Islands, lying like gems of gold in a sapphire sea.

Vociferous Boy (passing through the alley way of the air saloon). . . . Cigars! Cigarettes, candies, chewing gum!

Announcer. . . . We are now circling across the famous Bay of Biscay and rapidly approaching the coast of Cornwall, the Land’s End of England.

Saloon Waiter in White. . . . Second call for lunch! Lunch ready in the dining saloon! Second call for lunch.

The Announcer. . . . If you look now from the left windows of the saloon you will see the coast of Cornwall. We are now passing over the South of England; the seaport just left behind is Plymouth; two minutes away is Portsmouth. – London? No, lady, not for three minutes yet.

Vociferous Boy. . . . Cigars, cigarettes, candies, chewing gum!

Announcer. . . . Look below you, ladies and gentlemen, and you will now see the city of London. Our speed is now slackened down to five miles a minute and we descend to an elevation of one thousand feet, so as to afford all passengers a full view of Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the other sights of London. . . . There you see St. Paul’s! Notice the roaring sound we make in going past it. That other noise on the right side is Westminster Abbey. That whizzing sound below us is the Bank of England——

Lady Passenger (to her Husband). . . . Well, I’m certainly glad to have seen Westminster Abbey. I don’t think anybody’s education is complete without seeing it. Didn’t you feel a kind of thrill when you heard it go by?

Polite Passenger Across the Aisle. . . . Is this your first trip around the world, ma’am?

The Lady. . . . Yes, it’s our first. I’ve just been dying to go for a long time, but of course my husband is always so busy that it’s hard for him to get the time. You see it takes a whole day.

Polite Passenger. . . . They say the new line of air boats are to do it in half a day. That will make a big difference. And yet I think I like this slower line better. After all, there’s nothing like taking things easy.

Announcer. . . . Coast of Germany! . . . Berlin! . . . Poland! Warsaw!

Vociferous Boy. . . . Cigars, cigarettes, candies, chewing gum!

Husband. . . . So that was Germany, eh? Much flatter than I thought. And Poland looks a good deal yellower than I had supposed. Nothing like foreign travel for clearing up your ideas. I don’t think you can understand foreign nations in any real sense without actually seeing them.

Saloon Attendant. . . . Last call for Lunch!

Announcer. . . . Here you see the wide plains of Russia, a vast expanse that it takes us twenty minutes to cross. The city that went past four seconds ago is Jefferson City, formerly called Leningrad and before that Petrograd and in early history, St. Petersburg.

Restless Child Among the Passengers. Mother, may I run up and down the aisle?

No, dear.

May I go and climb up the ladder to the top deck?

No, dear, you might fall off.

May I go and see where they cook?

No, dear.

Well, mother, what can I do?

The Courteous Traveler. . . . It gets a little monotonous for the children, doesn’t it, this part of the voyage?

The Lady. . . . Yes, indeed. Where are we?

The Courteous Gentleman. . . . Over Central Asia and of course just here there’s nothing to see – just the Ural Mountains, and Turkestan, and Samarkand, and the Desert of Gobi.

The Announcer. . . . In passing over the Desert of Gobi, to mitigate the tedium of the trip, we now turn on the radio and allow the passengers to listen to the latest world news coming over the waves.

The Radio (in its Deep Guttural Tones, Without Hurry). . . . New York, ten-thirty a.m. International Oil, 40; International Air, 62; International Fire, 81——

The Husband of the Lady. . . . Gee! International Fire up to 81!

The Radio (continuing). . . . St. Louis nothing, New York nothing: Boston one, Chicago nothing . . .

The Courteous Gentleman. . . . It’s pleasant, isn’t it, to keep in touch like this with the news of the world? It prevents the trip getting monotonous.

The Radio. . . . Bandits rob Chicago bank. . . . Bandits kidnap teller in Denver. . . . Bandits explode bomb in Detroit. . . . Bandits steal babies from Maternity Hospital . . . Bandits . . .

The Gentleman. . . . Yes, it’s nice to feel that the comfortable old world is still close all around us.

Announcer. . . . China! . . . Looking below you can see, if you look quickly, a Chinese rebellion. . . . The army of General Ping Pong will be seen in four seconds on the right. . . . The army of General Ham is attacking it. . . . By the courtesy of the company, our ship will drop bombs at the expense of the company on either General Ping or General Ham . . .

The Restless Child. . . . Oh, ma! Can I see the bombs dropped?

Yes, darling, look close and you’ll see.

The Gentleman with the Lady. How do they arrange about the bombing?

The Courteous Traveler. Oh, it’s done by the International Friendship Committee, but, of course, the company has to bear the expense. . . . Ah! I think that one hit General Ping Pong’s munitions dump!

Vociferous Boy. . . . Cigars! Cigarettes, candies, chewing gum!

Announcer. China. . . . City of Pekin. . . . The Yellow Sea. . . . Japan. . . . Tokio. . . .

The Radio. . . . Philadelphia nothing, Cleveland nothing!

The Saloon Attendant. . . . Tea served in the forward compartment – afternoon tea.

Announcer. . . . The Pacific Ocean! . . . Kamskatska! . . . The Aleutian Isles. . . . Alaska. . . . You are now again in sight of the United States!

All the Passengers. Hooray! Hooray!

The Gentleman with the Lady. . . . Feels good, don’t it, to get back again in sight of the old flag!

The Announcer. . . . The Rocky Mountains. . . . British Columbia. . . . Western Canada.

All the British Passengers. . . . Hooray! Hooray!

Vociferous Boy. . . . Cigars, cigarettes!

Radio. . . . Boston nothing.

Attendant. . . . Last Call!

Radio. . . . Oil eighty. . . . St. Louis nothing. . . . Bandits . . . murder.

Announcer. . . . Reëntering the United States. . . . All hand bags ready, please. . . . Kindly get ready for customs officers, immigration officers, prohibition officers, revenue officers. All persons who haven’t paid income tax will be thrown out. . . . Persons not on the quota kindly jump off into the air. Gangway, please. All out!

All the Passengers (in a babel of talk. . . .) Well, good-by! Good-by! It’s been a great trip. . . . It certainly has. . . . And remember, if ever you come to Cincinnati. . . . I certainly will, and if you ever come to Toronto. . . . Well, good-by! Good-by!

TOC     INDEX

Athletics for 1950

Everybody has noticed the great change that has come over athletics within the last generation. To be in athletics, it is no longer necessary to play the game. You merely look at it. For the matter of that, you don’t really need to be there: you can hear athletics over the radio. In fact, nowadays, or at any rate tomorrow, you can see it all, with the television teleptoscope. Or, if you like, you can wait and see the whole contest in the high-class movies for sixty cents; or you can wait till next year and see it in the low-class movies for a nickel.

An athlete in the days of John L. Sullivan meant a powerful-looking brute of a man with a chest like a drum and muscles all over him. An athlete now means a pigeon-chested moron with radio plugs in his ears.

In old-fashioned football, thirty people used to play in the game and about thirty-three looked on. Nowadays, two elevens play the game and thirty thousand watch it. Even twenty-two is far too big a percentage of players. They block the vision of the athletes. Hockey is better. There half a dozen play on each side and thirty thousand look on. Prize fighting is a higher form still. Two play and two hundred thousand “athletes” participate.

And there’s more than that. Athletic teams don’t need to be connected with the places they come from – women seem to invade all sports equally – mechanical devices replace human skill——

Or stop! There is no need for me to write it all out in that way. That’s as prosy as a college essay.

Let me present the subject in the form of a few selections to show what will be the nature and fashion of the Athletic Page of any popular newspaper about a generation hence.

HARVARD-OXFORD CONFLICT

(Extract from the Sporting Press of 1950)

Definite arrangements have just been concluded for the Harvard-Oxford football game of this autumn. The contest is now scheduled to take place in the oasis of Swot in south centre of the desert of Sahara. The clarity of the desert sunlight, it is expected, will immensely favour the dissemination of the game by the Television-Teleptoscope, while the clear, still air will enable every faintest sound of the great battle to be carried all over the globe.

Front seats for the game in London, New York, Paris, Monte Carlo, Palm Beach, and other great athletic centres are already selling at prices ranging from ten to a hundred dollars.

Meantime the actual scene of the game itself will not be without a certain interest. It is calculated that the players, spare men, umpires, radio broadcasters, and television experts will probably number over a hundred people, a record attendance at any actual ground. No less than five airplanes will be needed to carry the players and the apparatus.

The athletic line-up is not yet complete, but it is officially announced that the centre forward for Harvard will be, as last year, Youssouf-Ben-Ali of Ethiopia, with Yin Foo of Foochow and Billy Gillespie of Toronto on the wings. For Oxford the brilliant young Scottish captain from Dundee, Einstein Gorfinkel, will have as his front line stalwart Rum Rum Gee of Allahabad, Hassan Bay of Mecca, and Al Plunket of Orillia, Ontario.

A special feature of interest this year is found in the fact that one of the Harvard players was actually in attendance two years ago at Harvard University where he was janitor of a dormitory. At the same time two of the Oxford team, the brothers Hefty, are bona fide Oxford men, having been butchers in the town for many years past.

The sharp rise in the shares of the Sahara Syndicate consequent upon the definite announcement of this the greatest feature of manly sport, has led to a revival of the rumour that a German syndicate is making an offer for Oxford and Harvard.

DERBY DAY IN 1950

An Exciting Finish

(Special Correspondence from Epsom Downs)

The advantage enjoyed by the present clock-work Derby over the now almost forgotten horse-race, in which living horses were used, was never better illustrated than in the exciting finish of the contest today.

Our older readers will perhaps recall the Derby as it was a generation ago and the way in which the introduction of machinery has gradually improved it up to its present standard. It appears that the first step was taken in introducing the Pari-Mutuel machine, which mechanically made betting odds.

The introduction of the stuffed bookmaker with clock work under his red waistcoat marked a further advance. The invention of the mechanical judge with high-power, 100 lens eyes, similar to those of the fly, and a running spool of registering tape in place of a brain brought for the first time a decision of absolute certainty.

The clock-work horse, operating on a moving platform geared at 200 miles an hour, enabled the whole race to be focussed into a small space, without straggling it out over miles of open country, as in our grandfathers’ time. The jockey, still remembered in old prints as a monkey-like figure in a little half jacket, naturally gave place to a power-house operator working with radio.

The cardboard stadium was filled (for photographic purposes) with some 10,000 (mechanical) spectators and gave an admirable setting to the event, recalling the days when thousands of people literally attended the Derby in person.

The great interest of this race lay in its exciting finish. When the photographic plates of the races were developed, it was found that Clicko, the English horse, had beaten the front leg of the American machine by the one hundredth part of a second. The announcement of this over the radio created an intense silence. Seismographic records show that ten million people held their breath at once. When they let it go it started a tidal wave that was felt as far as Japan.

PASSING OF A GREAT ATHLETE

We chronicle with regret the death of Mr. Eddie Feinfinkel, the famous Scottish hammer-thrower. Mr. Feinfinkel died at his residence last evening after an illness – a general debility – extending over about forty years. It is said that he had put more money into hammer-throwing than any man of his generation.

In the earlier part of his career the late Mr. Feinfinkel obtained a world-wide celebrity as a toreador by organizing the Pan-American Bull-Raising Corporation of Montana. It was his intensive work at his desk in raising bulls that first undermined the great sportsman’s health.

Mr. Feinfinkel afterwards threw himself with enthusiasm into aerial work as a director of the Pan-American Transit Company, in which capacity he sent no less than one hundred experts across the Atlantic, with a loss of less than ten.

It was while recuperating in Scotland that the great athlo-magnate first conceived the idea of hammer-throwing, and engaged a corps d’élite of sixty Scotch gillies to throw hammers for him. Mr. Feinfinkel, whose interest and energy were tireless, often kept up the hammer-throwing for eight or nine hours at a stretch.

The loss of Mr. Feinfinkel will be greatly felt also in mechanical crap-shooting, automatic dice-throwing, and in all forms of nickel-in-the-slot athletics, of which the late magnate was a generous supporter. His funeral (mechanical) will be broadcast next Friday.

WORLD’S BASEBALL SERIES

The world’s baseball series was held last night at the office of the Anglo-American-Pan-Geographic-Tele-Radio Company, New York. It has not yet been decided which club will be declared the winner, as the money is not all in yet.

ITEMS OF CURRENT SPORT

Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. – Advices from London bring the news that Oxford stands as the first favourite for the approaching annual boat race, the betting being at three to one. The Oxford women, it appears, are heavier than the Cambridge crew, some of whom are scarcely more than girls. Great interest, however, is still shown along the towing path, a number of the university professors turning out each day as spectators, wearing for the most part the new French chemisettes with ruffled insertions, so popular this season.

Among others, our correspondent noted Professor Smith, the biologist, in a dainty Cambridge blue creation under a picture hat, and the Vice Chancellor in a pretty frock of carnation, shot, or half shot, with something deeper underneath. The professor’s skirts are reported as slightly longer than last week.

REVIVAL OF WALKING

The efforts of Old Time Sports Society are apparently being crowned with success, at least in one direction. Walking as a form of athletic sport is becoming extremely popular. Joseph Longfoot, the great East Anglian amateur, established the endurance record yesterday in a contest in which he walked four and a half miles without stopping. He was brought back in his helicopter not much the worse for his titanic effort.

Advertisement.
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lorgnettes, field glasses, cushions, hot-water bottles, flasks, drinking cups, cigar cases, vanity boxes, men’s powder puffs.
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TOC     INDEX

The Criminal Face

Lately there has been much concern with what is called “The Criminal Face.” It appears that there is a certain type and shape of head and features that always goes with the commission of crime. If you have it, there is no escape. You might as well go right away and ask to board in the penitentiary.

Experts can explain to you this criminal face, feature by feature and line by line. But the real trouble with the expert is that he always knows beforehand that the face he is analyzing is that of a man who has committed a crime. That colours his conclusions. What if we were to put before him, as a criminal, the face of a philanthropist? What then?

Thus we take the picture of a certain face and we know that it is in reality the face of a kindly old professor. Indeed, we have recently, let us say, seen it described on the occasion of a presentation of his portrait to the city in the following terms:

PORTRAIT OF A SAGE

“The face of this distinguished scholar is known and loved by thousands who have listened to his inspired and inspiring words. It is a broad face, a kindly face, the face of a man with a wide heart, whose broad lineaments seem to indicate a corresponding breadth of sympathy. But there is a firmness, too, in the wide mouth, and character in the large but firmly chiseled nostril. The brow slopes nobly from the projecting frontal bones, the head is wide, of a width that tells of the capacious brain within. The ear is large, noble, and mobile, and the scant and snow-white hair remains as the mark of honour of a life spent in the service of mankind.”

—

But put the same portrait before the graphofacial expert, or facial graphologist, and tell him that it is a picture of a criminal recently sent to jail for life plus ten years, and ask him where he can see the tendency to crime, and this is the analysis you will receive of the countenance of the venerable scholar:

DANGEROUS CRIMINAL

“The photograph is that of a male about sixty years of age, with marked criminal tendencies. Note the flat face, indicating complete absence of thinking power. There is something almost simian or ape-like in the width of the mouth, while the low, sloped forehead is but little higher in development than that of the most degraded savages. Such brain as this man could have would be sunk so low towards his neck as to be of little use to him. The premature loss of practically the entire capillary growth of the scalp, with the utter loss of pigment in the remaining part, indicates a life evil and irregular to the last degree.”

—

Or suppose, in the same way, that a facial graphologist looked at a picture of a great war hero, he would say:

“What a stern, soldierly face, the face of a man accustomed to command, keen, penetrating, and able at the same time to be ruthless, but always to be just.”

But show him the same picture and tell him that it was taken from the criminal records of the New York police, and he may say:

“We see here the true type of the hardened criminal – the small brain, the wide-set eye, and the dull look that indicates moral irresponsibility, etc., etc.”

But the trouble is that the world is coming to attach more and more importance, too much importance, to experts. When the facial graphologist gets a little further, we shall find our courts of law following in his wake. The face itself will become a crime and our police court morning records will contain little items after this fashion:

MENACE TO SOCIETY

“Albert Jones, who later on gave in his name as coming from Chicago, undertook to take his face downtown yesterday afternoon with the apparent intention of parading it on Main Street. Police Constable Simmons noticed Jones’s face moving through the air and at once arrested him.

“On being taken to headquarters and submitted to expert examination, it was found that his face was criminal in a high degree. The stunted lobes of his ears, for which he received six months in jail, are only one among varied evidences of guilt. He was given from twelve to fifteen months for various parts of his brain that were absent.

“The lack of eyelashes drew a caustic condemnation from the court, which warned Jones that a face like his is more than society is prepared to tolerate.”

—

Or things may go even a little further than this, and we may find the “facial criminal” filling a still larger field, thus:

CRIMINAL OUTBREAK

“Telegraphic advices inform us that the city of Minneapolis and the surrounding suburbs are in the throes of a crime wave of unprecedented magnitude. The situation was precipitated by the arrival of a large excursion party of holiday visitors from the Doukhobor Settlement in Manitoba. It was noticed as soon as their faces emerged from the excursion train that they represented a mass of criminal possibility of dangerous volume. It was computed that not one in ten had had a hair cut once in ten months.

“The brachiocephalic index of nearly every one of them was of a kind to alarm the police force, while the facial angle of those who had the hardihood to show it justified immediate arrest. The entire excursion party were put on summary trial under the new Criminal Faces Statute and were ordered deported into Canada.

“Immediate difficulty arose, however, when the Canadian official refused all permit for reëntry into the Dominion, on the ground that men with faces like theirs are debarred from entry into a British country. The Canadian claim is that the men’s faces were all right when they left Manitoba, but took on their present criminal character when they got out at Minneapolis. For the time being, the entire party will be placed in a detention home.”

—

Ah, yes, and that last word “home” suggests to me another development that is bound to come when the criminality of the face is fully recognized. People will see that the proper thing to do for the criminal face is not to punish it, but to try to reform it. The idea will be replaced by the idea of redemption. A criminal face will be put into a home, where it will be surrounded with kindly and pleasant influences, where it may hear over the radio moral talks and sermons such as will cause the lobes of its ears to lengthen and will gradually lift up the lid of its brain to a normal height.

The situation will be marked by the appearance of such items as the following:

SUCCESSFUL REDEMPTION

“John Henry Thomas, aged 70, was released today from the Central Criminal Face Reformatory, having been placed on parole by the authorities. The old man had spent the greater part of his life in the Reformatory, having been arrested at the age of twenty on a variety of charges, involving not only the lobes of his ears and the cubic capacity of his cerebellum, but the structure of his spinal ridge itself. His tendency towards homicide was too marked to permit him to remain at large.

“The old gentleman, in stepping out again into the sunlight after his long incarceration, expressed his appreciation of all that had been done for him. Not only had the lobes of his ears gradually assumed a harmless and even benevolent shape, but his cerebellum, formerly too small, was now larger than he could use and practically empty. All tendency to crime was declared vanished. The old gentleman did, indeed, in leaving, attempt to bite the warden’s ear, but this was not attributed to any remaining criminal tendency. It was rather thought to be an evidence of a new playfulness engendered by his long opportunity for improvement.

“It is understood that Thomas intends to devote the remainder of his days to work as a facial graphologist.”

—

In other words, my dear readers, my advice is – never mind your face. What if you do look like a criminal of the most dangerous type? You may not be really fitted for it at all.

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Astronomical Alarms

The Rapid Approach
of Our Final End

Professor Smithson of the Smithsonian Institution in a statement handed out to the press has declared that it is now only too evident that the rotation of the globe is distinctly slowing up.

This terrible news was almost immediately corroborated over the cable by the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich and by the Director of the Cavendish Physical Laboratory at Cambridge. Further confirmation followed from the Lick Observatory, from the Cape of Good Hope, and from the Chinese Watch Tower at Peking. It appeared that even the Bolshevik observer at Nijni-Novgorod, although only paid by the piece, had noticed the same thing.

Personally, I shall not easily forget the sudden sense of alarm with which the news filled me. Without being a scientist, I know, as does everybody else, that the globe turns on its axis once in every twenty-four hours. I have even gone so far occasionally as to speak of this as the diurnal motion of the earth. Without this diurnal motion there would be no alternation of day and night. If the world stops turning, then, at any given place, it will be either daytime all the time or always night. Either ourselves or the Hindoos will have to stay in the dark. Personally, I would rather wish it on the Hindoos if it has to be. There are more of them for company.

—

But this, of course, is not the whole extent of the disaster calmly threatened by the astronomers. If the earth stops turning, there will be no seasons, no tides, no winds, no weather. The pulse of life itself will slacken and stop. The human race – including me as well as the Hindoos – will be overwhelmed in extinction.

Like many other people, when I read that news at breakfast time, I wondered if it was worth while to start off to my day’s work. Why not sit quietly at home, and brace one’s feet against the study table and wait for the shock? If the world had to stop, it would surely be unwise to work all morning and find that the stoppage came in the noon hour.

It was only after reflection that I decided to read the news dispatches a little more carefully so as to get an idea of how long it would be before the end came. The general phrases used – a “distinct slackening,” a “definite loss of momentum,” etc., etc. – sounded pretty ominous. There was no doubt that the astronomers were all agreed about the main fact of the case, namely, that “within a measurable time” the globe will cease to turn. But the next question was to see how long they gave us to exist.

I found on closer examination that the rate of slackening is estimated by comparing the successive sidereal days as measured by a parallax. This is a scheme of which I never should have thought myself, but which looks good. The results obtained from it show that the earth’s motion is slackening by the millionth part of a second every day.

When I read that I felt cheered up. After all, there was quite a little time yet. If it takes us a million days to lose a second, that makes – let me see – a loss of one second in about 3,000 years. I guess we can stand that. After all, what’s a second! It seems that old Tut-ankh-Amen and his court went spinning round a millionth part of a second quicker than I do. All right. Let them buzz! I can jog along after them.

And at that rate the final end of the globe, when the Hindoos freeze in the dark and I frizzle in the sun, is still quite a long way off. If it takes 3,000 years to lose one second of our 24-hour spin, it will take 180,000 years to lose a minute of it, and 10,800,000 years to lose an hour of it, and we won’t lose it all till twenty-four times as long as that; in other words, the end will be due in Anno Domini 259,201,929.

Come, let us cheer up and face our fate like men. We have a quarter of a billion years in which to get all set for what is coming.

And even at that, I notice in looking over the figures above that I have made a slight mistake: what they said was not the millionth part of a second, but the billionth. That lengthens out our time here quite considerably.

—

Indeed, on the whole, I am inclined to agree with the reassuring statement that one of the astronomers appended to his report, that there was no immediate occasion for alarm. No, I think not.

Scarcely had I recovered from the alarm suggested by the reports of the world coming to a stop, when I noticed a new astronomical alarm sent out from Greenwich and reluctantly corroborated by Washington.

It seems that the continents are sliding apart and that we are drifting out into the ocean. England appears to be drifting westward towards the magnetic pole, and the upper part of the American Continent is moving nearer to Asia.

The consequences of this are certainly alarming at first sight. If Great Britain disappears – Ireland first – into the northern ice, and San Francisco lands up against Yokohama like a chip floating in a horse-trough, where are we? Of what use all our years of effort?

But here the reassurance again follows, partial though it is and somewhat short of what one would wish. The rate of motion is calculated to be such that we are six inches further away across the Atlantic than we were a hundred years ago. Ship ahoy! We can still call to them. Anybody who cares to divide six thousand miles by six inches can tell to a nicety just when the Asiatics will come scrambling over the bulwarks.

—

In short, I should like to be allowed to pass a word of advice to the astronomers and geologists. Don’t announce these things ahead in this alarming way. Wait till they happen and then feature them up large when they’re worth while.

I understand that there are lots of other geological and astronomical disasters coming. It seems that the coast line of both New England and England itself is falling into the sea. A whole barrow load of dirt that was left near Shoreham by William the Conqueror has fallen in. Old Winchelsea and St. Michaels have rolled under the water. Passamaquoddy Bay is engulfing New Brunswick. Never mind. Let us eat, drink, and be merry. We don’t need to board on Passamaquoddy Bay.

The sun, it seems, is burning out. A few more billion years and its last flicker will fade. Many of the stars are dead already and others dying. The moon is gone – a waste of dead rocks in a glare of reflected light. Even empty space is shrinking and puckering into curves like a withering orange.

Courage! Forget it! Let us go right on like a band of brothers while it lasts.

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Great Lives in Our Midst

Memoirs of an Iceman

Another Splendid Volume Added to the Growing List of Memoirs

Note: The reading public of today adores memoirs. The publishers report that volumes of memoirs still continue to be among the best sellers. Readers apparently will take an intense interest in anything, provided it is put before them as something that somebody remembers. I understand that among the forthcoming volumes are to be “The Memoirs of a Boy Scout,” “Memoirs of a Girl Guide,” “Memoirs of a Bootlegger,” and many other fascinating volumes.

In anticipation of these, I venture to present here in brief outline some very striking selections from a work that will probably break all records as soon as published in full, “The Memoirs of an Iceman.”

My people came from Iceland. At least I have always heard my father say that his grandfather York Larfitorf had come from Iceland. His great uncle was one of the Henry Fjords of Norway. I understand that my grandfather settled first in Labrador, but, finding it too warm there, he moved to New England and thence to New York.

My father, however, was by nature a cold man and seldom spoke of his past.

—

My earliest recollections as a child go back to the Spanish-American War, which I suppose few people now alive can recall. It was fought between the United States and Spain. My father, who had a keen grasp of international politics though only a workingman, told us that he thought that the United States would win. I can distinctly recall the outbreak of the war and how my father came home after his work and laid his ice on the table and said there was going to be a war. My mother took the ice and put it away for breakfast, but said nothing.

—

My memory, which is still excellent, although I am nearly thirty-five, brings back to me distinctly the New York of those early days. My readers will realize that it was before the days of the motor cars, and that before the days of the motor cars there were no motors.

I distinctly recall that when I got my first regular job in an ice-house I had to walk from Brooklyn to Yonkers every day to my work. But we thought nothing of it in those days.

Life was very much simpler and quieter in those days, as there were only four million people in New York then, while such places as Jersey City and Newark were mere suburbs with less than half a million people in them. The highest buildings in the little metropolis of those days were only thirty stories high, though we already called them “skyscrapers.”

Looking back now on this, I am compelled to smile at it, which I suppose few people could do. I remember how, when the first thirty-story building was built, my father – who though a workingman was a man of great natural shrewdness – said he’d hate to fall off the top of it.

Work began with me early in life and has been more or less continuous, which is a matter I do not regret, as I consider that it is largely owing to an active life of work that at thirty-five I still have all or nearly all my faculties and my mind is at least as bright as it ever was.

My father’s influence secured me a position shoveling sawdust in an ice house, where my own industry gradually raised me to the top. As it is possible that some of my readers do not understand the technique of an ice-house, I may explain that our work in shoveling sawdust was of a highly specialized character demanding not only bodily strength, but skill, courage, and morality.

In the winter when the ice was put in, it was our duty to shovel the sawdust on top of each layer of ice, so that for every layer of ice there was above it a layer of sawdust.

Perhaps I can make my meaning clearer if I explain that the ice and the sawdust were laid in alternate layers; a good way to understand what I mean is to grasp the idea that the ice was covered with the sawdust and that the sawdust was over the ice. I am afraid that I cannot state it more simply than that, and the reader must either get it or miss it.

—

This was our work in the winter. In summer our task was reversed so that we shoveled the sawdust off and shoveled the ice out again, which lent a very pleasing variety to our work and prevented it from being monotonous. We thus rose and fell each winter and summer.

—

I recall very clearly the memory of some of my friends and fellow workers, such as John Smith, William Jones, Jim Thompson, and Joe Miller. I mention their names here not because the reader would know them, but because they are just as good as any other names and they help to fill up the memoirs.

—

I can very distinctly remember the presidential election of 1908. Excitement ran high, as it was felt that one or the other of the candidates was practically certain to win. My father took no part in it. He always claimed that a man delivering ice ought to keep away from the heat of political partisanship. He himself said that he would just as soon hand the ice to a Democrat as to a Republican.

—

With only a slight effort of memory I can bring back the recollection of the beginning of the great war. At the time I was only twenty years old, but even at that age my mind was nearly as developed as it is now, and I understood that if war began there would certainly be fighting.

My father, who followed closely all that was in the papers, was greatly excited over the war and was convinced that Belgium could easily beat France, though it turned out that he was mistaken. He himself was able to keep in touch with the war situation, as he was engaged in loading ice on the meat-ships that left almost daily for Europe. Added to this, his own European descent gave him a sort of inherited insight into European politics and he felt sure that in the end Norway and Sweden would come out ahead.

—

All this seems many years ago, and those days have drifted so far into the past that few can remember them. The war came to an end at last and was succeeded by Prohibition, and Aerial Navigation and other things. On these I must not touch, as I am now getting within living memory. Indeed, it was shortly after the war that my failing strength at the shovel necessitated my retirement from active shoveling.

The partial collapse of my mind, which happened at the same time, led me to undertake, on the advice of my medical attendant, the writing of these memoirs. It was his opinion that my mental powers had reached a state of decline, which would guarantee their success. My publishers assure me that this prediction has been amply justified.

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The Memoirs of a Night Watchman

Note: The publication of the “Memoirs of an Iceman,” printed above, proved to be a mere fanning of the flame of public demand. It was found necessary to follow it up immediately with the “Memoirs of a Night Watchman,” as here related.

I have the honour to belong to a very old family connected for generations with the night. I have heard my father, who was a furnace man, say that his ancestors were highwaymen, and he would speak of the blessing that coal heating had brought to the world in opening up night occupations for men of adventurous character.

While I was still but a little boy, my father would take me with him on his rounds. I would sit and watch him stoke up the furnace in the homes of the rich, and after he had brought it to a glow, Father would fetch some eggs from the ice-box upstairs and fry them in the furnace; while we ate them, Father would talk to me about the night and why it was superior to the day.

As our clientele was a rich one, I became accustomed early in life to move in luxurious basements with cement floors and spacious coal rooms, which has given me ever since an ease of bearing and a quiet step that no doubt helped the success of my career. We fed well everywhere, for my father believed in a generous and varied diet; on the other hand, he drank but little – a pint or so of champagne, perhaps, or if the night were cold, possibly a touch of old French brandy. For me he would open, perhaps, a pint of claret, but we drank it always in the cellar.

My father was very old-fashioned and strict in his ideas, and made no use of the drawing-room nor even of the dining-room, except, perhaps, on some special occasion. In one or two houses, where the billiard room was in the basement, Father and I would knock up a hundred points after his work was over. But in all such matters he was strict; only in very, very cold weather, for example, have I seen him make use of a sealskin coat for his work at the furnace.

As a rule, we had the night to ourselves; there was no one moving in the houses. And after the furnace was well stoked up and burning nicely, Father would sit on a trestle in the cellar and talk to me of the principles of ventilation and of the question of clinkers and back-drafts, so that I learned a great deal in being with him.

We usually arrived home a little before daybreak, bringing home breakfast for my mother and my younger brother. Father would generally bring home a satchel of coal with him, and would give some also to any of our neighbours who lived in the same basement as we did; for, after all, as my father said, the coal cost only the trouble of carrying it. We generally got to bed right after breakfast, as we kept early hours.

On Sunday, Father and I went to church, or rather to several churches, where Father tended fires in the basements, from which we could hear the organ. My father had no religious prejudices, and told me that he would just as soon fire one church as another. But he was rather bitter, for so mild a man, against Quakers and others that refuse to have heat in their places of worship. My father regarded them as misguided.

Meantime, I attended night school regularly, as Father laid great stress on education. He would have wished me to go from night school to a night college, and if possible to take a degree. Father said he had known several college graduates in furnace work, and considered them fully equal to first-class men. He always spoke of Oxford with great respect, and recalled that when he was a young man in marine boiler work on night shift, they looked on Oxford men as better suited for that than anything else.

But I was young enough and ardent enough to view education with impatience. I wanted to get forward in life, and dreamed already of being a night orderly in a hospital or a night guard in a penitentiary. Father had some influential friends in the penitentiary, and he said that when they came out he would see what they could do. But the chance never came my way. We also talked of banking, and Father said that if you could once get a footing in a bank at night, there was no telling what it might lead to. He had a friend who was very high up in one of the banks; in fact he worked on the principal vault itself, but nothing came of that idea either. Sometimes, too, we talked of the sea, and of course Father, as I said, had been a sailor himself (in the stokehold), and my imagination was fired as that of any boy is with the romance of the sea. I loved to picture myself in the stokehold of some great ship, sifting ashes and raking out clinkers.

Among such day dreams, or rather night dreams, I grew gradually toward manhood. Meantime, I had tried out a few desultory occupations, but found none to my liking. For a while I held a post as night porter in a family hotel, my hours being from 1 a.m. to 7. But it was too disturbed. I found that I had hardly settled down to my morning newspaper, next morning’s, for an hour or so, when there might be a ring of a bell, or a casual arrival that necessitated my presence.

The surroundings were not congenial, for though the lounge room was fairly comfortable, the library was poorly selected and unsatisfactory. I worked also as night clerk in a fire station, which I found congenial and quiet, but in the second month of my work there was an outbreak of a fire in a neighbouring part of the city and I left. Chance fate, however, decided where deliberate intention failed.

I returned home one day to find that my father had given up his job to accept a more or less permanent position in the county penitentiary. His removal there was not wholly of his own choice, but his duties were entirely congenial, as he found himself in charge of five night furnaces where his companions were men of education and culture, several of them college graduates. Indeed, his circumstances were such that at the expiration of his original contract, which I believe had been for three years – a matter of insistence on the part of the authorities – Father was invited to stay on as a salaried member of the staff. The change involved very little disadvantage, except that he lost his uniform and had to supply his own clothes.

Meantime, as a compensation for Father’s removal from his family – a matter on which his contract insisted – influential friends obtained for me the post of night watchman in a large downtown office building.

This position I have now held for fifty years, during which time I have every reason to believe that my career in and through the building has been a complete success. My hours are from midnight, when the last of the day staff leave, until 6 a.m., when the first of them come back. During this time it is my duty to visit all the doors of the offices and try the locks of the rooms, though, thus far, I have never been able to get into them. It is also necessary to punch a time clock on each floor of the building every half-hour. It is a crowded life, and in a way I shall not be sorry when some day the time for retirement comes.

I have found by experience that it is scarcely possible to do any serious reading, as it is interrupted every hour by duties. After the first twenty years I read less and less, and after the first thirty years I got into the way of contenting myself with reading the telephone book and the calendar. The necessity of keeping posted all the time as to which day of the month it is prevents intellectual stagnation.

Nor is it, as my reader might imagine, a life without incident. Every ten years or so something happens. I recall distinctly how, about twenty years ago, the burglar alarm rang, but I heard it in ample time to leave the building. On another occasion there was a great fire a few blocks away, which prevented all thought of sleep.

But yet I have begun to find that in the long run the position has a certain monotony, a kind of dullness about it. This feeling did not dawn on me at first, and often I forget it for five years, but it comes back. I ask myself, is this after all quite the work and quite the life for an active man? I asked myself this six years ago, and very soon I intend to ask it of myself again.

I am well aware that at my age, seventy, the time has hardly come to think of retiring. There is a man engaged in the next building on the street (I was talking to him only two years ago) who is nearly ten years older than I am. But without retiring from work altogether, I often think I may give up my present job and strike out into something more strenuous.

But no doubt many people think that.

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Confessions of a Super-Extra-Criminal

Note: No apology is needed for the publication of the manuscript here presented as the Confessions of a Super-Extra-Criminal. The eager and unsatiated demand of the public for revelations of the underworld is a guarantee of the absorbing interest with which the story will be received. Needless to say, the name assigned to the writer is a purely fictitious one. His real name we are not at liberty to mention, inasmuch as the mere whisper of his whereabouts will lead to his immediate execution in four different countries. If the government of Mexico, either government, could get hold of him, he would be garroted at once, while his condemnation to the guillotine in France only awaits his own consent. More than that, there are a number of his fellow criminals of the past who would knife him at sight, and others who wouldn’t even wait to see him. Our readers will understand this when they read what he writes. We may add that we have done nothing to edit or improve the style of this confession. We couldn’t. It is written in that straight-out, right-here-and-now, let-me-say-at-once form of composition that carries conviction with it – either present or past.

I want to say right here and now at the very start that there was no reason why I should have grown up to be a garage man. It was entirely my own fault. I had a good home and every opportunity to keep straight, and I had, too, gentlemen, the best of mothers.

“Ed,” Mother would often say to me, “keep straight,” and if I had listened to her, gentlemen, I wouldn’t have been through all that I went through, gentlemen.

But perhaps there was something wild in my blood that disinclined me to ordinary steady industry. My father had a regular job with a municipal garbage wagon where they trusted him with everything, and he would have taken me into it with him so that I would have grown up in that. However, nothing would do me but loafing around with a loose crowd of boys and talking about this man or that who’d made a clean-up as a plumber or garage man or a dry cleaning explosives expert, and never got caught.

We used to see them around the pool rooms nights. There was Dick Dynamite, or Dynamite Dick, as we used to call him, who was a nitro-glycerine man and worked in dry-cleaning shops blowing the buttons off vests; and there was Blow Torch Peter, who was one of the most daring men in the plumbing game, and Short Circuit Charlie, who had tied up the electricity in a downtown office for four hours single-handed with nothing but a pair of pliers and a screwdriver; and there was Water-Power William, a big hulking-looking fellow with a face as innocent as they make them, who had frozen up the water taps in one of the big hotels. All these men went about openly dressed in mechanics’ clothes, but it was mighty hard to prove anything against them. Every one knew, for instance, that Blow Torch Peter was a plumber, but they couldn’t prove it on him. It was known, too, that Dynamite Dick worked in dry cleaning, especially as he was reckless in his work and each explosion was bigger than the last, so that sometimes he’d blow off a thousand buttons in one day, but they could prove nothing.

And, of course, if any of these men got pinched, they always had enough money to hire one of the judges of the supreme court to defend them and got off pretty light.

But most of all we were attracted by the garage men because they seemed both the most expert and the most reckless. I have known Gasoline Jim to wreck a car in five minutes by merely crawling underneath it. The owner had brought it into the garage (I was loafing around there and saw it all) and he said, “Will you take a look at this car? It seems to be knocking or something.” Jim crawled under it and stayed there for about two minutes, chewing tobacco. Then he came out. “You’ll have to leave it here for two years,” he said. “Great Caesar!” says the man, “is it as bad as that? Surely not. Take another look.” Jim went under the car again, but this time he took a sandwich with him and a flask. He didn’t come out for at least ten minutes. When he did, he said, “Three years, and you’ll have to make a deposit of a thousand dollars.” Of course the man paid the money, but the next day Jim told him that he doubted if the car was much good; he said he found that the whole of the inside asphyxiation was pretty badly fuselated and that he’d have to send the car to Florida anyway to get it washed. I don’t think the man ever came back.

Well, I used to hang around and pick up ideas and watch the men work. So one day when a lot of cars were coming in Jim called out to me, “Here, Ed, see what’s the matter with this gentleman’s car.” Well, I knew Jim meant to give me a chance to see what I could do. So I rolled the car away back into a dark corner of the garage. Well, I felt pretty nervous about it, as I was mighty anxious to make good. So I got busy with a pair of pliers and an iron bar and in a few minutes I managed to get a hole knocked through the radiator and removed most of the ignition.

“How do you find it?” says Jim when I came back to the front of the shop where he stood with the owner. “I think, sir,” I said, “that most of the interior litigation is pretty well rotted out.” “What can you do with it?” asked the owner. “All I can suggest,” says Jim, “is to leave it with us and we’ll put a new engine into the body and then when we get it adjusted, put a new body around the new engine. But we’ll want two hundred dollars as a deposit and we don’t promise anything, and of course there’ll be storage to pay.”

The owner paid us the two hundred and Jim gave me my thirty per cent on it.

Well, of course, I felt pretty good about it, and that night I treated all the boys around town and began to feel myself mighty big stuff. Jim handed me over a car every day, sometimes two or three of them, and I was cleaning up money fast.

But I want to say right now and here that that kind of thing can’t last.

I wouldn’t want to think that anything in these confessions might attract anybody to the kind of life I’d fallen into. Often I’d think of how mother used to say, “Ed, keep straight.” And then some one would come into the garage with, say, a brand-new car and ask, “What’s wrong with the starter of this car?” and I couldn’t resist the temptation. I’d look at the car and say, “There’s nothing wrong with the starter, sir, the trouble is that the lining of the esophagus has got burned out. Give me a hundred dollars.”

Of course, the thing had to come to an end. There’s only one end to that sort of thing. All the time I had a feeling that I’d get pinched, and I wasn’t a bit surprised when one day a detective that I knew stopped me on the street. “Ed,” he said, “I guess you’ll have to come along with me.” Well, I knew there was no good to resist, and so he took me along to the police station.

When he told the police who I was, they hit me over the head with a police club till I was quiet and then gave me some coffee. “How are you now, Ed?” they asked, and hit me a few more times; after which they gave me some more coffee and bundled me into a cell.

Next day I was brought into the dock and charged with garage work. I hadn’t been able to get any judge of the supreme court, as they were all busy. The result was I got a sentence to ten years, with more if needed.

—

Now I’m not going to try to describe my life in prison beyond saying that it was dull; that’s the straight fact about it – a dull life. Indeed, I want to say right here and now, gentlemen, that prison isn’t worth while. I suppose that to those who have never been there, there is a glamour about it, a sort of romance. But I want to tell you that when you get to prison life itself, it’s dull. I don’t know how it is, but there’s a peculiar monotony – I might describe it as a sort of sameness, about it, that gets you in the long run.

In prison each day seems very much like any other day. You get up and have your bath and loaf around, take a little bit of exercise, file into the dining-room to eat a bite of lunch and so on. It may sound all right, but in reality it’s wearisome. Many and many a time I used to wish I was out of it.

However, there are good things, too, about prison; and one good thing I got out of it was my association with the prison chaplain, the Reverend Mr. Hardnail. I don’t know if he will see these lines, because perhaps he can’t read, but anyway I want to express my gratitude.

Yes, I want right here and now to hand one to that prison chaplain. He was a real man, that fellow, just a straight, up and down, square-sided, slab-headed man. There was no whining and sniffling about him. He’d just come into my cell and sit and talk and not a word about religion or anything like that. “Ed,” he’d say, “have you got a chew of tobacco?” And I’d give him some and he’d sit there and yarn away about horse races and dog fights.

I’ll tell you he was a real man, the chaplain. He didn’t talk any soft stuff about repentance, but just made himself a friend and a companion. “Eddie,” he’d say, “how about a little snort? Have you got any of the hard stuff around the cell?” Well, generally I’d have a little of it hidden away. “Here you are, Mr. Hardnail,” I’d say, “and you’re welcome to it.” So we’d sit and drink the booze out of a jail mug like a couple of old pals, and Mr. Hardnail would stay right there and chat away till it was all gone before he’d go.

—

But as I say, I’m not going to talk in detail of prison life. Later on, if I could see any money in it, I might. But not now.

I served my ten years, increased to twelve for good conduct, and came out of that prison with a feeling as if I had grown older since I went in.

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The Life of J. Correspondence Smith

J. Correspondence Smith was born in an isolated district in the western part of the east, the homestead being situated at a considerable distance even from any village. Fortunately, however, there was rural mail delivery at the very door. The infancy of the child was a period of great danger and anxiety, especially as no direct medical aid was available either for the boy or his mother. A treatment by correspondence, however, was successful in pulling them both through, although it was not until the postscript of the third letter that the worst of the danger was over. Smith’s father, meanwhile, kept up his courage by means of a correspondence course in Optimism, obtained from a central psychological college. Even at that, it often took ten cents’ worth a day to keep him up.

The years of childhood that followed, bright and innocent, often seemed to Smith in retrospect the best period of his life. He did not lack for plenty of little playmates, for, although there were no other children in the neighbourhood, little J. very soon joined a Little Folks Correspondence Circle. In this way he came to know (by correspondence) Lizzie M. (aged 5) and Johnny O’D. (aged 6) and Only Child (aged 4). The children carried on, through correspondence, all kinds of merry games.

The pleasant days of childhood naturally gave place to school and college. Young J.’s education was carried on entirely by correspondence courses, in which he achieved distinction from the very first. In his high-school work he ranked ahead of all his classmates by six cents’ worth of stamps a week, and carried off the prize essay in English by a lead of four and a half ounces, second class postal matter.

When the time came for college, Smith selected as his alma mater the well-known correspondence institution, the University of Okacheechee, Box D, general delivery, third floor. It was out of this box that J. Smith finally graduated.

Smith’s college course had immensely broadened his outlook. He had not only taken the routine subjects of mathematics, physics, and the elementary sciences, but had also had correspondence courses in College Life, Good Fellowship, and on the Influence of Social Intercourse on Human Happiness. He had taken also two courses on Patriotism, internal and external, and half a course on Religion – a fixed requirement for graduation.

But there is no doubt that all the experiences of earlier life are as nothing when compared to the first coming of love. It came to J. Correspondence Smith with the same first blissful awakening of dreams and fancies that it has brought to all of us. Never could he forget that beautiful summer evening when he stood beside the lilacs in the dooryard and read:

“Young lady, brunette, lonesome, would like to exchange letters with gentleman. Send photo and postage stamps for return.”

It thrilled him as he stood. She was a brunette, and she was lonesome. And what she wanted was correspondence; and that was the best thing he did.

His hand for once trembled on the pen as he wrote back:

“Young man, writing good hand, certificates in penmanship from three correspondence schools, begs accept offer lonesome brunette extent 2 ounces a week.”

The course of love for once ran smooth. How Smith thrilled when he realized that she made a letter D exactly as he did, and that she could spell pneumonia without lifting the pen! One day, greatly daring, Smith gave the girl a kiss – on the corner of the letter – and the return post brought no rebuke.

The fateful day came when Smith, dressed in his best clothes, neatly shaved, and with his hair well oiled, sat down and wrote firmly and clearly a letter of proposal of marriage. The happy answer reached him even before his oil was dry.

There followed a blissful period of engagement, with a letter by every post, and then marriage. Circumstances and distance made it impossible for Smith to be present at his marriage, which was confirmed by proxy, two notaries public exchanging certificates. Nor was it possible for Smith and his wife to live together, as their homes were in different parts of the country. But as husband and wife they settled down, by correspondence, to the routine of domestic life.

During all this period of courtship and marriage, the plain stern business of earning a livelihood had been carried on by J. Smith with unremitting industry. And here he had met with well-merited success. An appointment as Local Correspondent of the Meteorological Weather Bureau at Washington gave him an assured if humble income, and brought him in contact with various winds, storms, and cyclones, which he might otherwise not have appreciated.

It was his duty also to report all temperatures and changes of temperatures on his own isothermal line, a business that kept him in constant telegraphic communication with at least six meridians of longitude. At the same time his work brought him membership in a number of corresponding scientific meteorological societies, while, as a hobby, he acted as horticultural correspondent for a garden magazine, reporting from time to time the growth of oak trees, everlasting thorn, and century plants. This crowded life left him but little time for diversion, yet he managed to carry on a game or two of chess with correspondents, selecting one in Alaska and one in Chee-Foo, China, to avoid over-rapidity in the play.

There came into Smith’s life in due course the Great War, changing it and convulsing it from top to bottom, so that, as he himself said, the world scarcely seemed the same. Postage rates rose to four cents for half an ounce. Foreign correspondence was placed under censorship; at least ten of Smith’s letters – as he himself used afterwards to relate – were sunk by submarines. His weather reports were reduced to two words a day for fear that the knowledge of how cold it was in his district might be of use to the enemy. In his chess game it was only possible to make one move in two years. In other words, as J. Smith himself admitted, the war was a hard, cruel time during which he carried on as best he could.

Since the armistice, life on the whole has gone well with Correspondence Smith. His weather reports are again in full operation, and his correspondence is now wider than ever. The award by mail of two honorary degrees from correspondence schools has shown how the learned world has appreciated his success. In his domestic life Smith and his wife, though still unfortunately kept apart, have had their union blessed by a child (a little girl) adopted by correspondence with a Maternity Bureau for Homeless Children. The little one has been duly placed out at a Country Home for Selected Children, from which she writes every week (an ounce and a half) to each of her parents.

—

And yet in despite of it all, from what I have known of J. Correspondence Smith and from what I have heard about him, the man is not altogether happy. He gets a feeling – have you ever had it yourself, my dear reader? – as if he had been too much a spectator in life and too little an actor. Sometimes it seems to him as if life had all drifted past him like a moving procession, from which his own timidity debarred his entrance. Perhaps you have felt that, yes? J. Smith often wishes that at some time he had broken loose and done something – just what, he doesn’t know, but something.

If he had it all to do again, he says, he would plunge right boldly into everything that life offers, hit or miss, win or die, and use it to the very last gasp of it. Therefore, if there turns out to be such a thing as metempsychosis, or the transfer of souls, and if Smith comes back, just watch out for him. He’ll do big things – at least that is what he says in his correspondence.

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Eddie the Bartender

A Ghost of the Bygone Past

There he stands – or rather, there he used to stand – in his wicker sleeves, behind the tall mahogany, his hand on the lever of the beer pump – Eddie the Bartender.

Neat, grave, and courteous in the morning, was Eddie. “What’s yours, sir?”

Slightly subdued in the drowsier hours of the afternoon, but courteous still. “What are you having, gentlemen?”

Cheerful, hospitable, and almost convivial in the evening. “What is it this time, boys?”

—

All things to all men, was Eddie, quiet with the quiet, affable with the affable, cheerful with the exhilarated and the gay; in himself nothing, a perfect reflection of his customer’s own mind.

“Have one yourself, Ed,” said the customer. “Thanks, I’ll take a cigar.”

Eddie’s waistcoat pockets, as day drew slowly on to evening, bristled with cigars like a fortress with cannon.

“Here, don’t take a smoke, have a drink!” said the customer. “Thanks, I’ll take a lemon sour. Here’s luck.” Lemon sours, sarsaparillas, and sickly beverages taken in little glassfuls, till the glassfuls ran into gallons – these were the price that Eddie paid for his abstemiousness.

“Don’t you ever take anything, Ed?” asked the uninitiated. “I never use it,” he answered.

—

But Eddie’s principal office was that of a receptive listener, and, as such, always in agreement.

“Cold, ain’t it?” said the customer.

“It sure is!” answered Eddie with a shiver.

“By Gosh it’s warm!” said another ten minutes later.

“Certainly a hot day,” Ed murmured, quite faint with the heat.

—

Out of such gentle agreement is fabricated the structure of companionship.

“I’ll bet you that John L. will lick Jim Corbett in one round!”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” says Eddie.

“I’ll bet you that this young Jim Corbett will trim John L. in five minutes!”

“Yes, I guess he might easily enough,” says Eddie.

—

Out of this followed directly and naturally Eddie’s function as arbitrator, umpire, and world’s court.

“I’ll leave it to Ed,” calls the customer. “See here, Ed, didn’t Maud S. hold the record at 2.35 before ever Jay Eye See ran at all? Ain’t that so? I bet him a dollar and I says, ‘I’ll leave it to Ed,’ says I.”

That was the kind of question that Eddie had to arbitrate – technical, recondite, controversial. The chief editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica couldn’t have touched it. And he had to do it with peace and good will on both sides, and make it end somehow with the interrogation, “What are you having, gentlemen?”

—

But Eddie was not only by profession a conversationalist, a companion, and a convivialist, he was also in his degree a medical man, prescribing for his patients.

This was chiefly in the busy early morning, when the bar first opened up for the day.

Eddie’s “patients” lined up before him, asking for eye-openers, brain-clearers, head-removers.

Behind Eddie, on little shelves, was a regular pharmacopoeia; a phalanx of bottles – ticketed, labeled – some with marbles in the top stopper, some with little squirting tubes in the mouth. Out of these came bitters, sweets, flavours, peppers – things that would open the eyes, lift the hair, and renovate the whole man.

Eddie, shaking and mixing furiously, proceeded to open their eyes, clear up their brains, and remove their heads.

“I’ve got a head this morning, Ed. Fix me up something to take it away.” “Sure,” said Eddie in return, “I’ll fix it for you.”

By eight a.m. Eddie had them all straightened up and fixed. Some were even able to take a drink and start over.

—

This was in the early morning. But at other times, as for example, quite late at night, Ed appeared in another rôle – that of the champion strong man. Who would suspect the muscles of steel concealed behind Eddie’s wicker cuffs and his soft white shirt-sleeves? Who could expect anger from a countenance so undisturbed, a nature so unruffled, a mind so little given to argument?

But wait! Listen to that fierce quarrel punctuated with unpunctuatable language between two “bums” out on the barroom floor. Lo! at the height of it Eddie clears the mahogany counter in a single leap, seizes the two “bums” each by the collar, and with a short rush and a flying throw hurls them both out of the swinging doors bang on the sidewalk!

Anger? No, not that; inspired indignation is the proper phrase. Ed represented the insulted majesty of a peaceful public anxious only to be let alone.

“Don’t make no trouble in here,” was Eddie’s phrase. There must be “no trouble” within the sacred precincts. Trouble was for the outside, for the sidewalk, for the open street, where “trouble” could lie breathing heavily in the gutter till a “cop” took it where it belonged.

Thus did Eddie, and his like, hurl “trouble” out into the street, and with it, had they only known it, hurled away their profession and their livelihood.

This was their downfall.

—

Thus on the sunshine of Eddie’s tranquil life descended, shadow by shadow, the eclipse of prohibition.

Eddie watched its approach, nearer and nearer.

“What are you going to go at, Ed?” they asked.

“I’ve been thinking of going into chicken farming,” Eddie used to answer, as he swabbed off the bar. “They say there’s good money in chickens.”

Next week it was turkeys.

“A fellow was in here telling me about it,” Ed said. “They says there’s big money in turkeys.”

After that it was a farm in Vermont, and then it was a ranch out in Kansas. But it was always something agricultural, bucolic, quiet.

Meanwhile Eddie stayed right there, pumping up the flooding beer and swabbing off the foam from the mahogany, till the days, the hours, and the minutes ticked out his livelihood.

Like the boy on the burning deck, he never left.

—

Where is he now? Eddie and all the other Eddies, the thousands of them? I don’t know. There are different theories about them. Some people say they turned into divinity students and that they are out as canvassers selling Bibles to the farmers. You may still recognize them, it is claimed, by the gentle way in which they say, “What’s yours this morning?”

There is no doubt their tranquil existence, sheltered behind the tall mahogany, unfitted them for the rough and tumble of ordinary life.

Perhaps, under prohibition, they took to drink. In the cities, even their habitat has gone. The corner saloon is now a soda fountain, where golden-headed blondes ladle out red and white sundaes and mushy chocolates and smash eggs into orange phosphates.

But out in the solitude of the country you may still see, here and there, boarded up in oblivion and obliquity, the frame building that was once the “tavern.” No doubt at night, if it’s late enough and dark enough, ghostly voices still whisper in the empty barroom, haunted by the spectres of the Eddies—— “What’s yours, gentlemen?”

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Janus and the Janitor

Daniel J. Edwards – the janitor of our apartment – had practically no opportunities in life, no schooling to speak of, and no start. Yet here he is the janitor of a six-story apartment house, with twenty-four different apartments under his control. And the man is only fifty-three at that. As a matter of fact, he was full janitor of an apartment building when he had just turned forty-seven.

You may see him at any time in the quiet of a summer evening, sitting in his shirt sleeves half-way down the area steps that lead to the basement, smoking his pipe and taking things easy. After nine-thirty, as he himself says, there is scarcely a darned thing to do – unless some one calls him to go up to one of the apartments or something of that sort.

Few men – he himself feels it – have got along quite so steadily, have climbed to the top of the tree quite so successfully as Dan has. They call him “Dan” mostly around the apartments, though some of the children say “Mr. Edwards.” As he himself says, everybody knows him all around – the delivery men, the milkmen, the postmen, the boys with the telegrams, in short, every one. Indeed, to put it in his own words, he doesn’t know anybody that he doesn’t know.

The job that Dan has is, admittedly, a pretty soft thing. You could call it a cinch. Of course he comes on (that’s his phrase, “comes on”) pretty early in the morning, especially in the summer time, when he’s up and about freshening up the front steps before six o’clock. But then he likes to be up early in summer. In this world, it doesn’t so much matter when and where you “come on,” as it does how you feel when you do “come on.”

Anyway, all winter Dan takes things easy. Often he doesn’t budge from his bed till seven o’clock.

There’s a lot to do in the building and yet in a sense, as Dan has often explained it to me, there’s nothing to do. You can’t call running an elevator “work.” And if you go up with a monkey wrench to fix up a tap that’s leaking, or take a hammer and nails and tighten a window sash, you would scarcely consider that working.

Now, it would be different in an apartment house where the janitor does all the furnaces. But in a place of this size there’s a regular furnace man who comes on duty. Dan has nothing to do with the furnaces except to give them a little touch up now and then if they need it, or if it’s really cold weather, just slip into the furnace room once or twice in the night and coax them on a little. If a furnace man wants a lift with his ashes, Dan might give him that. But that’s all there is to it.

Dan tells a good story of how a man two blocks around the corner with a new – a pretty high-class – apartment house wanted him to come over there, at higher pay, big pay, but Dan asked him, “What about the furnace?” “Oh! I’d look to you to do that,” said the man. “Well, then,” Dan answered, “I guess it’s a case of no thanks.” It’s a good story and Dan likes to tell it and he tells it well. At the end he always repeats two or three times. “‘Yes, sir,’ says I, ‘I guess it’s a case of no thanks.’”

Telling stories like that makes an evening pass pretty agreeably.

But for the most part the main thing is that if you get into a job like Dan’s where people trust you, you are pretty well your own boss. If Dan wants any time to stick on his hat and slip across the street for anything, it’s all right.

In point of politics, Dan practically hasn’t got any. In his position you can’t. If you take sides either one way or the other, it gets known. It is much better to be friendly with both sides and hold quietly in between. Dan tells a good story of how one of his tenants wanted him to vote for him one time – he was a lawyer in Apartment C on the Sixth. “I hope you’re going to turn out and vote for me next Tuesday,” he said to Dan. “I’d like to, Mr. Thomas,” Dan answered, “but I don’t see how I can.”

I’ve heard Dan tell that story again and again. “‘Dan,’ he says, says he, ‘I hope you’re going to turn out and vote for me next Tuesday.’ ‘Well, Mr. Thomas,’ says I, ‘I don’t see how I can.’ He was elected all right. They had Apartment C on the Sixth.” It’s a good story, and Dan likes to tell it. He tells it well too. He has a lot of stories, all as good as that – in fact, all more or less like that – and he likes to tell them to you, sitting in the area steps when things have quieted down for the evening.

As far as money goes, Dan is now, as he himself has often told me, pretty well on Easy Street. He generally keeps well ahead of the game with ten or fifteen dollars up even at the very end of the month. And he has money saved up as well. There’s the hundred dollars that he saved up that he lent to his brother who got into trouble in Vancouver. He has that. That is to say, it’s there. And there’s a hundred and fifty dollars that he sent to his wife’s brother in Seattle, when they got burned out; he has that. In fact, quite a number of items like that, all of which are there still.

Anyway, Dan carries a pretty big life insurance; he has nine hundred dollars on a forty-year endowment. That’s coming along all the time.

Now all this I only mention in connection with a rather strange thing that happened about a fortnight ago, a queer trick of fortune, so to speak. Didn’t the ancient Romans call fortune Janus? If so it ought to connect up with a janitor, oughtn’t it?

Well, anyway, you may have noticed this in the papers yourself. But you would probably have passed it over. It is only when you know the person concerned that it has a different sort of importance.

At any rate, there was a news item that came from Seattle and was copied all around the press. It was headed, “Janitor Falls Heir to Fortune,” and it was worded like this:

“Under the will of John Henry Walters, almost the entire estate, about three-quarters of a million dollars, will go to his brother-in-law, Daniel Edwards. Walters, it will be remembered, who was working as a river driver, made a sudden fortune in the opening of the Summit Lake mining district. Edwards, for whom the Walters’ lawyers are now looking, is said to be the janitor of an apartment building in an eastern city.”

And those who did notice that particular news item probably saw also the one that followed it up a few days afterwards. It was headed, “Will Stick at Job,” and it explained that, “Daniel James Edwards, identified as the heir of the Walters’ fortune in Seattle, amounting to some three quarters of a million dollars, says that he means to stick right where he is and go on with his job.”

That was all at the moment.

And in fact, in a way, that is all of it.

Only one can’t help wondering just what Dan is going to do about it.

He said right away that he wouldn’t quit his job as janitor.

But two days later Dan decided that he’d take a trip out to the Coast anyway to see about things.

The next day he bought a new overcoat. It was a kind he used to covet when he was a boy.

However, he’s been working right ahead ever since – that is, talking mostly, half-way down the area steps. There are such a lot of people who want to stop to ask him about it all, and who like to be assured that he won’t quit his job, that it takes time to tell them.

Then they had him down at one of the newspaper offices to tell them about it there; and of course he had to get photographed in connection with it, with the legend under the photograph, “Won’t Give Up His Job.”

And one of the men on the top floor, Apartment A, who is a promoter, has been talking to Dan about how three quarters of a million dollars could easily be turned into real money, say, into a couple of million. And Dan himself has been thinking that, if he cared to, he could take this money, he could build an apartment house with it, a real dandy, with special janitor’s quarters to it, and then ride up and down with the elevator all day and be on a mighty friendly footing with the tenants.

And more than that, Dan and his wife have discovered that his wife has never traveled, never been anywhere. It’s a thing they never knew before.

So when Dan gets back from the Coast he may take the wife for a trip to Europe, or to Afghanistan, or somewhere – just for a trip.

But of course he’s not going to quit being a janitor.

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The Intimate Disclosures
of a Wronged Woman

A Palpitating Story in Which a Woman’s Soul Is Turned Upside Down and Then Right Side Up

Note: The following startling disclosures are, in our opinion, the most powerful piece of self-revelation that we have seen revealed this season. The writer lays her soul bare and jumps on it. She takes her readers into the most intimate recesses of a woman’s life, and if we know anything about readers, this hits them where they live. The writer does not spare herself.

CHAPTER I

My (First) Childhood

I want to begin these Disclosures by speaking of my childhood.

First let me talk of my parents. There were two of them, my father and my mother.

And I am now going to tell here something about my father which up till now I have never even whispered to a soul, namely, that he was born in Peterboro, Ontario.

My father seldom spoke of having been born in Peterboro. But I know he brooded over it. I remember once when I was quite a little girl he drew me to him and patting my head quietly he murmured, “I was born in Peterboro.” After that he sat silent, looking into the fire for a long time. Then he put on his hat and went out. And a little afterwards he came in again.

While I am speaking of my father, I may as well set down something else about him that I only came to know gradually and that I did not fully understand at first, and that is that he was five feet, nine inches and seven-eighths high.

I recall as if it were yesterday my mother measuring him against the wall, and saying as she looked at the measuring tape, “Five feet, nine inches and seven-eighths.”

I was too young to know what seven-eighths meant at that time; later on I came to know. But to the best of my belief neither my father nor my mother ever mentioned to anybody that he was five feet, nine inches and seven-eighths high. They were proud people and kept things to themselves.

Now that I am speaking of my father and wish to leave nothing concealed, I may as well state the fact openly that he was a Vegetarian. I have decided, in putting down this life story, to leave nothing unsaid – that I can think of to say – and so I will simply chronicle the fact that my father was a Vegetarian and let the reader judge for himself.

But this I only came to know slowly as I passed gradually out of my childhood, a thing it took me a long time to do.

As a little child I thought he was an Episcopalian or at times I fancied him a Wesleyan Methodist. Later I came to know the truth. He was a Vegetarian. Only once or twice, however, did I ever hear him refer to the fact.

I remember once he took me on his knee and said, “I’ve been a Vegetarian all my life”; then he kissed me and put me down again and walked out of the house. He did not come back again for a long time; not till meal time. I grew to know that my father always came back at meal time. I think he was too proud to stay away.

My mother stands out less vividly before me, partly, perhaps, because I never knew her height as accurately as I knew my father’s.

But I will record here one thing about her that always seemed to me to mark her off from most people, and in a way to isolate her in a class by herself, and that is that as a girl she had lived for some years in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Why this should have been so, I never knew. My mother never explained it to me and never spoke of it. But I think it gave her a kind of loneliness.

Later on as I slowly grew up, which took years and years, I began to understand that my mother was a disappointed woman. She realized, I think, that she had been let in in marrying Father. Each time she looked at him she felt that he certainly was a prize package.

The idea, I imagine, grew in her mind that if she hadn’t married Father, she might have hit something better and could hardly have struck anything worse.

There comes into every woman’s life the knowledge that she has married the wrong man. So it was with Mother. The realization that Father was a nut more and more shadowed her life.

Once, in one of her rare moments of confidence, she told me that there was a Mr. Jones in Little Rock, Arkansas, whom she could have married who was very musical and played the gramophone to perfection, but he had lung trouble and drank whiskey and was a Communist. So she held him off and he went west for his lungs and got better and made a lot of money in cattle and joined the Republican party.

But meantime Mother had married Father.

I suppose every woman has a romance in her life like Mother’s. I often used to wonder where I would have been if Mother hadn’t married Father, but had married Mr. Jones. But I couldn’t think it out. It beat me to it.

And now let me try to give a more intimate and confidential picture of my home, because I want to make my reader feel that he knows me. Our house stood in the country on the tenth concession of the third township backwards and sideways from the road and a little edgeways. I can shut my eyes and see it; but when I open them I can’t.

It was only a mile down the road to the post office of Blank and five miles and ten rods to the village of Blank. Our country town was Blink and there was no large city nearer to us than Asterisk.

With these facts well in mind, the reader can form a pretty clear picture of my home and its surroundings. I should perhaps have added that our nearest railway station was at ——— and our only telegraph office was at ———. Let the reader get these facts clearly before him and he will have a grip on my narrative which he otherwise might fail to get. Perhaps it is pertinent to say that the ——— Express Company had an agency at  * * * * * * and that there was a first class garage not more than three miles from  * ! * ! * !  . . .

At any rate, it was here in these quiet surroundings that I passed my first girlhood – not my second, my first.

And now I am going to give my reader something of the kind that he has been sitting up waiting for. I want to take him into all my secrets, and tell him some things that I suppose no woman ever tells to the world.

When I set myself to write these disclosures I said to myself that I would conceal nothing, but would tell my reader everything. If a great deal of what I have to say sounds unusual, I can only defend it on the ground that at least it is the truth.

I want to be quite frank with myself and speak of myself as if I were discussing somebody else. I want the reader to judge for himself everything that I have done. I don’t know whether I make my meaning quite clear. I am trying to state it as simply as I can.

I will only say that what I mean is that I am trying to say what I mean. I can find no other words to express it more simply, but if I can think of any later on I’ll use them.

I want to begin by saying that like a great many girls I was for a long time densely ignorant. I doubt whether society realizes even yet, in spite of all the revelations and confessions that have been published, how ignorant girls are. In my own case up to the age of—

But stop. That’s a peach of a place to end up this first chapter.

CHAPTER II

What Girls Don’t Know

In the last, that is, the first chapter I was telling my readers in the most intimate language I could get hold of all about my girlhood.

I said that I was brought up ignorant, in the dense ignorance that enshrouds so many young girls today. Even with the resolution I have taken to conceal nothing from my readers, it is hard for me, without a blush of shame, to go into details of my ignorance.

But I will quote as a characteristic example the fact that till I was nine years old I could hardly spell properly. I mixed up words ending in ough with words ending in double f.

Figures also gave me great trouble. For a long time I used to think that 7 and 8 made 13. I was too timid and too reticent to take my difficulties to anybody, least of all to my parents. Sometimes I thought of going to the minister of our church and asking him what 7 and 8 made, and how to spell hemorrhage. But a false shame held me back, and I feared perhaps that even he might not know.

And since I am confiding so fully in my reader I will make another confession, namely, that for many years I did not know the names of the branches of the Amazon, and always imagined that the Xingu came in on the top side. I concealed this as best I could from the people about me.

Of physiology and the human body and of the laws of health I knew absolutely nothing. I could not have told where the oesophagus was nor the prosencephalon, nor the duodenum nor the semicolon nor the major axis of the patella. Once while quite a child I caught a cold and was quite sick for three days without being aware of it.

My first love affair took place when I was just turned sixteen. I had hardly turned it when a young man came to stay at our house as a summer boarder. His name was Joe Granger, and he was training for a minister. This ought to have warned me, but I was young and without guidance. In any case, he seemed to me little more than a boy, which was perhaps the case, as he was only five feet, one inch high. But he was quite stout.

There was, however, one thing about Joe that my parents kept from me at the time and that I only learned later on accidentally. It was this: He paid us $2.00 a week for his board, but he was supposed to help father pitch hay and to make himself handy around the place.

Well, for the first two or three weeks that Joe Granger was at our house, I hardly spoke a word to him. But one evening just as I was starting down the lane to the pasture to fetch up the two cows there was Joe standing beside the door of the barn.

It was lilac time and I had on a print dress with a bunch of lilacs at my throat and a branch of apple blossoms in my hair and a bunch of wild convolvulus and chickweed in my waist belt.

“Where are you going?” Joe asked. “Down to the pasture,” I answered, “to fetch up the cows.” “All right,” he said, “I’ll go too.” I was feeling in a kind of reckless mood, as if I didn’t care what happened to me. “Come on!” I said.

It was a hundred yards or perhaps more down the lane, but all the way Joe said nothing except, “Say, look at that oriole. That’s pretty early for orioles, isn’t it?” So I knew that he was keeping himself pretty well in hand.

When we got to the pasture, the two cows were there standing under the shade trees.

“You chase up the black one,” Joe said, “and I’ll start up the other.”

I was feeling in a sort of desperate mood, as if I didn’t care. “All right,” I said.

We got the two cows started up the lane, and Joe and I walked along behind them.

“They’re easy cows to drive,” Joe said. I don’t know just how much he meant by it, but I answered just recklessly, “They sure are.” “Some cows,” Joe said, “are much better milkers than others.” I didn’t even stop to think. “Is that so?” was all I could find to say. “Yes,” Joe went on, “when I was on a farm near Cobourg, Ontario, I used to milk six cows a day.” I don’t know just what he would have said next, but just then we came to the corner of the barn and there was Father.

Joe is a preacher now and has children of his own, but looking back on it seems strange. I often wondered how many cows he milked after he left Cobourg.

My next love adventure was a few months later; in fact, that same Autumn. I was walking along the road to the village and the rural mail delivery man stopped his cart. “Like a ride, sis?” he asked. “Kind o’ hot walking, ain’t it?”

Just for a minute I hesitated. The driver was a quite elderly man and had four or five children, and it should have warned me. But a sort of spirit of daring had got hold of me and for a minute I hesitated. Already he had made a place on the seat beside him. “Climb right in,” he said.

Then all of a sudden I realized my danger. “Thanks,” I blurted out, “I guess I’ll walk.” “All right,” the man said, “please yourself. Get up, there!” and he touched up his horse and was gone.

I stood in the road for quite a time, thinking of what I had escaped.

I never saw the man again, but years after I heard that he was still driving on the same mail route and that his eldest girl had just finished high school. A queer fact about the whole thing, however, is that the government has never promoted him and that he is still on the same route.

By this time, of course, I had begun to realize that men are all wolves and are not to be trusted.

There was a young man one day came to deliver a load of cord wood and after he had unloaded it, he asked for a drink of water. Quite unsuspectingly, I fetched him a glass of water from the pitcher and was just going to give it to him when he said, “Do you ever go to the pictures?”

I threw the water in his face and rushed upstairs to my own room, where I threw myself on the bed. But it was a narrow escape.

Well, it was along about this time that our home got all broken up and Mother and I had to move away. It was all on account of Father, because Father began to use alcohol. Of course, where we lived the law didn’t allow any one to buy alcohol and people couldn’t get it. But they could get it in indirect forms.

They say there’s a lot of alcohol in barber’s perfumes and things like that. Well, Father found out that there is alcohol in axle grease and he began smearing his face with it evenings. He only put on a little at first, just enough to make him feel bright, but then he got to putting it on thicker and thicker and he’d sit there evenings with his face covered with it and the axle grease stupefying his mind. He found, too, that there is alcohol in linseed oil and he’d go out to the barn and soak himself in it.

It got so bad that Father was soaked most of the time, and he’d just stagger round the place soaked and plastered.

So the end of it was that our home was broken up and Mother and I went to live in the city. I have promised to tell my readers all my sensations and feelings, and I suppose there are feelings that a girl gets when she goes to live in a city that she has never had before.

I am in a way ashamed to speak of it, but the truth is that for nearly two months, perhaps, I didn’t like going up and down in elevators.

And since I am telling everything, I may as well say straight out and be done with it that I don’t think the pie in the city is as good as in the country.

We hadn’t been very long in the city before I began to learn that the men are just as much wolves and hounds there as they are in the country.

A young girl, even though she weighs 175 pounds as I did, has got to be on her guard all the time. It was just the same old story, and it began right away.

The first one was the house-agent who showed us over the apartments. He managed to sidle pretty close up to me and he sort of whispered, “This is a very desirable location.” I just gave him one push in the chest that put him against the wall and I said, “You just cut that right out.”

Then there was the young feller that came to turn on the electric lights. He said: “If you wouldn’t mind holding this candle for me, I’ll adjust the meter.” “Don’t you get so darned smart,” I answered.

I found it was just the same way when I went out to look for work in the stores. The first man I went to looked up at me from his desk and he said, “Just sit down, please, and tell me what you can do.”

“You just quit that right now,” I answered, and I was out of that place in five seconds.

However, I had not been very long in the city before life all changed and I met my first husband and got married. But I want to tell my readers just how it feels for a young, inexperienced girl to find herself married to a man. – I think that will hold them down for another chapter.

CHAPTER III

Married Life

In what I wrote before, I told about my experiences as a young girl and how love first came into my life.

I want to talk now about my married life and I am going to speak just as plainly as I can and tell my readers things that I have never yet ventured to say to anybody.

It was a little while after Mother and I had moved into the city, on account of Father having taken to alcohol in the country, that I met my first husband. His name was Mr. Thomley, and Mother and I first met him in one of the big stores where we went to buy things for the apartment. All we knew about him was that his name was Mr. Thomley and that his salary was forty-two dollars a week, and that his people had come from Ashtabula, Ohio, and that he had had a ten-dollar raise last month and another one promised for New Year’s, and that where he boarded there wasn’t a word against him, although there were three young girls in the house, one from Kentucky. Beyond that, Mother couldn’t find out any more about him.

Well, pretty soon Mr. Thomley began coming to the apartment and taking me out places nights and then later he would come and take me walks afternoons and shows evenings and ball games Sundays.

So one day at a ball game he asked me if I would marry him and I said all right. I remember it was Pittsburgh playing Philadelphia and Pittsburgh won the game, but I want to say right now, since I am writing confidentially, that I don’t believe they were the best team. I said to Mr. Thomley just after he asked me to marry him that I was sure the umpire was crooked. At any rate, I am going to say it right here, straight out, that I believe there was some dirty work on third base.

We went home right after the game, and I told Mother all about it and just what I thought of the Pittsburgh team.

Well, a little after that we got married, because my husband, whose name, as I said, was Mr. Thomley, had four days off from the store where he worked. He was in curtains and cretonne, and as it was the dead season in curtains he could get off easily enough; but for the matter of that, he had a pretty high-up job and could have got off for a couple of days to get married at any time.

So we went off on our wedding tour to Richmond, Virginia, and it certainly is a strange feeling for a young girl to find herself going to a hotel as a married woman. I am going to tell all about my experiences.

One thing that I noticed right away was that the food in the hotel was fierce, though we were paying eight dollars a day each on the American plan. I don’t know what my readers will think of me, but I am going to confess right now that I don’t like the American plan. I may as well say it straight out as conceal it, but I believe that on the European plan you get better service.

And right here I will disclose a little thing about married life that I never saw mentioned openly before, though everybody knows it is true, and that is that you can order a single portion and divide it and have a side order of bacon or anything like that for the same money.

That night a little before we retired Mr. Thomley whispered to me that all his life he had never liked hotel food.

We went for a long drive next day in an open carriage, and Mr. Thomley told me a lot of interesting and intimate things, such as how they made cement, and the way the city disposes of the sewage and the different methods they have for marketing the tobacco and things I had never known as a girl.

Well, pretty soon after that we came back to the city to settle down in our new home, and my married life began in earnest. If I had not decided to make a complete revelation of what married life first means to a woman and to keep back nothing, I might not care to tell of some of the mistakes that we made and the false steps that we took.

To begin with, we paid eighty dollars a month for our apartment, and it wasn’t worth it. There no proper way of disposing of the garbage, and every one of the cupboards was too small.

If young girls were told before marriage all the things they ought to know, they would never go into an apartment unless there was a janitor who took away the garbage without leaving it out on the back of the fire escape.

Some of the mistakes, too, were of our own making. We put cocoanut matting in the best room, and I’ll confess now that it hasn’t the warmth. It’s all right in the cool weather, but when winter comes it is better to pay another two dollars a yard and get real rugs.

There were some things, too, that I found I didn’t like to tell even to my husband. A young, inexperienced wife, such as I was, is held back by a kind of delicacy in speaking of certain things. The first of these troubles I kept to myself, but I thought of it day and night until at last I just couldn’t stand it any longer, and I said to Mr. Thomley, “There’s something I’ve just got to tell you; namely, that new ice-box is a bum ice-box. It leaks.”

Mr. Thomley was very kind about it and got a plumber up right away, but somehow things didn’t seem quite the same again after the ice-box started leaking.

Then, of course, there was a certain amount of trouble with other men, such as I suppose comes into the life of every young wife, especially when her husband has to be away days and men come, about this or that, afternoons.

There was first the young fellow who carried up the groceries, and the very first day he said, “If you like I’ll carry them right into the kitchen for you.” I said right away, “You cut that stuff out right now,” but after he was gone I went to the bedroom and had a good cry all by myself.

As soon as my husband came home I said to him, “There’s a thing I may as well tell you first as last: The grocery man tried to carry the parcels right through into the kitchen.” My husband said nothing at the time, but I felt there was a shadow between us after that.

It has been only as the months and presently the years have gone past that I have realized that my married life with Mr. Thomley has been a mistake. It would be hard for me to say just what has gone wrong, but I suppose I am only one of a great many women who feel that somehow life has wronged them. It seems to bring them nothing.

It was different for my husband, because he was in the store and was forging ahead all the time. He got moved up from curtains the second year of our marriage to being head of all the carpets, with a two hundred dollar increase, and a year or two after that they put him right on the ground floor with the whole of the gents’ furnishing, boys’ garments, and men’s goods under him. Then he’s away up in the United Mens-goods-men of the World, and belongs to a cornet and saxophone society that meets every two weeks all winter, and a clay-pigeon shooting-club that goes out once every two months in the summer.

It always seems that way. Men’s life is full of work and interest, and for women there is just nothing.

It was about when my eldest little girl was getting ready for public school – she was the first of the three children to go – that I began to feel the full emptiness of my life. It was so different from the kind of day dreams I used to have nights on the farm. Then I used to think I might marry a bootlegger, or an Arab slavedriver, or a French adventurer. I used to dream of a life where things happened and where some one would take me around and make things fly. It’s a kind of romantic spirit I have.

So nowadays when I sit evenings with Mr. Thomley, I feel that the time has come when I’ll have to divorce him. He was all right as a first husband, but for a second one I want something with more pep.

It seems to me that one of the great pitfalls of married life is getting tied up too long with a first husband.

That about concludes my disclosures. If I could think of any more intimate things to say, I’d put them in, because I know that my readers just snap them up and live on them. But this will do for now.

TOC     INDEX

Today and Tomorrow

Little Conversations
of the Hour

To Illustrate Life in the Third Decade of the Twentieth Century

“For what we are about to receive,” said the Archdeacon at the head of the luncheon table, bowing his head in a reverent attitude, “may the Lord make us truly thankful.” Then he lifted his head and added, “I see that Universal Copper went up four points this morning.”

“Yes,” said the nearest guest, also a distinguished divine, “I noticed them putting up the stock sheet just after our opening prayer at the meeting. I couldn’t see very clearly – four points, was it?”

“Are you in Copper, Archdeacon,” another guest asked.

“I was,” said the Archdeacon shaking his head sadly. “But I got out at 120. The Bishop gave me a hint to get out and I was foolish enough to take it.”

“I fear that the Bishop lacks faith,” said the guest.

“That’s it,” agreed the Archdeacon. “One needs faith for these things. I don’t think there ever was a time when one needed faith so much. Without it you can’t hold on. In my own case,” – he added humbly – “I shall take it to heart as a lesson for life. When I think that I was in British Breweries as low as 27——”

“Breweries at 27!” exclaimed another of the guests. – “Was it as low as that? – Why, this morning – what was it? – I haven’t seen it for an hour or so, owing to our meeting – but over four hundred surely?”

“Yes, over four hundred,” said the Archdeacon sadly, his eyes sunk upon his plate. “I repeat it – it’s a lesson for one’s life, a lesson in courage, in belief——”

“Oh, but my dear Archdeacon,” interposed a tall venerable gentleman, whose labours in the Mission fields of Asia had made his name known all over the world. “You mustn’t really blame yourself. You see after all one never can tell what is to happen. Surely it is sometimes better to hold part of what we have than to seek for something higher? I don’t want to discount what you feel about faith. But look at Asbestos, look at Carborundum or consider for instance the terrible fall in hides. Surely we have only to view the world about us to realize how uncertain it is and how wrong it is to place one’s hopes too much in it, except perhaps in iron or steel or in very solid gold bonds.”

There was a murmur of approval. Then someone else, to turn the conversation from the Archdeacon’s embarrassment, spoke to the missionary.

“And things in China?” he asked. “Not going very well I fear?”

“From bad to worse, I am sorry to say,” answered the eminent missionary, shaking his head. “These recent troubles are undoing the work of forty years. Pekin Municipal Bonds have simply vanished, utterly unsaleable; even the Shanghai International Loan has fallen to a mere fraction. Indeed I scarcely know of a real opportunity anywhere in our whole mission field. I could not, as it is, advise any young man to enter it.”

After which the talk drifted into more general topics, such as oil and the motor stocks and the rubber outlook. And presently the guests rose and the Archdeacon said:

“I too must hasten away. I want to go and call on a very dear old lady parishioner of mine. She has her good days and her bad and granddaughter has just phoned me that she is feeling quite bright today and will be pleased to see one.”

With that the party broke up and the Archdeacon went on his way to pay his visit.

“I am so glad you came,” exclaimed the pretty young girl who was sitting in the drawing room with a young man. “Grandmother is looking forward so much to seeing you. She couldn’t come downstairs today but wants you to come up to her room.”

In the room upstairs there sat in a chair a bright old lady in a cap and spectacles whose keen eyes and animated face cut down her eighty years by two or three decades. In her lap lay open a large book in a black cover which the trained eye of the Archdeacon recognized at once as Jones’s Manual of Continental Securities.

“My dear lady,” said the Archdeacon, bending over her hand, “I am so pleased, so delighted to see you looking so well.”

“Well!” said the old lady, “I should say so, and as a matter of fact, I ought to look well. I’ve just made a regular clean-up in Zinc products.”

“It’s turned out to be a regular cuckoo,” added the old lady, “a real pippin.”

“Ah,” murmured the Archdeacon. “A real pippin – I congratulate you on your good luck.”

“Good luck,” protested the venerable old lady. “Cut out that good luck stuff. It wasn’t a case of luck at all. I just had the sand to stay with it. I had a hunch that it was good to go up to 200 and I just hung right on to it. But now let us talk on something much more serious. What do you know about Synthetic rubber?”

And with that the conversation became quiet and intimate and earnest.

Meanwhile downstairs the young man still sat beside, close beside, the very charming granddaughter. Any observer, had there been one, would have seen in their eyes that they were lovers.

“I have something to tell you,” he was murmuring. “Something to tell you that I have been waiting and hoping to tell you.”

“Perhaps I know it,” she half whispered, her eyes on the carpet.

“Fluid Beef has gone up,” he said. “Gone up at last.”

“Oh, Edward,” she said with a happy little sigh, “has Fluid Beef really gone up!”

“Away up,” he laughed, “and us with it.”

“I was so afraid,” she said, with a doubting shake of her head, “that it was over-capitalized. Often at night I have a half fear that the standing charges were making our overhead out of all proportions to our earnings.”

“There was no fear of it,” he answered firmly. “Do you realize, darling,” he added, taking her hand, “that the whole of our bond issue can be looked after out of one month’s earnings?”

“But our deterioration,” she murmured as she nestled against his shoulder. “Are you writing it off out of current assets as we should?”

“Yes, easily, amply,” he reassured her, “and it means, dearest, that now there is nothing to stop us. We can be married the first moment you will.”

“And there’s something else, Edward,” she said, “to bring us happiness even better assured perhaps.”

“What?” he whispered, his eyes bright with expectation.

“Zinc,” she answered. “Grandmother told me this morning that the day we are married she is going to put a whole block of zinc in our names. Oh, Edward, isn’t life wonderful?”

—

And as a matter of fact, when you come to think of it life in the closing years of the Third Decade of the 20th century is away ahead of life under the Third Dynasty in Egypt.

TOC     INDEX

Travel Is so Broadening

I

THE IDEAL MOTOR TRIP IN EUROPE

“No more wonderful revolution in travel and in the culture that travel alone can bring has ever been effected than that occasioned by the advent of the motor-car.” So writes the enthusiastic and eloquent author of an automobile guide for foreign travel.

“Not only,” continues the writer, “does it bring within our eye a wonderful panorama of scenery, but it enables the fortunate traveler to envisage in his rapid flight the great epochs of history, to follow in the footsteps of Charlemagne and Hannibal, to gaze with awe on the silent dungeons of the middle ages and the crumbling amphitheatres of Roman Gaul.

“We set our course, let us say, down the valley of the Rhone. Here, at the very outset, is a massive and impressive scenery. For many miles of it, not even the new world of American can offer such a prospect of waving forests, whose age-old trees echoed to the hunting horns of the Merovingian Kings and of dark gorges cleft deep into river valleys by uncounted centuries of time. Here again we are out in the open, smiling country, a land of vineyards basking in the sun, of little roadside inns where red wine is poured out for us from stone jugs and where the luscious fruit of Provence is heaped in a very cornucopia on the table. Our noon-day halt is at Nîmes, where the great Roman amphitheatre, half in ruins, rears its sunlit, stone benches to recall the gladiatorial combats of the great days of the empire. Here sat, perhaps, a Nero or a Trajan, under a sweeping canopy of royal purple that rustled in the summer sun, while all about him stormy shouts of savage joy greeted the death throes of a defeated gladiator.

“A little further on in our journey and here is Avignon, the mediaevel city of the popes, and Carcassone, whose lofty turrets recall the splendors and the mysteries of the Middle Ages. . . .”

And so forth. . . .

II

THE REAL THING

Now let us put beside this the real vacation tour in a motor through Europe. We take it from the text of letter No. 13 from the correspondence of John Gasoline Smith, motorist-on-the-move, three days out from Paris and heading southward, westward, and a little east.

“On Thursday we got away to a good start from the town where we had slept and hit it up to about forty to forty-two an hour from 6.30 to 7.43, taking on gas only at the start, and filling up with twenty gallons. We calculate that in this country, which is hilly and rough, though the roads are good, we can’t get more than twelve out of a gallon. In the flat country, just out of Paris, we could easily get fourteen. The traction lift and the extra friction on the big hills makes a lot of difference. The wife and I find it mighty interesting to keep the figures and compare how many miles you can get out of a gallon in different parts of France. It gives a sort of diversity to the trip. In fact, we find that if you keep tab on your gasoline and your oil, and make a table of your mileage and figure out your day’s run in sections, it lends a great interest to the trip and prevents it from being monotonous.

“In France you soon learn the dodge of filling your tank right up, because at each station you are supposed to tip the man, and the tip is the same anyway. But we don’t mind the little stops anyway, because in France there is always something to study and look at, such as the way they set up their gas tanks, not a bit like ours and with a slower feed, and the much longer flexible pipe they use, so that you don’t need to drive off the road at all to get gas at the station.

“As I said to Lil, it is only when you travel that you really learn about a country. If we hadn’t taken this trip, I would never have known that in France they use a much more volatile gas than we do. It suits the climate better; and certainly the French climate is beautiful, with no danger of freezing up your radiator. In the French climate your oil never gets thick, but always runs nice and free and gets right to your bearings.

“Naturally, we are both picking up a lot of French, and can manage anything we want, such as, ‘Aves-vous de la gasoline?’ or ‘Combien chargez-vous pour gasoline ce matin?’ and ‘Voulez-vous avoir la bonte s’il vous plait de me donner un coup d’eau dans le radiator?’ and all the common, ordinary things like that.

“Coming down the valley of the big river here, which is called the Rhone, though at home we always heard of it as the Rhine, we struck quite a lot of bush and mountain country. But it didn’t matter, because the roads are all stone roads and the sight line is good, so that all you have to do is keep your eye on the road and go straight ahead.

“We made nearly 200 miles before lunch in spite of being held up for fifteen minutes by an old Roman town (the book said it was Roman), where the paving was so atrocious that we had two or three times to back out of a street again after getting started in it. However, we are getting wise to that game, and we find that when once you understand travel here you can avoid all the old towns by making a detour. Even if it takes you a few miles out of your direct way, it is well worth it.

“We got badly fooled, though, at a place called Nim, or Neam, or something like that, where we decided not to make a detour because we wanted to have a look at what we thought was a big new football stadium. It lost us about twenty-five minutes of our time and in the end the laugh was on us, because when we got nearer we saw it wasn’t a stadium at all, but just some sort of old ruin. We managed to avoid it before we got too close.

“We had lunch at a gasoline station. And then we got away on a clear stretch, and before the end of the day we had actually done 400 miles.

“We are reckoning that if we can do, say 250 miles a day from here, we can get clear to Spain by Thursday. I was suggesting to Lil that perhaps we could do better if we made a good part of our run after dark, when it’s cooler. There’s not much traffic in France after dark, and with good lights on your car you can see the road as clear as day, and that’s all you need to see.

“We are both fascinated with the trip and want very much to come again, if I can get away, and go over this same ground in winter. I’d like to see how the consumption of gasoline would compare in the colder weather. I’ve got an idea that the per mile cost of gasoline in France per ton of distance is away more than at home. It’s hard to reckon it out, as all the measurements are different. But I keep figuring on it in my head as we drive along.

“That’s another great thing about travel in Europe. It helps you to reflect. Often I fall into a regular reverie about it, and only wake up to hear a man saying, ‘Combien de gasoline, Monsieur?’ That’s the French for, ‘How much gasoline, boss?’”

TOC     INDEX

Tommy and Milly
at the Farm

The Old Version and the New

THE ORIGINAL VISIT, AS REPORTED IN ANY CHILD’S PICTURE BOOK
ANNO DOMINI 1900

Last summer Milly and Tommy went to spend two weeks at the farm with Mr. and Mrs. Pan-cake. Both the children were very fond of an-i-mals and they loved to see the moo-cows come up into the yard to be milked by Mrs. Pan-cake. Farmer Pan-cake put Tommy on the back of Dobbin, the old horse, and at first Tommy was afraid, but soon he got to like it and called out, “Gee! Up! Dobbin.” Mrs. Pan-cake showed Milly how to feed the ducks in the duck pond, and when Milly called “Dill, Dill,” all the ducks said, “Quack, Quack. . . .”

And so on. This visit could be carried on to infinity.

—

But now compare the visit to the farm by another Tommy and Milly, descendants of the above, some thirty years later.

THE VISIT OF 1930

Milly and Tommy, on their arrival at the farm, were shown into the study of the farmer, who was at that moment rapidly dictating to a young man, evidently his secretary.

Mr. Pangelly – he had changed his name from Pan-cake some twenty years before – pushed back his office chair, rose and shook hands cordially with the children.

“I remember very well,” he said, “the visit of your father and mother thirty years ago, though I did not see them. I was a youngster then just entering a technical college and I was not at home.”

The two children were somewhat embarrassed at first in the presence of the tall distinguished farmer, whose clear-cut features, slightly pale from his indoor life, looked piercingly at them from behind his gold pince-nez.

Mr. Pangelly, however, did his best to put the children at their ease.

“And so you little folks want to have a look around the farm, eh?” he said. “Well, well! Let me see. Burns,” he added, turning to the young man, “what time have I?”

“You’ve a conference with the Coöperative Sellers Committee at ten, sir,” said the secretary, “and I think you ought to finish dictating the crop report——”

“What about after lunch?”

“I’m afraid, sir, you promised to go round the links, and you’ve only half an hour anyway.”

“Humph!” said Mr. Pangelly. Then he stood for a moment as if lost in thought, murmuring, “Yes, that report, of course, yes.” He had the strange abstracted manner of a man accustomed to large problems.

Then suddenly he seemed to come back to himself.

“No, no, Burns,” he said, “let it all wait. Come along, we’ll take the young people around right now. And what would you like to see first?”

“Oh?” cried Tommy, enthusiastically, “I’d like to see the horses!”

Mr. Pangelly smiled.

“I’m afraid we haven’t any,” he said. “Have we, Burns?” The secretary shook his head. “You see, Tommy, we don’t use horses any longer in the country. They’re only used a little bit in city parks and drives by people who have a fancy for them. Here, of course, we use machinery——”

“Then couldn’t we see the cows milked?” asked Milly, humbly.

“I’m afraid I must disappoint you again,” said the farmer. “The cows are milked now by electricity and it’s done in the middle of the night. But come along, we’ll have a look around anyway.”

Mr. Pangelly took his Panama hat and his stick from a rack in the hall. “Tell Stetson,” he said to Burns as they went out, “that I will be back in twenty minutes.”

Tommy and Milly were greatly impressed with the huge farm buildings with the vast stone and concrete lower stories and the sweeping roofs of tin, each barn as large as a cathedral. From the inside came the dull hum of machinery.

Tommy and Milly in their shady street in the city had never seen anything close at hand so vast and imposing.

Mr. Burns, the secretary, opened the door of one of the buildings and showed to the children the huge lifts and clutches that handled the grain and the traveling cranes that moved it into place.

Mr. Pangelly followed their gaze, in his abstracted way.

“Did we ever test out,” he said to the young man, “the cost per ton of those? I’ve a notion that the friction loss is a way too high.”

“Anderson says no, sir,” replied Burns; “he worked it out and says that the friction loss is very heavy, but even at that it’s a way more economical than man power.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Pangelly, and stood for a few minutes lost in thought. “Perhaps,” he muttered, “perhaps.”

Then remembering the children he said, suddenly – “Well, let’s come out into the fields.”

From the barns the children passed through a tall hedge of cedar and before them opened up the huge expanse of a grain field. Tommy had hitherto seen nothing larger than a city ball ground in the park and was amazed at the size of the great field.

“What’s that big machine going up and down, sir?” asked Tommy.

“That,” said Mr. Pangelly, “that’s a tractor; wait a little bit and it will come closer.”

“The principle of it,” continued the farmer, as the huge machine, dragging a phalanx of tearing ploughs, drew close to them, “is quite simple. It’s only one of the many applications of the explosive engine combined, or perhaps I ought to say coördinated with a singular device in traction.” Mr. Pangelly’s voice trailed off into a sort of dreamy reverie as he spoke. “A simple device and yet how long we waited for it – just like the disk harrow – the most obvious application of an eccentric – and nobody thought of it——”

As they walked back towards the house, Tommy said timidly: “I think I’d like to be a farmer, Mr. Pangelly, when I grow up.”

“Quite right,” said Mr. Pangelly, “quite right. Aim high, little man, aim high, and stick to it. Many a little fellow has thought as you do and then after all fell back to be a lawyer, a doctor——”

Then he relapsed into silence.

“I can’t believe that Anderson is right about the friction,” he said. Then remembering where he was, “Burns,” he said, “I’m afraid I must get back. Now will you take these little folks to Mrs. Randall and no doubt she’ll get them something to eat. I don’t remember what children of their age do eat. A little grapefruit? Or pâté, or something. Good-by.”

“Good-by, sir,” said Tommy and Milly, humbly.

The visit to the farm was at an end.

TOC     INDEX

Life’s Little Inconsistencies

EXAMPLE NO. 1

The Up-to-Date Students
Take an Evening Off

They were sitting in their dormitory bed-smoking-study room – Gussie and Eddie – in the newly endowed million-door wing of their ten-million-dollar college.

Gussie had laid aside his ukulele and Eddie had given up the effort of trying to tune his mandolin.

“Have a cigarette,” said Gussie.

“Smoked them till I am sick of them,” answered Eddie.

“What in Hades can we do this evening?” said Gussie.

“I don’t know,” said Eddie with a yawn. “What about going to the pictures?”

“Sick of them,” said Gussie.

“There’s the sophomore play on tonight if we want to go to that.”

“I’m fed up with plays.”

“So am I. There’s a dance over at the Theta Beta Sorority.”

“Dance! I’ve been to ten this month.”

Gussie picked up the college newspaper and began looking up and down the columns.

“There’s a lecture in Founder’s Hall,” he said, “on Recent Progress in Science; want to go to that?”

Both the students laughed.

“Here’s another,” continued Gussie. “Meeting of the Astro-physical Society to discuss——”

“Oh, ditch it,” said Eddie.

“Well, I don’t see much else,” said Gussie. “There’s a reception by the senior year, we went to that last year, it’s hell. – There’s an uplift meeting of the Social Science Workers. There’s a debate at the Literary Society. There’s a motion picture show at the Geographical Club. – No, there doesn’t seem a thing to do.”

He yawned.

Both the students sat silent for a while.

Then suddenly Eddie became animated.

“I tell you!” he exclaimed, “I’ve got a whale of an idea. Let’s study! Let’s spend the evening right here and study! Eh, what!”

Gussie looked up.

“Right you are, Eddie,” he said, “you’ve said a mouthful. Got any books? Hold on, I’ve got some mathematics books there in the trunk packed with my winter underclothes. Attaboy! We’ll spend the evening just studying. However did you come to think of it?”

EXAMPLE NO. 2

The Golf Club Members
Brighten Up Their Afternoon

“Care to play bridge this afternoon?” asked the first member of the second.

“Too hot,” he answered drowsily.

Then they continued resting in the leather chairs of the lounge, gently breathing cigar smoke.

They had chosen a particularly comfortable corner of one of the fifteen lounge rooms of the More-Than-a-Million Golf Club. From the windows their eyes could roam over two hundred acres of woodland landscape diversified with brilliant greens and elevated tees. But they didn’t need to look that way. In fact, by telling one of the attendants to close the windows they needn’t see the course at all. The excellent acoustics of the building kept out all noise of any game.

“Don’t want a game of tennis, do you?” said the second member presently.

“I don’t think so, rather too much exertion.”

“It is, in a way. What about a dip in the swimming pool?”

“Oh, thanks, a little later it might be all right; rather too early in the afternoon now.”

“It is. But there doesn’t seem a dashed thing to do.”

There was another pause.

“Might play billiards, if you like.”

“Thanks, I was playing most of the morning.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do if you like,” said the first member, with the sudden enthusiasm of a man with an idea. “Come out on the links and I’ll play you a round of golf. What do you say?”

The other hesitated, attracted and yet wavering.

“The trouble is,” he said, “I’ve never played.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter. Very few of the members play. Come on. We’ll have a game of golf, just for fun.”

EXAMPLE NO. 3

The Nature-Writer Seeks Rest

“I’m tired, tired, devilish tired,” said the Nature-Writer, looking up from his table in the sun-and-air room of his Log Cabin in the Woods. “I get so cramped up here. There’s no space – no room to breathe. These everlasting woods all around and the racket of that river and the birds, and at night that whippoorwill! I can’t stand it!”

“I know,” murmured his wife. “I feel it, too, you know, though I haven’t liked to complain. One does feel so terribly shut in.”

“Listen, Emma,” exclaimed the Nature-Writer, throwing down his pens and paper. “Go and call up the railway station and get a compartment on that fast train that comes past this place at 2.30 in the morning; then call New York and get a room at the Biltmont, get seats for the Midnight Foolishness, and get a supper table at any of the good three-o’clock-in-the-morning clubs. – I need rest and quiet and I’m going to get it.”

EXAMPLE NO. 4

The Farmer Learns English

“Gee!” said the college professor of English to the Farmer, “this is certainly a pretty lay-out. I’ll say it is!”

“Yes,” answered the farmer, “we like to think that this view from our veranda is really quite as beautiful as any landscape could be. My wife often compares it to Versailles.”

They were sitting together after supper on the veranda at Meadowbrook Farm, where the college professor of English had just arrived as a summer boarder.

“It’s certainly a peach, all right,” said the professor.

“I like it especially,” the farmer went on, “when the sun sets and the twilight steals over it all. It gives one a sort of hushed feeling – I can’t express it – but something almost reverential.”

“I know what you mean,” said the professor, “it gets your goat.”

“I try in vain to think beyond it, to penetrate into the deeper mystery behind.”

“And it beats you to it,” murmured the professor sympathetically.

“At any rate,” concluded the farmer as they rose presently to go inside, “I am very glad and very much honoured to have you here. I want my son to go to your college, with English as his special subject, and now that you are here, I’ll have a chance to talk it all over.”

“Oh, send him to us,” assented the professor cheerfully. “We’ll learn it him all right.”

TOC     INDEX

New Words –
New Things

“Pardon me,” said the Aged Man. “Where did you say you come from?”

“I am a Lat,” said the Youth.

“A which?”

“A Lat.”

“Pray pardon me again. I meant what country do you come from?”

“I knew you meant that. I come from Latvia.”

“You will excuse me,” said the Aged Man, “but my memory perhaps grows weak. I have lived entirely out of the world since 1901, the first year of this century. I do not seem to recall your country. Where is it?”

“It is east of Czechoslovakia,” replied the Youth.

“Of what?”

“Of Czechoslovakia.”

“And where is that? I do not seem to know it.”

“It is almost directly North of Yugoslavia.”

The Aged Man, more than ever distressed at the apparent loss of his memory since his retirement, paused and was silent a moment; then he resumed.

“Are you under an emperor,” he asked, “or under a prince?”

“We are a republic, but we are not a Soviet.”

“Not what?”

“A Soviet. In fact, we are far indeed from being Bolsheviks.”

“Eh?”

“From being Bolsheviks. As a matter of fact, in our country we are much closer to being Fascisti than Bolsheviki.”

“Are you?” murmured the Aged Man feebly. Unable to comprehend anything of the Youth’s nation or national status, he proceeded to shift the conversation.

“And how did you happen to come to America?” he asked.

“Well,” replied the Youth, “in the first place, I was lucky enough to get on the quota.”

“The what?”

“The quota. You see the quota for Latvia is very seldom full. We are much luckier than Esthonia and Lithuania and Czechoslovakia. So I was able to get in.”

“I see,” murmured the Aged Man. But he didn’t. “And tell me, how did you come to think of migrating to America?”

“Oh,” replied the Youth casually, “I had got a great idea of the United States.”

“Ah, yes,” assented the Aged Man, glad at last to comprehend, “I understand. You had read a great deal about it.”

“No, I never read a word about it in my life.”

“But how then——”

“Oh, mostly in the Movies.”

“The what?”

“The Movies. I saw a scenario with a lot of skyscrapers in it. At that time, of course, we let in American films and were glad to get them, and this was a beautiful ten-reel film, one of the best films I ever saw on the screen——”

“Movies, films, screens,” murmured the Aged Man, putting his hand to his head. “I fear you must excuse me. As I explained to you when we met, I have lived for the last twenty-eight years as a missionary, entirely out of the world, among the Kalmuks beyond Yakutsk. I fear that perhaps the isolation has impaired my mental faculties. I do not seem to comprehend a word that you say.”

“No, no,” objected the Youth politely. “The fault is no doubt mine. I was explaining myself badly. I only meant that I was first attracted to the idea of America by the cinema.”

“The cinema?”

“Yes, by the cinematograph. That first attracted me; not only the skyscraper films, but a lot of scenarios. As a matter of fact, Hollywood itself has a wonderful attraction, I think. It is so absolutely American. Don’t you agree with me?”

“No doubt,” murmured the Aged Man. “And this flim that you speak of——”

“Film, sir,” corrected the Youth.

“This film with skyscrapers – I understand that, at least. It means a building ten stories high – it attracted you?”

The Youth laughed.

“To be frank,” he said, “it wasn’t only skyscrapers. There was a flapper, a typical American flapper.”

“A flapper?”

“Yes, a flapper. In the scenario the flapper was in a cafeteria——”

“It was where?”

“In a cafeteria: though we’d call them ‘She,’ sir, not it. The flapper was in a cafeteria – I mean in the beginning of the scenario, and there were a lot of guys sitting round and one lobster undertook to get fresh——”

“Stop! Stop!” pleaded the old man. “Were they eating the flapper?”

“No, no. The crowd would have eaten up the lobster.”

“Alas!” said the Aged Man, “I am quite lost. My brain, I realize, is a wreck. I don’t follow the story at all.”

“The fault again is entirely mine,” said the Youth. “If you don’t mind, I’ll explain it more properly and then you’ll understand it all right.”

“Ah, yes, pray do. Tell it from the beginning.”

“Well, you see the flapper in the story was the daughter of a bootlegger——”

“A what?”

“A bootlegger. Only, of course, no one knew that he was a bootlegger. To the outer world he was a very rich man, a refiner of gasoline, and the owner of a chain of garages and motor repair shops. That, of course, was merely in order to camouflage his real business – I think that is all clear, isn’t it?”

The old man gave something between a sigh and a groan, but he murmured. “Go on——”

“Very good. Well, naturally, being a bootlegger, or rather the head of a gang of bootleggers, this rich man was in direct contact with a good many rum-runners——”

“Rum – what? But never mind, go on.”

“Rum-runners; and somehow things began to get over to the ears of the prohibition officers——”

“The which?”

“The federal prohibition officers. And they learned that some one was running a power launch in and out of New York itself clear beyond the twelve-mile limit to the rum fleet. Do you understand?”

“Yes, yes, partly,” murmured the Aged Man.

“So they decided to get a fast airplane to try to——”

“To get a what?”

“A fast airplane – or to be more exact a hydroplane – you know what that is.”

“I fear that I have forgotten.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter; just picture to yourself an ordinary biplane with pontoon skids——”

“I’ll try to,” murmured the Aged Man.

“And they engaged an aviator who had been a famous ace——”

“A famous what?”

“An ace. – I beg your pardon, perhaps you don’t understand. – I simply mean an expert aviator in the service of the United States. Now it so happened that this very aviator the afternoon he was appointed to the job met the flapper; she was a débutante, who was the daughter of the rich bootlegger. He met her in a palm room——”

“In Honolulu?”

“No, no, in New York. He saw her tangoing with a friend of his.”

“Doing what?”

“Tangoing. It’s rather gone out now. You’d understand it better if I said doing the Charleston.”

“The what?”

“The Charleston, you know, the Black Bottom. I don’t understand these American dances very well myself, and, of course, when I saw it all in a film in Latvia, I only partly understood it. Anyway, this lobster, I mean the airman, saw the flapper dancing to the jazz music——”

The Aged Man put up his hand with a gesture of despair. “I fear that I cannot follow it – Airmen, jazz, lobsters, flappers, biplane! – I cannot understand it. Tell me very simply how it all ended.”

“Oh, naturally,” laughed the Youth, “it all ends happily enough. The girl learns through the indiscretion of the airman that her father is in danger and that they have set up a radio from the rum patrol to——”

“Set up a what from where?”

“A radio, a wireless. Just an ordinary receiver with a high-power transmitter with the antenna carefully hidden.”

“Oh, I see.”

“But the girl has a radio at the top of her father’s house and she listens in because she has learned to tune her wave length.”

The Aged Man sank into a half collapse.

“Tell me only how it ends at the very end. I suppose they get married, don’t they? The world can’t have changed as much as that?”

“Married! Heavens, no! They get divorced! You see, I forgot to explain. They were both married at the start of the story only——”

“Stop!” said the Aged Man, rising with a renewed firmness in his limbs. “You need tell me no more. I am going.”

“Going!”

“Yes, back among the Kalmuks. At least there, a thousand miles even from Yakutsk, I am safe from this modern incomprehensible world of radios and rum fleet, movies and wave lengths. I shall go back——”

“Where did you say?” said the Youth. “What was that place you named?”

“Yakutsk.”

“Yakutsk! Why, how odd. I saw the name of that place in the afternoon paper I was reading when you came in. Let me see, yes, here is the item: ‘Will fly to Yakutsk. Expedition will start in dirigibles for Yakutsk with a view to develop the deposits of radium said to be available about 1,000 miles to northeast. They will be equipped with wireless, and will carry not only collapsible hydroplane, but also interchangeable submarine parts and——’”

But the Aged Man had fainted.

TOC     INDEX

More Messages from Mars

A Personal Encounter with the First Martian Across

For some little time back it has become only too evident that we are on the brink of getting into communication with planet Mars.

Everybody knows that Mars is a planet just like our own. It is only forty million – or forty billion – miles away.

During this very winter the most distinguished of British mathematical astronomers has assured the press that there is life on Mars; that the conditions are such that there cannot fail to be life there. At the same time a London medical scientist, an expert in radio communication, has announced the receipt of actual messages from the planet.

The announcement has been followed by similar news from other quarters, of messages partly radioactive, and partly telepathic, messages which of course were imperfect and at times undecipherable, but still, from their very content, undoubtedly messages. To those who have the will to believe and who have not hardened their understanding into skepticism, the thing is achieved. Communication has begun.

Messages have been coming across the gulf of forty million – or forty billion – miles of empty space. I confess that I, like many other people, have been following every development with the greatest interest, an interest that has amounted almost to absorption.

But till just the other evening I should never have dreamed that it would be my individual good fortune to come into contact with an actual Martian, the first, so I am entitled to believe, who ever made his way to the surface of the globe.

Where I met him was at the dark end of a railway platform, in the night, at a lost railway junction, where trains meet and go on.

He sat there alone, huddled up in the dark against an express truck. The very outline of him told me that there was something strange about him, and yet I don’t know why. His figure was frail, but certainly human; his clothes queerly cut, but yet not so very different from ours. No, there was nothing external, but merely something psychic, to tell me that he was a being different from the common terrestrial kind.

He spoke.

“Is there a train south?” he said. His voice was the voice of a person framing the syllables to be understood. But the words were English and the sounds at least intelligible.

At the sudden sound of his voice I had not been able to restrain a start for which I apologized.

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I am afraid you startled me; to tell the truth, I was lost in thought. I was thinking of the Martians.”

“Martians?” he said. “That’s me. I am a Martian.”

“A Martian!” I exclaimed. “Great heavens, a Martian! From Mars? But how did you get here?”

“I wish I knew,” he said. “I’m from back there all right,” and he pointed his thumb over his shoulder to the south, to where the planet Mars glowed red just above the horizon. “But as to how I got here, with all these trains and things, I’ve lost all track of it.”

“Poor fellow,” I reflected, “he doesn’t understand.” I knew, of course, from what our leading scientists have told us that he had come to this earth by a process that will one day be as familiar as the passage of light and radioacting. He had been disembodied and sent over.

I could have explained to him, in a rough and ready sort of way, that his atomic structure had been broken loose and sent across the gulf of empty space and then had reassembled itself on this planet. Five minutes ago, so I could have told him, he was in Mars. But it seemed cruel to mention it. Those who had sent him over could reassemble him again, and bring him back – full of territorial information.

Even at the present stage of our scientific development there is no mystery in this; nothing but the need of the further elaboration of processes already known.

I determined, while there was still time, to make full use of him.

“There is no train south,” I said, “for over half an hour. But tell me about the Martians.”

“About the Martians,” he repeated. “What about them?”

“Yes,” I said, “about their life, how they live and what it feels like and what they do and what they think about things.”

The Man from Mars seemed amazed and puzzled at the question. “What they do and what they think?” he repeated. “Why – much like any other people, I guess.”

I realized that of course this extraordinary being, the denizen of another world, could have no idea that he was extraordinary. He took himself and his Martian world for granted.

I decided to approach things more gently.

“Have the Martians,” I asked, “ever heard of Mr. Hoover?”

“Of Mr. Hoover!” he answered with surprise. “Why, what do you take us for? Of course we have. We had the radio for a long time before the elections.”

I hadn’t realized that of course our terrestrial radio messages had reached the planet Mars as easily, or almost as easily, as they encircle our little globe. I saw myself on the brink of wonderful information.

“Wait a minute,” I said, “till I get out a note book. Even in this imperfect light I can jot down what you tell me. Now then, what are the principal things that the Martians are discussing, or were discussing when you left?”

“Well – prohibition——” he said.

“And what is their feeling about it?”

“Most of them think it a good thing in the business sense, but a lot of them think it would be better still if a man could get a good drink when he really needs it. As we see it in Mars,” he pronounced the name of his planet with a peculiar lisp, “the real solution would be some way of having total prohibition with honest enforcement and good liquor.”

I wrote it all down.

“What do they think about the women’s vote?” I asked.

“Oh, we’ve accepted that long ago,” the Martian said. “There’s no question of going back on their having the vote; the only trouble is that they seem to be using it too much.”

“Do the Martians,” I asked, “know anything about the question of the United States building a big navy?”

“Oh, sure,” he answered, “we all say that the United States needs a navy big enough to guarantee peace by licking all the European nations one after the other.”

“It is amazing,” I said, as I wrote his answers down, “what you Martians know about our big question. What about the St. Lawrence Waterways scheme?”

“We’re all for it,” answered the Martian. “We think it a good idea. It will help the Middle West.”

“And what are they saying over there about Church Union in the United States?”

“We ourselves,” he replied, “are about evenly divided among Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians. But we think that union is coming. But I tell you——” He broke off with something like impatience. “Naturally, we don’t spend most of our time talking over things like that. We are more interested in our own local concerns, the things that interest ourselves——”

“Of course, of course,” I said, “tell me about those.”

“Well, you see, just at this time of year there are the hockey matches every Saturday, and they draw a big crowd; and then there’s a good deal of excitement over the question of the new post office, and this coming week we are to take a vote on having a new radial railway to Philadelphia——”

“To where?” I exclaimed.

“To Philadelphia. Why not?”

A feeling of uncertainty began to come over me.

“Excuse me,” I said, “you are a Martian, are you not?”

“Certainly,” he said, “I am.”

“From Mars?”

“Not Mars,” he corrected me, “Marsh. It’s in Chester County, Pennsylvania, just a little place, but you seemed to have heard of it. Though how I got mixed up on these trains and got away up here is more than I can tell.”

“And this information,” I said, “that you’ve been giving me is not from the Martians of the Planet Mars but from the Marshians of Marsh, Pennsylvania?”

“Sure,” he answered.

“Well, never mind,” I said, as I turned away, “from all I’ve seen of the Martian communications from Mars up to now they are not any different from yours. That’s your train pulling in now. Good night.”

TOC     INDEX

Portents of the Future

Various recent events have brought again in the forefront of public attention the whole question of clairvoyance, of prophecy, and of the power of the human mind to interpret the portents of the future.

Indeed, it is a topic of which the interest is as continual and unending as in life itself.

The subject is not one on which I should care under any ordinary circumstances to have anything to say. My own opinions are certainly free from all prejudice, leaning, I trust, neither to being credulous nor to being impervious to conviction.

If I were inclined to hold an opinion in either direction, I fear that I should incline to skepticism rather than to belief.

But it happened to be my lot very recently to be brought into contact with a variety of facts, or rather, with a variety of narratives of facts, of such a nature that I cannot refrain from allowing myself to act as an intermediary through whom they may be conveyed to the reading public.

I may say that all of the persons concerned (whose names, for obvious reasons, I withhold) are personally known to me and have been known to me this long while.

None of them are capable of any fraud or deceit in the matters concerned, and no one of them has ever occupied the position of a professional medium or clairvoyant.

In other words, in what I am about to relate there can be no suspicion of bad faith or deceit; there might, of course, be errors of observation or lapses of memory. But the essential truthfulness of the narration cannot be gainsaid.

—

What happened took place around the fire after a pleasant dinner-party in which eight or ten persons, all old friends, had participated.

I do not recall just what had turned our thoughts toward the supernatural; it may easily have been something in recent press dispatches. But my memory is inexact.

At any rate, it was our host, X, who spoke first. I ought, perhaps, to state that X is not my host’s name, nor does that letter, it is only fair to add, enter into his name in any way.

I merely select it as one of the letters of the alphabet less apt, perhaps, to arouse curiosity and to stimulate conjecture than the more usual letters of the alphabet.

It was X then who spoke first:

X SPEAKS

“What you were just saying reminds me,” he said, “of a very striking case of clairvoyance, or vision of the future, that came under my own immediate observation.

“In fact, it concerned one of the partners in my own firm. My partner, whom I will call merely J, came to the office one day in what was evidently a very depressed condition. Indeed, I was struck with his appearance at once.

“I asked him if he was ill, and he answered that he was not in any way ill, but that he was suffering from an overwhelming conviction that something was about to happen. We all did our best to laugh him out of what seemed merely a foolish fancy, but it was of no avail.”

“And what happened?” we asked eagerly.

“Nothing that day,” said X, “nor indeed for some little while after. But exactly a month later, or, to be still more precise, exactly one month and three days later, J’s wife received a letter from India stating that a gentleman whom they had both met on a steamer, and whom J and Mrs. J both remembered quite well, had lost his job in the Bank of Bombay.”

PECULIAR EXPERIENCE OF Y’S BROTHER

There was a moment of silence at the sudden and tragical ending of X’s story. Then another of the guests, whom I will merely designate as Y, spoke in turn.

“I do not doubt for a moment that what you say is true, especially as I can quote a very similar case that happened in my own family; in fact to one of my own brothers.”

“What was that?” asked several of us eagerly.

“It happened last year at the time of the spring races,” continued Y, “and the person concerned, I mean the person who had the presentiment was my brother George, or perhaps I had better call him merely J.”

“Don’t call him J,” interrupted one of the group. “X’s friend was called J.”

“Very well,” said Y, “I will call my brother G, and will mention that he, G, was at the time to which I refer in Toronto and on his way to the Woodbine Races, or perhaps I had better say he was in T and on his way to the W. Races, or, if you like, to the W. R.

“I happened to meet him, and it seemed to me that he was deeply depressed. ‘Where are you going, G?’ I inquired. ‘To the W. R.,’ he answered, and I’ve got a peculiar presentiment (I think G said “Hunch”) that I am going to get stung.’ I learned later that he went to the races and immediately lost a bet, in dollars, at two hundred to one.”

“Lost two hundred dollars!” we all exclaimed.

“No,” corrected Y, “lost a dollar.”

AMAZING STORY BY MRS. Z

There was a silence for some time after the completion of Y’s narrative, each of us no doubt being engaged in puzzling over the strange case of clairvoyance, or prevoyance, that he had related.

When our conversation was resumed, it was one of the ladies of the group who spoke first. The lady in question, the wife of one of those present (whom I may call Z) and whose wife, therefore, may be designated for our present purpose as Mrs. Z, was an old and valued friend of several of those around the fire.

She was in no way addicted to idle fancies, and was distinguished rather by her matter-of-fact common sense than by a tendency to over-belief. There can, therefore, be no reason to doubt in any way the entire truthfulness of what she told me, incredible though it seems.

“I sometimes think,” began Mrs. Z, “that we women are perhaps endowed with keener faculties towards insight into the future than you men.”

There was a pause of several minutes, after which Mrs. Z continued:

“I certainly have known one case of clairvoyance that made the deepest impression upon my mind, especially as it concerned the most impressive of all portents, the portent of death itself.”

There was a still longer pause, half as long again as the first one, and then Mrs. Z continued once more:

“I had a very dear friend,” she said, “whom I will call G——”

“I beg your pardon,” said Y quietly. “I must apologize for interrupting, but we agreed to call my brother G.”

“Pray excuse me,” murmured Mrs. Z. “I fear I was lost in my recollections. Suppose, then, that I call my friend M.”

There was a general murmur of assent and then a pause, and then Mrs. Z went on:

“M from her girlhood up, and down, had always been of a highly-strung psychic temperament, much addicted to vivid dreams and profound introspection. Meeting her one day on the street, dressed as if for a journey, I was surprised to learn that she was leaving for Europe immediately. What was my further astonishment when M told me that she had a profound conviction that she was going to be taken ill on the steamer and die on board ship.”

A murmur of something like horror went round the little group.

“And she died on the way?” asked X.

“No,” said Mrs. Z, “that was the strange part of the portent. She reached England safely, spent the summer there, and then after the summer embarked on a ship for Stockholm, in Sweden.”

“And died on board!” we gasped.

“No, got to Stockholm, where she spent the winter.”

Mrs. Z paused. We all waited without speaking, conscious in some way that a tragedy was coming. At length Mrs. Z resumed:

“From Stockholm my friend took a boat for Dantzig, in Germany.”

“And died on it!” we all exclaimed.

“No, she got to Dantzig. And then oddly one day she took a small canal boat for a mere passage of a few hours to Hootch, in Poland.”

No one spoke for some time, and then Y asked very quietly, “Did she die on the canal boat?”

“No,” said Mrs. Z, “she did not.”

After which Mrs. Z fell into a deep silence which we did not care to disturb.

EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE OF Q

We therefore remained silent for some time, and indeed it was not until the stillness had grown almost painful that Mr. Q, a young married member of the circle, at length broke the silence. I ought, perhaps, to add that his name is not really Q.

“I suppose,” began Q, “that most of you have the usual prejudice against paid mediums and clairvoyants, and people who undertake for money to read the secrets of the future.”

A murmur that might have been either dissent or assent (or anything else) went around the auditors.

“What about it?” said X firmly.

“Well, at any rate,” said Q, “I always had such a prejudice and had it very strongly till it got rudely shaken a few years ago – shortly after our marriage, in fact.”

“Tell us the circumstances,” we all exclaimed with immediate interest, our faculties instantly alert.

“They were these,” said Q. “My wife and I were newly married, and there were certain things about our future that we were most anxious to find out. We went to a professional medium, Madame Zend Avesta, a Persian, I believe, though she spoke English as well as I do. I saw from her card in a magazine, however, that she was a native of Ispahan, and had been second assistant prognosticator to the Shah.”

There was a pause. No one felt inclined to urge Q to begin again, but presently he began.

“This woman actually told us some of the most extraordinary things. She foretold that I would be moved by my firm to Milwaukee, that I would get an increase of salary, that an uncle would leave me ten thousand dollars – in fact, a heap of things.”

We literally held our breath at these staggering disclosures from Mr. Q.

“Yes,” he continued, “we went right to Madame Avesta and put the questions to her. They were a dollar a question, and naturally we had thought them out pretty carefully. I first said to her:

“‘My firm talks of moving me to Milwaukee. Am I going there?’

“‘Yes,’ she answered without a second’s hesitation.

“I gave her a dollar. ‘Uncle John,’ I said, ‘always promised to leave me ten thousand dollars. He died in New Orleans a week ago. Has he done it?’

“‘He has,’ she answered.

“I was so amazed and astounded at the evident ease of her clairvoyance that, after paying her another dollar, I ventured to put a question of even more moment.

“‘Our manager, Mr. Niel,’ I explained, ‘promised me before last Christmas that I would have an increase of $1,000 a year this coming spring. Do I get it?’

“‘You do,’ she said.

“We asked her in all about twenty-five questions before we desisted, which we did not do until our money ran out and Madame Avesta said that her contact was weakening.”

“And did the prophecies come true?” asked several of us breathlessly – in fact, we had not recovered our breath since Q began.

“Most of them,” said Q, “or, at any rate, without exaggeration I should say that fifty per cent., or something very close to it, turned out to be absolutely correct.”

—

A long silence followed the conclusion of Q’s relation. After which we rose quietly one by one, groped our way out of the house, and then groped home as best we could.

TOC     INDEX

Rural Urbanity

Showing How the Country Is Now Certified Citified

About a generation ago the country newspaper was an unfailing source of merriment for the city people. There were columns of personal news items from such places as Price’s Corners and East Pefferlaw, which announced that Miss Posie Possum was over Sunday with her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Hamcake; that Edward Falls was back around town for a week Sunday (good boy, Ed! come again), and that some of our young people were over to Fesserton Friday, where a good time was had by all.

There was the description of the tea social held in the meeting-house on the town line, where forty-two people sat down to forty-two buckets of strawberries with forty-two quarts of ice cream, the pastor being untiring in his efforts, after which Cherry Blossom recited Hiawatha’s farewell to Mudgekewiss and a collection was taken in silver by Miss Phoebe Floss, aged 12.

There was the entertainment in the schoolhouse and – but there is no need to enumerate all these things. Everybody has read of them or has read parodies of them.

The point is, however, that all this is entirely changed. What with the motor-car and the rural telephone, hydro-electric power and the radio, the normal school and the speedway and the community movement, the farmers’ Rotary Club and the Farm Girls’ Social Improvement Circle, the country has become quite unrecognizable.

It is more citified than the city itself, and the only country left is in the immediate suburbs of the city where they keep hens in Maplewood and grow garden peas in Floraldale and have a local paper that likes to talk of the weather and the chance of raising ducks in the pond in the park.

But as for the country itself, you have only to compare the local press of the parody days, say in 1898, and the up-to-date local press of 1930. Put together, for example, side by side, the columns of the Midge’s Corners Sentinel and Advocate, 1898, and the columns of the paper into which it has developed by merging with three other Sentinels and two other Advocates under the name of the Midge’s Corners Metropolitan.

RURAL TRANSPORTS

1898.

We noticed Wednesday friend Ed Wildman out for a spin with a lady friend in his new top buggy. We have seldom seen anything that struck us as daintier or cleaner.

—

1930.

We observed with interest on Wednesday afternoon our friend Mr. Edward Wildman, Junior, trying out a circling flight in his new two-seater monoplane.

Mr. Wildman was accompanied by a lady passenger, who seemed thoroughly to enjoy the exhilarating and exciting sport. They effected their landing on the top of Joe Thompson’s new barn, which has been adapted for the purposes of an aerodrome. We congratulate the young people in helping to encourage aeronautics in this section. We are informed that it is in the air that the aeronautic society of the Corners will soon put up an aerodrome, the need for which is felt by all the farming community.

PERSONAL ITEMS

1898.

Charlie Neal was around all last week, looking pretty spry. Charlie still has work in the city and tells us he is making big money. Well done, Charlie!

—

1930.

We were glad to observe Mr. Charles Neal, the financier, as a visitor last week to this district, once his boyhood home. We understand that Mr. Neal is now planning a merger of the United States Steel Corporation with the principal European steel interests. We are certain that he will receive warm local support.

VAGRANTS IN TROUBLE

1898.

Two of our boys from the Corners, Archie Riddell and Joe Thayer, got safely back from the City today after a pretty hard experience. Archie and Joe lost their cash to a stranger, found themselves stranded with nowhere to go and with no knowledge of the city. Being naturally ignorant of where to look for help, the boys might have fared badly but for the kind offices of a city constable who got the boys safely on their home train. Our advice to our young people is to keep away from the city till they are of sufficient years and experience to be able to go there without risk.

—

1930.

Two unfortunate youths from the city found their way somehow to the Corners yesterday. They seem to have been mere immigrant youngsters acquainted only with the city and ignorant of everything. Some smart young local slicker, it seems, had relieved them of their cash. Quite unable to look after themselves, having never been out of the city, they might have fared badly but for the kind offices of our local constable, who put them on the train for the city. Our advice to young people in the city is they should not attempt to leave it until they reach years of experience.

CORRESPONDENCE

1898

The Editor,

The Midge’s Corners
Sentinel and Advocate.

Dear Sir:

I think that some of your readers need to be reminded that the culvert on the fourth concession is still not yet fixed right and more than one team has been through the top of it, endangering the horses’ legs, to say nothing perhaps of human life. Now, Mr. Editor, I think it is high time our people showed more public spirit in a thing like this culvert, which is a public danger. Mr. Nath. Gordon, as all know, has offered time and again to set it straight either on time and material or for money, and so far our Solons of the township council have done nothing about it. I think, sir, that if the farmers of the section would pay a little less interest to their own concerns and a little more to general interests of the world such as this culvert, it would be a good thing. Thanking you for the esteemed use of your valued space.

CORRESPONDENCE

1930

The Editor,

The Midge’s Corners
Metropolis.

Dear Sir:

The rather meager attendance at the Open Forum debate over the grocery on the League of Nations seems to show a lamentable lack of public spirit in this community. The failure of Poland to give a proper guarantee for the status quo of the Dantzig corridor is a matter that ought not to be complacently accepted by the people of our district. Most of our farmers, I am certain, are not in favour of a Polish sovereignty over an enclave of non-Slavonic groups, but if so they ought to speak out more definitely. I hope that this section will soon let the world know what it thinks.

THE CROPS AND THE WEATHER

1898.

Josh Peters says that the signs are for a bumper crop in this section as soon as the warm spell opens up. There is less fur on the chipmunks, so Josh tells us, and less tail on the woodchucks than for many seasons, and the tail feathers of the crows are thinning out already. All this points to hot, dry weather and a good growing season. Tell us some more, Josh.

—

1930.

Mr. Josiah Peterson has just prepared an interesting statistical forecast of the grain crop of this section, printed in another column of this paper, and based on an index average covering the last twenty years, with 1913 as the base. The humidity curve on Mr. Peterson’s chart shows a high upward tendency, with an average barometric pressure of over 94 per cent. Mr. Peterson estimates the world price of wheat at $1.51 cents, with a crop of 21.58 bushels to the acre, omitting, however, the Argentine and Soviet Russia, for both of which his calculations fall short of certainty.

MUSIC

1898.

The school concert last week was voted by all a success. Miss Posie McPhee sang “Pull for the Shore, Sailor,” and Miss Ettie Tomlinson sang “Yes, We Will Gather at the River.” Both were encored and both sang their songs again, the conclusion being applauded by all present.

—

1930.

The Ladies’ Every Other Morning Club held its second Chamber Music Recital yesterday in the school house, presenting an excellent program, both vocal and instrumental. Miss Posie McPhee’s singing of “O! Qual Orrore!” and her interpretation of “O! Quel Inferno!” scored a decided hit, while the rendition of Handel’s “Largo” in nine flats by Miss Ettie Tomlinson on the pianoforte was decidedly one of the triumphs of the local musical season. If we may venture a criticism, we would say that possibly the Price’s Corners’ quartet in presenting Braga’s “Serenata” took the aria with a little too much brio, a fault that further experience will easily rectify.

FOREIGN NEWS

1898.

A letter has reached us all the way from London, England, where Ed. Farrell reached safely last month after a voyage across the entire Atlantic. Ed. says that London is a great place. Mr. Farrell arrived there on the 10th ult. and his letter, dated on the 15th, arrived here yesterday. In another column we publish his description of the interior of Westminster Abbey as seen from the outside.

—

1930.

The news that Mussolini has a cold, posted on the grocery window, attracted quite a crowd last night. Considerable expressed alarm.

TOC     INDEX

College Now
and College Then

All Up!

Average Life at the Average College, as Gathered from the Pages of Any College Daily at Any Alma Mater

—

Monday, First of the Month.
Extracts from the Daily Ding Dong, Alma Mater College.

All up, Boys, for the big basket-ball game tonight. We want to see every man turn out and root and shout for Alma Mater. Remember, this is the first big game there has been for ten days, and there will be no other for over a week. Every man up! We want every man who has proper college spirit to be right there in the grand stand, rooting. You can buy right on the spot a program that will tell you who the players are, and how the game is played, and how to know which side is which. All up!

But at the same time:—

Don’t forget that before the game begins you have time to come and hear the Banjo and Mandolin Semi-Final Tryout in Hoot-It-Up Hall. All free, no charge. Remember that the Banjo Club and the Mandolin League need support. These things can’t live on mere love of music. They need enthusiasm, they need rooting, they need support. They need you. One dollar a year from every student at Alma Mater will buy a banjo for every man in the fourth year.

But, REMEMBER, best of all! Everybody up for the big ALL-ALMA-MATER SORORITY AND FRAT FEED right after the big basket-ball game! Buy your flowers early, as the College Chrysanthemum Shop reports a big run already. We want to see everybody at this feed and dance! It will be the last dance but two before the final three. Don’t miss it! All up!

We call your attention also to our advertising columns under the head of WHERE TO GO AFTER THE DANCE. Do you want a cozy feed for a dozen or so at a table and a high-class cabaret show? Drop in at the Students’ Alma Mater Union. Cover charge, only two dollars.

So ends Monday.

Tuesday, Second of the Month.
The Daily Ding Dong Speaks Again.

We hope that all students will duly turn out at 11.00 a.m. to exercise their privilege of voting for the new members of the Students’ Government League. The different faculties have suspended all lectures for the day in order to enable students to vote at eleven o’clock. Get in early. It is the duty of every student to remember that all the activities of college life ought to be his earnest concern. Don’t miss any. On page four you can see who the candidates are and what the Government League is. But come anyway. There will be student ushers who will tell you how to vote.

Also – for those who have voted——

FREE EXHIBITION OF CONJURING

All student voters are invited at 11.30 to come into Hoot-It-Up Hall and see a free exhibition of conjuring given for the benefit of the students by Signor Ninni the distinguished Italian conjurer now appearing at the Star Theater. What we need at Alma Mater is all-around culture. Conjuring is just as much a part of the student’s work as mathematics or football. All up!

And don’t forget——

Later in the day at 3.00 p.m. – STUDENTS’ ANNUAL ESQUIMO DOG RACE, followed at 4.00 p.m. by GRAND RECEPTION BY THE LOCK AND KEY SOCIETY TO THE VISITING DELEGATE FROM THE OJIBWAY INDIAN RESERVATION TECHNICAL SCHOOL.

Wednesday, Third of the Month.
More Extracts from the Daily Ding Dong.

Fellow students! Tonight is the big night – the one night in the year. Leave aside all books for this one evening and turn out for the ALMA MATER FOLLIES. The performance is staged for 8.00 in the Alma Mater Theater and runs till 1.00 a.m. Tickets $5.00 a seat and up.

All reports say that the Follies this year will be bigger, brighter, and brainier than in any year before. Special features this year include a buck and wing clog dance by the Trustees of Alma Mater, champion mouth organ solo by the Dean of Research, and a huge ensemble chorus composed of all the girls worth looking at in Alma Mater. All up!

Thursday, Fourth of the Month.
The Daily Speaks for the Fourth Time.

We regret that in our yesterday’s number we omitted to give adequate publicity to the joint meeting of the Mathematical and Economic Societies to hold a joint debate on “How to Make Money Out of the Stock Exchange.” We are glad to learn that the meeting was in any case a crowded one.

Lack of space prevented us from giving more than a passing announcement of the annual meeting of the Students’ Rod and Gun Club, of the Students’ Deep Sea Travel Association, the Bridge and Poker Club, the Night Off Society, and the Rest from Study Association.

—

Today the Daily earnestly hopes that every student of Alma Mater will turn out to see the final All-Continent Ping Pong Match between Alma Mater and the University of Tugugigalpa, Honduras. Alma Mater will be represented by Ted Swatgood, who has done more to put Alma Mater over at Ping Pong than any student alive or deserving to live. Tugugigalpa will be championed by the redoubtable Joe Logwood, one of the big figures of the Ping Pong world.

If Alma Mater wins – that is, if Ted beats Logwood – we are tied for the semi-final. Alma Mater has put big work into this; that is to say, Ted has been training under a staff of ten coaches for a year at the expense of the college. It won’t do to lose. If this college carries off the Ping Pong pennant, it is a grand thing for everybody connected with Alma Mater; this muscle-building, character-making sport is what is needed to build us up. It is all the greater pity that this year only four out of our four thousand students actually played the game. But we expect the others to make up for this by turning out en masse to help down Logwood.

Friday, Fifth of the Month.
The Daily Still Exhorting.

All students, attention! A principal feature for this afternoon will be an EXHIBITION OF DANCING GUINEA PIGS in Hoot-It-Up Hall. This entertainment, which is being staged by the Department of Anthropology, will run from 2.00 p.m. till 6.00 p.m. Students are requested to get into their seats sharply on time so as not to keep the pigs waiting. Remember the hour, 2.00 p.m., and the name, Guinea Pigs. All afternoon classes suspended.

—

We beg to call attention to a letter appearing in another column and forwarded to us by Mr. Hustle Moore of the class. Mr. Moore draws attention to the fact that under present conditions at Alma Mater the students have not enough opportunity to get to know one another. He suggests a new organization to be called the WHO DO YOU KNOW CLUB, with power from the students’ council to collect fees and to compel attention. The Daily is entirely in sympathy. The only way to get the students of this college to appreciate one another is to levy a suitable fee and fine those who drop out.

—

(Friday Continued)

Supplemental Item
Set by the Daily in Black

The Daily is under the melancholy duty of chronicling the death of one of our fellow students, Mr. J. Smith, under very distressing and baffling circumstances. The doctors who attended our deceased fellow student declare that he died from over-study. This seems inexplicable, but apparently the medical facts warrant no other conclusion. That any student at Alma Mater College could be exposed to a danger of this sort is extremely difficult to believe. It may have been that the mistaken young man was purveying books to his room and making surreptitious use of his room as a place of study. This, of course, would be extremely difficult to prevent.

The sad occurrence teaches us, however, one lesson at Alma Mater, namely, that every effort should be made to brighten and diversify our college life. Our present activities are confined perhaps to too limited a field, and it might be well to call a general meeting to form a WIDER ACTIVITIES’ LEAGUE. Meanwhile there is one thing that we can do to honour the memory of our misguided fellow student. We want to see every man turn out at his funeral and testify in an unmistakable way to the grief we feel. We suggest a try-out rehearsal for the mourners in Hoot-It-Up Hall and then a big grand rally on the day itself. All up, boys, for Smith’s funeral. Don’t forget the name, Smith.

Saturday. Last Call.
(Poster in the corridors of Alma Mater.)

Owing to the nervous prostration of all the editors, the Daily will not appear till Monday.

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Willie Nut
Tries to Enter College

The news item in last week’s paper to the effect that Willie Nut, High School graduate, attempted suicide excited no doubt but little interest and little comment. It was lost from sight among the world-events of a rapid age.

Under such circumstances, it is perhaps appropriate to make a brief statement of the facts in regard to Willie Nut’s attempted demise. It came as a direct consequence of his inability to get admitted to the freshman class of any of the great universities. As the difficulties he encountered are typical of the present situation all over the country, I propose to set down briefly the history of Willie’s case.

1919 to 1929 Willie Nut attended “Prep” and “High.” He studied Latin, Basketball, Arithmetic, Needlework, Chemistry, Character Building, and, in short, the full program of up-to-date education. He took 95 per cent in Latin, made the Ping Pong Team, and delivered a five-minute graduation speech on the Greatness of George Washington. The boy being thus entirely equipped, his father, William Nut, Senior, bought him a tuxedo jacket and tried to enter him at College.

The first application was made to one of the older historic colleges of the East. It is not fair to name it here, as the President has expressly disclaimed all responsibility for Nut’s attempted suicide. But the documents in the case are as follows.

There was first a letter of application for admission sent by William Nut, Senior, on his son’s behalf. As an answer to it there came back a letter from the Second Assistant to the Secretary of the President in regard to the “candidacy” of Willie Nut.

William Nut, Senior,

Nut Town.

Dear Sir:

In regard to your son’s application for entry with the first year of this university, I shall be obliged if you will fill out answers to the following questions:

1.  How many quarterings of nobility has your son got?

2.  What ancestors of your son’s fought in the American Revolution?

3.  Did you yourself ever fight in the American Revolution, and how did you come out?

Willie Nut’s parents having sent answers to these questions, the following further communication was received by Mr. Nut, Senior:

Dear Sir:

In regard to your son’s application for admission to this college, I am glad to inform you that his name has been duly passed and that he will be placed upon the probationary list of first year students. It is proper to inform you that it is hardly likely that he can be actually admitted to study until about 1940.

The Nut family, having decided not to wait until 1940, next tried another of the older eastern colleges and received the following answer from the Dean of the Committee of Rejection:

In regard to the application of William Nut, Junior, for admission to the freshman year of this college, I am happy to inform you that we have decided to eliminate the freshman class altogether. We find that the continued presence of students at the university impedes its work. As soon as the present upper year have been graduated, or expelled, we hope to limit the personnel of our college to the faculty, the football team, and the Rooters’ Club. In our opinion, this is all we need.

—

Being thus shut out from the colleges of the East, one after the other, Willie Nut next applied for admission to some of the better known colleges of the Middle West. Here, as everybody knows, admission is no longer based upon mere scholastic standing but on character. “We don’t want,” so wrote recently the President of one of these colleges, “students who think; we want students who live.” It is a resolute attempt not to let in dead ones that was expressed in Willie’s case by a letter sent to William Nut, Senior, in the following terms:

Dear Sir:

In regard to your son’s application for admission to college, we have to inform you that our selection of students is based chiefly on character. We shall therefore ask you to send out the following questionnaire, of which we enclose fifty copies, to fifty of your friends and acquaintances, in order that we may form an idea of your son’s candidacy. Afterwards we will send out another set of questionnaires to see how your friends stand themselves.

Questionnaire for Candidacy of Willie Nut

1.  What is your general idea of the character of Willie Nut, Junior?

2.  How would he measure up in an emergency? . . . If some one dropped a brick on him, how would he react to the brick? If he fell off a fifteen-story building, what would he do?

3.  What percentage would you say there is in Willie Nut’s character, (a) of personality, (b) of likability, (c) of enthusiasm, (d) of homogeneity, (e) of spontaneity, (f) of busibility?

4.  Would you consider young William Nut a leader? . . . and, if so, of what? . . . of men or of women? . . . What proportion of women would he lead?

5.  Getting down to facts, tell us if Willie Nut has ever been in jail, and if so where and for how long. Tell us at the same time any other dirty thing about him that occurs to you.

As a result of the questionnaire, fifty of Willie’s father’s friends wrote confidentially what they thought of Willie. That sank him.

—

Driven out from the Middle West, Willie next tried the colleges of the Central States, in the great metropolitan centres. In this case Mr. Nut, Senior, received the following communication:

Dear Sir:

Your son’s qualifications for admission have been (reluctantly) accepted by our Committee on the Exclusion of Students. It is necessary, however, for you to send personal letters of recommendation, and we think that on the strength of these we can still get rid of him. If you like to try, however, you are entitled to post them to us.

Mr. Nut, therefore, forwarded to the Dean of Rejected Students a bundle of personal letters in regard to his son, of which the following are typical not only of Willie’s case, but of students’ testimonials in general:

(A) FROM WILLIE NUT’S BARBER:
LETTER OF COMMENDATION

To whom it may concern:

This certifies that I have cut Willie Nut’s hair for the last ten years. I find him docile and tractable in the chair, able to stand pain, and intelligent in his outlook through a towel.

(B) FROM WILLIE NUT’S FATHER’S
GARAGE MAN’S ASSISTANT

This certifies that Willie Nut has been in and out of this garage one time and another for quite a time. I should say that he was a boy that you might think had something in him. He has often helped me in changing tires and in filling gasoline without asking a cent for it.

(C) FROM THE PAY-AS-YOU-ENTER
BUS DRIVER WHO DROVE WILLIE TO SCHOOL

To those whom it may concern:

For two and maybe three winter sessions Willie Nut drove to and from his High School in this bus. He always paid his fare like a little man; in fact, he couldn’t have gotten in if he hadn’t. He seemed to me a bright, intelligent lad, and every morning he used to say “Good morning” and every afternoon he’d say “Good afternoon.” I never knew him to confuse the two.

But here again Willie failed. The committee decided that the personal applications lacked something. They didn’t seem to have just the touch that was needed, the glow of warmth without heat, and the peculiar esprit, or esprieglerie that gives pep to a personal letter.

Willie was shut out.

—

Willie’s father next decided to try to get him admitted into one of the Military Academies that are just as good as any of the universities and charge ten times as much. Application was made to the Jefferson Jackson Military Institute, beautifully situated, as advertised, in the Ozone Mountains where the air is so salubrious a student couldn’t stay awake if he tried.

The answer to the application was as follows:

Dear Sir:

We shall be very pleased to admit your son to this Institute provided that you satisfy the following conditions, which we rigidly apply to all applicants for admission:

1.  He must bring with him two polo ponies, one for himself and one for me.

2.  Uniform being compulsory and uniform, he has got to bring four suits of it, three of them being big enough for me to wear.

3.  I would like him also to bring me a shot gun and a fishing rod and a pair of wading boots.

4.  His fees will be a thousand dollars a week and you must pay them before we will even look at him.

William Nut, Senior, didn’t find himself in a position to meet the conditions of the Institute, and Willie’s application was turned down.

—

It was decided next to make an effort to get Willie into one of the great Agricultural Colleges of the Southwest. Many people consider the training in these colleges, democratic and simple though it is, to be at least as good as, if not worse than, that of the larger universities. Willie Nut’s application for admission called forth the following reply from the Dean of the Pasture to William Nut, Senior:

Dear Friend:

Send your boy right along. We will be right glad to let him into the school, especially if he turns out to be a good milker. We would expect him to milk ten cows a day to start on, and we hope that he is pretty handy with hogs, too.

—

It was probably at this point that Willie Nut took the poison. He seems to have realized that entry in college in America is now practically closed. The real solution of his difficulty does not seem to have occurred to him before his unhappy attempt at suicide. The letter which he left behind him, or rather beside him, merely said:

Dear Pa:

Finding it impossible to enter college, I have just taken a draught of chlorate of lime. I shall soon be on my way to a place where no one is ever refused admittance and where there is still room for everybody.

—

It was only after Willie was fortunately resuscitated that a brilliant thought occurred to his parents which put an end to all Willie’s difficulties in entering American colleges. They have sent him to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

TOC     INDEX

Graduation Day
at the Barbers College

Note: These are the days of colleges. There are colleges everywhere and for everything. There are colleges for medicine and colleges for religion, and for dentistry, and for the banjo and for mesmerism and correspondence. And wherever you go, they bring with them the same old college spirit of good fellowship and love of knowledge.

In witness of which, let me here produce, or reproduce, the following verbatim report of one of the recent college commencements. It was handed to me a day or so ago and refers to the closing exercises of Metropolitan School of Capilletics, which used to be called more simply the Barbers College.

The graduation exercises at the School of Capilletics were held yesterday during the lunch hour in the upper corridor of the academy, just next the cloak room. President Clip briefly addressed the graduating class and spoke with feeling of their approaching separation. They had now been shaving together for over four weeks, and no doubt it seemed hard to part. Lasting ties had been formed, he hoped, during their college course which would endure through life. They would go out, he said, from the academy where they had received their training and be appointed, he did not doubt, to chairs of their own. He liked to think that the college had turned out some of the most eminent men of their profession.

A leading shampooist had said to him only the other day that without his college training he would never be where he was. The president regretted that Dean Follicle, who was to give the commencement address, was delayed a little in arriving, as he was detained below with a customer in the chair, as was also the senior professor of Capillary Science.

The president took occasion to say that he saw before him not only the graduating class and the juniors and the sophomores, but also the freshmen, who were still in their first week. He was aware that to these young men with still more than three weeks in front of them, the course looked long and arduous. But he would remind them that in years to come they would look back to their four weeks at their Alma Mater as the happiest days of their lives.

The president then spoke of the wonderful advances recently made in practical science: he touched lightly upon the electric flat iron, the new electric facial massage, and the improved mechanical clippers. He said the times demanded further specialization: we needed highly trained men for the back of the neck; we must have more intensive work on the mustache and better designs for behind the ears. The old-fashioned general practitioner, prepared to cut anything and everything, was becoming, the president said, a thing of the past. We were consigning him to the hair-basket.

We must educate the public to understand that two barbers for every customer is becoming an absolute necessity; to these, he said, there should properly be added an anesthetist to keep the customer asleep. In the old days, which he could himself recall after fifty years of practice, the academy – still called a shop – was small and quiet. The customer fell asleep of himself; all that was needed was to give him yesterday’s newspaper.

This has changed. The unavoidable noise of the overhead shampoo (he would not for a moment deny its utility), the rattle of the electric clipper, and the terrifying hiss of the hot irons kept the customers awake. The only remedy, as he saw it, was an extended use of anesthetics. This again demanded wider knowledge and a raising of the standard of the profession.

We have got to face the fact, said the president, that the course must be lengthened. Four weeks, he would say it positively and with conviction, is too short a time for turning out a highly-equipped man. The time has arrived when we must work for a six weeks’ course.

At this juncture the arrival of Dean Follicle called forth from the students loud cries of “You’re next!” followed by the college yell of Rah! Rah! Shampoo!

The Dean, in rising to speak, said that he was entirely in accord with the President on the matter of raising the general standard. He might perhaps refer to the monograph that he had published under the title of What a Barber Should Know. Any professor of practical capilletics – he would not say barber – must be a man of education, a wide man. Their customers – or should he say their patients? – expect it. When they come to your chairs, gentlemen, continued the Dean, they want information. They want to know who won last night’s boxing match. It is your duty to tell them. More than that, they want to know who is going to win the boxing match, or the horse race or the ball game, not of yesterday, but of next week. It is your duty to keep them posted.

These people come to you with confidence. They put themselves into your hands for twenty-five minutes; they allow you to cover them with a steamed towel, which precludes all argument. They cannot answer back. This, then, is your opportunity for enlarging their minds and extending their range of knowledge. You must keep them informed of the presidential election; you must understand the wet and dry laws of your state; you must follow every line of sport. In short, gentlemen, you must have made a study of yesterday’s newspaper from cover to cover.

A man who has read yesterday’s paper is a cultivated man, a well-informed man, an agreeable man; one who has not betrayed himself as an ignoramus unfit to handle a pair of scissors.

There had been, said the Dean, some little criticism, he would not say complaint, in regard to the examination paper on General Knowledge which had been given to this year’s graduating class. It had been said that the questions were hard. He would name some of them and let the audience judge for themselves. For example: Who is Mussolini? What is the salary of a big league ball player? Who flew where? How do they divide the money of a prize fight?

It was claimed that these questions were hard. They were meant to be hard; only a man who knows that Mussolini is “some guy” – or else is not – can hope to interest his customer in European politics.

The Dean then briefly referred to the question of Latin. He believed that the time has come when Latin must be made compulsory and that every graduate must have at least a week of it. So many of our preparations made up now have Latin names, such as Sine Qua Non and Ne Plus Ultra, that no graduate can hope to rise in his profession without Latin. He could name at least six Latin words that had been of the greatest use to him.

At the end of his speech Dean Follicle touched for a moment on the question of Women. He did not know, he said, of any greater problem in the profession than that of Women. The women of today were insisting on having their hair cut. And we must cut it for them. If we don’t cut it, some one else will. We cannot stop progress.

Is short hair, he asked, here to stay? He looked on this as perhaps the most important social question of the hour. To answer it would require a deep knowledge of history, social science, and human and animal psychology. But what we need, argued Dean Follicle, is to meet the situation both ways, so that we can do business whichever way.

The applause that greeted the Dean’s address showed how deeply interested the audience had been.

President Clip then handed out the degrees to each graduate and declared that he and the Dean would go back to their chairs and the other boys might have the rest of the noon hour free.

The meeting broke up with college yells and cheers for Alma Mater.

TOC     INDEX

Correspondence Manual
Number One

A Foundation Guide-Book
for All the Others

Everybody is aware of the vast amount of instruction that is carried on today by correspondence courses. It is, I suppose, literally true that one may now acquire the whole of an education in this manner. Not only is instruction given in all the various branches of learning, but also in the practical arts. Courses are offered in telegraphy, stenography, advertising, plumbing, and even in the purely mechanical things, such as short-story-writing, play-writing, the making of scenarios and how to earn a living by poetry.

Everybody also has admired the clearness and simplicity with which the manuals are composed. Take, for example, the one entitled, How to Learn the Alphabet by Correspondence. The pictures of the letters A, B, and C are drawn with such absolute sincerity and faith as to be unmistakable; while the pupil is gently led from C to D, from D to E, until a knowledge of the whole alphabet is acquired, and the pupil is ready to pass on to volume 2, How to Synchronize the Alphabet into Words.

But even with all this, it seems to me that the process has not gone far enough. There are still people who need help. We must remember that there are a great many persons who have had practically no early advantages, and who seem almost totally deficient and incapable in practical life. Thus one hears it said of such a one that he doesn’t know enough to pound sand, or doesn’t know enough to come in out of the wet, or again we say of this or that person that he doesn’t know enough to plant beans.

It is these people whom I propose to help by preparing a fundamental manual, under the name of Correspondence Manual Number One. This little book is meant as the absolute ground work of knowledge. It starts right at the beginning. It takes nothing for granted. Not only is no previous knowledge needed for commencing the study, but on the contrary any previous knowledge might be a drawback.

—

PART ONE

How to Pound Sand

This section of the little manual has on its cover two pictures, one showing a young man lying on the ground prostrate with despair; beside him a heap of sand – unpounded. He doesn’t know how to pound it! He has no one to help or guide him. The picture carries a printed legend below it, “He couldn’t pound sand.”

The other picture shows the same young man, upright and smiling in a debonair negligee shirt, knickers, and golf stockings and shoes, standing in front of a newly acquired bungalow and calling through the open door, “Look, mother, come and see me pound it.”

Below this are the clear and simple instructions:

“In order to pound sand, it is first necessary to acquire a fair-sized heap of sand. First-class sand may be obtained from a first-class sand-pit, or may be purchased direct from our office in Post Office Box 75,000, Lower Half. To any student of the course sending in a special sand order of one dollar, we will forward ten cents’ worth of sand.

“A pounder may be obtained by picking up any old stick or board or scantling, or it can be bought from an up-to-date hardware firm, provided they see you coming, for about three dollars.

“Having obtained the sand and the pounder, the pupil is now in a position to undertake Lesson I. For this the instructions are as follows:

“Take the pounder (P) in the two hands (H and H) and stand directly over the sand (S). Now lift the pounder in the air (A) and direct it with the eye (E) towards the centre of the sand (S) on which it is let fall with considerable force (CF).

“Lesson II. Repeat Lesson I.

“Lesson III. Repeat Lesson II.

“Lesson IV. Repeat Lesson III.

“Four lessons make up a course, but pupils who desire to carry the work further may pay another fee and take another four.”

PART TWO

How to Come in Out of the Wet

A second section of the course, not to be attempted until section one has been thoroughly learned, gives practical instructions in How to Come in Out of the Wet. Like Section I, it is illustrated with a little double illustration, the first part of which is labeled, He Didn’t Come In, and showing a young man lying on his own doorstep on a rainy day – drowned. The other part shows a young man, much better dressed, knocking at the door of a house and saying, “Let me in, mother, it’s going to rain.”

—

The instructional part of the section begins with a discussion of the nature of rain.

Lesson I

What Is Rain?

“What is rain? Rain may be said to consist scientifically of a precipitation of spherical globules of hydrated oxygen, or, what is the same thing, oxydized hydrogen, falling through the atmosphere.

“Get this thoroughly in your mind and then go on to Lesson II on, Why Does Rain Fall?”

Lesson II

Why Does Rain Fall?

“Why Does Rain Fall? Because the specific gravity of the precipitated globule is greater than that of the surrounding atmosphere.

“Repeat this till you feel strong enough to go on.”

—

But, there! It would never do to give away the whole course of instruction. Suffice it to say that the practical part, How to Get in Out of the Wet, may be easily acquired by a pupil of average intelligence and diligence after a few weeks of practice on wet days. Still more advanced exercises are given, for a further fee, for graduate students who propose to live in equatorial Africa or on the mosquito coast of Honduras.

—

On the back of the Manual is a little illustration called, His Salary Doubled Again. It shows a young man coming in triumphant to a bright room newly furnished and containing also a young woman and a baby. He is bursting in, radiant with happiness, with a sand-pounder in his hand, shaking the rain off his hat, and with a packet of beans and a hoe in his other hand. Beneath it the words – Course II: How to Plant Beans.

TOC     INDEX

In the Golf Stream

The Golfomaniac

We ride in and out pretty often together, he and I, on a suburban train.

That’s how I came to talk to him. “Fine morning,” I said as I sat down beside him yesterday and opened a newspaper.

“Great!” he answered, “the grass is drying out fast now and the greens will soon be all right to play.”

“Yes,” I said, “the sun is getting higher and the days are decidedly lengthening.”

“For the matter of that,” said my friend, “a man could begin to play at six in the morning easily. In fact, I’ve often wondered that there’s so little golf played before breakfast. We happened to be talking about golf, a few of us last night – I don’t know how it came up – and we were saying that it seems a pity that some of the best part of the day, say, from five o’clock to seven-thirty, is never used.”

“That’s true,” I answered, and then, to shift the subject, I said, looking out of the window:

“It’s a pretty bit of country just here, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he replied, “but it seems a shame they make no use of it – just a few market gardens and things like that. Why, I noticed along here acres and acres of just glass – some kind of houses for plants or something – and whole fields full of lettuce and things like that. It’s a pity they don’t make something of it. I was remarking only the other day as I came along in the train with a friend of mine, that you could easily lay out an eighteen-hole course anywhere here.”

“Could you?” I said.

“Oh, yes. This ground, you know, is an excellent light soil to shovel up into bunkers. You could drive some big ditches through it and make one or two deep holes – the kind they have on some of the French links. In fact, improve it to any extent.”

I glanced at my morning paper. “I see,” I said, “that it is again rumoured that Lloyd George is at last definitely to retire.”

“Funny thing about Lloyd George,” answered my friend. “He never played, you know; most extraordinary thing – don’t you think? – for a man in his position. Balfour, of course, was very different: I remember when I was over in Scotland last summer I had the honour of going around the course at Dumfries just after Lord Balfour. Pretty interesting experience, don’t you think?”

“Were you over on business?” I asked.

“No, not exactly. I went to get a golf ball, a particular golf ball. Of course, I didn’t go merely for that. I wanted to get a mashie as well. The only way, you know, to get just what you want is to go to Scotland for it.”

“Did you see much of Scotland?”

“I saw it all. I was on the links at St. Andrews and I visited the Loch Lomond course and the course at Inverness. In fact, I saw everything.”

“It’s an interesting country, isn’t it, historically?”

“It certainly is. Do you know they have played there for over five hundred years! Think of it! They showed me at Loch Lomond the place where they said Robert the Bruce played the Red Douglas (I think that was the other party – at any rate, Bruce was one of them), and I saw where Bonnie Prince Charlie disguised himself as a caddie when the Duke of Cumberland’s soldiers were looking for him. Oh, it’s a wonderful country historically.”

—

After that I let a silence intervene so as to get a new start. Then I looked up again from my newspaper.

“Look at this,” I said, pointing to a headline, United States Navy Ordered Again to Nicaragua. “Looks like more trouble, doesn’t it?”

“Did you see in the paper a while back,” said my companion, “that the United States Navy Department is now making golf compulsory at the training school at Annapolis? That’s progressive, isn’t it? I suppose it will have to mean shorter cruises at sea; in fact, probably lessen the use of the navy for sea purposes. But it will raise the standard.”

“I suppose so,” I answered. “Did you read about this extraordinary murder case on Long Island?”

“No,” he said. “I never read murder cases. They don’t interest me. In fact, I think this whole continent is getting over-preoccupied with them——”

“Yes, but this case had such odd features——”

“Oh, they all have,” he replied, with an air of weariness. “Each one is just boomed by the papers to make a sensation——”

“I know, but in this case it seems that the man was killed with a blow from a golf club.”

“What’s that? Eh, what’s that? Killed him with a blow from a golf club!!”

“Yes, some kind of club——”

“I wonder if it was an iron – let me see the paper – though, for the matter of that, I imagine that a blow with even a wooden driver, let alone one of the steel-handled drivers – where does it say it? – pshaw, it only just says ‘a blow with golf club.’ It’s a pity the papers don’t write these things up with more detail, isn’t it? But perhaps it will be better in the afternoon paper. . . .”

“Have you played golf much?” I inquired. I saw it was no use to talk of anything else.

“No,” answered my companion, “I am sorry to say I haven’t. You see, I began late. I’ve only played twenty years, twenty-one if you count the year that’s beginning in May. I don’t know what I was doing. I wasted about half my life. In fact, it wasn’t till I was well over thirty that I caught on to the game. I suppose a lot of us look back over our lives that way and realize what we have lost.

“And even as it is,” he continued, “I don’t get much chance to play. At the best I can only manage about four afternoons a week, though of course I get most of Saturday and all Sunday. I get my holiday in the summer, but it’s only a month, and that’s nothing. In the winter I manage to take a run South for a game once or twice and perhaps a little swack at it around Easter, but only a week at a time. I’m too busy – that’s the plain truth of it.” He sighed. “It’s hard to leave the office before two,” he said. “Something always turns up.”

And after that he went on to tell me something of the technique of the game, illustrate it with a golf ball on the seat of the car, and the peculiar mental poise needed for driving, and the neat, quick action of the wrist (he showed me how it worked) that is needed to undercut a ball so that it flies straight up in the air. He explained to me how you can do practically anything with a golf ball, provided that you keep your mind absolutely poised and your eye in shape, and your body a trained machine. It appears that even Bobby Jones of Atlanta and people like that fall short very often from the high standard set up by my golfing friend in the suburban car.

—

So, later in the day, meeting some one in my club who was a person of authority on such things, I made inquiry about my friend. “I rode into town with Llewellyn Smith,” I said. “I think he belongs to your golf club. He’s a great player, isn’t he?”

“A great player!” laughed the expert. “Llewellyn Smith? Why, he can hardly hit a ball! And anyway, he’s only played about twenty years!”

TOC     INDEX

The Golfer’s
Pocket Guide

A Manual to Help Him
to Recover His Game

Note: I have been very busy of late preparing a little Manual for Golfers. It was to have appeared quite early in the season, but unfortunately it was not completed in time, and still remains in an unfinished and unsatisfactory condition. In fact I am not able to publish it at all in its full form this season, and therefore present here merely a few fragments of what will next year, I hope, appear as a complete manual.

The general notion of my little book is to aid the golfer whose point of view needs straightening out to bring him back to his true bearings.

Reading over my little manual is supposed to help the golfer to recover rapidly the poise and attitude of his mind.

AN INTELLIGENCE TEST

Part One of the manual is to contain a set of questions and answers framed as an intelligence test. The golf enthusiast, before settling down to his season’s work, may test the adjustment of his brain by rapidly running over the following queries:

What is meant by summer?

The time of year during which golf is played.

What other seasons are there?

None, that I recall.

How would you define a city?

I should call it a large group of houses and people situated within eight or ten miles of a golf club.

Right. And what is a railway?

An apparatus of transportation used as a means of access to a golf club.

What is meant by the country?

Open space about a city divided into golf courses.

If you go further what do you see?

More golf courses.

Correct. What are trees?

Upright growths of wood on a golf course.

And what is grass?

Vegetation on a fairway.

—

Very good. You have answered these questions, which are elementary, in a way to show that your mind is rapidly readjusting itself. Let us now pass to something more difficult:

Name any way by which you can tell whether or not it is raining when you are playing golf.

A good way to know whether it is raining is to observe whether the water is running from the back of the cap down inside the back of the shirt and on down into the knees of the trousers. If so, then it is raining.

Very good. Now let us see if you recall the proper method of scoring at golf, including the technique, or, so to speak, the arithmetic of the score.

Let us suppose that in coming down the fairway you have had, as nearly as you recall, 4 long shots in which your aim has been distance, 4 more in which you have made your approach to and fro past the green and 4 more on the green itself. How many is that for the hole?

Eight.

Correct. Now let me test whether you have got back into the proper spirit of membership towards your fellow-members in your club. What is your feeling towards new members?

Keep them out.

What about Lady members?

Keep them out.

—

Very good. Your answers are satisfactory. Now will you tell me something as to the various combinations of players among whom golf may be played.

There is first the Two Some, or game of golf played by two people, each of whom is playing with the other because you can’t have a contest without getting another.

Then there is the Three Some, or game played by three people, each two of whom would rather that the third was not there.

Finally there is the Four Some, meaning a Large Crowd or Assemblage moving round the links, containing (as it feels to others) about seven players, and ten caddies. Total Twenty.

—

In connection with nearly all other games, as for example with bridge and chess, and so on, it is the custom to devise and print special “problems.”

By this means devotees of the game when not actually engaged in play may still enjoy the spirit of their pastime by working out these problems.

So far as I know, this has not been done for Golf and I am therefore proposing a few simple problems along the same lines. I will quote one or two in this connection.

PROBLEM I

A and B are engaged in a game of 9 holes and are exactly even after playing the eighth hole. A has played the last hole in 6 and, just as he completes it, is summoned to the telephone in the Club House. A calls to B to complete the hole and goes on into the Club House.

Which wins, and in how many strokes does B make the hole?

PROBLEM II

A player, X, is playing in a secluded corner of the fairway and has already had 5 strokes and has an excellent prospect of doing the hole in either 10 or 14. Making a powerful stroke with a brassie, he misses the ball entirely. Looking all around after his stroke, he realizes that he is quite alone. The grass, the trees and the sky are exactly where they were.

There are no sounds; all is quiet, and he sees no immediate evidence of the existence of an avenging Deity. How many strokes has he had?

PROBLEM III

Two of your fellow members, whom we will call M and N, invite you to act as umpire or arbiter in the case of the ownership of a mid-iron. They have found it mixed up among their kit, each having a mid-iron already, and each being uncertain as to whether he had an extra mid-iron, or professing to be so.

In looking at the mid-iron it reminds you of a mid-iron which you are nearly sure you left in a club locker last year – either in this club or another club – and either in this city, or in another city.

Question: After your award is all over, how many mid-irons has A and how many has B?

—

There. Those may serve as samples of the kind of problems which the enthusiast may multiply to any extent. Let me turn to another point which I think is not found in any other guide to the game:

GOLF FOR FOREIGNERS

Every member of a golf club knows that from time to time foreign visitors and guests are introduced whose language offers a certain difficulty in the conduct of play.

In my experience it is not well to try to teach them too many of the technical terms at once, or too much of the proper idiom of play. It is wiser to let them stagger along with such command of language as they already possess. I have, therefore, drawn up from my manual a little set of conversation exercises especially suited for this kind of case.

FOR FRENCH VISITORS

Exercise I

Where is the billiard? It is this. Where pose I her? She poses herself on the ground. Strike I her with the long cane? Yes, the long cane lets herself use of it. Strike I her at full force? Yes, and still yes. At what distance limits itself the flight of the billiard? At the most longest. Shall I strike? I pray you of it. You permit? Assuredly.

Exercise II

The blow was he strong? He was of a great force. And the billiard? Up to where her flight has extended itself? She has not flown. Behold her still there in the grass? Hold!

Exercise III

Where of it are we? We are of it at the fourth hole. Have we not approached ourselves again of the Club House? Yes, here see it on the left. Is not the restaurant in face of us? Assuredly. Might we not then finish ourselves of it and re-enter? But yes!

TOC     INDEX

The Golf Season
in Retrospect

A Personal Review
of the Big Games of the Year

Now that the golf season is drawing to its close, the time is opportune to look back at the record of the season. And by this I don’t mean the records and achievements of such people as Mr. Jones, of Atlanta, and the other champions. All of that can be read in the newspapers.

I mean my own personal record of the games as played by myself. That after all is the point of interest – for me. And it is likely that the record is of interest also to the thousands, the millions of players, who play something of the same kind of game.

I mean the players who talk vaguely of going around in about a hundred or less, and who never saw 100 in their lives and never will. Yet these, or rather us – that is, we – are the true enthusiasts of the game.

So I will change this review a little bit and make it not personal, but collective, and ask how do we stand, where are we, after our year of golf, what have we achieved?

In the first place, financially how have we come out? Financially, there is no doubt of it we are stood back – and quite a distance. I pass over the annual subscription to the club; that’s nothing. The real cost lies elsewhere.

I keep an accurate personal budget of the thing, and looking over it find such items as lost balls, 100 balls at 85 cents and 1 ball at 15 cents (it’s hard to lose them) making a total of $85.15; ginger ale for use in the locker room, 40 flasks at $5.00 a flask is $200 – but never mind. That doesn’t matter. The game is worth it.

THE BIG DRIVE

The real point is, are we coming on in the game? That’s the question. And in the first place, have we yet made that Big Drive? The Great Big Drive that we dream of, when the ball sails off into the blue neither too high nor too low, and rises and rises and seems to gain speed as it goes – have we hit it yet?

We have not.

Not yet.

But we may at any time.

What greater pleasure is there on a bright clear day, with just a little wind blowing, than to step up on the tee, and make a little heap of sand and place the ball, look up at the blue sky, adjust the club, grip it, shake it, measure the distance with your eye, raise the club for a long powerful swing and then let the ball have it fair and square just below the belt and stand leaning on your driver while you watch it sail into the ether?

I’ve never done it and I didn’t do it this summer; but I meant to. And when I do it I want there to be a few people there to see, especially a few ladies.

As a matter of fact, mostly when we drive the ball either skithers off sideways or goes up in the air. But no matter – the big drive is coming. Wait for the season of 1930.

HOLES IN ONE

Another point of interest in our year’s record is the question of a hole in one. In winter when we talk of golf around the fire, and illustrate our action with the poker on the hearth rug, stories are related all the time of people making holes in one. Surely some day it must come our way.

Once this year I thought I had it. On our links there is one hole where the course goes sideways up a hill and the hole is only 140 yards.

With a thorough good smash and, if I am in good shape with my limbs well oiled and all joints working, I can hit 140 yards. There is nothing to prevent me hitting into that can. When you drive you can’t see the hole or the green for the hillside, only the red flag.

On the occasion I speak of I hit the ball. It rose from sight into the air. I rushed up the hill. I looked on the fairway. The ball was not there! Eager with anxiety I ran forward to the green itself. The ball was not on the green!! There was but one conclusion to draw. The ball was in the can itself!!!

Trembling with the emotion that only a golfer of my class can understand, I drew near to the can. I could not bear to hurry. I felt, in the presence of such an occurrence, a sensation of something like awe. I pictured to myself the ball lying in the can, my coming exultation and for the future a long happy life spent in telling about it.

I stepped at last to the edge of the hole and looked in.

The ball was not there.

I got down on my knees and looked. It was still not there.

I put my hand in and felt all around the handle of the flag. The ball was not there.

The conclusion was only too plain. The ball had been removed. Some player crossing the course while I was hidden below the hill, had seen the ball in the can and removed it, supposing it there by accident.

I had just reached this evident conclusion when my opponent in the game, Captain R., who had followed more slowly up the hill, reached the green. He then stated that he had seen my ball moving rapidly in a sideways direction high in the air. I denied this. I said that he might have seen some ball moving high in the air. The air is full of golf balls moving in all directions. But that my ball was in the air I strenuously denied.

I may state that Captain R. wears glasses, has only played golf for five years and is a Frenchman; and yet his meager evidence in this matter was enough to prevent my depositing my record with the committee.

I am sure that a great many others have been similarly prevented from making holes in one. I propose that when we want to do it next year we go out at daybreak all alone; or, better still, two together and come back with the thing accomplished.

FRIENDS OF THE LINKS

The loss of Captain R.’s friendship recalls to me another item which we must account for in our season’s record. Where do we stand in our gain or loss of human affection? How are we on brotherly love? I fear that it is only too evident that with each season we lose a little more. In my own case several valued friendships have come to an end over various little points of the game.

For instance, if I lose my ball in the rough and then finding it, lift it up from under a tangle of grass – in sheer exultation – and cry “Here it is!” then placing it on a mound of earth – must I lose a friend for that?

They say that Scotland is mostly a lonely country of empty spaces, and the people keep to themselves to an amazing degree, trusting no one and never speaking. I think I can understand it. They began golf there 400 years ago.

PROGRESS AND SURGERY

But the most important question in the season’s game for me, in fact for all of us, is – Are we making progress? Do we play better than we did?

We don’t.

That’s the plain fact, so let us out with it – we don’t. In my own case I feel that I cannot get much further in golf without a surgical operation, or rather a series of surgical operations.

I need my thigh bones taken out and shortened. That’s the only way I can get what the “pro” calls the “stance” that I ought to adopt. Similarly, I need my back lengthened, by letting in a piece anywhere near where my braces join my trousers. If I had six inches more of back let in there, I could get that easy swinging action that I can envy but never emulate.

And I need a couple of sets of wheels put in somewhere for the mashie shot. I can’t do it without.

But after all, all the other players of my class are the same: They need wheels and cogs and they need lengthening and shortening. I don’t know one that I call a perfectly adjusted machine except at the Nineteenth Hole.

So why worry?

Instead of that, let us sit about all winter and talk golf, oil up our clubs, tell lies, and drink our conscience to sleep. And presently it will be the summer of 1930 and the grass will be green again, and perhaps – who knows? – we may really begin to play.

TOC     INDEX

Futurity in Fiction

Long After Bedtime

A Night Mystery Story
in the Mysterious Style

The house indicated as “No. 4 John Street” was one of four houses, each standing detached from the other, on the upper side of John Street. It is important for what follows to understand clearly the location of the houses. No. 1 stood first, while No. 2 was just above it, No. 3 coming next in order, and No. 4 being the fourth or last of the group.

The houses were separated by an interval of about forty feet between each two of them, so that there was forty feet between No. 1 and No. 2, forty feet between No. 2 and No. 3, and a similar distance, forty feet, separating No. 3 and No. 4. It would thus have been possible if the windows were open to hear anything louder than ordinary conversation from house to house. There is, however, no reason to believe that on the night in question any of the windows were open.

All of the four houses had been built apparently under one and the same contract and offered a great similarity in outline. But owing to the rise in the ground, No. 2 had one more step in front of it than No. 1, and No. 3 had one more step in front of it than No. 2, while No. 4, where the ground continued to rise, was higher by one step than No. 3 (the house immediately below it).

—

The house indicated as No. 4 was occupied by the family of Mr. John Smith, who had lived in it since first it was built. Smith himself was employed as a stock-broker’s confidential clerk, and the family were in comfortable, if not affluent circumstances. There was no reason to believe that Smith was in any way embarrassed financially. Nor was there anything in his past life to suggest any criminal antecedents or any tendency to be hurried or driven into any rash or desperate conduct. He was a more or less regular churchgoer, was well liked in the neighbourhood, and was reputed as rather above the average as a bridge player. It had been remarked, however, that as a bridge player he was more inclined to lead from length than from strength. It should be added that Smith had no ear for music.

—

On the night in question, the night of the fifth of March (just preceding the sixth of March), the entire Smith household seem to have been in bed and asleep well before midnight. For what follows it is important to understand the arrangement of the bedrooms in the Smith residence. The house was a two-story structure with a kitchen extension, all the bedrooms being on the upper floor. That of Mr. and Mrs. Smith was in the front looking out over the street and occupying the entire front face of the house. There were two side bedrooms and a bedroom over the kitchen.

The side bedroom on the right, or north side, the high side or top side, that is the side looking sideways up the side street, was occupied by the two little girls of the family, Flora and Dora, aged respectively eleven and thirteen. The two girls were both at the same school, though Flora was ahead of Dora in geography.

The other side bedroom was occupied by Willie Smith, aged respectively twelve. Willie also attended school, though on the fifth of March he had not gone to school. The reason alleged for this was that he had been slightly indisposed on the fourth of March. All of the children were in every way ordinary children, none of them having ever shown the least tendency towards somnambulism, or hysteria, or locomotor ataxia. Willie, however, could imitate a dog barking.

The room at the back, the one immediately over the kitchen, was occupied by the maid, Frieda Helsenfish, a Finn, who had newly arrived from Finland. There seems, however, to have been no reason to connect her with the Finnish revolution.

It is important to note that this room was connected by a back stairway with the kitchen, and also connected through a door with the landing on which were the other bedrooms. It was thus possible, indeed it was easy, to pass from this room downstairs by either of two ways. It was not possible, however, to go both ways at once.

—

At midnight, or shortly after, the entire family were asleep. This may be stated as a fact as a passer-by noticed that no lights were burning in the Smith residence and looking at his watch observed that it was 12.02 a.m. The watch had been newly repaired and was running evenly and smoothly, and was running still on the following day with equal smoothness.

—

An hour later the situation in the household seems to have been something as follows: the family were still asleep, Mr. and Mrs. Smith in twin beds in the front bedroom; the little girls in the top side room; Willie in the other side room; and the servant in the back. There is no evidence to show that any one in the house was awake or moving as between 1.00 a.m. and 2.00 a.m.

—

At 2.00 a.m. Mr. Smith, who was never a heavy sleeper, seems to have rolled over in bed. There is no reason to suppose, however, that he rolled far, or that he was not able to roll back again. Mrs. Smith appears to have waked up for a moment and said, “What’s the matter?” Smith answered, “Nothing, I just rolled over in bed.” Mrs. Smith said, “Oh,” perhaps “Ah.” She noticed that the luminous clock indicated the time as 2.10 a.m. Allowing that the clock was about ten minutes fast, this would fix the time approximately at 2.00 a.m.

—

At 3.00 a.m. the family were still asleep. There is no ground for supposing that they had done anything but sleep from 2.00 to 3.00 a.m. A milkman starting on his round at three saw no lights in the house. The front door was closed, and to all appearances had not been in any way tampered with. The milkman did not notice any broken panes of glass. The man, however, was short-sighted, was new to his route, and came from Bobcaygeon, Ontario.

—

At four all the Smiths were asleep.

—

At five the Smiths were all sleeping. The hour this time can be definitely fixed because a town clock within no great distance from John Street struck five.

—

At seven o’clock, however, things took an entirely different turn. Smith, always a light sleeper and an early riser, rose and dressed himself. He seems to have put on all his clothes in their customary order. For the next half hour Smith’s movements can be traced with something like accuracy. He seems to have gone into the bathroom (7.00 a.m.), taken a bath (7.01 to 7.03 a.m.), shaved himself with a safety razor, leaving distinct fingerprints both on the handle of the razor and on the bureau in the bathroom. At 7.24 he seems to have gone down to the front door and taken in the newspaper. This, however, was a regular and customary matter. A furnace man of the neighbourhood passing by said, “Good morning” to Smith, and immediately verified the time at 7.24. Smith appears to have answered either “Good morning,” or “Good Day,” or something of the sort.

—

At 7.30 Frieda, the Finn, came down (apparently fully dressed) into the kitchen and began to prepare breakfast. To do this she put water (cold water) into the kettle and set it on the gas range. After which she set about preparing the meal, which appears to have consisted of oatmeal porridge, bacon and eggs. There was no indication of poison, or any poisonous ingredient in any of the food.

—

At 7.35 Mrs. Smith rose and proceeded to call and dress the children. All three got up.

—

At eight the family breakfasted, and at 8.30, or perhaps 8.31 – certainly not later than 8.32 – Smith left to go downtown to his office and the three children accompanied him, starting on their way to school.

—

Smith seems to have got to his office all right. The children got to school. The Finn washed up the breakfast things, and Mrs. Smith settled down in the parlour to read a mystery story.

TOC     INDEX

The Newer Truthfulness

How the Up-to-Date Biographer
Slates His Hero

“Biography must first of all be truthful.” So declared not long ago one of the best known of our contemporary critics. I suppose it is in accordance with this idea that a new fashion has grown up in the art of writing biographies. In old days, the whole point of a biography was to show what a wonderful fellow the man was who was being biographed.

If he was a soldier, he had to win every battle. If he was a statesman, he had to be wiser than all the others put together. If he was an orator, he was supposed to leave the legislature gasping with admiration and coiled up in heaps on the floor.

Nowadays this is all changed. Under the influence of what is called historical research, the task of the new biographer is to prove what a pitiful simp his subject really is. Take, as an example, the following extract from “The Real Washington,” 1928, 700 pp., $25.

LIFE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON

As written according to the new style of searchlight biography.

“This poor sap was born in Virginia in 1732. The twenty-second of February, generally held to be his birthday and celebrated as such, is probably an erroneous date. Professor Searchit, in an admirable paper on Washington As We Don’t Know Him presented to the Historical Grouch Society of America, expresses the opinion that Washington was born in August or perhaps in November.

“Recent researches into the history of the Washington family show them to have been people of little account – in fact, a poor lot. A William Henry Washington was expelled from Princeton College in 1720, and a John Washington from Harvard in 1690. Either of these could have been Washington’s father or grandfather, or both.

“Legend has grown up around the first president’s boyhood. It is now definitely established that he never cut down a cherry tree, never had an ax, and probably lied as often and as successfully as any wholesome and clean-minded American youth.

“Washington’s earlier career, especially on the military side, has been the subject of gross misrepresentation. We know now that he did not serve under Braddock, as it has been proved that at the time of Braddock’s defeat Washington was carrying on a saloon and livery business at Acquia Creek.

“The part played by Washington in the revolutionary struggle has been greatly exaggerated. National pride in the foundation of our republic has led to a false view of his exploits. The saner military criticism of today shows us that, as a general, Washington was a wash-out. It seems established that he let the entire British forces, both naval and military, slip out of his hand and get back to England, while the escape of 50,000 so-called loyalists out of the country must be laid to his account.

“As president Washington showed in office the same fatal ineptitude as on the field. He selected his cabinet at random without reference to parties. His speeches are said to have been drivel, while his social appearance was rendered ridiculous by his extreme shortness of stature and by his excessive stoutness, which increased from year to year. His conversation – beginning always with the words, ‘When I licked Cornwallis,’ – is said to have been dull.

“On the other hand, it should be remembered that Washington was an excellent card player, sitting down after breakfast to a game of poker from which he seldom rose till after midnight. In religion he belonged to the Salvation Army.”

DID COLUMBUS DISCOVER AMERICA?

When it is not possible for the new biographer to calumniate a man’s whole life, because it is not widely known anyway, he fastens upon his main historical achievement and denies that it ever happened. Here, for instance, is the kind of thing the biographer does to the immortal Christopher:

“It was long widely believed that Christopher Columbus discovered America. The painstaking researches of modern scholars have gone far to disprove this. Columbus may have discovered something, but it was certainly not America. All that we know for sure is that Columbus sailed from the harbor of Palos with three ships in 1492, and that he came back six months later and said that he had lost two of his ships and that he had been to Japan. He was given more ships and made by the Spanish King and Queen Grand Admiral of Japan. After two more voyages to Japan, he retired.

“Columbus, in stature and appearance, seems to have been an awful little runt. He was apparently quite ignorant of navigation, had no idea where he was sailing to, and on his return from Japan in his old age easily fell into a garrulous way of talking of his supposed discovery of America. Columbus was long supposed to be buried in Havana, but modern research has proved that this was his cousin.”

DID BRUCE SPY THE SPIDER?

And even when the modern research student has got quite finished with the biography business, he still has another mission to fulfill. One by one he takes up the pretty legends of history and rewrites them so as to show that there is nothing in them.

Everybody who read in his childhood the story of Bruce and the spider thrilled with the noble example of unbeaten courage in adversity. The gallant Scottish king in a mood of despair sits watching the heroic efforts of the spider as it tries – but everybody knows the story.

Here is what is left of it after the modern research biographer has got in his work upon it:

“The legendary story in regard to the spider has been shown by the diligent efforts of modern students to be without foundation. In the first place, it is quite erroneous to say that ‘King Bruce of Scotland laid himself down, in a weary mood, to think’; there is abundant evidence to show that at this time Bruce’s enemies were chasing him around so fast that it was out of the question for him to sit down, let alone to lay himself down.

“Moreover, Professor J. A. Thompson of Aberdeen has proved that the spider was unknown at that time in Scotland, having been brought in by the English after the Union. It has also been established that spiders do not climb and reclimb a ‘silken cobweb clew’ from any sense of heroism or determination, a feeling which is quite unknown to them. They probably merely wish to get to the top.

“And, in conclusion, it was not Robert Bruce, but Angus Bruce, who saw, not a spider climbing, but some other animal doing something else.”

AND SO WITH ALL THE REST

And so it is with all the other beautiful legends, lives, and stories. Modern research is washing them all out. King Alfred didn’t burn the cakes: Oh, dear no! Research shows that Alfred had worked as a French chef at the court of Charlemagne.

Caesar didn’t say, “Et tu, Brute”; he merely said, “Who hit me that time?”

—

And to think that we are paying good money, public and private, to keep those research students at work!

TOC     INDEX

A Midsummer
Detective Mystery

Showing the Effect of
Hot Weather
on Cold Criminality

Note: “The best stories for the summer,” so writes the editor of one of our best-known literary weekly supplements, “are those that are suited for reading under a tree, or in a hammock or in a boat – stories of a gentler, a softer, one might almost say a drowsier type than the more exciting and exacting fiction of ordinary times.”

All right, Mr. Editor. Here is an attempt to write one for you. Get into your boat and rig a hammock in it on two sticks with a bough of a tree over it and then read this.

During the drowsiest moments of a warm afternoon, a well-dressed gentleman of middle age and quiet appearance pulled the bell at Scotland Yard. At the third summons the janitor, rubbing his eyes as if awakened from slumber, opened the door.

“You must excuse me, sir,” he said, “I was just having a bit of a nap.”

“It is indeed a warm afternoon,” said the visitor, yawning. “I feel sleepy myself.”

“Well, sir,” replied the janitor, “I must say that in this hot weather there’s nothing so refreshing as to just drop off for two or three hours after dinner, sir.”

“Indeed so,” said the visitor, and he yawned again. “I regard sleep as perhaps one of the most agreeable ways of passing the time that I know. But, by the way, are any of the police about? Any inspectors or detectives?”

“It’s hardly likely,” said the janitor. “Our gentlemen are mostly on the river on an afternoon like this; either that or in the country. Was you wanting any one particularly?”

“No, no special one. Just anybody who could aid in the solution” – here he yawned – “of a very daring crime.”

“Inspector Higgins, I think, is upstairs. If he is awake, sir, he will be very glad to see you.”

The unknown visitor was shown into the presence of Inspector Higgins, a heavy-looking man, seated at a table looking dreamily at a sheet of paper spread out in front of him.

“Sit down,” he said. “I was just working out a problem in noughts and crosses. But it’s too strenuous for this hot weather.”

“It is, indeed,” said the visitor. “I always feel that active thought and exertion should be reserved for the more rigorous months of the year.”

“I like the summer,” murmured the inspector. “I like the flowers and the fresh leaves. I often wish I knew the names of more birds than I do.”

“So do I,” said the visitor. “I came,” the visitor continued, “to say that I have every reason to fear that a murder has been committed.”

“An atrocious one?” asked the inspector with a yawn.

“I believe so.”

“Then I suppose you had better tell me about it.”

“I will, and if you will allow me I will begin at the beginning. My name is Charles Everett and I am a solicitor in good practice at 91 Chelsea Court.”

“I don’t think you need tell me all that,” said Higgins drowsily. “I couldn’t remember it.”

“Very good. I live about thirty miles outside London in Surrey at a few miles from Little Hampstead——”

“I don’t think it matters where you live,” said the inspector.

“All right. I continue. It is my custom every morning to walk two miles across country to catch the 9.15 local for Waterloo at Finchley Junction.”

The inspector yawned.

“That’s too intricate. Just get to the murder itself.”

“This morning,” continued the solicitor, “according to my wont——”

“According to your what?” asked Higgins.

“My wont. I was walking through a little wood when I was surprised, I might say horrified——”

“No, don’t say that,” murmured the inspector.

“—to see the body of a man lying beside a tree close to the bank of a little stream. The body was that of a middle-aged or elderly man respectably dressed. It was attired in a light grey suit, with white spats below the trousers, and a grey Homburg hat lay on the grass near it. Even in the cursory glance I gave to it, I noticed a heavy gold watch chain showing beside the waistcoat pocket, which led me to infer that robbery had not been the object of the murder. Leaving everything undisturbed—— But you’re not listening.”

“Yes, yes,” said the inspector, “I heard it all. I merely dozed off for a moment. You found a body in a little wood, quite so. You often find them like that. Go on.”

“Leaving everything undisturbed, I made my way to the junction and so to London and to my office. I meant to report the matter at once, but owing to the extreme heat of the weather——”

“Do you know,” said Inspector Higgins, “I think that this is about as hot a spell as I remember. I say, how would you like a cool drink? There’s a new American bar just round the corner this side of Westminster Bridge where we might get something.”

A few minutes later the inspector and the solicitor were standing in front of the long counter of an American bar while two tall glasses in which an iced drink clinked with delicious invitation, stood before them.

“By the way,” said Higgins, “I interrupted you. You were talking in the office about a murder.”

“Ah, yes, I’d forgotten.”

“That’s all right,” said Higgins. “But I’ll tell you what we can do, if you like. We’ll take a car and drive down into Surrey and have a look at it. I know a road to Finchley that’s a little bit roundabout, but makes a really pleasant drive.”

“The country certainly seems inviting in this weather,” answered Everett.

“And I tell you,” continued the inspector, “we might as well take lunch with us. I suppose, miss,” he added, turning to the barmaid, “that you could put us up a snack in a lunch basket, couldn’t you?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” answered the girl readily. “What would you like, sir? We could give you a cold chicken, a made-up salad, sir, with a cold meat pie, if you care for it.”

“Excellent. And you might put in half a dozen of bottled ale and a couple of pints of claret. – And now I’ll tell you another idea. I don’t know whether you care for fishing——”

“My dear fellow!” exclaimed the solicitor, “I’m passionately fond of it.”

“Well, do you know, in so many of these little streams even within thirty miles of London, though you’ll hardly believe it, one can often pick up some excellent brook trout.”

“Delightful!” said Everett.

“I’ll fetch a couple of rods and then we’ll be off.”

—

Three or four hours later the Police Inspector and the solicitor might have been seen seated beside a murmuring stream in the pleasant shade of a leafy wood. A delightful thirty-mile run through country lanes had brought them to the wood and the brook mentioned by Mr. Everett. The napkins that were spread upon the grass, the remains of an ample lunch, a claret bottle resting against a tree and some beer bottles cooling in the stream bore witness to the success of their outing.

Three or four brook trout, small yet delicious in appearance, lay on the grass in a shaded spot near by and proved that their angling had not been in vain. The fragrant smoke of two Havana cigars rose softly on the afternoon air.

“A wonderful outing!” murmured the solicitor. “I don’t know when I have enjoyed a day more.”

“Delightful!” agreed the inspector, “a beautiful little spot to come to. I’m glad to know of it.” Then of a sudden a thought seemed to strike him. “Dear me!” he said, “I am afraid that we’ve been forgetting something.”

“What?” asked Mr. Everett.

“Why, the body that you said you noticed early this morning somewhere in this wood!”

—

Just then a voice from close beside them interrupted their conversation.

“Pardon me, gentlemen,” said a man emerging from the trees, “I’m rather afraid I’ve lost my way. Can you direct me to Finchley Junction?”

The inspector and the solicitor looked up.

They saw before them a man of middle age or even elderly, wearing a light grey suit and a grey Homburg hat. They observed that he wore white spats and that a heavy gold watch chain crossed his waistcoat.

“Finchley Junction?” said the inspector. “Yes, keep on directly up the brook and then along the first road to the right.”

“Thank you,” said the elderly gentleman. “I fear I had fallen asleep and must have slept a long time. Good afternoon.”

The police inspector and the solicitor exchanged glances.

“The mystery,” said Higgins, “is solved.”

“Ah, I grasp it,” answered the solicitor. “The man was merely asleep!”

“Never mind,” said Higgins. “After all, at this time of year, it’s far more pleasant to have it end that way.”

TOC     INDEX

Little Lessons
in Journalism

I

The Feature Reporter Interviews the Captain of Industry

What really happened. . . . The high class reporter, whose specialty is for doing Pen Pictures of Personalities for The Evening Limelight is sent to interview the great self-made Captain of Industry, Mr. O. Wattaswine. He finds the magnate seated in his shirt sleeves in his office, chewing a cigar. The office room is about as plain and unadorned as the waiting room of a trolley car station. After an angry exclamation and a few grunts, Mr. Wattaswine kicks the reporter out of his office.

The trained journalist having thus got his “material” retires to his office and writes up the incident in the following terms:

Meeting a Magnate

It was with a feeling of something like reverential awe that one passed from the waiting room to the deep quiet of the inner office.

“He will see you now,” said the young (man) secretary who had taken one’s card.

They were simple words and yet somehow they thrilled one to one’s innermost fibre. He would see one now! This man, at whose bidding half the industry of the continent must stand still or go sideways, would see one.

One entered. For a moment one’s eyes felt unaccustomed to the half light of the room. One looked about at the paneled room, richly wainscoted, the lustrous mahogany table that took the place of an office desk. One noticed the somber Rembrandt that hung opposite to one, and the exquisite Carlo Dolci, a veritable gem, beside the window. One’s eyes caught with delight the Piccolomini that stood, not more than an inch high, on the mantel and yet indubitably a Piccolomini. Nor need one have been a connoisseur, nor even a virtuoso to recognize instantly the miniature that stood beside it.

The great Magnate of Industry turned slightly in his chair and looked at one.

One had time to make a lightning appraisal.

The head, poised on the massive shoulders, recalled somehow the Ercole Farnese of the Vatican. The brow brought back in a haunting way the portrait of Francis Bacon, at Magdalen College (upstairs at the back of the hall) while the eye suggested at once the well-known portrait of Peter the Great in the Museum at Yakutsk (downstairs first turn to the left).

One scanned the face, broad, impassive, expansive in a vain attempt to seize and hold it.

One felt baffled.

Then the mouth opened.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said.

He spoke with the quick tone of a man not accustomed to be thwarted.

One sat down.

He turned in his chair until he faced one full. He put out his hand. One took it and shook it.

“Good morning,” one said.

“Wet, ain’t it,” he replied. The words were simple, even ordinary, and yet one felt the peculiar power of them. Here was a man immersed in the quiet of his inner office, his complicated brain busy with the finance of the whole world. Yet he knew that it was wet. Somewhere in the recesses of that busy consciousness the idea that it was wet had been registered and held with the tenacious grip that marked the man. Not till it was dry would he let it go.

He said nothing further but remained as if waiting for one to speak.

One felt non-plussed. One wished naturally to speak. Yet it would have seemed the worst of Mauvais gout, an unpardonable faux pas to begin at once to talk of finance. One felt in an impasse in which savoir faire would seem to dictate a detour.

One began to speak of the art treasures in the room.

“What exquisite objets d’art!” one exclaimed. “Your Piccolomini is perfect.”

“My which?” he asked.

One detected at once the quiet vein of sarcasm underlying the simple words, only two of them, and one felt it wiser to shift the topic. One realized that with such a man there was nothing for it but direct speech, for a plunge in medias res, and immediate ad hoc, in short a statement of one’s business in flagrante delictu.

“The Evening Limelight,” one said, “is anxious to ask you, Mr. Wattaswine, what is your opinion of the present expansion of business?”

“How’s that?” he said.

One realized the quiet astuteness, the characteristic acumen behind the remark. He wanted to know not only what it was but how it was.

“Of what,” one explained, “are the present buoyant conditions an index?”

“A which?” he said.

It is typical of the man that every word must be defined, must be explained, must, if need be, be spelled. Such a mind has no room for inaccuracy. It is too large. The inaccuracy, once let loose in it, would never be found again.

One hyper-simplified oneself.

“Is this good business going to last?”

The great man looked at one – calmly, dispassionately, and rather by the circular movement of the eye than by alteration in the neck – he looked at one.

“Search me,” he said. “I don’t know.”

He didn’t know! One sat amazed at the candor of it: one could hardly sit. He didn’t know, and he knew that he didn’t know. The whole of his labyrinthine mind was focused into the phrase.

One was searching for some tactful way to bring the interview to a close, some neat jeu d’esprit that would allow one to retire, when one was spared the trouble of looking for it.

The great man gave it to one himself.

“If that is all you want,” he said, “I guess you can get out of this office.”

He hit a bell.

“Show him the elevator,” he said.

Could quiet resolution assume a more tactful, more tasteful form? The man’s mind was too broad, his spirit too humanitarian to tolerate a dismissal. Instinctively he found a way out of the dilemma. It occurred to him that perhaps one had not seen an elevator: one could be shown one.

One was.

II

The Tabloid Journal Learns that Ella Smith Has Eloped with the Hired Man

What really happened was this. Ella Smith, a grown up girl of about nineteen or twenty or twenty-five, or around there, went off one afternoon with the hired man. Nobody noticed it much at the time. Mr. Smith, who owns a fifty acre farm about a thousand miles from New York and four miles from any other railway station, was picking up pumpkins in the field when one of the younger children came and said, “Say, pa, Ella’s skipped off with Bill and ma says they’ve run away.” Mr. Smith said, “Well, Gosh ding that girl anyway!” In the latter part of the afternoon Ella and Bill were back again. They’d been over and got married before a justice of the peace at Centerville. They were back in time to help with the last load of pumpkins that came up to the barn. Ella is a quiet dub but the hired man they called Bill had come out from England only a year before and he had evidently had some schooling. As a matter of fact he had attended a night school in Bolton, Lancashire, where he took a course in plumbing, and a course in electric fixtures and internal heat. It was because he came from England that the Tabloid Weekly saw its chance to write up the episode thus:

HAPPY HOME BLASTED

Dashing High School Brunette
Elopes With Oxford Graduate

Inspired with desperate love which led her to disregard the agonized appeal of her parents, Ella Smith, a beautiful high school graduate of seventeen, deliberately smashed a happy home by going, with William Rufus Montgomery, before a justice of the peace, a reckless young Oxford graduate, leaving her beautiful home near Centerville and getting married.

Pretty little Ella in conversation with a Tabloid reporter soon after her flight said, “I just had to do it. I love Billy so much.”

It appears that Mr. Smith at the time of the elopement was down in his pumpkin field, presumably playing golf. His wife, whose name is Mrs. Smith, was occupied indoors, probably sorting out calling cards from yesterday.

The whole neighbourhood has been thrown into the wildest confusion. A posse, in fact half a dozen posses, of local farmers armed to the teeth with shotguns in their shirt sleeves are scouring the woods while the police are occupying every dive and speakeasy in Centerville that they can find. Mrs. Smith, the mother, is said to be prostrated with grief, absolutely flat.

The young man in question whose name is given as William Rufus Montgomery is described as “tall, short, dark but with spots of light.”

It is thought that the couple are making for the Canadian border, either that or the Mexican frontier or else Cuba.

—

Two Hours Later. Escorted by a large concourse of happy friends and falling into the arms of her weeping mother, pretty little Ella Smith all in tears sobbed out her appeal for forgiveness on her return home whither she had been tracked by bulldogs.

Ella and her new husband, handsome young William R. Montgomery, now reconciled with the young bride’s parents, will take up their home with the bride’s family, occupying the room over the summer kitchen.

TOC     INDEX

More Literary Scandals

Reputations of Adam, Noah, and Tut-ankh-Amen Shaken to the Very Base

It appears that in England another great literary scandal has just broken out. Somebody has written up – in veiled form – the life of some Royal Duke or Royal Prince or Royal Person, and a terrific storm of discussion has ensued. I am not sure of the details of the matter, but it seems to be one of those biographical cyclones that sweep over the reading public every six months. The reputation of everybody concerned has been shaken to its base and the public is having a glorious time.

It appears from the book that the Countess of X (who has been dead only ninety years) was very seriously compromised with Prince Q (buried in 1840) and that Lord P (only 38 in 1819) was in reality a half-brother of the ex-King of Corfu who died of hydrophobia at Baden-Baden in 1850.

Things like these keep people in London awake all night.

The publishers of the new book wrap themselves up in mystery and deny any knowledge of anything.

But the outlook in the commercial sense is so encouraging that we may look forward to further sensations in the near future, as thus reported in the press of the next few months:

LITERARY SENSATION FOR JANUARY:
REPUTATION OF ADAM BLASTED

Terrific excitement has been aroused in the book world by the publication of a new work, ostensibly a novel, under the title “The First Gardener,” which is in reality a thinly veiled attack on Adam.

In the book Adam, who appears under the disguised name of McAdam, holds a position as caretaker in a zoological garden from which the public are excluded and which is plainly meant for the Garden of Eden. The book is intended to expose McAdam’s utter ignorance of gardening and lack of any qualification for the care of animals, McAdam having obtained his post merely, so it is implied, for the lack of a better man.

Keen controversy has broken out in literary circles as to whether the strictures in the book are justified by the facts. Among hostile critics of the book, Dean Ding Dong reminds his readers that after all, thanks to Adam’s care, we have the animals with us now and as the Dean says in his caustic way, “Look at them!”

Several of the leading scientists, however, take the other side and claim that the animals on the whole are a bum lot, much distorted from what they might have been by Adam’s ignorance of veterinary surgery.

Still greater interest centres around the personality of Eve, disguised as Eva in the book. It is hinted – indeed, more than hinted – that Eva was never properly married in church to McAdam. The sweeping effect of this indictment in its consequences for the whole human race is only too obvious.

The story closely parallels the accepted story of Adam and Eve at every point. Mr. Satin, Eva’s friend, who spends much time with the McAdams in their garden, is thought by the reviewers to represent a carefully veiled attack on Satan. The sale reached half a million copies last week.

LITERARY SENSATION FOR FEBRUARY:
REPUTATION OF NOAH EXPLODED

“Life on the Ocean Wave.” This book, which has created the principal furor of the London season, is plainly and simply nothing more than an attack on the life of Noah. It is framed as a work of fiction, but the disguise is not difficult to remove, in so much as Captain Noherty is in command of a ship called the Ark which sails from Port Arrowroot. Keen-eyed reviewers at once called the public’s attention to the close resemblance between Noah and Noherty, Ararat and Arrowroot, Shem and Jim, and so forth.

In addition to showing Noah, or Noherty, as a hopelessly incompetent navigator, the novel represents him as having been twice married, so that Shem and Ham were only half brothers to Japheth. This last innuendo has excited London up to the boiling point.

The new book is having an enormous circulation, little else being talked of in fashionable and literary circles.

LITERARY SENSATION FOR MARCH:
DARING EXPOSÉ OF TUT-ANKH-AMEN

A work professing to be a novel, but more daring in its personal denunciation than any of the recent literary sensations, has just appeared in the form of an attack on the reputation of Tut-ankh-Amen. The book is from cover to cover a scathing diatribe on the late King of Egypt, masked under the title “The Life and Times of Touting Common King of Ghejypt.”

The book presents a picture of the late ruler of Egypt very different from that which has been hitherto accepted as history. Most people have supposed that Tut-ankh-Amen was born in the year 3431 B.C. or the Egyptian year, 22,608; the new novel daringly changes the date of the king’s birth and sets him back five years, which makes him 105 years old at the time of his tenth marriage instead of one hundred, as most of us have thought.

The number of the king’s wives, hitherto put at twenty-five, is boosted up to two hundred and twenty-five. There are, moreover, chapters of intimate gossip between Tut-ankh-Amen and Methuselah that reveal things about both of them that had hitherto only been whispered. There are also some deliciously naughty chapters about Tut-ankh-Amen’s mother-in-law (aged 203) which all London is eating up with avidity.

In spite of the literary sensation and the commercial profit effected by the appearance of the “Life of Touting Common,” a certain amount of antagonistic feeling has been called forth against the future issue of such a publication. “After all,” says a distinguished M.P., “we ought to remember that the late king was the sovereign of a friendly and allied state with which our history has been closely connected. Whether true or not, the innuendoes of the book cannot but fail to be distasteful, indeed painful, to his descendants, of whom we believe there are several hundred thousand now in Soudan.”

On the other hand, it is also claimed that our current fiction needs just this kind of brightening up and that we want not less but more of it. There is room, it is said, for a snappy little book on Nebuchadnezzar and for a bright little skit on The Thirteenth Ming Dynasty of China. Indeed, it is whispered that an eminent firm is preparing to bring out a whole series to be called “Naughty Old Men” and sweep the market clean.

TOC     INDEX

Who Reads What

Tell Me Who You Are and
I’ll Tell You What You Read

A little while ago the Psychological Department of one of the big colleges sent out a questionnaire to find out what kind of people read what kind of books. They sent the questions out to business men, to clergymen, to stenographers, to bootleggers – to all kinds of people.

So far as I know, the answers have not all come in yet or are not yet all sorted. But as far as the result goes, I am quite certain that I can give advance information as to what it will be, or at least as to what it ought to be. Let me take a few types of people and show the kind of things that they read.

I

Sophy of the Soda-Fountain

Here, for example, is the case of Sophy of the soda-fountain. All day she stands behind the fountain dishing out chocolate sundaes and ice cream eclairs. In her ear is all the noise of Broadway, in her eye the glitter of a thousand lights. And in the pauses of her labour she hops up on a high stool and draws from a shelf behind her a tattered book in a paper cover, and reads this:

“As the Countess thus sat at one side of the vast shaded lawn of The Chase, she became aware that Lord Flop was moving across the grass to join her. She realized that he was taking advantage of her momentary isolation in order to seek the tête-à-tête that for some time past she had at once dreaded and desired.

“The moment was opportune for Lord Flop.

“The Honourable Edward de Montmorency was at the tennis net with the Honourable Bertie de Courtenay. The Honourable Eleanor de Longshank was idly chatting with the Honourable Alicia de Bourg, whose father, Lord Bughouse, had just retired to the cool shades of the library, while Lord Lush had just challenged the Baron de Pâté de Foie Gras and the Vicomte du Plat du Jour to a three-handed game of pin ball in the ancestral billiard room.

“Lord Flop drew near and dropped upon one knee.

“‘Lady Mush,’ he murmured, ‘Isobel, let me press my suit!’

“‘Nay, nay,’ cried the Countess, ‘do not press it yet. Wait a little longer.’

“‘Not so,’ pleaded Lord Flop, ‘hear me and flee not, Isobel, I have waited long already; my love for you——’

“The Countess put her hands to her ears. ‘Not yet, Charles,’ she exclaimed, ‘not yet. Wait but a little while – a year.’

“‘Alas!’ murmured Lord Flop, ‘I have waited two years already.’

“‘Make it three, I beg,’ pleaded the Countess.

“Lord Flop rose. ‘Be it so,’ he said, gloomily, and then, his head bowed, he moved mournfully away among the elms.”

“Oh, gee!” murmurs Sophy, as she reluctantly puts the book back on the shelf and hops off the stool to serve a chocolate eclair, “ain’t that the life!”

The Countess Isobel

But meantime the Countess – that is to say if she were a real one – having told Lord Flop that he must yet wait three years, has retired to her boudoir – done in blue and white, with pictures by Watteau – and there, throwing herself into a chair, is able to forget her perplexities in the fascinating pages of a new novel just from New York, in which she reads – what? This:

“That next night when Maggie came out of the drug store, Billy was there waiting for her.

“‘Gee!’ he said, ‘you’re some kid! You certainly look good to me.’

“‘Garn,’ she snapped, giving him a smack over the mouth with a banana skin, ‘don’t pull that stuff on me. I wasn’t born yesterday, see!’

“‘Honest, kid,’ said Billy, ‘I mean it, see——’

“‘Cheese it,’ Maggie exclaimed, and gave him a smack over the face. ‘I’m sick of that love stuff.’

“Billy grabbed her by the arm and gave it a sharp twist behind her back. ‘You wanta drop that rough stuff, see! I tell you I’m all stuck on youse and you gotta marry me, see, you gotta!’

“He gave the girl’s arm another twist, till she cried out with pain.

“‘Lemme go!’ she half shrieked, half sobbed.

“He loosed her arm for a moment.

“Maggie leaped back and gave him a kick on the shins. ‘I don’t love yer!’ she said.

“‘You do!’ he rejoined fiercely, grabbing her by the ear.

“‘Leggo me ear!’ she yelled, driving her fist against his eye.

“‘Will yer marry me, then?’ he said fiercely.

“‘I guess I gotta,’ she replied humbly, her pride tamed.”

“Ah!” sighed the Countess, as she put down the book, “how wonderful life like that must be.”

II

The Archdeacon Goes To Sea

Now let us take another example. Seated in an armchair in the quiet study of his home, Archdeacon Paunch has picked up a book to read. The archdeacon is known over half a continent as one of the leading scholars and greatest preachers of his day. In fact, his published sermons have had an enormous vogue. But at present he has snatched a quiet half hour from the heart of a busy day and has settled down in his study chair with a volume of his favourite literature. Which is – what? It runs like this:

“‘Man the lee braces!’ shouted the captain, his voice heard even above the roaring of the storm and the rattling of the canvas. ‘Down helm and bring her up to the wind! Cut away the jib halliards! Stand by to cut away the foreshrouds, if the foremast goes. Steady now, hold her there!’

“The ship lay almost on her beam ends, the sudden fury of the gale howling in the rigging and slatting the canvas with a roar like that of artillery. The sea had not yet risen to its height, but even now great waves began to leap over the forward rail and flood along the deck. The crew were huddled under the windward bulwark, with axes ready to cut away the shrouds. The maintopsail had been blown from its bolt ropes and streamed in tatters to the rising gale. The foretopgallantmast had broken off short and hung in a raffle to leeward.

“For a few moments it seemed as if the great ship was doomed. But no – the superb seamanship of Captain Bilgewater was pitted against the fury of the elements. With the helm hard down and the lee afterbraces sheeted home on the main and mizzen, she reached gradually into the wind, righting as she came.

“‘Saved!’ cried the captain, as the gallant vessel lifted herself with the wind.

“But at that very moment——”

Yes, at that very moment there came a knock at the study door and the archdeacon, recognizing the signal that called him back to work, reluctantly laid aside the volume called “Upside Down in the Ocean,” and resumed his laborious day.

Captain Bilgewater Goes Ashore

And meantime, somewhere away out on the South Atlantic Ocean, or the Indian Ocean – it doesn’t matter – it is night time and there is quite a storm blowing around the sailing ship, Pride of Nantucket, outward bound for Thibet.

The wind howls, but down in his bunk, with a whale-oil light to see by, and with the roar of the waves and the heaving of the ship entirely disregarded, Captain Bilgewater, the real Captain Bilgewater, is reading. This:

“It may be questioned, therefore, whether the second book of Daniel, as explained in an earlier part of my sermon, is intended as a continuation of the third book of Ezekiel or vice versa. The account of the Hittites given in each shows a complete similarity, but on the other hand the lack of all reference by Ezekiel to the valley of Moab, or even to the Jordan itself, makes us doubt whether the writing is not perhaps of an earlier date——”

At which point a furious pounding on the deck over the captain’s head gave the call for “All Hands!” and the captain with a sigh marked the place in his volume of Sermons by Archdeacon Paunch and reluctantly drew on his sea boots for the coming struggle.

III

Clarence and The Bootlegger

“Gee!” said Clarence, as he and Desmond sat up in bed reading “Hull Down on the Horizon, or Ned Fearless Captured by Bootleggers.” “Listen to this, ain’t this great?”

“From the deck of the bootlegging craft, The Amendment, they could now see that the U. S. Cutter was rapidly approaching, a great crest of foam rising in front of her bows while the smoke streamed behind her in the breeze.

“‘Bang, bang!’ went her two forward guns and simultaneously two shells bracketed the Amendment, casting a great splash of foam on both the larboard and the starboard bows.

“‘Get ready the gun!’ yelled the bootlegger captain, livid with anger, with a ferocious oath that caused young Ned Fearless, who thus found himself against his will resisting the navy of his own country, to turn away his head with a blush.

“The chase was now fast and furious, but the end could not long be delayed.

“The Amendment, in spite of her magnificent build and powerful engines, was loaded down with twenty thousand twenty-six ounce bottles of Scotch whiskey worth four dollars apiece in Quebec and fifteen dollars each in New Orleans. Her speed was crippled, while the thought of what she carried roused the crew of the United States Coastal Cutter to a frenzy of indignation.

“A third shell from the cutter crashed through the upper gear of the Amendment.

“‘Get ready the gun again!’ yelled the skipper, while the crew, half reluctant, began tearing off the tarpaulins from the long four-inch gun camouflaged at the stern of the vessel.

“The moment was critical.

“Ned Fearless stepped forward and picked up an iron handspike. ‘Stop loading that gun!’ he shouted. ‘Captain Seashell, if a man on this boat fires a shot against the American flag, I’ll brain him on the spot.’

“Quick as lightning and with another oath worse than the last one, Captain Seashell drew a revolver and leveled it at Ned.

“But in that instant a sudden puff of smoke and a roar from the cutter’s gun——”

(To be continued in the next number)

“Ah, gee!” said Desmond. “It’s ended. I wonder what’s going to happen next? Ain’t it queer how the stories always end in an exciting place? I hope Ned is too quick for that bootlegger.”

The Bootlegger and the Bed Time Story

And meantime, somewhere down on the placid Gulf of Mexico where it is always afternoon, a real bootlegger is sitting in the sunshine on the deck of his craft reading. He is seated in the cozy hollow of a couple of casks of brandy with his feet away up on the ship’s rail. It is the drowsy hour of the day when all is peace, while the rippled waters of the gulf scarcely rock the ship, and the soft wind hardly fills the murmuring canvas. And the bootlegger read – what?

Bed Time Story No. 7620

“So next day when the two boys came to the Hollow Tree, Wee Wee, the white mouse, wasn’t there. They looked all around in the tall grass and under the sticks, but not a trace of Wee Wee could they see. High up in the air old Mr. Hoverhigh, the hawk, looked down and, of course, he knew where Wee Wee was, but the boys didn’t. And away up in the top of the elm tree, Cheep Cheep, the chipmunk, could see and he knew, but, of course, he wasn’t going to tell either. . . .”

And just at that moment one of the crew slouched over across the deck. “Bill,” he said, “get up and get busy. Here’s a motor launch coming out for her load.”

“Darn!” said the bootlegger as he left the bright world of romance for the cruel existence of the working day.

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Overhauling
the Encyclopedia

How to Make It Bigger, Brighter, Brainier

It seems that the year 1930 is going to be a year of encyclopedias, judging at least by the number of new editions just from the press.

If this is so, the moment is ripe for a little discussion of the encyclopedia question. A few timely suggestions to the editors and publishers might be of great assistance before they go to press. Personally, I can properly claim the right to give a little advice of this sort. My encyclopedia is my constant friend. I spend many a dreamy hour buried in its pages. I never go out to dinner without first hunting up a few topics of conversation in it, and when it says a thing, I believe it.

But even at that, I think it could be improved.

In the first place, I’d like to suggest that the new encyclopedia ought to begin with Z. We have all got pretty well fed up with A. We know it too well. Everybody who buys an encyclopedia always begins with reading up the letter A, and each time he stops and starts over he begins with A again.

Thus the other night at dinner, anxious to make conversation with the lady next to me, I said:

“Your mentioning the month of April reminds me of a rather curious fact in connection with the letter A. It appears that this letter of ours corresponds with the first symbol of the Phoenician alphabet, and represents not a vowel, but merely a breathing.”

“Indeed,” she replied, “and has not the form of the letter varied considerably? It was, unless I am wrong, in the earliest of the Phoenician, Aramaic, and Greek inscriptions (the oldest Phoenician dating from, perhaps, 1000 B.C.) The letter rests upon its side. But as borrowed by the Romans, it very early assumed an upright form.”

“Quite so,” I interposed, “as, for instance, in the inscription on a golden fibula——”

“Found, I believe, at Proeneste,” she added, “in the year 1886.”

“Exactly,” I answered with some warmth, “but not differing markedly from the letter A in the inscription unearthed in the Roman Forum——”

“In 1899,” she said with a sigh, and then added: “It seems a little sad, does it not, to think that the upright form of the A never seems to have been found in the early Boeotian and Locrian dialects of Greek——”

“Or only sporadically,” I said, after which there was silence.

To break it, I turned to my neighbour on the other side.

“You were in Europe this summer, were you not? Did you visit the river Aa?”

“Yes,” she replied. “We went all the way from Aalberg to Aalen, though as a matter of fact the name Aa is applied to a number of small European rivers and is perhaps derived from the old German Aha!”

“Which, I imagine,” I replied, “is cognate to the Latin Aqua.” But I spoke without any great enthusiasm. I realized that I was blocked on both sides. When I get my new encyclopedia, I am going to talk about the River Zizz, and the alarming growth of zymotic diseases. That ought to prove the last word.

—

Another little bit of advice that I want to give the encyclopedia editors is to suggest that they cut out all this SEE – SEE – business. All readers will know what I mean. You no sooner get started reading something in the encyclopedia than it immediately says: see something else. Thus——

Napoleon, the greatest general of modern times (see Time), was born at Ajaccio in Corsica (turn to Corsica and see Ajaccio). He was educated at the Royal Military School at Brienne, where he showed a marked talent for mathematics (see Long Division). Entering the French Army at the outbreak of the Revolution (see it), Bonaparte rose rapidly in rank. His victory over the English at Toulon (see Toulon and have a laugh at the English) earned him promotion. In 1798 he invaded Italy at the head of a French army and in a few months the plains of Lombardy lay at his feet (see Feet). He was made First Consul of the Republic (see Republic, Public, Public House, Publication, and Publishers) and in 1804 Emperor. Within ten years he conquered all Europe (see All Europe); but his crushing defeat by the Scotch at Waterloo (see Scotch, Hot Scotch, Gin and Soda) led to his exile at St. Helena (see Helen of Troy). Here he died in 1821. His remains were afterwards removed to Paris, where they lie in a stately sarcophagus in the Invalides (see Sarcophagus, Oesophagus, Paris, Invalid, Invalid Chair, etc., etc.).

—

Now one has to admit that that kind of thing gets tiresome. There is no time to “see” all these things. Any reader who really looked them up would never get any further. And yet they constantly tempt the reader in an alluring way into sidepaths and on into the woods.

How much better to let the article itself do all the telling. Let me illustrate it by showing how to write an encyclopedia article on the United States. Any editor who cares to use this article may have it in return for a complete set of his encyclopedia, a gold watch and a handsome lady’s hatpin – or any lady’s hatpin.

—

The United States, a republic of North America situated between the twentieth and the forty-ninth parallels of north latitude. By latitude is meant an imaginary circular line drawn around the earth at a fixed angular distance from the equator. The equator means a great circle described around the globe at right angles to its axis. An axis means anything on which anything turns, such as, for example, the wheels of a wagon. The use of the wagon is very ancient. We read in Diodorus Siculus that the ancient Etruscans made use of wagons whose wheels were made by sawing through the trunks of trees. In many parts of the ancient world trees grew to an enormous size and height, as for example the cedars of Lebanon, which were the admiration of antiquity and were of vast longevity. The best-known example of longevity actually recorded is that of Thomas Parr, or “Old Parr,” who is said to have lived from the reign of Henry VIII to that of Charles II and who is buried in Westminster Abbey. The abbey itself is a magnificent building, Norman in its original conception, but owing much to the later genius of Inigo Jones. Jones may be regarded as perhaps the greatest of the Italian architects of the Renaissance, though his work in London is overshadowed by the more numerous and fortunate creations of the great Sir Christopher Wren. The wren is a small bird found throughout the northern hemisphere, especially in Europe and in the United States. The United States is a republic of North America situated between the twentieth and forty-ninth parallels – and there you are round again.

To make the article complete, it is only necessary to add: (See Latitude, Equator, Axis, Tree, Longevity, Abbey, Jones, and Wren).

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Jazzled Journalism

What Would Happen if the Specialty Writers Changed Jobs

Few people realize the amount of care and thought and brains that has been put into the newspapers that we toss so carelessly aside. Few people realize how highly trained, how highly specialized is the talent that goes to build them up, feature by feature, page by page and section by section.

Here is a whole staff of writers, a little army, every one of whom represents expert knowledge and exercised art. Here is the work of a man with twenty years knowledge of the stock exchange behind him; on the next page some gifted woman shows in correspondence with despairing lovers her knowledge of the human heart. Here is a page of fashions that imply an intimate knowledge of Parisian taste: a column of jokes that carry us back to Ancient Egypt: a diplomatic editorial the writer of which ought to have been a prime minister; and so on through the list.

The careless reader buried of a Sunday morning along with his coffee and toast among the sheets of his vast Sunday edition thinks little of all this.

But just suppose that by some odd chance of fate the faultless machinery broke down, suppose the staff writers in some way got mixed up and changed places. What then? The reader would very soon realize how wonderful is the intellectual adjustment when he got results such as here follow.

I

What Would Happen if the Lady Editor of the Heart-to-Heart All-Girls-Together Column Took Over the Stock Exchange Page.

YESTERDAY’S MARKET – GRAY THE PREVAILING COLOUR – MANY CHIC COSTUMES IN EVIDENCE – PANTS SHORTER THAN EVER

Yesterday was on the whole a very dull day on the exchange, so everybody assured me, though in spite of it I noticed one or two very pretty spring effects that give an excellent forecast of what will be worn in the summer. I had a few moments’ chat with Mr. Bing, a very tall striking man, the senior partner and floor member of Messrs. Bing & Bong, Wall St. He was wearing a light summer grey suit of a clinging Spanish wool, over a Cambridge blue negligee shirt cut very full over the breast and held down with braces adjusted with pulleys. His tie was a very simple but recherché effect in a broad sage green carried under a starched double collar in a single sweep past the ears and round the neck.

Looking around the exchange it seemed to me that grey is likely to be the prevailing tone, if one can judge so early in the season, but I noticed here and there some distinct signs of brighter colour. One sweet thing in a bottle green especially caught my eye. The coat was cut very full and brought in over the waistline by a single button, the top thrown open so as to show a hay-green soft shirt with the dainty edge of a handkerchief in the side pocket. The pants were cut very, very full, and swung high above the top of the boots. There were one or two very pretty dull blues moving about, mostly a deep French bleu foncé to harmonize with the walls of the room.

I heard a good deal of talk about the recent collapse of credit which, so they say, is likely to check foreign importations. I imagine this means that a lot of the new French designs in men’s trousers will have to be held over. Altogether it seems likely to be a dull season unless the wholesale trade will find some way of carrying the brokers’ accounts.

II

If the Semi-Medical Editor of the How-to-Keep-Strong Column Wrote the Answers for the Lovers and Others Correspondence Page.

Agonized Anita. You say that the young man that you have been going out with regularly for six months has not come near you for a fortnight and you want my advice what to do. You say that you have a sort of sinking feeling all the time and that you don’t seem able to eat anything and keep waking up at night. The symptoms you describe strongly suggest an acidulated condition of the oesophagus, easily remedied by taking half a dozen tablets of hydrated phosphate of magnesia just before retiring. The sinking feeling you describe is not serious and is probably merely due to a partial collapse of the lining of the stomach easily set right by taking another half dozen tablets of hydrated phosphate of magnesia before retiring. The wakefulness at night, insomnia precox, is not lightly to be disregarded as it might lead to grave disorders either in the cerebellum or right slap in the proscenium. For any such trouble the very best thing to take is about a dozen tablets of hydrated phosphate of magnesia immediately before getting into bed. Take the tablets and then get in with one spring. Deep breathing exercises, keeping the mouth shut, and kept up all day in the open air will afford relief, or at least keep you busy.

—

Perplexed Edward. You write to me that you are a young man of twenty-one, just out of college, and that you have strong literary leanings but so far you have met nothing but failure. You have done several short stories which you are certain are first class but no editor will consider them. Something tells you that you can write, but so far no one seems to see it. You have an intense feeling towards the drama and have written three plays none of which are able to get a hearing. You want my advice as to what you should do to bring yourself forward. Have you ever tried a little hydrated phosphate of magnesia taken either in tablets or dissolved in proportions of twenty to one in tap water. I think that if, before sitting down to write your next play, you were to take about three dozen tablets, you could put more power in them. Remember that health means energy and energy spells success. Try a little deep breathing every morning as soon as you arise, standing on one leg in front of the open window.

—

Lonely Widow. You write that the world seems empty to you and that you lack the power of making friends. You long for companionship and can’t get it. Try a little hydrated phosphate of magnesia.

—

Octogenarian. You say you are not what you were. No doubt you are. Try a little hydrated phosphate of magnesia.

III

If the Literary Critic – whose Line is Caustic, Scathing Criticism – wrote up the Sunday Sermons Page.

ABRAHAM, LIFE OF – SERMON DELIVERED YESTERDAY IN THE AMALGAMATED CHURCH, BY THE REV. ELDERBERRY DINGDONG,
11.30 A.M. TO 12.25 P.M.

Frankly, we can find nothing to say in praise of this sermon except that it might, conceivably, have been longer. A more mixed up, confused rambling discourse, if we can call it a discourse, we have never listened to. In this biography of Abraham, if we can designate such a mess a biography, we look in vain for the lambent wit with which Mr. Lytton Strachey has dissected the life of Queen Victoria or the caustic epigrams with which Sir Andrew Macphail has recently dissolved the illusion of Lawrence in Arabia.

Of the private life of Abraham no disclosures are made whatever: as far as we can see this sermon adds nothing whatever to our previous knowledge of the patriarch. The whole performance lacked pep and punch. The Rev. Mr. Dingdong is, we are sure, an excellent man in his private life – though no doubt that might need a little looking into – but when it comes to dealing with a biography he is hopelessly outclassed.

We find his enunciation also very indistinct and difficult to follow. We don’t like his voice, either: there is something sheepish about it – especially the way he keeps saying “Ah”braham – which gets on our nerves. But what made us most tired was the sight of him. There is something irritating in his insignificant figure and his limp way of standing. We couldn’t help contrasting him with the King of Norway and Douglas Fairbanks. He isn’t in it with either of them. If this is the kind of sermon that the Amalgamated proposes to run this season, we prophesy for them a greatly diminished house with receipts at the vanishing point.

IV

Or Suppose That the Man who Writes the Funny Column Was Assigned to Do the Foreign News Items.

Here is the kind of thing that would result.

Laughable Incident in Vienna. Yesterday during the session of the Austrian parliament a bomb was thrown from the gallery to the floor of the house and exploded in a most amusing way among the deputies. A number of them were lifted through the windows in the most comical fashion and landed covered with dust on the sidewalk outside.

Funny Episode in London. Yesterday one of the Charing Cross busses collided in a most laughable way with a motor truck, the passengers on the top of the bus flying in all directions through the air. The most amusing part of the incident was that the driver of the bus got knocked off his seat clean into an open sewer.

Open Air Fun in China. The high floods of the Hoang Ho and the Yangtse have drowned about a hundred thousand Chinese: the rest are floating round on their houses in the most ludicrous fashion.

Joke in Java. A violent eruption of Mount Melaya has buried a whole village. The joke is that the incident happened just at the time when a great crowd of native pilgrims had come to town.

Funny Wheeze in Europe. Latest advices by cable seem to indicate that the Germans can’t pay a cent on reparations. This seems to mean that Germany will go bankrupt and that there will be another world war within a few months. Certainly the laugh is on the Allies.

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This Heart-to-Heart Stuff

Some “Birdie-Birdie” Shot for the “Kiddy-Kiddy” Writers

I want to express my opinion right here and now to the reading public that there is getting to be far too much of this “heart-to-heart,” “brother-brother,” “service” stuff in the world of today. I refer to all sorts of letters, circulars, communications – everybody knows just the kind of stuff I mean.

Who writes it, and just why they write it, I don’t know. Some of them, I imagine, mistake it for “efficiency”; some of them are just a little soft in the head, and some of them, more likely still, are just the sort of low-down pups who would really write it.

—

In the old-fashioned days when a man wanted to sell you furniture, he put up an advertising sign over his place of business, “John Smith, Furniture”; he put advertisements in the paper, “John Smith, Corner of Smith and John Streets, Furniture”; and he may have even gone so far as to send you by mail a printed circular, “Mr. John Smith begs to call your attention to his fine stock of furniture – tables and chairs in all designs.”

But further than that he did not go. You could buy his things or leave them alone. He wasn’t going to get down and crawl and whine about it; he wasn’t going to get off a whole lot of sob-stuff about your home and your “little folks.”

But listen to the stuff sent out by his descendants, The John Smith Furniture Company, of today. Here’s their last letter:

Mr. Citizen:

What about a little new furniture for that home of yours! How about an easy, cozy leather chair for your den, old man? And while we’re talking about your den——

Notice that – “while we are talking about your den.” Who’s talking about it? He is. I’m not. I haven’t got a den, but if I had I know what I’d do with it. I’d put a couple of hyenas in it and let the “come-along” man go in and talk to them.

His letter continues:

While we are talking about your den, how about one of our adjustable all-trash bookcases? If you haven’t seen them, let our Mr. Smith come up and show you one.

And while we are speaking of furniture, won’t you want something for the wife, too? Couldn’t we help to brighten up that little boudoir of wifie’s? And how about the little folks’ bedroom? A good idea would be to let the little tots have under their feet one of our all-goat’s-wool bedroom rugs from Siberia, Saskatchewan. These rugs are guaranteed to keep the little chaps’ feet warm in the winter.

And I wonder if the little nuts would like one of our Kiddy-Kiddy bookcases, all made of pure bamboo from our own Bamboo plantations at Bam, Boo County, Pa.

Suppose our Mr. Smith takes a run up to your home (he’d be delighted to do it) and has a run-round with the kiddies and sees how they are?

To which I would want to say that if he does come – he or any one like him, who writes the “brother-brother” letters – I’d like to receive him with a shotgun loaded up to the muzzle in both barrels with bird shot – what he would call “birdie-birdie shot” – and I know exactly where I’d like to hit him as he turned to go.

—

It is always on the question of children that these brother-brother people are especially strong. They have a silly idea that any parent’s heart will open at once as soon as they refer to “that boy” or “those boys of yours.”

Take the school advertisements and circulars. A decent correspondence school is content to advertise in a decent way: “The Jefferson Correspondence School: Courses in Shorthand, Typewriting, Accountancy, etc.” If you’ve said that, you’ve said it all. Beyond that, any further, intimate talk is just bunkum, just froth, worthless, and tiresome. No one is coaxed or flattered or deceived by it, except the poor nut who writes it. This is the sort of drivel that he writes:

Well, what about that boy? Coming along pretty well, eh? That’s good! That’s fine! And what are you going to make of him? Not thought much about it yet; no, naturally you hardly would. But perhaps we might give you a little help, a few pointers as to what might be done. We know all about it, you know. All the kiddies write us, and our heart is just so big that we have room for them all.

Well, then, about that boy of yours, or shall we say this boy of ours? Pretty good at figures, eh? Kind of natural-born calculator. I wonder if you’ve ever happened to see our text book, “Calcullatics or The Science of Calculation,” by Professor Calk? The professor swears it’s the biggest thing since Isaac Newton. We tell him he ought to sell it at a big price and make money out of it. But, no, he doesn’t care about money; he just goes right along selling his books at a plain $5.00 a copy. Even at that he sells thousands.

You say the boy has a taste for measurement! Always measuring things, eh? Ha, ha – hum – hum – let’s think. Here’s an idea. How about a correspondence course in practical land-surveying? Ten lessons gives him his diploma of T.K.F., or he can get the diploma straight away, without the lessons, if we classify him as registered first on the report of Professor Crook; perhaps he can get the registration, perhaps not; at any rate, send along a specimen of his handwriting, with ten dollars, to our Professor Crook and we’ll see what we can do with it.

Or has the little lad a taste for telegraphy? Edison began with that. Perhaps the little fellow is an Edison? Who knows? The little soap-sud may turn out a scientist. Anyway, send along ten dollars. . . .

And so on, and so on; more of it and still more of it. In earlier days there used to be vigilance committees for this kind of man. They turned up outside his door some quiet evening on horseback, with a lariat hanging on the pommel of the saddle, with a loop on the end of it all ready for a hanging.

Where are those committees now? We need them back.

—

The trouble with these brother-brother people is that they disfigure the whole of life with the pretense of sentiments that they don’t feel. Life is not all brotherhood or service – at least not outside of Salt Lake City. Business is business; has been and always will be. Part of it is hard; but it is not made softer by throwing over it a whitewash of hypocrisy.

If I owe a man an account and am slow in paying it, I much prefer to have him write and say:

Dear Sir:

Your account for $10.15 has been overdue at my store for six months. If you don’t get it settled by next Tuesday, I am going to sue you.

That’s the way to do it – the real stuff. There’s no come-along, brother-brother stuff about that. But look at the way in which the brother-brother man deals with it:

Mr. Friend and Customer:

Well, say, now what do you think? Looking over our books, we notice that same darned old $10.15 never paid yet! Guess you must have kind of clear forgotten it, eh? Well! Well! All right, send us along your check and let’s both have a good laugh over it. And say, stick on 67 cents for interest, will you, just to make the laugh all the jollier? Don’t forget it this time, old fellow, because Mr. Snide of our law department is such a darned old crank (we often laugh with him over what a crank he is) that he swears he’s going to haul you up into court next Tuesday. Well, so long, old boy, don’t forget, ten fifteen and sixty-seven cents, next Tuesday, or jail ten days. Good-by.

—

I suppose they wouldn’t write this kind of stuff unless there were some people to be misled by it. It is quite possible that the human brain is diminishing in size and is softening in texture. That may account for it. Many things of this sort make people of my age almost anxious to finish with this world and start off for another. Only if I did, I should have a haunting fear that the mail of the next day would bring to my house a printed letter in a black-edged envelope, with the word GRIEF stamped at the top and reading:

Dear Mourning Friends:

Well, well, the good old man is dead. What about burying him? Have you thought of that? Probably not. Let us do the thinking. How about having out Mr. Croak – he’s overwhelmed with tears right now – come up quietly to your home. . . .

—

No, the very thought of that letter would keep any one alive for twenty years. But what I mean is – what are we going to do about it?

TOC     INDEX

Also:—

Forty Years of Billiards

While playing English billiards the other night with my friend Captain R., it suddenly occurred to me that that very night was the anniversary of the first game I ever played and that I had now been playing billiards for no less than forty years.

My reflections for the moment were cut short by Captain R. coming to the end of his break – he had made three and a half – so that it was my turn to play.

But in the pauses of our play it kept coming into my mind that I had now been for forty years a billiard player. And I fell to thinking that there must be a good deal that a player of my experience could tell to youngsters at the game.

—

For the rest, the moment was hardly suited to reflection, inasmuch as our game had reached a point of interest that demanded an absorbed attention. We were playing very close together, our scores having both moved up from sixty to seventy in the last half hour by quiet, steady play.

I had reached seventy first, but my adversary, Captain R., by a brilliant rush of two, in which he drove the white ball before him into the corner pocket, had closed in on my heels. As there was still three hours to play before the club closed (at one in the morning), there was every prospect that we should finish our game the same evening.

The game indeed had settled down into a matter of rival tactics. For my own part, alarmed at the rapid advance of my opponent from 60 to 70 within a single half hour, I was trying as far as possible to keep my ball away from Captain R., hiding it well under the cushions, while Captain R. in his turn pursued the opposite policy of attempting such a rush at my ball as to drive it off the cloth, his object being to smash the balls together in a general collision even at the risk of straining the legs of the table.

But perhaps if I wish to convey my reflections at the time and to make them useful even to readers who do not know the game of billiards, I must give a word or two of general explanation.

The game of billiards (English billiards) is played, on a table 12 feet by 6, with three balls – one red and two white. Each of the two players has a white ball, which he hits with his cue, his aim being to make it strike or impinge on one of the other balls either red or white.

An outsider would here at once exclaim: “What? Can you so hit a ball as to make it move forward and strike another? Is such a thing possible?” I answer: “Yes, certainly.” I do not claim to be a first-class player – I mean in any absolute sense – yet I suppose I could undertake to make this stroke at least every other time.

That, however, is not all. The ball after hitting the other must go further on and strike the third ball: or it must drive one of the balls, either the red or the white (good players do not care which) into one of the “pockets,” which lie at the corners and in the sides of the tables: or else it must itself roll on from the ball it strikes and fall into a pocket.

Scores from the red ball count three, and the others two, the points adding up to 100, which is the game. Good players think nothing of reaching the 100 in a single evening, or at any rate quite early in the evening following.

The outline of the game is simple. But when one turns to the question of advice as to movement, strategy, speed, etc., one feels bewildered. It is difficult to say anything to the beginner without warning him that only long and arduous practice can lead to ultimate success.

—

Let me talk first of that which may be described as strategy, by which I mean the ability to seize opportunity and make use of it. The veteran player before making his shot takes a rapid survey of the entire position. His experienced eye tells him at once in which direction lies the best chance of success.

I can illustrate what I mean by describing an exciting episode in the earlier part of the game with Captain R. of which I am speaking.

It was my time to shoot. The balls were so situated that the red was well out in the table within no great distance from the side pocket on the right. I saw at once that the thing to do was to drive it into the pocket. I tried but failed. My own ball, then drifting near to the red ball, offered to Captain R., as, of course, he saw at once, a direct carom shot. He didn’t get it. The red and white, however, coming to rest nearly in a line, offered me a very pretty example of what we call a “follow” shot. I didn’t make it.

Captain R., seeing that my ball had stopped close to the cushion, at once seized the opportunity for the very showy but gentle shot called a cushion carom. He didn’t do it. But in failing he unfortunately left his own ball in such a position as to offer me a beautiful half-ball shot into the end pocket.

It is a shot regarded by all old hands as the key shot of the game: once get it nicely and the object ball may be returned to its position and the score continue indefinitely. I failed to get it.

By ill luck I left my own ball sitting on the very edge of the pocket, not more than half an inch from the edge. It was in vain for me to hope that the situation would escape my opponent’s eye. Captain R. saw at once the line of play suggested by the position of the ball. But he was too experienced a hand to hurry or bungle the shot. He first walked around the table and with his eye measured the distance from the ball to the edge of his pocket; he then chalked his cue, removed his waistcoat and hung it on the hook, and, with absolute assurance, with one splendid drive at the white ball, sank it to the very bottom of the pocket.

In spite of my mortification I could not help congratulating my adversary, not merely on the stroke itself, which was perfect, but on the strategic insight into the game that led him at once to a shot that others might have passed by.

I have mentioned, in speaking of this shot, the question of speed. I can imagine a junior player asking me, “What about speed? How do you calculate the speed you put on your ball?” To which I can only give the rather mysterious answer, “I don’t.” What I mean is that a player of experience regulates speed, as it were, automatically and without calculation. I am afraid that the only advice I can give to the beginner on this point is practice, practice, and practice. If I were to try to lay down a rule, I might do more harm than good.

—

But perhaps one might without risk suggest a few general hints on speed that will be of use to the beginner. In the first place, each player will tend to have his own style and to shoot at a characteristic speed that comes natural to him. Thus Captain R., being French, plays with the characteristic élan and dash of his race, and shoots at about 100 to 150 miles an hour. He is able thus at times to lift or drive his ball clean off the table, and on one occasion, I remember, he even drove it out of the open window of the club.

The beginner might ask, “Why do this? What object is there in driving the ball off the table?” The answer is quite simple. The ball may not go off the table, and suppose that with this high speed by good luck it keeps on the table, then it is bound to make a series of concussions right and left, probably setting all three balls in rapid motion. When the table is quiet again Captain R. need only visit all the pockets in turn to be sure of finding something to his score.

—

But as against this dashing hazardous type of play, you may set, if you like, the opposite form, the quiet, steady bull-dog game to which those of us who are British naturally incline. Here the speed is reduced to almost zero; the ball, however, moves steadily but irresistibly forward. Nearer and nearer it comes to the object ball. The slow speed guarantees the deadly accuracy of the shot. It moves nearer and nearer over the cloth.

Moving the length of the table (twelve feet) in six seconds, it is only traveling at the rate of one kilometer, five-eighths of a mile, per hour. But its approach, if sufficiently sustained, is absolutely certain. It gets nearer to its goal with every fraction of a second. Unfortunately it doesn’t always get there. It stops too soon. But the bull-dog player has at least the consolation that he was only prevented from scoring by the fact that his ball stopped.

I am frequently asked – I suppose that in these random notes, the order of the discussion doesn’t matter – what is the proper costume to put on for billiards. To which I reply that it is not a question of what costume to put on, but how much to take off.

All players find that it is convenient to take off the coat; without that the movement of the garment itself against the body disturbs the delicacy of the aim. But when the coat is gone the waistcoat begins to give a similar sense of awkwardness and spoils many and many a good shot. Again and again I have missed very simple shots when I was sure that the miss was due entirely to my waistcoat. Off with it. Without it the player is lighter, nimbler, easier in hand and eye.

The braces should go next. At any critical period of a good game the player will feel that he must discard his braces. If he is wise, he will discard also his collar and necktie. Many a good shot, such as those in which the player shoots lying upon the table, is hopelessly disturbed by the movement of his collar against his ears.

It is not customary, in the older clubs, to remove more than this. But players of experience often feel that they could play with greater accuracy and finesse if they were allowed to strip to the waist and have their body well oiled between shots.

—

I suppose that if I were to keep on yarning like this, some young aspirant to billiard honours would start to ask me about fancy shots and how to do them. For instance, the shot called the massé shot is one that always attracts the beginner, but which only the player of long experience need hope to achieve.

In this shot the ball to be hit with the cue is almost touching another ball. The player then, by holding his cue almost vertically in the air, hits downward with such force as to cut a piece out of the cloth of the table.

It is a neat and effective shot, not really as difficult as it looks, but less suited for performance on a public table than for exhibiting to a group of guests on a private table in the host’s house.

But I fear that my very love of the game has protracted my remarks beyond any reasonable limit. They represent about the current of my thoughts during the course of the game on my anniversary evening. It so happened that just when I had reached the point here indicated in my reflections Captain R. was called from the billiard room of the club to speak on the telephone. The score stood at 96 all.

In an instant I realized my opportunity. Every player knows that it is possible to score better, faster, and with greater certainty when the other man is at the telephone than at any other time. I at once requested the club attendant who was making the score to go and fetch me a cigar.

When he returned along with Captain R. I was fortunate enough to be able to tell them that I had made four and won the game. I have not played billiards for forty years quite for nothing.

TOC     INDEX

The Hero of Home Week

How Ed Smith Came Back
to Our Home Town

Last week was Old Home Week in the town which I happen to inhabit in the summer. They put it over on a pretty big scale, so as to make a success of it. The town had made a big hit with Mother’s Day just a little before, and with Father’s Day the week after that, and, I believe, there was talk already of a Grandfather’s Afternoon. So, naturally, the committee wanted Home Week to go over well.

They had the town decorated and all that sort of thing: flags across the main street, American, British, Belgian, Japanese, and French – a lot they had left over from the war time – and they had a band in the park for an hour every evening, and something going on all the time. The stores, too, kept wide open so as to make it feel like a holiday.

There were, I understood, a great many who came back to the town for Old Home Week: some who were on the road and generally came home for week-ends, and others who didn’t “make it” more than once a month or so, and others again who had been away for a year, or maybe for two years straight.

But the most noticeable one of the returning sons of the town was Ed Smith, who hadn’t been back home for ten years on end, and hadn’t even seen the place in all that time. Ed had wired from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, “Hope to make town for Old Home Week,” and the local papers, both of them, had carried headlines: “Will Make Town for Old Home Week – Ed Smith Will Hit the Home Trail from Saskatoon, Sask.”

There was talk of a demonstration at the train for Ed. But the boys were mostly in the stores and couldn’t make it. The committee meant to go down in a body and welcome Ed, but none of them were able to get off. However, Ed got a hack at the station and drove to the hotel by himself. He told us that it was the same old hack that he had driven away in ten years ago, and the same driver, too. He said the station looked just about the same, too, the track just where it was, and the platform and everything.

The committee had got up a special luncheon for Ed, that is to say, they all had dinner at the Continental Hotel at noon. (It was quicker than going home. They generally ate dinner there.) And I was present as a sort of guest, with the right to pay for my dinner. As a result, we all ate there and each paid for his own dinner, and Ed sat with us and paid for his. But, of course, Ed was the hero of the occasion and naturally as the dinner got near its end the talk fell on old times, and Ed lit a cigar and began to talk of what he remembered.

—

“I remember,” he said, “that years ago (most of you fellows wouldn’t remember it) there was a little old frame store down on the corner of West Street – queer-looking, tumble-down place – it’s a pity these little old joints get knocked down——”

“It’s not knocked down,” said one of the listeners. “It’s right there.”

“Oh, is it?” said Ed. “Well, as I was saying, there used to be a queer old character living in it, called Mulvaney, a real old-timer – you fellows wouldn’t remember him——”

“Oh, yes, yes,” interrupted three or four of the men, “he’s there still. That’s right. Jim Mulvaney’s still on the corner of West Street.”

“Is he?” Ed said, and he looked for the moment a little set back. “Well, what I was going to say was that in the days I’m speaking of Mulvaney had a dog, the queerest-looking creature you ever saw. It was all brown, except just one ear and that was all white——”

“He’s got it still,” chorused the crowd all together. “Jim Mulvaney has that dog yet——”

“Has he? What?” said Ed, evidently a little discouraged. “He has, eh? Well, I’m surprised. I was going to tell you about a darned funny thing that happened one day with that dog when I used to live here. Old Jim used to like to sit out in front of the house on the step with the dog beside him and watch the people go by. And a queer thing about that dog was he never could stand the sight of anything blood-red, just like what they say about a bull. Well, the Chief of Police happened to come along, and as it was a pretty warm evening, darned if he didn’t happen to stop right there and pull out a big red handkerchief and mop his face with it. Well, sir,” continued Ed, beginning to laugh, “as soon as the dog saw this, darned if he didn’t make one leap for the Chief——”

But this time Ed couldn’t even finish his sentence.

“He bit him again yesterday,” they all interrupted.

“He did!” said Ed. “Well, that’s a caution. But I was going to say this time that I remember he leaped at him from behind, and, say, you’d have laughed to see it, he bit the seat right out of his pants!!”

“So he did yesterday!” cried all the listeners in a chorus.

—

That quieted Ed down for a little. But naturally after a while he got talking again, speaking of this person and that that he remembered from the old days.

“Poor old Tim Jackson,” he said, “some of you may remember him. He lived in the little cottage with all the flowers in front of it along Centre Street. Poor Tim, he had T.B. pretty bad.” (Ed lowered his voice to a becoming tone.) “I guess he didn’t last much longer. They said he’d die that winter.”

“No,” somebody said quietly. “Tim’s not dead. He’s there still.”

“He’s got over his T.B.?” Ed said.

“No, he has it still.”

“Is that so?” said Ed. “Well, anyway, they said he wouldn’t last through that winter.”

“They say he’ll hardly last this,” somebody said.

There was a little silence for a while. Then Ed began again. But this time, instead of telling stories, he asked questions.

“What became of old Gillespie that had the lumber yard?” he asked.

“He’s got it still,” they said.

“Oh, has he? And where’s old man Samson that kept the hotel down beyond the station?”

“He’s there. He’s keeping it now.”

“And who’s got Ed Bailey’s pool room now?”

“Ed has.”

“Is that so? I remember there used to be an old Swede who used to be the marker at the pool room and sell the cigars – old Heiney, they used to call him – a darned decent old feller. I’d give five dollars to see old Heiney again.”

“I think he’s outside,” said one of the listeners. “I’m sure I saw him as we came in through the lobby. Wait a minute and I’ll see if he’s there.”

“That’s all right,” Ed said. “I’ll see him later.”

After that Ed stopped asking about the people he used to know, and he began instead telling about how he left the town and what happened to him.

“I had it pretty hard for a while,” said Ed, lighting a fresh cigar and sitting well back in his chair as he warmed to his narration. “When I left here I was stone broke and I thought I’d head west and try what I could do. I hit Winnipeg one dark winter morning to find myself absolutely alone and without a cent . . .”

“Say, excuse me, Eddie,” said one of the boys. “I guess I’ll have to be getting back to the store.”

“That’s all right, Jim,” said Ed, and as Jim left he continued, “Well, I thought I’d look around and see where I could borrow five dollars——”

“Say, I guess I’ll have to be going, too,” said another of the boys, looking at his watch. “You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Ed?”

“Certainly,” said Eddie, “that’s all right, Alf. Well, I remembered a fellow I used to know in Toronto and I managed to find him and he lent me five, and I got on a train and beat it as far as Brandon to work on a farm. At first it was tough——”

“I’ll say it was!” said one of the listeners. “But, say, Ed, I’ll see you later on, eh? I’ll have to go.”

“That’s all right,” Ed said. “At first it was tough——”

“I guess I’d better go along with Harry,” said another of the crowd, “so I won’t have to interrupt you any further. So long, Ed.”

“So long, Will,” said Ed. “At first it was tough——”

“Hold on a second, Ed,” said another man. “I don’t believe I’d better stay either. My time is just about out. Did any of the fellers pay for you, Ed?”

“That’s all right,” Ed said.

When this man had gone, Eddie and I were alone and I let him finish telling me how tough it was to find himself in a place where he had no friends. I thought I could guess it anyway.

—

After he had finished his reminiscences, Ed rose up. “Let’s take a whirl along the street,” he suggested. “I’d like to look in and see one or two of the old boys. Here’s Mel Rose’s hat store. I must drop in on old Mel. I’ll bet he’ll be surprised.”

We dropped in. The store was full of people. “Mr. Rose in?” asked Ed of one of the shop men. “He’s up in the middle of the store,” the man said.

Mel Rose was standing with a customer, selling a hat. He saw Ed and turned his head slightly. “How are you, Mr. Smith, something in a summer hat? Miss Williams, something in a summer hat, please!”

Just that. As if Ed had only been away a day. He meant no harm. The years is just a day in our town.

We left the store and went into the jeweler’s next door to it. Ed said he wanted badly to see Frank Padden, the jeweler, one of his oldest pals around the town. His idea was that he’d drop in and give Frank the surprise of his life.

Frank shook hands limply over the counter. “How are you, Ed?” he said. “Something in a watch?”

In the next store Ed’s old friend, Pete Williams, said, “Something in a necktie?” and in the store beyond that, Joe Kay, one of the best fellers (so Ed had assured me) that ever breathed, shook hands and queried, “Anything in summer shirting, Ed?”

But that time Ed was about all finished. The sunshine of the old town was fading out for him. He should have understood, but he didn’t.

“I guess I’ll go into the bank and get some money,” he murmured. I knew what he meant. He was going to leave town.

We went into the bank and Ed wrote a check for fifteen dollars. The clerk looked at it. “I’ll have to show it to the manager,” he said.

“Tell him Mr. Ed Smith, that used to live here,” said Ed.

The manager came out of his little office with the check in his hand. He saw Ed.

“You remember me, Mr. Calson,” said Ed, shaking hands. “I used to live here.”

“Oh, yes,” the manager said in a dubious way. “I remember you, but I was just looking at the check. I suppose it’s all right, eh! There’s ten cents exchange,” he called to the teller. “Well, good afternoon.”

We left the bank.

“There used to be a four-ten train for the city,” said Ed humbly.

“There still is,” I answered.

He took it.

—

For him, the next time the banners of Old Home Week will float in vain.

But Ed was wrong. He had made a mistake. The old town had given him the best welcome of all. The welcome of familiarity. And he had not seen it.

TOC     INDEX

Conversations
I Can Do Without

Enough of Some People’s Talk to Explain Why

I

When the Man at the Next Table Is Reproving the Waiter

“Waiter! Waiter! psst!! Waiter! Look here, waiter, I’ve been sitting at this table for fifteen and a half minutes——”

“I’m sorry, sir——”

“When I came in, it was exactly half a minute to nine and now it’s a quarter past. For fifteen minutes, and a half——”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“All I ordered was just some bacon and eggs with French fried potatoes and toast and coffee. You couldn’t take a quarter of an hour to cook that if you tried! I could go out there to the kitchen——”

“I’m sorry, sir, but——”

“You can just tell the head waiter or the chef, or whoever it is, that I don’t propose to stand for it. Just as soon——”

“Well, sir, if——”

“Just as soon as I’m through, I shall report the whole thing to the management. And you can go to the head waiter right now and tell him that if that order is not on this table in one minute – by this – watch——”

“I’m sorry, sir, but if you will kindly look on the table it’s there now. I think you covered it up, sir, with part of your paper. You were reading, sir, when I put it down . . .”

“Eh, what! That! Well, what the—— What! What! . . .” And the rest is silence.

II

The Conversation in the Smoking End of the Pullman Between Two Men Talking of Their Bootleggers

“As a matter of fact, all I have to do is just call up my bootlegger and tell him what I want and it comes right to the door——”

“Same with me. I just say to this feller that I want a case of rye or a case of Scotch and he fetches it right to the house——”

“Of course, I won’t touch it unless I know it’s all right.”

“Me, too. I don’t believe in taking chances on it. Last week a feller had some stuff at his house, moonshine – something he’d picked up out in the country. But I said, ‘No, thanks, not for me. It may be all right or it may not. But I don’t want it.’”

“No, that’s the way I am, too. All this stuff I get sent up to the house is labeled – all of it case goods, you understand, right from Scotland.”

“So’s mine. I won’t drink it unless it’s the real thing. I tried some last week, fierce stuff, I could hardly drink it.”

“Of course it’s hard to get the real old pre-war stuff any longer.”

“No, you just can’t get it.”

“Say, I’ve got a flask of stuff here in my bag. I’m not just so sure what it is. But the bell boy said it was all right. If you care to take a little touch of it. I haven’t tried it out yet. . . .”

“Oh, let’s try it, anyway. I guess it won’t kill us.”

III

Opening Half of Conversation in The Club from Armchair No. 1 to Armchair No. 2, Mine Being Armchair No. 3

“I held the king and the jack, but I couldn’t tell where the ace was. Dummy had only two low spots and all the trumps were out. Of course, my problem was——”

(But I never stay to hear what it was. I’ve heard others like it too often.)

IV

The Conversation Held by Two Women at the Close of a Dinner Party While I Stand Waiting with the Other Men to Say Good Night

“Well, good night, dear, your party has been perfectly lovely——”

“Well, it’s been just lovely to have you——”

(Telepathic thought of the group of men: “Yes, yes, lovely – but now – beat it!”)

“And really such a wonderful dinner. You know, I suppose it’s rude to talk about the things you are given to eat, but that fish soufflé was simply wonderful! How ever is it made? I must get you to give me the recipe.”

“Why, my dear, Bertha just makes it in her own way. But I’ll see if I can get her to write down the recipe and I’ll send it——”

(Telepathic chorus of the men all thinking the same thing: “Yes, yes, for Heaven’s sake, let her send it, let her write it out, let her print it – only let us beat it.”)

“Will you? That’s so kind! Well good-by, again, and thank you for such a lovely party, and I liked your friend so much – the gentleman who left early. I thought I’d just die laughing at some of his funny stories at dinner——”

“Oh, but really he wasn’t half as funny as he generally is! I was just thinking at dinner that I wished you could have heard him some night when he’s really funny——”

“But I thought him ever so funny tonight. I thought I’d die——”

(The telepathic chorus of the men: “Well, then beat it and beat it right now or perhaps you’ll die right here.”)

“Well, good-by. If you see Amelia and John, tell them I was asking about them——”

“Oh, we just never see them now since they built their big mansion. They’re far too grand for us in this house!”

“Too grand! Why, my dear, I think your house is just charming and that little sun-room, I mean that sun-room, is too cute for anything, especially if you put some flowers—— My dear, I saw some of the loveliest early wild flowers today when we were out in the country in the car. I simply must drive you out there——”

(Telepathic chorus, as before, “Yes, take her, take her now. Drive her clear to Mexico.”)

—

And then, just at this moment by Heaven’s special providence a butler or a maid or some one says politely:

“Your taxi’s waiting, madame.”

And the woman gives one wild leap toward the door. Women will talk forever when it’s only a matter of the men’s time, but when it comes to the moving finger of a taxi-meter, they wouldn’t buy five cents’ worth of talk from Shakespeare himself.

After all, these modern inventions are not wholly without advantage.

TOC     INDEX

Mr. Chairman,
I Beg to Move—

Showing the Wonderful Effectiveness of What Is Called Legislative Procedure

“There is no doubt,” says one of the recent Outlines of the Sidelines of History, “that the adoption of legislative procedure marked a great forward step in the progress of government. It lent to debate an order and precision before unknown; it clarified thought, and restrained the turbulence of argument by the dignity of formal address.”

Quite so. But did it? Let us see how it has worked out in some of the Meetings.

I

The Man Who Started the Trouble: A.D. 1295

Scene: Ye Chapel of St. Stephen’s in Ye Borough of West Minster.

Ye Speaker: An it please ye, my good Knights and Burgesses, sith this is a regular or model Parliament it would seem good to me that we frame or – as who should say – draught a set of rules whereby our parlement or, so to speak, our debate, shall be guided: Such as, first or in primis, that none shall speak when I am talking; second, that when others speak all shall be in order and form, such that not twenty speak at once as hitherto, but only one, or, so to speak, solus——

—

Fascinated with the idea, the houses of the King’s parliament of Edward I got together and made a set of rules of which the awful consequences are still among us. As witness—

II

The Familiar Scene When the Ladies’ Three-Weekly Discussion Club Undertakes Its Annual Discussion of the Club’s Finances. Verbatim Report:

Mrs. A: I’d like to rise——

The Chairman-woman: I don’t believe you can.

Mrs. A: But I am——

The Chair: I mean, I don’t think you’re in order. There’s an amendment to the previous motion still, I think, before us.

Mrs. B: If you mean my amendment, I had something that I want to add to it anyway, but I don’t mind leaving it over if Jennie feels——

The Chair (pounding on the table with a mallet): You’re out of order.

Mrs. B: I only want to say——

The Chair: You can’t. There’s a motion still before us and an amendment.

Mrs. C: But can’t she withdraw her amendment? I’d like to move that Mrs. B——

The Chair: You’ve heard the motion, ladies? Or no, I beg your pardon, it hasn’t been seconded. Doesn’t anybody second it?

Mrs. D: Before you take up that, wouldn’t it perhaps be better——

Mrs. A, B, C, and half the alphabet: Order!

Mrs. D: I’m not——

The Alphabet: You are!

The Chair (pounding): Ladies! Ladies!

Mrs. X: I’d like to second the motion, only I’d want to say at the same time that I think that Nellie——

Mrs. Q: Don’t you think, Madame Chairman, that we’ve done enough for one morning? I’m afraid lunch will be utterly overdone if we keep on. I told them one o’clock in the kitchen.

The Chair: Will you move a motion to adjourn?

Mrs. Q: Yes, if it is necessary. All I mean is that lunch——

—

And so after a hard morning they at last get adjourned.

III

How the Committee of Professors Undertake to Bring in a Report to the Faculty

The Chairman: Now, gentlemen, you have heard the remit, that this committee is to report on the question of the use of lead pencils in place of pen and ink.

Professor A: Mr. Chairman, I should like to ask a question, if I may.

The Chair: I don’t believe you can. You see, for the moment there is no business before us, and until we have some definite corpus loquendi as a prima materies there is nothing on which a question could depend.

Professor A: May I perhaps submit a motion?

The Chair (looking in a book of rules and shaking his head): I don’t think a motion would lie. It has nothing to lie on.

Professor B: I think, Mr. Chairman, that a motion that the remit be remitted would lie. Then I think Professor A could move for leave to ask a question as arising out of the remit.

Professor C: I don’t want to delay the work of the committee, but I cannot agree with Professor B. I do not think that any motion can lie at all until the chair sua sponte, or to put it more simply still, ab origine voluntaria, submits the remit to the committee. Till that is done the remit itself is in vacuo.

(General murmurs of approval. Professor C has evidently hit out a home-run. And so by careful legislative procedure, crawling forward from cover to cover, they manage to get to Professor A’s question.)

The Chair: I think, then, Professor A, that we may now hear your question.

Professor A: What I wish to ask, Mr. Chairman, is the precise sense in which the committee is to understand the word “lead pencil”; or rather, to be more exact, the sense to be attached to the term “lead.” The word “pencil,” I think, we may accept as a term generally understood. But the word “lead” offers difficulties. Does the remit include coloured leads or only black; would this change permit the use of crayons, chalks, and indelible pencils? In other words, I think we must formulate a definition of the word “lead.”

The Chair: I think Professor A’s remarks are entirely to the point. – Ha! Ha! Gentlemen, you must pardon me, I hadn’t intended any witticism – to the point, ha! ha!

All the Committee: Ha! Ha! To the point – ha! ha!

The Chairman (wiping his streaming eyes): Order, gentlemen, order. (And when the laughter has all died down). Well, then, we must define the word “lead.” Has anybody an encyclopedia here?

Professor C: Yes, I have one in my pocket.

The Chair: Will some one move that Professor C read what it says about it?

General murmur: Carried.

Professor C: Lead. A mineral carboniferous substance generally found in oleaginous rock. Lead was known to the ancients and was probably (but you can’t bet on it) the plumbum of the Romans: whence the word plumb, meaning heavy or straight as in “plumb” line; the word must be distinguished from “plumb,” meaning a fruit (Sanskrit, plupp), which originated in Corinth, which was famous for its fruit trees, a growth due no doubt to the favourable breezes from the Aegean, which was perhaps so called from its “Aege” or border as seen in Aegis, the shield carried by the Roman foot-soldier, but carefully to be distinguished from the pelta or shield of the Greek hoplite. The Greeks, in fact, were a great people——

Professor X (aged 79, waking up): I think, Mr. Chairman, that our meeting has been sufficiently protracted, and as I think I heard the dormitory dinner-bell——

The Chair: Shall we then defer progress and adjourn till this day six months——

All: Carried!

IV

The Crude Proceedings of Those Who Never Heard of the Model Parliament of Edward I

The scene is laid in any board-room where the directors of any great industrial company are making a simple little arrangement not involving more than fifty or sixty million dollars.

The Chairman: Well, then, what we want to do is to split the shares two for one. That’s it, isn’t it?

Murmurs of “Agreed.”

The Chairman: To take 100 millions of the new stock, the holders to take up at par——

Murmurs of “Agreed.”

The Chairman (to some one): Will you get that drafted, and will you see about the legislative authorization (they know all about it) – and – that was the only thing this morning, wasn’t it? All right, then we’ll adjourn till next time, eh?

TOC     INDEX

Fifty Cents Worth

“Is that my Uncle William?” asks the inquirer. His voice trembles a little as he says it. It is costing him fifty cents to ask this. If it should turn out not to be Uncle William – which might surely happen among the myriads of the spirit world – the fifty cents would be a dead loss.

But luckily it turns out to be all right.

“Yes,” says the voice of the medium. She is lying prostrate on a sofa in an attitude that resembles death, but she looks out of the corner of one eye. “Yes,” she says, “it’s Uncle William.”

She is dressed in a figured robe, presumed to represent the symbols of Persian magic, and, on the business card that stands on the window-sill, her name appears as Abracadabra, the Persian Sorceress (fifty cents a séance). But when she speaks, or when the voice speaks through her, the accent of the communicating spirit somehow is just plain, every-day English.

“Yes,” she repeats, “it is Uncle William.”

“And how are you, Uncle William? Are you happy?”

“Yes, very happy. It’s all so bright and beautiful over here.”

“That’s good. Is Henry there?”

“Yes, Henry is beside me. Henry is happy, too.”

“I’m glad of that. Ask Henry if he remembers me.

“Yes, he says he does. He wants you to believe that he is very happy.”

“Does he send any message?”

“Yes. He says to tell you that goodness is the only gladness, and you are to keep right on expanding yourself all you can.”

“Good. Ask him if Martha is there?”

“Yes. He says that Martha is right there.”

“Good. And ask him who else is with him there.”

For the first time the medium pauses. She speaks with a certain hesitation, as if groping her way. The reason is, no doubt, that there is some kind of thought-block or stoppage in the ethereal wave. Either that or something in the form of the question. Or perhaps the chief cause of these hesitations, or stoppages, is that the ethereal thought-wave has momentarily slipped from one plane to another and not yet regeared itself to the vibration. Very likely, too, the zodiacal body or somatic double has for the moment passed through an obfuscation. It is certainly some simple thing of that sort.

Hence it comes about that, when the inquirer asks who else is over there with Uncle William, the medium pauses and gropes.

“It is not very clear,” she says slowly. “There’s a dimness. I see two figures, but perhaps there may be three. They look strangely alike, and yet oddly dissimilar. They seem to be dressed all in deep black, or else white – I can’t quite be sure.”

The sitter interrupts.

“Ask if they are Mary Ann and Pete,” he says eagerly.

“Yes,” says the medium, “they are! They are! Mary Ann is waving to you. Pete is waving. I can see them very plainly now.”

“What are they saying?” asks the inquirer anxiously.

“They are saying that there is no light but eternity, and they want you to keep on getting on a higher and higher plane.”

At this moment the proprietor of the Spiritualistic Parlours (Hours 9 to 12, 12 to 6, and 6 to 11.30) comes back into the room. His official name, on his cards, is Nadir the Nameless, the Persian Astrologer, and this is why his face is stained with tan shoe-polish (rub well with the fingers, followed by a dry rag, etc.) But he too speaks plain English. He lays his finger on the shoulder of the inquirer and tells him that his time is up. His fifty cents worth is exhausted.

—

So the inquirer, his interview terminated, goes back to his fellows. He will tell of what he has heard. He will tell it eight or ten times that evening and repeat it at intervals for days and months afterwards. He will say that it was the most marvelous thing he ever listened to. He will say the woman knew all the names of all his deceased relations, named them without hesitation, and told him all about them.

All this is what he will say.

And the more often he tells all this, the more completely the inquirer feels that the mystery of mysteries is solved.

—

But, in the meantime, when the interviewer has left the Parlour of the Spirits, Nadir the Nameless helps his wife to rise from the tawdry little couch.

Her face is weary and sad.

“You’re tired, dear,” says the Astrologer gently. “Come into the other room. I’ve made some tea.”

“Ain’t I seen that fella here before?” asks the medium wearily.

“Yes, I think he was here one day last week,” says Nadir. “But I’m not sure.”

Nadir the Nameless and his wife don’t keep elaborate track of their clients. There is a myth abroad that they follow them about and dig up all kinds of information about them in secret. They don’t. Why should they? Uncle William is good enough.

“Look,” says Nadir the Nameless, as they sit down in the back room. “I’ve got the supper all ready for you.”

“You’re so good, Fred,” says the medium.

Then she begins to cry softly. “I was thinking of Nan,” she says. “All day while I was working I was thinking of Nan.”

Nan was the little daughter of Nadir the Nameless, and Abracadabra, his wife. She died last week. But do they call her up from the spirit world? Ah, no! Leave that for Uncle William and such.

“Don’t cry,” says Nadir. “Wait while I go and take the card out of the window. You mustn’t work any more today.”

“But there’s the rent, Fred,” says the wife, pausing in her tears.

“Never mind; we’ll manage somehow. And listen, dear, you take this fifty cents that that guy paid for his revelation and buy some flowers for Nan’s grave. Tomorrow’s Sunday. Wait till I go and wash, and we’ll have tea. Don’t cry, dear. Don’t cry.”

And, with this first and last of human consolations on his lips, he leaves her to herself.

TOC     INDEX

The Dry Pickwick

(1932)

~

The Dry Pickwick
Ratification of the New Naval Disagreement
A Mediaeval Hole in One

The Great War as Recorded by Mr. William Shakespeare

If the Gandhi Habit Spreads
In Praise of the Americans
Once to Everyman
Confessions of a Soda Fiend
A Guide to the Province of Quebec
Why the Next War Didn’t Happen
A, B, and C After Twenty Years
Breakfast at the Smiths’
The Perfect Optimist
“Tum and Play Dolf”
Ho for Happiness
Tennis at the Smiths’
A Butler of the Old School
The Flying Carpet
Come and See Our Town
Inflation and Deflation
L’envoi: What Next?

The Dry Pickwick

England’s Greatest Writer
Adapted to America’s Greatest Legislation

INTRODUCTION

The demand from the American colleges for a revision of the works of Charles Dickens has now become so insistent that something must be done. “How can we put before the eyes of our literature classes,” writes the president of the Mush Academy, “such scenes as those of the Maypole Inn, or the taproom of the Ipswich White Horse?” “Our girls,” writes Professor Lydia Leftover, “are tough enough already. If they start to read the drinking episodes of the Pickwick Papers, we can’t hold them.” “We must have legislation in this matter,” declares a well-known Senator from a Middle West State. “Our people are accustomed to lean on legislation. They can’t progress without it. What we need is a State law to declare that Charles Dickens is not funny.”

“But would it not be the more moderate and sensible course,” so writes to me the president of a New England college, “if we could obtain a revised edition of the works of Charles Dickens, so made as to retain all the charm of character and humour and to leave out those features of social life not in harmony with our environment?”

Exactly. But can it be done? Let us take some of the most famous and typical episodes of the Dickens books and imagine them undergoing such a revision.

All the world knows, at first hand or at second or third, the Pickwick Papers. All the world has read or heard of such unforgettable episodes as the Christmas visit of Mr. Pickwick and his friends to the hospitable Manor Farm of Mr. Wardle of Dingley Dell. What would revision leave of such a page of life?

Let us recall it as Dickens wrote it.

Here is the rubicund and jovial Mr. Pickwick, together with his inimitable and immortal friends, setting out by coach to visit Dingley Dell. We recall the starting of the coach from the inn yard, the vast hampers with mysterious bottles clinking within them; the cracking of the whips of the merry postillions; the pauses by the way for a change of horses at the wayside inns where Mr. Pickwick and his friends descend from their perch to visit the bar. Here a rosy landlord behind the long mahogany dispenses sundry smoking punches and hot drinks redolent of gin and lemons. We recall the arrival at Dingley Dell with jolly old Wardle merrily greeting his friends; more punches: festivities within doors and festivities without; hot toddies, hot negus, sugar, lemons and spices – the very atmosphere of the West Indies wafted on the Christmas air of England; skating on the ice; whist, cards, and round games in the drawing-room; huge dinners and substantial suppers; the consumption of oysters by the barrel and spiced beef by the hundredweight; and through it all the soft aroma of hot punch, mulled ale, warmed claret and smoking gin and lemons; till at the end the merriment fades into somnolence and Mr. Pickwick and his friends sink into innocent slumber having broken enough laws – if the scene were in America – to have sent them all to the penitentiary for life.

Can such pictures be revised? We dare not read them as they stand. They would corrupt the young. Let us see what revision can do.

So here follows:

THE REVISED OR DRY PICKWICK

The evening was that of the twenty-fourth of December. Mr. Pickwick had retired early to his room in the inn and had betaken himself and his night-cap early to bed, in anticipation of an early start for Dingley Dell by the coach of the morrow. Mr. Pickwick, we say, had retired early to bed, and reclined well propped up with the pillows with a bedside book open on the coverlet before him as a scarcely necessary aid in the summons of slumber. Mr. Pickwick’s night-cap, in the corporeal or, so to speak, the flannel, sense was upon his head, while his night-cap in the metaphorical sense, stood beside the bed upon the settee in the form of a tall glass of smoking toddy, from which the great man punctuated his reading from time to time with little sips. If we had looked sideways over Mr. Pickwick’s shoulder at the book before him, we could have read its title as “The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, together with the federal and state legislation for the enforcement thereof.” We would have observed, moreover, that as the great man read further and further into the volume before him his usual genial face took on a serious air which almost deepened into an expression of indignation. We should have heard Mr. Pickwick from time to time give vent to such expressions as “Most extraordinary!” “Not to be tolerated,” and various other ejaculations of surprise, indignation and protest. Nay, we should have noted that the repeated sips taken by Mr. Pickwick from the tall flagon of punch became more and more frequent and accentuated, as if assuming the form of a personal assertion of independence against an unwarranted intrusion upon the liberty of a Briton. Indeed we should have finally noted that nothing but the emptying of the flagon and the simultaneous expiration of Mr. Pickwick’s candle as if blushing for shame to have illuminated such a page, put an end to Mr. Pickwick’s reading. Indeed we may well imagine that the brain of that august gentleman, usually so well poised as to admit of a dreamless slumber, may for once have been carried into a dreamland, haunted with the uncomfortable visions called up by what he had read. Mr. Pickwick indeed slept, but——

—

“Better get up,” growled a voice at Mr. Pickwick’s ear before he seemed to have slept at all; “only ten minutes to coach time.”

If that was the voice of Tracy Tupman, Mr. Pickwick’s friend and contemporary, it was greatly changed; a surly voice with no good fellowship left in it; a mean voice – reflected Mr. Pickwick, as he sadly pulled on his clothes in the chill of a winter dawn – not like Tupman’s at all. No suggestion of a morning draught of gin and bitters, or of something that might warm the system and set it all a-tune for Christmas Day! Not even a “Merry Christmas,” thought Mr. Pickwick, as he dressed and descended to the yard where the coach stood in readiness. Mr. Pickwick’s friends were already gathered. They looked blue in the jowl and mournful in the chops; a sour-looking hostler half awake fussed about beside the horses.

“Don’t tip him,” whispered Mr. Snodgrass to Mr. Tupman.

“Tip him!” replied Tupman; “a mean, disobliging fellow like that; not a farthing.”

“Don’t tip the postboys either,” added Snodgrass.

“Certainly not,” said Tupman; “such a couple of lubberly stupid fellows I never saw in my life.”

Mr. Winkle, the fourth of the party, approached Mr. Tupman. “Have you got the hooch?” he asked in a half-voice.

“For God’s sake, Winkle, not so loud,” said Snodgrass. “You can’t tell who is hearing. I’m told they’ve got spotters now in all these yards. You’re never safe.”

With a sigh Mr. Pickwick ascended to the roof of the coach. “I never realized before,” he reflected, “what dirty smelly things these coaches are, intolerable.”

There were several other passengers on the Muggleton coach that morning. It had been Mr. Pickwick’s agreeable custom, hitherto, to invite conversation with his fellow-passengers, in whom he was accustomed to find a mine of interest and information. But the passengers of this morning – silent, muffled and mournful, their noses red with the cold, their hearts heavy with depression – inspired no such invitation to social intercourse. Mr. Pickwick left them alone. “They are a pack of bums,” he murmured, unconsciously making use of a word not known until fifty years after his own demise, “not worth talking to.” And then, as it were, suddenly taken with surprise at his own lack of urbanity: “I wish, Winkle,” he said behind his hand, “I wish I could get a gin and bitters.”

“Shut up!” said Mr. Winkle.

Mr. Pickwick looked down from the coach roof at a mournful-looking man who was helping to adjust the luggage into the boot. “Is everything there all right, Sam?” he inquired.

“Eh, what?” replied the man in a surly tone. “I guess it is. Get down yourself and see, if you doubt it.”

“Surly fellow,” murmured Mr. Pickwick to Mr. Tupman, and he added with a sigh, “How I ever could have thought that fellow Sam Weller obliging and amusing, passes my belief.”

“Why not get rid of him?” said Mr. Tupman in the same cautious whisper.

“Can’t,” said Mr. Pickwick, emphatically, “he belongs to the union.”

—

At length, with no more delay than coaches usually take in starting at such a season of the year, the coach with a fierce cracking of the whips and with sundry snarls from the postboys was off upon its way. “Mean, nasty weather,” muttered Mr. Snodgrass, shivering into the collar of his overcoat.

“What you can expect,” rejoined Mr. Winkle in a tone of equal complaint, “at this time of the year. It’s, let me see, the twenty-fifth of December: always rotten weather then.”

“Dear me!” murmured Mr. Pickwick, “Christmas!” and he repeated as if lingering on the sound of a remembered melody, “Christmas!”

“What’s that?” said Mr. Tupman.

“Nothing,” said Mr. Pickwick.

—

It would be too painful to trace the slow progress of the coach along miry roads, down muddy lanes with ragged snow in the hedgerows and past gaunt trees shivering in the winter gloom. There was no gleam of sunlight. A chill east wind flaked with sleet, blew in the faces of the travellers, while the sky darkened almost to the point of night. Conversation survived only in a few muttered imprecations at the weather, couched rather in the form of profane soliloquy than in that of mutual intercourse. Even the heart of the noble Mr. Pickwick sank within him. “I wish I had a drink,” he murmured from time to time. “Winkle, don’t you think we might take a sip out of the bottle?”

“Too dangerous,” replied Mr. Winkle with a guarded look at the other passengers. “One of those men,” he whispered behind his hand, “is evidently a clergyman. You can’t trust him. But wait awhile,” he added. “There’s an inn a little farther on, the Blue Boar. We can get in there and take a drink.”

“Ah, yes,” murmured Mr. Pickwick, “the Blue Boar!” and at the very name of that comfortable hostelry such a flood of recollections poured into his mind – memories of blazing fires and smoking viands, of hot punches and warm brandies, that for a moment the countenance of the great man resumed its usual aspect of serene good nature. “The Blue Boar,” he kept repeating to himself, “the Blue Boar,” and with his hat, face and spectacles well drawn within the folds of his collar and muffler, Mr. Pickwick was able, in spite of all discomforts, to relapse into something like a doze, in which no doubt his mind passed once more in review those pleasant scenes and episodes which had made his name famous throughout the civilized world.

—

“Get down here for awhile if you want to. We’re changing horses.” It was the voice of the guard which had rudely broken in on the somnolence of Mr. Pickwick.

He sat forward with a start. “Where are we?” he murmured, looking through the sleet at a large building, its main door boarded up, its windows for the most part shuttered and the swinging sign in front of it painted over with white-wash. “Where are we?”

“The Blue Boar, coach-stop number six,” said the guard. “Get down if you like. You have four minutes.”

Mr. Pickwick looked in silent dismay at what had once been the spacious and hospitable hostelry of the Blue Boar. Where now was the genial landlord of the bygone days, and where the buxom landlady, bustling about the inn, with a swarm of pretty chambermaids busy at her bidding, with serving-men stirring up huge fires, dinners on vast trays moving to private dining-rooms, with activity, happiness, merriment everywhere, whither had it fled? This gloomy shuttered building with makeshift stables at the back, the bar boarded up, the licence painted out, the chimneys almost smokeless! Mr. Pickwick sat motionless, scarce able to credit the transformation of the world he had once known.

“Get down, Pickwick, if you’re coming,” called Tupman from the ground, and accompanied his words with sundry taps at his side-pockets and with sundry rapid and furtive gestures, apparently indicative of the general idea of drink. “We may be able to get in,” continued Tupman, when Mr. Pickwick had made his way to the ground, “and we can perhaps get glasses and some soda water inside.”

The Pickwickians gathered in a little group in front of the closed-up door of the inn. They stood huddled together, their backs against the driving snow, while Mr. Pickwick, as became the senior and the leader of the party, delivered with the head of his cane a series of firm, dignified and expressive knocks at the closed door. There was no response. “Knock again,” said Mr. Winkle. “I understand that the landlady still lives here; if she once recognizes us she’ll let us in in a moment.”

Mr. Pickwick again delivered a series of firm raps upon the door in which the authority of command was delicately blended with plaintiveness of appeal. This time the response was not long in coming. An upper casement banged open. A fierce-looking virago, a shawl thrown about her head, leaned out of the window. “If you loafers don’t beat it out of there in five seconds,” she shouted, “I’ll put the sheriff after you.”

“My dear madam,” began Mr. Pickwick in mild expostulation.

“You madam me, and I’ll have you in the jug. You beat it,” cried the woman, and the window shut with a slam.

Aghast at what he heard, albeit couched in language he could not understand, Mr. Pickwick turned to his followers. “Can that be the same woman?” he asked.

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Tupman.

“Certainly not,” repeated Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle.

Yet they all knew that it was.

“It seems to me,” said Mr. Snodgrass, whose mild poetic disposition was ever disposed to make the best of anything, “that if we went around out of sight behind the stable we might take a drink out of the bottle. That’s better than nothing.”

In accordance with this excellent advice, the four Pickwickians, with much dodging and manoeuvring, retreated into a hidden angle behind the stable fence. Here Mr. Winkle produced from the pocket of his greatcoat a bottle – alas! only a pint bottle – of a beverage which had already been referred to as hooch. “There’s no glass,” he said mournfully.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Tupman.

“—and no soda or water.”

“It’s of no consequence,” said Mr. Pickwick majestically; “drink it as it is. You, Winkle, drink first – I insist – you bought it.”

“I think it’s all right,” said Mr. Winkle, a little dubiously. “I got it from a chemist in the Strand. He said it was all right. Try it yourself.”

“Drink first,” repeated Mr. Pickwick sternly.

Thus adjured and with his eyes upon that Heaven to which he looked for protection Mr. Nathaniel Winkle took a long pull at the bottle, and then removed it from his lips with a deep “Ah!” of satisfaction. “It’s all right,” he said.

The bottle passed from lip to lip. The four Pickwickians under its genial influence regained in some measure their wonted cheerfulness. Mr. Tupman straightened up his coat collar and his shirt and adjusted his hat at a more becoming angle. Mr. Pickwick beamed upon his companions with a kindly eye.

But, alas! their little glow of happiness was as brief as it was welcome. One drink and one half-drink, even with the most honourable division done with the greatest sacrifice of self, exhausted the little bottle. In vain it was tilted to an angle of ninety degrees to the horizon. The little bottle was empty. Mr. Pickwick gazed sadly at his followers, while a gust of wind and snow that rounded the corner of their little shelter, recalled them to an inclement world.

Mr. Pickwick rebuttoned his coat about his neck. “Come,” he said, “let us get back to the coach. But I wish we had kept a drink for Wardle. Too bad.”

“Too bad,” re-echoed Mr. Tupman, buttoning up his coat.

“Too bad,” echoed again Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle, buttoning up their coats.

Indeed the Pickwickians were just about to retrace their steps to the coach, filled with humanitarian sympathy for the fate of Mr. Wardle, when there occurred one of those peculiar intrusions of fate into human affairs such as can only be attributed to a direct intervention of Providence.

—

Round the corner of the stable wall there approached with sidelong steps and a stealthy backward glance, an individual whom even the chartable mind of Mr. Pickwick could only classify as obviously one of the criminal class. The shabby habiliments, the tight scarf about the neck, the cap close down over the cropped head combined with the saturnine cast of an ill-shaven face and sunken eye to suggest an atmosphere of malevolence and crime.

“I seen yous,” snarled this ill-omened individual – “I seen yous take that drink.”

Mr. Winkle, as one acknowledged to be the most martial and combative of the Pickwickians, assumed an air of indignation and stepped forwards towards the newcomer as if fully prepared to take him by the scruff of the neck and hurl him over the adjacent fence. “See here, fellow,” he began in a tone of mingled anger and contempt.

The “fellow” backed towards the fence. “Cut out that high hat stuff,” he sneered, and as he spoke he drew from his pocket an object which even the inexperienced eyes of Mr. Winkle surmised to be a weapon of a mortal character. None of the Pickwickians, indeed, could from any freak of supernatural forecast have ever seen an automatic pistol, but there was something in the menacing clutch with which the villainous-looking scoundrel held the weapon which seemed to warn them of its power. Mr. Winkle’s naturally pale face grew a trifle paler, while even Mr. Pickwick put up one hand as if to screen himself from an imaginary stream of bullets. “My dear sir,” he protested.

The man put his weapon back in his pocket.

“I didn’t come for no scrap,” he said. “I seen yous take the drink and I seen yous finish the bottle. Now, then, do you want to buy some more? I’ve got it right here. How about it?”

“Ah,” said Mr. Pickwick in a tone of enlightenment and relief, “more liquor. You have some to sell? By all means, what is it – brandy?”

“It’s the real thing,” said the man, pulling out a long black bottle from an inside pocket of his shabby coat. “You don’t get stuff like that every day.”

He held the bottle up in the dim daylight. It bore no label; the bottle itself looked greasy and no gleam of sunshine was reflected back from its contents.

“What is it?” again asked Mr. Pickwick.

“The real thing,” repeated the man fiercely. “Didn’t I tell you it was the real stuff?”

“And how much,” asked Mr. Winkle, whose martial air had entirely evaporated, “do you ask for it?”

“For you gents,” said the ragged man, “I’ll make the price at five sovereigns!”

“Five sovereigns!” gasped all the Pickwickians.

“Five sovereigns,” replied the man, “and you’d better hand it over quick or I’ll report to the coachguard what I seen here, and you’ll learn what the law is, if you don’t know it already.”

“Give it to him, Tupman,” said Mr. Pickwick, “give it to him.” It was characteristic of that great and magnanimous man, that the aspect of anger and quarrelling was overwhelmingly distasteful to him. Financial loss was easier to bear than a breach of those relations of goodwill and concord which alone hold humanity together.

Mr. Tupman, as the treasurer of the party, counted five golden sovereigns into the hands of the ragged man. The black bottle was duly transferred to a capacious pocket of Mr. Pickwick’s coat. The ragged man with a surly attempt at civility, based on the possibility of future business, took his departure.

“We might try a sip of it,” said Winkle suggestively.

“Let it be understood,” said Mr. Pickwick, “that there is to be no further mention of this bottle, until I myself produce it at the right time and place for the entertainment of our dear friend Wardle.”

—

With this understanding the four companions betook themselves sadly back to the coach, and were hustled up to the roof by the guard already impatient at their long delay. There they resumed their melancholy journey, the wet sleet and the drizzling rain alternately in their faces. The long day wore its gradual length away as the four Pickwickians were dragged over muddy roads, past mournful fields and leafless woods across the face of what had once been Merry England. Not till the daylight had almost faded did they find themselves, on reaching a turn in the road, in the familiar neighbourhood of the Manor Farm of Dingley Dell.

“There’s Wardle,” cried Mr. Pickwick, waking up to a new alacrity and making sundry attempts at waving signals with an umbrella. “There’s Wardle, waiting at the corner of the road.”

There, right enough, was the good old gentleman, his stout figure unmistakable, waiting at the corner of the road. Close by was a one-horse cart, evidently designed for the luggage, beside which stood a tall thin boy, whose elongated figure seemed to Mr. Pickwick at once extremely strange and singularly familiar.

“You’re late,” said Mr. Wardle in a slightly testy tone. “I’ve waited at this infernal corner the best part of an hour. What sort of journey did you have?”

“Abominable,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Always that way at this infernal time of the year,” said Wardle. “Here, Joe, make haste with that luggage. Drive it on in the cart. We’ll walk up.”

“Joe!” repeated Mr. Pickwick with a glance of renewed wonder and partial recognition at the tall thin boy whose long legs seemed to have left his scanty trousers and his inadequate stockings far behind in their growth. “Is that Joe? Why, Joe was——”

“Was the ‘Fat Boy,’” interrupted Wardle, “exactly so. But when I had to cut his beer off he began to grow. Look at him!”

“Does he still sleep as much as ever?” asked Mr. Tupman.

“Never!” said Mr. Wardle.

The cart having set off at a jog-trot for the Manor Farm the five gentlemen, after sundry adjustments of mufflers, gaiters and gloves, disposed themselves to follow.

“And how are you, Wardle?” asked Mr. Pickwick as they fell in side by side.

“Not so well,” said Mr. Wardle.

“Too bad,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“I find I don’t digest as well as I used to.”

“Dear me!” said Mr. Pickwick, who has passed more than half a century of life without being aware that he digested at all, and without connecting that interesting process with the anatomy of Wardle or of any other of his friends.

“No,” continued Wardle, “I find that I have to keep away from starch. Proteids are all right for me, but I find that nitrogenous foods in small quantities are about all that I can take. You don’t suffer from inflation at all, do you?”

“Good Lord, no!” said Mr. Pickwick. He had no more idea of what inflation was than of the meaning of nitrogenous food. But the idea of itself was enough to make him aghast.

They walked along for some time in silence.

Presently Mr. Wardle spoke again.

“I think that the lining of my oesophagus must be punctured here and there,” he said.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

“Either that or some sort of irritation in the alimentary canal. Ever have it?”

“My dear sir!” said Mr. Pickwick.

“It’s this damn bootleg stuff,” said Mr. Wardle.

Mr. Pickwick turned as he walked to take a closer look at his old and valued friend, whose whole manner and person seemed, as it were, transformed. He scrutinized closely the legs of Mr. Wardle’s boots, but was unable to see in those stout habiliments any suggested cause for the obvious alteration of mind and body which his friend had undergone. But when he raised his eyes from Wardle’s boots to Wardle’s face, he realized that the change was great. The jolly rubicund features had faded to a dull, almost yellow complexion. There were pouches beneath the eyes and heavy lines in the once smooth cheeks.

—

Musing thus on the obvious and distressing changes in his old friend, Mr. Pickwick found himself arriving once more in sight of the Manor Farm, a prospect which even on such a gloomy day filled him with pleasant reminiscences. The house at any rate had not changed. Here was still the same warm red brick, the many gables and the smoking chimneys of that hospitable home. Around and beside it were the clustering evergreens and the tall elm trees which had witnessed the marksmanship of Mr. Winkle in the slaughter of rooks. Mr. Pickwick breathed a sigh of satisfaction at the familiar and pleasant prospect. Yet even here, in a nearer view, he could not but feel as if something of the charm of past years had vanished. The whole place seemed smaller, the house on a less generous scale, the grounds far more limited, and even the spruce trees fewer and the elms less venerable than at his previous visit.

In fact Dingley Dell seemed somehow oddly shrunken from what it had been. But Mr. Pickwick, who contained within himself like all great intellects the attitude of the philosopher, resolutely put aside this feeling, as one always familiar in visits paid to scenes of former happiness.

Here at least as he entered the good old house was the same warm and hearty welcome as of yore. The old lady, Mr. Wardle’s mother, her deafness entirely laid aside, greeted Mr. Pickwick and his younger companions with affectionate recognition: while the charming Emily Wardle and the dashing Arabella Allen appeared in a bevy of pretty girls for the especial welcome and the complete distraction of the susceptible hearts of Messrs. Snodgrass and Winkle. Here too, as essential members of the Christmas party, were the two young medical students, those queer combinations of rowdiness and good-humour, Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Benjamin Allen, the brother of the fair Arabella.

Mr. Wardle, also, as he re-entered his home and assumed his duties as host, seemed to recover in great measure his genial good nature and high spirits.

“Now, then, mother,” he exclaimed, “our friends I am sure are thirsty; before they go to their rooms let us see what we can offer them in the way of wine. Joe – where’s that boy? – a couple of bottles of the red wine, the third bin in the cellar, and be smart about it.” The tall thin boy, whom the very word “wine” seemed to galvanize out of his mournful passivity into something like energy, vanished in the direction of the cellar, while Mr. Pickwick and his companions laid aside their outer wraps and felt themselves suddenly invaded with a glow of good-fellowship at the mere prospect of a “drink.” Such is the magic of anticipation that the Pickwickians already felt their hearts warm and their pulses tingle at the very word.

“Now then,” said the hospitable Wardle, “bustle about, girls – glasses – a corkscrew – that’s right – ah, here’s Joe. Set it on the sideboard, Joe.”

The cork of the first bottle came out with a “pop” that would have done credit to the oldest vintage of the Rhine, and Mr. Wardle proceeded to fill the trayful of glasses with the rich red liquid.

“What is it?” asked Mr. Pickwick, beaming through his spectacles at the fluid through which the light of the blazing fire upon the hearth reflected an iridescent crimson. “What is it – Madeira?”

“No,” said Mr. Wardle, “it’s a wine that we made here at home.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Pickwick. Volumes could not have said more.

“It’s made,” continued the hospitable old gentleman, passing round the glasses as he talked, “from cranberries. I don’t know whether one would exactly call it a claret——”

“No,” said Mr. Pickwick, as he sipped the wine – “hardly a claret.”

“No,” said Wardle, “a little more of a Burgundy taste——”

“Yes,” said Mr. Pickwick, “a little more of a Burgundy taste.”

“Drink it,” said Mr. Wardle.

“I am,” said Mr. Pickwick, “but I like to sip it rather slowly, to get the full pleasure of it.”

“You like it?” said Mr. Wardle eagerly.

“It is excellent,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Then let me fill up your glass again,” said Wardle. “Come along, there’s lots more in the cellar. Here, Winkle, Tupman, your glasses.”

There was no gainsaying Mr. Wardle’s manner. It had in it something of a challenge, which forbade the Pickwickians from expressing their private thoughts, if they had any, on the merits of Mr. Wardle’s wine. Even Mr. Pickwick himself found the situation difficult. “I think, perhaps,” he said as he stood with a second bumper of wine untasted in his hand, “I will carry this up to my room and have the pleasure of drinking it as I dress for dinner.” Which no doubt he did, for at any rate the empty glass was found in due course in Mr. Pickwick’s bedroom. But whether or not certain splashes of red in the snow beneath Mr. Pickwick’s bedroom window may have been connected with the emptiness of the glass we are not at liberty to say.

—

Now just as the gentlemen were about to vanish upstairs to prepare for dinner the sprightly Emily pulled Mr. Winkle aside. “Wait till the old guys are out of the way,” she whispered. “Arabella’s got a flask of real old tanglefoot, and Bob Sawyer and Mr. Allen are going to make cocktails. Come into our room and have some.”

“God bless my soul,” murmured Mr. Winkle.

—

The assemblage of the party for dinner found much the same group gathered at the Manor Farm as on the occasion of Mr. Pickwick’s previous visit. Here among the first was the elderly clergyman whose charming poetic talent had afforded such pleasure to the company.

“I am glad to see you,” said Mr. Pickwick heartily. “I trust, sir, I see you well.”

“Not altogether,” said the old man. “I am well enough except when it’s humid, but I find that after a certain saturation of the air, it affects me at once.”

“Indeed,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“I imagine,” continued the clergyman, “that it’s my sebaceous glands? Don’t you think so?”

“Possibly so,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Though it may be merely some form of subcutaneous irritation——”

“Quite likely,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“You see,” continued the old gentleman, “it’s always possible that there’s some kind of duodenal perforation——”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

The fortunate entry of Mr. Wardle with a trayful of cocktails carried aloft by the Thin Boy interrupted this ultra-medical conversation.

“These cocktails,” proclaimed Mr. Wardle in the same tone of irritation and challenge with which he had passed the wine, “you may rely upon absolutely. There is no bootlegged stuff used in them.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Pickwick, smiling, “and what is the principal ingredient?”

“Harness oil,” said Mr. Wardle. “They were made here in the house by my old mother herself. Mother, your health!”

“Your health, madam,” echoed all the company, while the guests with a resolution worthy of the sturdy race from which they sprang, drained the glasses with the unflinching courage of the Briton.

—

It would be as tedious as it would be needless to trace in detail the slow progress of the meal which followed. The oil cocktails indeed induced a temporary and hectic rise in spirits which lasted through the first of the many courses of that interminable meal. But the fires, thus falsely raised, died easily down.

Mr. Pickwick found himself seated between the old lady, who entertained him with a sustained account of her rheumatism, and the ancient clergyman, who apparently found his sole intellectual diversion in the discussion of his glands.

Nor is it necessary to relate in detail the drear passage of the long evening in the drawing-room which followed upon the long dinner in the dining-room. Mr. Pickwick found himself at the card table, with his friend Mr. Tupman as his opponent and two elderly, angular and silent spinsters as their partners. Here Mr. Pickwick slowly passed from dryness to desiccation; from desiccation to utter aridity such that the sand in the desert of Sahara was moistness itself in comparison. More than once he almost broke his fixed resolutions and dashed off to his room to fetch down the bottle of the “real old stuff” which lay in the pocket of his greatcoat. But his firm resolve to share it with his host and to produce it as the final triumph of the evening kept him from so doing. His sufferings were all the more intense in that some instinct warned him that there was, as it were, “something doing” among the younger people to which he was not a party. There were frequent absences from the card-room on the part of Winkle and Snodgrass and the two young medicos, closely coincident with similar absences of the lovely Emily and the dashing Arabella – absences from which the young people returned with laughing faces and sparkling eyes – in short, Mr. Pickwick had that exasperating feeling that somebody somewhere was getting a drink and that he was not in on it. Only those who have felt this – and their numbers are many – can measure the full meaning of it.

—

The evening, however, like all things human, drew at length to its close. And as the guests rose from the card tables Mr. Pickwick felt that the moment had at length arrived when he might disclose to the assembled company his carefully planned and welcome surprise.

Mr. Pickwick signalled to the Thin Boy, who had remained in attendance in a corner of the room. “Go up to my bedroom, Joe,” he said, “and you’ll see a bottle——”

“I seen it already,” said the Thin Boy.

“Very good,” said Mr. Pickwick, “fetch it here.”

“And now,” said Mr. Pickwick, when the bottle was presently brought and placed with the cork removed beside him on the table, “I have a toast to propose.” He knocked upon the table in order to call the attention of the company, some of whom were already leaving the room while others still stood about the table.

“The toast of Christmas!” said Mr. Pickwick, holding aloft the bottle. At the sight of it and with the prospect of a real drink before them the company broke into loud applause.

“This bottle, my dear old friend,” continued Mr. Pickwick, his face resuming as he spoke all of its old-time geniality and his gold spectacles irradiating the generosity of his heart, as he turned to Mr. Wardle, “—this bottle I have bought specially for you. I could have wished that this bottle, like the fabled bottle of the Arabian nights (I think it was the Arabian nights; at any rate, certain nights) – that this bottle was everlasting and unemptiable. As it is, I fear I can only offer to each of us a mere pretence of a potation. But for you, my dear Wardle, I insist that there shall be a real bumper, a brimming bumper.”

Mr. Pickwick suited the action to the word, and filling a glass to the brim, he handed it across the table to Mr. Wardle.

“You, Wardle, shall set us a good example by first draining this glass in honour of the spirit of Christmas!”

The kindly face of Mr. Wardle betrayed a noble struggle in which the desire for a drink, a real drink, struggled for mastery with more magnanimous feelings. He hesitated. He paused. The liquid in the glass might be dull in colour and lustreless to the eye, but the pungent aroma, or odour, with which it seemed to fill the room bore witness at least to the strength of it.

“Pickwick,” said Wardle, deeply moved, “I can’t. You are too kind,” and then suddenly: “Damn it. I will.”

And as if anxious to leave no room for any weakening of his resolution, Mr. Wardle lifted the glass and drained it to the bottom. Only when he had consumed the last drop did he set the glass down upon the table. He set it down, so it seemed to those about him, with a slow and heavy hand, and stood a moment, after his potation, as if pausing for speech.

“Pickwick,” he said at last, “it’s – you are——”

His utterance sounded suddenly thick. His eye seemed fixed in a strange way. He looked straight in front of him, not at his old friend, but as it were into nothingness.

“Pickwick,” he repeated, and then, in a loud voice like a cry of fear:

“Pickwick!”

Wardle’s hands groped at the edge of the table. He swayed a moment, trying in vain to hold his balance, and then sank down in a heap against the edge of the table, unconscious, his breath coming in heavy gasps.

Mr. Pickwick rushed to Wardle’s side. The affrighted guests gathered about him in a group, vainly endeavouring to recall the good old man to consciousness.

Mr. Pickwick alone retained some measure of decision. “Sawyer,” he said, “where’s Sawyer? Sam, Joe – quick, go and find Mr. Sawyer!”

“Here, sir,” said the voice of the young medico re-entering the room to which the tumult had recalled him.

He stepped up to Wardle’s side and seized his wrist with one hand and with the other opened Mr. Wardle’s waistcoat to feel the beating of the heart.

Silence fell upon the room, broken only by the stertorous breathing of the old man lying against the table. The eyes of the guests were fixed upon young Bob Sawyer, who stood silent and intent, feeling for the beating of the flickering pulse, transformed in a moment by the instinct and inspiration of his profession from a roystering boy to a man of medicine.

Sawyer’s eye fell upon the empty and reeking glass. “What did he drink?” he asked.

“This,” said Mr. Pickwick, silently passing the bottle to the young man. Bob Sawyer, with a shake of the head, released the wrist of Mr. Wardle. He poured a few spoonfuls of the liquid into the glass and with the utmost caution tasted it with the tip of his tongue.

“Good God!” he said.

“What is it,” said Mr. Pickwick, “raw alcohol?”

“With at least fifteen per cent of cyanide,” said Bob Sawyer.

“And that means?” Mr. Pickwick asked with an agonized look at his old friend, whose breath had now grown faint and from whose face all vestige of colour was rapidly fading.

Bob Sawyer shook his head.

“It means death,” he said. “He is dying now.”

Mr. Pickwick threw his arms about the shoulders of his old friend. In an agony of remorse, he felt himself the destroyer of the man whom he had loved beyond all his friends. His own hand, his own act had brought about this terrible and overwhelming tragedy.

“Wardle, Wardle,” he cried in tones of despair, “speak to me. Wake up! Wake up!”

—

Again and again, so it seemed at least to himself, he cried, “Wake up, wake up!”

Then as he repeated the words yet again Mr. Pickwick suddenly realized that not he but some one else was vociferating, “Wake up, wake up!”

The voice echoed in his brain, driving out of it the last vestiges of sleep.

With a gasp of relief, as of one rescued from the terrors of a dreadful dream, Mr. Pickwick slowly opened his eyes and assumed a sitting posture, his hands still grasping the coverlet of the bed.

“Wake up, Pickwick, wake up. Merry Christmas!”

—

There was no doubt of it now! It was the voice of Mr. Tupman, or rather the combined voices of Mr. Tupman, Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle, all fully dressed for the coaching journey and gathered in gay assemblage about the bed of their tardy leader.

It seemed too good to be true! Here was the cheerful face of Mr. Tupman beaming with Christmas salutations as he pulled back the window curtains and let the sunlight flood into the room – here was Mr. Snodgrass arrayed in the bright finery of a poet on a Christmas holiday, and here, most emphatical of all, was Mr. Winkle proffering to Mr. Pickwick a tall bubbling glass of brandy and soda that leaped and sparkled in the beams of sunlight as one of those early pick-me-ups or restoratives, so essential for the proper beginning of a proper Christmas.

“Bless my soul!” said Mr. Pickwick, shaking off the remnants of his terrible dream. The great man leaped from his bed and assuming a dressing-gown rushed to the window and looked into the inn yard. There was the coach, gaily bedecked with sprigs of holly, in the very imminence of preparation for departure, the horses tossing at the bits, the postillions about to mount, the guard fingering his key bugle for a preparatory blast and Mr. Sam Weller in his familiar wide-awake, his face illuminated with its familiar good nature, gaily tossing minor articles of luggage in graceful spirals to the roof of the coach.

Mr. Pickwick, with one last shuddering recollection of the world of the future, slipped back a hundred years into the Good Old Days of the past.

TOC     INDEX

Ratification of
the New Naval Disagreement

An Extract from
the Annual Register of 1933

The principal event of the year just passed (1932) was undoubtedly the successful discussion and ratification of the new international naval disagreement.

By the opening of that year practically all of the existing disagreements had either lapsed, or had gradually worn out. The international situation was rapidly sinking into stagnation, in which naval defence was discouraged and public interest diverted towards other channels. All the Chancelleries reported that a new and dangerous tendency towards international sports, puzzle competitions and international Tom Thumb golf was largely responsible for the lack of public enthusiasm over naval expenditure. Under these circumstances naval defence, instead of being a pleasure, was becoming a burden, and the public Press of all countries echoed and re-echoed this new nature of the heavy burden of naval armament. It was even whispered in diplomatic circles that the mind and conscience of the civilized world were set more and more against war.

It was felt, therefore, that what was needed was something to give tangible expression to this new feeling of brother love among the nations: in short, something to put a little “pep” into the naval idea. Nor was anything better calculated to do this than the idea of complete naval disarmament, subject only to the retention of such naval ships as might be needed for purposes of defence, that is to say, for the object of maritime combat, in other words, as combat. At the same time it was desired to cut down all coastal defence to the mere amount necessary to defend the coasts. The general suggestion of reducing the building of submarines and confining it to the construction of boats needed underwater, was further aided by the general wish to confine aerial defence to the air.

As a result of these motive forces of international goodwill, the opening of the year witnesses a series of gestures of mutual reassurance.

In January the British Government, in announcing the building of five new battle cruisers, declared that this was intended as a first stage in naval disarmament and that the new cruisers would be armed with 18-inch guns.

The Premier of France, referring in a speech before the Deputies to this splendid pacific gesture on the part of Britain, said that France cherished the ideal of peace as the true French policy and stated that in pursuit of this policy the government would at once lay down the keels of three battleships of the first class.

The British, he said, were a noble nation and it was gratifying to think that war between France and Britain was at once and for ever impossible; otherwise, he added, the British might get a bad licking.

Replying to this a few nights later in the House of Commons, the leader of the Government said that he regarded the French as his brothers; they might, he added, be our inferiors in many ways, but for his part, since he had recognized them as brothers, he felt himself bound to live up to the ideal of brotherhood; this, he said, would only apply as long as the French behaved themselves.

The naval debate thus originated in the British and French Parliaments was re-echoed in the other European countries. In the Reichstag, Herr Dudelsach explained that Germany was entirely pacific in character and deprecated all militaristic preparation.

The Germans were friends with everybody. The great guns that were being built at Kiel and about which so much misunderstanding had arisen were intended merely as demonstrations of friendship.

In the same way, the vast new chemical factory on the Elbe was entirely and only an expression of international unity and love.

The Italian Parliament, in accepting the Government’s proposal for fifty new destroyers of high speed, called attention to the fact that these destroyers would merely enable Italy to convey messages of greeting to other nations more quickly than ever before. Italy was all for peace, declared the dictator, and if any one denied it, Italy would knock his block off.

It was at this junction that the United States, through its corps of ambassadors, offered its good offices to compose the growing unrest in Europe.

In a general ambassadorial message, it was explained that America viewed with concern the lack of harmony among the European powers. If the European powers would only try to realize what a poor set of snipes they were, they would cease to quarrel. They would feel too sorry for themselves.

The United States, in order to allay the growing danger in Europe, offered to build twelve more battle cruisers of the highest efficiency. If need be, it would build more; in fact, it would build just as many as the European nations needed to keep them quiet.

These ships, it was added, would be built entirely at the expense of the United States and would cost Europe nothing, but would be ready for use in the interests of Europe at any moment. The United States had no interests of its own; no interests, no designs, no ideas, no prejudices, no thoughts – nothing.

Unfortunately, the American naval rescript, while undoubtedly helpful in general, provoked in certain circles an unreasoning resentment. Lord Bulkinthehead, the leader of downright opinion in England, asked the Americans plainly who they thought they were. The French Minister of Finance stated that he might reluctantly be compelled to raise the hotel rates against the Americans.

The rising trouble was somewhat appeased by a pacific speech from the British Prime Minister, in connection with the building of thirty new submersible warships.

The Americans, he said, were tied to the British by bonds far more lasting than mere iron and steel. The original kinship between the two nations had been strengthened by a century of unbroken friendship.

He said it was pleasant to think that it was over a hundred years since the Shannon had whipped the Chesapeake, and he had every hope that it would probably not need to be done again.

The Prime Minister’s speech was warmly received in the American Press, and his sentiments in regard to the long-continued peace were everywhere echoed with approval.

It was recalled also that it was now nearly a hundred and fifty years since General Jackson licked the British at New Orleans and drowned them in the Gulf of Mexico.

It was this increasingly satisfactory situation that brought about the famous Naval Disagreement Agreement of 1932, which may be expected to have settled for a long time to come all outstanding naval problems.

The conference was summoned by the Government of Liberia, and consisted of delegates sent from each of the great governments of Europe and America, each Government paying its own expenses, except laundry.

Its proceedings resulted in the drafting and ratification of the 1933 Naval Disagreement. Its principal terms may be summarized as follows:

I. All participating nations agree that war is very wicked.

This resolution, presented to the conference by the Ladies’ Fortnightly Club of Monrovia, Liberia, was almost unanimously carried, China and Nicaragua alone dissenting. It was felt that the recognition of this principle alone would go far to prevent future conflicts.

II. It is agreed that no nation will ever begin a war without announcing it over the radio the same evening.

III. Each contracting nation pledges itself never to carry on a war unless it has something to gain by it.

IV. Each of the great naval powers limits itself to building enough ships to lick all the others.

The compact thus drafted was accepted and ratified with enthusiasm by the delegates of all the great nations concerned. The Prime Minister of Great Britain, in accepting the honorary degree of D.F. awarded him by the University of Liberia in recognition of his work for peace, declared that Britain accepted the new regime wholeheartedly and would at once build half a dozen new dry docks to help the United States carry out the Eighteenth Amendment.

The American minister, on whom the Negus of Abyssinia conferred the Legion of Honour (Class A.1 guaranteed two years), declared that the United States would lend fifty cents each to any other peace delegates, without interest for two years.

The French, Germans, and other delegates to the Liberian conference, in expressing their thanks for an annual pass over the Street Railway System of Monrovia, joined in the sentiment that world peace was now assured.

At the close of the year all the delegates left for home in order to get their naval budgets in good shape for Christmas.

TOC     INDEX

A Mediaeval Hole in One

Wet Golf in Dry History

The Middle Ages, from what we know about them, were days of pretty tall deeds and pretty tall talk. In the Middle Ages, if a man accomplished a feat of arms, or a feat of dexterity, or a feat of anything, he didn’t let it get spoiled for want of telling. In witness of which take the marvellous accounts of archery, swordsmanship, strength, skill, and magic which fill the pages of mediaeval romance from the Chanson de Roland to Walter Scott.

And there is no doubt that the “tall talk” of the Middle Ages was greatly helped along by the prevailing habit of tall drinking. They drank in those days not by the glass but by the barrel. They knew nothing of “flasks” or “cups” or “glasses,” or such small degenerate measures as those of their descendants. When they wanted a real drink they knocked in the head of a “cask” or “tun” and gathered round it and drank it to the bottom of the barrel.

Even for a modest individual drink they needed a “flagon” – and a “flagon” in the Middle Ages was of the same size as one of our garden watering-pots. A man who had inside him a couple of flagons of old “Malmsey” or old “Gascony,” had a power of talk and energy in him no longer known among us. When it is added that old “Malmsey” only cost ten pennies for a full imperial gallon – six of our quarts – one can see that even the dark age had its bright spots and that history was not so dry as it is called.

As a result, not only were the deeds and feats of arms of the Middle Ages bigger than ours, but even the narration of them had more size. And the spectators and witnesses, having sopped up on their own account a few “hogsheads” of “mead” or sack, could see more, far more, than our poor dried-out audiences. In witness of which take any account of any tournament, bear-fight, bull-fight, archery match or rat-hunt anywhere from A.D. 1000 to 1500.

For all of which deeds and performances, the running accompaniment of knocking in hogsheads and draining flagons kept the whole event in character.

No king in the Middle Ages ever appeared at a public tournament or joust without ordering the ends of half a dozen casks of sack to be knocked in. No royal christening was ever held without “tuns” of ale being distributed or “broached” for the populace, and “pipes” of wine being pumped into the nobility. At all big celebrations there were huge bonfires. Oxen were roasted whole. Any good man would get away with fifteen pounds of roast meat, six gallons of ale and a flagon of brandy, and go roaring home with an atmosphere round him like the mist round a brewery.

—

Those were great days. We cannot compete with them.

But in just one point the superiority is ours. The mediaeval people didn’t have our opportunities. Their archery and their tournaments were poor stuff beside our games of today. Just think what would have happened if they had had such a thing as golf in the Middle Ages! Imagine the way in which, with their flagons of sack and their hogsheads of Malmsey right on the ground, they could have carried out a golf-match. Imagine what they could have done in the narration of it afterwards! Conceive what could have been made of a mediaeval Hole in One. Our poor unimaginative truth-telling generation can form but little idea as to how they would have dealt with it.

What follows below represents an account of a Hole in One, as achieved in the year A.D. 1215 and related after the style of mediaeval romance. It is based on the account of the famous tournament and meeting at Ashby de la Zouche (which is in England) during the reign of King John. On that famous occasion, as Walter Scott related in his Ivanhoe, there was an archery match between Hubert the Norman, the protégé of King John, and the Mysterious Bowman, Locksley, otherwise Robin Hood the Saxon Outlaw. In this contest Hubert “sped his arrow” (that’s the mediaeval name for what he did) with such consummate skill that it pierced the very centre of the bull’s-eye, three hundred yards away. But Locksley had a still more consummate touch. He sped his shaft with such unerring dexterity that the point of it struck fair in the notch of Hubert’s arrow, still sticking in the bull’s-eye, and split it into two exactly even halves! After which even the stingy King John had to treat the crowd, a whole meadowful, to about two firkins each.

Imagine what would happen if people who could write that kind of thing and people who could believe it had had a chance at a golf story.

Come! Let us turn Hubert and Locksley into their twentieth-century form and make the contest a Hole-in-One-Shot! Thus—

—

All was now prepared. The vast concourse of spectators, both Norman and Saxon, crowded the vacant spaces of the course, and even invaded the fairways from which the heralds and poursuivants sought in vain to dislodge them. The humbler churls, or jarls, clustered in the branches of the trees.

At intervals along the course great “butts” or “tuns” by which we mean “vats,” had been placed, from which not only the yeomanry but even the commonry were permitted that day to drink at the King’s expense.

King John was seated on a dais beside the sand-box of Tee No. 1, at the edge of which the pious Archbishop Stephen Langton knelt in prayer for the success of the Norman Hubert. Around and about the tee, on tiers of rudely contrived benches, the Knights of the Household in full (autumn) armour were mingled with the resplendent Ladies of the Court.

“Sirrah!” said the King, turning sternly to Hubert, “dost think thou canst outswat this Saxon fellow?”

“My grandsire,” said Hubert, “played in the Hastings handicap, and it shall go hard with me an I fall short of his score.”

The King scowled but said nothing.

“What is bogey?” whispered Roger Bigod, Earl of Bygod, to Sir John Montfaucon de la Tour, who stood beside him near the tee.

“Three, so it thinks me,” answered Sir John.

“And gives either of the contestants as it were a bisque or holeth he in one stroke the fewer?”

“Nay,” said Montfaucon, “they play as man to man, or as who should say at scratch.”

At this moment the loud sound of a tucket armoured by the winding of a hobo from the second tee announced that the lists were clear.

“Let the course be measured!” commanded the Chief Marshal.

On this Sir Roger Mauleverer of the Tower and Sir Eustace, the Left-handed, Constable of the Cowstable, attended by six poursuivants carrying a line of silken yarn, measured the distance.

“How stands it?” asked the King.

“Four hundred ells, six firkins, and a demilitre,” answered the Marshal.

At the mention of this distance – which corresponds in our modern English to more than four hundred yards – an intense hush fell upon the attendant crowd. That a mere ball no larger than a pheasant’s egg could be driven over this tremendous distance by a mere blow from a mere wand of hickory, daunted the mere imagination.

The King, who well knew that the approaching contest was in reality one between Norman and Saxon and might carry with it the loss of his English crown, could ill conceal the fears that racked his evil conscience. In vain his cup-bearer fetched him goblet after goblet of Gascony. Even the generous wine failed to enliven the mind or to dissipate the fears of the doomed monarch. A great silence had fallen upon the assembled knights and ladies, broken only by the murmured prayers of the saintly archbishop kneeling beside the sand-box. Even the stout hearts of such men as Sir Roger Bigod de Bygod and Sir Walter de la Tenspot almost ceased to beat.

“Have done with this delay,” exclaimed the King. “Let the men begin.”

Hubert the Norman stepped first on to the tee. His lithe frame, knit to a nicety, with every bone and joint working to its full efficiency, was encased in a jerkin of Andalusian wool, over a haut-de-chausse, or plus eight, of quilted worsted. He carried in his right hand a small white ball, while in his left he bore a shaft or club of hickory, the handle bound with cordovan leather and the end, or tip, or as the Normans called it, the bout, fashioned in a heavy knob flattened on one side to a hexagonal diagonal.

The manner of the Norman Hubert was grave, but his firm movements and his steady eye showed no trace of apprehension as he adjusted the ball upon a small heap of sand upon the forward, or front, part of the tee.

“Canst do it?” queried the agonizing King, his hands writhing nervously on the handle of his sceptre.

“My grandsire . . .” began Hubert.

“You said that before,” cried John. “Shoot!”

Hubert bowed and paused a moment to drink a flagon of Amsterdam gin handed to him by the King’s boutellier, or bottle-washer. Then, standing poised on the balls of his feet at a distance of two Norman demis (twenty-six and a half English inches) from the ball, he waved his club in the air as if testing its weight, while his keen eye measured the velocity of the wind.

Then, as the crowd waited in breathless silence, Hubert suddenly swung the hickory to his full reach behind his shoulder and brought it down in a magnificent sweep, striking the ball with its full impact.

There was a loud resilient “click,” distinctly heard by the spectators at the second tee, while a great shout arose from all the Normans as the ball rose in the air describing a magnificent parabola in its flight.

“A Hubert! A Hubert!” they shouted. “Par le Sang de Dieu,” exclaimed Sir Roger Bigod de Bygod, “some stroke!”

Meantime the ball, glistening in the sunshine and seeming to gather force in its flight, swept above the fairway and passed high in the air over the ground-posts that marked the hundred, the two hundred, and the three hundred ells, still rushing to its goal.

“By the body of St. Augustine!” cried the pious Guillaume de la Hootch, “’twill reach the green itself!”

“It has!” shouted Sir Roger Bigod. “Look! Look! They are seizing and lifting the flag! ’Tis on! ’Tis in! By the shirt of St. Ambrose, the ball is in the can!”

And as Sir Roger spoke a great shout went up from all the crowd, echoed even by the Saxon churls who lined the branches of the trees. “A Hole in One! A Hole in One!” cried the multitude, while an immediate rush was made to the barrels or vats of mead which lined the course, into which the exultant populace precipitated themselves head first.

For such readers as do not understand the old Norman game of Goffe, or Gouffe – sometimes also called Guff – it is proper to explain that in the centre of each parterre or terrace, sometimes called a Green or Pelouse – it was customary to set a sunken receptacle or can, of the kind used by the Normans to can tomatoes, into which the ball must ultimately be driven. The virtue of Hubert’s stroke was that he had driven the ball into the can (a feat for which many Normans required eight, ten, or even twenty strokes) in one single blow, an achievement called in old Norman a “Hole in One.”

And now the voice of the Chief Herald could be heard calling through hautboy or megaphone:

“Hole No. 1; stroke No. 1. Hubert of Normandy scores Hole in One. Player in hand, J. Locksley, of Huntingdon, England. Clear the fairway for shot No. 2.”

All eyes now turned to where the splendid figure of the mysterious Locksley, the Unknown Golfer or Gopher, ascended the first tee. It was known to all that this was in reality none other, or little other, than the Saxon outlaw Robin Hood, who was whispered to be the Earl of Huntingdon and half whispered to be, by his descent from his own grandmother, the Saxon claimant to the throne.

“How now, Locksley!” sneered the triumphant John as the Saxon appeared beside him, “canst beat that?”

Every gaze rested upon Locksley as he stood leaning upon his hickory club. His mysterious appearance at Ashby de la Zouche and the whispers as to his identity lent to him a romantic, and almost fearsome interest, while his magnificent person marked him as the beau-ideal of the Saxon Golfer still seen at times even in the mimic contests of today.

His powerful form could have touched the balance at two hundred and eighty-five pounds avoirdupois. The massive shoulders would have seemed out of proportion but for the ample sweep of the girth or waistline and the splendid breadth of the netherward or rearward hindquarters.

He was clad, like Hubert, in woollen jerkin and plus eights, and he bore on his feet the terrific spiked sandals of the Saxon, capable of inflicting a mortal blow.

Locksley placed his ball, and then, grasping in his iron grip the leather-bound club-headed hickory hexagonal, he looked about him with complete sang-froid and even something of amusement.

The King’s boozelier, or booze-hound, now approached Locksley and, after the courtesy of the age, offered him a horn, or “jolt” of gin. The Saxon put it aside and to the astonishment of the crowd called only for water, contenting himself with a single bucketful.

“Drink’st not?” said the scowling King.

“Not in hours of busyness,” said Locksley firmly.

“And canst thou outdo Hubert’s shot?” sneered John.

“I know not,” said Locksley carelessly; “Hubert’s shot was not half bad, but I’ll see if I can touch up his ball for him in the tomato can.”

“Have done with boasting!” cried the King. “Tell the archbishop to count three, and then let the fellow shoot. If he fail, my lord Montfaucon and you, Roger Bigod of Bygod, see that he does not leave the tee alive.”

The archbishop raised his saintly face towards the skies and began to count.

“Unum!” he said, using the neuter gender of the numeral adjective in accordance with the increasing deterioration of the Latin language which had already gone far in the year A.D. 1215.

“Duo,” said the archbishop, and then in a breathless hush, as the word “tres” quivered on the lips of the ecclesiastic, Locksley’s club cleft the air in a single flash of glittering sunlight and descended upon the ball with such force that the sound of the concussion echoed back from the woods beyond the farthest green.

In a moment the glittering trajectory of the missile could be followed high in its flight and then the curve of its rushing descent towards the green. For a moment the silence was so intense that even the faint rustling of the grass was audible to the ear, then the crashing concussion of the driven ball against the inner tin of the tomato can showed that Locksley also had achieved a Hole in One! But the gasp or gulp of astonishment had hardly passed when the crowd became aware that Locksley’s skilled marksmanship had far surpassed the mere feat of a Hole in One accomplished by his opponent. His ball, driven with a power and accuracy that might wellnigh seem incredible, had struck against Hubert’s ball inside the can at exactly the angle necessary to drive it out with great force and start it back in flight towards the first tee.

To the amazement of all beholders, Hubert’s ball, easily distinguishable by two little dots on its lower face, was seen rushing in rapid flight to retrace its course above the fairway. So true was its path that it landed back precisely on the tee from which Hubert had shot it and came to rest on the little pile of sand on which the Norman gopher had originally placed it.

“By God!” shouted Bigod of Bygod, as Locksley picked up the ball and handed it with a bow to King John.

A wild shout that rose alike from the Saxon Thanes, the Danes, and even the Normans, rent the air, while even the ladies of the court, carried away in a burst of chivalrous admiration, tore off their silken baldrics and threw them at the feet of the victor.

Nobles and commons alike, Norman and Saxon together seized axe or bill and began beating in the heads of the casks in their eagerness to drink the health of the victor.

“A Locksley! A Locksley!” cried the multitude. For the moment the King paused. His ear caught in the roaring plaudits of the crowd the first note of that mighty unison of Saxon and Norman voices which was destined to cast him from his power.

He knew that any attempt against the life or person of the Saxon chieftain was without avail.

He turned to the venerable archbishop, who was prostrate beside the tee, eating sand.

“Fetch me the Magna Carta,” he said, “and I’ll sign it.”

TOC     INDEX

The Great War
as Recorded by
Mr. William Shakespeare

Extraordinary War Play
Discovered at Stratford-on-Avon

Editorial Note: As everybody knows, the Great War, as it drifts into retrospect, is becoming more and more the theme of literature and drama. Already more than one masterpiece of the drama or of the film has depicted for us the reality and the tragedy, the lights and the shadows of the Great War. But how many people must have felt the wish that Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist of all times, could have been alive to clothe the war with the wonder of his genius.

And now comes the glad news by cable from Stratford-upon-Avon that there has been discovered a most extraordinary manuscript. It is evidently a play dealing with the Great War and written, without a doubt, by William Shakespeare, the famous dramatist of three hundred years ago. How Shakespeare, who is known to have died at Stratford in the reign of James I, could have written a play dealing with the war of fourteen years ago is a mystery. It can only be explained, as everything nowadays is explained, by some form of spiritualistic action. In any case the authorship of the play is proved beyond a doubt by the internal evidence of its contents. For instance, Shakespeare, who called his play dealing with the Hundred Years War in France “Henry V,” very naturally called this new drama “George V.” That’s Shakespeare’s touch exactly. But the text of the play may speak for itself with one or two slight alterations or explanations to make it clear to those who are not Shakespeare scholars.

—

ACT I.

A Camp in Flanders.

Enter the King of the Belgians with the Belgian Army (two men) followed by My Lord French with the English Army (two men) and the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies with the French Army (one man).

My Lord French:

How now, my liege?

The King:

. . . But ill, my noble French,

Town after town, the jewels of my crown,

Lost to these dirty Pups; in sooth,

Good French, the thing begins to get me.

The Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies:

Not so, Lord King, we are not licked by half.

Our army, sore reduced, can still make head.

Let us fall on again.

The French Army (waving his sword):

Fall on.

(Exeunt the three armies.)

Lord French:

Well said, O noble France,

Let them fall on. Mark me – let them, not us,

And when they do, let us take cognizance

Of how it fares with them.

The King:

How stands our cause in England?

Lord French:

Not half bad,

Our armies multiply, while on the seas

From each far corner of the distant world

Comes the full tide of Empire.

The King:

Exactly, you mean that the various

Dominions of the British Empire have shown an
entire willingness to participate in the war.

Lord French:

Didn’t I say that?

The King:

Belike, perhaps, yet, couched in subtle verse,

It reached me not. And tell me, noble France,

What is the latest word from Washington?

The Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies:

The noble Wilson walketh in his room

And times he will and other times he won’t,

Whether to seize the sword and cut the knot

Or hold the equal poise of statesmanship.

The King:

Thank you. I get the idea without
further difficulty. You mean that it is still
uncertain whether the United States will enter
the war.

The Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies:

Yes.

Enter an illiterate peasant.

The Illiterate Peasant:

My liege, my lord, alas!

All:

What bring you! What news.

The Illiterate Peasant:

Sad is the news, my lord. The infuriate Hun,

Wreaking his wrath in ever-widening sweep,

That will not take denial of advance,

Hath met and overwhelmed our weakened force

And all are gone—

The King:

All five?

The Illiterate Peasant:

All five, my lord.

The King:

Alas! this day! good French,
commend me to my cousin George.

(King stabs himself and falls dead.)

Lord French:

Alas, good King, I am a soldier
too. I follow still.

(Stabs himself and falls dead.)

The Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies:

Be it not said that in this Big Idea

A Frenchman failed.

(Stabs himself and falls dead.)

The Illiterate Peasant:

I, too, the last to the Hyrcanean shades,

Where gloomy Pluto reigns o’er slumbering souls,

Will down.

(Stabs himself and falls dead.)

Enter Winston Churchill, with a link and an historical note-book.

What scene is this! (looks at the bodies)

A dreadful sight in sooth I witness here,

A king distended on a German bier.

CURTAIN.

—

ACT II.

A Hall in Castle in Lorraine.

Enter the Emperor of Alleman accompanied by his army (three) and the Dukes of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. A tucket sounds.

The Emperor:

Who comes?

Enter the King of Austria.

Welcome, noble Austria. What news bring
you, and how are our Brothers Bavaria and

Bulgaria?

The King of Austria:

Sweet William, all are well, the noble Fred

Drives all his enemies before him.

The Emperor:

Us too? Not so, my Lord

Dukes?

Dukes Hindenburg and Ludendorff:

It is.

The Emperor:

We lick the world.

Dukes Hindenburg and Ludendorff:

We do.

The Emperor (raising a Goblet):

Gesundheit!

At this moment the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, wearing a frock-coat and hat and looking very solid, walks around the back of the room.

The Emperor (affrighted):

What is it!

All (affrighted):

Lo, where it walks

’Twould speak . . .

The Ghost of Lincoln:

Beware the Ides of April.

The Ghost vanishes by walking across to a door and going out of it.

The Emperor:

What means it?

Dukes of Hindenburg and Ludendorff:

It means
that the United States has entered the war on

April 5th.

The Emperor

Give me poison, quick!

Hindenburg:

Not. Wait till the last Act. You
get it then and get it good.

The Emperor (speaking in rhyme to end the Act):

Oh what an April idiot I am

Fighting France, England, America and Siam.

CURTAIN.

—

ACT III.

A Camp in Eastern France.

Moonlight. Enter My Lord Pershing of Paterson, New Jersey. He addresses the moon:

Oh thou bright orb, whose incandescent beam

Looks down each night on the United States,

Floods Porto Rico and the Philippines,

Gilds with its gold the Zone of Panama,

Alaska’s snow, and Hikkitikki Beach

In Honolulu – shine but one more night,

One more – we have them pinched.

Enter the Earl of Philadelphia leading the American Army (four men).

Pershing:

How now, good Philadelphia?

Philadelphia:

All is well.

Our noble army landing from New York

Hath pushed its way across the map of France,

Leaving a track of cigarettes and gum,

Nought can avail against its driving force,

Onward and forward goes our dry canteen,

Y.M.C.A. and lecture for the Boys,

In vain they try to dam us and they don’t.

Pershing:

They dam us not.

Philadelphia:

They don’t and now behold we have them pinched.

Our boys in front, stout England on the flank,

And in between, the boys from Canada,

While farther East the army of Siam

Joins hands with France and noble Portugal.

The thing’s a cinch.

Noise of battle is heard, occasioned by some one beating with a stick.

Pershing:

The fight approaches. Stand fast.

All:

Stand fast!

Enter the Emperor of Alleman in flight, pursued by My Lord Currie of Strathray and the Canadian Army (both of them), followed by the King of Austria pursued by George V of England, followed by the Duke of Hindenburg pursued by Woodrow Wilson, followed by King Ferdinand of Bulgaria pursued by the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and the King of Bavaria pursued by the Speaker of the French Senate. Alarms and Excursions â€“ in fact, it is a real Shakespearian climax – all fight, two by two, round the scene.

The Emperor of Alleman:

Oh! I am killed. (Falls dead.)

The King of Austria:

So am I. (Falls dead.)

The Duke of Hindenburg:

Me, too. (Falls dead.)

All the enemies fall dead, while Lord Pershing, the Earl of Philadelphia, Baron Currie of Strathray and the others stand looking at the bodies of the four dead kings and their dead Field-Marshals.

The Ghost of Abraham Lincoln (appearing in the moonlight):

I think, gentlemen, I may say without hypocrisy

That this sort of thing looks pretty safe for Democracy.

CURTAIN.

FINIS

TOC     INDEX

If the Gandhi Habit Spreads

What If All the Politicians
Strip to the Waist

All the world has its eyes on Mahatma Gandhi, the strange emaciated little Indian who is said to hold in his hand the destinies of three hundred and fifty million people. All the world has been struck by the wave of enthusiasm which greeted in England Gandhi’s appearance at the All India Round Table Conference. The strange little man, with his large spectacles, his loincloth, his bottle of goat’s milk, has made an impression on the public mind greater than that of Kings and Emperors in glittering uniform.

But it has not yet occurred to the public that Gandhi’s appearance in London carries with it a grave danger. What if the other politicians of the world follow suit – follow Gandhi’s suit? The probable result can be clearly seen from the following Press despatches, the first of which has already come over the wires, while the others will follow later.

I

Gandhi in London

Mahatma Gandhi has literally carried London by storm. He appeared at the All India Round Table Conference, clad only in his spectacles and his loincloth. His little brown enfeebled body bore witness to his long fasting and privations. Gandhi’s arms, it was remarked with a thrill of enthusiasm, are hardly bigger than billiard cues. The exuberant and admiring crowd which accompanied Gandhi from the Victoria Station to the Conference at the India House noted that his legs were little more than tubes with flexible joints. His stomach, however, is rather better, which makes his general appearance that of a compressed-air vacuum cleaner. Gandhi carried in one hand a paper bag filled with curdled goat’s milk and in the other a portable spinning-wheel, model of 100 B.C. As he took his seat at the Conference amid overwhelming applause it was felt by all the assembled statesmen that Gandhi had conquered. “We can’t go up against that,” said one leading Conservative peer with characteristic British sportsmanship, “the man has out-trained us and we know it.” It is said that Gandhi can now dictate his own terms by threatening to upset his goat’s milk and take off his loincloth. “If he does,” said the same peer, “we must withdraw from India.”

II

Snowden goes One Better

England has been saved from the sudden and overwhelming crisis into which the country was plunged by Mahatma Gandhi. To the wild delight of the supporters of the National Government, the Chancellor, Philip Snowden, appeared on the second morning of the India Conference wearing nothing except spectacles, sandals and a Lancashire bath-towel. Snowden, it was seen at once, has a daintier figure than Gandhi, with better arms and a cute little neck and shoulders. His skin is excellent and excited the immediate admiration of every poultry-fancier. Snowden carried a beautiful Hampshire cabbage which is all that he proposes to eat during the deliberations. He has entirely thrown Gandhi’s spinning-wheel into the shade.

III

Ramsay MacDonald Joins

The wavering allegiance of the Labour Party was welded again into solid bonds of cohesion by the appearance of Ramsay MacDonald in the full (Gandhi) costume of his native Scotland. The Prime Minister’s rugged and magnificent figure was revealed clad only in the MacDonald one-piece tartan. His chest was thrown open to the public. He had a tin-can of Haggis tied to his waist and he carried a sledge-hammer in his right hand. He has sworn to eat nothing but Haggis till Scotland is moved away from England and given Dominion status without expense. As he brandished his hammer and shouted “Bring me that Budget,” the crowd went wild with excitement. Meanwhile Mr. Gandhi was carried unobserved to a hospital, suffering from an inflation of goat’s milk.

IV

And the House of Commons

English politics last night were restored to a new basis of stable equilibrium by a meeting of the House of Commons which showed the universal adoption of the new Gandhi method. All the members appeared in the full costumes of ancient Britain, wearing only about the loins a chaplet of oak leaves, or in some cases only a mere paragraph of mistletoe. Their bodies were stained blue and it was plain that they had allowed their beards to grow during the long vacation. They carried heavy clubs with which they beat upon the floor with loud cries of Rah! Rah! England! Skol! Skol! Hooroo!

The one remark heard through the galleries and corridors was, “This is England again! To hell with the pound sterling!”

V

Mahatma Briand Gandhies France

The new Gandhi tactics have rapidly spread to Europe where they are accomplishing the same terrific political results. The first consequence in France has been to effect the political salvation of President Briand and Monsieur Laval, his Prime Minister. Briand appeared this morning on the Champs Elysées wearing only a dainty little frilled pantalonette, style Marie Antoinette, with a light chemisette of transparent batiste, style Charlotte Corday, thrown over his shoulders. He carried a dainty little parasol and a basket of fresh eggs. The wildest enthusiasm greeted him as he walked down the Champs Elysées to join the Premier at the Palais Bourbon. “Comme il est beau!” exclaimed the ladies, and again and again one heard the remark, Quel joli petit derrière, et comme ça se trémousse! On the steps of the Palais Bourbon the President was received by Prime Minister Laval, who wore eye-glasses and a pretty little blue-silk fichu looped round the hips and nailed on with tin-tacks. Of the two, Laval has perhaps the more upright figure, but Briand undoubtedly the more girlish. The attempt of the Opposition to raise the cry that he needed a shave was lost in the general enthusiasm. The Government is now safe till the cold weather.

VI

And America

Latest advices from Washington report the White House as closed absolutely to the public since yesterday at noon. It is known, however, that messengers have been sent out to fetch a bunch of California Asparagus, and a mountain goat from Idaho together with an electric milking machine. Among the large crowd gathered about the White House the one subject of speculation is, “Will he do it?”

“If he does,” said a leading Democrat disconsolately, “there will be no presidential election next year.”

TOC     INDEX

In Praise of the Americans

Thoughts Suggested
by Writing the
First Story in this Book

THE AMERICANS ARE A QUEER PEOPLE: they can’t rest. They have more time, more leisure, shorter hours, more holidays and more vacations than any other people in the world. But they can’t rest. They rush up and down across their continent as tourists; they move about in great herds to conventions, they invade the wilderness, they flood the mountains, they keep hotels full. But they can’t rest. The scenery rushes past them. They learn it but they don’t see it. Battles and monuments are announced to them in a rubber-neck bus. They hear them but they don’t get them. They never stop moving: they rush up and down as Shriners, Masons, Old Graduates, Veterans, Bankers – they are a new thing each day, always rushing to a Reunion of something.

So they go on rushing till the undertaker gathers them in to a last convention.

THE AMERICANS ARE A QUEER PEOPLE: they can’t read. They have more schools, and better schools, and spend more money on schools and colleges than all of Europe. But they can’t read. They print more books in one year than the French print in ten. But they can’t read. They cover their country with 100,000 tons of Sunday newspapers every week. But they don’t read them. They’re too busy. They use them for fires and to make more paper with. They buy eagerly thousands of new novels at two dollars each. But they only read page one. Their streets are full of huge signs. They won’t look at them. Their street-cars are filled with advertising. They turn their eyes away. Transparent colours, cartwheels and mechanical flares whirl and flicker in the crowded streets at night. No one sees them. Tons of circulars pour through the mails, through the houses and down the garbage chute. The last American who sat down to read died in about the days of Henry Clay.

THE AMERICANS ARE A QUEER PEOPLE: they can’t drink. All of the American nation is haunted. They have a fierce wish to be sober: and they can’t. They pass fierce laws against themselves, shut themselves up, chase themselves, shoot themselves: and they can’t stay sober and they can’t drink. They have a furious idea that if they can ever get sober, all of them sober, they can do big things. But they can’t hold it. They got this mentality straight out of home life in Ohio, copied from the wild spree and the furious repentance of the pioneer farmer. The nation keeps it yet. It lives among red spectres, rum devils, broken bottles, weeping children, penitentiary cells, bar-rooms and broken oaths. The last man who sat down and drank a quiet glass of beer, was found dead – dead for twenty years – in Milwaukee.

THE AMERICANS ARE A QUEER PEOPLE: they can’t play. Americans rush to work as soon as they get up. They want their work as soon as they wake. It’s a stimulant: the only one they’re not afraid of. They used to open their offices at 10 o’clock: then at 9: then at 8: then at 7. Now they never shut them. Every business in America is turning into an open-all-day-and-night business. They eat all night, dance all night, build buildings all night, run cars all night, make a noise all night. They can’t play. They try to, but they can’t. They turn football into a fight, baseball into a lawsuit and yachting into machinery. They can’t play. The little children can’t play: they use mechanical toys instead: toy cranes hoisting toy loads: toy machinery spreading a toy industrial depression of infantile dullness. The grown-up people can’t play: they use a mechanical gymnasium and a clockwork horse. They can’t swim: they use a float. They can’t run: they use a car. They can’t laugh: they hire a comedian and watch him laugh.

THE AMERICANS ARE A QUEER PEOPLE: they don’t give a damn. All the world criticizes them and they don’t give a damn. All the world writes squibs like this about them and they don’t give a damn. Foreigner visitors come and write them up: they don’t give a damn. Lecturers lecture at them: they don’t care. They are told they have no art, no literature, and no soul. They never budge. Moralists cry over them, criminologists dissect them, writers shoot epigrams at them, prophets foretell the end of them, and they never move. Seventeen brilliant books analyse them every month: they don’t read them. The Europeans threaten to unite against them: they don’t mind. Equatorial Africa is dead sour on them: they don’t even know it. The Chinese look on them as full of Oriental cunning: the English accuse them of British stupidity: the Scotch call them close-fisted: the Italians say they are liars: the French think their morals loose, and the Bolsheviks accuse them of communism.

—

But that’s all right. The Americans don’t give a damn: don’t need to; never did need to. That is their salvation.

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Once to Everyman

People often say to me, “What is the sensation of flying? How does it feel to be up in the air? I would like to go up,” they say, “but I am nervous as to how I should feel if I do.”

To which I always reply – and I have answered the question a hundred times – “The first sensation, the first lift off the ground as you find yourself rising above the tree-tops is perhaps one of the most delicious sensations ever experienced. I shall always recall that wonderful feeling – the first time I ever went up.” I add in a quiet, modest tone, “It is a good many years ago, of course, but I shall never forget that sense of soaring above the tops of the trees.”

What I take care not to say is that the first time I went up is also the last time I went up. That is my own private business. I went up in an airplane just once – about ten years ago. I was up in the sky for quite a time, I am not sure just how long, but say a week. Then I came down. And I found that when I came down I had passed into a new class. I was a man who had the right to talk of flying. Once is all you need.

Notice how easy it is: I speak modestly of “the first time I ever went up, many years ago of course.” The fair inference from that is that in the intervening years that have since passed, I have been pretty well up in the air all the time – just down for meals, so to speak. If people say to me, “Is flying really dangerous?” I can truly answer, “Well, it’s ten years since I first went up in a machine and I have never had the slightest accident” – then I correct myself – “well, once perhaps a little trouble in landing.” That, you see, is true, because on the only occasion when I landed I was in such a hurry to get out that I broke one of the straps. That made a little trouble, about fifty cents’ worth.

Please observe, anyone who wishes to follow my example, the use of that word “machine.” If you want to qualify as an indoor aviator, don’t call an airplane by its own name. Call it a “machine,” or a “bus” or an “old horse,” or better still “a freight car.” Speak of it with contempt. Act as if you weren’t afraid of it: I always say, “I shall never forget the first old box I went up in: nothing would tempt me to go up again in an old banjo like that.” I don’t add that nothing would tempt me either to go up in a new banjo, with Colonel Lindbergh to run it.

The reader must take careful notice that sometimes questions and answers become a little embarrassing. It needs a really good command of English to fit them in. But a little reflection and practice will do a lot. Thus at times people say to me, point-blank:

“Do you fly much?”

The answer to this is – “Not now!” with a very strong and serious emphasis on the now. I don’t fly much now. This implies, you see, that there was a time when I flew like all Hades – a regular dragon-fly. Then you may add, if you like – “I don’t think one ever gets tired of it, though.” In my case I am sure I didn’t get tired of it. I was tired of it before I started.

But I repeat I did actually fly once, and most people won’t do even that. I may not be a Colonel Lindbergh but I have the right to lord it over the ordinary man in conversation.

Somebody once even asked me, “Did you ever fly much?” That seems a hard one, but the answer was after all quite easy. I merely said in a deprecatory way, “Oh, no, I never flew much. I don’t suppose I was even in a plane more than once in any one week.” Quite so, and I might have added – “in any one century.”

What I have described above, however, is only one aspect of the peculiar consequences which follow for anybody who has ventured “once up.” There are other things as well. I find, for instance, that my casual conversations on aerial navigation have acted as an incentive to others. After hearing what I had to say many a quiet listener has gone away with the determination to venture into the air in the hope that he may some day become a veteran aviator like me. Some of these “pupils” of mine have taken to aviation in the full sense of the word and one or two have become distinguished aviators. Looking back on it now over the increasing years I am cultivating a convenient confusion of mind as to just when I began aerial flight and just whom I encouraged and helped in his earlier days. Baron Richtoffen was, perhaps, a pupil of mine. I am not sure. Billy Bishop, the great Canadian flier, I am certain – almost certain – was one of my disciples. At any rate, I am sure I remember buying lunch for him either just before he became celebrated or just after. Indeed, when I get really started talking aviation from my arm-chair at the University Club, Montreal (under the statutory legislation of the Province of Quebec), I am not sure that I didn’t have a good deal to do with the training of Santos Dumont, the Wright Boys (both intimate friends) and Professor Langley of the Smithsonian institute and the Brothers Montgolfiers.

Any one of my readers can enjoy the same increasing reputation and the same glowing retrospect who will merely go “once up” in the air and then come down and talk about it for ten years.

More than that, I recall the case of a young man who actually took my advice, acted on my example, and came down a transformed man. The morning after his flight he walked into his employer’s private office with that resolute compelling look that any man wears who faces the floating clouds three thousand feet above the earth. Afraid! afraid to ask the senior partner for a mere increase of a hundred dollars a month! A man who has seen his plane’s wings bank at an angle of forty-seven degrees to the tangent of the visible horizon, afraid of a smuffy business man in a sack suit who never left the surface of the globe. Nonsense. And the senior partner rose with a pleasant smile and said, “I think I guess what you’ve come in about, Johnson; as a matter of fact, the firm were going to take up that question on their own account.” So the thing was done in a minute.

From the office that afternoon young Johnson went straight to a residence in the costlier and leafier part of the city where there was a certain house into which he had never before entered without a certain trembling of the heart: because there was in it a drawing-room in which he always felt a peculiar palpitation of nervousness: because in the corner of it was a sofa, and on the sofa, in the afternoons, an expensive-looking girl in a flowing dress fortified behind flowers and a silver teapot. But what did he care now? He had “flown over” her darned house – girl, teapot, rubber trees and all. Any man who has “flown over” a girl – well, after that the thing is simple. So Johnson walked in with that exalted look on his face and that quiet friendly steadiness in his blue eyes that one can only get at an altitude of three thousand feet, and nowhere else. And the girl just rose and put out her two hands with a sort of wonder in her face and said – “Oh, Edward.” The rest was over in ten minutes. The girl’s father went down before the aviator like a ninepin. They are married now and live in their own house on which they have paid an instalment – just once – and there has come to them the sweetest little baby – just once – and there you are.

I hope that by this time, my dear reader, you have realized that this article is a direct personal appeal and exhortation to yourself. Are you aware that, just outside your own city, there is a station of the Aircraft Company? If you go out in that direction you will see a large empty field with two or three airplanes trundling round on it, and one or two neat, efficiently looking young “air-men,” waiting round. Those boys will take you up any time, ride you round the sky and bring you back for five dollars. You do know this. In fact, you have known it for years, but you try not to know it. And you’ve got the five dollars – you must have, because you spent as much as that yesterday buying Russian cigarettes and French tea-cakes for the same girl that you brought the violets for last Saturday.

Come. Be a man. Drive out to that aviation place – one minute of resolution. Step into the machine – up you go – and when you come down, you’re a hero. And when you go back to the girl, buy her a ten-cent plug of tobacco and a Scotch thistle. She’ll know her place all right enough after this.

That is all; except just to say this. It is just possible that the Aircraft Company of Montreal (back of the Mountain, first turn to the left), seeing this article might be so pleased with it as to offer me a free ride in one of their machines. If so, please don’t let them bother. I have found for some time past that aeroplaning gives me a twinge of rheumatism, just a touch of inflammation in the mesencephalon – in short, I don’t suppose I’ve been up in a “machine” for months and months.

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Confessions
of a Soda Fiend

Written from
a Condemned Cell

I believe that I cannot in any better way impress these confessions on the minds of my readers than by the simple opening statement that they are written from a condemned cell. Through the kindness of the authorities I have been supplied with pen and ink and paper, but I have been warned at the same time that my time is short. It has seemed to me, I repeat, that an appeal from a condemned cell ought to attract the attention of even the most careless of readers. People who as a rule read nothing are immediately attracted by anything that has been written in a condemned cell.

It was for that reason that I came here. As soon as I knew that this old municipal building – with the town lock-up in the basement – had been condemned, I went to the mayor and asked, “Could you let me have the use of one of the condemned cells?” He demanded my reason for my request, and I said, “I want it to write confessions in.” He said, “Very good. But remember your time is short. The contractors want to start demolishing the building at ten o’clock this morning.” I asked, “May I have the use of writing materials at the expense of the authorities?” The mayor said, “Yes, provided that you work in a write-up of the town as a factory site. But you don’t get stamps.”

It is for that reason, gentlemen, that I find myself seated in this condemned cell, gentlemen, and writing my memories, gentlemen. And I want to say, gentlemen, before I stop calling you gentlemen, that I would gladly keep it up all through the confession. But as I have always noticed that writers of confessions in condemned cells only call their readers “gentlemen” a few times in the opening pages and then forget about it, I have decided to crowd it all into the first two sentences.

—

I want to say also at the start that this autobiography of my life and downfall is here presented with apologies to a great many eminent writers who have in the past attempted to do the same thing. I have in mind here such stories as the Dipsomaniac, John Barleycorn, The Ravages of Rum, and other confessions of the sort. Their relative failure arose from the unsatisfactory nature of the material available for the authors. In their day they had no more terrible picture to present than that of the ravages effected by rum, brandy or absinthe. They traced the decay of mind and body under the influence of these baneful spirits. But they could form no idea of the terrible wreck of a body inflated and distended with effervescent soda water and of a mind diluted to the verge of liquefaction. If my sufferings have been greater than theirs, it was because I was far more completely soaked than they were.

—

But to begin – I feel I ought to. There is nothing in the circumstances of my parentage or upbringing that I can plead in extenuation of my downfall. I was born of a family in comfortable, if not affluent, circumstances, of parents of sincere, if not profound, convictions, in a home that was educated if not cultivated, in a house that was rough cast if not brick, with plumbing that was effective, if not open.

In short, I enjoyed all the ordinary advantages of the average middle class.

My father was essentially a temperate man. If he took a glass of iced soda water now and then it was merely as a matter of conviviality and to suit the gaiety of the occasion. I may have seen him slightly inflated at Christmas or New Year’s, but never unduly distended.

—

I grew up, then, as a bright boy whose school and college days differed little from those of others. I made friends easily, learned without difficulty and was fortunate enough to know little or nothing of the trials and sorrows of life until I was on the threshold of manhood. Least of all could I have imagined that drink would ever become a danger to my welfare. Eating perhaps, but not drink; frequently at our meals at college one or the other of my friends might say, “My God! how you do eat!” and I can frequently recall, in a restaurant or in a hotel dining-room, hearing some one say, “Look at that boy eat!” As a matter of fact, I took the first prize for pie-eating at college while only in my second year. Our Alma Mater, I remember, was keen on all activities and friendly rivalries and I think I may say that I held my own at most of them, such as pie-eating, the oyster contest, the spaghetti championship and the other big events of college life.

But it was not, as I say, until my college life as an undergraduate was over and I found myself a student of law, that the real trial of my life began. I was preparing for a law examination, working hard, indeed up to the limit, as a keen student is apt to do, without being aware of overstraining the faculties. I often sat at my books till long after nine at night, even till nine-thirty or nine thirty-five, and would be up again and at it by ten o’clock in the morning, working right on till ten fifty-five or even till eleven-two. The truth is that I was overstrained, though I didn’t know it. Often as I played pool my hand would shake till I could hardly pot the ball; and at times in throwing dice I could scarcely throw a double six.

Then came the fatal morning when I was due to appear in the examination room at nine o’clock and found myself not only ill prepared and exhausted, but worse still, hopelessly nervous and in a condition of something like collapse.

As we were about to leave our college room one of my friends said, “Here, Charlie, drink this.” He handed me as he spoke a tall glass of bubbling soda water with a piece of ice tinkling in it. I drained it at a single drink and as I set it down I felt a new life and power. My veins tingled with animation, my brain revived, my ideas became active, my fear vanished. I stepped into the examination room and wrote what I believe was the most brilliant law examination test of that year. One of the examiners, who was himself the senior counsel for a local distillery company, said that even in his experience he had never seen anything like it. Undoubtedly I should have ranked first except for the fact that in my eagerness to write and with my newly acquired sense of power, I had not waited to look at the examination questions, but had answered from my recollection of them without consulting them. It seems that for technical reasons the paper had been changed overnight and my answers were no longer applicable. The point is one of mere college organization, easily understood by those acquainted with the matter and not in any way reflecting upon my capacity or memory. Indeed the senior examiner, who was also chairman of a large brewery company, said that I was just the kind of lad that needed encouragement, and would get it.

I remember that as I came out of the room my friend who had given me the soda slapped me on the back and said, “Well, Jack, you certainly wrote hard enough. Come along and have another soda.” After that I recall nothing except being with a group of my fellow law students and drinking soda after soda and finally some one saying to me, “Brace up, Bill, it’s time to get home.”

—

I pass over the circumstances of my gradual downfall. I will only say in my own defence that when I began drinking soda it was rather from a false sense of good-fellowship than from any real craving for it. That only came later. What got me at first was the easy careless conviviality. Some one would knock at the door of my room and say, “Come along, Jack, and let’s go and split a soda.” We would often begin after breakfast – or even start the day before breakfast with a long drink of ice water – and keep it up sometimes till night. Frequently I have sat in my law lectures in my final year with perhaps six or eight quarts of soda in me. You ask me, how I could do it? I can only answer that the first, the immediate, effect was one of exhilaration, of expansion.

It was not long before I reached a second stage. Convivial drinking was not enough. I must needs keep a private stock of soda in my cupboard for furtive drinks at any hour of the day or the night. I well remember how I first mustered up my courage and went into a corner grocer’s and said with all the assurance I could command, “I want a case of plain soda water sent over to my room.” The man demurred a little: said he must have twenty-five cents down: but in the end he sent it.

After that I was never without a supply. At the time of which I speak there was of course no legislation in the matter. Students might buy soda water, pop and even lemon sour without interference.

—

I suppose that my story as I relate it has been that of countless other men. If drink went singly it would be bad enough. But as everybody knows, drink never does come singly: other dissipations, other wastes of time and life go with it; and most often women.

Women are, so it often seems to me, our best and at the same time our worst angels. I am not aware that the thought has ever been expressed before, but I say it now, anyway. To my mind a good woman is one of the greatest things on earth, second only perhaps to a good child or a good man. But it is an old, old adage that for a young man at the susceptible age of life, women, and wine and song – are dangerous things.

So it was that women came into my life and helped to wreck it. The beginning was simple enough. I chanced to meet one Sunday morning in the street a girl whom I had known years before in the country when she was a girl. She greeted me and asked me to come to church with her. I went. It cost me ten cents for the church plate and ten cents for street-car fare to take her home. But it proved only a beginning. The next Sunday found me taking her again to the same church, but this time with her sister – so that the car fare home now cost fifteen cents. The Sunday after she brought not only her sister but her mother, so the car fare had risen within sixteen days to twenty cents.

If I had had the wisdom of a mature man I should have stopped there on the threshold. But I was after all little more than a boy and half full of soda. Somehow, Ellen – I think her name was Ellen, but it may have been Helen – continued to introduce me to half a dozen of her girl friends among the congregation. Somehow, I don’t know how, I found myself turning up at Sunday school, where Helen – or Aileen – persuaded me to take a class. Then before I knew where I was I found myself hand in glove with a regular church crowd and going the pace as only a young man started that way does. I was in the Young People’s Bible Class, out at night with curate’s young people’s debating society and working early and late at the church bazaar. Often I would come rollicking home on the street-car as late as ten at night with two or three girls and a couple of curates and would blow in as much as fifty cents’ worth of car tickets in a couple of evenings. The pace was too swift. To keep myself going throughout the day I would have perpetual recourse to the soda-water bottle. At night when I came home to my room – often not till nearly eleven – I would rush at once to the soda water. My impatience was such that I found opening the bottles one after the other too slow and installed a five-quart siphon. At this I would make a rush after my return from the church at night and squirt it all over my face and head.

—

Wine, women and song! So stands the familiar trinity of destruction. My own case was no exception to the rule. I don’t remember just at what stage of downward course I bought a gramophone. But I can recall the surreptitious purchase, my waiting outside the music-shop and looking furtively up and down the street for fear that I might be recognized, and my return home, the gramophone under my arm and my hat down to avoid the glances of the passers-by. After that, I would spend long hours in my room, sogged with soda, listening to coon songs, such as “Old Black Joe,” “There Is a Happy Land, Far, Far Away,” “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” and other negro melodies.

—

Well, as everybody knows, if a young man once gets started with a fast crowd of associates such as that, gambling and cards inevitably turn up as an accompaniment. Till then I had never played cards in my life and indeed hardly knew one card from another. But one night as we were coming home from choir practice – excited a little no doubt by some of the hymns – the mother of one of the girls said, “Come on into the house and let’s play bridge.” If I had had sense and recollection I should have quietly said, “I refuse.” But the temptation was too much and I succumbed without an effort. The cards were produced, the game was explained and for the first time in my life I found myself sitting down to play cards for money. We played, I remember, for a tenth of a cent, and I lost it. After that I played practically every night, always for a tenth of a cent, and I lost it every night for ten nights. After that I had chance streaks of luck and three or four times running would win a tenth of a cent, but somehow by the end of each month I was always behind and began to have financial worry and embarrassment added to my own troubles. By the end of six months I owed the curate’s wife ten cents, I owed the rector twenty-five cents and ten cents each to the choir and ten cents that I borrowed from one of the girls’ mothers to pay the girl with. Nor could I see any way to pay it.

Meantime my law studies had degenerated into a mere farce. I would sit over my books, sogged with soda water, my brain unable to function.

—

There is no need to follow in detail the stages of my downfall to my final disaster. I had soon abandoned all attempts at serious study; spent my whole evenings hanging around the Sunday school and choir practice.

—

Then came the inevitable crash. I have noticed in reading memoirs similar to my own – but inferior – that the inevitable crash always comes. In fact, it seems to be unavoidable. I was picked up one evening on the street – I believe that victims such as myself are always finally picked up on the street. I believe that when found I was practically insensible from soda water, that I had five aces and the rules of bridge in one pocket, and in another a gramophone record, evidently just purchased, of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

Luckily I fell in good hands. The medical man in whose care I was placed prescribed for me five months’ complete rest on a truck farm, either that or driving a truck for five months on a rest farm.

He recommended also that I might put together the record of my experiences as a human document for magazine use as a means of paying his fee. It is while waiting for a truck to take me to the truck farm, that I have borrowed this condemned cell to write my confessions in. I can only hope they may be of service in saving others from the fate that has been mine.

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A Guide to the
Province of Quebec

For the Use of
American Tourists

I travelled the other day from New York to Montreal, where I live, in the pleasant company of some Americans coming to the Province of Quebec for a brief vacation. “I like the altitude,” said one. “The air,” said another, “is wonderful.” “What I specially like,” said a third, “is the charm of the old French civilization.”

Now what they said was true. But it seemed to me to leave out something. The man who said he wanted altitude was six feet high already. So he must have had another purpose as well. The man who said he needed air was a big hearty-looking fellow four feet round the waist: that man needed something more than air to keep him going. And the other one who said he loved the old French civilization was very probably one of the Bourbons of Kentucky.

Something or other, some malign influence, seemed to have been at work to rob these men of their natural candour and plain speech. Presently I discovered what it was. They had with them, for reading turn and turn about, a little Guide Book to the Province of Quebec. I realized when I looked through this little volume how mendacious are all the “guide books” that are compiled for travellers: how artfully they conceal the true motives that start the average man upon a vacation journey.

The writers of these little books either are, or pretend to be, labouring under a constant misapprehension. They pretend that every tourist is crazy over history, with a perfect thirst for dates, memorials, and survivals of the past. They presume that if there is anything in the way of a tombstone within ten miles he will be wild to see it: that if you can show him a rock on which Charlemagne once sat he takes a twenty-four-hour round-trip just to sit on it.

When the tourist is not busy with histories, tombstones, and graveyards, he is supposed to get excited over folk-lore, old customs, and the dress of the peasants. When this interest flags, the tourist is expected to fall back on geological information, altitude above the sea, and relative rainfall. Thus his pretty little vacation is filled up with examining what the peasants wear, how high they are above the sea, how much rain falls on them each year, and whose grave is said by tradition to be situated at, or near, their village.

Now as a matter of fact this kind of tourist lived in the days of Washington Irving, a hundred years before Sunday afternoon radio information, and is as dead as Washington Irving.

Let me illustrate the case by an examination of the Guide Book carried by my American friends. It starts out, as such books always do, with a burst of romance.

It is not without a thrill of romantic interest that we find ourselves on our journey northward from New York, swiftly borne along in the night through the great forests of the Adirondacks and thundering through the darkness along the historic shores of Lake Champlain. The broad surface of the lake lies sleeping under its winter mantle.

Quite so: and so we don’t see it: the lake is frozen, and it’s night and it’s dark and we’re asleep and we don’t see it. We didn’t come to see it, either. No passengers, except crooks, stay awake in an Adirondack sleeper at three o’clock in the morning. So much for Lake Champlain.

But the Guide Book rattles on.

We are now in a country replete with historic interest. It was here that the heroic Montcalm stormed Fort Ticonderoga, here that Ethan Allen overwhelmed the slumbering British; here General Burgoyne, hopelessly surrounded, made his last stand on Bunker Hill while Sitting Bull and his mounted braves closed in upon his devoted band, with Sheridan still forty miles away. . . .

Exactly so. But we learned all that stuff in Grade Eight and we passed our examination and are done with it. Anyway, we’re still asleep. Again the Guide Book—

We have now passed the height of land and are speeding down the Appalachian Slope into the Laurentian plain. The rugged massif of the Adirondacks is exchanged for the broad valley of the Richelieu, an alluvial plain, thrown up, perhaps, in the postprandial epoch. The soil about is a conglomerate semi-nitrogenous loam; our altitude is now 200 feet with a saturation of 175 per cent. and a barometric air pressure of twenty-seven point three.

Precisely. But as a matter of fact we are in the dressing-room of the car trying to shave and we do not propose to risk cutting our throat in the interests of geological science. So the Guide Book goes off on another tack and takes up its favourite lines of manners, customs, and the peasantry. This sort of thing was worked for so many centuries in Europe that it is hard to let it go.

We are now passing through some of the oldest settlements of La Nouvelle France. We observe the quaint houses, taken as they were right out of Old Normandy, with the solid stone walls, the high gabled roofs, and the little windows of the dortoir projecting high above the fenêtres of the cuisine. Behind is the écurie of the cows nestled beside its pleasant fumier.

That’s enough of the French. Will the guidebook people never understand that we speak nothing but our own language, acquired at great difficulty and cost and already brought as near to perfection as we hope to go? This is all that we can afford. But we know, of course, what the next item will be – “the picturesque peasant.” All right. Bring him on:

As we pass the quaint farmsteads half buried in the snow, we note here and there the characteristic figure of a habitant, half buried in the snow, seated in his one-horse sleigh or calèche, his rough country horse, or cheval, half buried. . . .

That’s all right: bury him and be done with it. It is strange that the guide books are unable to learn that human beings nowadays are all alike everywhere. A Chinaman from Shanghai and a pygmy from equatorial Africa and a high-school teacher from Oklahoma are all the same. They all see the same movies, hear the same radio, and they all lost money when the stock market crashed. The picturesque differences are now all gone. Turks wear American shoes, Americans wear Hindu pyjamas, Hindus wear English shirts, and English students wear Turkish trousers. The picturesque peasant belongs back in the days of Voltaire, but today, when the Eskimo smokes cigars in his snug igloo and the Patagonian football team plays home-and-home games with the French Penal Settlement at Devil’s Island, what’s the good of pretending any more?

But at last, after passing through all the scenery and history and geology and local colour, the guide book finds itself arriving at a real city: let us say the city of Montreal. Here at last is something like life and animation, taxicabs, noise, restaurants, beefsteaks, life. But can the Guide Book see it? No.

As we disentrain ourselves at Montreal we realize that we are at the very spot where the intrepid Jacques Cartier stood in amazement within the great stockaded fort of Hochelaga (1535), or where the gallant company of the Sieur de Maisoneuve prepared in 1645 the fortified town beside the great river which was to witness the surrender of Vaudreuil to General Amherst in 1760, which thus prepared the way for its capture in 1775 by the American General Montgomery, who little thought that the same scene would witness the building of the Grand Trunk Railway in 1856 which culminated in the World War of 1914.

After which, having insinuated the history of the city in this painless fashion into the visitor, the guide book goes on to give him the really up-to-date information about the city of today. Thus:

The chief points of interest in the present city are the site of old Hochelaga (exact position unknown), the grave of the Sieur de Maisoneuve (the location of which is disputed) and the burial places of Hiawatha, Pocahontas and other early pioneers. . . .

I suppose there must be people to whom this kind of information seems good and this aspect of travel congenial. There must be, otherwise the little guide books and the illustrated travel booklets would cease to live. Presumably there are people who come home from their vacation tours and carry on conversations something like this:

“You were in Montreal on your vacation, were you not?”

“Yes, the city was founded by Maisoneuve in 1645.”

“Was it indeed? And what is its altitude above the sea?”

“Its mean altitude above high tide is 40 feet but the ground on which the city stands rises to a magnificent elevation, or mountain, which attains the height of 600 feet.”

“Does it indeed? And has this elevation a name?”

“It has. It is known as Mount Royal, a name conferred upon it by the first discoverer, Jacques or Jim Cartier.”

“Really, and what is the annual rainfall?”

“Well, the annual rainfall – if you include the precipitation of snow——”

“Oh, yes, I do; of course——”

“—In that case it would be about fifty inches.”

“Indeed! What a fascinating vacation you must have had!”

“We did. I recall one very old habitant, a peasant . . .”

—

Instead of the mournful and misleading information about history and the peasantry, how much better if the Guide Book would drop on the side a few little items of real and useful information, as:

The exact site of the old French town may be said to lie in a straight line between Molson’s Brewery (now running) and Dow’s Brewery (still brewing). The house occupied by General Montgomery in 1775 is easily found by its proximity to the principal offices of the Quebec Liquor Commission. . . .

—

But wait, stop – an idea occurs to me. Let me rewrite the Guide Book to the Province of Quebec as it should be written with a view to attract, instruct and delight the tourist from the United States.

—

REVISED EDITION

Guide to the Province of Quebec

The Province of Quebec, licensed to sell beer, wine and spirits, has an area of 706,000 square miles. Its magnificent extent reaches from the border of New York State to the shore of the Frozen Seas. The most northerly licence is that at Oopchoopchik in Labrador. But it is not necessary to travel so far as that.

The great glory of the province is the broad stream of the river St. Lawrence. On its noble bosom ply the magnificent passenger steamers of the Canada Steamships Company, the bars on which usually open at seven o’clock. There is no finer sight for the American tourist than to sit on the forward deck (the bar deck) of one of these palatial vessels and to watch the magnificent panorama of historic scenery which is unfolded to the eye as the ascent of the river is made.

Here on our right hand as we come up from the sea the magnificent stream of the Saguenay pours its foaming waters through the gateway of frowning rock as it joins the St. Lawrence. Clinging to the very crest of the rock, like an eagle upon its nest, is a tiny hotel, licensed to sell wine, beer and other malt liquors.

Ascending the river further, we pass the famous falls of the Montmorency, from which the soda water is made. Pouring over the cliff in a cascade over 200 feet high, the water is churned into soda at the foot. Nothing is needed but to mix with this soda a small quantity – or a large – of the Scotch whisky, freely imported for private orders under the laws of the province. The result is a delicious beverage, sparkling and refreshing, which may be placed beside us on a little table on the deck, while we smoke our Havana cigar, with one foot up on a camp-stool.

Our attention is next turned – though not completely – to the historic and picturesque Island of Orléans. Here are the quaint villages, the little spires, and the stone houses of the old French civilization, unchanged since its first foundation under Louis XIV. Through our field glasses we can see the thrifty French Canadian farmer busily engaged in distilling whisky blanc, or white whisky made from wheat.

In front of us now rises the impressive outline of the Quebec Bridge, its huge span crossing the river from summit to summit, and here before us there appears the grey old city of Quebec, standing on its rocky stronghold, the sentinel of New France. Our eye detects at once the dominating outline of the Château Frontenac Hotel, the bar of which commands a splendid view of the river. Here lie the great ocean steamers of the Canadian Pacific Railway. They do not draw as much water as the steamers of the White Star and the Cunard lines that enter New York harbour. But they draw far more beer.

We are now so close in that we are right beside one of these leviathans of the deep and can hear one of the white-coated stewards cracking ice. As we pass by another of these ocean greyhounds, we catch a glimpse through the windows of the smoking-room of ale being sold for eight pence a bottle.

The ancient City of Quebec well repays our brief visit of inspection. Here is the gateway where brave General Montgomery met his death on the wild December night when he tried to storm the city gates. Here is the entrance to the Hotel St. Louis. Here is the famous Convent of the Ursalines where Montcalm died. Here is the Hotel du Canada.

Our stay in the mother city of America is all too short. We would fain climb the heights to reach the broad plateau or plain of Abraham, where the destiny of America was settled at a blow. There are no licences now anywhere near the Plains of Abraham.

If our time allows, we drop in for a moment to visit the splendid building where the Parliament of the Province of Quebec is in session. Here the Lieutenant-Governor sits enthroned, the direct representative of the King. Around him are the ministers of the Crown leaning over his chair. There is a strange charm in listening to the courteous debate which is going on, all of it, we note with unreasonable surprise, conducted in French. The distinguished Premier of the province is speaking. We bend our ear to listen, understanding as best we can. We gather that the Prime Minister is speaking, gravely and earnestly, on the question of the percentage of alcohol in the beverages of the province. Certain members of the opposition have urged that it be raised from 100 to 150. The Premier does not see his way to do this. But he assures the house that if any one will show him how to do it, he will do it.

The ancient city of Quebec has her own proud way of dealing with the modern liquor problem. She gives no licences but sells liquor only through the medical profession, and then only to those who need it. As we descend the slope from the legislature we pass the gay little street of the doctors, with its laughing crowd of sick people around each door. The law is very strict, it appears. No prescriptions must be filled out for more than a barrelful at a time. The enforcement of this law is aided by a vigorous public opinion in its favour.

We are back again upon our comfortable steamer. We are again ascending the river on our way to the metropolis of Montreal. The bar, which was closed during our absence on shore, is now open again. It is a strict rule of the Canada Steamships Company that when nobody wants a drink the bar is closed.

The scenery has changed now. On either side of the river, we pass from time to time the quaint little villages of French Canada, each with its tall church spires and its neat hotel, licensed to sell beer and wine. From time to time larger towns rise upon the bank. Here is Three Rivers with its vast piles of lumber, its tall smoke-stacks and its eighteen licences.

In the country to the north, we can see the dim outline of the Laurentian Mountains – a vast territory of lake and mountain, forest and stream, an ideal hunting ground, the paradise of the sportsman. Some of our passengers have visited the Laurentians and as we sit about the deck in a circle they exchange stories of their adventures. One tells us how he was once moose-hunting beyond the forks of the Batiscan and lost his flask. Another tells a tale of how he and two companions got separated from their party over the divide in the wilderness near Lake Mistassini and for four days had only two bottles of whisky among the three of them. Stories such as these, though told lightly and casually, give one a very real idea of the peculiar hardships and dangers of the hunter’s life in the Laurentians.

But our steamboat journey is at an end. Our boat is steaming into the river harbour of Montreal crowded with shipping. Before us lies the great metropolis framed against the background of its Royal mountain. Our landing fills us with wonder and delight. On every side are objects of interest. Here in the foreground of the picture is the great brewery of the Molsons; we can see the thin steam rising from its covered top in a dainty cloud in the clear air. There is something exquisite in the sight that recalls the canvas of a Turner or a Correggio or the skyline of Milwaukee as she used to be.

In the upper town, all is animation, on every side are evidences of industrial prosperity. It is the noon hour and we can see that even the labourer on the street has his can of beer beside him as he eats his dinner.

Ah! Here is the hotel, our destination. The hotel is full to the roof and has been since July, 1919, but it can always find room for one more. We enter. We sink into the luxurious wicker chairs of the Palm Room where a Czecho-Slovak orchestra (they call it Hungarian before the war) is playing Jugo-Slav music. We order a quart of champagne each and send for a bundle of naturalization papers and a fountain pen. We shall never go home.

TOC     INDEX

Why the Next War
Didn’t Happen

An Attempt
to Reassure the Public

Along with a great many other people, I begin to feel that it is time that something was done about the “Next War.” The public are constantly being too much alarmed about it, and it is fitting that some one should undertake to reassure them.

I am well aware of the terrific prophecies that are being made. I know that Major-General Fitz-Bung, the great artillery expert, has told the Press that in the “coming war” the range of guns will be a hundred miles; that Admiral O’Breezy has declared that in the next war submarines a quarter of a mile long will be pitted against battleships five hundred feet high; that the great chemical expert, Herr Schwefelstink, says that in the next war poisonous gas will pour over the whole civilized world and especially on civilians, women and children, hospitals, homes for incurables, and golf clubs. The aerial experts, I know, offer to let loose a bomb that will lift London into the North Sea.

I am quite aware that the military writers all agree that the war after the next will be a corker, and that the next war but two will probably be about as bad a war as the world will see till the fourth war, in which the entire human race, if they have any luck at all, will be exterminated.

Personally, I take no stock in it at all. It’s not going to happen. The mistake that people like General Fitz-Bung and Admiral O’Breezy make is that they are unaware of a whole lot of new influences that are coming into the world. Let me show what I mean by looking forward about twenty years, and then backward about nineteen, so as to show in retrospect just what happened, and why it was that the “next great war” never happened.

The Great War of 1935

This war was to have been as between England and the United States. It was all set and staged to break out early in the summer of 1935.

The precipitating cause, that is, the cause that should have precipitated it, was one of those high-class diplomatic “incidents” which no self-respecting nation can tolerate. An American sailor was thrown out of a saloon in Singapore right on to the sidewalk on the mere pretext that he had been in the saloon long enough.

The newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic were immediately filled with the “incident.” All America agreed that the affront was one that no high-chested nation ought to take with equanimity. The British retorted that the right to throw anyone out of a British saloon at any time was a fundamental part of the British constitution, which no determined, self-respecting, bull-necked people would ever allow to be curtailed.

But just at this stage there intervened the opening of the second annual international dog show in London, in which the first prize for Belgian police dogs was carried off by an American dog from Idaho. The enthusiasm and excitement over this, on both sides of the Atlantic, was such that the Singapore sailor was entirely forgotten. When the incident turned up again, America agreed that the sailor probably needed throwing out anyway, and British people urged that at least the sailor ought to be put back again in the saloon and stood up at the bar at the expense of the British Government.

But right after that came the international chess match in Vienna, and then the tour of the Welsh choir in the United States – two hundred voices at a pressure of fifty pounds per inch – and the whole episode was forgotten.

The Great War of 1940

This looked a fine war. It was to have been between England and France with the United States purely neutral and sinking the ships of both. It should have been ready as of June the first, but just at that very moment Alphonse Jules de Marigny won the golf championship of England in the great three-day competition at Scarborough, and on the very same day, by an odd coincidence, Hoke Peters, of Pie Corners, Oklahoma, won the golf championship of all France at Deauville; Edward Beauclere de Montmorency (a direct cousin of the Earl of Hasbeen) won the American championship at Paterson, N.J.; and Angus Macpherson Macrae, of Dumfoolish, the great Scottish expert, issued a challenge to play off against all winners at ten cents a hole, cash down before hitting a ball.

This upset the whole war. As the President of France said over the radio that evening, “Is this a time for making a war?” and the United States minister to Great Britain, speaking over the telephone to Siam, assured the world that golf had replaced all other forms of argument.

The Great War of 1945

The 1945 war was spoiled by the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. It ought to have been a real peach, and indeed all through February and March it looked as if world-wide destruction might be let loose at any moment.

The incident – it is not recorded just what it was – was admitted to be one of the nastiest, dirtiest incidents that had turned up in ten years. The American Secretary of State had written a dispatch in which he said that if the incident turned out in the way he was sure it was going to turn out, his Government would have to consider the matter as one of those matters they would have to consider. This brutal language almost carried war with it. And the situation was made even worse when the British Foreign Secretary replied that His Majesty’s Government was not prepared to admit that anything had happened, but that the whole circumstances would be investigated, and if when they were investigated they turned out as he knew they would turn out, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves reluctantly compelled to take whatever steps they felt they ought to take.

This open and direct threat brought war to within forty-eight hours, and set up a feverish activity in all the paper factories, rubber factories, and gas companies of two continents.

Then that very afternoon came the astounding news that Oxford had at last beaten Cambridge in the annual boat race, and that the principal factor in the victory undoubtedly was that the Oxford boat contained five Americans, whereas Cambridge, very foolishly, had only four. The wild enthusiasm and the celebration of this event in London, Denver, Saskatoon (Saskatchewan), Phoenix (Arizona), and other great boating centres, dissipated all thought of war.

The Great Asiatic War of 1950

The collapse of the British-American war of 1950 was followed by several years of despairing quiet. For a little while it looked as if there was a chance of getting Serbia to fight Czechoslovakia, or of working up something as between the Latts of Latvia and the Slats of the Dantzig corridor; with good luck this might have started a conflagration that would have spread through all Europe, and sideways through Greenland to Canada and the United States.

Experts openly declared that only a spark was needed; unluckily during that very summer a main motor highway (London to Bagdad) was opened up via Latvia and Slatvia and an influx of American tourists poured into the country. The president of Latvia telegraphed at once: “This thing is too good to spoil, let us be friends,” and all chance of war was gone.

A last blow was struck in 1952. This year was to have witnessed the great Europe-Asia conflict, which all military experts had for twenty years declared unavoidable. But at the moment when the war was about to burst, a famous American explorer returned from Central China with a dinosaur’s egg – very old, but as good as new – and a British geologist returned from Western Mongolia with a robin’s nest in a perfect state of preservation, and a French scientist discovered in Cochin China, what was evidently one end (hard to say which) of a prehistoric megatherium, which must have been dead – which evidently had been dead – for over a million years.

The astounding discoveries led the International Ornithological Society to announce that it would hold its next annual convention at or near Lake Gob in the centre of Central Asia. The rush for tickets for this event, coupled with the announcement of the Palaeontological Congress and the International Biochemical Society that they too would meet in Mongolia made it necessary to postpone the whole Asiatic conflict for five years. In fact, it was widely felt that the opportunity was practically gone.

—

And so, if one may point a moral too obvious to need pointing, the world gradually began to realize that there was something else in it as well as high explosives.

TOC     INDEX

A, B, and C
After Twenty Years

Twenty years ago I wrote a book called Literary Lapses and I put into it a story called A, B, and C. It dealt with the three famous people whose names used to appear in all the arithmetic books used in the schools. Readers of ripe, or middle, age will recall A, B, and C as they used to be, and will remember the little anecdotes about them which ran after the following fashion:

A can do a certain piece of work in three days; B can do it in five days; and C in eight. How long will it take them to do it, if they all work together?

A was always the strong one, the quick one; B just ordinary; and poor C was just a nut. C worked slower, walked slower, swam worse, chopped less wood and laid fewer bricks than A and B. He lost every race, was beaten on every bet, and came out at the tail end of everything.

Now it happened that the other day I looked again at the story I wrote twenty years ago, and opened again the little text-books from which it had been derived, and I marvelled at the change of circumstance as between then and now.

The A, B, and C of my schooldays, with their “certain piece of work” – they never said what it was – look hopelessly antiquated now. They used to ride old high bicycles on which A, the hero, hit up a speed of eleven and a half miles an hour. They used to walk from X to Y – quite a walk, evidently, from the fact that they took “a certain number of hours” to do it: a thing that no one in these days of motor-cars would think of doing.

The biggest diversion that A, B, and C could think of was to “eat apples,” one after the other straight ahead. That was their best notion of a really wicked time.

When it came to money, their transactions were pitiably small. A used to “loan to B a certain sum of money,” which sounds most alluring and attractive, until it turns out that the “certain sum of money” was only thirty-five cents.

The highest wages that I could ever find credited even to A, the husky hero, which would work little C into consumption, was eleven cents an hour. When it came to speculation or gambling, the farthest any of them would go was that A would “offer to wager with B one dollar.” Whether B took up the bet or not, was not said. Beyond that the three poor pikers never got.

In other words, any up-to-date child studying arithmetic and reading such little anecdotes as that would despise them.

In the story as I wrote it twenty years ago I professed to have seen A, B, and C in the flesh and pictured their actual appearance: A, big, husky, and self-assertive; B, firm and moderate, but standing on his own feet; C, delicate and shaken with a consumptive cough and quite unfit even for a “certain piece of work.”

So let us imagine what their successors of today, the A, B, and C of 1932, would look like.

Here comes A, tall and swaggering and dressed in a plus-four golf suit. Here’s B in a Palm Beach effect, fairly sturdy-looking; hair mostly gone from drinking too much wood alcohol. Here, finally, is C, a weedy, mean-looking little type, with a cigarette hanging from his lip and a peaked hat over his eyes.

“Let’s take a look at the arithmetic problems set for today,” says A. (We imagine him looking at a school blackboard before school begins.) “What have they got us down for, anyway? Say, fellows, listen to this!” He begins to read:

“A, B, and C undertake to do a certain piece of work, beginning at six in the morning——”

All three break out into laughter.

“Isn’t that a peach?” says A. “Here, wait till I change it before the class come in.”

He writes:

“A hates work worse than sin, and B quit work after he made a clean-up in oil, and C hasn’t worked since he came out of Sing Sing. Guess how long it will take all three together to do a certain piece of work.”

They laugh, but B, the moderate one, says, “You shouldn’t pull that law stuff about Sing Sing. C doesn’t want that shouted out.”

“Aw, shucks!” protests A. “Anybody who reads the Arithmetic books can guess that C has served time in Sing Sing. You couldn’t explain him any other way. But have it as you like. I’ll rub that out on the blackboard and put in another. Listen to this old chestnut. Did you ever hear the beat of this? – ‘A, B, and C are engaged to cut cordwood, working each day for ten hours and receiving 10 cents an hour——’ How do you like that, fellers?”

“Gosh!” says B. “Ten cents an hour! Listen, A, let’s rub that out and write it like this, to make it up to date:

“‘A, B, and C, not having done any work in six years, invest their savings in the oil exchange. A cleans up a quarter of a million dollars, B half a million, and C gets stung for a hundred thousand and——’”

“But look at this one,” interrupts A, still reading from the blackboard. “Just listen to this:

“‘A, B, and C set out to drive from X to Y in three separate conveyances. A, whose horse is the fastest, makes seven miles an hour——’”

They all break into a shout.

“Gimme the chalk!” says C.

“You can’t write anything profane,” says B. “It’s a school.”

“Don’t I know it?” says C. “I ain’t writing nothing profane, see! I’m just putting it into up-to-date English, see? The way A done.”

C writes on the board:

“A, B, and C fly across the Atlantic——”

“Good!” interrupts A. “Stick in a bet! Make it for money.”

“‘ – for a million-dollar pool. A goes at the rate of 180 miles an hour – which is faster than B or C by twenty miles an hour——’”

“That’s the stuff!” says A. “Attaboy! And so I beat you both to it, do I, and get the pool?”

“You don’t,” says C. “The sum don’t end that way. You hit an iceberg, see, and you get in the drink——”

“And I win out!” laughs B. “I can go next quickest to him.”

“Yes,” says C, “but you don’t win out just the same. You stop to help A, see, because you’ve gotta sort of soft spot in your bean, and while you’re trying to help him, I beat the both of yous to it, and win out!”

“Get out!” roars A. “You beat him and me! You miserable little undersized hound! Why——”

“Stop!” says B, warningly. “Quit your scrapping and vanish. Here comes the teacher and the pupils. Leave those sums on the board just as they were, C. I guess the old-fashioned stuff is better as it is than anything we could put over now.”

TOC     INDEX

Breakfast at the Smiths’

A Little Study
in the Beauty of Cheerfulness

Speaking at a scientific convention last month, one of the leading medical men on this continent made the statement that cheerfulness at meal-time was the best health tonic in the world. One good laugh at breakfast, declared the eminent doctor, is worth half a dozen bottles of medicine.

There is no doubt that when this advice was given to the world it was kindly meant. No doubt the medical man thought it true. But little could he suspect the revolution that it was bound to work in the families of those who took it seriously – as notably in the home of the Henry Edward Smiths of Shadyside Street.

Till this news came out in the Press, breakfast at the Smiths’ had always been a silent meal. Mr. Smith sat down behind his newspaper with Mrs. Smith opposite him and with little Wilhelmina Smith, aged 10, on one side and John Algebra Smith, aged 13, on the other. After five minutes, Mr. Smith said: “Milk!” and they passed it to him. Then he went back to his newspaper, trying to estimate yesterday’s loss on fifty shares of Hip Hoorah mining stock at three-eighths of a cent per share. A little later he said: “Toast.” After that he murmured: “Marmalade.” And just at the end: “Coffee.” During this time Wilhelmina had said “Milk” three times, and muttered to herself parts of a French verb for her morning school. John Algebra had said: “Milk! – toast! – marmalade! – sugar,” each three or four times. He, too, was busy thinking – estimating how long it took to buy a white rabbit at six cents a week.

Mrs. Smith herself never spoke except to the hired girl when she rang the bell. Even then she only said: “Coffee.” But she too was thinking all the time, estimating how many yards of celanese it would take to make a circular-flounced afternoon dress.

The whole meal put no strain on the dictionary, and the Smiths had got so used to it that they didn’t know that there was anything wrong with it.

Then came to them the fatal truth that they needed laughter at their meals, and their life changed with a complete revolution.

—

“Well, children,” said Mr. Smith as he sat down to breakfast with a roar of laughter, “here’s a funny riddle for you. Why is Chicago like a hen?”

“Chicago like a hen?” laughed Mrs. Smith. “It sounds terribly odd.”

“Because there’s a ‘b’ in both,” roared Mr. Smith, “or at least I should have said: Why is Boston like a bird? But it’s all the same.”

The laughter had hardly died away when Mrs. Smith, who was shaking so much with fun that she could hardly pour the coffee, recovered herself enough to say:

“I heard a terribly funny story the other day about a man who told a Pullman porter to put him off the car at Buffalo at three o’clock in the morning and the porter made a mistake and put off the wrong man!”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” laughed the rest of the family – “he put off the wrong man! Ha! Ha!”

“Father,” said little Algebra Smith, “did you ever hear the story about the Scotchman?”

“About a Scotchman!” exclaimed Mr. Smith, beaming with anticipation. “No, I’m sure I never did. Do tell it.”

“Well, this Scotchman was a farmer and he had a cow that had two calves and so he decided that he’d give one to the minister, only he couldn’t make up his mind which one to give. The calves were both in the pasture together and there came a storm and one got struck by lightning, and when the Scotchman came down to the pasture and found it had been killed, he said: ‘My! My! the minister’s calf has been killed.’”

For a little time the uproarious laughter that followed the story almost precluded all attempt at eating until at length, when something like order was restored, little Wilhelmina spoke:

“I know a funny story about a lawyer,” she said, “only I don’t know if I can tell it right.”

“Go on! Go on!” cried all the rest of the family.

“Well, this lawyer,” said Wilhelmina, “had by accident swallowed a twenty-five-cent piece and it stuck in his windpipe, and so they rushed him to a doctor’s office and the doctor had him turned upside down to shake it out of him. But all they could shake out was eighteen cents.”

Renewed roars of laughter went around the breakfast table.

“There’s a story about an Irishman——” began Mr. Smith.

“Oh, do tell us that one,” said the rest.

“I was reminded of it,” Smith went on, “when you spoke of doctors. This was an Irish county gentleman whose wife was sick and so he wrote a note for a doctor and gave it to a manservant to ride on horseback and take the note to the doctor. But by the time this man was ready and the note was written, the Irishman’s wife was better. So he just scribbled in pencil at the bottom of the letter: ‘Since I wrote this my wife has got better, so you won’t need to come.’”

Convulsed with merriment, the Smith family struggled in vain to eat their toast.

“How would you like me to imitate Harry Lauder for you?” asked Smith presently.

“Oh, yes, do, do please,” cried the exultant table, clapping their hands.

Whereupon Mr. Smith gave them the uproarious imitation of Harry Lauder that had made such a hit every time he did it at the Thistle Club, and at the Elks and after the Rotary meeting. After which Smith was just starting in to do Al Jolson for them when Mrs. Smith suddenly said:

“Good gracious, John, it’s nearly a quarter to nine!”

And the family, still laughing and chuckling, made a rush from the table to get ready for school and the office.

—

But that morning at eleven John Smith collapsed in his office and had to go home in a cab, Wilhelmina and Algebra were brought home from school with nervous exhaustion, and Mrs. Smith was found on the sitting-room sofa in a state verging on coma and didn’t speak for two days.

And when medical service was called in, the doctor – such is the perversity of the profession – had the nerve to recommend complete quiet for all of them, and no mental excitement whatever.

So, as a result, on their recovery the Smiths have gone back to breakfast as it used to be. Smith reads about the Hip Hoorah mine and murmurs: “Milk.” The children work out French and algebra in their heads and Mrs. Smith’s mind is on the eternal dress problem.

—

In other words, human nature being what it is, you’d better leave it to its own way of doing things.

TOC     INDEX

The Perfect Optimist

Or Day-Dreams
in a Dental Chair

Well, here we are again seated in the big red plush chair in for one of our jolly little mornings with our dentist. My! It certainly is cosy to settle back into this comfortable chair with a whole quiet morning in front of us – no work to do, no business to think of, just to lie in one of our comfortable day-dreams.

How pleasant it is in this chair, anyway, with the sunshine streaming in through the window upon us and illuminating every corner of the neat and immaculate little room in which we sit.

For immaculate neatness and cleanliness, I repeat, give me a little up-to-date dental room every time. Talk of your cosy libraries or your dens, they won’t compare with this little nook. Here we are with everything we need around us, all within easy arm’s-length reach. Here on this revolving tray are our pleasant little nippers, pincers and forceps, some so small and cute and others so big and strong that we feel a real confidence in them. They’d never let go of anything! Here is our dainty little electric buzzer with our revolving gimlets at the end; our little hammer on the left; our bradawl on the right – everything!

For the moment our dental friend is out of the room – telephoning, we imagine. The merry fellow is so popular with all his friends that they seem to ring him up every few minutes.

Little scraps of his conversation reach our ears as we lie half-buried in our white towel, in a sweet reverie of expectancy.

“Pretty bad in the night, was it, eh? Well, perhaps you’d better come along down and we’ll make a boring through that bicuspid and see what’s there!”

Full of ideas, he is, always like that – never discouraged, something new to suggest all the time. And then we hear him say: “Well, let me see. I’m busy now for about a couple of hours——” Hurrah! That means us! We were so afraid he was going to say, “I’ll be through here in about five minutes.” But no, it’s all right; we’ve got two long, dreamy hours in front of us.

He comes back into the room and his cheery presence, as he searches among his instruments and gives a preliminary buzz to the buzzer, seems to make the sunshine even brighter. How pleasant life seems – the dear old life; that is, the life we quitted ten minutes ago and to which, please Providence, we hope to return in two hours. We never felt till we sat here how full and pleasant life is. Think of it, the simple joy of being alive. That’s all we ask – of going to work each day (without a toothache) and coming home each night to eat our dinner. If only people realized it – just to live in our world without a toothache. . . .

So runs our pleasant reverie. But, meanwhile, our dental friend has taken up a little hammer and has tapped us, in his playful way, on the back teeth.

“Feel that?” he asks.

And he’s right, the merry dog! We do feel it. He guessed it right away. We are hoping so much that he will hit us again.

Come on, let’s have a little more fun like that. But no. He’s laid aside his hammer and as nearly as we can see has rolled up his cuffs to the elbow and has started his good old electric buzzer into a roar.

Ah, ha! Now we are going to get something – this is going to be the big fun, the real thing. That’s the greatest thing about our little dental mornings, there’s always something new. Always as we sit we have a pleasant expectancy that our dental friend is planning a new one.

Now, then, let us sit back tight, while he drives at our jaw with the buzzer. Of all the exhilarating feelings of hand-to-hand conflict, of man against man, of mind matched against mind, and intelligence pitted against intelligence, I know of none more stimulating than when we brace ourselves for this conflict of man and machinery. He has on his side the power of electricity and the force of machinery.

But we are not without resource. We brace ourselves, laughingly, in our chair while he starts to bore. We need, in fact, our full strength; but, on the other hand, if he tries to keep up at this pace his hands will get tired. We realize, with a sense of amusement, that if his machine slips, he may get a nasty thump on the hand against our jawbone.

He slacks off for just a second – half withdraws his machine and says, “Were you at the football match yesterday?” and then starts his instrument again at full roar.

“Were we at the football match yesterday?” How strange it sounds! “Why, yes, of course we were!” In that far-away long-ago world where they play football and where there is no toothache – we were there only yesterday afternoon.

Yes, we remember, it was just towards the end of that game that we felt those twinges in one of the – what does he call it, the lower molars? Anyway, one of those twinges which started the exultant idea racing through our minds, “Tomorrow we’ll have to go to the dentist.”

—

A female voice speaking into the room has called him to the telephone, and again we are alone. What if he never comes back!

The awful thought leaps to our minds, what if he comes in and says, “I’m sorry to say I have to take a train out of town at once.” How terrible!

Perhaps he’ll come in and say, “Excuse me, I have to leave instantly for Canada!” or, “I’ll have to let your work go; they’ve sent for me to go to China!”

—

But no, how lucky! Back he comes again. We’ve not lost him. And now what is he at? Stuffing cotton-wool up into our head, wool saturated with some kind of drugs, and pounding it in with a little hammer.

And then – all of a sudden, so it seems – he steps back and says, “There, that will do nicely till Monday!” And we rise half-dazed from our chair to realize in our disappointment that it is over already. Somehow we had thought that our pleasant drowsy morning of pounding and boring and dreaming in the sunlight, while our dental friend mixed up something new, would last for ever. And now, all of a sudden, it is over.

Never mind! After all, he said Monday! It won’t seem so long till then! And meantime we can think about it all day and look forward to it and imagine how it is going to feel. Oh! It won’t be long.

And so we step out into the street – full of cotton-wool and drugs and electricity and reverie – like a person returning to a forgotten world and dazed to find it there.

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[OMITTED CHILDREN’S POETRY REVISED; ALREADY INCLUDED IN SHORT CIRCUITS]

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“Tum and Play Dolf”

What Will Happen When Miniature Golf Gets in Its Effect on the Human Mind

A couple of little boys stood looking in at the lighted and attractive entrance of the miniature golf course. Little boys – well, that is what I took them to be at first sight. Their little frilled dresses, their bare knees with little white socks and slippers, seemed to belong to any age from four up to ten. But at a second look I saw that their faces were those of grown-up men.

“Is ’oo goin’ in?” asked one of the other.

The other nodded. He had a piece of money held tight in one hand and a candy stick in the other.

“Tum on,” said the first.

Then, as the two little boys – or little boy-men – passed under the bright lights at the arched entrance, I recognized them as no “little boys” at all. One of them was the general manager of one of our banks and the other, the little fellow with the candy stick, one of his chief directors.

“’Oo wait outside, nurse,” they called back, and then I noticed for the first time a neat-looking woman in a nurse’s uniform, standing beside a large double perambulator.

—

Let me stop here to explain that I had been abroad for over a year and had just returned home. I knew nothing of the sudden and universal craze for Tom Thumb or Miniature golf which had invaded this entire country. Still less could I guess, or for the matter of that, still less could anybody guess, the extraordinary effect which it was producing upon the mentality of the present generation.

—

I stood looking with amazement at the varied concourse of people jostling eagerly about the entrance. Many of them were undoubtedly children, while others, though indubitably grown up in years and stature, seemed to have assumed the garb, or at any rate the expression, of little children. One saw a jumble of sailor suits, little frilled frocks and all the insignia of childhood.

I turned for a moment to the woman in the nurse’s uniform who still stood slightly aside from the entrance waiting beside the large double perambulator.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, “I think I know the two – the two young folks in your charge. Did you bring them up from downtown?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied. “I always call at the bank just at closing time for Master Charles and Master Freddy. You see, sir, Master Charles is general manager and he always rides down to his work in his own car in the morning as he has for years; but after the bank closes, sir, nothing will do Master Charles but he must ride up in this perambulator with Master Freddy. They say they take all the pennies they can find out of the cashier’s drawer when he isn’t looking, so as to have money to get in. I think they look real cute today in their new frocks, don’t you, sir?”

I remained lost in amazement, without an answer.

I was roused out of my reverie by a voice beside me.

“Queer sight, isn’t it?”

I turned to recognize the tall figure of my friend Dr. Chipton, the distinguished physician. His fine figure, his keen face and his neat and sober costume contrasted favourably with the motley juvenility around us.

“Queer sight, isn’t it?” he repeated, as he shook hands. “You’ve been away from town, haven’t you, so it must be all new to you. But it certainly is the most extraordinary phenomenon of the kind which I can recall. It is evidently a form of mob aberration, one of those phases of collective psychology which we are just beginning to investigate.”

The doctor’s eye rested on the entering crowd.

“Odd,” he kept murmuring, “very odd.”

Yet somehow as I watched him the doctor himself seemed to be feeling a special fascination in the motley liveliness, the blatant childishness of the spectacle.

He turned to me again.

“Would ’oo like,” he began, and then with a frown, correcting himself, “Would you like to come in and look around for a minute? I dot tum pennies – I mean, I have some money.”

We entered.

I need not dwell on the details of the spectacle that confronted us on entering into the covered and lighted premises of the miniature golf. It was like passing through the portals of a baby world. Little wee hillocks of grass were interspersed with tiny roads and little trees. All of a sudden it brought back to me the world as I knew it at three years old, far beyond the mists of present memory. There it all was, the little square of green, the little frames of field and trees, all vague in distance to the infant mind, with neither proportion nor direction; something seen before the age of calculated distance, and of a brightness and sweetness long since lost in the arid pathways of life. . . .

“Goo-goo . . .” I began, and then with an effort of will checked the queer gurgling infantile language that seemed to come to my lips. . . . What was it I wanted to say? “Booful?” Was that the word? I gathered my faculties together and looked about me.

The scene before me, I repeat, is at present so familiar to so many thousands of people that I need not describe it. But to me it was all new, and it came to me with an unwonted suddenness which perhaps added to the innocence of my vision. It was not only that the landscape was transformed, but the people – all the little people, if they were little – all the children, if they were children, who flocked up and down the queer obstructions and alley-ways, chasing little balls about with tiny clubs.

I could see my two friends who had arrived together in the perambulator, in eager rivalry over a tiny tunnel that seemed to them no doubt a vast cavern. “Me ahead of ’oo,” shouted Charlie, the bank president, while little Freddy turned angrily with his uplifted stick. “’Oo don’t play fair!” he cried, half sobbing. “’Oo hit ’oo ball out of turn.”

—

Little scenes like this were being duplicated all over the course. The grown-up children seemed to be alternately laughing and crying, fighting and making friends with the happy carelessness of childhood. Little girls of fifty stood coyly round with admiring glances at funny little fat boys of sixty. “Would ’oo like a peppermint tandy?” I heard one little boy (a judge in the outside world) saying to a pudgy little girl in light blue, whose grandchildren to my knowledge were already entering the university.

Grown-up attendants in monkey uniforms, carrying little bags of clubs, moved about among the players, aiding their game and composing their little quarrels.

One of them approached us. “Like to play, sir?” he asked the doctor. “Like to take some clubs?” His manner was firm, almost compelling, his eye fixed and direct.

“No, no,” said the doctor hastily, almost rudely, it seemed to me. He spoke like a man thrusting away temptation.

I turned to him. “What do you make of it all?” I asked the doctor.

He seemed to hesitate a moment before he answered, and his mouth seemed to frame the word “me” and “oo” several times before he could get started into articulate speech.

“I don’t think it’s hard to explain,” he said at last. “The psychological basis of it has been familiar for a long time. We know all about the extraordinary power of visual suggestion and the still greater power of collective hallucination. Look at India where hundreds of people sit round and see a man – who isn’t there at all – climb up into the air by a ladder which doesn’t exist. So here, all this collective fun and childishness——” He broke suddenly off. “Would ’oo like to take a ’tick and ’tart a game? . . .” Then he murmured, “Damn it,” and seemed to retire into himself. But I noticed that his hands were beginning to move in a queer uncontrolled way.

“There’s more to it than that,” continued the doctor after a pause, speaking now in a quiet and restrained voice. “Don’t you see that in real truth the world of the child is a prettier and brighter world than yours and mine? Don’t you see that it is a sort of lost paradise from which long ago we were ruthlessly expelled? The pretty world of infancy undisfigured by distance, by calculation, a world of unconscious freedom among the tossing flowers and the towering grass, a world without sorrow or death – this is what even the least imaginative is brought back to by the neat alleys and little crooked pathways of this place.

“Not but what,” the doctor continued, and he seemed as he spoke to have entirely recovered his mental poise, “there may be danger in it, mental danger. It may be a first sign. I’ve often wondered, you know, whether this machine age of ours isn’t too great a strain upon the human brain – whether we aren’t in danger of a sort of collective breakdown.”

“Have a set of clubs, sir,” said the attendant again. Something in his fixed gaze and steady voice seemed to suggest a sort of magic, something Eastern, a fascination hard to resist.

“No, no,” said the doctor quickly. “Not today, I tell you, not today. . . .” Then he resumed: “You can see the medical consequences of this thing also. You see that little boy there, yes, on the right, the one they are calling Eddie – well, not really a little boy, of course, he’s a middle-aged man, but if your eyes are getting as disturbed as mine are he looks like a little boy, at any rate, in that queer little suit with his hat on sideways. Well, anyway, he is, or he was till yesterday, one of our biggest men, president of an important railway, though I admit he always had an extraordinary leaning toward sport. What do you think he proposed yesterday at the board meeting?”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the attendant, coming up again. “Were you reaching out for clubs?”

“No, no,” said the doctor, almost fiercely, “I was only gesticulating.”

The attendant moved aside, his eye still upon us.

The doctor sighed and continued: “Why, he actually proposed that instead of the present equipment they substitute a little wee railway with cars only two feet high and little wee tin stations with wooden poplar trees. They say the directors nearly voted it – a lot of them play this thing, and of course it has a damn queer sort of fascination, hasn’t it?”

“Clubs, sir,” said the attendant.

“No,” the doctor almost screamed – “and you see that other one playing near him, yes, the one he called Percy, well, that’s a leading stockbroker whom perhaps you know. Would you believe it, he proposed to the exchange yesterday that they use in future a tiny little house made of cardboard, with money all made of little wee pieces of tin. . . . He got so worked up over it they thought of taking him to the hospital——”

The doctor broke off with a wild queer laugh, quite unlike his usual voice or intonation,

“—though, as to the hospital,” he said, “it did strike me that it would be a damn funny idea – eh, what? – to do away with the huge fool building we have now, and have a tiny little wee hospital of beaverboard – you know – just big enough to crawl into – eh, what? – with cute little wee beds——”

“Clubs, sir?” said the attendant.

“Yes, yes,” yelled the doctor, “by all means dimme a club. Mee doin’ a play dolf. Me doin’ a play——”

He began throwing off his coat and trying to roll up his sleeves, and then:

“Dimme a club too,” I shouted. “Me play dolf wiz ’oo! Look at booful dolf ground!”

And with that I waved my hand in wild excitement at the prospect.

—

Waved it and hit it. Hit it, I suppose, on the little railing or fence outside the entrance to the golf course. For that is where I found myself standing when the knocking of my hand against the wood brought me back to myself.

I looked around. There were people going in and out, suddenly grown prosaic and ordinary. There was a neat-looking woman waiting for two little boys – lights, people, the tall doctor standing beside me – and beyond that, nothing.

The gates of the lost world of childhood had closed again.

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Ho for Happiness

A Plea for Lighter
and Brighter Literature

“Why is it,” said someone in conversation the other day, “that all the really good short stories seem to contain so much sadness and suffering and to turn so much on crime and wickedness? Why can’t they be happy all the time?”

No one present was able to answer the question. But I thought it over afterwards, and I think I see why it is so. A happy story, after all, would make pretty dull reading. It may be all right in real life to have everything come along just right, with happiness and good luck all the time, but in fiction it would never do.

Stop, let me illustrate the idea. Let us make up a story which is happy all the time and contrast it as it goes along with the way things happen in the really good stories.

—

Harold Herald never forgot the bright October morning when the mysterious letter, which was to alter his whole life, arrived at his downtown office.

His stenographer brought it in to him and laid it on his desk.

“A letter for you,” she said. Then she kissed him and went out again.

Harold sat for some time with the letter in front of him. Should he open it? After all, why not?

He opened the letter. Then the idea occurred to him to read it. “I might as well,” he thought.

“Dear Mr. Herald” (so ran the letter), “if you will have the kindness to call at this office, we shall be happy to tell you something to your great advantage.”

The letter was signed John Scribman. The paper on which it was written bore the heading “Scribman, Scribman & Company, Barristers, Solicitors, etc., No. 13 Yonge St.”

A few moments later saw Harold on his way to the lawyers’ office. Never had the streets looked brighter and more cheerful than in this perfect October sunshine. In fact, they never had been.

Nor did Harold’s heart misgive him and a sudden suspicion enter his mind as Mr. Scribman, the senior partner, rose from his chair to greet him. Not at all. Mr. Scribman was a pleasant, middle-aged man whose countenance behind his gold spectacles beamed with goodwill and good nature.

“Ah, Mr. Harold Herald,” he said, “or perhaps you will let me call you simply Harold. I didn’t like to give you too much news in one short letter. The fact is that our firm has been entrusted to deliver to you a legacy, or rather a gift. . . . Stop, stop!” continued the lawyer, as Harold was about to interrupt with questions, “. . . our client’s one request was that his name would not be divulged. He thought it would be so much nicer for you just to have the money and not know who gave it to you.”

Harold murmured his assent.

Mr. Scribman pushed a bell.

“Mr. Harold Herald’s money, if you please,” he said.

A beautiful stenographer wearing an American Beauty rose at her waist entered the room carrying a silken bag.

“There is half a million dollars here in five-hundred-dollar bills,” said the lawyer. “At least, we didn’t count them, but that is what our client said. Did you take any?” he asked the stenographer.

“I took out a few last night to go to the theatre with,” admitted the girl with a pretty blush.

“Monkey!” said Mr. Scribman. “But that’s all right. Don’t bother with a receipt, Harold. Come along with me: my daughter is waiting for us down below in the car to take us to lunch.”

—

Harold thought he had never seen a more beautiful girl than Alicia Scribman. In fact he hadn’t. The luxurious motor, the faultless chauffeur, the presence of the girl beside him and the bag of currency under the seat, the sunlit streets filled with happy people with the bright feeling of just going back to work, full of lunch – the sight of all this made Harold feel as if life were indeed a pleasant thing.

“After all,” he mused, “how little is needed for our happiness! Half a million dollars, a motor-car, a beautiful girl, youth, health – surely one can be content with that . . .”

It was after lunch at the beautiful country home of the Scribmans that Harold found himself alone for a few minutes with Miss Scribman.

He rose, walked over to her and took her hand, kneeling on one knee and pulling up his pants so as not to make a crease in them.

“Alicia!” he said. “Ever since I first saw you, I have loved you. I want to ask you if you will marry me?”

“Oh, Harold,” said Alicia, leaning forward and putting both her arms about his neck with one ear against the upper right-hand end of his cheekbone. “Oh, Harold!”

“I can, as you know,” continued Harold, “easily support you.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Alicia. “As a matter of fact, I have much more than that of my own, to be paid over to me when I marry.”

“Then you will marry me?” said Harold rapturously.

“Yes, indeed,” said Alicia, “and it happens so fortunately just now, as papa himself is engaged to marry again and so I shall be glad to have a new home of my own. Papa is marrying a charming girl, but she is so much younger than he is that perhaps she would not want a grownup stepdaughter.”

—

Harold made his way back to the city in a tumult of happiness. Only for a moment was his delirium of joy brought to a temporary standstill.

As he returned to his own apartment, he suddenly remembered that he was engaged to be married to his cousin Winnie. . . . The thing had been entirely washed out of his mind by the flood-tide of his joy.

He seized the telephone.

“Winnie,” he said, “I am so terribly sorry. I want to ask you to release me from our engagement. I want to marry someone else.”

“That’s all right, Hal!” came back Winnie’s voice cheerfully. “As a matter of fact, I want to do the same thing myself. I got engaged last week to the most charming man in the world, a little older, in fact quite a bit older than I am, but ever so nice. He is a wealthy lawyer and his name is Walter Scribman. . . .”

—

The double wedding took place two weeks later, the church being smothered with chrysanthemums and the clergyman buried under Canadian currency. Harold and Alicia built a beautiful country home at the other side – the farthest-away side – of the city from the Scribmans’. A year or so after their marriage, they had a beautiful boy, and then another, then a couple of girls (twins), and then they lost count.

There. Pretty dull reading it makes. And yet, I don’t know. There’s something about it, too. In the real stories Mr. Scribman would have been a crook, and Harold would have either murdered Winnie or been accused of it, and the stenographer with the rose would have stolen the money instead of just taking it, and it wouldn’t have happened in bright, clear October weather but in dirty old November – oh, no, let us have romance and happiness, after all. It may not be true, but it’s better.

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Tennis at the Smiths’

A Simple Statement
of the Facts

It was agreed by all the Smith family when they took their Lake Shore bungalow for the summer that it was a great thing to have a tennis court. The fact that the ground was a little bit cramped, and that there wasn’t much room between the end of the court and the cedar trees, didn’t matter. After all, tennis is tennis. You don’t need an absolutely first-class court just for ordinary summer play. You can have all the fun you want on just a plain bit of grass, leaving to the professionals the high-class clay courts and all that sort of thing.

In other words, there is no doubt of the enthusiasm of the Smith family over having a court. The fact that they never played on it during the summer is not to be put down to any lack of enthusiasm.

—

The court as they found it in May was naturally in rather poor shape. It had a lot of coarse grass in it and there were a good many large stones, almost boulders, in the ground.

But as Mr. Smith – the head of the family – said when he came out for his first week-end, the only way to get rid of the boulders was to take your coat off and get to work at them. He said that in business a man learned the habit of going right at a thing: the more difficult it was, the better it was to get at it without delay.

Mr. Smith took his coat off and got to work with an iron bar to take the stones out. At the end of the afternoon he had scratched around four stones, partly lifted one, and partly dislocated his shoulder.

Next day he said he had no time to go on with it, and so Mrs. Smith said she would get a man to come and do it. As in most families, whenever it was found that Mr. Smith tried and failed to do anything, they sent and fetched a man, a real one, and he did it.

So Mrs. Smith got a man and he took out the stones, and got a man to mow the grass with a sickle and run a lawn-mower over it, and got a man to trim back the cedar trees a little at the end of the court.

By the end of the second week in May the man had the court all ready, except just marking it. But Mrs. Smith told the man that that didn’t matter: her husband or her sons would mark the court.

It turned out that this was the fatal error.

Mr. Smith undertook first to mark the tennis court when he came up in May. Mr. Smith is a methodical man. When he does things, he does them right. He is fond of saying that when you take over a job, either do it well or don’t do it at all. He claims he owes a great deal of his business success to this simple maxim.

Mr. Smith said that to do the court properly he must first cut a set of little pegs, so as to put in one at each intersection of the lines. By this means you knew where you were.

To cut the pegs, Mr. Smith needed to make use of a small hatchet, and he found the hatchet too dull to do the work properly. Get your tools into good shape, he used to say, and your job is half done.

So Mr. Smith undertook first of all to sharpen up the hatchet. That involved fixing up the grindstone so as to make it turn properly without wobbling. If your grindstone doesn’t turn true, you’ll never get a proper edge on your tool. . . . When the day closed Mr. Smith was looking for some turpentine to clean a file, to file a saw, to cut a board, to make a stand for the grindstone. The court was still not marked. Mr. Smith went back to town that Monday. Attack number one had failed.

The next attempt to mark the court was made by Wilfred Smith, eldest son of the family, just after his return from college where he had taken a brilliant course in mathematics.

Wilfred said that there was no difficulty about marking a tennis court if you just applied a little mathematics. There was no need to cut a whole lot of pegs: all you wanted was a couple of straight lines with a right angle between them and then to remember that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the two sides. This proposition, Wilfred says, dates back at least to Pythagoras, and was probably known to the ancient Egyptians. The help that it affords in marking a tennis court is quite obvious. If the court is 36 feet wide and 70 feet long, all you have to do is to take the square of 36 and add to it the square of 70 and then take the square root of what you get. This will be the cross distance and will exactly locate the bearings of the court.

It was 11 a.m. when Wilfred Smith began ciphering. At twelve he was still at work. At twelve-thirty he broke off to try and hunt up a book that showed how to take the square root of anything. He couldn’t find it. There were very few books in the bungalow and not even a Life of Pythagoras. Wilfred worked on at the problem that afternoon. Finally he worked out the square root by algebra. He said that it was a complicated process, but that it could be done. When he got the result, it showed that the cross distance from corner to corner on a tennis court is a little over a quarter of a mile. This would have put the tennis court away out in the lake. Wilfred quit. And, anyway, he had to go away next day to attend his college commencement and receive his honour degree in mathematics.

Attack number two had failed.

The next attempt to mark the tennis court was made just at the end of June by Renee and Gene, the two girls of the family. They just got an old broom and a big pot of whitening and water and had the whole thing done in half an hour. Unfortunately they put three courts on each side of the net instead of two. This meant that the court couldn’t be played on, but Mrs. Smith said it didn’t matter as they would only have to wait till the rain washed out the lines.

All July it didn’t rain. It rained everywhere else, but not at the Smiths’ bungalow. There was a cloudburst in Texas, and in British India they had the wettest season in fifty years.

But it didn’t rain at the Smiths’ bungalow.

At the beginning of August, when at last the whitening disappeared, the two little Smith boys marked out the court one evening after tea. Unluckily they used flour by mistake and dogs came in the night and ate the service line.

After that Mr. Smith learned that the simplest way to mark a tennis court is to buy tapes, already joined and numbered. You nail these to the ground and there you are. No one, it seems, uses whitening any more, once he has got on to the idea of the tapes. Mr. Smith got the tapes and spent all of one afternoon crawling around the court with a hammer and nails and tapes and a little paper of directions which said: Lay down the point A at a rectangular distance from B, and so on. When Mr. Smith got the first half of the court done, he realized that he had nailed it all down crosswise instead of lengthwise. So he said “Oh, hec,” and pulled up all the tapes and threw them into the garage.

Finally about the end of August Mrs. Smith did what she ought to have done at the start. She got a man to come and mark the court – not her husband, nor her sons, but a man.

The man was a painter – house and sign – not portraits. He came over from the village with some stuff mixed up in a little pot no bigger than a silk hat, one little brush, and a piece of board.

He had the court all marked in an hour and a half. He charged one dollar and twenty cents.

—

But, as a matter of fact, it had grown so late in the season that the Smiths didn’t use the court. The boys were on the lake all day, and Mr. Smith needed all his time for golf, and the girls wanted the afternoons for bridge.

But the court is there, all ready to play on.

In fact, Mrs. Smith is thinking of getting a man to come and play on it.

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A Butler
of the Old School

As Transformed and Enlarged Under the Eighteenth Amendment

“Perhaps you might like, sir,” said the butler, “to have a look through the cellars?”

“That’s very kind of you, Meadows,” I answered.

It was indeed thoughtful of the old man. Here I was accidentally deserted by my host and his household through some stupid error in regard to the hour of my arrival, with a long summer afternoon before me which I had to spend somehow in this vast, but deserted, country mansion waiting for the return of my friends.

True there was the billiard-room. But knocking the balls around by oneself is poor work; and in any case one always doubts the accuracy of the cushions in a country home, even in such a noble old place as the Vineyards.

Then there was the library, of course, and yet somehow one felt disinclined in such glorious summer weather to sit cooped up over a book. On the other hand, one realized that the wine cellars of such old places as the Vineyards, built and stocked heaven knows how long ago, offer a cool retreat on such an afternoon as this.

“It’s very kind of you, Meadows,” I said. “I should enjoy it of all things.”

Meadows himself looked the typical part of the butler and cellarer of the old school. He might have stepped out of the pages of an old romance. His somewhat rosy yet solemn countenance, the neatness of his person and the sobriety of his costume were all in keeping with the character.

“Then will you come this way with me, sir,” he said, “and we will go down.”

We passed through Meadows’s private butler’s pantry and then down a little winding stairway, panelled with dark wood, that led to the floor below. The cellars themselves, dark, cool and silent, with flagstone passage-ways and heavy oaken doors, suggested almost the dignity and solemnity of a crypt.

“How old are these cellars, Meadows?” I inquired.

“Constructed in 1680, sir,” he answered with ready knowledge, “though the house itself is not so old, sir. The original Vineyards house was burnt in 1760. But these, sir, were the original wine-rooms. They’ve never been altered since . . .”

The butler had selected a small key from the bunch he carried and fitted it to the lock of a narrow oaken door which he swung open. “This is one of the best rooms, sir, I always think – the driest. The wood of the bins is the original mahogany of 1680, sir.”

Meadows reached out a hand and turned on a flood of electric light. . . . “We’ve put in the electricity, sir,” he said, in an apologetic sort of way, “though it does seem a little out of place, doesn’t it?”

In a way it did. Yet it served at least to light up the rows and rows of the old wine bins and the tiers of dusty bottles that lay each on its side in orderly array.

“Now, what have you here?” I asked.

“This is the Rain Water Room, sir,” replied Meadows. “Nothing else except rain water and practically all of it from the same date. The year 1924, sir, as you may recall, was a wonderful year for Rain Water – something in the quality, sir. It was a rain, sir, with better body to it, fuller, sweeter, than any rain, I think, since the famous year 1888.”

“Ah, yes,” I replied, “the year of the Johnstown flood.”

“Yes, indeed, sir,” said Meadows. “But the 1924 rain is not far inferior. Of course, it still needs age. You can’t expect good rain water, when it’s only seven or eight years old.”

“Do you still lay down much?” I asked.

“Only in the good years,” said Meadows. “It’s not worth while, sir, not at least for them as knows a good rain water from a bad. But let me draw a bottle for you, sir.”

“No, no,” I protested, somewhat feebly, I admit. It seemed a shame to open a whole bottle of such grand old stuff for a casual sip. “It doesn’t seem fair,” I said.

“I have some pints here at the side,” said the butler, “and I’m sure, sir, the master would wish me to open one for you. It’s not every day that I have the pleasure of offering it to a gentleman who knows real rain water when he sees it.”

I felt my power of resistance weakening. The sight of the glorious old vintage that had lain here brewing its own sunlight in the dark for all these years was too tempting. “Come on then, Meadows,” I said with a laugh, “but you must share the bottle.”

The butler selected a bottle covered with dust, its cork heavily wired. The electric light shot a green glitter into its contents. Meadows took two glasses from a nearby shelf and then with the trained touch of an expert, firm but gentle, without disturbing the repose of the grand old fluid within, unwired the bottle and removed the cork. “It’s a still rain water, sir,” he said, as he poured it into the glasses, holding the bottle so steadily that the liquid flowed gently without the least disturbance. It showed the opalescent tints of green and gold under the light, only seen in the best rain water. . . .

I am not, I trust, addicted to overdrinking, and would not wish to appear a mere useless sybarite, but I must say that as I raised and drained the glass, I felt its full charm. The taste seemed to conjure up pictures of rain puddles in the evening sunshine, of springtime in the cow pasture and raindrops glistening in the April grass. There was in it all the freshness of the morning dew. . . .

I put down the empty glass with a sigh. “Wonderful, Meadows,” I said, “wonderful. Nothing like rain water after all.”

“Perhaps not, sir,” said Meadows respectfully, “though I am not sure that my own fancy isn’t for ditchwater. We have a rare Ditchwater here,” he continued, stepping out into the corridor. “If you’ll take a look into the next room, I’ll be glad to ask you to sample a taste of it. . . .”

With which the good old man, whose rosy face, I noticed, was kindling to an even rosier hue under the influence of the generous beverage, began eagerly fumbling with his keys to unlock a second door.

“I say, Meadows,” I laughed, “I’m afraid I really must call a halt.”

But Meadows would hear nothing of my protest. “You must try the Ditchwater, sir: the master is more proud of this than of anything in the cellar.”

The butler had taken from a bin a bottle even dustier than the last. In place of the radiant green and gold of the rain water it shone with a dusky brown lustre that bore witness to the strength of the generous fluid within.

Meadows held it up to the light. “It is a Ditchwater,” he murmured, with something like reverence in his voice, “that got just the right body in it. You know, sir, if you get one of those cheap commercial Ditchwaters, it’s either got too much mud in it, or it’s so thin it has no strength. Now this, sir, as you see, has got the mud, has got the body. . . .”

I laughed. “Come along, Meadows,” I said, “and don’t tempt me any further with a sermon. Out with it.”

Meadows with even greater care than before decanted the Ditchwater. This time it was a full quart that he opened, but I couldn’t find it in my heart to protest.

How can I describe its taste? Full, rich, with just a tang of dead sticks and just that slight soupçon of slugs that gave it character. Without apology I held out my glass to be refilled, while the old man, after filling it, drained the rest of the bottle. “Wonderful stuff, Meadows!” I said, as I drained the last drop.

“But I’ve got some better than that, sir, better than that,” said the old man. “Come along this way, sir, this way.”

I could not restrain a feeling of amusement as the good old man bustled ahead of me along the corridor, his step slightly unsteady.

“No, no, Meadows,” I protested feebly, “your master will be back soon. I mustn’t really encroach further. . . .”

“Just this one,” said the butler, “just this one.” Meadows led me along the corridors, around the corners, and in and out amongst the intricacies of the famous cellars of the Vineyards. I realized that those noble fellows our ancestors never did things by halves. When they undertook to lay the cellars of a colonial mansion such as this, they made a real job of it. Here and there the butler stopped at an oaken door and threw it open for a moment to give me an idea of what was within. Every possible variation for the taste of every possible connoisseur seemed here to be represented. The most critical hydrophile could have found nothing missing. Here was French Tap Water bottled in Paris, Pump Water from a town pump of the early nineteenth century, Trough Water from an abandoned New England farm, English Pond Water in stone bottles and Dutch Canal Water in tempting square bottles with yellow and green seals. Here and there, I blush to say, in spite of our avowed intentions, we could not resist opening an odd bottle and drinking off a quart or two of the mellow liquid. The Canal Water struck me as especially fine, but undoubtedly heavy. I asked Meadows what he supposed to be the percentage content of sulphuretted hydrogen in it. But the old man shook his head. “I’m not much of a one for what you might call the formula, sir: Master Charles, I don’t doubt, would answer all of that. But to me, sir, good liquor is just good liquor.”

At last Meadows threw open a final door and revealed a majestic cask that occupied the centre of a little room. There was on each side of the cask an ancient seat, the true model of a Jacobean wooden “settee” with oak arms that had grown black with age and darkness. Down we sat, while the old man with pride and expectancy in his look slowly polished a pair of tall liqueur glasses, long, thin, and delicate as Canterbury bells. . . .

“What is it, Meadows?” I asked, indicating the cask.

“West Indian Bilgewater,” the butler answered. “Right from the old days, a hundred years old if it’s a day.”

Meadows turned the spigot and slowly filled the glasses with the dark amber fluid, thick, heavy and redolent with a delicious bouquet of old tar, ship’s ropes and rotten timber.

Facing one another on the settees, we raised our glasses to one another.

“Your health, sir,” said Meadows, and an audible hiccough shook the good old man as he drained the liquor at a quaff and filled the glass again.

Can I ever forget the wonder of that West Indian Bilge? There was in it all the romance of the old pirate days with visions of West Indian Quays, of pirates at their revels drinking great goblets of Bilgewater, round bonfires of odd timber that turned the heavy tropical night to glaring brightness and lit up the strand of the sea beside them as they sat.

“Yo! ho! and a bottle of Bilge,” I sang as I handed my glass for more. . . .

Upstairs and outside no doubt was the light flood of summer sunshine and the garish day. But down below in the depths of the cool cellars, there sat Meadows and I as far removed from the world of today as the pirates themselves whose memories we toasted in glass after glass of Bilge. . . .

—

Ah, well-a-day! It is but a sad world! Let those whose cold hearts and puritanical standards may condemn us, do so if they wish. For me I have no regrets for that long-drawn afternoon in which the magic draughts of the old Bilgewater spread its charm, quart after quart, upon our souls. . . .

How many? My memory fails. I can recall the vision of Meadows seen through a half-haze still repeating, “Another glass, sir”; recall his telling me the story of his life – his early struggles in a city pumping station, his apprenticeship in an aqueduct, his first real job in a soda-water factory and his elevation to the post of chief water-cooler in a big hotel, from which, ripe with experience, he moved to his present situation.

So passed and waned the afternoon. There they found us, I admit, Meadows and me, asleep beside the noble cask of Bilge. My merry host and his guests – shouting in vain for Meadows, calling in vain for Spring-Water Cocktails and Ditchwater Loving Cup – at last descended and found us, and woke us with their laughter.

—

The good old man, I believe, toddled off to his private pantry, where no doubt he continued his slumber. For myself I had to make the best face I could against the merriments of my friends and drink a few more quarts of Ditch, Pond and Pump Water for good-fellowship’s sake.

But the afternoon remains a pleasant reminiscence of old days now fading on our social horizon. . . .

TOC     INDEX

The Flying Carpet

But Where Could It Fly To, Now?

Suddenly there appeared to me the other day, in the midst of my daily life – as a dream, or a moment’s reverie, or, if you will, as a reality – the Magic Arabian, the Flying Carpet.

Swarthy and dark he was, with a red fez and dangling jewellery and a beard as of Haroun al Raschid, once Caliph of Bagdad.

On the ground before me he spread his Magic Carpet, bright with interwoven red and gold and tasselled at the corners, with all the tints of the golden sands of Samarkand.

“Buy it,” he said.

“What is it for?” I asked.

“Sit but on it and utter a wish and it shall transport you to the ends of the earth: it shall take you into the uttermost corners of the globe; there you shall see the strange people of the world, the dwellers of the unknown frozen regions of the North where life itself expires; the pygmy men of the jungles of Equatorial Africa, the grand Llama of Tibet——”

“You speak with imagination,” I said. “Who are you?”

“I am the shade of Hasheesh, the Arabian poet.”

“Dead long?”

“Since the year of the Great Plague, the Arabian year 700.”

“What do I have to pay for the carpet?” I asked.

“One hundred shekels of beaten silver.”

“Can I have a ride first and try it out and see if it is worth it?”

“Come,” said Hasheesh, and we sat down on the carpet. “What will you see first?”

“I would like to go first,” I answered, “first of all to the Frozen North where the lonely Eskimos live in their igloos of snow——”

—

Even as I spoke the carpet rushed up into the air and we were borne away with incredible speed.

A moment later, as it seemed, we descended in the Arctic regions. But it was not so very snowy, mostly piles of rock. Nor did we see any igloos of snow, but what seemed to be, here and there, low houses of stone.

An Eskimo came walking towards us. He was not dressed in furs, but in an ordinary golf suit with a forage cap on his head and a bag of clubs in his hand. He was smoking a cigarette.

I went out to meet him.

“I saw your plane coming,” he said. “You’ve parked it behind that rock, haven’t you? The black fellow’s your pilot, isn’t he? You seemed to be making very good time.”

“Yes,” I said, “we came fast.”

“As a matter of fact,” continued the Eskimo, “I was rather afraid you might come a nasty cropper, landing where you did. Most of the planes that come land farther over that way beyond the Golf Club.”

“Do you have a Golf Club?” I inquired.

“Why, of course,” he said.

“What? Up here in the Frozen North?”

“My dear fellow,” laughed the Eskimo. “Do drop that ‘frozen north’ stuff. It’s entirely played out. But I’m afraid I’m forgetting my duty to a stranger. You must be tired. Perhaps you’d like some tea, or if you care to come over to the Kayak Club I can give you some really good whisky. My bootlegger is absolutely reliable.”

“No, thank you,” I said, “I’m not thirsty.”

“Well, what about a game of golf? Come across to the club and I’ll get a couple of chaps to make a foursome.”

We walked over to the great igloo of stone that constituted the clubhouse of the Kayak Club.

A number of Eskimos were seated about, smoking cigarettes and drinking dry ginger ale.

One of them was talking earnestly—

“I don’t claim,” he was saying, “that the gold standard was perfect. But the way I see it is, that now we are off the gold standard here in Sloopernaavik, we’d better stay off. It was a shock, and for a while we were on thin ice. But things are cooling off and the gold standard, at two grains troy to the kyak——”

“Just wait a minute,” I said to my companion. “I want to go back and speak to my pilot.”

I went back to where Hasheesh was sitting on the carpet behind some big rocks.

I sat down beside him. “Hasheesh,” I said, “this place is no good for me. There is no uttermost corner of the earth about this.”

—

With a rush the carpet was up in the air. I was conscious of passing with incredible speed over the ocean thousands of feet below, of rushing across the green plains of Europe, of passing over the vast ranges of the Himalayas, and then all in a moment we dropped down in Tibet.

The Grand Llama was seated on the piazza of the Llama House. (Rooms from twelve shillings up.)

He was in a rocking chair and had his feet upon another. He wore a flowing robe, but it was really a linen duster – the kind they wear up in the Welsh mountains.

He was talking to a couple of other Llamas.

“I tell you, gentlemen,” he was saying, “the best thing that ever happened to us, was when the Americans bumped us off the gold standard. I don’t say that it didn’t work fairly well for a time. But I always felt that one of these centuries it would break down. If we do bring it back, it certainly won’t be at the old rate of two pennyweights to the goal. You see, the gold standard——”

At this moment the Grand Llama noticed my approach and turned towards me with a polite bow.

“We were speaking of the gold standard,” he said. “Perhaps, sir, if you have just planed over from Europe, you can tell us the latest news of its operation. Is the Mint price of the English sovereign as compared with New York discount on sterling——?”

“It is,” I said, “and I’ll tell you all about it. But just sit quiet in your rocking chair for a minute while I speak to my chauffeur.”

I went across the hotel court-yard (dogs only admitted when on a leash) to where Hasheesh sat beside a flower-bed of American Beauty roses and a hedge of English ivy.

“Hasheesh,” I said, “get out the carpet and beat it. This uttermost end of the earth is no better than the other. Let us hit it out for the real thing this time. Make tracks for the very heart of Equatorial Africa where the pygmies live.”

And at the word the Magic Carpet rose again into the air. It rushed across the great snows of the Himalayas and the sandy deserts of Baluchistan. The Red Sea passed as a streak of blue and then the deserts and the Nile, and after that the great Equatorial forests in endless billows of green.

—

Where we landed there was an open space in the forest covered with grass and sand, and built in it a huge kraal of dried grass, a vast structure like an enormous beehive.

From within the great kraal there came the babel of hundreds of voices and the measured beat of the tom-toms.

“Ha! Ha!” I exclaimed. “This is the real thing at last!”

Towards us there came from the kraal across the grass, two pygmies.

They were diminutive little men dressed in gingerbread suits with Derby hats.

“Howdy?” they said, both together with a friendly grin.

“How-do-you-do?” I answered. “And will you please tell me what is going on? Are you practising the sacred rites of Voodoo in the big kraal over there?”

“No, no,” said the senior pygmy with another grin. “It’s the Kiwanis Club. We generally have our meetings on Mondays, but this is the first Monday in the month and so it’s Ladies’ Day. They’re at lunch now, but the speeches haven’t yet begun.”

“Luncheon!” I said. “Speeches! Ladies’ Day! And is this Africa?”

“It’s Africa all right,” laughed the pygmy. “But do come inside. The Chairman sent us out to invite you in. You’ll just be in time to see them take the straw vote.”

“The straw vote?” I asked.

“Yes, they’re beating the tom-toms for silence now, and then they’ll take the vote.”

“What is it about?” I inquired.

“They are voting to see whether, here in Pygmalia, we’ll abandon the gold standard for the coco-nut standard. Some of them think that the gold standard——”

“Hasheesh!” I murmured, “the carpet – quick, the carpet. Let me get back to where I came from.”

—

And with that I was back again in the department store where I was buying rugs for my new house. Before me on the floor was the rug of red and gold with tasselled edges from Samarkand, which had occasioned my reverie.

Beside it knelt the Arabian attendant with the beard of Haroun al Raschid – or was he Arabian or just sunburned from his summer vacation?

“This,” he was saying, “is a very valuable rug.”

“It is indeed,” I answered.

TOC     INDEX

Come and See Our Town

How the Visitor Feels
When Shown Around

It often falls to my lot, as no doubt to that of other people, to be “shown around the town.” Most people whose business or pleasure takes them into our smaller towns will know just what I mean. You land at the railway station, step out of the train, and there he is waiting for you – your host or your friend, your customer or your patron, or whatever he happens to be – waiting to take you for a ride around the town.

You had hoped, though you knew it was no use hoping, that he would not be there, that you might get a chance to go quietly to the hotel by yourself, that he might miss the train, or that by good luck he might be ill – dangerously ill. But no, he was there. He was always there.

—

“Glad to see you,” he called, as he backed his car to the edge of the platform at the railway station. “Get right in and we’ll take a little run around the town before I drop you at the hotel. Wait a minute, I’m afraid that door don’t quite catch—— There!

“Little wet, isn’t it? It’s a pity you didn’t come yesterday. Everything was looking much better. On a damp morning like this, things don’t look so good.”

[“They certainly don’t,” I said, only I said it to myself. “In fact, if you ask me my private opinion of your town, I should say it looks about the dingiest, meanest place I was ever in.” This, I say, I merely thought to myself; in these monologues with the local patriot you never get a chance to speak out; at best, you can only murmur. He does all the broadcasting.]

“Around the station here, of course,” he continued, “it always looks burnt-up and dusty so far on in the summer as this. You really ought to have been here in May, when the peonies were out. They sometimes call this place, ‘Peony Town.’ They say it’s the greatest place for peonies east of the Mississippi. Pity you couldn’t have come sooner and seen them.”

[“Pity!” I murmured. “It’s a heart-break. If I’d been here in May, I’d have been clean back safe home right now.”]

“Now here we cross the river – I’ll have to drive a bit slow because this bridge is not as sound as it ought to be. They call this the Grand River. Of course, it’s run down pretty small now and so late in the season it’s full of mud, but it’s a great sight here in April when the water’s high. I wish you had been here in April to see it——”

[“I wish I had,” I thought, “then I needn’t have come in May.”]

“—farther up the river – it’s quite a few miles – are the Forks; they say it’s about the most beautiful spot in North America. I’ve heard people say who have been across to Europe that there isn’t a more lovely spot anywhere in Europe than right up here at the Forks. I wish you could stay over a day and I could drive you up there and you’d be astonished.”

[“Astonished!” I said. “I’d fall dead. Only, thank heaven, there is no power in the physical universe that will keep me off the 5 p.m. train this afternoon.”]

“Now, this, what we’re coming into, is the business section——”

[“Let me understand myself,” I murmured. “Do you mean that this little collection of two-story houses, with the hardware store on one side and the drug store on the other, is actually called a business section? This!”]

“The town is pretty quiet today. But I wish you could stay over till Saturday night and see this place when all the farmers come in.”

[“What a treat!”]

“Here is our new Y.M.C.A. building. They say that it is about the most handsome building of the sort south of the Great Lakes. And that next to it is the public library. They say it’s one of the best-designed libraries north of the Equator. It’s got 10,000 books, or is it 100,000? I forget. It’s closed today, or I’d take you in and have a look around. You’d be interested in meeting Mr. Smith, the librarian. I’m sorry you couldn’t have stayed over till tomorrow.”

[“Too bad,” I murmured.]

“Now, that’s our new hospital up that street. If you put your head out of the window and twist it a little sideways, you can see the front door of it. I can’t take you up, because it’s a one-way street and they’ve got the traffic stopped, and, anyway, the pavement’s torn up. But if you get your head a little farther out (shove your shoulders through the window) you could see the main entrance. I wish I could have taken you up there. I’d have introduced you to Dr. Smith, the resident doctor. You’d have been interested in seeing him.”

[I realized that another big opportunity had slipped past.]

—

“That’s our new United church along up that side, just past the trees. I can’t drive you right to it, because they’ve got the pavement up, and, anyway, the pastor, the Reverend Mr. Smith, is away on his vacation. If you could have come next month, he’d have been back. You’d have been interested in seeing him.”

[Another chance lost.]

—

On such an occasion this semi-monologue is carried on for about half an hour. At the end of this time you have learned that the population of the town is 13,400, but that undoubtedly it is really larger than that, as the census work was crooked; that if people only knew about it, it would be the greatest tourist centre east of the Rockies; that, even now, it is the third largest paper-bag making centre west of Paterson, N.J.; that the pavement is torn up in front of the United church, the hospital, the County Historical Museum, and the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, so you can’t see them; that most of the interesting people, including the Head of the Asylum, the Warden of the Jail, the Chief of the Fire Brigade, and the Manager of the First National Bank, are out of town on their vacations; that you should have seen the town when the river was higher or lower; when the chestnut trees were out or else when they were dead; that you should have come in April – or in May – or in October – but not now; that you should have waited till the new rink was completed; that by coming today you have missed your whole chance of being at the chicken supper of the Rotary Club; that you’ve struck the one day when the band doesn’t play in the park – the one day when no farmers come to town – the one day, the worst day, the meanest day of all the year to visit what ought to be, if it had its deserts, the most admired spot in America.

—

And yet, please remember, there are two sides to this thing. Do you realize that the gentleman who has so kindly driven around his town for nothing goes back to his house and slings down his hat on the hall table with a sigh of weariness?

“My goodness,” he says to his wife, “I drove a man all around the town (they’d asked me to) and showed him everything, and he just sat there and didn’t say a word; just seemed a regular nut.”

—

Such are we all to one another.

TOC     INDEX

Inflation and Deflation

—or—
Flation In and De

A little while ago – just after the War ended, wasn’t it? – everybody was absorbed in the idea of making things “bigger and brighter.” There was a movement for a “bigger and brighter London,” “bigger and brighter schools,” “bigger and brighter gaols.” These mass ideas always take effect. Things really began to get bigger and bigger, and brighter and brighter. Houses grew higher; apartments got larger; the streets got wider; the hotels went up, servants went up, food went up. Trains went faster; buses went still faster; motor-cars went faster still. Babies ran at two: children bicycled at six: old people flew at sixty.

Everything inflated and expanded. Narrow people got broad. Heavy people got light. Small-minded people got wider ideas. The whole race improved. There were beauty contests in every village, marathons for old men, efficiency tests for imbeciles and imbecility tests for the efficient.

The sheer lightness and brightness of things set everybody on the move. All the people in town rushed to the seaside. All the people who lived by the sea flocked to the town. Tourists filled all the hotels and the hotel men went on all the tours. The continent was full of Americans and Americans were full of the continent.

It began to get so big and so bright there really wasn’t any night. Night was extinguished in a glare of light and a babel of sound. All round the bright world Jazz called to Jazz and radio squawked to radio. People in London listened at midnight to an anthem sung by priests in Tibet tomorrow morning: New York watched the pictures of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, hours before it happened.

And everywhere was money – money, money, lots of it. “Take it, my dear fellow, I don’t need it. How much did you say? – ten pounds? Better have twenty, you might need it.” Jones lent to Smith, Smith lent to Brown and Brown lent to Jones. Tokio floated a loan in New York and New York floated it back to South America. Money floated like scum all over the ocean.

Also investment. People without a penny invested thousands. Shopkeepers bought up mines and mines bought chain stores: bankers bought farms and farmers bought banks.

Things certainly moved! Of course, the gaols were full, but a new cry had gone out for “sunlight in every cell,” and so the gaols were big and bright with jazz music pouring out of every window, and with burglars telling the warden when to buy copper and when to drop nickel.

Buy! Soon you didn’t need to buy! You just picked things up! One man – I knew him – picked up a quarter of a mine in Northern British Columbia for a song – and he couldn’t sing, either. Another picked up twenty shares in a pearl fishery in Switzerland; another man got for practically nothing, or less, forty thirty-fifths of an ice plant in Greenland. There was something coming to everybody, and everybody got what was coming to him.

All this made a great intellectual brightening. Talk became so interesting! Everybody else’s mind seemed so bright – what with nickel and copper and Kansas hogs on the hoof, and Rhodesian cotton by the bale – and all going up! Every dinner party was a rattle of brilliant repartee made up of equal parts of arithmetic, geography, hogoaraphy and market biography; or of softer undertones, in whispered asides, such as “Hogs are up in Kansas, darling, by a cent and a half!” “Oh, Fred, isn’t that lovely?” “Yes, sweetheart, and Selected High Quarters are up higher still. They touched 25 cents.” “Oh, Fred, what a lot it will mean to mother!”

Of course, what was really happening was simply “inflation.” We were all just being “inflated” and we didn’t know it. The merry banker who shoved a hundred sovereigns across the counter, in that pleasant way he had, why, he was just inflated; that was all. The kindly broker who gave us – practically gave us – the shares in the Andalusian Asbestos Abattoir – he was just inflated. The merry waiter who squirted the champagne all over our shirt-front and wouldn’t charge for it – inflated. The jolly clergyman who ran the Mothers’ and Children’s lottery on the Abyssinia Sweepstake and cleaned up – you remember, cleaned up enough to send all the Home for Incurables to the seaside, and they never came back, drowned or something, but it didn’t matter—— Well, of course, the whole thing was just inflation.

The Government, too. There was that terribly funny speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer – nineteen-twenty-something, wasn’t it? – in which he said that he was afraid there was going to be a surplus, and the house roared!

All the world in those big and bright days seemed infected with something. Scientists tell us that there is a gas that could do it, a thing called by the technical name of protoxide of nitrogen, but also known as “laughing gas.” It was just as if we had each had a whiff of protoxide every hour or so and were inflated with it. It is just possible, so the geologists say, that this gas lurks in the depths and crevices of the earth under our feet and at times filters through and infects us. So that was what was wrong. We were all full of gas. When the Prime Minister – I forget which one – made that splendid, buoyant, hopeful speech, ending with the words, “England! England!” and then fell over backwards while the house rocked and cheered – well – he was just full of gas. The merry fellows on the golf-links losing three-shilling balls on every other drive – the hilarious meetings of the shareholders, the gaiety of the Federated-charties Tag-Day – all of it, just gas, merely inflation.

Too bad.

—

That was it. All the brightness: all the laughter and the merriment of the present: the fond hopes for the future, the fortunes that seemed assured, the old age so comfortably provided for – so that was all it was, just inflation! The bright new world iridescent with the sunlit colours of the soap bubble! To think that it had to go!——

Of course, it had to go. It couldn’t last. Sooner or later there was bound to come a wave of depression. That is always the fate of our humanity. It no sooner gets set in any one direction than a wave of something knocks it into another. It is like a tired swimmer staggering ashore in front of a rising tide.

—

So depression came, first here and then there and in little bits. Somebody staggered home from a lobster lunch and lay down flat and murmured, “I’m depressed.” People on tiptoe moved about him. “He’s depressed,” they whispered. Then more people and more; and so it spread. Depressed people won’t travel: so it was soon found that a wave of depression had hit the tourist business. Then another wave of it smothered the hotel business. So it kept spreading: the papers reported that copper was depressed, that rubber was sinking, that Kansas hogs on the hoof were feeling terrible. It reached economic social life: it appeared in little signs and notices: “Owing to the depression the miners will only mine just a little now and then,” or, “Owing to the depression the anniversary of Christopher Columbus will not be observed.”

—

For all of which there is of course only one remedy, Deflation. We have got to deflate. In fact that is what we are doing now; we are being deflated. People look about them in this saddening world and wonder what is happening. What is this queer strange feeling that is reaching all of us? – this vague sense of discomfort and apprehension that never leaves us? Why has our bright world grown so dull – all the things that were bigger and brighter and that are growing smaller and dingier?

How changed the people are! Where is that merry banker who shovelled me over the sovereigns – not this disobliging, discourteous dummy who tells me that my cheque is no good merely because there is no money in my account. Where is that merry fellow who used to drive the three-shilling golf ball into the water hazard and laugh at it? Where? There he is, on all fours, upside down in the rushes beside the pond looking for the sixpenny ball that some one lost there last week.

All the world is getting like that; Michaelmas Jones who rode in his thousand-guinea car and weighed 250 pounds without his cuff-links is now walking and weighs only 150 pounds. He’s deflating. But of course what he weighs now is troy weight – the fellow is a real Trojan.

Trojans all, but how dull they are. All they can talk of at dinner now is of the fall in copper, and the crash in rubber and the smash in wheat. Bright eyes grow dim with tears about the whispered rumour that bullock hides have fallen again. Old people sit with clasped hands, silent all evening because they know now that Siamese pig-iron is unsaleable. They are sitting silent, deflating. Their married daughter who was going to take a trip to the continent is not going: she will stay at home and deflate in Devonshire. The American tourists who were going to make a tour in Devonshire will stay at home and deflate in Kansas City. . . .

How changed, this bigger and brighter world!

—

But listen! If this process of deflation has got to go on, let’s get at it and deflate in earnest and with good-will. I’ll confess, if you will, that I wasn’t brought up to ride in a taxi: I’ll confess, if you will, that till three years ago I never owned a single gold-mine: I’ll admit that it is not so long ago that I used to be afraid of a waiter, and could eat without a finger-bowl: that I used to do such ridiculous things as turn off an electric bulb when I went out just to save light: that I only ate three meals a day and thought that Pâté de Foie Gras was the name of a French general.

We must all deflate. And the young people most of all. How ridiculous – in the inflated days – to call for a girl in a hired car to take her to a dance only three or four miles away! Let her walk. How insane to bring her a great bunch of hothouse roses! Let her twine a wild rose in her hair, the way our grandmother did: or go out with her to the meadows or the pasture and find an early cowslip. We must have deflated courtship, and deflated weddings, with a mournful best man, gloomy little deflated bridesmaids, and a clergyman with all the gas gone out of him.

We must get down to it.

After all, it won’t last for ever. Things never do. Not for nothing did nature frame this universe in spinning circular orbits. Things come around again. Something is bound to happen. Perhaps some one will get up a war, a really destructive war, the only thing humanity seems to understand, one big enough to restore prosperity. Not right here, of course. But perhaps we could get Brazil – it’s an ambitious country – to invade Mongolia. Then the sharp rise in coffee will start an upward movement in leather and a boom in copper and a gold-rush to Patagonia and there we are – spinning again and with the gas turned on full.

—

But, till then, let us take our deflation like men – shrinking, contracting, subtracting, condensing, getting smaller and denser and duller – but at least – men.

TOC     INDEX

L’envoi: What Next?

A Glimpse
into Our Ultimate Future

There are certain people, of whom I am one, who have the peculiar gift of looking into the future. I believe it is often called “peering” into the future. But I don’t need to “peer.” I just look; and the farther I look the better I see.

This peculiar gift, which is technically called “prophetic vision,” is one of the most unchallenged assets that anyone can possess. Provided it is kept well ahead of the present, say a hundred years in advance, it involves nothing of what we call, on my side of the Atlantic, a “come back.”

I propose to exercise this gift now on behalf of the readers of this book and to show to them the kind of world in which will be living, a few centuries on, the future readers of my works, then swollen, of course, to an immeasurable multitude.

The judgments involved and the arguments pursued are so simple and so inevitable that no one can dissent from them.

To begin. We now live in a world in which talk and speech, pictures and sounds, flow easily to every corner of the globe. The Prince of Wales makes a broadcast address from London to Montreal; the Chinese sit and blink at the pictures of the Belgian coronation; and the pygmies of Equatorial Africa follow eagerly the fortunes of the American World Baseball Series. In other words, we are now all talking to one another. For the first time in history there is a world inhabited by a human race.

In such circumstances all the world gets the same general idea at the same time. All the world thinks intensely about the same thing in the same way. The pygmies are just as worried over the collapse of the Stock Exchange as we are: they lost a year’s corn-cobs in it.

Now just at present all the world is worried and preoccupied over two questions – the same two everywhere. These are the peace-and-war question and the unemployment question. As to war, all the world has, quite suddenly, come to realize that there is “nothing to it.” A wave of anti-war feeling, in thought, in literature, plays, books and pictures, is submerging the whole world. War has got to go. The pygmies feel that as long as they stood up pygmy to pygmy, with a big club, it was real stuff. But now when a canful of gas lays out a whole row of pygmies, toes up, in the long grass under the cactus, without a chance even to know who threw it, the whole business is bankrupt.

When the world, all the world, tackles a problem in that spirit it is bound to solve it. It is not that war is any “muddier and bloodier” than it used to be. It was always that. The first crusaders were cannibals and the soldiers of the Religious Wars regarded “atrocities” much as we regard football. But machinery has killed war. It has made war as complex and tiresome as the packing industry in the Middle Western States. Any man working at it feels the need for a vacation, and longs for a round of golf. War is dead. Machinery killed it.

Not so homicide. That is different. Homicide corresponds to general instinct in our nature and is bound to stay. The desire to kill people is quite natural. If I see a fiend in green goggles roar past me on a motor-cycle at a speed of fifty miles an hour, tearing my ears with noise, I want to kill him. Rightly so. It may be inexpedient to do it, but it would be the thing to do. I may want to kill an umpire, or a comedian or an after-dinner speaker – but to want to kill a whole nation, to poison and drown and destroy by machinery thousands of innocent beings, to pretend that little children are “enemies,” and to want to starve them to death – ah! no, I won’t do it. Don’t ask me. War, in other words, has got on the wrong side of our parental feelings, and it’s got to go.

It won’t take long. Come on, pygmies, let’s get rid of it! We don’t need any covenant, any agreement. That’s been the queer mistake up till now – the idea that you end war by a document. You end it by stopping it, and it’s over now. Ask the first pygmy you see – in a tram, on the street, anywhere. He’ll tell you. He’s done with it.

So that’s one problem done. Now as to the other – this unemployment and depression business. So long as unemployment was local and poverty personal, nobody – that is, no other person – worried over it. But now the cause of unemployment (whatever it is, nobody has ever found out) has become so universal that it affects all the world at the same time. It now becomes possible to find out what the cause is, by a process of elimination like an equation in algebra. It can’t be drink, because there is unemployment in the United States where nobody drinks. It can’t be the gold standard, because it exists in China, where they have no gold. It can’t be extravagance, because it exists in Scotland. And so on, all down the line. Which, of course, means that the solution of this economic riddle of the Sphinx is at least in sight.

The more so as there now exists a real motive for solving it. Hitherto unemployment only affected the poor. Now the accursed thing affects the rich. An unforeseen consequence of corporate organization is that the rich may at any time lose their money, without effort or fault of their own. This, in the old days of landed proprietorship, was not possible. Fortunes could not be lost without fault or folly: it needed at least a pack of cards. Hence by a queer twist of human destiny the very rich and the very poor are in the same boat. Such a situation is intolerable. This means economic salvation, or at least salvage, for both.

The exact solution of the problem doesn’t matter here. It may take another fifty years to reach it; but it’s bound to come. All in all, as compared with the great human triumphs of the past – the invention of the alphabet, the use of Arabic notation, the discovery of distilling spirits – the thing is nothing. Another half-century, then, one lifetime as it were, will have seen the clouds of war and the fogs of poverty move away from the sunlit landscape of our little world. And all the scene will change and begin to look quite different from what is now before our eyes.

The changes as a matter of fact are happening even now. The surface beneath our feet is altering. But in our present bewildered outlook we do not see the ground beneath us. Presently, however, as war dies, and poverty vanishes, humanity will begin to be aware that a queer sort of uniformity, something like a great stillness, is coming over the world.

This is beginning now. The great “sameness” which is to envelop and stifle mankind has already begun. Universal communication rapidly begets universal similarity. The word “standardization” has already come uppermost in the industrial world. Standardized machines turn out products of incomparable uniformity. Divergencies and differences drop out. They cost too much. Hence, as the age of the great sameness draws on, all men will more and more be found to be more and more alike, and they will wear the same clothes buttoned in the same way, fashioned probably in a rather infantile style. It is clear already, from the amazing spread of Miniature Golf, Tom Thumb Tennis, and Dicky Bird Football, that grown-up people revert easily to the costume of the child.

But the greatest changes and the greatest sameness will be those in the things of intellect and education. Already all our schools are being framed on the same model, with the same text-books, the same “readers,” the same recitations, the same standardized literature and adjustable patriotism. There is already no way to tell one teacher from another except by their finger-prints. Even those will soon look alike. This uniformity of the schools and school-teaching will spread all over the world. It is America’s revenge on the people who discovered it. The infinite variety of the Old World will be replaced by the prosaic uniformity of the New.

With the school, of course, goes the college. Students and studies are already being ironed out as flat as rolled steel in a Pittsburg mill. In the time to come, all the colleges will be utterly and absolutely alike. The rich variations of senility and imbecility which marked the professoriate of old days will all be gone. Each professor will be as neat as a tailor’s dummy. At the first sign of aberration he will be pensioned off to where he can do no harm.

Outside the schools and colleges will be the great mass of what was once the reading and thinking public – rapidly sifting into something like the accumulated grain in a ten-million-bushel elevator. They will still read the newspaper, the one newspaper – the best, so why have any others? – the World Gazette published from Patagonia to Peking via New York and London. It will contain the personal news of the important people in the world – there will be, say, about six of them; great world sporting events like the Tom Thumb Golf in the Sahara between the Bolsheviks of Moscow and the Y.M.C.A. of Iowa; great world disasters, such as the upsetting of a train in Patagonia (still not completely organized) with the breaking of the conductor’s leg; all of this together with one daily poem – the best in the world, so why print the others? – and one daily joke by the greatest humorists in the world, beside which the others are not worth laughing at.

The same public will have that day looked at the world moving picture, and in the evening will all read the novel, the same novel, and all fall asleep at the same point in it.

Meantime human life, its cares gone, its digestion rotating as smoothly as a sleeping gyroscope, lapsed in ease and with preventive medicine at its elbow, will grow longer and longer. From the fifty years it has now reached in its recent sudden advance it will move to seventy, to eighty, to ninety, and still onward. Little old clean-shaven men will sit down to bridge for the fifty-thousandth time, with partners they knew a hundred years ago.

The lengthened and assured span of life will bring with it a new dreariness. There will be no death, except by an accident – odd, exceptional, awful, a thing to be shuddered at – or by the extreme weariness of old age, a slow and imperceptible sleep, the parting from a world already long forgotten and unregretted. Human life will have been lengthened, but not the soul and the freshness of it that belongs only to life’s morning. After that, life will stretch in front of each, in a long vista, visible to an infinite distance of dreariness, like a trail across a desert.

Thus will the human race sink, generation after generation, into a slow stagnation that will lead it unconsciously to oblivion. The restless survival instinct, that fought its wars, and chafed at its poverty, and cared for its young and its own, this will fade out, and with it the power to live.

Then in some far future there will come the great mortality – not a pestilence, not a plague – just a great mortality – and the human race, like lone islanders upon a rock, will perish to the last man.

TOC     INDEX

Afternoons in Utopia

Tales of the New Time

(1932)

~

Utopia Old and New

Dear Old Utopia
Ten Seconds for Refreshments
The Real Utopia

Grandfather Goes to War

War Stuff
He Goes in A.D. 1810
He Goes in 1950
With the League of Nations, A.D. 2000 Or So
War in Utopia, Later Still
War Extracts from the Press of A.D. 2050

The Doctor and the Contraption

Medicine as It Was: The Saviour of Men

Medicine Year, 1932: The Doctor and the Contraption

Medicine Year, 2000: The Walrus and the Carpenter

Rah! Rah! College, or Tom Buncom at Shucksford

Introduction – Anno Domini 1880
1 … A First Day at College
2 … The Rah Rah Life
3 … Danger Ahead
4 … Sunk and Saved!
5 … College in Utopia
6 … The Dissolution of Shucksford College

The Band of Brothers

1 … Reflections on the Fall of Capitalism
2 … Our Courts of Justice
3 … Our System in Operation
4 … Lights and Shadows
5 … Revolution

A Fragment From Utopia

The Fifty-Fifty Sexes

Utopia Old and New

I

Dear Old Utopia

Suppose that there were written down the chronicle of one day’s doings of any ordinary family of today, how strange it would appear – could they have foreseen and read it – to the people of three or four hundred years ago! Not their day to us, but ours to them; not one of their days as seen by us in retrospect, but one of our days as seen by them, if it were possible, in prospect. The little acts and incidents and surroundings which we take for granted as part of our daily life, how marvellous, how inexplicable to them!

Their day to us would not seem strange or mysterious, but only limited, cramped and objectionable. People in dirty houses with garbage floating down the street outside; people without motor-cars and newspapers and telephones; ignorant people in an ignorant world, full of silly beliefs and superstitions, and cruel in their silliness; people to whom moving pictures would have been the work of the devil, Charlie Chaplin a ghost, and an airplane an angel – the lives of such people would have no charm or wonder for us. Even the vast mystery of the unknown and unlimited world in which they lived is spoiled by their stupid certainty about the little stars set up in the sky to light them.

But our day to them, could they but see it! For them we live in a world of humming wires and rushing winds, of ghosts walking in white light on paper walls, the voices of the spirits calling from the unknown at our command. Magic wands control the forces of the earth and air in a new world in which they would find everything changed, nothing left that was – nothing but man himself.

Nothing but man. Yet man himself goes next. The biggest change of all is yet to come – as will amply appear in the pages of this book.

.  .  .  .  .

Now ever since people learned to write and set down their imaginings in books, many wise and interesting writers have given to the people of their day pictures of what they thought the world was going to be like later on. Plato began it. The fathers of the Church, the monks and the Arabs went on with it. In Henry the Eighth’s time Sir Thomas More before (not after) he was beheaded wrote his Utopia. After him came Bacon and Milton and Bunyan, and Lord Lytton and Mr. Bellamy, and others writing still.

So many of these Utopias have been written that they have all run to a pattern that grows drowsy in its very sameness. In all of them the narrator falls asleep for two hundred years and awakes (which is a pity) to find himself in an altered world. He is confronted with a “venerable being” who is cut to a pattern in a “flowing robe,” with the further credential of a “majestic beard.” This being, then, who speaks beautiful but antiquated English—

But stop – let us reproduce the familiar scene of the long sleep and the arrival of the awakened sleeper in dear old Utopia. We will introduce, however, the slight, but novel, innovation of supposing that the narrator in this case arrives with – and not as usually depicted, without – his brains.

My Voyage to Utopia

Having decided to make one of those voyages to Utopia which have been the source of great literary profit from the days of Sir Thomas More until now, I realized that I must find means to fall asleep for a hundred years.

I did so.

—

On awakening I found myself as it were awake, and looked about me in order to ascertain, if possible, where I was. I found myself reclining on a couch in what appeared to me to be a large Gothic chamber – I might almost call it a hall – I will call it a hall – of which the lofty ceiling extended into a half darkness while the hall itself was lighted by a soft and suffused light coming from I knew not where. But as I had not expected to know where the light came from, this did not in any way upset me.

I was well aware that in all Utopias the light is soft and suffused and comes from you don’t know where. As a matter of fact I had seen, even in the poor old vanished world from which I came, little tricks like this light stuff, or nearly as good.

I had therefore no means of telling whether it was day or night – another fact which gave me no concern, as I was indifferent as to whether it was day or night. I looked at my watch. It had stopped. I had an idea that it must have stopped because it had run down. This fact I presently verified by winding it up.

Rising to a half-recumbent posture – which is as far as I care to go in one rise – I looked about me. The chamber as I said was vast yet contained little furniture other than a few oaken tables and chairs of an exquisite workmanship and design which I never recalled to have seen before. This, however, was not surprising as I have never worked in a furniture store. A few rugs of elaborate craftsmanship lay on the floor; but whether of skins or of woven fabric I was unable to say. I always am.

Being well acquainted with Utopias I knew that I had only to wait patiently and they would start something. I was certain that they wouldn’t be long, nor indeed had I long to wait. A door at the side of the room opened and a “slippered attendant” appeared. I knew, of course, that the first thing to come would be a slippered attendant. If he hadn’t I’d have slippered him myself.

I saw at once that he was an attendant from the fact that he wore one of those “loose smocks” which by common consent are recognized as the costume of all attendants, two hundred years hence. It was a sort of two-piece pyjama suit made of some plain woven material, but of what I could not say which.

The slippered attendant approached the couch where I was now only one-quarter recumbent and made a low obeisance.

“Come,” he said, “Oom will see you.” “All right,” I said and I readjusted my collar and necktie and followed him.

We crossed to the further end of the great hall and my attendant knocked at a small oaken door. To my surprise, the door opened of itself without the aid of human hands. Often though I have seen this – doors in restaurants and other places that open this way – I am always surprised at it. I don’t see how it is arranged unless there is some kind of catch or spring or trick about it. Anyway, it opened.

As yet, however, I could not see into the room beyond, which was half darkened.

The attendant bowed low in the doorway.

“One is without,” he said.

He didn’t say what I was without (perhaps, without a drink) but I guessed from my previous reading that he merely meant “outside.”

A deep resonant voice answered back, “Let the stranger enter.”

I found myself, on entering, in the presence of a venerable being whose flowing robe and majestic beard lent to him an air of dignity almost amounting to senility.

“Stranger,” he said. “Thou art awake, welcome.”

Just why he should adopt a form of speech lost for four centuries except in Yorkshire, I was at a loss to know. But I remembered that that is the way they always speak in the Utopia books.

“What wouldst?” continued Oom.

“First,” I said, “if you don’t mind I would like something to eat and drink.”

“Your pardon,” said Oom, “I had forgotten. With us it matters so little.”

He clapped his hands.

Two slippered attendants at once appeared as if by magic – in fact by magic.

“Bring viands and drink,” commanded Oom.

“Don’t you yourself eat, Dr. Oom?” I asked.

“I am indifferent to it,” replied the venerable man. “Our constitutions and the life we lead – so different from yours of the Earth-as-it-was – render food scarcely necessary. I break my fast in the morning with perhaps an egg, or bacon or eggs, or perhaps a beefsteak, or lamb kidneys and bacon with waffles – but it is a matter of indifference. At noon I take nothing, unless perhaps a cold meat pie or a lobster. Beyond this I eat nothing till at eventide and then possibly a hot goose or a boiled jack-rabbit with a veal cutlet – it is of no consequence. The abstemious life brings its own reward; the mind, O Stranger, becomes clearer, more liquid—”

“I know,” I said, “less full of mud. Indeed this abstemious life had got well started in what you call the Earth-as-it-was. I have often heard people speak as you do.”

“Here’s the food,” said Oom.

The attendants then set before us a tray of dainty and refreshing viands – including what appeared to be pâté de foie gras, only better, and canapé aux anchois, only not so smashed up.

For drink the attendant poured a liquor of exquisite appearance into tall glasses of incredible thinness and delicacy. The soft light of the room seemed reflected into iridescent opal colours both from the liquid and the glass.

“What is it?” I asked of Dr. Oom as I held the marvellous beverage up to the light.

“Your tongue,” he said, “hath no speech for it. With us it is called Slooch.”

“Is it intoxicating?” I asked.

“Not in the least,” replied Dr. Oom. “Indeed,” he continued, “I can see from your questions how far our world has travelled from the Earth-as-it-was. Were it not for my knowledge of history, I should be at a loss to answer your question. But sit, stranger, eat and drink and I, too, will partake with you of a friendly bite as it approaches even now the equidistant point between my last meal and my next.”

As we ate, Dr. Oom proceeded to explain to me how the questions of what we used to call prohibition had long since been entirely solved. All that was needed, he said, was to discover a beverage which, like Slooch, was stimulating and exhilarating but not intoxicating. Slooch, he explained, could easily bring one to laughter or tears, or might even provoke a desire to sing, or set up a noble anger, or at times induce a profound sleep – but it was not intoxicating. He explained the matter further but I was unable to follow entirely the explanations which he gave. It seemed to turn on the idea that what is “intoxicating” is a matter of legal definition, so that by arduous improvement of the law all danger of intoxication was cut out.

When we had at last finished Dr. Oom said, “Well, I suppose we had better begin. You wish to ask me, I am sure, all kinds of questions about the new world in which you find yourself.”

I took out my pencil and notebook and nodded.

“What shall I start with,” said Dr. Oom, “or rather how likes it you that I lay on? How about currency and coinage, would you like me to begin with that?”

“No,” I said, “never mind currency and coinage. I never had much grip on that.”

“The Gold Standard,” began Dr. Oom.

“I know,” I said. “It was already doomed. Try something else.”

“Would you like,” said Dr. Oom, “to ask me about wages and labour and what is now the relation of the capitalistic classes, as you used to call them, to the workers? Let me talk about that, eh?”

“No, please don’t,” I replied. “I had got so fed up with that before I fell asleep that I really don’t care about it one way or the other.”

“The problem,” said Dr. Oom reflectingly, stroking his majestic beard as he spoke, and disregarding my interruption, “proved in the end amazingly simple. But the manner and method in which it was solved involves a rather detailed intricate narration, partly in Old English, of what has happened in the industrial world in two hundred years. However, I will try—”

“No,” I said, “please don’t, Dr. Oom – I presume you are Doctor. Please don’t. Let’s get on to something with a little more go to it.”

Oom began again.

“Among the many things which will surprise you most in the world you are about to visit is the prolongation of human life. In the days when you lived I believe that the average duration of human life was about fifty-eight years decimal four. It is now – but you will see for yourself when you meet our old men. I am sure you will be delighted and surprised to see what a snappy lot of bright old men we have among us.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “But I can get all that in figures later on, can’t I? Give me something that sounds a little more like a news item or a feature story.”

“How about peace and war?” said Dr. Oom.

“I think I can guess all that,” I answered. “The nations came together and agreed to abolish war.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Oom, “by a vote of thirty-one to thirty. It was a close thing but it got through.”

A silence fell upon us during which Dr. Oom refilled his glass from the flagon and drank its contents with a reflecting air.

“I made a mistake,” he said.

“Why, of course!” said I.

The same idea had evidently struck us both at the same moment. “Of course,” I repeated, “you should have first shown me this new world and what it looks like. This chamber, as a matter of fact, has a passageway leading out upon the ‘leads’ and balconies of the vast building in which it is constructed—”

“How did you know that?”

“Oh, it always does,” I said. “Come, lead me out upon the roof and let me see the changed world that lies about me.”

Oom rose and without a word led me through a side door and along a short passage, and then out upon a flat balustraded roof from which, in an instant vision, appeared a vast panorama illumined with brilliant sunshine and reaching to the horizon.

Great Heavens! Was this the city I had known! Whither had gone the tall skyscrapers reaching to the clouds? Where was the long reach of the wide Hudson, the vast suspension bridge hung like an aerial web from shore to shore? Where was it all gone? or how had it changed to this? I turned to Dr. Oom, who stood beside me, quietly smiling at my evident and utter astonishment.

“Can this,” I said, pointing to the vision around me, “can this be New York?”

“New York?” said Oom. “No, of course not. This is London.”

The exhilaration which had kindled in his face died out of it. In fact he looked rather crestfallen. “Yes,” he said, “this is London. What made you think it New York?”

“Why, I fell asleep in New York,” I said.

“I believe that’s right,” said Dr. Oom, reflecting. “You did, very likely. There was a sort of patriotic exchange of hundred year sleepers between England and America and you must have come over in that lot. In fact, now I think of it, you did.

“But sit down, sit down,” he said, recovering his animation and indicating a stone bench overlooking the balustrade. “Sit down and let me tell you of this vast city, every detail of which will surprise you. You notice that it is all covered in with glass, do you not? – I mean, dost not thou? That must give you, a being of a previous world, quite a jolt, doesn’t it?”

“Well, in a sense,” I said, pausing to light a cigarette which I had found with a lighter in my pocket, “and yet in a sense it doesn’t. We had started that.”

“You will be surprised at least to learn,” said Dr. Oom, “that in all this vast city there is not a single moving vehicle—”

“I hardly expected there would be,” I replied; “no doubt the sidewalks themselves . . .”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Oom.

A silence ensued which began, in a way, to be almost painful or at least boring. I realized that the scene between us had been worn so thin in preceding generations that it was difficult to keep it up at the proper point of intensity.

I began to feel it my duty to discover some subject at least upon which the revelations of Dr. Oom would come up to the standard of feature-article interest.

“Dr. Oom,” I said, “there is one thing that always and forever, in each successive world and generation, is of undying interest. What about the position and status of women in this new world?”

“Ah!” said Dr. Oom, “most interesting; let me explain first . . .”

But he had hardly spoken when the little door through which we had stepped out onto the roof was swung open and a glad, girlish voice called: “Why, father, where ever have you been?”

A ravishing girlish figure rushed across to the leads and threw its arms in affectionate impulsiveness about the neck of Dr. Oom. . . .

How ever can I forget the moment – my first sight of Rooshna – my first glimpse of she for whom or rather but for whom all that I was, or rather whatever else I am – but enough. Words fail me to convey the picture of the exquisite being who thus burst upon my sight.

She was clad in a long and quietly flowing garment which appeared made of a single fabric, that is, I couldn’t see a hole or a join in it, in which, or rather from which and through which the colours of the sunshine seemed to glisten in opalescent irradiation.

“Rooshna,” said Dr. Oom in a voice of gentle remonstrance at the impulsiveness of the exquisite being who clung to his neck. “Look, my child. One is with us.”

Rooshna unclasped her arms as she became aware of my presence. Then moving towards me, her hands clasped in agitation, she raised her eyes to mine.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, “at last you are awake! How wonderful! Sometimes I used to think that you would never wake; some years you seemed almost to do so and other years you seemed to sleep harder than ever.”

Marvellous it seemed to me to think that this exquisite being – if I may call her that again – had watched over my slumbers.

Dr. Oom turned towards us.

“My daughter, Rooshna,” he said with a smile, “has long been your constant attendant while you slept. She was always hoping that the day might come when she herself might show you all the wonders of this strange new world.”

“But I should like nothing better,” I said. “I shall be charmed indeed if Miss Oom will be so kind as to act as my guide.”

“Excellent,” said Dr. Oom; “for myself I pray that you will excuse me as I have to attend this afternoon a meeting of the Witanagemot.”

“Come along then,” said Rooshna gaily; “let me lead the way.”

“You must tell me,” she said as we made our way through the passages and halls of the beautiful building from which we had emerged, “what you want to know about first. There must be so much to explain to you; how would you like to hear first about our currency and coinage?”

“Currency and coinage!” I repeated with delight. “I can imagine nothing more fascinating. Do tell me about it.”

“I will,” said Rooshna, “and then, after that, what about a little talk on transportation facilities.”

“Glorious!” I said.

“And then I know you want to hear about labour and capital and social insurance.”

“Delicious! I can’t hear enough of it.”

“Then I shall have lots to tell you. Of course father could have explained it all much better.”

“Miss Oom,” I said boldly, “I don’t regret your father’s absence.”

Rooshna looked at me with an air of perplexity.

“Why do you say that?” she questioned. “I can’t understand why you say that. Really I can’t. But anyway” – her expression cleared as she spoke – “father couldn’t come as he had to be at the Witanagemot – if you know what that is?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “the meeting of the Wise Old Men. And pray, tell me, what does your father do, Miss Oom?” I asked.

“Do?” she said. “How do you mean?”

“I mean what is his work.”

“Oh! I understand,” said Rooshna, breaking into a pleasant laugh, “work! You see there’s practically no work at all now. It’s all done by the machines and especially by the new life-force which science has invented and which is called Wheee! You’ve heard of that?”

“Not exactly,” I answered, “but of course in all the Utopia books there was generally a marvellous force of that sort.”

“Quite so,” said Rooshna. “So you see since the discovery of Wheee, there is really terribly little to do. Employment has grown extremely rare and is confined to the young. So that the men like father have to find other things to occupy them.”

“And how does he occupy himself?”

“He works on the sky a good deal, astronomical work, you know, like taking the mean altitude of the sun and finding the diameter of the moon. He does both of those every day, and then he generally copies out the multiplication table every morning.”

“But hasn’t all that been done before?”

“Of course,” answered Rooshna with just a shade of irritation in her tone, “but what else can father do? Since the invention of Wheee there’s no work and of course there are no professions because we don’t have soldiers any more, and there is no law, and since the invention of Healall there is no illness and no doctors. You know about Healall?”

“I think so,” I said; “already it was foreseen in some of our newspaper advertisements. It cures everything.”

“Exactly. So what can father do? But come along – don’t let’s sit here. Let’s go out in the street. There!” she said, “is the outer door swung open. How do you like the look of it?”

“Marvellous,” I said. “Why, the street is all roofed over with glass! How wonderful! And the sidewalk actually moves along like a moving platform! Who could have believed it?”

“Jump onto it then,” cried Rooshna, “and away we go!”

—

Marvellous indeed was the afternoon which ensued during which Rooshna conducted me, on the moving platform and on foot, among the pleasant squares and gardens where we rested and talked of the wonderful world about us. At little tables set under sycamore trees, slippered attendants served us with Slooch in golden glasses and with synthetic fruits and canned sardines. Rooshna meanwhile explained to me the currency, the coinage, the labour legislation and the rules of procedure of the Witanagemot. I was delighted with all I saw, and especially pleased to remark the excessive number of old men moving about, and how bright the old fellows seemed!

The prolongation of life, as my fair conductress explained, had naturally led to the existence of a high percentage of bright, snappy old people. The young were few, and, I presume, for the most part busy elsewhere, at school or work. But their absence was more than compensated by the great number of old men, every one of whom seemed in full possession of all the faculties he had ever had or needed.

Never have I had such a delightful afternoon. So much so that I returned from it with the most glorious feeling of satisfaction, a feeling as if I had, so to speak, plenty of it.

That evening I banqueted with Dr. Oom and his friends in the great hall. The meal was served to us, not seated in our stiff fashion of today, but in the true Utopian pose of reclining languidly on couches, while slippered attendants served us with exquisite viands as we reclined. Our discourse was accompanied by soft music proceeding from I know not where. During the meal, which was a prolonged one, Dr. Oom and his friends conversed enthusiastically of the altitude of the sun, of the binomial theorem, and of the multiplication table. Their talk, I perceived, was animated but never contentious. Just once for a moment something like controversy arose as to what was nine times eight but it was only for a moment. For the most part, I realized, there was nothing to argue over, everything being long since settled; and in a world where nothing happened, there were of course no events or happenings to talk about. As a consequence conversation was able to move on the higher ground of eternal verities such as multiplication and long division.

—

I need not describe in detail the marvellous days which succeeded my first awakening in Utopia. Each day brought its delightful round. Rooshna would join me after breakfast and would talk of currency, bimetalism and the elimination of the unearned increment. Then I would spend half an hour beside the venerable Dr. Oom, holding his astronomical instruments for him, while he measured the apparent diameter of the moon, and listening to his pleasant talk on the zodiac and the equinoxes. After, would come a ride on the moving platforms with Rooshna, while we discussed the relation of profits to interest, or the relation of interest to profits, or the possibility of a regulated currency based on the reciprocal variation of the index of general prices. The evening brought with it the customary prolonged and delightful banquet on synthetic eggs, fried figs and goulash under glass. The food, I discovered, had all been prepared years and years before. . . .

—

How long this delicious existence might have lasted I cannot say. I was aware, however, that my feelings towards Rooshna were rapidly passing from the mere sense of interest and companionship to something more intense, deeper, and, if I may so call it, broader and indeed higher. In fact I was already conscious in my own heart that I loved her. Again and again as I sat under the spell of her talk on sociological science I could scarcely resist the impulse to take her to my heart and tell her of my love.

—

But at the same time another and entirely different impulse kept drawing me in an opposite direction. More and more each day I began to feel an overwhelming desire to go to sleep. My sleep at night was not enough. I wanted more. As I sat with Dr. Oom watching his grave face as he tested out the multiplication table with marks on a bit of paper, I wanted to sleep. If I sat out in one of the little squares where the fountains splashed beneath the sycamores, my head would sink forward with a drowsy desire for sleep. Even at the banquets in the evening something in the soft unvarying light, the gentle music and the murmur of the scientific discourse on the properties of a right-angled triangle – even this failed to keep me roused. Sleep – I must sleep.

Yet behind this feeling there seemed to me some strange, deep, subtle meaning which I couldn’t fathom. Why this unending ever-present desire for sleep? Had it some bearing on the mystery of life itself? Could it mean that beyond all the arts and contrivances of man – this prolongation of life and removal of accident, danger and disease – there was something, some undeniable decree. What was this world into which I had penetrated by some occult process unknown to myself? Could it be? – I put the thought from me – could it be, could that be – the meaning of unending quiet, this unending harmony, this living among the unchanging truths of existence – this life without life – I wouldn’t name the word – was that where I was?

—

It was on the tenth day.

Overwhelmingly the thought came to me. I sprang up from the bench on which I sat.

I stood erect and grasped Rooshna’s hand as she sat. “Rooshna,” I said, “I love you!”

“I know that,” she said quietly, not speaking like a Utopian but like a woman of the Earth-as-it-was. “I know that,” she said. “I knew it from the first.”

“Rooshna,” I said, “I love you. But I must go . . . out, out of this . . . I don’t know how, or where, but out and back into life again. . . .”

“I know,” she said, “I’m going too.”

“But you can’t,” I said, “your place is here. Your father . . .”

Rooshna shook her head.

“He is not my father. I call him that, but I too belong as you do outside. I don’t know – I can’t remember now – it is all so perplexed. It seems as if I had been here ever so long – waiting for you.”

I seated myself again beside Rooshna.

We sat silent for a little time, our hands clasped.

Then she spoke.

“Listen,” she said, “will you trust me?”

“Oh, of course,” I answered.

“But I mean trust me a great deal. Do you remember that in the life you came from long ago there were stories called fairy stories – and often in these fairy stories, there was a princess, and the princess would say to her lover, ‘Will you trust me and do what I say, and no matter how hard it is you will do it and everything will be all right?’”

“Well?” I said.

“Well, I want you to do that now. You want to sleep – to sleep as if to sleep forever. There, lie upon the bench – your head upon my arm – so; and now say to me good-bye. I understand, dear. You cannot stay. Sleep.”

—

“You’ve been asleep so long. I didn’t like to wake you.”

It was my wife’s voice. She was standing beside the bed, with a cup of tea in her hand – my wife’s voice, but where had I heard it before?

“I didn’t want to wake you,” she repeated, “but I do so want to show you this. I found it in turning out some old things this morning. Do you remember it?”

As she spoke she handed me, half blushing, a little picture of the queer old kind once called a “tintype.”

“Why, of course!” I said, still half dreaming, “it’s you and me.”

“When the tintype man took us on the little seat under the sycamore.”

“The day I said, when I—”

“Yes,” she answered, “that day.”

II

Ten Seconds for Refreshments

After reading about the Dear Old Utopia of the preceding chapter, the reader ought in fairness to sit down and take a breath and think about it. He might even eat something. He will see on a little reflection that the trouble with this dear old Orthodox Utopia is that it is altogether too comprehensible. You can understand it. It may be marvellous, no doubt it is, but after all it is terribly like the world in which we live. The real Utopia, if we could get a look at it, would be quite incomprehensible; we simply wouldn’t understand what the people were talking about. Neither could they explain it all, as the Dr. Ooms do in the sham Utopias, because they wouldn’t understand what it was that we didn’t understand. Anyone who has ever tried to explain to an intelligent Eskimo the operation of the New York Stock Exchange will know just what I mean. Few people perhaps have had that experience. But anybody who has undertaken to describe the nature of the photo-electric cell to an Equatorial African pygmy will understand the case exactly.

Well, then – let’s get back and see the rest; let us take a look at the Real Utopia.

In other words, let us suppose that we could really look ahead and see, not this venerable being with whiskers, but the real world of tomorrow. Let us suppose that we fall asleep for a hundred years and then wake up and sit up and see. Or no – don’t let’s even fall asleep. Let us simply take a look right now at a family group in Utopia. There they are, apparently a mother and two children, seated at breakfast. Breakfast, yes – it looks like breakfast. Some of the things at the little table look a little queer (we’ve never seen a coffee-gun, of course, or a synthetic egg) – still, it must be breakfast. There, they’re beginning to talk – listen.

III

The Real Utopia

“Good news, children!”

It is the woman, the mother, who is speaking as she sits at the breakfast table. She speaks gaily, as if full of happiness.

“Good news, children. Father is coming out of jail!”

“Good,” said the little boy. “I always like it when father comes out of jail.”

“This father,” corrects the little girl solemnly, looking up from the porridge.

“I meant that, Clara, of course,” said the boy. “You know I didn’t mean Mr. Angleneck. When does father come out, mum?”

“This morning, I think – in fact quite early, almost now. Wait a minute.”

She moved with her fingers a little dial that lay on the table. (By the way, how Utopia-like that would have seemed only a little while ago. But we are doing it already.)

“It’s Mrs. Ex-Angleneck-Afterthought speaking,” she said, “is that the Elysian Fields Jail?”

A voice seemed to speak from the wall, from nowhere, just in the room (an inconceivable wonderful thing, but we’re doing it now). “Yes.”

“Is that the office?”

“No, it’s the ballroom. Last night’s dance isn’t over yet – it was graduates’ night, you see, but I can get you the office – or perhaps – I can tell you what you want.”

“I wanted to find out if my husband has left the jail yet; he was to come out this morning.”

There was silence, a long pause, and then the voice spoke again.

“I’m so sorry. The governor of the jail won’t let him go.”

“Won’t let him go?”

“He says he simply can’t spare him and that he must stay over for the polo match. He says not to expect him till tonight.”

Mrs. Afterthought put down the dial with a sigh, yet with a slight flush of pleasure on her face. “He’s such a favourite out there,” she said. “Every time he goes to jail it’s the same thing. They simply will keep him there.”

Little Clara looked up from her plate.

“But I thought that only wicked people were put into prison.”

“Clara!” said her mother severely, “what have you been reading now? If you and Edward will keep dragging old books off the library shelves—”

“I didn’t get it out of an old book, mother, and you know I didn’t, because I can’t read the funny old letters in them.”

“Well, wherever you got the idea it was very wrong of you to say it. Surely you know that some of the best and noblest people in the world go to jail. Your father tells me that every time he goes he meets the most distinguished people – really brilliant men – financiers, bankers, senators—”

“Crooks,” muttered little Edward.

“Edward!” exclaimed his mother. Mrs. Afterthought looked at her two children in silence. They often puzzled her. They seemed so old-fashioned.

“Then why did father have to go to jail?” asked little Clara.

“He didn’t have to, Clara,” said her mother.

“Well, they took him in a van,” said Edward, “with wire over it.”

“Certainly, Edward, because otherwise his subconscious self might have made him leap out.”

“Then what did he go for?” asked Edward.

“Atavism,” said Mrs. Afterthought.

“What?”

“An attack of atavism. The judge himself said so. Father’s had it again and again.”

“Atavism,” said little Edward. “What does that mean?”

“It means when you go back and copy things done by your great-grandfather, or your great-great-grandfather, or any number of greats.”

“But how could papa imitate his great-great-grandfather when he never saw him?”

“But he did. He brought home from the club, dear, a fur coat that didn’t belong to him.”

“Did great-great-grandfather do that?” asked little Clara.

“He must have, dear, because your father did it.”

“But wouldn’t father go to jail for doing that?”

“No, but on the same day he atavistically carried away some money (lying on the desk of a bank, I think) and a gold watch which he had, by pure atavism, taken from a gentleman’s coat pocket while the coat was hung up.”

“So what happened?” asked Edward.

“Well, Judge Gloop – you’ve seen him here, dears, very often at lunch with papa, suggested six months in jail. Your father said no, in fact he was against it from the start. He thought a sea voyage, or a trip to Monte Carlo might be better. However, they insisted – in the court I mean – and in the end your father had to give way. It happened, however, that two other gentlemen that your father knew very well were going too, so they agreed to go together and share expenses.”

“What did they steal, the other two?” asked Edward.

“My dear Edward!” exclaimed his mother in gentle protest. “How can you drag up those terrible words out of old books and belonging to the mediaeval days? They didn’t steal anything. They had amnesia.”

“Amnesia?”

“Yes, amnesia. They forgot their own names and in attempting to write their own wrote down other people’s. The judge said that it seemed to him that jail was the only place for them. They said no, and suggested a long rest – they thought of South America. Indeed I believe that one of them had taken a ticket for South America to go and begin to rest when he received, just as he was getting on the ship, this other suggestion about going to jail instead.”

“And did he turn back?”

“Yes, on condition that they’d put in a new billiard table. I believe they did it. The judge said it seemed eminently fair.”

“But I don’t see—” began little Edward. He was about to continue but at that moment a soft light appeared on the wall and a voice said: “I beg your pardon, I think I was to call you up this morning, was I not? It is the secretary of the High School speaking – about your little boy’s geometry, you remember. Have you decided to have it done?”

“I really don’t know. It’s so hard to decide. Would he be in bed long?”

“Oh, dear, no,” said the voice with a pleasant suggestion of a laugh, “only one afternoon, perhaps not that. At his age, you know, it’s really a mere nothing. I think it could be done at home if you like, only it’s not so easy to give the anaesthetic.”

“I see. And it’s really quite simple, is it?”

“Oh, a mere nothing as far as that goes.”

“And I suppose it’s not very expensive, is it?”

“Oh, not at all; not for plane geometry. It’s only ten dollars (a thousand pounds). Of course if you wanted spherical geometry, it’s much more and still more for Einstein; it’s hard to get the plasm for those. And in any case those can be acquired, you know, afterwards by vocal teaching.”

“What do you think yourself, Eddie?” asked his mother, turning to the little boy.

“I don’t care, mum,” said Eddie, “I didn’t mind algebra a bit. They don’t hurt you and once it’s in it feels just like arithmetic or anything else, you know. Do you know, mother, I heard our headmaster say that long ago in his great-great-grandfather’s time or something they used to beat it into them with sticks. How do they do that? It sounds so cruel and unnatural?”

“It was, dear, but I can’t talk about it now.”

Mrs. Afterthought spoke to the wall again. “I think if you don’t mind I’ll talk it over with my husband again before I decide. He’s rather old-fashioned about that sort of thing. He has a feeling, he says, as if it weren’t quite honest. He’s so strict, you know. He’s in jail just now, and I hate to disturb him.”

“Oh, well, by all means let it wait. There’s no hurry. Good-bye.”

“Mother,” said Edward, “while you’re talking you might as well have asked about the war.”

“I didn’t need to,” said Mrs. Afterthought, “there isn’t any today. It was announced last night that the war would stop for today.”

“Oh!” said both the children, “why?”

“It was put off for the Dog Race in the Sahara. The Harvard Dog is racing the Oxford Dog, and so there wouldn’t be enough power for the war as well. And by the way, children, please remember if grandfather comes in this afternoon, don’t say anything about the war.”

“Oh, mother, why not – isn’t grandfather commanding a ship? I thought he was commanding one of the big battleships.”

“Yes, dear, and that’s why. Grandfather lost his ship – lost with all hands, it seems – nothing left afloat except a little wreckage.”

“Mother! How dreadful!”

“And grandfather’s terribly put out about it. I don’t think they can say it’s exactly his fault, but he feels it terribly. He says the loss is very serious, especially some of the officers; not the captain – he was worn out, but the chief navigating officer (I think he said) was absolutely new and equipped with every latest device that grandfather could put in him. In fact grandfather had spent months working on him. But wait, children, it’s time to ring for Jane and get the things cleared away. I’ll tell you all about it presently.”

Mrs. Afterthought pressed a button as she spoke and sat watching with her children as the servant came in through the door from the kitchen. Jane moved around the table in her characteristically rigid and mechanical way that would have seemed laughable to the children but that they were so familiar with it. She seemed to move in straight lines and exact circles, picking up the plates with a round sweep of her arm. Here and there, if a plate or dish was out of Jane’s reach the mother or the children passed it into her hand, but no one spoke to her. “Jane’s slow,” said little Clara as the servant finished and went out.

“I don’t think you wound her up properly on Monday, mum,” said Edward.

“I don’t think it’s that, dear. I’m afraid that she’s getting all out of repair. The electrician looked at her yesterday and said that she needed a new sheet of tin on her back side. But it costs such a lot.”

“Well, mother,” said Clara, “I saw the loveliest butler in a shop yesterday, an imported English butler, marked at only thirty thousand pounds – three hundred dollars, isn’t it?”

“I know, darling, but we couldn’t afford it. Papa says it takes more power to make an English butler move than for four ordinary servants. But, good gracious—”

Mrs. Afterthought broke off suddenly at the sound of a noise, a queer bumping noise that seemed to come from under their feet.

“What is it, mum?”

“Why, don’t you hear it? I’m afraid that it means there’s a ghost in the cellar again.”

“Hooray!” shouted Edward. “A ghost! Come on, Clara, get your Badminton racquet. Come and chase it out.”

The two children sprang—

—

BUT THERE – Any reflective reader can see that a place like the Real Utopia couldn’t possibly be understood in that fashion. It is far too different from the World-as-it-is. Not the place – but the people. The apparatus, the machinery, the setting, is all there already. But the effect is still to come.

So we must begin all over again and learn Utopia, bit by bit.

TOC     INDEX

Grandfather Goes to War

I

War Stuff

War memoirs and war reminiscences cannot be understood without a knowledge of the nature and circumstances of the war of which they treat. War itself has greatly altered in its character from age to age. Take only the modern age of the last century or two and we can see how great has been the alteration not only in war itself, but in the attitude of mankind towards it. To the generations of the eighteenth century war was an intermittent part of national life, not very terrible, and ending always in peace. Sometimes one side won and sometimes the other, but generally both. In those days war held the place now occupied by the World’s Baseball Series, the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, and the Nobel Prize. It was the only way the nations had of getting together.

To the people of the late Victorian Age, war had passed into a scourge inflicted by Providence upon yellow, black and brown people as part of their elevation towards civilization. From England it had gone forever.

For the Americans of the United States there had only been one war, the Civil War, a matchless epic of devotion. It could never come again, because in the united country after the war there was henceforth no North and no South – so many people having moved West.

But in our day, at this little moment of infinite time called the year 1932, the case is different. We are sitting waiting for the next crash. The nations are now so intimately connected that the quarrels of each are the quarrels of all. With a central agency in the League of Nations and with the universal transmission of irritation by radio, a dispute can spread over the whole world in five minutes.

In older days the world was protected by its blanket of ignorance. Europe took no part in the Great Mongolian Conquest of China (Second Dynasty, Subdivision Five) because it never heard of it. In our own time, in all common sense, the fact that Poland wants a Corridor ought to matter to you and to me in North America about as much, and as little, as that Pussy wants a Corner.

But we are given to understand that this desire of Poland to keep a Corridor along with the immutable resolution of the Czechs rather to die in an enclave than to live in an anschluss, are among the reasons why we are all presently to be overwhelmed in the disaster. The mixed collection of peoples who used to seem to us a picturesque set of organ-grinders, now appear to hold the destinies of the world in the hollow of their organs.

In other words, we of the outside world, barely recovering from the staggering shock of the Great War, are sitting waiting for the next blow. All the best authorities are in agreement about it. And the war hounds, the real hot dogs who talk of nothing else – assure us that the next great war is going to be something awful. And it appears that the people who get it in the neck are not these war hounds themselves, but us – you and I – the ordinary plain people who never saw a gun fired in anger outside of a bar-room.

It seems, so they say, that the whole attention of the armies will be devoted to destroying civilians – women and children a specialty. Bombs will be dropped on us from the air; we will be blown up on our own golf links; killed with gas while at the movies. Churches will be no place for people who fear death and sick people had better keep away from hospitals.

These war hounds keep cheering us up with news of bigger and brighter bombs, higher and higher explosives, yellower and yellower gas. They have an explosive now that will blow us five hundred feet in the air; last year we were only up to four. And there’s a new gas that you can’t see as it approaches; it has no smell, so you can’t smell it; it gives no feeling, so you don’t feel it. Without having the least idea of it you are dead.

But anyone who is familiar with the history of war in past ages will take but little stock in this awful picture. In reality war is coming to an end. In fact it is almost there now.

It may be, or it may not be, that there will be one more war. If so, this one more war that will follow as an aftermath of the Great War, will be the War of Desolation and that will be the end. The reason is that war has lost what you might call its charm, the peculiar drowsy fascination that it had up till about fifty years ago. In those good old days war was the greatest of open-air sports. The life was free and open, the food good, lots of fun, and the danger practically nothing, or nothing more than being at home.

Think of the wonderful attraction for a young officer setting off to war. He embarked upon a troop ship – a huge floating castle under sail; music, sunshine, tears, farewells, brandy and soda! Glorious. Any danger of a bomb from the air? Good heavens, no! never dreamed of. Any fear of being blown up at night by a submarine? Good Lord, no! Any danger of anything? Not till we get to the scene of the war. When do we get there? Oh, in about six months.

Thus used to sail the French and the English to the West Indies; brandy and soda on deck all day and cards played under an awning for ten rupees a punto; that’s the life!

Thus sailed a United States naval expedition somewhere about a hundred years ago for the island of Sumatra. Why? To punish a native chief. Now if anybody can think of better fun than what “punishing a native chief” used to be, I want to hear of it. Time of this expedition, four months out and four back. Warfare involved – bombardment of Quettah Boola, or some such place, for half an hour, then a native banquet with hams, yams, clams, and a native drink called “hooroo”! And at all these banquets, of course, there were girls, lots of them, yellow, tan, brown, anything. They always collected them in any of the dear old expeditions. After which they collected the ransom and sailed home.

Danger in the old wars never came till you were ready for it, all keyed up for it, wanting it. And it was over in no time – it was like a thunderstorm, fearsome and full of light and then gone! In any good old campaign the armies always laid off for winter, and always took time off for saints’ days, holidays, and generals’ birthdays on both sides. They stopped for wet weather, muddy weather, or when there was too much static in the air. A campaign lasted as a rule all summer with a battle once a month, lasting anywhere from twenty minutes to all day. Waterloo began after early lunch, and all concerned were finished for late dinner. Wolfe’s battle at Quebec lasted twenty minutes. It had taken from the first week in January till the middle of September to get it ready.

As to the danger of death, the open air life was so superior to sedentary work at home that it was on the whole safer to be at war. England lost, in twenty-two years of war with France, only one hundred thousand soldiers – about five thousand a year. About half of these died of fever in the West Indies without any battles at all. Apart from fever, the mortality at home was far greater.

Can we wonder that war flourished. For the officers it was, literally, a picnic; as for the common people, they didn’t matter in those days. But they probably liked it fairly well – better than home anyway.

Gradually the thing began to get spoiled. New weapons were invented which were really dangerous to handle. Napoleon’s wars were fought with an old flint-lock gun, which, if handled carefully, was not very dangerous. If fired too fast, it might kick or burst and do damage.

The American Civil War, was, as we can see it now, the real turning point. The Americans, as usual, took hold of a good thing, improved it, and spoiled it. They got busy inventing iron-clad warships, submarines, trench mortars, and heaven knows what. General McClellan had the right idea; he proposed four years’ drill before beginning war. Grant butted in and spoiled it.

The Civil War was – in all reverence – the last of the heroic age of war. In place of it has come the War of the Machine Age, the war of gases, bombs, depth charges – where personal valour is of no avail – where right does not conquer – where the weak go down – where the Mass Production of Death reaps its wholesale harvest.

No, it won’t do. All people are sick of it. War is finished. It’s too dangerous. The League of Nations can try as they like to keep it alive. Their votes and debates and disputes in the old days would have started a war every six months. But not now. Any two nations who start fighting are now looking over their shoulder for someone to intercede and stop them.

War, therefore, will die out. But when it is gone the world will begin to feel a dull place without it. So much so that – But stop – let us see it as a series of pictures as the world saw it in the adventurous past, in the appalling present, and will see it in the Utopian future.

II

He Goes in A.D. 1810

Every time that Admiral Halftop’s two little grandchildren were taken to see him, they always set themselves to make their grandfather tell them stories about the war.

The little old admiral, in his faded blue suit, cheery and ruddy and hearty at seventy-five, was a great favourite with children, and most of all with little Clara and Edward, his grandchildren.

“Story?” the admiral would say, “story about the war? Tut, tut, I’ve told you all about it long ago. Fiddlesticks!”

“Oh, please do tell us a story!” said little Clara.

All three of them knew that he was going to in any case.

So the admiral would take his stick and his spy-glass and walk out with the children from his cottage along the cliffs beside the sea. His “cottage” the admiral always called it; and he spoke of it as a “snug little crib.” But the eyes of others saw a green and white mansion set in handsome lawns and gardens and glass houses, in a sheltered hollow, behind the cliffs, within sight and sound of the sea.

The stick the admiral needed from a slight stiffness of the left knee acquired in boarding the Sanctissima Trinidad on October 21, 1805. The spy-glass might at any moment be needed to examine a ship far out at sea and to explain to the children why the ship, from the extra length of her mainyard, was a “Frenchman.”

It always seemed so strange and fascinating to the children to think that grandpapa had been in the great war, had actually seen “Boney” on the deck of the Bellerophon, and had even talked with “the Duke” – ever so many times, in fact more and more often as he told about it.

So sometimes they walked along the cliffs and grandpapa told stories of the war; and sometimes if it was windy they came and sat on a bench under the great trees on the spacious lawns of the sheltered “cottage.” Cottage or not, it was an estate of great beauty and would have commanded a lot of money in the market. For like all his generation, the admiral had done well out of the war. What with prize money accumulated for years, and the lucky purchase of lands in Portugal and the pension of a grateful sovereign, the admiral was a wealthy man. But that, of course, was always the reward of war and the admiral took it all modestly and with due humility.

—

So that afternoon Admiral Halftop sat with the children in the autumn light among the falling and fallen leaves.

“Did you ever fight on land, grandpapa?” asked little Edward.

“On land! Aye, to be sure, my boy. When the war moved to Spain, you know, we hadn’t much to do at sea then, so they shoved a lot of us youngsters with the naval brigade. We marched in from Santander – or was it Corunna – no, wait a bit, it was Santander – aye, that’s right, Santander, of course, yes, Santander.”

The admiral kept murmuring “Santander” so long that little Edward said, “And what did you do, grandpapa?”

“Do? Oh, we were supposed to go and help the Spanish gorillas.”

“Spanish what?” asked Clara.

“Gorillas,” said the admiral.

“Animals?” exclaimed both children.

“No, no, my dears, gorillas is the word we used for irregular Spaniards.”

“Is it spelt like the word in the picture book?” asked Clara.

“Couldn’t say,” said the admiral. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of my Spanish years ago. We never had another war against them – or with them, I should say; they were, as I remember, on our side. At sea they’d been against us.”

“How was that?” asked Edward.

“Don’t know,” said the admiral; “anyway, that was the arrangement. But they were a poor lot. I remember when our column joined the Duke – he’d come through, you know, from the Tagus – wait a bit, the Douro – not the Tagus, yes, yes, the Tagus – we had about half a company of them with us – marching anyhow – some on donkeys. The Duke reined in his horse. I was right beside him as he stopped. ‘What the devil are those fellows?’ he said, turning towards me. ‘Spanish gorillas, sir,’ I answered. ‘Damme,’ said the Duke, ‘they look like it.’ Then he looked at my uniform, ‘And what are you?’ ‘Naval brigade, sir.’ ‘Damme,’ said the Duke, ‘I see you are.’ Then he turned to an aide-de-camp. ‘Ride and tell Sir John to dress those damn Spaniards better.’ Then we heard him murmur, ‘How the deuce do they expect me to meet Marmont with a lot of sailors and Spaniards!’ And off he rode.”

“What a disagreeable man!” exclaimed little Clara.

“Disagreeable! Not a bit!” said the admiral. “Deuced fine fellow, the Duke. I remember well the next time he saw me he said, ‘So you’re the young puppy that came in by Santander, eh? Damme, I hope you like it.’ Always knew everybody, the Duke did, always had a word to say like that. Next time I saw him outside Burgos. ‘Eh, what the devil,’ he said, ‘not shot yet?’ Oh, we all liked him, the Duke; damn fine soldier, no nonsense about him. But he couldn’t stand for the Spaniards. Neither could the French officers for the matter of that. In fact they often told us so.”

“The French?” said Edward, puzzled, “but weren’t you fighting against the French?”

“Certainly, the French were the enemy. Splendid lot they were too.”

“Then why were you fighting them?”

“Ah, well! that didn’t concern us – nor them either, for that matter. I mean to say, the French were the enemy and that’s as far as it mattered to us. Excellent fellows, we got to like them better and better.”

“But how would you know them if you were fighting them?”

“My dear Edward,” said Admiral Halftop. “Surely you don’t think that a soldier’s life is made up of fighting. I’m afraid you’d get damn few chaps to care for that. Plenty of time for fighting in its proper place, but when we were in bivouac they’d walk over to our lines, or we to theirs. And they’d send us over things – under a flag, you know. At first their commissariat was far better than ours – especially the wine. The ridiculous thing was that we couldn’t take anything from the Spaniards and of course they could. So they’d send over wine and game and things.”

“But was that allowed?” asked Edward.

“Allowed? Well – they’d hardly expect us to fight them on an empty stomach, would they?”

“You mean you actually knew the French and talked to them?”

“Why, of course,” said the admiral. “Saw a great deal of them, you know – truces, prisoners of war, parleys, all that sort of thing. As a matter of fact when the fighting wasn’t going on we often met them in the inns – against all rules, you know – but none of the generals ever cared. Why, Marshal Soult and the Duke, you know, became great friends.”

“But then, what was the war about if you didn’t hate the French?”

“Ah, now,” said Admiral Halftop, “that’s another question, isn’t it? Everyone said that the war was because Bonaparte was determined to conquer Spain – quite right of course – and we were determined to stop him – equally right, so there you are—”

“Then he was a very wicked man,” said little Clara.

“Wicked!” protested the admiral. “God bless me no! Fine fellow, Boney. I saw him myself, Edward, spoke to him – or at least he spoke to me. I went on board the Bellerophon – not to sail with them, hadn’t the luck to do that – but sent with despatches. I had to wait on deck while the captain took the papers below to answer. Boney was there asking questions with a lot of our fellows round him and he was asking questions about the running gear. It seemed to surprise him that we knew the names of it all. ‘Et vous,’ says he turning to me, ‘quelle est cette corde-ci?’ Well, as a matter of fact all it was was simply the lower top-gallant-down-haul and I told him so. ‘Tiens!’ he said, ‘c’est curieux.’ That’s French, my dears, and it means ‘Well, that’s a rum go.’ And then he was silent. I had an idea he was thinking that if he’d had sailors like us . . .”

—

“Children, children!” cried their mother’s voice. “Here’s the pony carriage. Come along. Papa, if you don’t go in and dress you’ll be late for dinner. You’ve got Commander Cormorant coming, you know.”

“Ah, to be sure, to be sure! Bustle along, my dears, good-bye. Come again soon.”

—

As they drove home in the pony carriage little Clara said, “If I were a boy I think I’d like to be a sailor – or else a soldier—”

“What else is there to be?” said Edward.

III

He Goes in 1950

“You’ll have to go out on the lawn for a little while, children, and look after your grandfather.”

“Oh, bother,” said Edward. “Can’t he look after himself for once, mother?”

“You know he can’t,” said the woman gently, “and I can’t stay with him any longer. It’s Tilda’s afternoon out, and I have the work to do.”

“I know, mother,” said Edward, “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t really mind, mother. Come on, Clara.”

“Put your jacket on, dear,” said the woman to the little girl. “It’s too cold now to be out without a jacket. It’s nearly winter already.”

Little Clara said nothing. But her wistful face and half frightened eyes showed how she felt. The truth was the little girl was frightened to be with grandfather. With her brother Edward there, she didn’t mind so much, but if she had to be alone with him at all – if Edward went into the house to fetch anything – the presence of the old man frightened her. There was something in the unmoving attitude of the tall straight figure, sitting upright in a rustic chair, hardly ever speaking; something in the droop of the half withered left arm, the fingers always clutched; and most of all something in the sightless face that seemed to chill within the little girl the very springs of life and gladness.

For both the little children, to have to “sit with grandfather” was the standing trial of their existence. School was not so bad; the limitations of their shabby home they scarcely knew. The fact that they were not well off, because all the money of their family had been lost ever so long ago in the war – these things did not affect them in any conscious way.

But their trial was that for part of the time each day, or at any rate two or three times each week, they had to look after their grandfather. Somebody had to be near him, they knew that. For most of the time each day there was a village boy who was paid to be with the old man; and part of the time the clergyman’s daughter from the next house came and read to him. In the evenings, indoors, their mother was there, and Tilda, the maid, ironing in the kitchen. Grandfather sat in his room then, and it was all right.

But when they had to be alone with their grandfather and to know that he was under their charge, the children felt a strange uncanny feeling – an apprehension that something was going to happen. They were afraid.

Partly this was because they knew that their grandfather had been in the War of Desolation. This alone seemed to strike a chill into his presence. They knew that he was one of the very few surviving people about them who could remember the terror of that time. But he never spoke of it. And the children never asked him about it. They had always been told that they must never talk to grandfather about the War of Desolation.

They knew of course from their history books the general idea of what had happened. There had come into the world first of all a war of four years’ duration which the history books still called the World War. The children never could remember what nations were on which side though they had had to learn it at school. But it was hard to remember. And they had learned how after this war, not very long after, there had come another war, much more terrible, called the War of Desolation.

They knew too that this “final war,” this War of Desolation, had come to a sudden and strange end. The history books, it is true, glossed it over with generalities about “universal agreement” and nearly all the people who had been in it were dead. But everybody knew that the war had just ended, broken up, collapsed. All of a sudden, by a sort of mass impulse, the soldiers had left the trenches, hundreds and thousands of them together, in a mad desire to get back home to save their wives and children from the horror of the “falling death.”

It had long since been known that the war would be fought from the air and that its chief weapons would be great blankets of heavy poison gas sent down on the crowded cities. The trenches, everyone knew, would only be a frontier, a line of deadlock. But few had foreseen what this would mean. No army of men could be made to sit in the safety and shelter of a dug-out line while hundreds of miles behind them their wives and children perished. The soldiers broke. Officers were shot down, or broke with the men, in the wild rush for “home” to save their people or to die with them. It was not against the “enemy” that the anger of the soldiers turned. It was against governments, parliaments, statesmen and patriots. The history books gave but little account of the vengeance taken, often as blind and ruthless as war itself. But war, as an institution, died with the War of Desolation – self-destroyed.

—

Since then a generation had gone by – nearly two generations. There were nations still, and even a league of nations, and in a limited and declining way, armaments and armed forces.

But even children knew that war was gone.

—

So the children went out that afternoon to sit beside their grandfather.

“If you call me, I can hear,” said their mother, “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

“That’s all right, mother,” said Edward.

“And, Edward—” she called the boy back a minute and whispered – “come and fetch me at once if – you know.”

“I know, mother, if there’s an airplane. But there won’t be. They never come here.”

“Sometimes they do. And, Edward, when grandfather asks for his medicine, come and take it out to him. I won’t get it ready till he asks.”

—

Out on the lawn in the presence of their grandfather both the children felt a little bit afraid, as they always did. Partly it was because the old man sat so still, so silent. For a long time he never spoke. Then at some rumbling noise in the village street, he started a little in his chair and asked, “Was that a cart?”

“Only a cart, grandfather.”

Then he fell silent again. The hedges around the little lawn and the tall trees that grew beside it shut out, for the most part, all light and sound. Above the trees the blue autumn sky was empty and silent.

—

“Was grandfather always like this?” asked little Edward as he stood in the kitchen watching his mother prepare the tonic for the old man. “I mean, was he like this ever since the war?”

“Oh, no, dear,” said his mother. “It only came on much later, the effect of the terrible poison was very slow in his case. After the war your grandfather worked for years – he was an engineer, dear, and a very clever one. He had to work because all the money was lost in the ruin of the war.”

“Was grandfather’s family rich before?”

“Oh, very rich, dear. There was a famous old admiral – your great-great – I don’t know how many greats – at any rate your ancestor who was an admiral and had lands in Spain that turned into a fortune, but it was all lost in the War of Desolation.”

“When you were a little girl, did grandfather ever talk to you about the war?”

“Never about himself, dear, but of course we knew.”

“Why didn’t the gas kill him?”

“I don’t know, dear. He was the only one they found alive in streets and streetsful of the dead. He had his little brother held against him, dead. Father, your grandfather I mean, had come back from the trenches when the men broke from the command. He knew they were going to bomb the city and he wanted to save his brother. There were only those two left alive in the family. The others were gone.”

“And he couldn’t save him?”

“No, dear.”

“And he got ill after?”

“Only gradually, dear. When your aunt and I were little girls, I can remember him so straight and strong. Then his sight began to go – little by little. And then it began to reach his brain. The doctors say . . .” She paused. Perhaps it would be just as well not to tell the little boy what the doctors said; time enough when it happened.

Then suddenly—

“Good heavens, what is it?”

“Oh, oh, mother! mother! come quick!”

It was little Clara’s voice as she burst into the room in a panic of fright. “Mother, come! There’s something the matter with grandfather.”

Mother and children rushed out on the lawn. The old man had risen from his chair to his full gaunt height. His sightless eyes were turned towards the sky. His clenched hands waved and threatened in the air. From his mouth came a storm of fierce imprecation.

Loud over the trees beyond came the roaring of an approaching plane. The old man seemed to hear their steps on the grass as they drew near. He turned towards them. He was clutching one arm against his breast as if to hold something – nothing – sheltered against it.

“They’re coming,” he shouted, “keep close to me. Follow me. Put your head there, close under my coat, your mouth covered. Don’t be afraid, little brother, I can save you. Stop firing,” he shouted. “It’s useless now. To the cellars, all of you!”

The old man stood erect, motioning with one hand to the unseen people whose hurrying feet and pallid faces had passed from the earth fifty years ago. With his other hand he clasped his little brother close against his breast to shield him from the onrush of the gas. On his sightless face was the inspiration of exalted courage, and over his head screamed the approaching plane.

His daughter rushed to him and seized his arm.

“Father! Father!” she pleaded. “It’s nothing; only an airplane. Father, come in, come with me – It is nothing.”

The old man yielded as she dragged him towards the house, his voice sinking to a murmur as the great plane swept overhead and passed.

“Run, Edward,” whispered his mother, “and fetch the doctor. Tell him that grandfather is bad again. Come, father, dear, come and lie down.”

—

Quite late that evening, the two children were taken to their grandfather’s room. They were told it was to say “good-bye.” But the room was nearly dark and they could hardly see him. His hand was cold and what he said was only a whisper beyond all power of hearing. But the children knew and were frightened.

Afterwards, when they stood outside the door on the landing: “Do you think, Eddie,” said Clara, “there’ll ever be another war?”

“How could there be?” said Edward.

IV

With the League of Nations,
A.D. 2000 Or So

If the pictures of the past and of the immediate future as presented in the preceding chapters are correct, then let us grant that war, as we know it, has got to go. The common sense of humanity revolts at slaughter by machinery.

But as it goes, and when it goes, what happens to nations and governments and diplomacy and above all, what happens to the League of Nations? Will it cease to exist? Not at all. Institutions long survive the original impetus and circumstance from which they rose. They linger as survivals when their original significance is lost; and as they pass from activity to obsolescence they acquire a quaint and picturesque element as of a fragment of a lost world. Thus do the forms of the Middle Ages survive among us today, and thus will the League of Nations assume as it sinks into oblivion a mediaeval aspect all its own.

In illustration of which, there may be appended here the document which follows:

Extracts from a letter
written by a lady tourist
in Switzerland
A.D. 2000, at least:

And now do let me tell you of the most surprising and interesting of all our experiences here in Geneva. You’d never guess. A visit to the League of Nations. Just think of it. I know that you will say at once that the League of Nations doesn’t exist and hasn’t existed for generations. But it does. Really it seems too picturesque for words, to think of the League as still actually in existence here, with its own premises and staff.

Of course it no longer occupies the palatial quarters that you see in the historical illustrations. The present “palace” of the League as a matter of fact is rather a pathetic place, in fact only a very dilapidated old house on a side street. Indeed when we first asked about it at the hotel, none of them seemed to know where it was, though of course everybody here knows that it still exists. That happens, you know, even at home. People ask you the whereabouts of old cemeteries or old monuments and you know perfectly well that they are somewhere in the city but you couldn’t for the life of you say where. How many people, do you suppose, know that the Tower of London is still there behind the Frozen Meat Dock-Houses?

But we found an old cabman who drove us to it, and it really gave us quite a thrill to drive along the quaint old street, all grown with ancient trees, and to see the dilapidated house standing behind tumbledown palings. You can still read the letters on a plate on the door, “Society of Nations,” and underneath it, “Leave Groceries at the Back Door.”

We rang and rang and at last we could hear shuffling steps and the door was unchained and there was the oddest and most ancient old man you ever saw. But he was ever so polite and showed us in with quite a grand air and asked if he might have the privilege of showing us the “palace.” When he said “palace” the two children nearly laughed, because really it was just a dingy old dwelling-house with a narrow hall all dust and cobwebs.

The old man was quite garrulous and we hardly needed to talk at all because he went right on with explanations without waiting for questions. He told us that he was the Brazilian Ambassador, at least that he had been long ago, but that they had forgotten him and left him there, and that the League had kept him as Caretaker. He called it, I think, “Custodian,” and “Conservateur” – in fact he had a lot of names of mixed-up languages like that. But when we said, “Do you mean Caretaker?” he bowed in his grand way and said, “Yes, Caretaker!” quite proudly.

Then he opened the door at the side and showed us the “Hall of Assembly” which was really just the front room of the house, only it had a desk in it and twenty or thirty chairs in little rows. The room was dusty and dim like the hall passage, but the Brazilian Ambassador turned on a light to show it to us. Just fancy, an electric bulb sticking out of a bracket! The children had never seen one before! He said that it was a pity we hadn’t been coming tomorrow, instead, because the Grand Hall was going to be cleaned out for a “general assembly in plenum.” (That is what he called it.) A woman was to come in that evening and get it ready. We asked him who were coming to the general assembly and he waved his hand and said, “The various nations.”

Then he showed us in to the room behind, which he called the “secretariat” and he said that that was where the president did all the work of the League. This room was better, with a very fine old table – too big for the room – and some wonderful old chairs.

There was a typewriter machine on the table, the kind that used to be worked with people’s fingers. I never saw one before.

We asked the Ambassador if he could show us how the machine worked, but he said no; he said that he had always meant to learn how but that he never had. He had been too busy. He said that the president’s secretary could work it but that he was out.

We asked him if the president of the League was there and he said yes, that he lived there! Only it seems that he was asleep. Some of the ministers he said had lived there for years and years.

We asked him, what about the British Ambassador and whether there was one; and he said yes, of course, only that just now he was out as he had gone down the street with the French Envoy to get the groceries. The tradesmen, it seemed, had been very disagreeable about leaving them unless the money was given them in advance. The funds of the League, the Ambassador explained, were just now in a certain confusion; he said that some of the payments due to the League, including the annual interest on what he called the “Reparations” from Germany, were over a hundred years in arrears. He gave a lot of explanations which I couldn’t understand but which seemed to mean that the League was really very rich, or at least when all its claims are collected. But he said that the extension of the “Moratorium” (I think “Moratorium”) for a further hundred years would leave them still somewhat embarrassed for the next century. Meantime, however, the Bank of International Settlement (it is on the top floor of the house) is endeavouring to float a loan of five hundred dollars for immediate current outlay. The old man spoke very proudly of this Bank of International Settlement which is upstairs. He says it has its own staff, entirely distinct from the League – except for meal times.

The Ambassador seemed to lay such stress on the words “money” and “funds” that I fell in quite a quandary. I felt I ought to give him something and yet I hesitated to, as he seemed so dignified. But at last I plucked up my courage and gave him two dollars and it turned out quite all right. He became more polite than ever, and said that he regretted so much that he could not take us upstairs where the “technical staff” were at work. I didn’t press him to, because I thought that perhaps the technical staff might be as by-gone and as pathetic as all the rest of it. He said, too, that he feared he must not show us the “kitchens” (he didn’t say how many) as the Portuguese Ambassador was cooking, it being always his turn on Wednesday.

Just as we were going little Edward, you know how bold children are, asked him, “What is the League supposed to do, anyway?”

I was afraid that he would have got terribly angry. But not at all, the question seemed to delight him.

“An excellent question! Most intelligent. It’s a question so often directed to me – what is the League for?”

“And what is it?” said Edward.

“The object of the League,” said the Ambassador, “is the maintenance of Peace and War.”

“But there isn’t any more war now!” said Clara.

“No,” said the Ambassador, “not just at present. But we think it likely that one will be arranged for next winter. We are working on it now. If we succeed in getting it started we shall then at once offer our services to stop it. In fact,” he said, rubbing his hands, “it will be quite like old times again.”

And with that he excused himself a minute and went upstairs and fetched what he called some of the latest “war correspondence” and said we might take it with us.

After we got back to the hotel I talked about it with Professor Dustie at the table d’hôte and he was able to make it all a little clearer. The League, he said, had long since ceased to have an official existence. But it seems that it still goes on – though I couldn’t quite understand how. He said that the ambassadors are no longer accredited, but as the League continues to recognize them, there is no one to deny their status.

—

Postscript. I forgot to say that after we got home I read over the “war correspondence.” It had evidently been written out on the funny machine, the typewriter, that we saw, and it is hard to read because it is all done in the old lost spelling. But I enclose one or two samples of it as I thought you would find it curious.

Correspondence of
the League of Nations,
April 1st, 2000 A.D.

SAMPLE NO. 1

From the League of Nations

To the Business Manager of the United States,

Dear Sir:

I regret to inform you that the present condition of your armament is decidedly below the standard required by this league for qualification. Your battle cruiser is, in the opinion of all who have seen it, quite obsolete and appears to have only two cylinders instead of five, while the feed box is inadequate for the engine. We have already protested against the disgraceful condition of your submarine and cannot accept your plea that it is not meant to go under water.

SAMPLE NO. 2

From the President
of the League of Nations

To the Chief Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland,

Reverend Sir:

I write on behalf of the League to enquire whether you would feel interested in getting up a war this season between the Scotch and the Welsh. As you are doubtless aware, the Welsh have been saying a lot of dirty things about Scotland lately. There was one man here yesterday in our office who said that he would lick any three men north of the Tweed. We feel it our duty to bring this to your notice and ask whether you are prepared to stand for that sort of stuff. If not, then our League offers its services at very favourable rates for any publicity that you may need. Our department for the International Dissemination of Insults will be pleased to look up for you the ancestry of the Welsh, and to cast animadversions on it at a reasonable rate per hundred. At the same time our Agricultural and Floral Division will be pleased to take your order for mustard gas, deadly nightshade, mushrooms, or any other form of vegetable poison.

Appended to this document was the telegraphic reply of the Chief Moderator.

REGRET SAY WAR WELSH PRACTICALLY OUT QUESTION IMMEDIATE INTEREST INTERNATIONAL BAGPIPE COMPETITION INVERNESS KEEPS OUR PEOPLE BREATHLESS CONDITION STOP ALSO APPREHEND WAR FINANCIALLY INJURIOUS BUSINESS INTERESTS SCOTCH TERRIER BREEDERS, FINNAN HADDIE EXPORTERS, GOLF CLUB PROFESSIONALS AND PRESBYTERIAN MISSIONS STOP SUGGEST APPLY JAPANESE BUREAU ORIENTAL LOVE.

V

War in Utopia, Later Still

It should not have been difficult to see the ultimate destiny of war. Here on the one hand was the growing magnitude of the desolation and suffering involved by actual physical warfare. With each decade there increased the possibility of inter-human slaughter on a vast scale, without reference to justice, bravery, or human welfare. But here on the other hand was the natural pugnaciousness of mankind, the tendency to dispute. More than that, there remained the glory of the panoply of war, the brilliant uniforms, the flashing steel, the waving flags and the long roll of the drum. These awake in the human heart impulses not to be denied, and heroisms not to be decried.

How then to reconcile the two? The solution ultimately was easy enough. Let machinery have its will, but let mankind in the personal sense slip out from under. Let the machines fight.

The beginning of this had already been found in the earlier ’thirties of the twentieth century. The invention of the mechanical man, the half-comic “Robot” who could walk erect, wash dishes and shake hands, already pointed the way. Let the Robot fight.

To this was added, during the same period, the control by wireless of airplanes and seacraft without the presence of human beings on board. An “iron quartermaster” could steer a ship, and a beam of electricity could tell him where to go. In a naval battle, the one unnecessary thing was a human being.

Such new ideas once started were bound to move fast. War, reduced to a mechanical form, could retain its panoply and its glory, its flags and its drums, and could get back again that glorious atmosphere of open-air sport which it had had in the eighteenth century and had lost in the twentieth.

War on its new footing inevitably became again the leading human pastime. A man who wouldn’t fight for his country was a poor lot. The ordinary patriotic citizen would subscribe to every war loan, buy front seats every Saturday in the War Stadium and a box in the evenings at the War Arena. The League of Nations, as shown above, would keep up an ineffectual protest. But mankind would heed it not. As witness of all which, let us set down from the public newspapers of the year 2050 A.D. some typical war dispatches.

VI

War Extracts from
the Press of A.D. 2050

London, October, 2050 a.d. – A thrill of pride swept over England when the press cables from Russia brought the first full authentic accounts of the Charge of the Light Brigade of last Tuesday. Among the many notable episodes of the present world war none have attracted a wider attention or called forth more widespread comment. Oddly enough, the episode recalls a once famous charge – itself known as the Charge of the Light Brigade, which occurred during a war with Russia about two centuries ago. Students of literature will recall that this charge was made the subject of a famous war poem by Albert Tennyson, the great Scotch dramatist of the day.

The historic Charge of the Light Brigade of the nineteenth century was, however, entirely eclipsed by that of Tuesday. To begin with, the Light Brigade was in this case far lighter. The weight of each man – including internal wiring – was only forty pounds while that of each horse, including its gasoline tank, was only a hundred. All those who were lucky enough to be “looking-in” at the charge over the television apparatus agree that condition and bearing of the troops were perfect to the last degree. The criticism was indeed made that they looked too straight in front of them and hence received no ophthalmic photostatic warning of the dangers at the side. To which criticism, however, the chief constructor of the Bureau of Military Design has answered that he had first made the Brigade with revolving heads to turn in all directions on their necks, but that the War Office had condemned this type of soldier as contrary to British traditions.

That the charge was misdirected seems beyond a doubt. But whether the fault lies with the apparatus of transmission or with the directional use made of it will never be known. Military experts are already questioning also whether the type of horse used in the charge has its gasoline tank in the right place. The same criticism implies in a minor degree to the type of officer; it is questioned whether we should continue the prevailing practice of filling up the officer’s tank just before the action.

—

GENERAL SHERIDAN’S RIDE

NEW STYLE – A.D. 2050

Richmond, Va.—The amazing mechanical rider appropriately nicknamed “General Sheridan” performed yesterday a feat of automatic heroism and endurance which may prove a vital factor in the war now being conducted in Virginia. A certain credit is no doubt due to the horse ridden by the General, which is an entirely new departure, having eight legs in place of the usual six. The problem of synchronizing the movement of eight legs has hitherto baffled every war department in the world. Its solution by the United States offers us the permanent advantage of eight-legged cavalry which ought to mean a decided superiority, at least under existing rules of war.

We are unable to inform our readers of the precise object of “General Sheridan’s” ride. The directional operators have refused, as a military secret, to state its purpose, and it is probable that in the future, countless thousands will read of “General Sheridan’s” ride with no idea whatsoever of what he was riding for. This, however, in no way detracts from the merit of the performance. Presumably the General had been filled with dispatches of the greatest importance and of such a nature as to require their transmission in physical shape from one directional centre to the other. This is, of course, mere conjecture. He must, however, have been full of something.

But we repeat that the main thing after all is the ride itself. It was with a thrill of mingled national pride and intense excitement that the whole country heard at three o’clock yesterday afternoon that “Sheridan” was only ten miles away. Away from what, we do not know. But we insist that the glory of the ride is quite independent of this. An hour later came the news that “Sheridan” was only five miles away; and when the announcement was made one hour after that “Sheridan” was only two and a half miles away, an exultant feeling swept over all the listeners-in as they realized that at that pace “Sheridan” was bound to get to his destination – wherever it was. Naturally there ensued a slight disappointment when it was found that an hour later “Sheridan” was still a mile and a half away. Indeed it was only too plain that some mechanical accident had happened to the General whereby his pace was slackening though his gain was continuous. Latest advices seem to show that “Sheridan” is now gaining half the remaining distance in each succeeding hour. A radio bulletin from the Smithsonian Institution states that in all probability “General Sheridan’s” gear had slipped so that the revolutions of his horse’s legs are now in an eccentric with a continuous but diminishing advance. If so, they claim he will ride forever without getting to where it is that he is away from. But it is admitted that if he rides long enough he will get there. This paradoxical ending, it seems to us, only crowns the ride with a new immortality. It demonstrates, as well, the superiority of the new mechanical age over the now forgotten world of the past.

—

VALUABLE BUOY LOST

APPARENTLY LEFT STANDING
ON THE BURNING DECK

Alexandria, Egypt – An unfortunate incident of yesterday’s big sea fight was the loss of a valuable buoy of which since the explosion that destroyed the enemy’s flagship, no trace can be found. It was one of the new patent French buoys, filled with inflammable gas. It is not exactly certain what happened, but all are agreed that while the ship was burning, the buoy stood on the burning deck.

TOC     INDEX

The Doctor
and the Contraption

Medicine as It Was

I suppose that when an up-to-date doctor of today looks at you or me, or at any one of us, he sees something very different from what we see. In place of a human personality – a soul looking out from the infinite depth of the human eye – he sees a collection of tubes, feed-pipes, conduits, joints, levers, and food and water tanks. He sees thirty-five feet of internal elastic piping, a hundred and ten feet of wiring, together with a pound and a half of brain, arrayed behind a couple of optical lenses set in gimbals. In other words, what he sees is not a man at all but a complicated machine contraption, probably running very badly, wheezing in the pipes and clogged in the carburetor. Naturally he wants to get at it, just as a garage man longs to tear a motor to pieces. He would like to take a monkey-wrench and tighten up its joints; turn a hose into it and flush out its piping; or better still, put a new boiler into it and throw the old one away.

This is what is called the Medical Instinct. There is something fierce, as it were, to the verge of comicality in what a doctor would like to do to a patient short of driving shingle nails into him with a tack hammer. Even that might come in handy.

But contrast the change there has been in the common practice of medicine within a couple of generations. Compare the medicine of fifty years ago with the medicine of today and we can easily foresee the further progress of the science.

Thus, first:

I

Medicine Year, 1880

The Saviour of Men

In the old-fashioned days when a man got sick he went to a family doctor and said he was sick. The doctor gave him a bottle of medicine. He took it home and drank it and got well.

On the bottle was written, “Three times a day, in water.” The man drank it three times a day the first day, twice the second day, and once the third day. On the fourth day he forgot it. But that didn’t matter. He was well by that time.

The place where he visited the doctor was the doctor’s own house, in the room called the “surgery” which was the same room as the one where they played euchre in the evening. There was no apparatus in it, except fishing rods and shotguns.

The doctor mixed the medicine himself at the tap over the sink. He put in anything that he had – it didn’t matter much what. As a matter of fact the man began to feel better as soon as he saw the medicine being mixed.

The doctor didn’t take an X-ray of the patient. He couldn’t. There weren’t any. He didn’t test his blood pressure or examine his arteries; people had none then.

Very often after the patient had gone away the doctor, if he was a thoughtful man, would sit and smoke a pipe and wonder what was wrong with the man anyway. But he never, never expressed any such wonder or doubt to the man himself. His profession had learned this maxim from Hippocrates and it had come down as an unbroken tradition. The medical profession never talked medicine to the patient.

Sometimes the doctor suspected that the man was really ill. But he never said so. Only after the patient was quite well again, did the doctor tell him how ill he had been. Hence every illness appeared in retrospect as a close shave in which a timely dose of medicine had saved a human life. This raised the whole tone of the business. The doctor appeared as a saviour of men. As he got older his beard – all doctors wore beards – became tinged with grey; his person acquired an easy dignity; his expression, something of nobility. He cured the patient by his presence. Beyond that, all he needed was a bottle of medicine and a cork. In an extreme case, he sat beside the patient’s bed in a long vigil that might last all night. But the patient was well in the morning.

For convalescence the doctor prescribed a “light diet.” This meant beefsteak and porter.

—

Such medicine, of course, was hopelessly unscientific, hopelessly limited. Death could beat it round every corner. But it was human, gracious, kindly. Today it is replaced by “machine medicine” with the mechanical test, the scientific diagnosis, the hospital, the X-ray. All this is marvellous. But no one has yet combined it with the Art of Healing.

As witness:

II

Medicine Year, 1932

The Doctor and the Contraption

The Contraption sits huddled up in its serge suit in a consultation office chair. Its locomotive apparatus is doubled up beneath it, folded at the joints. The thing is anxious, but the doctor doesn’t know that. The poor Contraption is consumed with something like panic that is gripping it by the feed-pipe. But it makes as brave a show as it can.

“It’s a little hard to say,” says the doctor, “just what the trouble is.”

He has been making a few preliminary investigations by punching and listening in.

“I don’t know that I quite like that heart,” he adds, and then relapses into a reflective silence.

“Yes,” he continues, as he comes out of his reverie, “there are symptoms there that I don’t like – don’t like at all.”

Neither does the Contraption, but he keeps quiet.

“There may be,” says the doctor, “an ankylosis there.”

What an ankylosis is and what it does, the Contraption doesn’t know. But the sound of it is quite enough.

“It’s just possible,” says the doctor as another bright idea occurs to him, “that there’s an infiltration into the proscenium.”

These may not be the exact medical terms that the doctor uses. But that is what they sound like to the Contraption.

“Is that so?” he says.

“However, we’ll keep that under observation till we see what we find. You say you never had hydrophobia?”

“Not so far as I remember.”

“That’s interesting. The symptoms seem to suggest hydrophobia, or just possibly hendiadys.”

The doctor reflects a little more, then he begins to write on little bits of paper.

“Well,” he says in a cheerful tone, “we’ll try it out anyway.”

He writes out little orders for X-rays, blood tests, heart tests.

“Now,” he says in conclusion. “Don’t be alarmed. You may blow up on the street. But I don’t think so. I’m not much afraid of that. It’s possible that your brain will burst open at the sides. But I’m not alarmed if it does. If your eyes fall out on the street, let me know.”

These are not his exact words. But they give exactly the impression that his words convey.

“I will,” says the Contraption.

“And now,” says the doctor, who by this time has warmed up to the case and is filled with artistic interest, “about diet – I think you’d better not eat anything – or not for a month or so; and don’t drink; and you may as well cut out tobacco, and you’d better not sleep.

“And above all,” concludes the doctor with a sudden burst of geniality that he had forgotten to use sooner, “don’t worry. You may blow up at any time, but don’t let that worry you. You may fall dead in a taxi, but I’m not alarmed if you do. Come back in a week and I’ll show you the X-ray plates. Good-bye.”

The Contraption goes away for a week. That means seven days, or 168 hours, or 10,080 minutes, or 604,800 seconds. And he knows every one of them. He feels them go by.

When he comes back in a week he finds the doctor beaming with interest.

“Look at them,” he says, holding up to the light some photographic plates.

“What are those?” asks the Contraption.

“The brain,” says the doctor. “You see that misty-looking spot – there, just between the encephalon and the encyclopaedia – ?”

“What is it?” asks the Contraption.

“I don’t know yet,” the doctor says. “It’s a little early to say. But we’ll watch it. If you don’t mind, I think we’ll probably open your head and take a look. They are doing some wonderful things now in the removal of the brain. It’s rather a nice operation, but I think I may take the risk. I’ll let you know. Meantime you’re following out our instructions, I hope, not eating anything.”

“Oh, no.”

“And nothing to drink or smoke.”

“Oh, no.”

“That’s right. Well, now, in a day or two we’ll know more. I’ll have your blood by that time and the sections of your heart and then I think we’ll begin to see where we are. Good-bye.”

—

A week or so later the doctor says to his lady secretary, “That Contraption in the serge suit, wasn’t he to have come in this morning?”

The lady looked over a memorandum book. “Yes, I think he was.”

“Well, call him up on the ’phone. He doesn’t need to come. I’ve had all his hospital reports and they can’t find anything wrong at all. Tell him they want him to come back in six months and they may find something then. But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with him now, unless it’s his imagination. And, oh, by the way, tell him this – it will amuse him. That cloud on the X-ray plate that looked like a clot on the brain turns out to be a flaw in the glass. He’ll have a good laugh at that.”

The secretary vanishes into the telephone room and it is some little time before she comes back.

“Well?” says the doctor, “did you get that gentleman on the ’phone?” He calls him a gentleman now because medical interest in him is over.

“I got his house,” she answers, “but they say the gentleman is dead. He died last night.”

“Dear me!” says the doctor gravely. “So we were wrong after all; we should have tested for something else. Did they say anything about how he died?”

“Yes. They say that as far as they know he died from gas. He seems to have turned on gas in the bedroom on purpose.”

“Tut, tut,” says the doctor, “suicidal mania! I forgot to test him for it!”

—

But, still, humanity gets used to anything and thrives on it. Already this new method of medicine, this tinkering, testing, inoculating, is a recognized part of our common life. Already we can see developing in it the healing art of the future; or rather, not the healing art which is a thing lost in the past and surviving only by the wayside. What is replacing it, is better called the art of reconstruction. Its aim is not to heal the patient; he’s not worth it; reconstruct him; make him over. If his engine doesn’t work, put a new one in him. Everyone today knows in a general sort of way something of what is being done in reconstructive surgery. Bones are taken out and new ones put in. Patches of skin from Mr. Jones are grafted on to Mr. Smith. No one cares to think out too completely the gruesome details or to ask where they are leading. But the goal is plain enough. And no doubt when it is reached all idea of gruesomeness will have vanished from it. Ideas of that sort are only secondary and relative, things with no basis in absolute reality. An octopus looks terrible; a cooked lobster looks delicious. If no one had ever seen a cooked lobster, a whole supper party would rise, shrieking with terror at the sight of one.

Thus it would seem probable that with the triumphant progress of reconstructive surgery, all sense of terror or gruesomeness will pass away. We are quite used to people with false teeth; we are getting used to people with lifted faces; and presently we shall not shrink in alarm from a friend who has just bought a brand new stomach:

In witness of which:

III

Medicine Year, 2000

The Walrus and the Carpenter

“Now, I’d like to have him pretty well made over from the start,” said the self-assertive lady to the doctor.

As she said it she indicated a miserable-looking creature, evidently her husband, sitting flopped in a chair, gazing feebly at his wife and at the doctor.

The woman was of that voluble, obtrusive, assertive type that has made the two sexes what they are.

The man was of the familiar pattern of the henpecked husband, with a face as meek in expression as the countenance of a walrus, and with the ragged drooping moustache that belongs with it.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he murmured.

But neither the lady nor the doctor paid much attention to what he murmured.

“He needs nearly everything new,” said the woman, “and I’ve been telling him I’m going to give it to him as a present for our wedding anniversary next month. It will be twenty-five years we’ve been married.”

“Twenty-five years!” said the doctor.

“Of course,” gurgled the lady. “I was just a mere girl when we got married. They used to call me the little Rose Bud!”

“Yes, yes,” murmured the doctor. He was looking at the lady in an absent-minded way, not really seeing her. Perhaps he was thinking that no lapse of time, no passage of generations can alter this type of woman or vary this line of conversation. On the other hand, perhaps he wasn’t. He may have been merely thinking of the case. It was not every day that Dr. Carpenter was called upon to do what was called in his profession “a complete job.” To put in a new bone or two or insert part of a brain or to replace an old stomach was an everyday matter. But to make a subject over from head to toe was still unusual and perhaps a trifle experimental.

“As a matter of fact,” the husband began again, “I’m not so sure that I really need so very much done; in fact so far as I am concerned—”

“Now, John,” interposed his wife, “don’t let me hear any more of that. This is my business and not yours. I’m going to pay for it all out of my own money, and you’re not to say another word.”

The doctor was looking meditatively at the patient. He seemed to be measuring him with his eye. “There’s a lot of him that I can use,” he said.

“How do you mean?” asked the lady.

“Well, for instance, his head. That’s all right. I can use his head as it is.”

“Not his face!” said the lady.

“Yes, even his face, in a way. You’d be surprised what can be done without any radical replacement of tissue. What his face needs is not any change, but more animation, more expression, more alertness. You wait till I’ve put about twenty thousand volts of electricity through it, and see how it looks then.”

“I say,” murmured the man, “I’m not so sure that I feel so very keen about that.”

“You won’t know it,” said the doctor tersely, and then continuing, “and I don’t see why I couldn’t use his frame-work. The arms and legs are all right.”

The woman shook her head.

“He’s not tall enough,” she said.

“Personally,” began the man, but his wife paid no attention to him and went on.

“He needs presence. He makes such a poor appearance when we go out evenings. I’d like him quite a lot taller.”

“Very good,” said Dr. Carpenter. “It’s easily done. I can put in another six inches in the thigh bone simply enough. He’ll look a little short when he sits at table but that won’t matter so much. But of course to get the right proportion you’ll need to alter the arms as well. By the way,” he added as a new idea seemed to occur to him, “do you play golf?”

“Do I play?” said the patient, showing for the first time an obvious animation. “Do I do anything else? I play every day, and yet would you believe it, I’m about the worst player in the club. Take yesterday, for instance, I’d come down the long hole, four hundred and eighty yards in three – right on to the green, and there I stuck – seven more to get into the hole. Seven! Can you beat it?”

“I’ll tell you,” said the doctor. “If you feel that way about it, I might do something about your golf while I am altering your arm.”

“Say, if you could, I’d pay a thousand dollars for that,” said the man. “Do you think you can?”

“Wait a bit,” said the doctor. He stepped into the adjacent telephone cupboard. What he said and what was said to him was not audible to either Mr. Walrus or to his wife. The detailed operations of the medical profession are not either now or in Utopia as noble to contemplate as its final achievements. But if there had been an ear to listen when the dial was turned, this is what it would have heard.

“It’s Dr. Carpenter. What about that Scotch professional golfer that you got yesterday? Is he all gone?”

“Wait a minute, doctor, I’ll ask. . . . No, they say nothing much gone yet. Do you want his brain?”

The doctor laughed. “No, thanks. I want his right forearm. I’ve a client who’ll pay anything that’s fair up to a thousand. Right. Thank you.”

“That’ll be all right,” said the doctor. “I can put a golf adjuster in you; and so now I think we can go right ahead, eh?”

“There’s just one thing,” said the wife, “that I’d like changed more than anything else. John is always so retiring and shy. He don’t make the most of himself.”

“Oh, come, come, June!” protested the man bluntly, “there’s nothing in me to make much of.”

“Well, I think,” the woman went on, “that John’s got what they call an ‘inferiority complex.’ Isn’t that the word? Now couldn’t you do something to his brain to get that out of it?”

Dr. Carpenter smiled.

“That’s not in his brain, Mrs. Walrus; that’s a matter of his glands and there’s nothing easier than to alter that. The adjustment is a little difficult, the only danger is that he may get a little the other way.”

“That’s all right,” said the woman, “that won’t hurt him. He needs it.”

—

It would be grossly out of place to linger on the details of the weeks of “treatment” which followed for Mr. Walrus. Such things belong only in a book of technical medicine. Even nowadays we prefer to leave all that in a half light, and in future generations, convention will dictate a still greater reticence in regard to the processes of reconstructive surgery. In any case the use of sustained anaesthetics in place of the intermittent anaesthetics of today put a different complexion on the whole affair. Convalescence itself being under anaesthetics, the patient – or rather client, to use the more ordinary term – knows nothing from his entrance into the Refactorium (formerly called hospital) until his final exit. The declaration of such a client that he “felt a new man” had a more literal meaning than now.

Suffice it to say that within a week or so Mrs. Walrus received a telephone communication from the hospital which said, “His legs are done.” A little after that came an inquiry, “How about his whiskers? Would you like to preserve them or will you have a permanent clean shave?”

—

Under such circumstances, Dr. Carpenter was not at all surprised when in about six weeks from the original interview the renovated John Walrus walked into his office. He was all the less surprised because of the fact that Mr. Walrus was practically unrecognizable as his former self. What the doctor saw now was a tall man whose erect bearing was almost a perpendicular line and whose clean-shaven face, hard square jaw (evidently brand new) proclaimed a man of character and determination.

“Mr. Walrus!” exclaimed Dr. Carpenter when at last he realized who it was.

“I am,” said the man, shaking hands with a cordial but firm clasp, “though it’s a measly sort of name and I don’t like it.”

“And how do you feel?” asked the doctor.

“Fine,” said Walrus. “I’ve just been out on the links. I went right up there first thing as soon as I came out. Do you know, I went round under forty; and that long hole I did in four – can you believe it? – one under the par. Certainly the rest and the treatment have done wonders for my arm.”

“Certainly,” repeated the doctor.

“Though as a matter of fact,” Walrus continued, “I think I’ve a natural aptitude for the game. After all, you know, brain counts in golf as well as brawn. But, however, that’s not what I came to talk about but just to thank you and to ask you to be good enough to have your account sent to me – to me personally, you understand.”

“But I thought,” said Dr. Carpenter, “that Mrs. Walrus wanted to pay it herself?”

“Nothing doing,” laughed the client. “I’m not such a fool as that. If she paid it, it would create a sort of lien, don’t you see, legally?”

“Oh, I know that,” said the doctor. “The case often occurs. Still, in your instance I should have thought—”

“There’s more to it than that,” said Walrus, pausing to light a cigarette. “I went up to the house and saw her. My heavens, Carpenter, what a tongue that woman has! Absolutely never stops! The fact is, I don’t think I care to go back to her. She’d talk me to death.”

“As far as that goes,” said the doctor, “if it was only a matter of her tongue, I could shorten it for you.”

“You could, eh?” For a moment Mr. Walrus paused as if in some slight doubt. Then he went on speaking in the firm decisive way that was now, since twenty-four hours, habitual with him.

“No, no, it’s too late now. And anyway, I don’t want to. The fact is, Carpenter, that I have arranged to take a new wife. I’ve decided, in short, to take one of the nurses from up at the hospital. You may have noticed her when you were up there, the dark, very tall one. In fact, if anything, she’s a little too tall.”

“I could shorten her,” murmured Carpenter.

“By how much?” asked Walrus – “Or no, I’ll keep her as she is.”

“And when do you get married?” asked the doctor.

“I haven’t quite decided,” replied Walrus. “Very soon, I think.”

“No doubt,” said the doctor, “the young lady is equally keen on it?”

“I haven’t asked her yet,” said Walrus. “I shall probably mention it to her today. But I want to go and have another eighteen holes first. Well, good-bye, doctor, don’t forget the account, and by the way, when you make it out to me kindly alter the name. After this I’m changing my name from John Walrus to Hercules Bullrush.”

—

After the client had gone out, Dr. Carpenter, who was a thoughtful man, sat down at his desk and continued his work upon his forthcoming treatise, “On the Probable Limitations of Restorative Surgery.”

TOC     INDEX

Rah! Rah! College
or Tom Buncom at Shucksford

Introduction –
Anno Domini 1880

There can be little doubt that the work of the colleges has been progressing and broadening with every decade for three generations past. This is true all over the world but nowhere more so than in North America. When we think of the college of the old-fashioned days we stand appalled at its limitations. There it stood, the poor old place, among its elm trees with its campus in front of it. The whole population was perhaps three hundred people. It was all housed in a single building with a “residence” or “dormitory” among the trees at the side. There were few signs of life about it. In the daytime, its students were in the class rooms, listening to lectures. At night the only sign of them were the little lights in the rooms where they studied. The absurd notion of that time was that by listening to lectures, the students might hear something, and by sitting studying they might learn something. Under these hopeless misconceptions, the students devoted all their time to study.

The old-fashioned college had no women, except charwomen. It had no administration, there being nothing to administer and no building to do it in. It had no stadium, no engineering factory, no publicity department, no cavalry barracks, no all-night cafeteria, no billiard parlours, no club-houses, no roulette tables – in short, it was not a university at all.

Its programme of studies was absurdly limited. It taught Latin and Greek – together with Greek and Latin – mathematics, astronomy, ancient history, and philosophy and spelling. Everybody learned everything. There was no choice. The college did not teach any such subjects as Deportment, Morality, Salesmanship, Infidelity, Hotel Keeping, Horsemanship, Embezzlement – in fact it taught next to nothing.

There was no college life except lectures and study and playing games on the campus with no charge for spectators and no spectators anyway. There were no student societies, no Banjo Club, no Badminton Club, no Alpine Society, no Anglers Association, no Jockey Club, no Polo Club – in short just nothing.

Once a month there was a Debating Society that met in the dark and debated, “Resolved that Archaeology has done more to brighten human life than Palaeontology.”

Once every two months the students all went into the town and went into a saloon and drank four glasses of beer each, and then went out and upset a horse-car and went home. That lasted them till the next term.

Gradually this old order changed. The first improvement was the introduction of more varied studies. The students began to study English – a language which they had hitherto not known. Then came modern languages, political economy, ethics, physics and similar lighter and brighter studies.

At this critical moment – somewhere in the ’eighties and the ’nineties – arrived the women, “the co-eds.” This altered and improved everything. The buildings were brightened up, new windows put in, curtains, carpets and cut flowers. All the studies were made brighter and lighter still – with languages like Italian, a mere laugh-it-off as compared with Greek, and Social Science, otherwise Table Talk.

After the women, the business world broke into the life of the colleges and practically remade them. By great good fortune a connection had been found between the colleges and electricity, water-power, mines, and various ways of making money. This led to the opening up of new sections of the college, such as the faculty (or factory) of science, the factory of engineering, etc.

Very naturally, under these circumstances, the old-fashioned programme of studies in liberal arts was more and more altered from its old-time narrowness and rigidity. The ridiculous custom of dictating to a student what he should study became more and more obsolete. The idea of free choice by a free intelligence, unprejudiced by previous knowledge, was embodied in the system of “options.” At the same time the giving of “lectures” began to pass out of date. Why should a student be compelled to listen to a professor when he was quite capable of talking himself? Indeed in all the field of learning, formal instruction was more and more replaced by intellectual freedom. The student’s mind, thus liberated and held, as it were, in a neutral vacuum, was free to absorb anything which it cared to absorb, while rejecting all material heterogeneous to our processes.

The effect was to exchange poverty for wealth. With the business men came money, floods of it. Endowments rose, receipts rose, fees rose, salaries rose, everything rose. The colleges were swept into the roaring flood of commercial life. Stadiums were built – by people who didn’t know they were stadia; college football was capitalized. College hockey replaced prize fighting. College athletics superseded college study. A newer larger life replaced the dull routine of the old days.

Naturally this new life pushed aside the old. “Scholars” disappeared in favour of “hustlers.” The last “college student” died years ago, unnoticed.

Any shortcomings that may exist in the bigger and brighter academic life, and any regrets for the bygone days expressed by sentimentalists, are only the back-eddies in the rising and triumphant tide of “college life,” rising higher with every decade. Soon this rising tide will reach – indeed, it is now rapidly reaching – its flood, and with that will come the inevitable overflow.

Both these things, the fullness of the flood tide and the inevitable overflow and its social consequences, are things already early for the prophetic eye to discern.

But if we should wish to compare the old-fashioned college as it was with the new-fashioned college as it is going to be, perhaps we can best do it by means of a detailed picture of college life.

All the world has read, or at any rate has heard of, that charming old story of college life called “Tom Brown at Oxford.” Let us see beside it a new and up-to-date college story under the title of “Tom Buncom at Shucksford.”

I

A First Day at College

It was with a thrill of pride and enthusiasm that young Tom Buncom found himself at Shucksford College to enter on his first day as an undergraduate. There is indeed something about the opening of a college term on a bright autumn day calculated to rouse the spirits and excite the animation of anyone fortunate enough to be entering on the charmed life of a college undergraduate.

Here is the campus, its great trees nodding in the autumn sunshine, their leaves still unfaded, the grass still green beneath them. Here and everywhere are the moving crowds of young people, restless as a swarm of ants and in appearance as devoid of purpose.

The bright dresses of the co-eds lend a touch of varied colour to the scene. From every side comes the laughter of merry greetings, of renewed acquaintance, the college chatter about the approaching term. And here facing the campus is the beautiful old main building of Shucksford, the Hall of Liberal Arts, with the scroll cut in stone over the doorway, NON FAR NIENTE. Above the building, for this is a gala day of ceremony, floats the college flag. Now and again in the light autumn breeze one can read on it the words of the college motto, “Atque Nihil Quidquid” – “Even Nothing is Something.”

—

“Come along, Tom,” said Tom’s chum Ned Fairfakes, “let’s get on inside and try and get a chance to register.”

Inside the main hall of the building the crowd seems even greater, the movement even more varied than outside. From the groups of students and co-eds arose a babel of talk that never seemed to slacken.

Ned Fairfakes, who had already put in a year at Shucksford, was greeted right and left by old acquaintances, especially by the co-eds, with whom he seemed a special favourite. “Hullo, Ned,” said a bright-looking, fair-haired girl. “Nice to get back to the old place, isn’t it? Where in hell were you all summer? Say, it’s hell trying to register, isn’t it? I don’t see a hell of a chance of getting in there this morning. Oh, your friend! How do you do, Mr. Buncom. Going into the first year? Good! So am I. I was in it last year but I got a hell of a flop back into it again. Say, what are you going to take? Don’t know? Well, take religion, won’t you, for one thing? I wish to God I’d taken it last year. It’s a hell of a cinch. Well, good-bye, boys, I’m going to try to barge in now.”

“Who’s that?” asked Tom, greatly attracted as the bright-looking girl jostled her way along. “Nita Zigzag,” said Ned. “Nice, isn’t she? Her father’s the Bishop. You’ve seen his name in the papers. He keeps dogs. But wait, here’s Dorothy that I told you about. Dorothy, one second, this is Tom Buncom.” “Oh, how do you do,” said a demure-looking girl, quieter than Nita and yet with a sort of seriousness that seemed to suggest character. Dorothy smiled as she shook Tom’s hand. “How do you do, Mr. Buncom,” she said, “it seems so nice to meet you after hearing such a hell of a lot about you. Generally when you hear a hell of a lot about anybody they don’t turn out to be such hot stuff after all. But you,” she added gently, “I am sure are all right.”

Greetings and badinage like this made the minutes pass easily. Tom noted with surprise how greatly the co-eds outnumbered the men, but Ned told him that as a matter of fact the number of men this year was greater than it had been for a long time. He had heard it said that the men this year were as much as one in five. He said that the faculty had started a new intelligence test which kept a lot of the girls out, excluded in fact all the bookworms. It was indeed a tradition of Shucksford, often boasted by the president, that learning is not to be found in books. In fact they didn’t look for it there.

—

“The Dean will see Mr. Thomas Buncom,” called a voice, and a moment later Tom Buncom, somewhat hesitant and nervous, found himself in the Dean’s sanctum.

Tom’s previous idea of a dean had been that of a stern and forbidding person and he entered the sanctum of Dean Dump with a certain trepidation. But he was greatly relieved at the cordial way in which he was received. Dean Dump rose and shook hands and did not take her seat again till Tom was seated beside her, alongside of her desk.

“I know your name very well, Mr. Buncom,” she said. “I think your father was at Shucksford, was he not? I don’t, of course, remember him,” she added, quickly, “but I’ve seen his name as an old Shuck.”

“Yes,” said Tom, “both father and grandfather were old Shucks.”

“Well, then, we seem good friends already,” said Dean Dump, smiling at him through her gold spectacles. And as she said it she reached out and took Tom’s hand and gave it a slight squeeze.

Tom remembered now that Ned Fairfakes had said, “You want to watch the old girl.”

“Now,” said Dean Dump, “what about your studies though I shouldn’t call them that – what about your field? You must elect three subjects, you know.”

“Well,” said Tom, “I thought of taking Religion for one.”

“Quite right,” said Dean Dump, marking it down on a card. “I always recommend Religion. You’ll find you get quicker credit with that than with another. But of course we don’t allow you to carry Religion into your second year.”

“I know that,” said Tom.

“Well, next, what about the other subjects, Tom?” asked Dean Dump. “What else do you think you will take, Tom, eh, Tom?”

Tom paused; in fact it took him a few seconds to regain his composure on being addressed as “Tom.” “There’s a good deal of choice, isn’t there?” he asked.

“All the choice you like,” said Dean Dump. “The rule at Shucksford is that the student selects the course; you take anything you like; but of course I can advise you. Have you got a good head for figures? If so you might take something in Mathematics, or in Economics, such as Embezzlement or Bankruptcy.”

“We had a little of that at high school,” said Tom. “I didn’t like it. I was wondering could I take Trout Fishing – I’m fond of that.”

“Excellent,” said Dean Dump, “especially as it’s new in Shucksford. Trout Fishing, first class, and with that?”

“Could I do something in Dogs?” said Tom. “Do they offer any Dog stuff?”

“Oh, yes,” said the Dean, “you can take Dogs. You mean, do you, the veterinary side, illness and dissection of dogs and that sort of thing?”

“Oh, no,” exclaimed Tom. “I don’t mean that sort of thing at all. I just mean, don’t you know, keeping a dog and taking it out for walks.”

“Oh, now I understand,” said Dean Dump, writing on her paper. “Field work in Dogs, of course.”

After which Dean Dump briefly explained to Tom how his work would be carried on. There were, she said, no formal lectures at Shucksford, a relic of barbarism entirely abolished. But he would be supposed to put himself into contact with his work; in fact, to think about it. Every time he thought about it he would get a credit. Then these would add up into units till he had the requisite number of credit units for the semester, after which he could either stop thinking or think of something else. This system, she explained, was known at Shucksford as the Intensive System, and was becoming rapidly universal in the colleges.

Under it, Dean Dump explained, Tom would be called upon to take his dog out for a walk, which would give him one unit-credit, or better still go fishing and take his dog with him and think about Religion while he fished, which would give him three unit-credits at once.

“And what exams do I have to pass?” Tom enquired.

Dean Dump smiled.

“No exams, Tom,” she said, as she put her arm for a moment about his shoulder in that spirit of comradeship which marked all work at Shucksford. “No exams, in the old sense; you will have to pass an intelligence test at the end of the term, you and your dog. But as that will be under my direction” – she smiled and for a moment took hold of Tom’s ear in that free and unrestrained way that comes with real comradeship – “you don’t need to worry about it.”

—

Ned and Nita and a “bunch” were standing outside as Tom emerged.

“What did the old vamp do to you, Tommy?” asked Nita. “You want to be careful or she’ll get an awful crush on you.”

“Shut up, Nita,” said Ned. “She’s all right, old Dolly Dump, she’s a good head. What are you taking?”

And with that the talk fell into the usual students’ chatter about options and courses and units and credits. All the boys and girls were taking Religion, but beyond that there was great divergence. Several new courses had just been initiated at Shucksford under the general division newly introduced and called Mental Range. Among these a course on Thought was proving immensely popular, together with a course on Purpose. Many of the students were combining these, and were taking under the free choice system of Shucksford, half a Thought with half a Purpose, or a quarter of a Thought and a quarter of a Purpose together with a minimum of Religion.

The merry chattering discussion, the migration about the campus, the greeting of old friends and the meeting of new went on endlessly throughout the happy autumn day. Tom Buncom felt that he had never been in anything so close to Utopia as the undergraduate life of Shucksford.

—

The college day, being the first day of the term, ended with a general assembly in the big hall to hear the president’s talk to the students. There was such a crowd in the hall that Ned and Tom could only manage to squeeze in at the back, where they remained standing. Between the shoulders of those in front of them, they could get a vision of a sea of heads in the seats, and on the platform in the distance the alert figure of Dr. Snide, the president. Beside him was the venerable form of Reverend Oliver Mumble, chaplain of Shucksford, and with them the deans of the various faculties. Behind them was arrayed the Shucksford College Orchestra.

Tom realized for the first time, with something of a thrill, the panoply and dignity of a college. The president was speaking, but Tom could not hear what he said owing to the perpetual shouts of:

Rah! Rah! Shucksford!

Shucksford! Shucksford! Rah!

Ned explained to Tom that this was the Shucksford yell which had been made up a few years before by a very brilliant student in English of the fourth year. The student, Ned explained, had had a great future before him but had gone insane just after finishing his work on the yell on which he’d been engaged at high tension for months.

When the speech finished all the audience stood up in their seats while the orchestra played the Shucksford college song in which the students joined. It was the first time that young Tom’s ears heard the anthem of his Alma Mater, destined to be so familiar and so beloved as the days went by. The sound of the anthem, set to slow majestic music, seemed to echo to the very roof:

At the close of the anthem the audience all resumed their seats and the president, Dr. Snide, addressed the students in his annual speech of welcome to the incoming class. Tom could hear but little of what he said, owing to the great distance from the back of the hall to the platform, but between the shoulders of those standing in front of him, he could get a glimpse of the president’s upright figure and could from time to time catch the sound of Dr. Snide’s firm and resonant voice. He was speaking, Tom realized, with great earnestness. From time to time such phrases reached Tom’s ears as, “those things on which, even in this age of uncertainty, we may best rely” . . . “a trust that will not readily pass away” . . . “a security upon which we may with confidence place our full reliance.” Tom caught the reverent accents of the speech and half bowed his head in recognition of it. “Is it an obituary address?” he whispered to Ned Fairfakes. “No, no,” said Ned, “he’s talking about the college investments.”

A little later the president’s tone seemed changed; it had turned to a note of optimism, of resolute purpose . . . “the improvement of our forward line,” he was saying . . . “more mutual co-operation” . . . “above all, the determination not to be beaten.” “What’s all this?” whispered Tom. “Football,” Ned whispered back.

The president’s closing words Tom seemed to catch more distinctly; they were an earnest adjuration towards a Christian life with an explanation that by the term “Christian life” the president did not refer to any particular form of Christianity.

—

So ended the college day. It was autumn twilight as Tom and his new chum, Ned, walked across the rear campus of Shucksford to their dormitory that stood back among the trees. A slight detour as they went took them past the college Book and Novelty Store (“Jimmy Groggan’s,” the boys called it); they dropped into the back of the store and got a can of beer – a tin pail with a lid on – those without lids being against college rules. With this they sauntered homewards.

“I couldn’t half get the president’s speech,” said Tom.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Ned. “They always print it in full in the morning papers; and anyway, it’s the same as last year.”

At this moment the venerable figure of Dean Mumble, the chaplain, crossed their path in the half darkness. “Ah, Mr. Fairfakes,” said the Dean; his memory for the boys, especially the richer boys, was proverbial – “Mr. Buncom? Oh, but I think I knew your grandfather, one of the Buncoms of Bunktown! Of course! And what have we here, Mr. Fairfakes?”

The Dean shook his head reprovingly. “Not beer! Mr. Fairfakes, not beer, I hope.” “I’m afraid it is, sir,” said Ned half shyly. “Won’t you take a little, sir?” Ned knew that he was fairly caught but was determined to make the best of it. “Let me see the can,” said the venerable Dean. “I never touch anything as you know; but just to see if it is beer . . .” The chaplain lifted the can to his lips. When he handed it back it was quite light. “It was beer,” he said. “Good night, gentlemen.” And he was off. “Only thing to do,” said Ned, “or he might have reported us. Come on back to Jimmy’s for another.”

II

The Rah Rah Life

“Hold on now,” said Ned, “till I see if I can find the president’s speech.”

As he spoke he turned over the voluminous pages of the Daily Shuck, the morning after the events related in the preceding chapter.

“Wait a bit, it’s somewhere around here; I saw the heading a minute ago – stock exchange news, curb market notes – no, that’s not it – dog show, dog notes, dogs for sale – no, that’s not it. It must be on another page – movie actress talks to students – no – ex-convict lectures on moral evolution, no – ah, here it is – president appeals for bigger college spirit and more money, that’s it.”

Ned folded back the paper as he spoke so as to get it right page out. “Good old prexie – He’s a great man, Tom, this new president.”

—

The two boys were seated in their dressing gowns over their breakfast, in their sitting-room in the dormitory where they lived.

It was the quiet hour of the college day, the time between breakfast and the serious work of the morning, a pleasant little interval of repose which the college man learns to value above the noisy and strenuous activity of the hours that follow. In the next room to that of Ned and Tom two of their classmates were quietly playing on the ukulele, while in a room opposite a few of the seniors were having a quiet boxing match, while some of the younger men were quietly playing baseball in the corridor.

“A great man,” Ned repeated. “He’s done more for old Shucks in the five years he’s been here than most men would do in a lifetime.”

“Is that so?” said Tom. “I thought he looked a pretty alert sort of man.”

“Yes, he is. Till he came here we had no college band – think of it, Tom, no band! He got that. Then he hustled around town and got us the swimming pool and the pool-room. He simply put Shucksford on the map, that’s what he did. He collected the money to send the Shucksford minstrel troupe south to Alabama and the Shucksford Snowshoe Club north to Fort Providence. It’s that kind of thing, you know, Tom, that makes a university.”

“I know,” said Tom; “it certainly does.”

“But now, listen to this,” said Ned, folding back the page of the newspaper. “Here’s the annual report that he was reading yesterday. You’ll see that Prexie is not only a money-getter – that’s the first thing needed – but he’s a hell of a good administrator. ‘The trustees of the College,’ this is what Prexie says, ‘acting on my advice, have given serious consideration to the further raising of the entrance standard and the further restriction of numbers. For some years past we have viewed with apprehension the great number of students who flock to the college, making this a serious drain on its resources, and by the sheer deadweight of class work and study threatening to limit and hinder its true activities. Our football field is habitually overcrowded, our swimming tank is full to the brim, and it is difficult for any but the most powerful of the students to get near a pool table. Drastic measures will therefore be taken to cut down the number of students who can get in, and to throw out as many as possible who do get in. The entrance examinations will be tightened up with a literacy test, excluding all who are unable to read or write, and there will be imposed also a colour test admitting only Nordic stock. Already we are glad to report the application of similar methods have thrown most of the students out of the medical course, and it is thought that the few who remain in Applied Science can be got rid of within a few years. We are encouraged to hope this by the fact that the number of students expelled for grave misconduct has risen from one to ten per cent in five years. Our problem may therefore solve itself. But in the Faculty of Liberal Arts the situation is still acute. We propose, however, to meet it by the introduction in the current year of an intelligence test which will perhaps admit of the expulsion of fifty per cent of those now in attendance. The excellent result of these tests as now applied to railway employees, night watchmen, and bank janitors, warrants the assumption that it would apply prima facie and mutatis mutandis to students of the Liberal Arts at any rate as a pro tanto if not as a sine qua non.’”

“Gee! he writes well, doesn’t he?” said Tom. “Talks Latin as easy as English. But say, Ned, I don’t like this intelligence test idea. We might get chucked out.”

“Nah,” answered Ned, “not on your tin-type. Too big a stand-in, both of us. With your grandfather an old Shuck and with Dolly Dump vamping you in the office, you should worry!

“But come along,” added Ned, “get your things on; let’s get busy. We’ve got to go over to the Phi Gamma Gamma to make up a slate for the Delta Sigma raffle for the prettiest girl. Get a move on.”

Tom dismissed the slight preoccupation that had come over his mind at the vague thought of the intelligence test, and away they went.

—

If young Tom Buncom had had any illusions in his mind about college life being a mere easy loaf they were rudely shattered from the very first day, when he stepped out of his dormitory with his chum, Ned Fairfakes. In the days and weeks that followed, Tom realized that college life nowadays is a strenuous existence crowded with activity. He made the discovery that a student of today has got to work and to work hard all the time.

To begin with, there was a lot of work to be done in connection with the entry into a “frat” or fraternity. Tom was up against the difficult task of making a choice, more or less irrevocable, as to whether he would join the Phi Gamma Gamma or the Gamma Gamma Phi with just a possibility of falling back on the Omega Omega Nu. All three of these were “out” for Tom, so that a large part of his first week was taken up with eating lunch with different delegates of the “frats.” These, of course, were resident societies with premises of their own. But in addition to these Tom had to be “tried out” for a variety of other social organizations. There was the Coal Heavers’ Club, one of the most aristocratic and exclusive at Shucksford, admitting any men whose grandfathers had owned coal mines. There was the All Night Club, whose members were pledged only to go to bed once a week; the Apple Pie Club, whose object was eating; the Flowing Bowl, that met twice a week for drinking; the Walter Raleigh Society, that met for smoking; the Pedestrians, all pledged to walk half a mile a day; and the Coach and Motor Club, pledged to drive three thousand miles a month. It was the boast of Shucksford that no college was richer in activities of this sort.

Along with them, of course, were a great number of leagues and organizations of a wider and more general character, designed simply to promote mutual acquaintance, in short, to give to the students a chance to know one another. It was a standing apprehension at Shucksford College – or it had once been – that the students might be so absorbed in their studies that they wouldn’t know one another. Hence the Get-Together Society and the Keep-Together Club and Voluntary Friendship Association (compulsory in the first year).

Tom Buncom, however, was not the kind of boy to devote all his time to societies such as these. He was anxious also to get into contact with the things that meant Art and Literature. He put his name down at once for the autumn try-outs of the Banjo Clubs and for the clog dance entrance-test for the Drama Society. He had even hopes of getting a footing in the Arts and Letters Society, the oldest of the academic organizations which had descended directly from the Literary Society of by-gone days. For this, however, a proposed member must have certain recognized qualifications such as a talent for coon songs, or ability to imitate Yiddish, or to draw a dog in four strokes – in other words, native genius.

Within a few weeks therefore, Tom Buncom found himself acquiring a real footing in his college, going forward every day with that sense of something done, something accomplished, which is the real soul of college life. Now it was a lunch at the frat house to work up new coon songs for the Friendship League, now a busy afternoon of clog dancing or a long hard day canvassing men so as to pick out men to select the team for the inter-class banjo contest.

With all this Tom found time to devote to his regular study options as selected with Dean Dump. He took his dog out for a walk at some time every day, made trout flies whenever he could, and in his spare time thought about religion, and even added on a half-unit of prayer.

Each time he went into Dean Dump’s office to get his credit sheet signed, the Dean expressed her approval. “You’re doing fine, Tom,” she said and gave his hand a tight squeeze. “Come back next week and let me know all you’re doing.” Then she squeezed his hand again.

When Tom told Ned about Dean Dump, Ned shook his head. “You want to go easy with that old dame, Tom – if you’re not careful you’ll get in wrong.”

“I think she wanted to kiss me last time,” Tom said.

“Well, you’d better be pretty canny,” Ned answered. “If you get in wrong she’ll make trouble.”

But for the rest, such small difficulties or dilemmas or the over-kindness of Dean Dolly Dump were but light clouds floating in a summer sky. Beyond that all was serene.

—

Nor was Tom’s life all work. There was pleasure in it too. The evenings for the most part were given over to amusement. As a rule, after the dinner in the dormitory, Nita Zigzag and one or two co-eds would turn up outside and throw up rocks at the window, and then take Tom and Ned out in their car. At times Nita, who cared nothing for college rules, would come right up to the sitting-room and take Tom by the ear and drag him away from his evening paper. “Come on, Tommy,” she said, “you’re such a hell of a bookworm you’d sit and read that damned old rag all evening. Come out in the car, we’ll go out to the Hop and Song Pavilion and make a night of it.”

—

Other evenings were quieter. Old Dr. Mumble, the chaplain, who had taken a fancy to Tom and who had learned that Tom was taking Religion would drop in at Tom’s room and spend the evening smoking and drinking beer out of a can. The old man would discuss such things as Predestination, fixed Fate, and the difference between mind and matter, till the beer was all gone; after which he left. The boys liked his society and felt at ease with him the more so because like all deeply religious people he never mentioned religion.

—

So passed the college days, gliding through the autumn sunshine.

—

“Hullo,” said Ned, looking up one morning from the papers of the Daily Shuck, “Professor Woolgather is here today. I’d like to see him.”

“Who’s he?” asked Tom.

“Listen to this. ‘Students of Shucksford will have the opportunity of renewing acquaintance with Professor Woolgather of the Department of Botany. The professor has just returned from a two years’ leave of absence during which he has been engaged in studying the poppy plant in Java. We understand that he will now go back to Java with another three years’ leave for further study of the poppy. When interviewed yesterday by a representative of the Daily Shuck Professor Woolgather said that on his return he would probably devote himself to a study of the lotus plant for which he would very likely need to spend a few years either in the Galápagos Islands or at Miami, Florida. Meantime his volume of the dandelion which he completed while still working on the campus will be published this autumn.’ I’d like to see him,” said Ned; “my uncle was in his class.”

“Why doesn’t he stay here?” asked Tom. “He can’t,” said Ned, “there’s nothing for him. He finished the dandelions two years ago and before that he had worked on burdocks and Timothy hay. These are the only three types, you know, in this climate. So the trustees sent him to Java.”

“Why, that reminds me,” said Tom, “I meant to ask you ever so many times and kept forgetting it. Where are all the professors? Aren’t there any at Shucks? In father’s time there were ever so many, and they gave lectures.”

“Oh, they’re here all right,” Ned answered, “only of course they don’t give lectures as there aren’t any lectures to give. That whole system ended years ago. They’re mostly doing research and things like that. Wait, I’ll show you.”

Ned went to the door and called down the hallway. “Phil! Haven’t you got a Shucksford Academic Directory in your room?”

There was the noise of a book flying through the air.

“Thanks,” called Ned, and came in with the book.

“Now,” he said, “here they are, the whole lot of them – they’re in alphabetically.” He began to read:

Abbott, A. A. Professor Abbott during the present session has been granted leave of absence to spend a year in Kurdistan where he will look for Dinosaurus eggs. The egg which he found last year turned out to be a wild turkey’s egg.

Bonehead. Professor McBean Bonehead is absent on leave in Scotland making researches on the distillation of alcohol from barley malt. The professor reports that he is getting results already.

“They’re all working like that,” Ned explained, turning over the leaves of the directory. “‘Professor Loafer has just been awarded two years’ leave for making sociological investigations in England. He will do this in London, working from the Piccadilly Hotel, both intensively and extensively. . . .’ I wouldn’t mind doing that myself, or this one either: ‘Professor Snoop of the Anthropological Department will conduct investigations in Italy during the coming summer. His special field will be anthropometric measurement and he will measure at least a thousand Italian girls of the ages between sixteen and nineteen with a view to obtaining comparative data. It is understood that he will not be able to find time to measure the older women.’ And so it goes on.

“You see,” said Ned, shutting the book up with a snap, “they are all working. But naturally they can’t do their work here. There’s nothing here for them.”

“It must have been funny in the old days,” said Tom, “when the professors actually gave lectures, long talks to the students. I’d like to have heard one.”

“Why, you can,” explained Ned. “They have a lot of the old lectures on all sorts of things canned up in phonographs in the old lecture rooms. It’s all kept locked up but I got in once last year with special leave and heard some.”

“What on?” asked Tom.

Ned shook his head. “We couldn’t tell,” he said, “the lecture didn’t say. Some of us thought it was history but others said it was medicine. You couldn’t tell. The title had got torn out.”

“I wish I could hear some,” said Tom, “it would be interesting.”

“You, why, of course you could – with your stand-in with Dolly Dump. You go to the old bird’s office and say you want to get keys to get in and hear a lecture. She’ll fall for you all right. Only don’t let the old girl come along with you. Shove her out of it if she tries to. I tell you what we’ll do. I’ll get Phil and we’ll go over and get Nita and Dorothy and one or two of the girls to come, and then you can say to Dolly that it’s a group of students and not just you and that may keep her out. Get busy and get ready.”

—

“Why, of course, Tom, you may have the keys,” said Dean Dump, “I’ll send one of the janitors with you.” Then she added in a heart-to-heart voice, “You’ve been so much in my mind of late; I’ve been hoping that everything is well with you.” She took his hand a moment and clasped it with an eye-to-eye look that meant volumes. “Now,” she continued, “let me see, I wonder if I can find time to go with you.” She took a look at her gold watch. “Yes, perhaps, let me think.”

They moved together towards the door. As Tom held it half open they could see the little group of students in the corridor and he heard quite distinctly Nita’s rough voice saying, “I hope to God he doesn’t bring his old vamp with him.”

Whether Dean Dump heard the words, Tom, not being a woman, didn’t know. He only knew that her manner turned suddenly rigid. “I’m afraid I’ve no time, Mr. Buncom,” she said. Nor did Tom know that after he was gone Dean Dump said to her secretary, “Will you hand me please the list of women students liable next month to a character test.”

—

Meantime Tom joined the other students.

“Your lady-love not coming, eh?” laughed the girls.

“No time,” said Tom, and the girls laughed again.

It gave the students, even the co-eds, a certain sense of awe as they were ushered by the janitor into the locked-up wing of the old lecture rooms. The walls were dusty. Little sunlight came from the shuttered windows, and the corridor seemed to echo with forgotten voices and with the sound of footsteps long since gone by.

The door of the lecture room creaked on its hinges. The janitor threw back a shutter to let some light into the room. “My grandfather took lectures here,” said Ned. He spoke low as in a church.

“A hell of a place,” said Nita in the same reverential tone.

All about them stood tall upright phonographs with inscriptions on them. “Lectures in Psychology, 1888.” “Mediaeval History, 1896.” “Political Science, 1901.”

“Which shall I turn on, gentlemen?” asked the janitor.

“Which do you want, girls?” asked Ned.

“What in hell is Political Science, anyway?” asked Dorothy gently.

“I don’t know,” said Ned. “I think it was a sort of introduction to Communism. Turn it on, Harry, and see.”

The janitor wound up and started the mechanism of the phonograph. The machine began to talk, reproducing word for word the long-forgotten lecture.

“We begin today, gentlemen, the first of our lectures on the Elements of Political Science. Any treatise on Political Science must necessarily begin with some discussion as to the scope and province of the science itself, and its relation to the other branches of human knowledge of a kindred character. This is especially necessary for two reasons. In the first place the term Political Science has been used with a great deal of latitude, not to say ambiguity both in colloquial language and in common discussion. In the second place—”

“Oh, cut out the second place,” said Nita. “The first is quite enough.”

The janitor stopped the machine.

“Say, my heavens! Can you imagine anything so fierce as that? Imagine sitting listening to that stuff. Why, Dorothy, what’s the matter? The kid’s crying.”

“I’m not,” said Dorothy with a sniffle, “only it all seemed so queer, such long-ago stuff.”

“Ah, forget it,” said Nita, “let’s get back into the sunshine.” And with that they left.

—

As Tom and Ned crossed the campus on the way to their dormitory, they came across Professor Woolgather standing under a tree. Ned went up to him and put out his hand. “You don’t know me, Professor,” he said, “my name is Fairfakes and I think my Uncle George was in your class years ago.”

The Professor looked a little dazed and then shook hands rather spasmodically.

“Ah, yes, yes,” he said. “I think I remember your uncle very well, Mr. – er – Fairman, yes . . . yes . . . and you’re here now at Shucksford. First year, I suppose? . . .”

“No, sir,” Ned said. “I’m a sophomore.”

“Ah, yes, a sophomore, second year, yes, and how are you getting on, Mr. Fairweather? Taking what?”

“Very well, thank you, sir,” answered Ned. “I’m taking mostly the open options, sir.”

“Ah, yes, quite naturally. And your friend, Mr. Fairtree? Is he in the second year too?”

“No, sir, the first. Let me introduce Mr. Thomas Buncom, sir.”

“The name,” said the Professor, stooping a little forward with his hand to his ear.

“Buncom,” said Tom.

“Ah, yes,” said the Professor, “Bome, yes, Bome. I always like to get a name correctly; it’s the only way to retain it. Once seized one can hold it. And now perhaps you’ll excuse me, Mr. Feathertrue, as I have” – he grabbed at his watch – “an almost immediate engagement. Good-bye, Mr. Bickam.”

And with that he went striding off – anywhere.

—

As Tom walked back to the dormitory he paid but little attention to Ned’s enthusiastic talk about Professor Woolgather. His mind kept running on the fact that Dean Dump had called him “Mr. Buncom.” Instinctively he felt it meant something.

III

Danger Ahead

All that evening and at intervals in the days following Tom worried over the possible consequences of the sudden coldness of Dean Dump. But after all, such small troubles as this were easily forgotten in the strenuous but agreeable life at Shucksford.

This was all the more true as the college was now at the height of the football season and the day had come for the big game of the year, the annual contest between Shucksford and its great rival, Nutt College. On that day, once a year, every old Shuck and every old Nutt listened in on the radio to the great game, or rather, to use the proper term, “look-listened” through the radio television. It was said to be the biggest gathering of graduates on the air that took place all the year round. There was, of course, a huge air-crowd for commencement day every June, and the air was crowded again for some of the hockey finals, but it was generally said that the Nutt-Shucksford game took more air than anything. Every graduate was in on it.

Indeed Tom felt a fine sense of college companionship, a sort of feeling of a band of brothers as he and Ned sat in their sitting-room that Saturday to listen in on the big game.

Football games, of course, were no longer played at Shucksford itself. That antiquated system had gone long ago and the old-time stadium had been turned, years before, into a students’ private aerodrome. The Shucksford-Nutt game, like all the big football of the year, was played out in the Nevada desert where the absolute dryness, the clear light, the complete isolation and the freedom from any possible form of bribery made conditions for football ideal. The Shucksford team had been sent out to Nevada in cages a month back. But the special interest of this year’s game lay in the fact that one of the Shucksford team, Jim Doherty, was actually a student at Shucksford.

“It used to be like that, altogether,” Ned Fairfakes explained to Tom as they sat waiting for the game to begin. “I’ve heard old-timers who have read it up explain that in the old days all the players actually were students of the college.”

“It must have been hard to arrange,” said Tom. “I don’t see how they’d get very good men that way.”

“They didn’t,” Ned said. “Why, you look at this list here” – he picked up the programme as he spoke – “Bullock comes from Yorkshire; they hired him in England last summer. Toussaint Camouflage is from Madagascar and Cheng Go-to-Heaven was picked up at the Chinese Missionary College in Canton. Jimmy Doherty is the only white one, unless you count Bullock. But wait a bit, I guess it’s starting.”

Ned turned a button and a voice began. “The game today is presented to the public by Chaw’s Chewing Tobacco. The players in this contest are Shucksford College and Nutt College and in your television glass the entire line-up can now be seen chewing Chaw’s Chewing Tobacco. The game will be introduced by President Snide of Shucksford, who will say a few words.”

“Is Prexie out in Nevada?” murmured Tom in the ensuing pause.

“No, no,” said Ned, “they took him here in front of a dummy cardboard set. There he goes.”

Tom saw the president’s familiar form step out, apparently in front of a group of players, and heard his voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are privileged today by Chaw’s Chewing Tobacco to look on one of the greatest events of the football year on the continent. Football is a grand old game. As I was remarking this morning to the president of Chaw’s Chewing Tobacco over a plug of long number one which sells at the popular price of five cents per plug, football is a manly sport, a splendid exercise for millions of our young people. It trains our young people to acquire the mens sana in corpore sano. I may say that the president of Chaw’s Chewing Tobacco expresses his entire assent.”

And with that Tom found himself carried away with the rush and excitement of the game. Not only the voice of the announcer, but the television itself showed the pictures of it. Tom followed every phase of it, breathless, as it was announced.

“First quarter, second minute, Bullock punts behind the Nutt college line, Makiyama returns . . . Komsky fumbles . . . tackles . . . ball dead . . . Chaw’s Chewing Tobacco beg to announce in the interval, Harvard-Oxford, nothing-nothing; Moscow Y.M.C.A. against Vatican, nothing-nothing . . . game on . . . punt . . . touch . . . ball dead . . . man hurt . . . by kindness of Chaw’s Chewing Tobacco . . . International Copper six, International Nickel ten . . . revolutions in Paraguay . . . game continues . . .”

—

It was Tom’s first experience of big football. He followed it with tense interest every second and when the final score was called nothing-nothing, he felt that he had really seen something.

He shut off the instrument with a half sigh. “Hand me that plug of Chaw’s Chewing Tobacco, will you, Ned, the smaller plug which sells at the popular price of five cents, thus guaranteeing its wide appeal.”

—

The Monday following the great football game was, if Tom Buncom had only known it, one of the turning points in his life.

A note, half printed, half written, was brought by a janitor to the dormitory:

President Snide will be pleased to see Mr. Thomas Buncom in his office this morning at 10.17.

“Why’s that, Ned?” asked Tom. “Anything the matter?”

“I don’t suppose so,” said Ned, looking at the note. “It’s the other way. It’s a compliment. He knew your people, didn’t he?”

“He was at college with father,” said Tom.

“Ah, then, there you have it. But say, Tom, did your governor ever give any donation to Shucksford?”

“I don’t think so,” Tom answered.

“Well, it might be that. The president, you know, is said to be the finest money-getter on the continent.”

—

As Tom entered the president’s office he realized that Ned’s praise of the president was more than justified by his appearance. Alert, keen, with every faculty awake – with a figure as erect at fifty as at twenty-five – the president’s appearance was that of the ideal money-getter. There was something in the firmness of his face, and in his keen intelligent eye which suggested the getting of money, while his long prehensile hand, with every finger joint working to perfection, suggested the keeping, or retention, of it.

Never before had Tom realized more clearly the truth of the assertion that the ideal college president must be a money-getter. He felt, as it were, awed in the presence of the man who had got the money for the brass band, who had raised, single-handed, the money for the whole equipment of the pool rooms, who had got together the money for the college garage, for the oil tank station, for the swimming baths, for the dance hall – in fact for most of the things that were making the college what it was.

“Well, well, Mr. Buncom,” said the president, cordially shaking hands. “I’m delighted to make your acquaintance. Your father and I were at college together.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tom, “he has often told me so.”

“Not only at college together, but in the same class – terque quaterque beati – we took Latin in those days, Mr. Buncom – indeed I might add, sine qua non, e pluribus unum, so to speak.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tom. It was impressive to find oneself in the presence of such a scholar as the president.

“And how is your father, Mr. Buncom?” asked Dr. Snide.

“Very well, indeed, sir,” answered Tom.

“That’s good, that’s good,” said the president, rubbing his hands, “and keeping well, I hope. Not affected I trust by the rather – how shall I say – adverse business conditions.”

“I don’t think so,” said Tom. “He hasn’t said anything about it.”

“Ah, hasn’t said anything about it. Now you know I’ve been wondering, Mr. Buncom, whether your father, as an old Shuck, might not feel like – how shall I say – doing something to keep alive his contact with his own college. Some of our old Shucks do one thing, some another. But on the whole we find that perhaps the best form of contact with a college is giving money to it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tom.

“Money, after all,” said the president, seeking a moment for a word, “is money. In fact I might say pecunia non olet.”

“It is, sir,” said Tom.

“So I ventured to write to your father – Miss Flame, please hand me my yesterday’s letter to Mr. Thomas Buncom, Senior – a letter which he will have received this morning. I’ll read the copy:

“Dear Mr. Buncom:

“The presence at Shucksford of your son, of whom I hear excellent reports, recalls to me our old college days of thirty years ago. I have therefore been wondering whether you would care to endow and equip a college distillery.

“You are no doubt aware that at the present, our students, both men and women, have no better access to distilled spirits than that which can be obtained by mere random purchase.

“I need hardly tell you what hardships and indeed what frauds this imposes on them, and in fact on the whole college community. Only last week I myself was compelled to pay ten dollars for a bottle of what I call very inferior gin.

“It has therefore occurred to a number of professors and trustees that if we had our own distillery on the premises we should be able to offer to these young people under our charge a continuous supply of what I might call first class stuff. We could easily arrange, by personal inspection and test, to guarantee its excellence.

“Your name occurs to me as that of one eminently suited for this form of philanthropy. I shall take an early opportunity to call you by ’phone and arrange to talk over the matter.”

“There!” said the president. “That went to your father yesterday. I presume he has it this morning. In sending for you this morning, my idea is that you may now speak with your father—”

“Speak with him?” said Tom.

“Exactly – over the long distance. Miss Flame, will you get the connection if you please.”

Misery and apprehension sank into Tom’s heart as he sat waiting for his father’s voice. Only too well he knew what the answer would be; only too often had he heard his father tell of how when he was at college they used to call the present president “Slippery Snide.”

But even Tom was hardly prepared for the burst of profanity that broke out at the other end of the telephone. Fortunately for him, the president couldn’t hear it. Had Tom been skilled in dissimulation he might have carried off the situation. But his tell-tale face betrayed his father’s refusal.

“Well, Mr. Buncom,” said the president, “what does he say?”

“He’s – he’s—” Tom stammered for words – “he’s going to think it over.”

“Ah,” said Dr. Snide. He knew with lynx-like quickness that Tom’s father had utterly refused. “Ah, yes, think it over – excellent. And now a rather smaller matter, Mr. Buncom. We like to think at Shucksford that even our students, the wealthier ones like yourself, have opportunities for aiding and helping the college.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tom.

“I have a fund, the exact purpose of which I need not trouble you with, but call it simply a fund—”

“Yes, sir,” said Tom.

“—into which may be put any sum large, or if need be, small; in short, anything. Even a hundred dollars, for example, would find a place in this fund. Have you, Mr. Buncom, for instance, a hundred dollars?”

“No, sir,” said Tom.

The president frowned.

“Fifty?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t,” Tom said. “The truth is that all I have now, till father sends me more, is this—”

As he spoke, he took out of his pocket a two-dollar bill and some silver.

The president took the two-dollar bill. “It’s very good of you to subscribe it, Mr. Buncom,” he said. Then he added, “But I must not detain you longer.”

And in a moment Tom was outside the door, wondering what had happened.

“It looks bad, Tom,” said Ned. “You see you’re in bad with Dolly Dump and now with Prexie. Why on earth didn’t you offer to write, or draw on your father for a thousand dollars?”

“I never thought of it,” said Tom.

“It may not be too late. Why not write now and ask for a thousand?”

Tom shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said, “father wouldn’t like it.”

—

The blow fell next morning. Pushed under the dormitory door was a formal notice:

Mr. Tom Buncom will present himself this morning at 10.30 at the Department of Psychology for an intelligence test.

IV

Sunk and Saved!

The Intelligence and Character tests, as of course Tom and Ned and all Shucksford students knew, were carried out in the quarters of the Department of Psychology. This department fulfilled at Shucksford much the same functions as those of the Executioner at a mediaeval court.

This distinction had been earned by the department by sheer merit. Shucksford, like all other great schools, had taken its part in that astounding progress of psychology which had been one of the outstanding features of twentieth century education. It had shared in the brilliant discovery that the real test of knowledge is not what a man knows but whether he is capable of knowing anything. The old notion that learning implies a well-filled mind neglects the obvious idea that there may be a leak in it. Thus the whole academic work at Shucksford was planned to disregard entirely the question of what a man learns or knows or thinks, and to lay stress on the question, could he learn anything if he had to? Could he think, if he were compelled to? Hence all rank and standing at the College turned on practical laboratory tests. The department carried out these tests in Intelligence, Efficiency, Personality, Urbanity, Honesty, Transparency and various other criteria from which they were able to estimate in each case the reaction to Environment, Opportunity, Responsibility, Emolument, and any other concomitant. By plotting these out on a chart the department could make a graphic survey of all the things for which the individual was utterly unfitted.

The proof of the system lay in its splendid practical results, both in the college and outside. The department tested business executives for honesty with a micrometer; tested criminals for their crime-pressure, salesmen for urbanity, and clergymen for transparency. In one case it exposed an apparently successful railway president who had no “train-reaction” and a sea-captain whose percentage of salt was forty points below the normal.

For the students, naturally the straight intelligence test was applied for all questions of promotion, dismissal or reward.

It was such a test as this that Tom Buncom found himself called upon to face.

—

As Tom went across the campus to go to the Departmental Test Laboratories he met Nita Zigzag standing among the falling leaves of the November trees. About her were one or two sympathetic friends. Nita, from her face and attitude seemed divided between choking back tears and uttering imprecations.

“Look at this, Tommy,” she said, holding out a paper as he came near. “Isn’t that the dirt?”

“What is it?”

“A character test,” said Dorothy, who stood near by. “Dean Dump has reported Nita as lacking in the standard of character and deportment.”

“Isn’t that a heller!” Nita half sobbed. “The dirty old cat, and of course, she’ll be on the board herself and I won’t have a god’s ghost of a chance.”

—

When Tom left Nita he made his way to the Psychological Department, where he had been directed to present himself before Professor Rattrap and a board of assistants. The aspect of the Intelligence Board, seated in caps and gowns beside a long table, was of itself sufficiently disconcerting. Still more, the words with which the chairman greeted Tom as he took his place, standing, in front of them.

“I understand, Mr. Buncom,” said Dr. Rattrap, “that you are sent here at the request of the president for a test as to your intelligence. What is your reaction to that?”

“I beg your pardon,” Tom began.

“Exactly, you haven’t any,” said the chairman. “And now, Mr. Buncom, will you please spell your Christian name backwards omitting the vowels—”

“My Christian name?” said Tom.

“Yes, you can’t do it,” said Dr. Rattrap. “Indeed I may inform you that your reflexes are decidedly slow. Dr. Edge, will you kindly test the candidate on his perception?”

“Certainly,” said the examiner on the right. “Now, Mr. Buncom, kindly close your eyes. Are they tight shut?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then tell me how many window panes there are in this room.”

“I didn’t count them, sir,” said Tom.

“Tut! tut! Mr. Buncom, do you mean to say you enter a room without counting the window panes? Kindly keep your eyes shut and tell me how many chairs are in the room?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t notice, sir.”

“Oh, oh! Mr. Buncom! Then I suppose that you never count the chairs either. Well then, at least tell me this – keeping your eyes closed, please – in the picture of George Washington hanging behind me, what is General Washington’s attitude?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t notice it.”

“Yet you saw the picture of Washington?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” said Tom.

“Did you really, Mr. Buncom? Well it isn’t Washington. It’s Abraham Lincoln. I’m afraid, Mr. Chairman, our candidate’s perception is practically nil.”

“Mark on the record, please,” said the chairman, “perception varying from nil to none at all. That seems a fair statement as I understand it. And now, Dr. Cipher, will you test Mr. Buncom in Mathematical Synthesis; let us hope we may get better results.”

“With pleasure,” said the examiner at the other end of the table, adjusting his glasses and looking over his notes. “Mr. Buncom, I presume you have some acquaintance with arithmetic?”

“I think so, sir,” said Tom.

“Ah, yes,” said the examiner pleasantly, “some acquaintance with arithmetic. And so perhaps, Mr. Buncom, you will kindly tell the examiners, what is arithmetic?”

“Arithmetic?” said Tom.

“Yes, arithmetic.”

“Arithmetic,” repeated Tom.

“Yes, sir, arithmetic,” said Dr. Cipher.

“Well,” said Tom desperately, “it’s – arithmetic.”

“Correct!” said Dr. Cipher.

There was a rather awkward pause; the examiner was not prepared for clear-cut thinking of this sort. But the examiner rapidly recovered himself.

“Let me ask you this, Mr. Buncom. Let us suppose that Mary Jones is twenty years old and that Mary Jones is twice as old as Anne Jones was when Mary Jones was as old as Anne Jones is now. How old is Anne Jones?”

Tom remained silent.

“Any further questions?” asked the examiner-in-chief. “Perhaps members of the board would like to satisfy themselves with a few random, efficiency questions; or with your permission I will put a few myself.

“Mr. Buncom, without stopping to reflect, which is the west end of a cow going east backwards? . . . If two snakes each swallow the other by the tail, what ultimately happens? . . . If a herring and a half, Mr. Buncom, costs a penny halfpenny, how many do you get for a shilling? . . .”

The examiner paused. Tom remained silent. His senses seemed to have deserted him. He only half heard the chairman summing up for the board the result of their investigation. But the full import of the concluding words was clear, even to his stunned intelligence.

“I presume, then,” Dr. Rattrap was saying, “that we must advise the president that Mr. Buncom’s intelligence is not sufficient to warrant his remaining at Shucksford! You all concur in that? Thank you, gentlemen. Then I need not detain you longer, Mr. Buncom.”

—

Down on the campus under the trees Tom met Nita Zigzag. The tears had gone from her face though the traces were still there. But in place of sorrow, anger and resolution were in her countenance.

“Well, Nita?” Tom said.

“Flunked!” she answered. “Kicked out! The dirty old cat!”

“You’re put out of Shucksford?”

“Hell, I knew it,” said Nita, “as soon as they started to work that character stuff. The dirty old cat with her snoopy character questions! Anyway I made her sit up a bit with some of the answers! And what about you, Tommy?” Nita laid her hand on his arm. “Did you get the bounce, too?”

Tom nodded.

“Oh, that’s too bad. That was dirty, because they had really nothing on you. What are you going to do, do you know? Come over to the Cafeteria and let’s have a gin-sundae and talk.”

—

“Well, what do you think you’ll do, Tom?” asked Nita, repeating her questions a little later as they sat over their gin-chocolate-sundae in the Cafeteria. Both were already recovering their spirits and, with the resilience of youth, their minds already reached forward to welcome the unknown. “What do you think you’ll do?”

“Well, I tell you, Nita,” Tom said. “I half thought of a Rhodes Scholarship and going to Oxford. There’s no intelligence involved. The pay is pretty good and I think my dog work would come in fine in England.”

“No!” said Nita, “there’s nothing in it. This college stuff is dead. I’d like to get into something where you’ve got to use your brains, something that takes real ability and gives you a chance.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as I’ll tell you what,” answered Nita. “I was thinking over it the other day when I guessed I was going to get the kick. A gasoline station! You and I go partners in it. Will you do it? They say now there’s a great demand for college-trained people for handing out gas. I had a book over in the dormitory on professional openings for college graduates, and it put pumping gas away up in the list. And there’s money in it.”

With which Tom and Nita began to figure out gas and Tom took a pencil and showed that if you got say three cents a gallon for yourself and pumped one thousand gallons a day that would be thirty dollars. Nita said you need really to own your own station. And Tom said that very likely he could ask his father to put in the station and they could pay rent on it. And Nita said that if you built your own station you could make it artistic and that that attracted the public, especially if you had a dandy garden all around it with lots of flowers. And Tom said that really the only way was to live right there in the station, then you could be certain that it was always pretty and attractive. Nita thought that if you had one nice big room rigged up as a living room, and Tom added that then all you needed was a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom. And Nita said “a couple?” and they both laughed, and Tom reached out and took Nita’s hand and said, “Do you mean it?” Nita replied, “Why, of course, Tom, I always did from the first.”

—

Outside, the short November day had sunk to twilight and then to darkness; but Tom and Nita lingered on in the corner of the Cafeteria where an unmoved rubber tree nodded over the confession of their affection.

It was Tom Buncom’s last day at Shucksford. Eight weeks ago he had entered college, a raw untrained boy. He was leaving it now a mature man, ripe in knowledge and experience, disciplined, equipped and trained. His Alma Mater had set its stamp upon him. He was ready now to go out into the world and set his hand to its work on the gas pump.

V

College in Utopia

It is clear enough to those who have the eyes to see it that the college is changing visibly from what it was. For those who can see a little further still into the future it is equally clear what will be the outcome. The college is coming to an end. The functions it fulfills will be broken up and divided among other and newer agencies. As witness here below the description, in the current press of the year 2000 A.D., the dissolution of Shucksford College.

VI

The Dissolution of Shucksford College A.D. 2000

(AS REPORTED IN THE PRESS)

The dissolution of Shucksford College, as formally announced yesterday in a speech by the president, falls into line with the general tendency now going on throughout the country. Indeed Shucksford may be said to have retained its corporate existence and to have carried on its corporate functions perhaps longer than any other college of the same rank. But, as Dr. Soap so wisely phrased it yesterday, events are stronger than men. The inevitable tendency towards the segregation of assets and the separation of functions was bound to bring with it sooner or later a dissolution of corporate life. That such a dissolution involves no loss to the community was clearly brought out in the speech of the president. Indeed we cannot put the whole matter in a clearer light than by reproducing the address itself.

Dr. Soap said in opening that he would first deal with the dissolution of the college from the point of view which would best appeal to his hearers, namely that of money. He was aware that all friends and benefactors of the college and all of its alumni would be asking themselves the question, “What about money?” He would hasten to assure them that the money side of the whole business was all right; he would add that if there were no money in dissolving the college, he himself would have had nothing to do with it.

The president went on to explain that the continued rise in value of the real estate on which the college and the campus stood had reached a point where the subdivision and sale of the land would bring in a handsome profit, he would say an enormous profit, over all original costs, endowments and contingent charges. He would hesitate to say how much there would be in it. But there would be a lot. If not, he might add, he would not be in it himself.

He was glad to announce that a syndicate formed exclusively of graduates of Shucksford had come forward with a proposition to buy the ground and to subdivide it into urban lots. These lots would then be offered to the public at large, without discrimination or favour, on the mere test of ability to pay. Another group of graduates had come forward to knock down the buildings, while a third group would come forward to take an option on the library, the gymnasium and all commercial apparatus. He would go so far as to say that practically all the graduates were in on it. The trustees were therefore assured in advance of the support of the whole graduate body.

The funds thus realized, continued Dr. Soap, would be ample to look after all contingent charges and leave a handsome balance over. How handsome he would not like to say; but if there were not a handsome balance he himself would not be in on it. The question had been raised as to what would happen to the professoriate. He was happy to announce that the trustees were in a position to pension every professor at his full salary until his death. With what would happen after that the trustees could offer no guarantee. It would obviously depend on the efforts of the professor himself. But in any case, said the president, the proposed pension until death at full pay had called forth the unanimous support of all the professoriate. For what would happen to them after death they were willing to take a chance.

The president then proceeded to indicate the details of the segregation which are of course already familiar in outline, from the case of other institutions. The scientific research of the universities, Dr. Soap explained, had long since been absorbed and taken over by the great industrial companies. In the case of Shucksford most of the scientific laboratories were, as they knew, already carried on as a distillery. He himself was willing to leave it at that.

The athletics of the college, he need hardly recall, had already been capitalized and incorporated years ago as the Shucksford Hop Step and Jump Syndicate. The shareholders would continue as at present, and pay a lump capital sum in place of the annual Yelling Rights rented from the College. They would naturally look to the public for the same enthusiastic college spirit, the same esprit de corps, which they had enjoyed along with their Yelling Rights in the past. But if it were not forthcoming, they would get along without it.

The whole of the musical organization of the college, including the Banjo and Mandolin Club, the Brass Band, the Chapel Choir, the Faculty of Music, the Negro Minstrels and the Uncle Tom Show, would be amalgamated as the Shucksford Vaudeville Circuit.

It was unnecessary, the president said, to indicate further the details of the dissolution. A few points of difficulty, he admitted, still awaited solution. For example, the building originally that of the Faculty of Arts had so long been used merely as a rest room, restaurant and barber shop, that it was a delicate matter to indicate its proper allotment. He was glad to say that the barbers now in occupation had shown a most conciliatory spirit and, in short, were ready, as usual, to meet the public half-way. They hoped, however, to retain their chairs.

In conclusion the president ventured to touch upon a personal note. Alarm had been expressed in various quarters, he said, that he himself might not come off all right in the proposed arrangements. He wanted to tell his hearers that they need have no such alarm. He could assure them that there was no need for any anxiety about him. Arrangements had been made, he would call them generous arrangements, for his financial welfare, not only till death, but for the future. Indeed he might say that without these arrangements he never would have acted at all. He would say, however, that if he found that anything had been left out that he needed, he would not hesitate to ask for it.

In conclusion, Dr. Soap said that any of those in the audience who cared to put a nickel in the slot in front of their seats would receive a memorial card with the word “Good-bye.”

TOC     INDEX

The Band of Brothers

I

Reflections on the Fall of Capitalism

WRITTEN A.D. 2020

Looking back from the present year of 2020 A.D. one is able to see things of the past in retrospect with a clearer perspective than was visible for the people of the time. It ought to have been possible for anyone, even as early let us say as the year 1932, to see that great changes were impending. The so-called “capitalist system” was already doomed. In fact it was doomed just as soon as people began to call it by such a name. They had also taken to calling it the “individualist system” and the “profit system” and a lot of other names just as opprobrious. People who had lived all their lives under it and never knew it was there turned bitter about it.

In short, it was clear that the whole industrial world was going to smash. Some economists gave it another generation still to live, some half a century, others only a few years. But none of them foresaw the suddenness or the full extent of the Revolution of Brotherly Love which overwhelmed it in disaster.

I am among the few elderly people whose childish recollections can carry back so far. I have even haunting memories, dim but terrible, of the shootings and hangings that accompanied the institution of the government of Peace and Harmony. This gives me an opportunity to judge things of today somewhat differently perhaps from the point of view of my fellow comrades and sisters. Still more so, perhaps, can I see things in their right light by reason of my lifelong affection for reading old books and memoirs of the past. I can picture to myself the days of the first Queen Victoria, long before the rebuilding of London. I have a quite clear mental picture of the old motor-car which went by gasoline. I have even actually seen a horse, not one of the mechanical contrivances now known by that name, but the living animal. What with early recollection and continuous reading I can, as it were, reconstruct for myself the world of a hundred years ago, and realize that its end was inevitable.

The people of a century, or a century and a half ago, lived in what seemed to them a beautifully simple and stable world. I am thinking here not only of the days of Victoria the First but of the times of the Georges who were before her and ruled over both England and the United States. (Victoria herself, of course, did not govern the United States, the Royal Family having decided to give it up.)

This old economic world was one in which were set up a few fixed beacons and boundaries as signboards for the guidance of society. These were thought to be all that was necessary. Law and order, property, industry, honesty – that was the whole of it.

I have about me some of the old books, long since prohibited, in which this system was written down. Here is Adam Smith on the Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and the essays of the brilliant American, Thomas Jefferson. Readers of these memoirs will be surprised that I would openly admit the possession of these books for any one of which a man would go to jail today. But my official position and my close connection with many of the Comrade Super Commissioners gives me a kind of immunity in these things. Our government today, with all its shortcomings, has its indulgent side. Indeed only the other day Comrade Ilyitch Smith, chief censor of propaganda, saw on my table a copy of Chalmers’ Sermons, and only laughed about it. He himself once lent me a volume of Euclid’s Geometry, and admitted that he personally saw nothing to criticize in it.

But I grow garrulous with advancing years. I was only trying to say that the world of the earlier nineteenth century was economically a very simple place, regulated by a few maxims. Work hard – that was the first idea. People used to talk approvingly of being “as busy as a bee” and of “working like a beaver.”

By dint of calling himself a beaver, and an ant, and a horse, civilized man succeeded here in England and still more in America in persuading himself into the “work habit,” which remains even now as one of our perplexities. It never occurred to him that “work” is an idea quite unknown to the beaver or the bee; the bee is busy all day, but so is a man who is playing golf or buried in a game of chess. Animals don’t work; they’re just in business. But man acquired the work habit, not realizing that it would be fatal in the long run.

Next to work was saving. “Waste not, want not” – “A penny saved is a penny earned” – “Put by something for a rainy day.” These were the little maxims of industrious humanity in our great-great-grandfathers’ time.

After work and saving came honesty. That was a little harder perhaps for our ancestors to put over. Man, under capitalism, being born a crook, the maxim, “An honest man’s the noblest work of God,” didn’t call forth much competition. Better, perhaps, was the compromise, “Honesty is the best policy.” On that basis was built up the blend called “business honesty,” which presently flourished alongside of “Christian infidelity,” “humane warfare” and other nineteenth century paradoxes.

Next came the idea of trade; sell all that you can and live on what you can’t sell. Don’t waste money on extravagance. All of the economic writers of the time laid stress on the wickedness of the spendthrift. He was an enemy to society. How wicked to waste his money on champagne and cigars when he might have asked for pig-iron!

This warning sank in. People got afraid to spend money. Rather than buy a yacht they would found a Chair of Theology; whole colleges were endowed by people afraid to have a good time with their money.

Last – indeed, in a sense, first – was education, the pursuit of knowledge, science. Equip a nation with that and it moved ahead. Education stimulated invention, the very key to progress. Mankind in 4,000 years had invented the alphabet, the wheelbarrow, the distillation of whiskey, gunpowder and printing – then stuck dead. With that Europe was content. After all, to sit in a comfortable wheelbarrow and read a printed book of poetry, with a bottle of whiskey and a shotgun within reach was not so bad.

But the people of nineteenth century capitalism, and especially the Americans, took hold of a good thing, improved it, and spoiled it. Within a hundred years they had covered their country – land, sea and air – with a vast clutter of roaring machinery.

The end – we can see it now – was bound to come. People working like beavers for a hundred years, rising with the lark, never spending any money except on pig-iron and machinery, were simply heading for disaster.

So it was that civilized man both in Europe and America went roaring along from decade to decade, piling up savings, machinery, industrial power.

In other words, the ground was all prepared, or rather let me say that it was all undermined, for the explosion which tore the existing framework of society to pieces.

I don’t know exactly why I should have put down these reflections. They are meant as a sort of preface to the notes and memoranda which follow. What I intend to write is a mere random record of comment upon our present government. It seems best to set it against this background.

II

Our Courts of Justice

This morning I paid a visit to the Criminal Court, a place which by natural disposition I would sedulously avoid. But I was glad I went. It made me feel that after all and in spite of all the troubles that surround us, we certainly have progressed and are progressing. Looking around at all the present day dangers and the threats of social revolution, one is apt to think that all said and done the world is just as imperfect as in the old days of capitalism.

Even though nobody talks about it openly, yet everybody is alarmed nowadays at the rapid spread of revolutionary ideas. Capitalism has been driven underground, but it is none the less dangerous. Everyone knows that the man who murdered Comrade Marcus Scipio Wilkins last week was a capitalist. Everyone knows that the gang who blew up the new Upper Thames bridge last summer were capitalists. It is whispered that even in the best ranks of society, if the truth were known, there are dozens and dozens of capitalists. The colleges and schools are said to be full of capitalistic ideas, not only among the students, but even in the ranks of the professors. Only last week in a public lecture Comrade Professor Dope, lecturing on the history of public institutions, openly said that for his part he’d like to have a house of his own and a room of his own instead of having to sleep with the other professors. There was a fuss made about it, of course, but the Commission of Superior Education decided to let it go with a reprimand. After all, the man is old; his memory, like my own, goes back to other days. Like myself, perhaps, he gets garrulous and talkative as he gets older. They let it go.

Still it alarms one as one looks about – so many troubles facing us on all sides. Not only capitalism, but religion. One hears of nothing – in whispers, it is true – but the spread of religion. People are actually, indeed more or less openly, using the churches for religious services. People go into the churches on Sundays on the pretence of playing cards, but in reality they hold services. Among the revolutionaries in the slums there are said to be a number of clergymen and even bishops. And with that, sects and sectaries of every sort, the Philanthropists, the Churchworkers, and the Vegetarians. In spite of all the public executions two years ago Vegetarianism has come to life again – more threatening than ever, it seems.

So, as I say, I was glad to go to the criminal courts and see that at least in some respects we are far, far away from the cruel hard old times of the criminal courts of a hundred years ago.

I went to the court with my friend Comrade Itchalot Jones, Second Super-Commissioner of this district, Renovated London, Outside Ring Number 2, Section Greenwich. And perhaps for those who read these memoirs, if any ever do, I must explain who Comrade Itchalot Jones is and why I came to go with him. He and I were sitting in the Free-For-All-Come-In Club, a very exclusive institution which the Super-Commissioners have established for themselves here on the Thames, and I said that in some ways I doubted whether in every respect our world was better than the England of a century before. It was a dangerous thing to say out loud, but luckily no one heard it. For a minute Itchalot Jones looked startled and afraid, but, as it happened, no one heard. Itchalot Jones himself, I always feel, doesn’t matter. He is a thoroughly good fellow in spite of being a Super-Commissioner, and although he’s a public official, quite honest. In any case, as between him and me, there is a queer personal connection that goes back at least a hundred years. His grandfather lived as a gardener on my grandfather’s estate down beside the Channel on what we now call the Island of Marine Brotherhood, but which was then called the Isle of Wight. If it were not against the law to do so, I’d say it was in Hampshire. Itchalot Jones’s grandfather and all his great-grandfathers before that were gardeners to my great-grandfather. So when his grandfather came to the top as a revolutionary at the time of the Great Massacre of Brotherly Love that started communism, his family looked after my family.

It may sound an odd thing, and I know it is an illegal thing to write, but there was a great deal in the old system of families and living in families, with only one wife, and keeping track of which were your children. No doubt I’m old-fashioned. I seem to miss it though I’ve never enjoyed it; it often seems to me, in fact, as if I belonged somehow to a past age and not to this. To have a house of one’s own and actually know it was one’s own house, and to have a little boy, a son of your own, and know he was your own son – how wonderful it must have been. I know, of course, that this system is higher and nobler – to have a share in all the houses and a share in all the children is the greater destiny. The law makes me, for example, a district parent of all the children in this District Number 16, Renovated London, Outside Ring Number 2, with a vote on the annual question of increasing the number of children or cutting them down. It’s higher, of course, and the law is right to forbid all discussion of the point. But the old family life must have had a certain attraction to it.

Hence comes the queer connection between Itchalot Jones, the Super-Commissioner, and myself, an old family relationship not to be shaken off. Why, I can remember that when I was a little boy, Itchalot Jones’s father once by accident called my father “my lord.” It was only a slip of the tongue, but a queer slip that went back through the centuries.

So it comes about that in the new world the Itchalot Joneses have looked after us. Itchalot Jones got me my present post of Corrector of Astronomical Time at the Greenwich Observatory. My hours of work, like everybody else’s, are five hours a day, together with writing a weekly report on whether astronomical time has varied. As it is not likely to do so for at least a million years, my duties are not onerous. Indeed, like all those similar offices, I can absent myself as much as I like, provided that I take the risk of everything going on all right in my absence.

So when yesterday Itchalot Jones said, “Come and see the courts if you want to realize our progress,” I said, “What about my astronomical time? It might go wrong!” I meant it, of course, just for a mild joke, but I noticed that Itchalot Jones didn’t like it and frowned. It is characteristic of the people of this time and epoch that they do not like a joke. They seem afraid of laughter. It’s being said, in fact, that Head Super-Commissioner Caesar Alexander Tompkins said in the council not long ago that there were too damn many Humorists, and that the Humorists were getting dangerous and that state action was getting necessary. He himself, he said, liked a joke as much as anyone and dared anyone to say he didn’t appreciate humour, but if he wanted a joke, he wanted it to be out of the government joke-book authorized by the State, and guaranteed to contain nothing dangerous. That reminded everybody of the trouble with the Humorists of ten years ago. Some were even executed, one heard. One fellow, so they said, was found to have copies of an old paper of a century ago called Punch (the possession of which was long since prohibited by law), which contained under a thin veil of humour some desperately fierce propaganda.

It seems that in these memoirs I keep drifting backwards instead of forwards – my disposition again. I was only saying that Itchalot Jones didn’t like a joke.

“Come along to the criminal courts,” he said, “and you’ll see one good side of things. And while you’re there,” he added, “let me remind you not to say too much, or better, not to say anything at all; there are rumours that are difficult to contradict. Someone heard you even in our own club reciting some lines of poetry, old stuff by a poet called Wordsworth, wasn’t it? You left some of it written on a pad and one of the servants reported it to the District Censorship of Loving Thoughts to get you arrested. I had a lot of trouble to straighten it out. It was a lot of stuff called ‘We are Seven.’ They claimed it was anti-communistic because it violated the state monopoly of arithmetic. So this time keep quiet.”

I promised I would. But Jones need have had no fear as all that I saw delighted me – the pleasant sunlit atmosphere of the court-room, with its easy lounge seats, the judge smiling over his papers, and the “prisoner” sitting at a little table inside the dock with an omelette and a glass of Moselle in front of him. Here and there one saw a good-natured warden or two, a couple of policemen playing cards in a corner, and a few odd spectators seated to listen.

My reading of history and stories told down through my family make me aware of how vastly different all this is from the terrible and cruel courts of the past. We still – why I cannot tell – keep to such antiquated terms as the word “prisoner,” meaning the gentleman for whose sake the court is held, and “dock” to mean the small private enclosure reserved for his table, papers, refreshments, etc., just as we used the word “policeman” to indicate his selected companion who refuses to leave him. But beyond the names, the similarity is all gone.

In the old days, history tells us, a “prisoner” was regarded as a man who had done wrong and must be punished. But already, even in the earlier twentieth century the contrary idea was gaining ground that the prisoner was a man who had met misfortune and must be helped. Indeed we are told that this point of view was one of the earliest tenets and one of the earliest reforms of communism. Here, for example, was a poor fellow who had stolen ten pounds. He needed help. Here was another who had picked up a bag, not his own, in a railway station and gone off with it. He needed light. Or here another who had signed another man’s name to a cheque and received money for it. He needed education. Or more deplorable still – here was a poor chap who had cracked another over the head with a pintpot and killed him. What he needed was more practice, better knowledge of mass, momentum, and inertia as compared with kinetic energy, in short knowledge of what a pintpot will, or will not, do. Even when the matter at first sight looked really grave, as when a man was found to have strangled his uncle for his inheritance, it resolved itself on close enquiry into a mere case of “atavism,” that is, of survival of past tendencies – in short, nothing serious.

I must say that everything I saw that day in our criminal court convinced me of how far we have travelled on our new road. While I was still looking with a pleased interest at the scene about me, the judge looked up from his papers.

“Have you finished?” he asked the prisoner.

“Half an egg left,” said the prisoner.

“Quite all right,” said the judge; “please don’t hurry.”

Presently the prisoner pushed aside his plate and finished his Moselle.

“Well!” he said.

“It seems here,” said the judge, running his eye over the indictment, “that you are charged with breaking into a house at night, with the theft of a gold watch, and with having given the occupant of the house what is called a ‘bat’ over the head which is said in the words of this indictment to have ‘knocked him silly.’ I’m afraid I don’t like it.”

“He was silly, anyway,” said the prisoner carelessly.

“But you admit you broke into the house? It says you climbed in at the upper window.”

“I had to,” said the prisoner indignantly; “the front door was locked.”

“Oh, it was locked, was it?” said the judge. “I must make a note of that. That puts a different aspect on it. Locked, eh?”

He began to scribble some notes.

“Yes, and with one of those dirty patent locks with the narrow key. I couldn’t make a thing of it. I hurt my finger on the rim of the lock and my electric torch went out, and there I was. It was a dirty, dark night, and this man actually had a dog loose somewhere round. I heard him growling in the shrubbery. So naturally I left the front door and climbed up the verandah post.”

“Naturally,” said the judge.

—

I must say that as I listened I could see the reasonableness of it all. Even in the old days it was always felt that what was called crime could all be clearly understood if one saw it from the right point of view. Here was this poor man, shut out in the dark, his torch gone, the lock refusing to open and a fierce dog within a few feet of him.

The judge sat tapping with his pencil on the desk and murmuring, “I see, I see. But when you at last got up the post and into his bedroom, you did take his watch?”

“Oh, I took his watch, all right.”

The judge shook his head.

“That’s different,” he said. “Have you any explanation to make for that?”

“Yes,” said the prisoner, “atavism.”

“How so?”

“My great-grandfather used to steal watches in the old days under capitalism; I don’t seem able to get over it.” He wiped his sleeve across his eye.

“Poor chap!” said the judge. “But just one more thing. This bat over the head?”

But at this moment a man whom I had noticed seated near the judge in an easy chair and turning over the pages of a magazine, rose to speak. As he did so I recognized him as Comrade Acumen Edwards, State Prosecutor of the district.

“I don’t think,” he said, “that the State proposes to go into that, Comrade Judge. The indictment says that the prisoner ‘knocked him silly,’ but his friends say that he is no sillier than he was.”

“Very good,” said the judge, looking up and down over his notes. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to suggest a term in seclusion.”

“Where?” said the prisoner.

“What about Wormwood Gardens?”

“No,” said the prisoner, decidedly, “out of the question.”

“Well, what about Dartmouth-by-the-Sea?”

The prisoner seemed to hesitate.

“You’ll like it,” said the judge, “splendid air, better golf than in any other prison in the country, absolutely quiet – come, now!”

“All right,” said the prisoner, “I’ll go.”

“Good,” said the judge, beaming through his spectacles, “and shall we say two years?”

“One!” said the prisoner.

“Well – eighteen months – eh, what?”

“All right,” said the prisoner, “eighteen months.”

—

I strolled out of the court with the judge and Comrade State Prosecutor Acumen Edwards, more than ever impressed with the gentle and humane character of our communistic justice. Unfortunately, something of the full bloom of my satisfaction was dissipated by a scene that took place just as we emerged from the gates of the court grounds on the streets. A group of police officials were dragging in a couple of “capitalists” – rough, ill-looking fellows in shabby rags, I admit, and yet, after all, human beings. They had been arrested, I presume, for propaganda and I suppose there was no doubt of their guilt. Yet it went to my heart to see them dragged along in the dust and beaten with clubs. I have, I hope, as much detestation of a capitalist as anyone, and I know that we cannot allow men to stand up openly in the street and advocate private property. Of course it won’t do. One of these scoundrels, so I heard afterwards, had publicly said that he’d like to have a hundred thousand pounds of his own. That’s dangerous, and I know it. And yet one wonders if it’s right to treat them as we do. I would have spoken up and said something – in fact I nearly did, but Comrade Jones took me by the arm with a warning grip. “It’s as much as your life is worth,” he whispered.

So I came home, saddened after all.

III

Our System in Operation

I suppose that each successive generation of mankind has imagined itself to be living in an age of peculiar importance, of impending danger, and of fleeting happiness. Certain it is that in this age of communism the lights and shadows seem thrown in fiercer contrast than ever before.

Today, having nothing urgent to do in connection with astronomical time, I went out on a little excursion with Itchalot Jones and his friend, Super-Commissioner Clockwork Smith, director of Industry. I think perhaps Jones had planned the excursion in order to remove from my mind the painful impression carried away from our outing of yesterday. Comrade Smith, one of the Directors of Industry, is in especial charge of the Commission of Enforced Leisure for the Working Class. His function is to see that the working people do not work too hard. The Commissioner is a man of great intelligence and of wide reading and was telling us as we rode about in his car something of the origin and meaning of his office.

“The danger under communism,” he said, “is that the workers will work too hard and injure their health. This was foreseen at the very start by the keener minds, but only after the lapse of half a generation did we learn how to cope with it. Even now it needs watchfulness on our part.”

“Indeed!” I said.

“Very much so. Only yesterday I was called in to use my authority for a very difficult case – the case of a drain digger who refused to quit digging. In our city drain digging, as in everything else, you know, five hours is considered the maximum permissible day’s work. Indeed there are rigorous notices in all the drains and sewers that men must absolutely come up at the end of five hours. Of course we have to wink at minor breaches of the rule. Very often the men go on digging in the drain for an extra hour or two without our liking to interfere. But here was a case of a fellow who had been in the sewer for ten hours and was still digging away. They had called down to him repeatedly to come out of the sewer, but he merely shouted back, ‘It’s all right; just let me work a little longer; just a few more bucketfuls of muck and I’ll come up.’ In the end we had to send men down and take away his spade. The poor fellow was quite hysterical when they fetched him up.”

Jones proposed that as the morning was pleasant and the weather agreeable, we should first see something of work in the country. We accordingly drove right away out of London into the beautiful rolling wooded country of Food District Number 2, once called, I believe, the county of Surrey. It was haymaking time and the work, shared in by men and women alike, was at its height.

There is nothing, I believe, so cheering to the mind as the spectacle of the busy, happy labour of the field. From the earliest times, poets have sung of the work of the hay and the harvest, the fragrance of the fields, the joy of work in the wind and sun, and the sweetness of rest after the long toil of the day. And of all field labour, I suppose that of haymaking has the greatest appeal. So at least we found it this morning. Here was one group of haymakers seated in the shade of a branching tree, playing cards. Here was another group on the grass beside an ancient thorn, drinking beer, while in another part of the field men and women were playing dominoes among the hedges. One or two of the workers, with that taste for solitude which marks the truly rural mind, could be seen along the banks of a little stream, fishing. Everywhere was activity.

One of the directors of the work – I presume a gangster, or overseer – approached us and saluted my companion. “All busy, I see,” said Clockwork Smith.

“Very busy,” answered the gangster; “in fact they’ve been going it a bit too hard; I’m trying to get them to rest up. I was wondering whether you could get the district council to send us down a roulette wheel. It’s a bit hard on them having only the dominoes and the cards, and many of them get tired of fishing.”

“What about golf?” asked Smith.

The gangster shook his head.

“The chaps don’t seem to care for it,” he said. “Too much like work, they say; after being used to a pitchfork, they find a golf club pretty strenuous.”

“All right,” said Smith, “I’ll arrange for the roulette table.”

We drove back by a roundabout way so as to come into the Power and Mechanism Area, where the factories are. Smith suggested that we look in at one of the works, and under the guidance of a comrade overseer we went through one of the great mechanical plants. Charming as is the spectacle of work in the country, there is something perhaps more impressive in the aspect of a great industrial factory. The vast glittering machines, the huge wheels, the universal regularity and order, combine to convey an imposing sense of human power. The impression given by the workers was different from that one received from the haymakers, but contained many of the same elements. Here was a little group seated around a steel drum, throwing dice; another group, reclining on a huge leather belt which served as a sort of hammock, were playing spillikins; or a solitary worker might be observed pleasantly seated in the angle of two cogged wheels, reading a book.

“Not working today?” asked Smith of an overseer.

“Yes, indeed,” he said, “we’re very busy. Consumption overtook us a week or so ago and we’re running on full time. This,” he added, “is the lunch hour” – he looked at his watch – “or, no, it’s more likely afternoon tea; or perhaps they have sent someone out for a can of beer and oysters. We find our output is better if we slacken up now and then, though at times it’s hard to stop them.”

We passed on to various other plants, all presenting the same appearance of industry and activity, and all illustrating that nice adjustment of production and consumption which is characteristic of our era. One plant we saw, highly specialized after the fashion of communistic industry, was devoted solely to making bolts and nuts. Here no work was being done. The men had made nuts enough to last for years and were all off at the seaside. Here in another plant was a peculiarly interesting situation. An intricate electrical engine had broken down and they couldn’t start it again. A comrade therefore had been sent to take a two years’ course at Cambridge – in the great boiler factory – and learn how to fix it. Till then, as Itchalot Jones explained to me, the industry must remain shut down. The fate of the individual workers does not count under our iron discipline. For the good of the majority, they must stop work; most of them, in fact, had gone yachting.

Such was the encouraging appearance, almost everywhere the same, of our industrial system. It gave me a great feeling of confidence. Indeed as we returned to London in the later part of the afternoon, I felt cheered and relieved at the thought that our social difficulties and revolutionary dangers are as nothing beside our obvious and practical success.

—

But the pleasant impression conveyed by the day’s outing was marred, if not obliterated, by what happened towards its close. On our way back into town, we ran into a huge street procession, or parade, of “capitalists.” There must have been two or three thousand of them in line. Rough, evil-looking fellows they seemed, or at least their clothes made them seem so, though here and there I thought I saw one or two faces of real power. They carried humbly devised banners and streamers with such mottoes as LIBERTY; EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF; LET ME LIVE OR DIE IN MY OWN WAY.

We learned afterwards that they had held a monster gathering in the new park, the Gardens of Sweet Converse (where all speech is strictly forbidden except with a police license). There had been a lot of inflammatory talk, wild stuff about human rights and the liberty of the individual, which no government could tolerate. The police had hung back, not liking to interfere. Then the capitalists had started in a big procession, heading, so people said, for the house of the Parliament. They were probably not all capitalists. Their ranks had been joined on the way by a rabble of Vegetarians, and Churchworkers and Philanthropists, in short, by all the roughs and outcasts of the city. Yet I must say again, some of them looked fierce, brave men, full of purpose.

I think the police were afraid of them. Till we came, they were hanging back and merely trying persuasion. “Come, gentlemen, come now,” they were saying, “you’ve had your little bit of fun; come now, kindly drop those banners.”

Then, just as we came near by, we could see soldiers on horseback appearing at the end of the street, and the police plucked up courage and began striking in among the capitalists with their heavy clubs, smashing at their arms and fingers to make them let go the banners. The capitalists fought back bare-handed. For all their rags, they were a brave lot. At the sides of the street and on the door-steps of the houses the people watched, and there were cries of “Shame, Shame!” even from the onlookers. I noticed especially the younger women, shouting at the police, “Shame, you brutes!” They looked fierce as furies. Some of them even threw themselves into the fight.

Then at the end of the street we could hear volley firing beginning, and the crowd began to break into a surging mass. I didn’t see the end. Itchalot Jones seized me by the arm and dragged me up a side street and from there, through backyards and passages clear away from the scene. A thing that surprised me was that as the crowd was surging past us, Jones spoke to one tall man, evidently a leader of the capitalists. “You’re mad,” he said; “I told you it was months too soon.” He spoke in a low and hurried voice for no one to hear, but the words reached me and set me wondering.

—

That evening at the Free-for-All Club we talked things over. It is about the only place where we could talk since the membership is very exclusive, in fact confined to the class called officially Men of the Heavy Burdens, meaning those who receive the highest salaries from the State.

The parade and riot had started, it seems, from a big seizure of unlawful books that the police had been carrying out. Super-Commissioner Smith said he had seen cartloads of a lot of the most vicious stuff. Some of it was out and out Vegetarian propaganda such as Cabbages and How to Grow Them; Spinach as a Stimulant; Why Kill a Hen? and Ham is Death.

This led us to speak of Vegetarianism and how the police had practically driven it underground. I suppose it had to be done. If the communist State orders all comrades to eat forty-eight ounces of meat per week and adjusts its animal production to that, you can’t have a set of people preaching that it’s wrong to eat meat. Yet on the other hand, as I said to the Commissioner (for we spoke with great freedom), if a man keeps his ideas to himself why punish him for that? “Here,” said I, “you have a case of a man in whose room you find a book on Cabbages or a pamphlet on Vermicelli Soup. Would you send him to jail?”

The Commissioner shook his head. “I’m afraid we have to,” he said; “you can’t allow people to disseminate opinions contrary to law.”

For a good deal of the other books and printed matter that was seized there was no excuse. A lot of it was just rank capitalism, such as John Stuart Mill’s Liberty, and the Declaration of Independence and trash of that sort. Some of it was more subtle, but yet calculated to make people want to get back to the old world that was, by painting it in false colours, such as an atrocious volume of poems by the man Tennyson, of whom one had read, or novels of the period of Queen Victoria the First (just after the Georges). There was one book in especial called the Pickwick Papers. Commissioner Smith said the police seemed powerless to suppress it. Yet it had done endless harm in presenting a false view of the world as a happy place full of pleasant people and needing only to be left alone.

After the others had gone home, I stayed on and talked to Jones by himself. He spoke of capitalism and he made it clearer to me than before just how and why they are “capitalists.”

A capitalist, so to speak, is a man who says, “I don’t believe in your system and I won’t share in it. I will not work under your bosses.” Well, what can you do with him? Put him in jail – so we do. Shoot him? It seems, according to Jones, that there are an appalling lot of executions in the Homes of Rest, or what used to be called the Political Prisons. Yet you can’t shoot or imprison them all. So there you have these ragged people living in the abandoned parts of the city – in what used to be around Hyde Park – a district of dilapidated houses, without heat or water or light service, a space densely grown with the shrubs and trees of a hundred years. This was once the fashionable part of London, so it is said. Here live the capitalist class, feeding as best they can; it is rumoured that they have underground connections with the outside, that farmers on the State farms are in league with them. Jones told me that they even have an organization of their own, that they recognize old forgotten titles and dignities. Then he said quite suddenly, “You heard that man speak to me.” “Yes,” I said. “Well,” said Jones quietly, “he’s a Marquis. The first day he wants to, he can lead a thousand men against the government.” And then Jones added, “He’s only one of scores like that.”

We said no more but sat smoking beside the fire in silence. I began to understand the bearing of what Jones had said to the man in the street.

IV

Lights and Shadows

Such a bright pleasant morning, calculated to take away the evil effects of yesterday’s rioting. In the first place, the morning newspaper, The Voice of Truth, explains that the rioting was of no real extent or consequence and arose out of a misunderstanding on the part of a few misguided people; that the number of people hurt, apart from being clubbed or shot, was very few. In short, that there is no occasion at all for social alarm, a thing which, with my disposition, I was glad to learn.

So this morning, having nothing to do, I drove over with my friend Comrade Doctor Chipperman to the State Maternity and spent a pleasant hour with him, walking through the delightful wards and nurseries. It did one’s heart good to see such bevies and flocks of soft-looking babies and sweet-looking infants. And to think that all the dear little fellows belong to everybody in common. My own share, statistically speaking, would be, I think, more than four of them, four decimal two, Chipperman said. This Birth District in which I have my share has, it seems, a fairly high percentage. Seeing the children gives one a pleasant feeling of ownership. Any citizen comrade of the district, so Chipperman tells me, has the right to come in and talk baby talk to the babies or sing to them. One of the nurses offered me one, but I felt afraid to take hold of it. Each dear little fellow has his number, and all are dressed in the same way, and each has one Teddy Bear, one rattle, and one bottle. The most perfect equality! It is wonderful to think that we have got away from the old brutal selfishness of fatherhood. The idea of forcing a group of little children to recognize two particular grown-up beings as their “father and mother” was too tyrannous for words. Thank goodness, we have at least got beyond that.

Yet the day has not all been happy. This afternoon, having nothing particular to do, I sat in the club after lunch, reading a report, a confidential report, on the food supply. It seems there’s a lot of starvation. The nice adjustment of supply to wants, the commissioner’s report says, is very difficult. Last year there were twenty bags of potatoes too many. This meant socially needless work. So all the potato growers went on a holiday to the seaside. This year there are hardly any potatoes. The commissioner says, of course, that they went too far; once at the sea it was hard to get them back. Some, I believe, got drowned.

But it proves that even under our system, economic life is hard to regulate.

—

I doubt a little whether the strongest part of our new era is its music. Last night I attended a concert along with a very pleasant party – Commissioner Comrade Jones, three of his wives – or rather I should say, three lady comrades, and two husbands of one of them, and Commissioners Melody Mudge, Clockwork Smith and one or two others. I see I have been betrayed into writing the illegal words “husband” and “wife,” but these multilateral relationships, pleasant though they are, are a little perplexing. Indeed I fear I made a slight faux pas last night in thinking that Comrade Sister Jemina was a wife to Commissioner Smith – which it appears she never was.

Melody Mudge, the Commissioner, is an excellent fellow but difficult to be with because he is so deaf. He is Chief Commissioner of Music, but his deafness, I fear, works against him, although it is possible that he is also handicapped by never having had any taste for music. He was elected into the office because of his disastrous failure as the head of a railway.

No doubt the system is all right, but somehow it leaves a lot to be desired.

The people who had been elected to sing for the evening seemed to me hopeless. And there was a man who played – or rather who had been elected by a district vote to play – the ’cello. He had never played before and he owed his election to the spirited way in which he offered to try to play if elected. He explained this and did his best, but, as he said himself, it was his first attempt and he was not sure whether the instrument he brought with him was a ’cello or not. However, the audience gave him round after round of applause.

The whole thing set me thinking. It reminded me of the Communist Academy of Painting last spring. The same difficulty occurred. The general council voted the National Gold Medal to Comrade Tompkins, a first cousin of Super-Commissioner Tompkins (a fact which gave him the election). Then they told Tompkins to paint the picture. But Tompkins was very busy at the time, and, never having painted before, only just managed to get the picture done by working half the night before the Academy exhibition. He said also that the oil that the Hardware Paint and Oil Division supplied to him was poor stuff. He said he couldn’t make it go further than a gallon to a square yard. The picture was to have been called “Spring” but at the last minute he changed it, with white lead, into “Winter.” I could not help but doubt its merit. How strange it must have been in the old days when people were actually allowed – but perhaps that is getting too close to high treason for even these memoirs.

Yet all the time I find myself thinking about it and wondering, can things last as they are? Last night, for example, I accidentally – it comes from my everlasting reading of old things – called Comrade Eliza “Mrs. Jones.” She and Jones have always been together, more or less, in fact they celebrated their fiftieth birthdays on the same day not long ago. When I said “Mrs. Jones,” she shook her head so sadly, it seemed to me, and said, “You mustn’t say that; it’s illegal.” But there were tears in her eyes.

V

Revolution

The impossible has happened! Within forty-eight hours the whole world has been turned upside down!

Two days ago the people stormed the house of Parliament and threw the president out of his chair and declared Capitalism restored. It all came so suddenly that it seems unbelievable. But at this moment the streets are filled with crowds, parading up and down and shouting “Hoorah for Capital!” They have put up huge placards that read – FOR EVERY MAN HIS OWN! MAKE THE BUMS WORK! MY HOUSE IS MINE! ONE MAN ONE WIFE! All over the city there are placards and great banners with legends like that which would have been high treason the day before yesterday.

The “capitalists” and the “outcasts” of yesterday that were called the revolutionists and conspirators are today the “people” and the “patriots.” The revolution must have been skillfully and deeply organized, it seems so complete, so overwhelming. What brains and strength and energy these underground people must have acquired! They seem to have sprung to life as natural leaders, men of exception. Before them the drowsy, lazy “Commissioners” and “Super-Commissioners” have simply faded away.

No doubt, too, their changed appearance has helped – the change from unseemly rags and squalor to brilliant uniforms and decorations. It appears that among the first things they did was to plunder the clothing shops, conscript all the tailors and have them make military uniforms. I saw one of the new leaders, General Sir Montague MacGregor Monteith riding on a black horse in front of the Parliament buildings this morning; it seemed incredible to believe that he was one of the two ragged “bums” that Itchalot Jones and I saw dragged along the street by the police only a week or so ago. With him also in uniform were Sir Everett Ironside and Sir Hellanall Paget. A week ago they were living in hiding in the slums. Today they are organizing the new army. With them was Lord Hardgrit. It is amazing where they get the titles from! They seem to fish them up in all directions.

On the street people are laughing and joking. They already are calling one another Mr. So and So and Miss So and So. It seems so pretty and so deferential; makes everybody feel higher in rank. If any man dared to call another “comrade” today he’d probably get knocked down for his pains. Lord Hardgrit was (three days ago) Commissioner Wilkins, but of course, like everybody else, he knew his real family name.

Most amazing are the young men and women. Even the bitterest enemies of capitalism used to have to admit that after all it was a movement of the young. Something in its creed – the idea of relying on one’s own strength and power and fighting for oneself – always appealed to young people. Looking back on it, I can see now that all the “brother-brother” stuff of communism seemed hopelessly false. And marriage! Itchalot Jones told me yesterday that marriage will be back in a week. Nothing can stop it. All along the streets you see the young men and women, pairing into couples, their arms locked, their faces bright with love, their lives joined. Jones said that they are setting fire to the community dormitories all over town. They have leaflets out already saying, “Give us houses. One family, one House. Give us back our Home.”

Lord Penrimmon, who has been named Quartermaster General, is to prepare at once a new plan for rebuilding London, knocking down all the Dormitories and the Children’s Repositories and the Day Cribs and the Night Crèches. They are going to make a clean sweep of it. The energy and the driving power of these new people is marvellous!

Looking back, it seems difficult to set down a coherent account of how it all happened. The only thing clear is that the capitalist revolution was far more widely planned and more deeply based than anyone suspected. More than that, it must really have had a deep hold on great masses of people. The idea of being free to do what you want to, instead of spending every hour of the day under the control of a board or a commission appealed to something fundamental in human nature.

Itchalot Jones, who came over to the new movement at once, in fact who has somehow made himself one of the heads of it, says he saw it coming all along. Jones, by the way, is now to be Sir Shalot Jones and will be one of the ministry; either that, he says, or perhaps Archbishop. He has not yet decided.

At any rate, he said that he knew that the object of each of the big parades like the one we saw, was to gain access to the legislature and throw out the Parliament. Once the capitalists could do that, they knew that they could win. All the military organizations, and the uniforms, and the printing had been arranged beforehand. Communism, they knew, was just a hollow shell. It would collapse at a touch. So, two days ago, when the crowd stormed the Parliament, one of them went up to the “president” who was pounding the desk for order and simply said, “Get out, you bum! Your time’s out. We’re going to have a ‘Speaker.’” He only answered “Certainly.” Then they went through the departments’ offices and began throwing out the commissioners and super-commissioners and subcommissioners; “get out, you pack of loafers,” the crowd yelled. Yet, oddly enough, it all was done with laughter and hilarity. There was very little force. They did throw a few into the Thames; they were seen swimming away towards the sea. The crowd called, “Let them swim to Russia!”

As for myself, it seems that I need have no particular anxiety about the future in spite of the fact that I was, technically, an official of the communist government.

A letter which Sir Shalot Jones sent to me an hour ago seems to make my future lot both easy and agreeable. Jones writes:

“My dear Lord Edward:

“You will allow me to address you by your proper title, which, I have no doubt, will be at once rendered regular and legal by royal warrant on the return of Prince George Edward Albert Henry Charles. Indeed His Majesty’s cable of this morning permits us to make all such interim and immediate appointments as the situation necessitates—”

It gave me something of a shock of surprise to find myself thus addressed as “Lord Edward.” But after all, my great-grandfather never voluntarily gave up his title, and Jones, excellent fellow that he is, knows his own place and rank in society too well to deny mine.

The reference in his letter to the return of the heir of the Royal Family did not surprise me. I always understood from my reading of history and old memoirs that when the Prince’s ancestors at the time of the communist revolution retired to their Tomato Farm in British Columbia, they left nothing behind them but good-will and esteem. Everyone knew that a capitalist overturn would bring back the young prince. The newspapers of yesterday had already indicated that nothing would delay the return of young Prince George Edward Albert Henry Charles except perhaps the condition of the tomato crop. This morning’s bulletins said that not even the tomato crop would stop him. Jones’s letter continues:

“I have the further pleasure to inform you that your name has been put on the list for the Reconstituted House of Peers and that you are invited to attend the Dedicatory Service tomorrow in Westminster Abbey (formerly known as Diet Dispensary Number One, District Number Two).

“I need hardly tell you that under His Majesty’s new government there can be no expectation of the continuance of such sinecure and useless offices as the Commissionership of Astronomical Time, which was held by you. It is felt that the new era must be one of effort and sacrifice, and that all such needless and unjustifiable posts must be ruthlessly abolished. On the other hand, my dear Lord Edward, I am glad to say that the Ministers agree to my appointing you at once to be Master of the Royal Buckhounds, an office which automatically comes back into existence. To this end, I will endeavour to get you a buckhound as soon as possible.”

I put down Jones’s letter with a sigh and have sat musing beside it, thinking of the future and of my new office and its responsibilities. Out in the bright sunshine of early July, the crowds are singing and laughing in the street.

What a great change! How strange, how sudden! But I have no time to spend in musing. I must be up and doing. I must at once try to get hold of a tailor. I shall need white silk trousers.

TOC     INDEX

A Fragment From Utopia

The Fifty-Fifty Sexes

Note:

In this third decade of the twentieth century, it is already clear that the two sexes are moving towards a complete equality. Political equality came first, a thing practically everywhere achieved and now taken for granted. Economic equality is rapidly following, and social and domestic equality will ensue as an obvious consequence. Only one element, perhaps, was very generally left out of consideration in this process of social change. The two sexes necessarily react upon one another. Equalization will therefore be brought about not solely by modifying the character and status of the women, but also by altering that of the men. As Utopia approaches, men will be found more and more endowed with the graciousness and charm of the other sex, while losing nothing of the virtues of their own. Without an appreciation of this fact, a person of today would be perplexed and mystified in reading any account of social life in Utopia. As witness of the fact, let us take the following pages, a fragment of a Utopian novel, to which this antecedent note supplies the key:

OMINOUS NEWS

Edward Evenshade had no sooner unfolded his newspaper on his way downtown that morning, than he saw that it contained news of the gravest importance, indeed news of an ominous significance. His eye had only half scanned the list of the foreign despatches when a telegraphic item arrested his attention. It read:

“Current advices from Paris seem to make it certain that this season the waistline will be brought down low, and will even be kept close to the hip-bones.”

All the way to his office, Edward could think of little else than this newest revolutionary dictate of fashion. If he had only known it, the news items of the year 1932, long before he was born, had contained exactly such an item. The waist-line had been shoved down to the hip-bones and held there. But in that remote day such an item referred only to women. In Edward Evenshade’s time, men also had learned to take that anxious thought for a pleasing appearance which had previously been the sole prerogative of women. In Edward’s day, if the waist-line were moved by a decree of fashion to the hip-bone, no business man could hope to carry on his business without conforming to it. In fact, his clients and customers would expect it.

Evenshade threw the paper on his office desk.

“Have you seen it, Undertone?” he asked of his partner.

“I have,” said Undertone, with evident indisposition, “and it’s no use asking me. I can’t. Mine won’t stay there.”

“Of course,” said Edward, “if you will read a little further you’ll have to admit that they modify it just a little. You see, it says you can define it with a narrow suède belt, if it is preferred.”

“Can I do that?” asked Undertone. “Let me see it. Yes, that’s right, ‘can be defined if it is preferred by a narrow suède or fabric belt.’ That might not look so bad, eh – a suède belt. Does it say anything about the colour?”

“Not here, but I’ve read elsewhere that the colours allowed this season will be principally puce or beige or, in the evening, navy blue and carnation pink.”

“Is that so?” said Undertone. He seemed to fall into a sort of reverie. “Is that so?” he muttered again. Then, looking up from his fit of abstraction, “Did you say pink carnation or dull red carnation?” he asked.

“Pink,” answered Edward.

“Well, say, I don’t think pink would look so bad, eh? I’ve been trying it before the mirror here. Pink wouldn’t be too young for me, would it?”

—

Edward Evenshade was still thinking of this ominous news item when he went over to his bank where he had to meet two or three of the directors in the board room. As he came in, they were leaning across the table reading one of these same despatches.

“I call it ridiculous,” said the vice-president, the senior of the men present. “It is not only ridiculous but it is practically tyranny. Have you seen this, Evenshade?” he asked, turning to Edward as he entered.

“Yes,” Edward said, “I saw it. It is outrageous, isn’t it, to think that a set of men over in Paris – heaven knows who they are – should dictate to us men over here what we are to wear and how we are to wear it.”

“Listen to this,” said the vice-president. “‘Coats are to be loose or belted and to achieve a straight simplicity by intricate smooth goring.’ What this ‘goring’ is, I don’t know, but it seems to me that a man won’t be allowed to wear buttons on his coat.”

“That’s what it means,” said Edward, “because it tells you elsewhere that smooth surfaces will be stressed, eliminating buttons almost entirely.”

“What about pants?” asked the vice-president, “any buttons to them?”

“It doesn’t seem to mention them,” answered Edward.

The vice-president looked at the newspaper and ran his eye further down the column. “Listen to this – ‘Wide shoulders will be broadened by tricky cuts rather than by big sleeves, and narrow hips will be simulated by tailored fabric belts giving the impression of a high waistline.’”

“What’s that?” interposed the general manager, a stout man, who hadn’t yet spoken. “Let me see that about the wide shoulders – there seems some sense in that, eh? I don’t know that I would object to that. When do we wear that, is that for the office or what?”

“Yes,” said the vice-president, “that’s for the daytime. It says that for the evening you wear a waistlength velvet evening jacket with a huge fur collar, often in skunk, and perhaps with cartridge-pleated velvet collar and cuffs.”

“That sounds pretty nifty, doesn’t it?” said the general manager.

“It does,” said the vice-president. “I admit there’s something in that. I’ve often thought, you know, that you’d get quite an effect with a really fine bit of fur like that – I mean for the evening when you want to wear something worth while. Does it say anything as to what kind of stuff or what coloured stuff you wear with it?”

They were all quite animated now, bending over the newspaper, their indignation apparently evaporated. “Here it is,” said Edward Evenshade. “The best things seem to be a smooth printed Shantung or a pink organdie, with pastels as a distinct feature.”

“I wonder how those would look?” said the vice-president.

“What is organdie, anyway?” asked the general manager.

“I don’t know,” said the third director, “but let’s send out and get some.” He rang the bell. “Young man,” he said, “kindly go down the street and get some Shantung and organdie.”

“Yes, sir,” said the young man, “already mixed or in two bottles?”

“No, no, it’s a fabric. Get – oh, get about ten pounds of each.”

“And while you’re there, ask them if they have any skunk fur and a case of cartridges.”

“Directly, sir,” said the young man.

“You know,” said the vice-president, stepping over to the large mirror at one side of the room and trimming his coat tight in to his waist, “I’ve often thought that in a way our clothes are all wrong. You take that line now – there – see what I mean, John—”

“I know,” said the general manager, “or even drawn in a little more smartly – allow me – so, like that, eh?”

“You’re right,” said the vice-president. “I see how it means. The paper says, doesn’t it, that the general effect aimed at is that of an Egyptian silhouette? Something like this, eh?”

—

Edward realized that it was no use for him to try to do business with his fellow directors in their present preoccupation. He left, promising to come back later in the day. They were so absorbed that they hardly saw him go.

From the bank, as his business of the day demanded, Evenshade went to the office of the president of one of the great railways.

“Can I see the president?” he asked of the secretary in the outer office. The president and Edward Evenshade were old personal friends, and Edward was never denied an access to the private office of the magnate.

“I’m afraid not,” said the young man.

“Is he busy with a conference?”

“No,” said the secretary somewhat reluctantly, “not exactly that. His milliner is with him.”

“His milliner?” said Edward.

“Yes. To tell the truth, it arose out of something in the morning’s paper about the new change in the waistline – wait a minute – I have it here – ‘It is generally understood in Paris that the contemplated revolution in the waistline will react at once upon the hat. It is claimed that hats will be drawn lower in the brim than ever and set a little sideways with a suggestion of espièglerie, or even diablerie calculated to intrigue.’ Yes, that was it; he was talking about it with the traffic manager and they sent out for some. I think they’re trying them on.”

“Perhaps I might wait,” said Edward.

“I hardly think so,” said the secretary, “they’ve been half an hour already.”

At this moment a smart-looking messenger boy burst his way in. He had in each hand a huge round cardboard hat-box. “Hats for the president,” he said. “I don’t think—” began the secretary. “It’s all right,” said the boy. “He telephoned for them.”

—

Edward realized that the ominous news from Paris had utterly upset the commercial world for the day. It was impossible to transact business in an atmosphere so tense with apprehension.

In fact, for the rest of the day he made no attempt to carry on the usual work of the office, merely sitting with Undertone discussing the outlook for a modified waistline and exchanging with his friends, over the telephone, comments on the extent to which a man might hold out against the decree.

It was a great relief to Edward when the wearisome business day was at last over, and he was able to set his face homewards. The pleasure was all the greater in that Edward had before him the anticipation of a dinner party which would at any rate give him a chance to wear some of his pretty things so soon to be discarded at the inexorable bidding of fashion.

—

That evening at about seven o’clock Edward Evenshade was seated on a low stool in front of a long mirror, engaged in dressing for dinner. Several new people were expected and naturally Edward wished to look his best.

But a choice is difficult. The litter of frills and laces on the floor beside him showed the vacillation of his mind. He had already almost decided on an evening dress shirt of soft white foulard with ruchings up to the throat, when he rejected it in favour of a dainty clinging slip-over of passementerie worn over a low brasserie. Then again he wondered whether burnt umber was really his colour. He picked up the dainty little dinner jacket and turned it in his hands. It was sweet, there was no doubt of it. On the other hand, not everybody can wear burnt umber. Would he look better in terra cotta or potash? But then again, the evening candle light at dinner is not like sunlight. But if he didn’t wear the burnt umber then a jacket with a higher collar would mean doing his hair all over again, or at least clipping it close round his ears. Or would that show the shape of his head too much? He knew that the shape of his head, though he hated to admit it, was not his best point. It was shaped too much like a nut.

So sat Edward Evenshade in perplexity till the slamming of the front door and the sound of hurried steps on the stairs told him that Clara had come home.

“I’m late as hell, Eddie!” she called from the landing, “but it will be all right. I’ve still time to chuck on my clothes for dinner.”

“No, come in here,” called Edward from his dressing-room. “I want you to help me pick something to wear.”

Clara strode into Edward’s dressing-room.

“Why, Eddie,” she exclaimed, “you’re only half ready.”

“I know, Clara. I just couldn’t decide about the colours. Look! how do you like that?”

As he spoke, Edward held the little burnt umber dinner jacket up against his cheeks.

“Why, you look perfectly sweet,” Clara said.

“No, but is the colour too strong for me?”

“I don’t think so, dear, not in evening light. But if you think it is, why not put on something else? But I must skip. I’ve simply got to get ready. They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“No, it’s all right. They’re invited for eight; there’s lots of time. Before you go, what about money for Bridge tonight? Have you got any, or do you want any? And where do we stand today? You know, Clara, if we don’t do up accounts each night it gets so complicated, doesn’t it?”

“I know, Eddie,” answered Clara, “but I write it down always. I’ve got it here in my little book. Yes, here it is. You paid me up to the day before yesterday, Tuesday – No, I’m wrong, we were square till last night. There’s only today.”

“All right, what are the items?”

Edward and Clara, like all other reasonable husbands and wives in Utopia, knew nothing of that economic dependence of the wife upon the husband which is the blot of our present situation. Although, in their case, Edward was the outside breadwinner and Clara lived at home, it was recognized that her functions in life and her work were just as much an economic contribution to their welfare as the money which Edward earned in his office. Their accounts were kept in accordance with this principle.

“What are the items?” asked Edward.

“Well,” said Clara, “first, I took baby out of his cradle and washed him – two dollars is right, isn’t it?”

“Quite right,” said Edward. “If you sent him to the laundry they’d charge that.”

“Then I rocked his cradle for an hour—”

“Two dollars,” said Edward.

“But I sang to him,” said Clara.

Edward looked doubtful. “I don’t think that’s extra,” he said.

“All right, Eddie,” said Clara good-naturedly, “let it go at that. Here are the other things, at the rates we’ve generally set for them—”

“Ordering the food over the telephone, fifty cents.”

“Right!”

“Directions to maid about how not to cook the food for the dinner party, fifty cents.”

“Right!”

“Having lunch with your mother at her house, five dollars.”

“I suppose so,” said Edward.

“Visit from the Reverend Canon Jaw and refusing a subscription to build a new chancel. What’s that worth, Eddie, be fair? That saved a lot of money. And think of it! he was here an hour.”

“I admit,” said Edward, “that’s tough; go on though, and we’ll lump it together. What else?”

“Well, really nothing much,” said Clara, looking at her notes. “Taking baby up, putting baby down, singing to baby, talking to Mrs. Woundup over the ’phone – but let that go. And then I went to golf at four and I’m just back.”

“Well, call it for the whole of it, fifteen dollars, will that be all right?”

“Oh, quite right, Eddie, perfectly fair.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Edward, as he felt in his pocket for the money, “it’s more than I made myself today downtown. Hardly any of us did much.”

“Why?” asked Clara.

“Oh, this blasted news from Paris.”

“I didn’t see it. What news? Is it another market smash?”

“No, no, not that. This infernal fall of the waistline to the hips. But I suppose if we’ve got to do it, we must make up our minds to it like men. But skip, Clara, and get ready.”

“Give me a kiss first,” said Clara.

“Who pays?” asked Eddie.

“Fifty-fifty,” she said.

TOC     INDEX

Hellements of Hickonomics
in Hiccoughs of Verse
Done in Our Social Planning Mill

(1936)

~

Preface
The Social Plan
Dead Certainty
The Ranchman’s Reverie
Happy Jim, the Consumer
Oh! Mr. Malthus!
Meet Mr. Wegg, Banker
Finale
An Educational Appendix

Preface

Lecturing the other day before a brilliant galaxy of young men and women, known, in the college where they belong, as Economics Three, there occurred to me, and I used, the metaphor of a social reformer sitting as a raven on the window-sill and croaking “Social Plan.” Economics Three woke up and laughed. This gave me the idea that it might be of great service if economic problems could be discussed in the form of the literature of the imagination. This would help to remove the argument from the angers and the bitterness that so often surround it. If we cannot discuss it like gentlemen, let us at least discuss it like idiots. Having got the idea, all I had to do was to write this book.

Of the economic basis of this book I would like to say this. Forty years of hard work on economics has pretty well removed all the ideas I ever had about it. I think the whole science is a wreck and has got to be built up again. For our social problems there is about as much light to be found in the older economics as from a glow-worm. Only one or two things seem to me clear. Cast-iron communism is nothing but a penitentiary. Sooner or later either it is doomed or man is doomed. I believe that the only possible basis for organized society is that of every man for himself,—for himself and those near and dear to him. But on this basis there must be put in operation a much more efficient and much more just social mechanism. We need not a new game but a new set of rules. There must be bread and work for all; and that ought to mean mighty little work and lots of bread.

I would like to say a word or two about some of the theories with which these verses deal. The theory of Malthus was triumphant for a hundred years. It was regarded as a melancholy truth, but as none the less true. The great American economist, Francis Walker, spoke of argument directed at it as being only the “headless arrows of beginners.” But from the first I shot my headless arrows at it, unheeded. All that is true about the Malthus stuff is that if people multiply fast enough and long enough presently there won’t be standing room. But it is no explanation of the industrial poverty, the starvation and the slum of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The great collapse of the last five years has proved this to everybody. Poverty, unemployment and disaster have overwhelmed alike the city and the solitude: the world is starving in the midst of plenty: numbers have nothing to do with it. There is no population problem for humanity at large: only for the single family, that cannot place its offspring: and that problem belongs not under “numbers-and-subsistence,” but under social organization.

In regard to Malthus himself, I have permitted myself, in the interests of art, to clothe him with an imaginary character and appearance to suit his doctrine. It is true that Malthus, who was an ordained clergyman but lectured for the East India Company at their college at Haileybury, had a hare lip and was more or less unintelligible to his hearers. This, however, is hardly a disadvantage for a professor of political economy. But there is no reason to imagine that the reverend gentleman was cadaverous or doleful, or averse to the joys of matrimony. He married at twenty-nine and had a nurseryful of children. But Art is higher than literal truth.

With regard to banking, I am aware that certain wicked persons have lately widely said that a bank is bunk; that a banker usurps what ought to be a social privilege in that he sits down and “makes money” with a pen and ink. This is not so. A great many of the forms that a banker uses have to be printed. And anyway, even if it is true that he can make money for other people by sitting down and writing “loan” with his left hand and “deposit” with his right, he can’t do that for himself. All he can get out of it is the interest that other people pay him for the “loan-and-deposit” stuff. In return he performs the social service of helping to shift the world’s production from one channel to another. Looked at that way I don’t think he’s any crookeder than the rest of us. I’ve known several bankers. They seemed all right.

I am not saying that there is nothing wrong with the present conditions under which banks work, and with the present privileges which they enjoy. They need further social regulation and control, just as all other branches of industrial and financial activity need it. That is part of the new world in which we live. Forms of legislative control and grants of legislative privilege that worked well enough in the simpler environment of three generations ago do not work so well now. But the banker only shares this environment with the rest of us. There is no more reason to “abolish” the banker than there is to abolish the butcher and the baker: as much, as little. If we abolish them, then their place is taken by the officials of a communistic state, —appointed, in the pure wind of theory, by the honest and enlightened vote of their free fellow-citizens but appointed in reality on a basis of favoritism, intrigue, fear and tyranny of which one shudders to think.

If one wishes to appreciate a banker better, one has only to think of a state bank, run by and for the people, handing out free loans like free lunches. This is the picture that I have tried to portray in the person of Comrade Ilyitch the Commissar. I try to mean by him all that is good and bad in Bolshevism, its fierce elemental energy, its rootage in bye-gone tyranny, and its inevitable end.

I linger with interest on what is to me the pathetic but attractive figure of Happy Jim the Consumer. I see him, dancing in his rags, a poor scarecrow in the wind, but carrying down with him in history all the lost glory of Manchester School. Who pays any attention to Jimmy now? We call a commission on a tariff, and listen to what is called “evidence” from manufacturers: we hear from bankers on banking, and from burglars on burglary. Who listens to poor Happy Jim? If he came to the door in his rags, with his tambourine and his John Stuart Mill, would they let him in? Suppose they did and Jimmy the Consumer read out a piece of John Stuart Mill, how they would laugh?

I do not mean by this to deny the need and the expediency of tariff protection. We are not yet ready for the Kingdom of Heaven of Universal Free Trade. In our present world it would tend to force down the wages of all nations to the wages of the lowest. Not until the sunken areas are leveled up can we have a uniform world. But it seems to me that in the post-war period we have gone tariff-mad. The “nationalism” of the unhappy Versailles Treaty has acted as a virus in the veins of humanity. It has put us back, centuries back, into the poisonous attitude of regarding other nations’ ruin as our own welfare, and other nations’ welfare as our ruin. We are back again to the insular insanity of Rule Britannia, exulting in the fact that other nations “shall one by one to tyrants fall.” We have forgotten David Hume’s noble sentiment in which even as a citizen of Great Britain he “prayed for the flourishing commerce of France.” It may, therefore, do no harm to recall the “welfare economics” of the consumer and to tolerate for a moment the salvation songs of my Happy Jim. No manufacturer need fear that the tariff is going to vanish overnight.

The wind-swept picture of the Western farmer is one I have loved to present. It is meant to express, and I hope it does, something of the age-long fascination of the land, and the magic of its ownership. I for one cannot bear to think that the old independent farming is to go: that the breezy call of incense-breathing morn is to be replaced by the time-clock of a regimented, socialized, super-mechanized land-factory. We must keep the farmers. If they cannot regulate the “how-much” of their production, let them, as they used to, raise all they damn can, and then fire it round anywhere,—pelt one another with new-mown hay and sugar beets. But don’t let’s lose them.

And with that, I put this book as the politicians say, “in the hands of my friends.” At least they will find no ill-nature in it.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

3869 Cote des Neiges Road,

Montreal

April Fool’s Day, 1936

The Social Plan

I know a very tiresome Man

Who keeps on saying, “Social Plan.”

At every Dinner, every Talk

Where Men foregather, eat or walk,

No matter where,— this Awful Man

Brings on his goddam Social Plan.

The Fall in Wheat, the Rise in Bread,

The social Breakers dead ahead,

The Economic Paradox

That drives the Nation on the rocks,

The Wheels that false Abundance clogs—

And frightens us from raising Hogs,—

This dreary field, the Gloomy Man

Surveys and hiccoughs, Social Plan.

Till simpler Men begin to find

His croaking aggravates their mind,

And makes them anxious to avoid

All mention of the Unemployed,

And leads them even to abhor

The People called Deserving Poor.

For me, my sympathies now pass

To the poor Plutocratic Class.

The Crowd that now appeals to me

Is what he calls the Bourgeoisie.

So I have got a Social Plan

To take him by the Neck,

And lock him in a Luggage van

And tie on it a check,

Marked MOSCOW VIA TURKESTAN,

Now, how’s that for a Social Plan?

TOC     INDEX

Dead Certainty

The Hickonomics
of Insurance

This is a Study in the Wonders of Insurance familiar to any one who has ever been cast for the character called a Prospect; and a presentation of the Social Blessing of Salesmanship.

.  .  .  .  .

There entered an Insurance Man, He looked me in the Eye

And he pointed with his Finger and he said, “Suppose you die?”

I should have answered him, “Hi! Hi! Suppose that it were you!”

But couldn’t find a thing to say or think a Thing to do,—

I merely answered, “Must I die?” He said, “It has to be,”

And then he took a little Book and laid it on his Knee.

“Suppose,” he said, “a Railway Train should spread you out all flat.”

I answered, with a certain Pain, “I never thought of that.”

“Suppose,” he said, “a Motor Truck,—

We’re picturing the worst of Luck,—

One afternoon should run amuck

When you are coming by—”

“The Fault,” I cried, “would all be mine!

Give me the little Book to sign.”

He pointed to the dotted Line

“Thank God, I’m saved!” said I.

He drew a deeper, quiet Breath,

“Let’s talk no more,” he said, “of Death.

Dismiss the Thought of Death, I beg,

But how about a broken Leg?

Or shall we say, a Thigh?

Suppose you get a nasty Fall,

A broken Wrist perhaps is all,

The Cost is relatively small,—

But should you pay it,—why?

And quite apart from City Streets

What wretched Accidents one meets!

What awful Risks one takes!

I do not wish to raise Alarm,

To needlessly suggest a Harm,—

You say you have a Summer Farm,

Now, have you thought of snakes?

Come! give us your unbounded Trust!

If you get physically bust,

As very probably you must,

We take the Loss: it’s only just.”

I turned to the warm-hearted Man,

“Save me,” I said, “while still you can.”

.  .  .  .  .

My visitor now settled back in more decided Ease,

“And now,” he said, “let’s have a talk on lingering Disease,

Shall we,—it’s friendlier by far,—discuss it over a Cigar?

Try one of these.

You’d be surprised,” he said, “the Things our Medical Department brings,

A Case that’s often seen by us, is loss of the Aesophagus,

A wretched Business, which I am convinced affects the Diaphragm

Sets up a sort of Wheeze,

Coagulates and clots the Blood

And turns the Ductless Gland to Mud.

I merely mention it to you, because you seem to show a few

Odd Symptoms such as these.

We had a striking Case last week,

A Mr. Omega, a Greek,

The poor young man could hardly speak

He’d lost his Mesencephalon,—

A thing the Greeks are death upon,

His Omphalos had slowly filled,—

A man of just about your Build.”

I gave him one appealing look

“The Book,” I said, “I’ll sign the Book,”

And murmured as I signed, “Too bad!

Somehow the Whole Thing makes me sad.”

.  .  .  .  .

“To bad! my dear Sir, not a bit! The Luck our clients often hit

At times miraculous to reckon, Take this,—A Scotchman called McMechan—

From Aberdeen perhaps you’d guess,— no further still, from Inverness,—

Walked in, insured, and said Goodbye,

Slipped on the steps and broke his thigh,—

We paid: Our moral Standard’s high.

Later,—too late for any good—

We found the leg he broke was Wood.”

I shook my head, “I didn’t mean, ‘Too Bad,’ in just that way,

I only meant is saddened me, the kind of Things you say

The Illness and the Accidents as every Day goes by,

With only one dead Certainty, our Certainty to die.”

“Die!” he exclaimed, “My dear good Man!

You don’t know our Endowment Plan,—”

His Fingers down the Column ran,

“The Benefits we give.

I’ll reckon it at sixty-eight

And make it fifty thousand straight.

Now then,—suppose you live!

You’ve all your Premiums paid and thus,

From that Day on, you live on us.

A Man can have a lot of Fun

After his working Life is done.

We have a client,—eighty-two,—

Goes out with Girls, drinks, takes a chew,—

In fact, I hear it’s his intent

To join a Nudist Settlement.”

I felt myself convulsed with Joy,

“And can I live till then, Oh Boy!”

“Till sixty-nine” he cried, “Sure Mike,

I’ll make it eighty if you like.”

Excited now and all alive,

I shouted, “Make it eighty-five!”

“Ninety,” he said, “No! Ninety-one!”

I called delirious with Fun.

“One hundred! Going, Going, Done!”

Sobbing I fell upon his Neck,

“And now,” he said, “You sign a Check.”

The rest was easier and drier, we put a little Touch on Fire

And then a reasonable Sum for Burglars,—let the Fellows come—

For Arson, Bigamy, and Theft

Till not a single Thing was left.

Since then I walk the Street erect, of every Fear bereft,

If Death is with me on the right, Endowment’s on the left.

A motor Truck I never duck;

The thing could only bring me Luck,

I do not fear a car.

I laugh at Germs, despise Disease.

I eat and drink just as I please,

And smoke in my hilarious Ease

A fifty cent Cigar,—

Danger for me completely floored

Because I’m thoroughly insured.

And now perhaps I may explain the economic Bearing,

For Facts without a Theory are wearisome and wearing.

I want to give the World a Tip,—I owe all this to Salesmanship.

There is a spiteful School of Thought

That does not judge it as it ought

And says for everything that’s bought

The cost of Sale is half,

But this no longer makes me mad

If anything it makes me glad,

In fact, I only laugh,

I ask,—if I’m inclined to doubt it

Where would I be right now without it?

Extinct, or crumbling with Disease

Like Thanatopsis of the Knees.

Earning our Money doesn’t end it,

We need the Salesman’s help to spend it

Fair and above board, nothing shifty

We split it with him, fifty-fifty.

.  .  .  .  .

So anytime I chance to meet my Benefactor on the Street,

We stop and have a Chat,

On Group Insurance and Tontine,

And why a Rate based on a Mean

Is better than a flat.

I sometimes take him out to Tea, and he explains it all to me.

I dropped in there the other Day

And found that he had gone away;

In fact, a thing I hate to say—

They told me he was dead.

His Death they said, was much deplored.

I ventured an Enquiry toward

A courteous Member of the Board,—

“No doubt he’s thoroughly insured,”

“He carried none,” he said.

TOC     INDEX

The Ranchman’s Reverie

The Hickonomics
of Planned Production

This is a study of the newer and higher Agriculture.

.  .  .  .  .

The Farmer is a broad, substantial Man, heavy and slow with Pride

Of Economic Status.

Westward he lives, towards the Great Divide,

Wherever that is,—

Out near the Platte

He’s at,

And from his Porch he sees his Herd each Day

In Hairy Undulation far away.

His work is never done,

Not even with the Sun,

Because it’s not begun.

He hasn’t got to;

We pay him not to.

Knee-deep in Fragrant Deficit,

His kine

Are yours and Mine.

.  .  .  .  .

See where he sits in his cane-bottomed Chair, broad-based in Thought, full-beamed in Reverie.

Wide and complacent is his Face and, so it ought to ever be.

The Pain, the Effort from the Face is gone,

The furrowed Brow is wrinkled not with Care,

It may have been a little time ago, but now

It’s Hair.

And whiles he walks o’er his broad Acres, lazy,

Dreaming, why not? He’s nothing else to do.

And whiles he drops a tear on some wee Daisy,

Seeming to lift his Shoe.

He will not plough thee under, little Flower,

Not such as thou.

He has not met thee in an evil Hour,—

He doesn’t plough.

Bloom on, ye Flowers of the Savannahs, do not fear to bloom,

For Man towards your Bowers has changed his Manners: there’s lots of room.

Gone from the field is the commercial Hoe Crop: it’s left for you,

Of the vain-glorious Wheat there now is no crop: it’s up the Flue,

Under the Western Sun the Harrows

Corrode to Dust.

The Sucker on the Field Pump slowly narrows

Until it’s bust.

Well may the Western Farmer say,

Gone are the Pumps of yesterday.

Thus once again the Prairie turns to Meadow,

And on its Sod

Unvexed by Man, in Wind and Sun and Shadow,

The Blossoms nod.

The Land Man will not fructify lies fallow,

Goes back to God.

Over the wide Savannahs all the bees are humming,

And by-the-bye we pay him by the Bee,—

And musing as he walks what thoughts are coming

And what may be the Ranchman’s Reverie?

He’s thinking with a vague sense of Alarm,

How different it was on Father’s Farm.

The Homestead Farm, way back upon the Wabash,

Or on the Yockikenny,

Or somewhere up near Albany,—the Charm

Was not confined to one, for there were many.

There when the earliest Streak of Sunrise ran,

The Farmer dragged the Horses from their Dream

With “Get up, Daisy” and “Gol darn yer, Fan,”

Had scarcely snapped the Tugs and Britching than

The furious Hayrack roared behind the team.

All day the Hay

Was drawn that way

Hurled in the Mow

Up high,—and how!

Till when the ending Twilight came, the loaded Wain

With its last, greatest Load turned Home again.

The Picture of it rises to his Eye

Sitting beside his Father, near the Sky.

.  .  .  .  .

Down on the Heat of Harvest beat the Sun,

The Reaper clicked until the Day was done,—

Four Men to bind the Corners, one by one,

He sees himself, a little Elf

In a blue Smock,

Bearing a Wheat-sheaf, bigger than himself

To make a Shock.

Winter stopped not the Work; it never could.

Behold the Furious Farmer splitting Wood.

The groaning Hemlock creaks at every Blow

“Hit her again, Dad, she’s just got to go.”

And up he picks

The Hemlock sticks

Out of the snow.

.  .  .  .  .

And yet not all was Toil, oh, no siree,

You mind the Dancing at the Paring Bee?

O, Hear the Fiddlers, Boys! oh, listen, say!

Hear the two Fiddlers tuning up their A!

What toneless Radio can make you feel

The old-time joy of the Virginia Reel,—

When in and out the dancers go

With “for’d and Back,” and “Do-si-do,”

And the Fiddlers say that we never should

Play with the gypsies in the wood.

“Set your Partners,” “Swing again,”

“All get ready for the last grand Chain.”

For—it’s O Dear-what-

Can-the-matter-be-

Johnny’s-so-long-at-the-Fair.

.  .  .  .  .

Upon his dreaming Ear the Accents die,

The Farmer groans: he looks up to the Sky

To where the Prairie Hawk is poised on high

As motionless as he,—

All Nature idle, Wind and Flowers asleep

What can the matter be?

The shy Coyotes from their Burrows peep,

In their dumb Sympathy beside him creep,

And rub against his Knee.

.  .  .  .  .

The Farmer stands in Thought: lifts his clenched Hand

And flings it in a Gesture of Command

“This must not be.”

“This shall not be.” He calls, the Heavens repeat it,

It echoes wide. All the Coyotes “beat it.”

“No dole! No quota! Give me back my Fork.

You hear me, you, who took away my work,

I want it now.

Give me my Plough

My ‘Whoa! there, Dan, and Gee up, Fan,’

I want, I want to be a Man.”

.  .  .  .  .

And even as he lifts his Voice to speak

A stronger, cooler Wind strikes on his Cheek.

Such winds as reach the Prairie, so they say,

When Storms are on the Ocean far away—

With Ozone from the Ozarks, while the roll

Of dull, far-distant Thunder soothes his Soul

As if, the Moment that he ceased to brood,

Something in Nature answered to his mood,

And cast its Idleness aside to pass

An angry Hand across the Prairie Grass,

To toss the stricken Flowers and far on high

Gather the Tempest in the darkening Sky.

Fierce and impulsive in the western Wind

That gives its Temper to the Western Mind;

Sudden and swift, no warning of Alarm

Sudden and swift, thus comes the Western Storm.

.  .  .  .  .

The Farmer turns to make for Home again

About him gather now the Wind, the Rain

Falling in slanting Sheets that tear the Soil,—

What once were Rivulets as Rivers boil,

And the dry Land, on which the Farmer stood,

Turns into yellow Foam and moving Mud.

In growing Darkness for his Path he gropes

And stands, like Ajax, in the Lightning strokes,

Scarce can the Farmer tell where he is at

It all seems River,—well, you know the Platte.

But not the flashing Storm, the foaming Flood

Abate his angry rage, his heated blood;

His hands are clenched, he murmurs “I’ll begin

For Man or Nature, Idleness is sin.” . . .

With Hands tight clenched, “I mean it, yes, I will.”

And then the Lightning got him. He lay still.

.  .  .  .  .

They found him in the Morning, laid out flat

Among the broken flowers beside the Platte.

The Waters gone, all Nature calm again,

The Prairie Hawk still watching o’er the plain.

“Old Bill,” they said, “got kind o’ lazy too.”

They looked at the clenched hands,

But never knew.

TOC     INDEX

Happy Jim, the Consumer

In my Home Town, when the autumn evenings close in, the Salvation Army, round a naphtha lamp in the street, lift up the confession of their sins. On such occasions queer local characters, broken by fate, such as the Happy Jim of the poem which follows, leap and dance in a sort of religious ecstasy. The “Happy Jim” of Economics, rejoicing in his own suffering, is the consumer. I am, and have been, a Protectionist. I was brought up to understand that a free-trader wasn’t quite a gentleman. In spite of this, I think that in our unhappy world the tariff business has been overdone and threatens to drive us crazy.

.  .  .  .  .

Happy, Happy, Happy Jim

With his Tambourine and its Rattling Rim

What’s the Matter, the Matter with him?

Jimmy, the Consumer.

Happy Jim with his foolish Face,

But all lit up with Heaven’s Grace

By a naphtha Lamp in the Market Place,—

Crazy, that’s the Rumuor!

Very often a Passer-by

Asks, “Who’s the queer half clerical Guy?”

And the raggedy Boys around him cry

“He’s Jimmy the Consumer.”

Happy, Happy, Happy Jim,—

Look now, he’s going to start a Hymn,

Just wait, keep still,

He thinks it’s a Prayer Book he’s got in his Hand,

It isn’t really, you understand,

It’s a tattered Text Book, at second hand

By Mill, Stuart Mill.

[JIMMY SINGS]

Now join and sing the Words of Mill,

The Words of Stuart Mill,

And if you have a Soul to save,

Then he can save it still.

For read with me in Mill’s Book Three,

Admittedly his best,

And what says Mill? All Saving will

Result in Interest.

Result in Int—Result in Nit,—Result in Interest.

This is his Fundamental Prop—

—Osition number One;

O! Do not stop to look on Top

Till Fundaments are done.

For what says Mill? The Bottom will

Support the whole Extent

Of Proofs that go to help him show,

To show his Fundament.

To show his Fun, to show his Fun, to show his Fundament.

Now these are just the Elements,

The Elements of Mill,

And in Book Four are things in store

More Complicated still,

These are just El,—These are just El,—just

Elements at will.

So join and yell, and yell like Hell, the Elements of Mill.

.  .  .  .  .

How old would Jimmy be, anyway?

Why that would be very hard to say;

From his face you couldn’t tell.

He talks of Ricardo and Adam Smith

And Macaulay and Bright and Cobden as if

He knew the whole of them well.

“Why don’t they send him Home and to Bed?”

He has no Home and he sleeps in a Shed,

And all that was Home for Jimmy lies dead

In the grave yard under the Hill.

Jimmy went crazy with taxes and debt

Long years ago and he’s crazy yet.

Look as he lifts his Hands in the Air

Where under his Sleeves his Arms are bare,

Shrunken and grey with dirt;

Look at his pitiful Overcoat,

Pinned and fastened about his Throat,

Jimmy has got no Shirt.

They taxed it off him, Shred by Shred,

Taxed it down to the latest Thread

To the very, very end.

Each time that Industry needed a Spurt

They tore off a Section of Jimmy’s Shirt

For a textile Dividend.

They taxed his Boots, they taxed his Coat,

They snatched the Muffler from off his Throat,

They smashed his Hat.

Like an old time Martyr dragged through the Town,

Beaten and buffeted, hounded down,—

He was like that.

You see for yourself the State he’s in;

He’s crazy: he thinks he’s rebuked for Sin;

He shouts with a Martyr’s ecstatic Pain,

“Tax me again, Lord, tax me again.”

“Lord, I was sinful: I’m sinful still.

I wouldn’t listen to John Stuart Mill.

Tax me some more!

Open my Eyes, Lord, and let me see

All Taxes finally rest on me!

Mill is quite sure.

O! Lord, I hadn’t read Seligman

Forgive me, Lord, I will if I can,

But in thee, O Lord, I will put my trust,

All Incidence falls on me, as it must

Hit me again,

Amen.”

He leaps in the Air as he ends his Prayer

And he smashes his Tambourine,

Leaps and dashes

And yells and smashes

And in between the Music crashes

And the raggedy Urchins scream.

Come, come away; it’s too sad to stay

But we must do something for Jimmy some Day

But what can we do? Every Government plan

Finds Jimmy a quite superfluous man.

Thus it happens that every now and then

The Government send to our Town some Men

To stay at the best Hotel,

To hold a “Hearing” with Ink and Pen

And to gather up Evidence why and when

The Nation is going to Hell;

And they listen to all the World but Jim;

But why should ever they think of him?

What Government ever went looking for Light

By a naphtha Lamp in the Street at Night?

But the Bankers come in two by two,

The Embezzlers three by three,

And the Plutocrat with the silken Hat,

And the Motor Promoter all Oil and Fat,

And here comes Linoleum over the Mat,

Now what shall the Tariff be?

Here come Men with abdominal

Paunches phenomenal,

Holding companies, Gee!

And Iron and Steel walk Heel to Heel,

Heavy and hard and short of Breath,

Twin cousins of War and Allies of Death.

And they show their Figures of Cost and Price

Their Figures of Price and Cost,

The Ledgers that show what a terrible Slice

Their public Spirit has lost.

And a Textile Company sobs aloud

Too feeble almost to knit,

And a Paper Man falls down in the Crowd

And is carried out in a Fit.

And Carpets and Linoleum

Moan and there’s no consolin’ ’em,

Till a Manufacturer makes Grand Slam

With a paid Economist’s Diagram,—

And up goes the Tariff,—that’s it.

Then the Industries come out one by one,

And the Bankers two by two,

But alas for you, poor Jim, my son,

This is never the place for you.

For what would you do but babble and rave

—(An Ophelia with Flowers from Cobden’s grave)—

Of Nations and brotherly Love,

Of the Ties that bind and join Mankind

In a world-wide trade where the World may find

The Blessings that fall from Above,—

You’re mistaking a Tract

For a Tariff Act.

Go back to your Lamp and your street, Poor Jim,

Go dance in your naphtha Flame,

Sing your Universal Brotherhood Hymn

With your raggedy Boys and your Shame.

.  .  .  .  .

So a while ago, some of us, knowing Jim

Felt the Time had come to look after him.

We got him admitted, with perfect Good Will,

To the Big, Big House just over the Hill

Where the Bug-House People lie.

The wind-swept House, all Gardens and Flowers

With zig-zag Flower-beds red with Flowers,

And with crooked Paths for the idle Hours

Of the People who cannot die.

For the People far better dead, Ah me,

Till God had laid His Hand on their Head

And set them fancy-free.

And they talk and laugh,

On the crooked Path,

In the zig-zag Allée of Flowers,

No Rhyme, no Reason,

No Time, no Season,

To vex the Flight of the Hours,

In a world all bright as Bubbles of Soap,

And smashed to a coloured Kaleidoscope,

All meaningless and absurd,

With splinters of sunlight off the Trees,

And flickered Shadow that jumps and flees

As fast as a Humming Bird,—

Where the Mind that has cast the Burden of Sense

Recovers its first Inconsequence.

But Jimmy, of course, knows nothing of that,

Oh nothing, nothing at all.

He thinks it’s a sort of College he’s at;

He calls it Consumer’s Hall.

And fancies that every Guest on the List

Is some bye-gone famous Economist.

So there sits Jimmy as proud as Punch

With the Bug-House People seated at lunch.

“Good-morning, Bentham,” “How are you, Mill?”

“Where’s Macaulay, boys? Is he writing still?”

“Ricardo, I want you to meet Lord Brougham,”

“Sit right here, Rousseau, next David Hume.”

.  .  .  .  .

As proud and as pleased as Punch is Jim

And the Bug-House People are proud of him.

For with Bug-House People everything goes,

They live in a make-believe World, God knows,

Where each Man sees what he wishes to see

God touched their Heads and he made them free.

TOC     INDEX

Oh! Mr. Malthus!

The Hickonomics
of Hearth and Heart

The Reverend Thos. Robert Malthus, a clergyman of the Church of England and a professor of Political Economy, in his famous Essay on Population of 1798, taught the doctrine that the numbers of mankind are always pressing on the means of subsistence. This easy theory explained poverty and want in the comfortable terms of inevitable economic law. The complacent rich could shake their heads at the improvident poor. The doctrine darkened human life for over a hundred years. Only the oncoming of the age of abundance shows that the source of poverty is elsewhere. Our food increases faster than we do. Wordsworth’s We Are Seven, with its comforting explanation of the death of cottage children, appeared in the same year as the Essay.

.  .  .  .  .

“Mother, Mother, here comes Malthus,

Mother, hold me tight!

Look! It’s Mr. Malthus, Mother!

Hide me out of sight.”

This was the cry of little Jane

In bed she moaning lay,

Delirious with Stomach Pain,

That would not go away.

All because her small Existence

Over-pressed upon Subsistence;

Human Numbers didn’t need her;

Human Effort couldn’t feed her.

Little Janie didn’t know

The Geometric Ratio.

Poor Wee Janie had never done

Course Economics No. 1;

Never reached in Education

Theories of Population,—

Theories which tend to show

Just how far our Food will go,

Mathematically found

Just enough to go around.

This, my little Jane, is why

Pauper Children have to die.

Pauper Children underfed

Die delirious in Bed;

Thus at Malthus’s Command

Match Supply with true Demand.

Jane who should have gently died

Started up and wildly cried,—

“Look, mother, look, he’s there again

I see him at the Window Pane,

Father,— don’t let him,— he’s behind

That shadow on the window blind,—”

In vain the anxious parents soothe,—

What can avail their useless Love?

“Darling, lie down again; don’t mind;

Branches are moving in the Wind.”

With panting Breath, with Eyes that stare,

Again she cries, “He’s there, he’s there!”

The frightened Parents look, aghast,

Is it that something really passed?

What is it that they seem to scan,

Ghost or Abstraction, Dream or Man?—

That long drawn Face, the cloven Lip,

The crooked Fingers all a-grip,

The sunken Face, cadaverous,

The dress, Ah, God deliver us!

What awful Sacrilege is that?

The Choker and the Shovel Hat,

The Costume black and sinister,

The dress of God’s own minister!

What fiend could ever urge a Man

To personate a Clergyman!

The Father strides with angry fist

“Out, out! you damned Economist!”

His wife restrains his threatening Paw,—

“William, it’s economic Law!”

She shrieks,— “Oh William! don’t you know

The Geometric Ratio?—

William, God means it for the best

Our Darling’s taken! we’ve transgressed— ”

And crying, “Two times two makes four,”

She crashes swooning to the Floor.

And when her Senses come again

Janie had passed from mortal Pain

And scowling Malthus had moved on

Murm’ring, “That’s one more Infant gone,”

To other Windows, one by one;—

Later he came and took their Son.

With Jane and John gone, out of seven,

They kept at five and just broke even.

“Mary,” the chastened Father said,

“I feel God’s wisdom; two are dead

The world has only food for five,

Quintuplets are the thing that thrive.”

She sobbed,— “We’ll do it if we can!

But, oh that awful Malthus Man.”

Such is the tale, we have it straight from Wordsworth’s pious Pen

He happened to be out, not late, just after sunset, when

He met a little cottage Girl, she was eight years old, (she said),

Her Hair was thick, he saw, with Curls that clustered on her Head;

And he recalls in pious Verse the Interview she gave

While sitting eating Porridge on her Sister Janie’s Grave,

Reciting with her Baby Voice and placid Infant’s Breath

The orthodox complacent Thought on pauper Children’s death;

And thus the plump and happy Child, her Belly full of food,

Drowsy with Sunset Porridge smiled,— the World was pretty good.

With her little Belly fully

Satisfied, her Mind got woolly;

She was just like all the rest

Couldn’t stand an acid Test,

Took her thoughts too near the Place

Where Digestion had its Base.

What the Child mistook for Knowledge

Just fresh air and lots of Porridge,—

Here is where Biology

Moves into Ontology.

But Willie, Willie Wordsworth, if again you walk the Street

Just meet a little Cottage Girl, and get the thing complete.

You’ll find her just as charming as a Child upon a Grave,

And her Hair in Curl is permanent with what she calls a Wave.

She needs no babbling Innocence, no baby Words to show,

The danger spots of little Tots in moving Ratio.

That population is a Thing that all the world must shun,

She’ll show you as a Theorem in Economics One,—

At least until four years ago, when all the World went crack

And all the world got overfed, and all the World got slack.

And by the Bump we call the Slump, Production’s Force was torn

And Coffee Beans went up in Flames beside ungathered Corn

And Melons floated out to Sea and Hogs were left unborn,

And beer rolled down the Tennessee and California Wine

Was used as Blood for Hollywood, and Rye thrown in the Rhine

And Super-Products in a Stack,—

But stop, a bit, we must turn back.

Turn back to Malthus as he walked o’er English Fields and Downs

And walked at night the crooked Streets of crooked English Towns,

Lifeless, undying, Shade or Man, as one that could not die

A hundred years his Shadow fell, a hundred Years to lie,

The Shadow on the Window Pane when Malthus’ Ghost went by.

He chuckled as he passed at night God’s Acre filled with Dead;

The little Graves were packed as tight as Paupers in a Bed.

But he never heard the little wings that rustled overhead,

Or heard the Voices in the Air

Of unborn Souls lamenting there.

He wandered in the Summer Lanes when all the World was green,

And he never heard the Wedding Bells of Brides that might have been,

Tall English Flowers that drooped and fell and withered on the stem,

Victims of Malthus’ evil Spell,— what should he know of them?

In rustled Silk and Lavender the Garden Path they trod

And listened where the Hollyhocks and tall Delphiniums nod,

And whisper to the blushing Face behind the Bonnet hid,

Of Wedding Bells that were to ring,— that were, but never did.

And he never knew the empty Homes with angry Quarrels rent,

He never knew the blighted Souls, out of their Nature bent,

The blighted life of Man and Wife where Children are not sent,

And Love’s Illusion wears away

And Single Self comes back to stay.

He scowled to see the Working Class was disobedient still,

The teaching that the Gentry grasped was lost on Jane and Bill,

And round the Slum

The Children come,

As Children ever will.

In vain upon the Brain of Jane and Bill was cast the Thought

That Hope of Social Gain was nil and Poverty their lot,

That social Betterment could not

Permit a Baby in the Cot.

“All right,” says Bill, “we’ll have them still,”

And Jane she said, “Whoi not?”

“I likes to see ’em, reverend sir,

A crawling round, and so does her;

We’re not like Gentry Folks, you see,

There ain’t much else for her and me.”

And all the while the World roared on, each Decade passing by,

Machine and Power and glowing Sun to Malthus gave the Lie.

The silly Pedants could not see

Man’s Food grows faster far than he.

The Wheat Plant easily can grow

A hundred grains per Seed

Three times a year, what, Baker, Ho!

How much is it you need?

One Buckwheat Pancake, only one,

Swells in three months to half a ton.

The Barley of a single Year

Would turn the Rhine to Lager Beer.

The oyster with a million Lives,

If each potential Oyster thrives,

As with Encouragement they do,

Can turn the World to Oyster Stew,

Our social Future only wants

Bigger and Brighter Restaurants.

Thus from a hundred dusty Chairs in dusty Schools of Thought,

Professors’ talks with Boards and Chalks the Work of Malthus taught,

Explained the social Danger hid

In each superfluous extra Kid.

Each Decade as it moved along

Rehearsed the wearisome Sing Song.

“When Numbers on Subsistence press then Wages cannot rise,

Humanity is in Distress because it multiplies.

No hope of social Betterment can ever be made good

Because the Wicked Working Class will eat up all the Food.

So if the Poor are here to stay

We need not worry anyway,

And Patati et Patata

And Quack, quack, quack, and there you are!”

With every Decade more and more two Giant Forms were seen

To stride across the Universe as Power and as Machine,

And little Man beside them ran, knee-high he ran between,

All ignorant he was of why,

Or what these Things might mean.

Their Eyes of Brass, their Arms of Steel,

That Grip and Drive the Plunging Wheel,

That tear the Forest, burst the Soil,

And make the cloven Ocean boil,

Turn the white torrent’s foaming Might

To strike with Death or blaze with Light.

— What is the meaning, Little Man,

And have you got your little Plan?

“Ask teacher?” My dear sir, alack!

Your Teacher only says, “Quack, quack.”

Thus forward drove the World, divorced from any one Control,

Each Man might grasp a little Part, no man could view the Whole.

The Giants drove it like the Wind

And Little Man clung on behind,

Picture of Terror and Despair

His Coat Tails flying in the Air.

Faster and faster, on they sped,

Machine and Power went mad, saw red,

On Little Man fell their Attack

And smashed his World to Bric-a-brac,—

Broke it with War and at its Cease,

They turned and broke it worse with Peace,

Broke it with overwork, and then, with myriads of Workless Men;

Starved it with Want, then changed their Clutch and choked the World with Overmuch.

And when their Rage had spent its Shocks,

Left little Man upon the Rocks

Of Economic Paradox.

His mournful Face and weeping Eyes

Look on his World in mild Surprise,

See Milk on the Potomac roll

And milkless Children on the Dole,

A crazy World it seems, grotesque,

Where all his Theory is Burlesque,

All jig-saw Bits,

Where nothing Fits

So there he sits

Bereft of Wits,—

And murmurs through his little Hat,

“Will someone tell me where I’m at?”

Start once again, O Little Man!

Remember, when you first began,

What a determined Cuss you were

And how your Efforts made a Stir;

Recall again through Time’s dim haze

The dear old Neolithic Days!

With bed-room Exercise your Shape

You raised above the Common Ape.

You muttered to yourself, “They’ll see!

There’s no Ourang-Outang in me.”

You practised every manual Trick,—

Like how to use a pointed Stick,

Bent down a Bough and let it go

And grasped the notion of a Bow.

Deep-seated in a Cocoa-tree,

You learned to count as far as three;

Moved into Theory, went higher,

And saw that Heat was got from Fire.

You did not know it, but you were

The first Research Professor, sir,

Contained, within your hairy Body,

A noble Rutherford or Soddy.

Nay,— what is more,— your Lot was rude

But showed the College attitude,

You made it an unswerving Rule

To disregard the Common Fool,

You overlooked the silly chaff

Of Laughing Jackass, gay Giraffe,

You heeded not the caustic Smile

Of Dinosaur or Crocodile,

Passed undisturbed the Ridicule

Of comic Crow or haw-haw Mule,—

In short, in Culture’s earliest Span

You acted like an Oxford Man.

Their Idleness soon proved their Loss;

You made yourself Creation’s Boss

Do it again,— see what I mean?—

Come Little Man! Beat the Machine.

You that the Pterodactyl slew,—

Show this new Demon who is who!

And first you have to throw away

The stuff that led you all astray.

Numbers are not the Bane of Man

And numbers never yet outran,—

... Go think it out; I’m sure you can.

For want and Poverty may come to empty Prairie, crowded Slum,—

Enough, enough— it’s quite enough,

Get rid of all the Malthus Stuff.—

Let’s seek the Shade of Malthus out from where he walks at Night,

And bring him up for Punishment,— It certainly seems right;

He that misled a hundred Years Man’s Footsteps from his Path,—

That turned our Household Joy to Tears,— how shall he feel our Wrath?

Shall boiling Oil reduce his Flesh to Chicken à la King,

Would molten Lead upon his Head be pretty much the Thing?

Ah, no! not bye-gone Cruelty his erring Soul shall harry,

We’ll fit the Punishment to Crime, make Mr. Malthus marry.

Ho! Reverend Robert, come and doff

That cleric suit; yes, take it off,—

Nay, never mind the leather Face

The faded parchment skin,

Come, stand up, Robert, chuck a Brace,

Another life begin!

We’ll dress him all in Love’s Attire our great grandfathers knew

As one who led a Bride to wed the Year of Waterloo.

Behold the Sandy Beaver Hat, the Sandy-coloured Suit

The gorgeous Vest, the high Cravat, the glowing Hessian Boot!

Enormous Buttons, made of Horn,

Our Wedding Bridegroom shall adorn.

O! Hear the Bells— that ring Ding, Dong,

For Malthus Euthalameon,

Pop-u-la-tion for the Na-tion

Spells and tells its long sal-va-tion.

Now hold the Chime a little Time,

Malthus, the ringers stand beside

And let us go and bring the Bride.

She stands upon the Garden Path where she was wont to tread,

Eternal flowers, that know not Death, still nod beside her head.

In rustled Silk and Lavender, a hundred Years alone,

Is it in Truth a Maiden’s Form, or withered Frame of Bone?

Seek not the hooded Face to scan where hides the drooping Head

Perchance the Curls lie damp upon the Features of the Dead;

Perchance in place of glowing Life, now desiccated, null,

Earth’s final Parody of Love, the Simpering of a Skull.

Or Maid, or Ghost, or Pictured Fate

Let her be what she may,

We bring her forth to join her Mate

This Golden Wedding Day.

Moving before us,

Singing in Chorus,

Golden and Glorious,

Time honoured Lay,

Of wearing a Bonnet,

A blue ribbon on it,

On a Golden Wedding Day.

Bring on the same old Thesis

Of how Man Increases

As the Clover Blossoms blow.

And we’ll sing such Pieces

Till we get Paresis

And we go where Ratios go.

For if Man increases

If he never, never ceases

If he never, never says, “Go Slow!”

If he will not let the Pop-stop

Why then, ergo, there’s a drop-stop

But it’s all right — Let er — go.

(music dies away)

TOC     INDEX

Meet Mr. Wegg, Banker

The Hickonomic
Theory of Banking

In the drama of economic history the banker was always the villain of the piece. In his early out-of-door days in Italy, angry citizens at times smashed up his “banco” or “bench” and made him a “bankrupt.” This didn't stop him. He moved indoors and kept a strong-box. Mediaeval Kings pulled out his teeth and boiled him in oil,—or at any rate boiled his fellow-craftsman, the counterfeiter. But that didn't stop him either. He now has false teeth and boils the public in oil. That at least is the view of such high authorities as my old friend and one-time colleague, Professor Frederick Soddy. He and others hold that the banker in “coining credit” defrauds the public of what belongs to society at large. Personally I don’t see it: as witness here below.

.  .  .  .  .

You may have heard of Silas Wegg,—

The Man who had the wooden Leg,

Eh, What?

Yes, yes,— in one of Dickens’ Books,—why not?

One of those most attractive Crooks

For whom we hanker,—

Really,—Though Dickens didn’t know it,

But presently I mean to show it,—

Wegg was a Banker.

Wegg at a Table by the Street

Beneath a green Umbrella,

Some Straw to Warm his Foot (not Feet),

Sold Bills of Sale, Forms of Receipt

And Ballad Music by the Sheet

Poor Fellow!

Little he’d need his Trade to serve,—

A Book and Pencil,

An empty Box marked “Cash Reserve”

In home-made Stencil;

Mark “Debit” here and “Credit” there

As Taste and Fancy might declare,

“Loans” to the left, “Deposits” right,

Wegg’s Books would balance every Night

Should any ready Cash come of it,

Then take it out and call it “Profit.”

.  .  .  .  .

Now could you just imagine this,—

That’s all a Banker really is!

Ask Frederick Soddy: He affirms

A Banker, in his lowest Terms,

Is just a Sort of Silas Wegg;

He may not have a wooden Leg,—

A new Analogy will serve

He has to have an Iron Nerve.

But all he does is take a Pen

Write Entries in and out again,

In fact, the way that Soddy said it

The Banker is “Creating Credit”;

Just as the Bee secretes its Honey

The Banker sits secreting Money.

A Banker really would be able

To work like Wegg with just a table,

Or like those Men you often see

Work with Three Thimbles and a Pea.

Let’s fancy how the Thing might be

In pure Imagination, we

The Abstract Banker now will see,

The Scene of all Externals rob

With just the Banker on his Job.

Sneak up and watch his furtive Poise . . .

Step gently, Soddy, gently, boys!

The Fellow hears the slightest noise.

He sits there in his tall silk Hat,

A great big Ledger laid out flat,

A rounded Glass beside him set

With which to magnify a debt,

An Ink Eraser, short and stout

For rubbing a Deposit out,

Ink and a lovely “Banker’s” Pen

With which to write it in again.

Soddy, you guessed it when you said it!

Hush! Watch him now, He’s “coining Credit.”

He doesn’t see us! Hold your Breath!

Look past his Arm and Underneath,—

See that last Flourish where he joined it,

The Thing is done! By George! He’s coined it

Oh, what a Crook the Fellow is!

Soddy, do come and look at this!

See what he did? He wrote in “Loan,”—

Made out, you see, That was his own,—

“Deposit” next,—deposit what?

They owed him what they never got!

Now if they go to cash a cheque,

The next Man gets it in the Neck.

No Juggler with an easier Air

Plucks half a dollar from your Hair;

No Juggler from his empty Hat

Takes out a Rabbit just like that!

And is it possible you say

That’s all a Bank is anyway.

Soddy, you think

It’s all just Ink?

There is no doubt that long ago

That’s all a Banker was, you know.

In Sunny Italy he sat,

He didn’t even need a Hat.

He just laid out his little Stall

In Venice by the Grand Canal,

His “banca” (bench) from morn till dark

By the Cathedral of St. Mark,

And all around him and above

Coo’d the Cathedral turtle Dove.

Thus early had he caught the Sense

Of gaining public Confidence.

A simple Stock in Trade he had,

A mediaeval writing Pad,

A Pergamentum Parchment Pile,

A pointed Stylus, just for Style,

Cash in a Bowl, all chipped and worn,

And paper Money badly torn,

Round Counters, very soiled and sorry,

Like Sales-Tax Milk Tops in Missouri.

The simple Folk, unused to sharks

Around St. Marks, were easy Marks;

He worked it like a Poker game

And Heads and Tails were all the same.

But though he did the Public up

They sometimes turned and yelled, “You Pup,”

“You stole our money and you gotta

Quitta de Biz, you’re banca rotta,—”

They break his Bench, his Cash Corral

And throw him in the Grand Canal.

He hit the water with a Splash,—

That was the first financial Crash.

But Bankers, Gentile both or Jew

Soon got to know a thing or two;

Their place was not the Open Air,

Their Business was not on the Square.

In fact, they realized their Trade

Did so much better in the Shade!

The Banker,—it is not his Fault,—

Needs first of all a first-class Vault

It is a Rule that Bankers shall

Keep right away from a Canal.

Nay more than that,—they found the Sense

Of all Mankind lives on Pretence,

Loves Dignity and Form and Style,

A Temple and a Stately Pile.

Man cannot stand upon his own,

Must fortify himself in Stone,

Express himself in Urn and Bust

In spite of Gray, I say he must.

No Disbelief his soul can smirch

If he erects an A.1. Church,

And indicates his moral Rank

With Marble Columns on a Bank.

Stable and strong his Life is set

On a broad Base of bonded Debt.

More still, the man of Station knows

He has to have the proper Clothes.

Alone among Creation’s press

Man is the only one needs Dress.

The noble Horse that strikes the Plain,

Regards its Saddle with Disdain,

No string of Pearls, no Diadem,

Is needed for the Barnyard Hen,

But man without Meticulous

Attire is just ridiculous.

And most the Banker’s Obligation

To dress to indicate his station,

With confidence the World inspire

By the bon ton of his Attire,

In flowing Tweed his Form disguise

And trim a Van Dyke beard to size.

With this Apology, we may

Turn to the Banker of Today.

The Poet says he knows a Bank whereon the wild Thyme grows,

Embedded in a Sea of blue, the Periwinkle blows,

And every Air that wanders there is scented by the Rose.

But let him keep his fragrant Heap of Foliage if he will,

His Bank I find a trifle rank: I know a better still.

I know a Bank and where it is, I do not care to say,

Tall, Grecian columns are its Face, a Church across the way,

Narrow and clean in the Street between anti dark at the Noon of Day.

The precincts know no heavier Noise

Than the muffled Roll of a rolling Royce,

All baser Traffic, under a Fine

Forbidden by a Traffic Sign.

No garish Sunlight penetrates where

The left is Money, the right is Prayer.

Here only have their Habitat

The Pauper and the Plutocrat.

The Poor pass in on the right to pray

The Rich on the left pass in to pay.

The Poor through a Portal wide and High,

And the Rich through a Door like a Needle’s Eye.

From the Church the sound of the Organ floats

In a golden flood of its Liquid Notes,

From the bank there flows no musical Tide

The Floating of Notes is all done inside.

Inside the bank is a wide, wide Aisle,

The Guide Book calls it a “Peristyle”;

And after You pass through that you come

To a pillared Hall called the Atrium;

The Guide Book says that the Freseoes on

The ceiling recall the Parthenon;

So lofty the Hall, so dim the Light

The Ceiling is almost out of Sight,

So still, so calm it is, they say

That at Times the Folk from across the Way,

By accident wander in to pray.

The Bank permits it,— in Fact is glad,—

A thing like that is a splendid Ad.

I am standing here in the Atrium, how wide it is and high,

Counter and cage around its Edge in one vast horseshoe lie,

And Footsteps o’er the Flagstone Floor fall echoless to die.

Noiseless the People seem to glide

From Desk to Counter to stand beside

The courtly Tellers who bend their Necks

To Plutocrat Dowagers signing Cheques,

Courtly Tellers all spick and span,

And everyone a Gentleman;

While farther back under Lights of green,

The Ledger Keepers are dimly seen

You know what they’re doing,—ask anybody

Who's read the Works of Professor Soddy.

They're busy with that contemptible trick

Which is known as Banker’s Arithmetic.

With Credit and Debit in Ink expressed

And Nothing from Nothing leaves Interest.

A watchful Attendant is prowling around, grizzled and hard and grim,

No Bandit would stand it, I'll be bound, to get in a Fight with him;

For the Ribbon adorning his Uniform’s Edge,

I rather suspect is a Privilege

That he got at the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

Nay, honest Vimy, eye me not,

I’m restless, yes, but I’ll tell you what,

My Business here in the Bank, I own,
ls to ask for a Thousand Dollar Loan.

D’you think they’ll lend it? They must have got it.

They’re waiting, I understand, to “allot it.”

But Soddy says all they have to do

Is coin it,— Vimy, d’you think it’s true?

And with this an Assistant with courteous Bow,

“Mr. Midas Wegg, sir, will see you now.”

Behind Mahogany and Teak sits Mr. Midas Wegg

Courteous and Debonair and sleek, he needs no Wooden Leg,

The whole Environment makes good with heavy Leather, polished Wood,

And panelled Walls with just a Hint

Of Acquarelle or Mezzotint.

No vulgar Signs of Common Toil

The polished Table’s Surface spoil.

A pointed Pencil laid out straight

Beside a marble Paper-weight,

A sage green Blotter, which, I think

Has never seen a Spot of Ink,

And Daffodil and Violet

In front of Midas Wegg are set.

No titled sovereign, I confess,

Exceeds the Banker’s courtliness.

I really cannot fancy how

A King could make a statelier Bow,

Or say with a more gracious Tone

“The Bank will entertain your Loan.”

Just think,—how easily it’s done!

I’m back within the Atrium,

Thrilled with Emotion, I must own,—

The Bank has entertained my Loan!

No Entertainment that I know,

No Comedy or Minstrel show,

My Sense of Fun so well sustains,

As when a Banker entertains!

I stand there dreaming all alone,—

The Bank has entertained my loan!

Then breaks upon my inner Sight

The Thought, Is Frederick Soddy right?

It sounds too simple,—I am sure

There must be, must be something more.

For Midas, writing my account

Can “coin” me any God’s amount.

Can write with Ink and call it “Loan”

But can he write it for his own?

Of course he can’t! Could Silas Wegg,

The real one with the wooden leg,——

By writing with his Pencil Stub

Enrich himself,—ah! there’s the Rub.

The banker lends, but at the best

All that he gets is Interest.

He coins the public Credit, serves it,

Gets Interest and well deserves it.

And at that thought a sudden Flash of future Visions rise,

And What may happen later on, appears before my Eyes.

Suppose from angry Argument, from bitter Social Hate,

Wild social Revolution starts,—-too late, alas, too late,—

The Demons you are raising now you cannot then abate,

Suppose, suppose the Bank went down in Fire and Flame and Smoke

The day that on that peaceful Town, fierce Revolution broke.

With shouts of Fury an angry scum

Of People have stormed the Atrium;

The vision rises before the Eye

Tellers in Cages, who fight and die

Not debonair but fierce with Rage,—

Then Tangled and Dead across the Cage,

And Vimy Ridge dies where he stood

Grim and grizzled and smeared with Blood.

The Bank has been rifled high and low

It’s the PEOPLE’S TREASURY now, you know;

The Ledgers are scattered and thrown away

What need for ledgers? the PEOPLE say,

Where each owns all and may take what he may.

In the noisy Atrium now there floats

The acid smell of the Sheepskin Coats,

The Flagstones are coated still with Mud

That no one cleans, and with Stains of blood.

In the Sanctum Room the Rulers are,

There’s Ilyitch the Commissar,

Smoking a heavy black cigar,

And Heiny the Halfwit, worse by far.

Ilyitch the Commissar,—heavy boots all mud,

Ilyitch the Commissar,—features cut from wood,

Ilyitch the Commissar with a mind misled,

Born for a devoted Serf, made a Boss instead,

Ilyitch the Commissar, hand as is an iron Bar

With a Hand of Lead

But in war fearless,

And to pain tearless,

And underneath a smothered Fire

Of what was once a righteous ire.

And with him Heiny the Halfwit sits,

As cruel as only can be half wits,

A Thing with a watery weak blue Eye

And slithering Features all awry,

Contemptible and treacherous,

And underneath all lecherous,—

Such Things may revolution spue

To govern some day me and you.

Heaped on the Table all the while

Is greasy Money in a Pile,

Uncounted cash from Vault and Store,—

“Come take it, Brother, here, take more!”

For the Brothers yes,—but for others what?—

The scourge, the dungeon,—picture their Lot.

.  .  .  .  .

And with that the Vision breaks and is fled

I am back in the Atrium,—no one’s dead,

A teller, still living and debonair,

Hands me a cheque book all unaware,

But old Vimy Ridge has a questioning Stare.

And the Customers slide and move and glide

Ah, good old World! let me back inside.

Soddy, you’re wrong, It isn’t so!

The Banker gives us a Quid pro Quo

Mr. Midas, shake! you’re the Real Stuff

—Well, another Thousand, would be enough.

TOC     INDEX

Finale

A Resurrection
of Adam Smith

Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is generally understood to have started the modern science of political economy. It is time that he was called up to answer for it.

.  .  .  .  .

Adam, Adam, Adam Smith,

Listen what I charged you with!

Didn’t you say

In the class one day

That selfishness was bound to pay?

Of all your Doctrine, that was the Pith,

Wasn’t it, wasn’t it, wasn’t it, Smith?

Don’t you remember your book begins

With a Panegyric on making Pins?

Didn’t you say that the more we made

The bigger would be External Trade?

We sold the pins and the Foreigners had ’em,

That was the Big Thought, wasn’t it, Adam?

And didn't you say,—don’t think it funny,

That the greatest thing in the world was money,

And didn’t you say,—now please don’t shirk,

That the basis of value was human work,

And the Worker must be content with his lot

Being worth precisely just what he got.

Come don’t evade it,

Long-winded Scot,

Just, whether you said it

Or whether not?

And if you said it, you must confess

You have brought the World to a terrible Mess,

For a hundred Years since your Grave was made

We’ve been making Pins and Machines and Trade,

All selfish as Hogs, whether rich as Sin

Or as poor as Rats,—Ah! why begin

To teach us about that fatal Pin!

How can you venture to look in the Face

Of an honest fellow like Stuart Chase?

How can you dare to be blocking the way

Of an Enterprise such as the NRA!

Smith, come up from under the sod

Tell me what did you do with God?

You never named him, I understand,

You called him (Book IV) an invisible hand;

You gave him the system all geared and speeded

With none of his Interference needed.

It wasn’t worthy a man of your size,

Smith,—come up and apologize.

TOC     INDEX

An Educational Appendix

(For Those Who Can Read It
and Care To)

I present these Hickonomic Verses, not merely as a study in political economy, but, in all modesty, as a study in educational method. They are meant to illustrate that mode of learning by means of the imagination which is beginning to play such a large part in the college curriculum of today. I am thinking here of the brilliant work that is being done in teaching students of English the beauty of our literature and drama, by having them undertake a creative effort of their own. The real key to interpretation and appreciation lies in that. We are moved and stimulated to understanding far more by our imagination than by our intellect: more even than by our self-interest.

I have lived long enough in colleges,—half a century,—to have seen each of these principles in operation. The old disciplinary curriculum was hard and stern, training the mind. The practical, and optional, curriculum that replaced it invited the student to learn how to do the very things that he was going to have to do to earn his living; and now, dawning and expanding, is the light of a newer idea,—the allurement of the artistic impulse, the awakening of the creative instinct, which, once aroused, moves of itself, asking no reward.

No educational program could be based solely on any one, or any two, of these underlying principles. It must use them all in their degree. But the higher ideal lies with the last one.

When I entered college half a century ago, the curriculum was almost entirely disciplinary. It aimed at training the mind—not to do any particular thing but to learn afterwards with ease any particular thing it had to do.

Any of my classmates who had been trained in Greek syntax, could easily learn how to keep books in a laundry. Many of them did. The old curriculum was hard and uncompromising. It did not so much train men to live as fit them to die. In fact it killed some of them right in college.

That was the trouble with it. It was too hard, too disciplinary. It often defeated its own end. It did not have in it a sufficient element of fancy, of diversion, of creative effort. In point of sheer fun, it never got further than the occasional framing of Latin Hexameter verses, or a six line acrostic on Milton’s genius. We did, about once every twenty years, put on a Greek play in the original Greek, as laborious as the gestation of a female elephant bringing forth its offspring once in half a century. The Greek play was printed in Greek and in English and followed by the audience in a book. They got the book free or they wouldn’t have come. It took three years to rehearse the play, seven years to recover from it and ten years to revive it. Night after night and week after week, the students of the old disciplinary curriculum stayed in their little boarding-house bedrooms, working at their books with midnight oil long past midnight. The pace was too hard. Once in about every two months, they broke loose, paraded the streets shouting, Rah! Rah! Rah! College! drank about one cubic foot of beer per student, upset a horse car and then went home,— sated.

A saving grace of the old curriculum was the existence of the College MagazineCollege Magazine, not the roaring Daily of today, but a magazine of the old sort, not giving the news but printing translations of Catullus and essays on Oliver Cromwell. Every now and then the magazine helped to create, or rather, to hatch a poet.

After that, at about the end of the old century, began and spread the new idea of a practical curriculum. It is supposed to teach people how to do the very things they are going to have to do. It has been in existence now for over a quarter of a century as a chief element in the college program. I regard it as very largely a failure. It undertakes to train college men exactly in the way in which men who don’t go to college get trained. It substitutes four years in college for one in a workshop. Here belongs in great part, as now taught, the subject of Political Economy, compelled by the outside pressure of mass demand to convert itself into a vade mecum of business. Here belongs a great part of what goes with Schools of Commerce— which are admirable things in so far as they keep away from Commerce.

But the life of the practical college student has at least been adorned with all sorts of amenities on the side. His “practical” life has led him into a wilderness of college “activities,” college “politics” and organizations. He is as busy as a committee man, as powerful as a labour delegate, as self-important as a city alderman. Moreover he has with him his “co-eds,”—who entered the university so modestly and so coyly under the old disciplinary curriculum and helped to smash it all to pieces. So the “practical” student with his co-eds lives in a garden of flowers, a very Ispahan of hanging gardens. No midnight oil for him. He prefers to burn gasoline. His busy life turns him out an active, efficient, wide-awake citizen. But in his soul the more delicate flowers of learning have withered at the root. The little poet dies on the first year benches.

Now, as I say, is coming a newer time, or rather a new influence, blown into the college atmosphere like invigorating oxygen. This consists in the re-invocation of the spirit of creative imagination as the mainspring of education,—such as it was in the twilight of civilization. There is no doubt that truth can reach us best if it comes with an emotional appeal. Mothers who teach little children instinctively give everything a personal and imaginative twist. They do not say that two and two make four, but suggest that John has two peaches and Tom has two peaches,—and with that a swelling emotionalism is set up that makes addition easy. The mothers do not know it but they are repeating the history of the human race. This is seen in the early Hindu Arithmetic—that led Europe in point of symbolic calculation, a thing the Greeks never understood. All the “problems” in the Hindu text book have a queer slant of imaginative fancy. Thus a sum in multiplication runs something like this:—

“Oh! sacred cow, musing beside the River in the pasture, tell me how think’st thou ten would multiply with five?” Even more striking is the attempt of the Hindu Mathematician to put into Arithmetic a sort of amorous element or what the French now call “le sex-appeal.” Thus. “I have given thee, O Fair One, eight kisses already: If I add seven more, how many is that?” It is probable that many girls would feel that they would get along faster on the Hindu system than they do now.

Compare this. Euclid says, “Parallel straight lines produced ever so far both ways will not meet.” This is good, —bold, striking and final. But Rudyard Kipling beat it when he said, “But East is East and West is West and never the Twain shall meet.” There is a yearning, unfulfilled desire there that Euclid did not grasp, which conveys by emotion a drearier infinity than Euclid’s lines could do. Similarly Einstein has said in opposition to Euclid. “Parallel lines if produced far enough must finally meet.” But if he were capable of saying it with a touch of imagination how much more convincingly would it reach our minds. Thus “Parallel lines if produced far enough, must sooner or later, like lovers long separated, come together in the end.” No sympathetic mind could miss the appeal of that.

But this new transfusion of creative vigour into learning, in which even mathematics may share, would seem at first almost impossible for Political Economy. Here is an obstinate and crabbed science, living on facts and figures, untouched by imagination. Worse than that, it is now crippled and discredited with controversy. It has become the snarling sister of the sciences, living on argument. It knows nothing of the reverend senility of Philosophy, the outcome of two thousand years of thought: nothing of the chattering femininity of Language: nothing of the austere dignity of mathematical truth, as calm and unmoving as the polar sky.

Yet political economy must alter or perish. It needs, if it is to be reformed and reconstructed, the vivifying touch of warm imagination. The ossifying frame of Economics needs a Pygmalion to wake to life the Galatea that was once a living form; or shall I put it more simply and say, It has got to be louder and funnier? This Hickonomics book is an attempt to open the locked door behind which economic scholasticism is drowsing into final oblivion, and to let in a new current of life.

FINIS

Model Memoirs
and Other Sketches
from Simple to Serious

(1938)

~

Preface

Model Memoirs

My Victorian Girlhood
Through Arabia on a Mule
Up and Down Downing Street
So This Is the United States
The Criminal Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte

Model Monologues

Mrs. Uplift Betters Society
Mrs. Newrich Buys Antiques
Mrs. Eiderdown Roughs It in the Bush
Mrs. Easy Has Her Fortune Told

The Dissolution of Our Dinner Club
How Teachers Swim
How to Lose Money
The Familiar Magic of Fishing
Overworking the Alphabet
On the Need for a Quiet College
Removal Problem Solved
Turn Back the Clock
Quality Does It
Come Out into the Garden
All Nice People
The Anatomy of Gloom
A Dip into Psychology
Then and Now
Thrown Out
What I Read Then; What You Read Now
Feeding Time
Hand Me Down that Book
Who Knows It?
How Much Does Language Change?
How Far Can We Plan?
College as Comic Stuff
All Is Not Lost!

Preface

Many of the memoirs and sketches in the present volume have already appeared in print. My thanks are due to the editors who so kindly received them and, with equal kindness, set them free again.

The Model Monologues in the book are constructed as radio sketches, two of them, as marked in the text, being made over from stories in my other books and the others written expressly as radio monologues.

I am aware that parts of this volume may be found offensively serious, and can only plead the influence of advancing years.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

McGill University

November 1938

Model Memoirs

–1–
My Victorian Girlhood

By
LADY NEARLEIGH SLOPOVER

The life we led at Gloops – Gloops was my father’s seat – had all the charm and quiet and order which went with life in my young days. My dear Papa (he was the eleventh Baron Gloops) was most strict in his household. As a nobleman of the old school, he believed fully in the maxim noblesse oblige. He always insisted on the servants assembling for prayers at eight every morning. Indeed his first question to his own man when he brought up his brandy and soda at ten was whether the servants had been at prayers at eight.

My dear Mama, too, always seemed to fulfil my idea of what a grande dame should be. She fully understood the routine of a great house like Gloops, and had a wonderful knowledge, not only of the kitchen, but of all sorts of draughts, simples and samples and the use of herbs. If any of the maids were ill, Mama never called a doctor but herself mixed up a draught from roots that would have the girl on her feet in half an hour.

Nor did she disdain to do things herself, especially in an emergency. Once when Papa was taken faint in the drawing-room, Mama herself rang the bell for an egg, told the butler to hand her a glass and a decanter and herself broke the egg into the glass with her own hands. Papa revived at the sight of her presence of mind and himself reached for the brandy.

To myself and my younger sister Lucy, Papa and Mama were ideal parents. Never a day passed but Papa would either come up to our nursery himself, and chat with our governess Mademoiselle Fromage – she was one of the De Bries – or would at least send up his own man to ask how we were. Even as quite little girls Papa could tell us apart without difficulty.

Mama too was devoted to us, and would let us come down to her boudoir and see her all dressed to go out to dinner, or let us come and speak to her, when she was ready to drive in the phaeton; and once when Lucy was ill Mama sent her own maid to sleep in Lucy’s room, in spite of the infection.

Gloops was on the border of Lincolnshire. All of Papa’s tenants and cottagers spoke with the beautiful old broad accent of the fen country and said “yowp” for “yes,” and “nowp” for “no,” and “thowp” for “thou,” and “sowp” for “soup.” It seems so musical. It is a pity it is dying out.

Papa was a model landlord. The tenantry were never evicted unless they failed to pay their rent, and when the cottages fell down Papa had them propped up again. Once a year Papa gave a great ball for the tenantry on his estate, and our friends used to drive long distances to be there, and the great hall was cleared for dancing, for the gentry, and the tenantry danced in the great barn. Papa gave each of them a bun and an orange and a prayer book for each child. The working class was happier, I think, in those days.

Papa was not only democratic in that way with his tenantry but also with the people of the neighbourhood and of the village, though none of them were gentlemen. Quite often he would bring Dr. McGregor the doctor of the village to dine at Gloops, I mean if no one else was there. Dr. McGregor had taken a very high degree at Edinburgh, but was not a gentleman. He had travelled a great deal and had been decorated by the King of France for some wonderful medical work for the French armies in Algeria, so it was a pity that he wasn’t a gentleman: especially as you couldn’t tell that he wasn’t if no one said so.

Isolated as Gloops was, many great people drove down from London to see us, on account of Papa’s position in the Lords. Indeed the most wonderful thing about our life as children at Gloops was the visit every now and then of one of these great and distinguished people whose names are now history. How well one remembers them – such old-world manners and courtesy! I recall how Lucy and I were brought into the drawing-room to shake hands with dear old Lord Melrush, the Prime Minister – always so pleasant and jolly. I remember Mama said, “These are my two little girls” – and Lord Melrush laughed and said, “Well, thank God, they don’t look like their father, eh?” Which was really quite clever of him, because we didn’t. And I remember old Field-Marshal Lord Stickett, perhaps England’s greatest strategist – they called him Wellington’s right-hand man – he’d lost his left arm. I can still see him standing on the hearth-rug saying, “Your two little girls, ma’am: well, I don’t think much of them!” He was always like that, concise and abrupt.

I liked much better Admiral Rainbow, who had been one of Nelson’s captains and had a black patch over his eye where some one hit him in the face at Trafalgar. I was quite a growing girl when he came, fourteen at least, and he said, “By Gad! Madam, shiver my spankers, but here’s a gal for you! Look at the stern run under her counter!”

Another great thing in the life at Gloops was when I got old enough to dine with Mama and Papa and their guests. Such dinners were a wonderful education. I was taken into dinner once by Lord Glower the great archaeologist. He hardly spoke. I asked him if he thought the Pyramids were built by the Hittites. He said he didn’t know.

We used to dine in the old wainscotted dining-hall – it was a marvellous room, dating from Richard III, with the panels all worm-eaten almost to pieces. Papa was offered huge sums for them. It had some grand old paintings – one a Vandyke, so blackened you couldn’t possibly tell what it was, especially as most of the paint had fallen off: Papa later on presented it to the Nation – the year the Prime Minister voted him the Garter – refusing any pay for it, though the Prime Minister made him accept a thousand guineas as a solatium. Papa fetched down another Vandyke from the storeroom.

By the time I was eighteen I think I may claim to have grown to be a very handsome girl and certainly, as everybody said, very aristocratic looking. I was several times compared with the Princess Eulalie of Schlatz and once with the Grand Duchess Marianna Maria of Swig-Pilsener. Dear old Dr. Glowworm, our Vicar, who was so old that he remembered the French Revolution, said that if I had lived then, I would certainly have been guillotined, or at least shut up.

But presently there came into my life, a little earlier than that – I was eighteen – the greatest event of all, when I first met Alfred, my dear husband that was to be. It was at a great dinner party that Papa gave at Gloops, given for Sir John Overdraft, the head of the new bank that had just made Papa a director. Sir John was the head of the bank and had been knighted, but the strange thing was that he was really nobody. I mean he had made a great fortune in the City and had huge influence in finance, but he wasn’t anybody. And, what was more, everybody knew that he was nobody. Papa made no secret of it. I remember hearing old Lord Tweedlepip, our neighbour, in the drawing-room before dinner ask Papa who Sir John was and Papa said, “As far as I know, he isn’t anybody.” But in meeting with him Papa was courtesy itself: indeed he often explained to us children that even though prominent people – writers, painters, sculptors, for instance – were often nobody, we should treat them in society as if they were like ourselves.

It was such a large party that I can hardly remember all the people, especially as it was my first real dinner party: I was out, but hadn’t yet been presented. But there was one man there I especially noticed, although he was not only nobody but was an American. He was the first I think I ever saw, though now of course you meet them anywhere, and many of them such cultivated people that you can hardly tell them. But this man, the first American I saw, seemed different from the men around him, more hard and dangerous, and yet pleasant enough, but no manners. I couldn’t even be sure of his name because Papa and Sir John, who both seemed to know him well, kept calling him different things like “Old Forty-four Calibre,” and “old Ten-Spot.” His family seat was called Colorado and I gathered that he owned gold mines. I gathered all this because I happened to be near the library door, a little before dinner when Papa and Sir John and Mr. Derringer – that perhaps was his real name – were all talking together. Mr. Derringer wanted to give Papa an enormous part of a gold mine and then Papa was to pass it on to Sir John and the new bank was to pass it over to the public. It all seemed very generous. I heard Mr. Derringer say to Papa, laughing, “Gloops, if we had you in the States you would be sent to Sing-Sing in six months.” Sing-Sing it seems was a new place they had just started in America. It corresponds, Mama said, to our House of Commons. Mr. Derringer laughed when he said that Papa could get in, but I am sure he meant it.

But I am leaving out, in a feminine way, I fear, the great thing of the evening which was that it was dear Alfred, my later husband, who took me in to dinner. So wonderful he looked, over six feet high and as straight as a piece of wood, with beautiful brown hair and those handsome high side whiskers, the French call them cotelette de mouton, which were worn then. I had never seen him before and all that I knew of him was that his name was the Hon. Alfred Cyril Nancie Slopover, eldest son of the tenth Marquis of Slopover and Bath and that his people were West Country people, but very old and very good. His mother was a Dudd, which made her a first cousin of Lord Havengotteny.

Alfred, I say, took me in. We hardly spoke at dinner, because I think I was shy, and at any rate at our end of the table Mr. Derringer was telling Mama wonderful stories about hunting the wild papooses in Colorado, which must be fascinating, and how the Cactus Indians pursue the buffalo with affidavits, and we were all listening. But Alfred, though he never talked much, had that firm incisive way of saying things, just in a word, that sounds so final. For instance, after dinner when the men came into the drawing-room for tea, I said to Alfred, “Shall we go into the conservatory?” And he said, “Let’s.” And I said, “Shall we sit among the begonias?” and he said, “Rather!” and after a time I said, “Shall we go back to the drawing-room?” and he said, “Ah!” When we got back to the drawing-room, Mr. Derringer was still telling Mama of his wonderful adventures – indeed they were all listening.

It made me realize what a vast country America is. In fact I have always felt, and still feel, that some day it will have a great future. But that evening I could hardly listen to Mr. Derringer because my heart was beating so with happiness, as I felt certain that Alfred had fallen in love with me. He looked so noble, sitting there listening to Mr. Derringer, with his mouth half open, seeming to drink it all in. Now and again he would make such intelligent comments as when Mr. Derringer told about the easy social life in the West, and the lynching parties, and of how they invite even the negroes to them. And Alfred said, “Do they really!” He seemed that evening, in fact he always has seemed, so typically British, so willing to be informed.

Everybody was so loud in praise of Alfred next day. Tiptoeing round the house, because I did not think it dishonourable, I was able to hear such a lot of complimentary things about him. Mr. Derringer, who used a lot of those fascinating American expressions, taken from their machinery, called him a “complete nut,” and Lord John, who is so brusque and quick himself that he admires Alfred’s dreamy, poetical nature, said he seemed “only half there.” But think of my delight when a day or two later Alfred sent Mama a beautiful bouquet of roses from Slops, his father’s seat, and then a basket of hothouse grapes, and then, for Papa, a large fish, a salmon. Two weeks after that he wrote and definitely proposed to Papa, and Papa went up to London and saw the solicitors and accepted Alfred. It all seemed so romantic and wonderful, and then Alfred came over for a blissful week at Gloops as my betrothed, which meant that we could walk in the grounds together by ourselves, and that even in the drawing-room Mama would sit at the other end of the room and pretend not to see us.

Of course Love always has its ups and downs and never runs smooth: I remember that there was a dreadful quarrel with my sister Lucy who said that Alfred was ignorant and didn’t know anything: and I said why should he? What did a man like Alfred need to know? It seemed so silly. I remember I often thought of it later on when Lucy made her own unhappy marriage.

Then for a little while there was a little trouble about my dowry, or jointure. Papa at first offered five thousand pounds and Alfred refused it flat. He said he ought to have at least ten thousand. It seemed so romantic to be quarrelled over like that, as a sort of gage of battle. Alfred was so firm: even when Papa raised from pounds to guineas he held out. So at last Papa gave way completely, and not only gave way, but went generously further and gave Alfred twelve thousand pounds, all to be paid in shares in Mr. Derringer’s gold mine. Papa explained that they were called “preferred” shares, which made them very desirable. He said that if Alfred and I kept them long enough there was no telling what they would be worth. So Alfred was delighted at his victory over Papa, especially as Sir John always said that Papa could have been a financier and Mr. Derringer had said he could have got into Sing-Sing.

I remember that Papa, in the same generous fit, gave away a lot of the same gold shares, practically all he had, to various people, to Alfred’s father, Lord Slopover, to old Lord Tweedlepip, our neighbour, and others, for next to nothing, or at least nothing like their real value.

Then came the happy day when Alfred and I were married in the little church at Gloops, by old Dr. Glowworm. Everybody was there, and all the tenantry and cottagers in a long line outside the church, for Alfred and me to walk through; and Papa gave a grand fête for the tenantry on the lawn with beer to drink our health in and an orange and bun for each of the children, and a work-box for each grown-up girl, a work-basket each for the old women, and for each young boy a book called Work. I think the working people were far happier then than now. They often strike me now as restless. I think they need more work.

After our marriage we went to live in London because the Prime Minister wanted Alfred to go into the House, as he said that England needed men like Alfred. Alfred accepted the seat, but on the firm condition that he needn’t speak, or work, or attend, or have anything to do with the voters. The Prime Minister said yes at once: he didn’t want Alfred to see the voters at all.

Naturally, of course, our earlier married life had its ups and downs as it does with all people. When we first went to London we were quite poor, I mean not at all well off, and it was difficult for us to afford enough servants to manage our house properly: on the other hand, without a house that size it would have been hard to use all our servants. Even as it was Alfred would himself often fetch up his own shaving water, and more than once I have seen him light his own fire, touch the match to it himself, sooner than ring up a servant. But we both agreed that these little discomforts only make life all the more worthy.

But after a little while Papa’s influence got for Alfred a Court appointment as Gentleman Equerry of the Bloodhounds, which made our position much easier. Alfred, of course, didn’t have to take the bloodhounds out himself, as that was done by the Yeoman Equerry: but he had to countersign all the warrants for what they ate, which often kept him busy.

Then on top of little hardships at home came the terrible trouble of my poor sister Lucy’s marriage. Lucy had always, I think, been a little wanting in making proper social distinctions. I remember that even as a girl she would often speak with cottagers in what seemed quite a wrong way, as if she were their equal. So in a way it was not surprising when she married absolutely beneath her. Papa and Mama were utterly consternated when they heard of it, and Mama decided to do the only brave thing about it and not speak to Lucy any more. She had married a man who not only had no family – I mean in the literal sense absolutely none – but who worked as a journalist on a newspaper. I know that, of course, nowadays things are different and a journalist can be received anywhere, I mean if he is properly born. But it was not so then, and Lucy’s husband, whose name was Mr. Smith, was even worse than that, as he had tried to write books as well: indeed he had one published, a book about flowers and botany. The whole thing was, of course, a great pity to us – I mean, Lucy’s living like that, until at last Papa, who naturally had great influence, got the Colonial Office to pay Mr. Smith’s expenses, with Lucy and the children – there were three already – to go out to British Borneo to study flowers: as he couldn’t afford to get back, they all stayed there and it was all right. Papa had a letter later from one of the boys from Sarawak, and Papa said he seemed promising and might grow up to be a Dacoit.

But much more serious were the financial troubles which once or twice threatened to overwhelm us. The first was when Papa’s bank broke and Sir John and the directors went to jail, because in those days the law was very strict and fair and the bank directors went to jail like anybody else – except, of course, Papa. In his case, as the Lord Chief Justice explained, it had to be understood that he acted in utter ignorance, in fact that he knew nothing, being a nobleman. Indeed Lord Argue, after sentencing the directors, complimented Papa very highly: he said it was men like Papa who make embezzlement possible – which we all thought very handsome. But after all it was a great relief when it was over, expecially as it turned out that by a lucky chance Papa had sold all his own shares in the bank the very day before it broke.

But to us, Alfred and me, a much more direct blow was the failure of Mr. Derringer’s gold mine. We never knew just what happened. It seemed that the mine had not exactly failed but it had never been there. Alfred heard in the City that Mr. Derringer had “salted” the mine, but Alfred couldn’t see how he could do that, as it would take such a lot. At any rate it was all in the American papers, and poor Mr. Derringer’s trial, and he was sent to prison for ten years and was there for weeks and weeks before he could get out. Papa’s name came into it all, of course, as a first director, but he was out of it since, though there might have been a sort of scandal except that the American judge spoke very handsomely of Papa’s ignorance of it all. Indeed he said that what Papa didn’t know would fill a book, and that it was men like Papa who gave England the name it had.

So it all blew over, but presently Alfred and I found that after that the dividends from the mine stopped, which we couldn’t understand as they were preferred. Alfred would have been very cool with Papa over it, but as Papa was getting old it seemed wrong to get cool with him. If anything happened to Papa while Alfred was cool, it might make a difference, Indeed it was just at that time that dear Papa got a stroke, his first stroke. It didn’t really incapacitate him at first but we thought best to call in a consultant opinion, and then he got a second stroke, and so, in real alarm, we sent for a great Harley Street specialist and Papa got a third stroke. With the third stroke, he passed out.

—

I will not carry these Memoirs down any further than the day of Papa’s funeral which seems a good place to stop. Such a wonderful day, one of those bright crisp autumn days when it just feels good to be alive! Gloops looked so wonderful in the bright sunlight and everywhere the late autumn flowers. And such wonderful messages of sympathy! One from the House of Lords, official, to say that the House had learned with satisfaction that Lord Gloops was to be buried; and one from the Home Secretary expressing his personal appreciation of Papa’s burial; and one from the Secretary in Waiting at Windsor Castle that the whole Court was ordered to go into half mourning for a quarter of an hour. And then the funeral service in our dear little church at Gloops. Old Dr. Glowworm, though he must have been nearly a hundred at the time, preached the funeral sermon. It was just a little hard to hear him, except the text which was “Where has he gone?” – we all thought it so beautifully apt – but we couldn’t quite follow Dr. Glowworm’s answer. Then as the crowning thing in the day came the reading of Papa’s will, by Papa’s own solicitor, Mr. Rust, who came from London to Gloops on purpose. Of course we knew that everything would be all right, but of course couldn’t help feeling a little nervous. Poor Papa had always been a little uncertain and when we remembered about Papa’s bank and the mine, we couldn’t feel quite sure what would happen to Gloops. The title, of course, would go to my cousin, the present Marquis of Gloops, but the entail had been cut long ago and Papa was free to do as he liked. I remember how dear Alfred sat so bolt upright, trying so hard to understand every word, though of course that was impossible as most of the will was in law terms. But the meaning came out clear enough. Dear Papa had done everything just as it should be, according to the fine old traditions of the time. Mama was given the Dower House for life, with the full right to use her own money in maintaining it. All the old servants were remembered – Papa gave them each a suit of mourning and quite a substantial sum, I forget what, but I think at least ten pounds, which meant a great deal to people in their class. For my sister Lucy, Papa could not, of course, in view of what had happened, do very much: but even in her case he left her something to remember him by, a beautiful set of books from his library – sermons bound in old leather – and a purse for each of her children – there were only five at that time – with half a sovereign in it, and a prayer book each. Alfred and I got Gloops and all the residuum – that was the word Mr. Rust used – residuum of the estate – which was only fair as we should need it to keep the estate up: on the other hand we could hardly have used the residuum if we hadn’t had the estate itself. Mr. Rust explained it all very clearly.

After it was all over Alfred said, “Well, it’s all over.”

TOC     INDEX

–2–
Through Arabia on a Mule

By
MAJOR ALLHELL

Late Pindilwani Field Force
(Third Base)

We based our expedition on Waz-el-Yaz, which is about two hours’ steam, or four hours’ hot water, from Aden. From Waz-el-Yaz, or Yaz, as the natives call it, our purpose was to strike direct into the desert. At Yaz, therefore, we spent several days in terrific heat (the thermometer standing, even at night, at over 110° Fahrenheit), in what seemed at the time the hopeless attempt at organizing the expedition. Our accommodation meantime was a wretched hotel or caravanserai, conducted by a villainous Frenchman, where for three days we drank the most abominable champagne at a most iniquitous price, our sole diversion being endless games of billiards on a perfectly impossible billiard table, or endless games of écarté with a pack of unrecognizable cards.

At last, however, after the most terrific exertions we were able to start. We had with us four Dhouris, as bearers, two Yawks for the heavier stuff, and as our guard six Hepaticas – very fine-looking fellows – on foot. My advice, by the way, for any one proposing to follow our route would emphatically be not to take Yawks. A Yawk is good enough as a bearer, reminding me very much of the Dongolas of Angola, and may do at a pinch as a beater, but only at a pinch, and is quite hopeless as a scout or tracker. If I were going again I should use every effort to get Scafaris. I give this advice merely for what it is worth. I may add that for my own transport, in addition to being carried by the Yawks, I had also a mule. The mule was less comfortable than the natives, but I needed her for these memoirs.

Our Nilghari, or dragoman, completed the procession of our escort, as apart from Major Boozer, young Charteris, myself, and Professor McTosh. The fellow seemed to know his business and professed to talk six of the Arabian desert languages – though I presently doubted if he knew anything of them except a few words of Pindi and perhaps a little Hootch.

For the use of prospective travellers who may follow in our steps, I will first set down a few words in regard to our special equipment for the desert. It consisted of 18 boxes of chocolates supplied by the kindness of Messrs. Sweets, Bonbons and Company, Ludgate Hill, Piccadilly Circus, Covent Garden, London: 10 pounds of the best condensed preserved ginger, very kindly contributed to the expedition by Messrs. Ginger and Ginger, of Preserve Street, Soho; one fur sleeping-bag and a tin of arctic cough drops, supplied by the kindness of the Hudson’s Bay Company; together with a bottle of Bromo Seltzer, given to us as a send-off by the Royal Geographical Society. All these things, of course, had been given to us gratis, and I desire here to express my sense of obligation to the donors. We had also an aneroid barometer, a clinical thermometer, and part of a sextant. All these were given to us, so we took them.

As for arms we had with us one elephant gun, two cow guns, a buffalo gun – an excellent piece sighted up to fifty feet – and two fowling pieces, carrying fowl shot. Our natives were all armed with double-headed Knerries and with the usual smooth Kiboshes, very deadly at close quarters.

I prefer to say as little as possible in this place about ourselves. But the acrimonious discussion in regard to our expedition that has followed my return to London makes it perhaps necessary to say at least a few words as to my companions.

Of Major Boozer, late of the 89th Hurraws, and young Charteris, I may say, apart from any question of ill-faith or treachery, for which my narrative will speak for itself, that they were at least both gentlemen. Major Boozer was one of the well-known Boozers of Hampshire, indeed one of the best known. In the case of young Charteris, certain temporary difficulties in connection with his leaving Sandhurst, after being sent down from Oxford and sent back from Canada, had made his father, Lord Mudloft, anxious to have him out of England, and led to his being placed in our expedition. I must add in all fairness that our subsequently leaving him in the desert was due rather to a misunderstanding, on our part, of Lord Mudloft’s wishes, than any ill-will on our part; the more so as the lad was a likeable boy and had proved a good companion on the coastal steamer that took us from Suez to Aden, though, I admit, a poor hand at cards, losing so habitually that presently Boozer and I ceased to play with him.

But at least both Boozer and Charteris were gentlemen. It was this that induced me to take them, my experience being that if you are embarking on an expedition into the dark places of the earth, among crime and vice, what you need are gentlemen. A gentleman will go where other men refuse to; indeed will go anywhere, provided, of course, that his expenses are paid. In a tight place he will get out of it more quickly than any other man. In especial I have found that Oxford men – but I must not over-exalt my old Alma Mater (where I was up for two years and had my Blue before I was down) except to say that if I have to go anywhere among savages, give me an Oxford man every time. But as to poor Charteris, I need only add that I doubted from the first whether his physique could stand the strain of Arabian travel. Even while still waiting at Waz-el-Yaz, the boy showed signs of what looked alarmingly like Beriberi, though it turned out to be only a touch of Billi-billi. But we were hardly two days out from our base when I was compelled to discuss with Major Boozer the question of leaving him to die in the desert. In many ways it seemed the right thing to do. On all such expeditions as ours, one has to face the fact that some of the members have got to be left to die somewhere, and it is perhaps better to get it over and done with as early as may be.

Boozer, however, argued that if Charteris were left to die so near the base, natives might pick him up, so that it would be better in any case to take him as on far as he could go.

Of Professor McTosh, our other companion of the march, I say nothing. He was not at the time attached to the expedition except in a temporary capacity. Professor McTosh, who holds the chair of Archaeology at the University of Inverness, is, I suppose, one of the world’s greatest archaeologists. He has himself told me that he regards his interpretation of Mesopotamian cuneiform inscriptions as superior to anything else that he knows of. The flat stones which he brought home from the Euphrates (he has never divulged the exact spot) containing inscriptions absolutely unreadable by anyone else, were bought by the British Museum for a thousand guineas; Professor McTosh donating a Gaelic translation as a personal gift. At that stage of our expedition all that we knew of Professor McTosh’s plans was that he was entering Arabia with a view to excavating the buried city of Blob. This city, he told us, was mentioned by Herodotus, mentioned again, though somewhat dubiously, by Pythagoras and afterwards, though with great hesitation, by Pliny. Strabo never speaks of it. Then silence falls over it for more than a thousand years, and Professor McTosh argues that it is buried under the sand and claims that he knows where it is. He expects, moreover, to find inscriptions of the greatest interest, probably, he says, Coptic, but perhaps Cryptic. Major Boozer and I, as plain soldiers, could have but little interest in this. Nor had we, as in the case of young Charteris, any apprehension as to the Professor’s stamina for the desert journey. Though advanced in years McTosh’s appearance speaks of rugged strength and endurance. His wearing of a plaid and a tam o’shanter at a time when Boozer and I were glad to just wear merely a pugaree and a suttee, was merely personal eccentricity.

McTosh, by arrangement, was to come with us into the desert to a point where his route should leave ours, paying for his transport for himself and for his baggage, carried by one of our Yawks. He himself arranged the fees, a matter which Major Boozer and I, as gentlemen, could hardly discuss. He set down the price of carrying himself and his baggage, including his whiskey, in Arabian money, at one Arabian jolt (four squid) per pound for each mile. We found later this equals one Singapore cent for ten miles; a sum on which McTosh claimed a further deduction per mile when he walked, while from the weight of the whiskey he subtracted one jolt each time he took a drink, and two when he treated us.

Yet, whatever its difficulties and dangers, we soon fell under the spell of Arabian travel in the desert. I shall never forget our first night in camp. Only those who have seen the sand deserts of the tropics know how rapidly day changes into night. The glare and heat and dust passed into stillness under the great stars of a purple sky. We sat upon mats round a light fire of dried roots of desert grass, for a chill strikes when the sun is gone, the camp equipment piled in a ring around us, the natives at a respectful distance, sitting on the ground occupied with cleaning and furbishing their weapons. Even McTosh admitted that nowhere, except in the Hebrides, had he known a more peaceful scene. Little did we think that that peaceful camp – but I must not anticipate except to indicate that plenty more is coming. Boozer and I, as old campaigners, sat and discussed our route over a parchment map, dimly illuminated by the firelight.

We proposed to strike east, direct across the desert, then to turn and strike west, after that to strike north – and by this means, after three strikes, to go out.

This route eastward, if successful, would let us visit the Veiled City of Hush, as yet never penetrated by Europeans. The routes to the west and north would then afford a safe exit. The main difficulty and danger, however, lay in the fact that to reach Hush, we must go through the country of the Fusees, said to be the fiercest tribesmen of the desert, while westward – but again I must not anticipate.

During our deliberation, McTosh, who had mixed himself an evening toddy for fear that the desert might get damp, said nothing, but sat adding up accounts and shaking his head from time to time. Young Charteris lay trying in vain to sleep, but groaning slightly. The lad had complained of fatigue so I had given him a heavy dose from our medicine chest; on his again complaining I gave him another, after which his complaint had ceased.

But whatever the charm of an evening encampment, with the first streak of dawn our day’s work, the stern routine of desert travel, began again. I warn all prospective travellers that it cannot be undertaken except by those who have the physique to stand it. With the earliest daylight our Swas – the word is the same as the Indian Kitmutgar – called Major Boozer and myself, bringing us a long cool swizzle-stick, which we drank somewhat slowly to allow our bearers, all Mohammedans, to make their prayer to the rising sun just visible in the east. Our Yawks then lifted us into the two palanquins, or sedan chairs, that they carried (my mule I seldom rode till the cool of evening) and the march over the sand, unremitting and relentless, went on for three hours, till a halt was called for breakfast. At midday a longer halt enabled the bearers to prepare us our tiffin. We ate in such shade as we could find, there being no trees, either under the shady edge of a broken nullah, or under a canvas shelter set up on spears. . . . Here we slept for the three hours of the afternoon siesta, a necessity of tropical travel, after which the march began again, and we were carried five hours, sleeping as best we could, or waking from time to time to take a drink of Rhine wine and Seltzer, a wise precaution against tropic disease of any kind.

Our first fortnight’s journey had brought us far out into the tropical Arabian Desert. I can best describe it as flat, quite deserted and entirely without vegetation or vegetables. The soil is what one would call sandyish, but here and there roughish and even rockyish, and some of it clayish. The reader may form a mental picture of the Arabian desert by imagining a flat country covered with a dense forest and then removing the forest. We had, however, now reached a region where the flat desert began to change to a country of rolling sand hills, called, I believe, “dunes” in Scotland, or “djinns” in Iceland, and in Norway, where they don’t have any, “dumps.” From this we knew that we were entering the country of the Fusees, a fact confirmed by the obvious trepidation of our natives and their anxious glances from time to time at the horizon. Even my mule at times humped me up sharply in the air as if scenting danger.

It was just at this stage of our journey that the unfortunate incident occurred which led to our separation from Professor McTosh. Under the circumstances I fear I can call his departure little else than treacherous desertion. The circumstances were these. Major Boozer made the astounding discovery that Professor McTosh was carrying a large sum of gold money in a belt around his person. His laying it aside for a few moments enabled Major Boozer, the soul of honour, I may say, to estimate rapidly with his fingers that it contained at least two hundred sovereigns. He had just opened one end of the belt to ascertain whether the coins really were sovereigns and had removed one with a view of biting it, when McTosh reappeared and with some heat demanded his belt. Both Major Boozer and I explained to him the folly of his carrying such a sum of money when unarmed in the dangerous region we were entering, We showed him the obvious advantage of transferring it to us – I think the suggestion was made for a transfer in half and half. McTosh absolutely refused this, although Boozer offered to give him a written receipt and our words as gentlemen.

That night, after the camp was quiet, Major Boozer and I discussed the propriety, in the Professor’s own interest, of taking his money into safe keeping. Something may have been said about chloroform or even a tap on the head, nothing very severe, with a stick. No decision was reached.

Judge of our amazement on finding in the morning that McTosh had disappeared. A brief note, left on a piece of rock, explained that he proposed to leave our company and make his own way to the buried city of Blob. The note contained the sum of ten pounds ten shillings and sixpence for his board as from Yaz and in compensation for two Hepaticas and one Yawk, persuaded, apparently, to go with him.

This treacherous desertion of McTosh was a severe blow. We had relied on him for our line of march as neither Major Boozer nor I could use a sextant. It had been understood also that McTosh would collect and classify the flora and fauna of the desert which should have formed the appendix to these memoirs, now unfortunately missing. We ourselves saw no flora that we recognized as such, and, as for fauna, the few bugs we were afterwards able to collect made too poor a showing afterwards. In any case, we lost track of which was which.

It would indeed have been possible to follow after McTosh to the buried city of Blob. But this would mean abandoning our search for the Veiled City of Hush. Both Major Boozer and myself were unwilling to do this. A buried city is of merely archaeological interest whereas a Veiled City evidently carries the idea of Veiled Women; and both for Boozer and myself Veiled Women hit us where we live. To women, in the abstract, I confess that I am not particularly susceptible. But shut them up and I want to get at them, especially if they are veiled before being shut up. To me therefore the notion of women in a harem or purdah or a zenana, wearing a Yasmak and under the care of a duenna or a bigorra, has an irresistible attraction. These feelings, I may say, are entirely shared by Major Boozer.

To us, therefore, there could be no hesitation as between a march to the buried city of Blob, to dig up a few archaeological specimens of rock, and a forward advance towards the Veiled City of Hush. Little could we foretell the sequel of our choice – but I only add that so that the reader may know that we couldn’t foretell it, and keep excited.

Three weeks more of arduous travel on this soil had brought us into the very heart of the Arabian desert, a country not flat like the Sahara or the Gobi or the Kalahari, or in short, any of the half-dozen deserts I have traversed, but made up of rolling sandhills alternating with open spaces of flat rock. It was here that we got our first alarm of the Fusees. It was, fortunately for us, just at sundown, after we had gone into camp in the bottom of a hollow much resembling a donga, or a South African drift. Here, just at dusk, outlined against the last of the sunset, appeared on the sky-line a string of Fusees, mounted and riding in single file. They appeared tall fine-looking men wearing the usual shapka over their shoulders and armed with long pointed spears. They resembled very closely the more familiar Bedouins or the Baggaras of Bahr-el-Gazal (I know all these places). We could form no estimate of their numbers as we saw them only over a shoulder of a sandhill, but they were evidently numerous and formidable. Their distance from us being less than a hundred yards, it seemed little short of miraculous that they didn’t see us. This was due, I presume, to their position on the sky-line.

At the sight of the Fusees our Hepaticas fell to the ground, shuddering with terror, while our Yawks seemed about to bolt away in sheer panic. I realized at once that, as so often happens, we had taken the wrong natives. I gather not only from my own experience, corroborated by that of Major Boozer, but also from many books of adventure, that one nearly always gets hold of the wrong natives, the terrified ones, whereas the really desirable ones are always those on the sky-line, who belong to the enemy party. There is also, I admit, something very terrifying about riders on the sky-line. Even in my own case, such riders if accurately on the sky-line, get me every time. I have noticed it often, at the cinema, as applied to a Sheriff’s posse in Wyoming, or to the Mounted Police descending the edge of the Rockies.

Fortunately, the Fusees passed us by, but from this time on we advanced with extreme caution, concealing our march in the hollows. From time to time we could observe parties of Fusees on the horizon – though we managed to keep them off the sky-line – or at times a single Fuse, riding rapidly over the desert.

Whether we should be able to make our way through country thus occupied to the Veiled City of Hush now became a serious matter. Our Hepaticas, let alone the Yawks, were in a constant state of terror, our Nilghari in an absolute funk. To say that Major Boozer and I were afraid would of course be ridiculous. We could at any time have bagged half a dozen of the fellows on the sky-line with our buffalo gun. But then the remaining fellows might have come off the sky-line and bagged us.

This first alarm of the Fusees made us realize that the time had come to abandon poor Charteris. It was quite unlikely that his strength would carry him forward. His one chance was to be left behind – a procedure always adopted in any expedition I have known. If the Fusees found him it would divert their attention at a possibly critical moment. We therefore left the lad beside a shady rock, giving him a supply of water, the sextant, a can of corned beef and the copy of last year’s Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, presented to us in London. Little did we think at the time – but naturally we had little time to.

Our march from now on became extremely hazardous. Almost every evening, usually just about dusk, Fusees appeared upon the sky-line, in long cavalcades in single file, or in smaller parties, or at times merely a single Fuse. It became necessary for us to avoid the sky-line altogether and to keep hidden at dusk, marching only in the day time, when they couldn’t see us. A week of such travel saw but little progress, especially as we had no idea where we were going.

Both Major Boozer and myself agreed, that is, I agreed with myself as completely as he did, that our only hope would be to secure the services of a friendly native as a guide. Experienced travellers find that among a given group of natives there is always one that is “friendly.” This “friendly native” usually speaks broken English, such as can just be re-set by a printer into type, has probably been in the United States and has very likely worked in a saloon in Chicago. Get such a man as that and his devotion is extraordinary.

By good luck we got him the third night we tried. On Boozer’s suggestion we adopted the strategy of setting up a bottle of rye whiskey on a stick, a few yards from the sky-line – with a piece of cardboard carrying the words Family Entrance. “If he comes from Chicago,” said Boozer, “he can’t miss it.” True enough, on the third night, we perceived a friendly native carefully crawling on his stomach – their only method of approach – the nature of his wriggling leaving no doubt of his sentiments. Boozer and I walked forward to meet him. He rose up at once and introduced himself, carefully breaking his English, as Hassangarlick Ibn Allah. He said that he had worked in Chicago on South Clark Street for three years, knew all the best people there, mixed with any of them, anything. He seemed an excellent fellow, friendly and biddable from the first, and told us to call him simply Hassangarlick; the rest of his name, “Ibn Allah,” merely meaning “faithful child of God,” a point he was willing to lay aside while working for Christians. We preferred, however, to call him “Ibn” as having more character for us.

To our great delight Ibn not only knew the city of Hush – he pronounced it Hootch – but said that we were only three days’ journey from it. We asked at once about veiled women and where they kept them, and were reassured when Ibn, understanding at once, laughed, showed all his teeth as friendly natives always do, and said, “Oh yes, yes, Bulbul Zenana!” My knowledge of Arabic was sufficient to tell me that this meant the “Birdcage of the Nightingales,” and fitted our idea exactly.

This was just the place for us. Boozer and I agreed to push our march with full speed. We stepped boldly up on the sky-line – in spite of the tremors of our Hepaticas – and walked straight along it. My mule, which proved too slow for this part of the advance, I left tied to a stick in a nullah.

In three days of this bold advance we never saw a trace of a single Fuse. Confidence always wins. Imagine our delight on the fourth morning when Ibn, leading us to the top of a ridge of rock, showed us almost at our very feet a silver inlet of the sea, and beside it the goal of our desires – The Veiled City of Hootch, the capital of the Sultan, or Sheik, of Fuz.

I have to admit that after the first ecstasy of discovery had passed, the prospect was not altogether as we had expected it. The city of Hootch did not appear to be sufficiently veiled. We saw what were undoubtedly large gas tanks. We could even read the words “Standard Fuz Oil Company.” Several at least of the buildings looked like skyscrapers on a small scale. Most disappointing of all was a huge sign over a gate with the words HOOTCH – WELCOME. Indeed in the nearer foreground, outside the gates, we could detect what we were almost certain were little buildings like cabins, with signs apparently reading TOURISTS and perhaps FRESH EGGS.

In short, the first aspect of the city seemed to add one more disillusionment to our rapidly vanishing myth of Oriental mystery. As I said to Major Boozer, who agreed with me – in fact we both did – as far as any mystery or romance or oddness about the place went, we might as well be back among the Pygmies of Central Africa, or in a café in Samarkand or at any ordinary Boy Scouts’ reception in Constantinople. “The thing,” I said, “Boozer, is over. I’m going back for my mule.”

But in one moment all our excitement was restored when Ibn touched me on the elbow and pointed to a large group of buildings standing in a heavy grove of cypress, on the east side of the city, now illuminated with the light of the rising sun. The place was just right; square buildings, with small barred windows, wide screened verandahs, the whole set in a compound surrounded by unbroken walls at least twelve feet high. “That’s it,” said Ibn, “Bulbul Zenana.”

I need not say in what eagerness Major Boozer and I waited for the day to wear slowly towards night. We hurriedly prepared the scaling ladders, together with other apparatus, such as ropes, masks – both gas and ordinary evening wear – and chloroform, et cetera, et cetera. What we had not got Ibn fetched secretly from the city, from a chain gas-and-mask store.

Our calculations were that we could carry two women each and Ibn one, and make three, perhaps four, trips a night.

Our excitement did not abate as the swift tropical sunset passed into purple night. We had sneaked, under such cover as we could find, to a favourable spot beneath the compound wall. Here we waited till we could hear the priests or muezzins call out their night prayers from the roof. We knew that after this all pious Fusees would seek the peace of their own harems. The night and the dark were for marauders like ourselves.

With no difficulty we ascended the wall by our ladders and came down on the other side among the shrubbery. It was almost pitch dark and very still, so much so, that men of a different type might have felt apprehensive. But for old soldiers, such as Major Boozer and myself, the darker it is the better we can see. For Ibn, who had known the West side of Chicago, our enterprise, at the rate of ten women a night, was nothing.

We moved gently through the shrubbery, making use of our flash-lights only when strictly necessary. I cannot say at what point our first misgivings arose, but I think it was when we came across a little bench labelled with the device Reserved for the Bible Class. This shook us. Something seemed wrong, still more so when we carefully made our way to a side entrance of a building, flashed the light a moment and read, Bible Class Entrance. Reckless with apprehension we now walked boldly along the building to what was evidently its main entrance. We turned the light full on to the large brass plate beside the doorway. Its inscription read: FEMALE TEACHERS’ EDUCATIONAL MISSION PERSIAN GULF BRANCH. LEAVE ALL PARCELS AT THE TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE. Lower down was another plate, marked with hands to indicate directions, and with the legends Y.W.C.A. BUILDING TO THE LEFT, W.C.T.U. OFFICES TO THE RIGHT. “W.C.T.U.! Good Lord,” exclaimed Boozer, “school teachers! Let’s get out of this.”

I understood, of course, his meaning. Boozer’s code of honour was entirely my own. A gentleman has no hesitation in carrying off veiled women but when it comes to carrying off female teachers, and members of a women’s Temperance Union, his code of honour forbids it. Our only course now was to get out of the place, before being tempted to break a rule and take a teacher.

Our disappointment no doubt made us forget our position. We must unconsciously have spoken too loudly and made a noise in our movements. At any rate, within a few moments, windows opened in the upper floor, lights appeared everywhere, and from heads put out of the windows came everywhere the cry of “Men! Men!”

“Great Heavens,” said Boozer, “run for the ladders! They’ll get us.” We lost no time, running as best we could through the dark shrubbery. We just reached our ladders in time. Ibn, I imagine, was caught by the women. We had no time to think of him.

But for us it was out of the frying pan into the fire. The noise and lights in the compounds had attracted the Fusee Police outside; it was not like our orderly home cities, where one can escape comfortably, in a fusillade of shots, by motor car. A fusillade hurts no one.

Boozer and I, no doubt, could have knocked over half a dozen Fusees each. But as that only made twelve and there were about twenty-four, we submitted. We were taken into custody, amid an increasing hullabaloo, and dragged to what appeared to be a sort of jail. Here we were thrown into separate cells, ignorant of one another’s fate. For myself, I spent a sleepless night, with nothing in the way of supper except a little coffee, a few dates, and some French rolls, and nothing to smoke except native cigars. My jailers, however, for some reason I failed to grasp, were singularly civil.

I was still more surprised when in the morning a person, evidently an official, for he wore a frock coat and a tarboosh and had a Rotary Club “Good Luck” button, was shown into my cell. He told me that I was not to go before the cadi, or magistrate, but was to be taken to the Sultan of Hootch himself – the Sheik ul Fuselem.

The Sheik – always called in Arabic and Turkish The Shake, as they don’t know it is pronounced Sheik – was seated on his divan, in a heavily curtained room, windowless and fragrantly scented with bil and sice. He looked exactly the right thing for a Shake – heavy, and gone to fat; his features the colour of light gingerbread, heavy and motionless, his lips large, his eyes protruding. He too wore a frayed frock coat, the kind used with us by peddlers, and a tarboosh with a tassel. He had on the lapel of his coat the French Legion of Honour (Class A1) and the British Victoria Cross. Most Shakes are eager for these and pay well for them. The Shake was smoking a narghile in rose water.

My conductor salaamed twice – once for the Shake and once for me – and left us. From this I knew that I was received not as a prisoner but as a gentleman.

Oriental courtesy demands delay. The Shake motioned me to a cushion and invited me to smoke. After half an hour he clapped his hands and ordered coffee. Half an hour later he ordered a drink of Scotch whiskey, and five minutes after, two more. After that, he began to talk. Rolling his eyes slightly sideways, and speaking with evident meaning, “You were in the compound?” he said. “I was.” “What’s it like inside?” he asked, his mouth expanding into a smile. “Women?” “Full of them,” I said. “A female teachers’ educational mission!” “Heavens!” said the Shake, smacking his lips with gusto! “Female teachers, eh? Ha! Ha!” “And a branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.” . . . “No!” exclaimed the Shake, his eyes popping with excitement. “You don’t say so! Tell me all about it!”

I began to realize that the Shake had never seen the inside of the Women’s Educational Mission Compound – the Bulbul Zenana as Hassangarlick translates it. His treaty arrangements forbid all intrusions or interferences. I therefore told him very frankly all about it – that it was organized apparently by the Young Women’s Christian Association, and by the W.C.T.U. (I explained the term) and incorporated as the Female Teachers’ Educational Mission. I stated without concealment that I had been looking for “veiled women,” confessed, as a plain soldier, to their peculiar fascination, and admitted that I had intended, along with Major Boozer, to abduct as many as we could carry. But I strenuously denied all desire to interfere with the females of the Y.W.C.A., the W.C.T.U., or the F.T.E.M. For me, veiled women or none.

To my utter surprise, I began to realize that the Shake’s point of view was entirely different. The more he heard of the Y.W.C.A. and the W.C.T.U., the more excited he became. All he asked – he made no secret of it – was an opportunity to get at them. He freely confessed that “veiled women” were nothing to him. He’d seen too much of them, and in any case he had as many as he wanted of them right there in his harem. But these women of the Y.W.C.A. and W.C.T.U. were different; think of it, young, Christian women! . . . The Shake admitted that for him there was something irresistibly attractive about Christians, especially if taken young. And “temperance” women, whom he had never seen, conveyed a peculiar mystery that reached him where he sat. His only difficulty – I was amazed to learn – was that, under his present circumstances, he had no right to enter the secluded premises. And I learned further, with puzzled surprise and delight, that the Shake was fully willing to grant me my liberty provided I could aid him in making a legitimate and proper acquaintance with the ladies of the Mission. If I could give him an introduction in the ordinary formulas of English or American social life, that would let him enter the compound in a non-political capacity, he would not only grant me my liberty, but give me a free passage home in a vessel leaving the port next day.

This was rare good fortune. There was, of course, the apparent difficulty that I did not personally know the ladies of the Mission. But I had known so many like them that it didn’t matter. Indeed I realized that to them an introduction to an Eastern potentate would sound so good that it was of no consequence who signed it. As long as it appeared orthodox and decorous it would get by.

Another slight difficulty was that my plans made no provision for Major Boozer. This was, I admit, a matter of lively regret. But I realized that a soldier’s life must leave no room for sentiment; and that a man of resource, especially a Boozer, will find a way out of anything. The further thought that I would thus get first home to write memoirs, I put aside as unworthy.

I therefore at once sat and wrote on the tablet supplied to me by the Shake:

The Lady Director,
The Female Teachers’ Education Mission,
Persian Gulf Branch,
Hootch.

Dear Madam,

May I present to you by this note of introduction my esteemed friend the Shake ul Fuselem, Sultan of Hootch? You will find in the Shake a charming and cultivated gentleman, a graduate of Harvard, a member of the Lion’s Club and an honorary director of the Girl Guides of Omaha. You will be reassured to know that the Shake some years ago not only readily embraced Christianity, but asked if there was any more of it. The Shake would like much to meet some of your young ladies and to take a selection of them to visit his harem. I may add that the Shake never touches liquor except as a beverage.

The Shake on reading the letter, declared that it was exactly what he wanted and with Oriental gratitude threw round my neck a chain of beaten Persian gold – and only removed it on second thoughts as better sent by Express. Meantime he summoned his scribe, arranged for my papers of passport and transit, gave me an excellent cigar, and declared me free. Next morning a courteous official conducted me to the dock, pointed out my steamer and in saying good-bye, gave me another excellent cigar, making two.

I could see from the busy decks and smoking funnels that the steamer gave every evidence of approaching departure. To my utter surprise the first person I saw as I came up the gangway was Major Boozer. His manner, as I greeted him, was singularly constrained, as was also no doubt my own. Indeed for some time we conversed with a certain malaise, each of us aware of an arrière pensée that set up a gêne. This gêne was only dispelled over a whiskey and soda, which I may say has always had for me an unrivalled power of dispellation against a gêne. It was Boozer who voiced the idea that had arisen in both our minds. “Tell me, Allhell, did you give a letter to the Shake?” “I did,” I answered. “So did I,” said Boozer. “Shake!” After that our friendship was easily cemented over another whiskey and soda, which, as cement, I consider unequalled. I also gave Boozer one of my cigars.

But a further surprise was in store for both of us. Judge of our utter astonishment, and I may add our chagrin, when we learned on coming out on deck again that Professor McTosh was to travel on the same ship. It appeared that he had just arrived from the buried city of Blob. Our first intimation that he was to be a passenger was the sight of a large number of heavily loaded cases being lowered on a winch into the hold. The boxes were all labelled “McTosh, Blob to Aberdeen via Hootch and Aden,” and, from the elaborate markings on them, conveyed the idea of great value. The purser of the ship was checking off the consignment and a group of officers and men were watching the operation with the greatest interest. We inquired if the boxes contained specimens of rocks. The purser laughed and said they were mostly filled with gold and silver cups, jugs and ornaments, together with specimens of early beaten gold. The ship’s manifest placed them at £50,000 sterling, but the sum, he said, was merely nominal. They represented the first result of Professor McTosh’s excavation at Blob.

Major Boozer and I, whatever our resentment at the treachery of McTosh, felt that, as gentlemen, we must conceal our feelings. Indeed, when the Professor presently came on board, we evinced every sign of friendliness, even offering to help him with the transport of his property, and to check over and value for him his gold and silver mugs – in short, to get our hands on them in any way useful. His consistent refusal led to a coolness that lasted throughout the voyage.

A still more embarrassing feature of our life on board ship was the presence of young Charteris. It seemed that he had been picked up by friendly Fusees and carried in safety to Hootch. Delighted though Boozer and I were to see the lad again, we could not but reflect that his return to England would seriously impair our arrangements with his father, Lord Mudloft. Boozer even offered to lend Charteris money to go back to the desert, but all our efforts at conciliation were of no avail.

The return of our expedition to England has given rise to a great deal of misunderstanding and acrimonious controversy. In the first place Lord Mudloft is dissatisfied with the way in which Major Boozer and I carried out our arrangements in regard to his son, and refuses to fulfil his own part of the contract. He admits the necessity of our abandoning Charteris, but claims that we did not abandon him in the proper way. Boozer and I have offered to begin over again and take the lad out to Brazil and abandon him up the Amazon, but the offer is refused. Lord Mudloft, I believe, is now thinking of the Pole as an opening for the boy.

The Royal Geographical Society also has acted in what seems to me a very narrow spirit. They have refused to print my memoirs as not sufficiently geographical, at the very time when the King’s Printer has sent them back to me as not sufficiently Royal. At the same time the Boozers of Hampshire – the well-known Boozers of whom my companion is one – are bringing an action against my using their name in the memoirs. They claim that even if they are Boozers, I have no right to say so, a familiar point of law. Professor McTosh on the other hand has written me a very handsome letter, congratulating Boozer and me on getting out of jail, and refunding a one-and-sixpence overcharge on his Hepatica.

In addition to these personal matters, there has been rather a nasty mess with the Foreign Office in regard to the Shake’s letters of protest. He wants them to remove from his harem the ten teachers that he took from the Compound.

I trust that the appearance of these memoirs will help to put matters right.

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–3–
Up and Down
Downing Street

OR
WHO STARTED THE GREAT WAR?

MEMOIRS OF A WAR DIPLOMAT
(The One Hundredth Set of Such)

The lapse of years has only served to heighten the interest in the question of who started the Great War. Indeed to those of us in inner diplomatic circles – I myself am right in the middle – the thing gets positively feverish.

Only last week a former diplomatic opponent of mine, the ex-Crown Prince Halfwitz of Ratz, came into my office in great agitation, threw himself down on a sofa, and sobbed out, “I didn’t start it, I really didn’t.” That same evening, at a dinner given by the War Office, General Spittitout, of the Roumanian Staff (who was sitting next to me), after saying nothing for nearly half an hour, turned to me quietly and said, “I didn’t do it.” On my other side Field-Marshal Scratch of Bulgaria, who had said less than nothing for more than half an hour, nodded still more quietly and said, “I didn’t either.” The moment might have been an awkward one for such a topic to be raised, but the French Ambassador, sitting opposite, with characteristic tact said, “Will you pass across the cucumbers when you’ve done with them?”

The quiet savoir faire, thus exercised to avert an awkward situation, was typical of the courteous diplomatic intercourse of the older school. Frequently by passing cucumbers, or asking for a match, we avoided a European crisis. But, I repeat, to those of us who survive from those exciting days of the great crisis of nearly thirty years ago, the question of who started the war possesses a burning interest, and the continuous publication of memoirs serves only to fan the fire into a flame.

It is the realization of this intense interest which has led me to the publication of these memoirs and with them to divulge the real origins of the Great War. I had intended to keep my lips sealed, and such memoranda as I had written, disclosing what I know of the inner diplomacy that preceded the Great War, were all duly docketed, tied up and sealed, and marked “Not to be opened till fifty years after my death.” But I found this unsatisfactory. Although I had informed the Press that my memoirs were deposited in the Bank of England and would not be disclosed till I had been dead fifty years, it failed to occasion any outcry. Indeed I searched in vain for comment on it, except for a brief note in the English Press under the heading, “Commendable Decision,” and an American item, “Will Keep Mouth Shut.”

I found also to my chagrin that my colleague in the Cabinet, Lord X———, had also deposited his sealed memoirs with the Bank of England, labelled “Not to be opened for sixty years,” that Lord Y——— had gone as far as seventy years and the Duke of Z——— had made it a hundred.

Nor was that all. A number of continental diplomats, our former associates, having now no safe place of their own, entrusted us with their sealed memoirs. Then when the market for memoirs opened, they began divulging them. Prince Scratchitoff, now a refugee but formerly of the Czar’s entourage, keeps telephoning me to know if his memoirs have yet been divulged. It seems that “divulged memoirs” command a good price without waiting fifty years.

It is understood, however, that in divulging these memoirs before their time, I am compelled to preserve as far as possible the seal of confidence as the cloak of anonymity. I necessarily refer to my former Cabinet colleagues as X——— and Y——— and even as A, B, and C – none of which, as the reader easily guesses, corresponds to their names. If I refer to the King of Roumania, I call him simply the K. of R., and the German Kaiser I indicate as the G.K., and so on.

The question is often asked me to what extent did we as a Cabinet know what was going on in Europe? Did we know anything? Or were we as ignorant as we looked? To which I can only answer that we know a great deal, but not as a Cabinet. Readers, unused to diplomatic memoirs, will have to pause over this phrase and get it as best they can: I say, “not as a Cabinet.” The Foreign Office probably knew a great deal that never reached the Colonial Office: while the Colonial Office undoubtedly had information that never got to the Admiralty. On the other hand the Admiralty had on their files secret information that never got off their files and the War Office no doubt had a mass of material that they used for gun wadding. The Home Secretary knew a great deal but had no right to say it.

This system of checks and balances, which has often been called the spirit of British Government, worked admirably. It meant that everybody knew something, somebody knew anything but nobody knew everything. Hence, acting as a Cabinet we knew nothing at all. This gave us a free hand and allowed us to keep an open mind, closing our eyes but having our ear to the ground. But it must not be supposed from my speaking thus of checks and balances that there is implied any division or dissension among us as a Government. Indeed the very contrary was the case. The group of men who formed at that time the Ministry and the diplomatic circle of the Foreign Office, I regard as the most remarkable group of men – not excepting myself – ever gathered together in one Government with me in it. Not only were they signalized by their high intelligence but they worked together like a band of brothers.

Let us speak of them in turn. Lord X——— was a gentleman of the old school with all the culture given by the older universities and the aristocratic circles in which he had been brought up. If there was any fault to be found with him, it was that his brains were ossified and his mind moved so slowly that a man like me couldn’t wait for it. I sometimes wonder, perhaps, whether the older universities have not developed a sort of dry rot of which men like Lord X——— are the result. X——— was a poor speaker, and a very indifferent writer.

Y——— and Z———, my other two senior colleagues, were also men of commanding intellect. My only criticism of them would be that their minds, though commanding, were small, and their point of view extremely childish, and their experience of life practically nothing. Beyond that, they were invaluable.

G——— was a man of superb genius, but, I must admit, always seemed half asleep. Q———, at the Exchequer, would have been admirable if he had understood figures. Lord M——— at the Foreign Office was exactly the right man in the right place, but had a very feeble knowledge of geography and couldn’t spell and was deaf. Taken all in all the Cabinet were perhaps the most imposing group that had governed England since Queen Anne.

One naturally asks then why such a group of gifted men could not have prevented the outbreak of the Great War. Surely, it is argued, something could have been done. To which I reply that we did prevent the Great War, again and again, and had been preventing it for twenty years. The quiet tact of old war diplomacy before the War had again and again forestalled what seemed an inevitable outbreak. It is not generally known that the German Ambassador had asked for his passports on the news of the Agadir crisis. Lord Z——— gave a grave nod of acquiescence, and said, “What about a Scotch and soda before you go?” He was still there in the morning. Three or four times the Admiralty were merely waiting to press a button, the Exchequer were all ready to nail up the Bank of England, when a casual invitation to lunch, or the loan of a cigarette, saved Europe. One must realize also that all this time we continued, nominally at any rate, on the most friendly relations not only with the Quai d’rsay – which went without saying – but with the Ball Platz and the Quirinal and Escurial and even with the Yildiz Kiosk and with others I can’t think of for the moment. Maintaining these foreign relations required a very delicate equilibrium, which was rendered still more unstable by the need of considering also our relations. It was not only the Quai d’rsay and the Thiergarten that we must consider, but also the Château Laurier at Ottawa, the Nelson Hotel at Cape Town and the Palmer House at Melbourne. We realized that the least shock might shake the Empire to pieces; in fact that the least tap would knock it into fragments. Indeed we felt that nothing held it together but ourselves. With all of these chancelleries we were in constant correspondence, and if at any time one or more of us were fishing in Norway or shooting grouse in Scotland, there were always others to answer his letters. Ultimatums were thus regularly answered by return mail and there was always somebody available who could arrange a modus vivendi over the week-end to prevent an impasse that might lead to a cul-de-sac.

It was the sudden and accidental collapse of this orderly system of diplomatic intercourse that precipitated the War. Those who recall the early summer of 1914 will remember that it was a season of exceptionally beautiful weather; all the world seemed to take holidays by the sea and on the moors. The G.K. was yachting off Norway. The Crown Prince of Serbia was pig-sticking. The President of France was at Vichy drinking Vichy water. The Bavarian Government was at a Bath; the King of Italy was at a circus; while our own Cabinet was scattered through the country, mostly on the moors, but some up the fjords and others on the veldt.

It was under these peculiar circumstances that an ultimatum happened to be sent to Serbia by the Government of Austria. In itself the ultimatum did not differ from a large number of ultimatums sent back and forward in the preceding ten years of crisis. I forget its exact terms, but it stated that unless Serbia was prepared to do so and so within forty-eight hours, Austria would declare war in forty-seven. It spoke of the Serbians as murderers, etc., but not in any offensive way. In the ordinary course of events, Serbia would at least have answered and, even if compelled to reject the ultimatum, would have at least expressed its appreciation of the literary style of the ultimatum and hoped that the rejection of this ultimatum would not prevent the Austrian Government from continuing to submit others.

The case was aggravated by the fact that none of the other governments to whom complimentary copies of the ultimatum had been sent had paid any attention to it. Worse still, no one of them had “divulged” it. The Austrian Government had thus to undergo the supreme humiliation of having its ultimatum unanswered and undivulged, and was compelled to divulge it to the papers itself.

When at last the diplomatic corps returned from their holidays, it was too late to mend matters. A meeting was called at the Foreign Office in the hope of finding a way out, or at least a modus vivendi, accepting the status quo as a res judicata – and then going fishing again. But it transpired at once that the insult to Austria was not to be overlooked. It was in vain that the French Ambassador offered the Austrian plenipotentiary a cigar – a good one, two for ninepence. He merely put it in his pocket and said he would smoke it when he got home. “This,” said Prince Halfwitz of Ratz, “means war.” No one dared contradict him. The Prince, who had been hunting big game in New York, felt that it was all his fault in having left Europe without him for six weeks. “Where does Roumania come in?” asked General Spittitout, at that time Roumanian chargé d’ffaires. “Wait and see,” said Lord G———, “we’ll find a place for you on one side or the other.”

The gathering that evening at the Foreign Office was imposing as the last of the great diplomatic parleys conducted with the old world formal courtesy. When we came together again at Versailles the world had changed, the old courtesy gone.

We sat that evening in the famous conference room of the Foreign Office quietly smoking our cigars, with an occasional sip of whiskey and soda, the map of Europe spread out before us. Many of us, myself, I admit, included, wished that we had studied it sooner and to better purpose. It was difficult to make out which were railways and which were rivers. Many of us, I am sure, felt that it was hard to part and to say good-bye to our pleasant diplomatic gatherings. The German Ambassador, as he took his Scotch whiskey and soda, felt that he might not get any more for years.

Yet, as best we could, we had to construct at this brief notice the alignment of the Great War. “You had better take Bulgaria,” the German Ambassador said to the Prime Minister. “Let me see where it is,” he answered. Then he shook his head. “Is that where Bulgaria is?” he continued, “No, we can’t take it, unless you’ll take Turkey on your side.” “I suppose we’ll have to,” the German Ambassador said reluctantly. “France,” interrupted the French plenipotentiary, “will take on her side whatever oppressed nations are striving for liberty.” “Give him a sandwich,” said Lord X——— and saved the situation. Just as the list was complete, Lord M———, of whom I spoke above, interrupted hurriedly. “Haven’t you forgotten Nevada?” he asked. For a moment there was consternation and a hurried consultation of the map, till a Cabinet member said hesitatingly, “It’s in the United States: I’ve been there – at Reno.”

And, as he spoke, Big Ben began tolling the fatal hour. Europe was at war.

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–4–
So This
Is the United States

A SIX WEEKS’ THOROUGH SURVEY

As made by
A LECTURER FROM ENGLAND

The desire to visit the United States had been to me for many years a cherished ambition. My admiration for American life and character, which I am glad to set down here and which my publishers are at liberty to use in any way they like, led me to wish for a nearer view of a country which had so deeply impressed me both physically and geographically, as well as financially. Moreover, the increasing vogue of my books in America guaranteed a warm welcome. My American readers were multiplying rapidly; almost every day I received letters which read:

Dear Sir or Madam (the word “madam” being carefully crossed out to signify that the writer knew that I was not a woman): As an autograph collector I would be glad to add your autograph to my list which already includes those of Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H. G. Wells, the King of Siam, and some others which I can’t remember. Kindly pay your own postage. The others did.

To such tributes were joined the casual remarks of a number of chance acquaintances. An American gentleman whom I met in the Piccadilly Bar told me that he had read one of my books (he was sure it must have been mine) while suffering from insomnia on a voyage from San Francisco to Pago Pago. He was certain, at any rate, that it was Pago Pago.

To this was added a very cordial, direct invitation from the Cunard White Star Steamship Company, who had apparently heard of my interest in America. The company wrote:

This is travel year. Why not cross the Atlantic? The holding of the International Steamfitters’ Convention, the first in a hundred years of steam fitting, at Pittsburgh, Pa., seems to offer a splendid opportunity and invitation.

The final incentive was given by a very flattering proposition sent to me by one of the leading lecture bureaus of the United States. It ran:

Dear Sir or Madam: The increasing popularity in America of your books (book, speeches, or sermons, as the case may be) leads us to invite you to make a lecture tour in the United States, regardless of expense, as we don’t pay it, giving us 80 per cent of your gross receipts and the rest in cash. We may add that the holding of the International Steamfitters’ Convention at Pittsburgh seems to offer a special opportunity and invitation.

Without fully comprehending the financial terms, expressed with typical American generosity, I decided to come.

My journey across the Atlantic was one of unparalleled pleasure and comfort, and if the Cunard White Star Company care to say I said so, they are at liberty to do so. In the intervals of idle day-dreaming in the saloon bar of the palatial liner in which I had engaged my passage (I will name it if the Company like), I was able to put the finishing touches to the lecture that I was to deliver in the States. The bartender to whom I read portions of it said that it seemed to him A1. He said he had heard a lecture at Schenectady, but failed to recall what it was about. The reader may judge with what a thrill of fascinated interest I caught sight, from the sea, of the sky-line of the skyscrapers of New York. One got from the prospect an impression of something one could scarcely convey in words, though I shall keep working on it.

At the Customs House in New York, where I met with every courtesy and politeness, an inspector asked if I had anything of value to declare. I said that, apart from my bag with my personal belongings and my lecture suit, I carried nothing but my lecture itself. He looked at it, shook his head, and said there was nothing to pay, the duty being ad valorem only. I said that he had better perhaps read the lecture, and he answered with characteristic American courtesy that he would see me I forget where.

This characteristic American courtesy I soon found to be characteristic of America. In New York, in spite of the rush and pressure of American life, there is always this same courteous desire to please, a willingness to break away from the claims of business in order to extend courtesy to strangers. On my first morning in the city, I presented my letter of recommendation to the manager of one of the biggest banks of the city, remarking on having been impressed, in a way I could scarcely convey, by the sky-line of the skyscrapers. He immediately asked me had I been up on the Empire State building, rang the bell for a clerk and insisted on my going at once, urging me to spend at least an hour, or better still, to stay there all day.

The head librarian of one of the great city libraries, to whom I presented my card, asked me if I was interested in Assyrian literature and at once took me to a roomful of it, and told me, as he closed the door on me, to read it all.

I duly visited the offices of the lecture bureau under whose auspices I was to make my tour, and found the personnel of the bureau extremely friendly and obliging. The courteous manager immediately asked me whether I had enough money for current necessities and hearing that I had more than enough, at once arranged to take charge of the balance. The rapidity with which money is moved like this in America is most gratifying. The manager then asked me whether I had had lunch, and urged me to go and get it without delay.

On returning next day to the bureau, I learned that the opening lecture of my tour was not to be given in New York (owing to the question of overcrowding), but in a place “up state.” For the benefit of English readers I may explain that the whole of the United States is divided into States, such as New York State, Boston, the District of Columbia, Ontario, and so forth. My lecture, I found, was to be delivered at the Ladies’ Musical Club at Hicksville, the subject of the address being “Charlemagne.”

This was, as a matter of fact, the topic on which I proposed to lecture every time during my tour. Such a thing is easily possible in America: owing to the great size of the country the lecturer can take a train after his lecture, and get away to another State before the news of his last night’s meeting. He is thus always twelve hours ahead of his lecture. All that is needed is a second lecture for the return tour, which can, however, without difficulty be written on the back of the first. In my own case, I decided to lecture from New York to San Francisco on “Charlemagne, the Man,” then to turn round and lecture on the way back on “Charlemagne, the Boy.” I had selected this subject of Charlemagne because in America it is absolutely necessary that the topic should have novelty, and at the same time there is an unwritten law against bringing in politics, sex or race, while such topics as religion and Christianity are naturally offensive. Liquor must not be mentioned, nor must the lecturer introduce the name of the President or of God. It is well to keep away from Labour, Fascism and Communism. All of this had been very carefully explained to me and had led me to select the subject of Charlemagne.

My reception at Hicksville was cordiality and kindness itself. From the station, which the Americans call a depot (but they mean a station), I was driven by the husband of one of the ladies to the lady’s house, where we had cocktails with a group of friends; after we had had three, at the suggestion of one of the other ladies, we stepped across to her house close by and had three more. The lecture hour, however, being almost come, there was just time for two more at the house of another friend, a minister, who lived just over the street. I found indeed that the habit of giving the lecturer and his audience plenty of cocktails before the talk is universal in America. It might indeed be commended to our restless audiences at home, always loud with interruptions and disturbance. In the United States it is not good form to interrupt a lecture. The audience remain absolutely quiet, the room being suitably darkened. The lecturer, after being introduced, is shown to a quiet corner of the platform with a lamp on it, beside which he reads his lecture. It is thought very bad taste to leave the place while he is still reading, or seeming to read. In fact, the utmost courtesy is extended to him to enable him thus to read to himself till he is finished.

At Hicksville I met the first of such delightful American audiences. It being a leafy night in June, very quiet and balmy, there was an intense stillness, which made it difficult to realize that the audience was there. I read my lecture in a suitably low voice for almost an hour and a half, following Charlemagne from Poitou to Poitiers and then from Poitiers back to Poitou. After the lecture was over we went over to a very pleasant house and had some more cocktails in a large and comfortable library. The minister of whom I spoke, in thanking me for the lecture, said that the small size of the audience – thirty-five – was because the weather was so fine as to keep the young people out of doors, and yet still cool enough to keep the old people in. A Hicksville audience, he said, was very distinctive: it was hard to get them to turn out, and hard to warm them up, and difficult to get them to let themselves go, but if they ever turned out and warmed up and let go, they were a great audience. He said a lot of them were getting a lot more out of my lecture than you’d think they were. He told me that he himself was thinking of going into life insurance as it offered better openings for the ministry.

My experience at Hicksville was pleasantly repeated on later evenings at Heckville in Connecticut and in Huckville, Maine. In each place unfortunately the coolness of the evening still imprisoned the old people, while its freshness tempted away the young. I put down in my notes this temptation of the young and the imprisonment of the old as typical of American life. As I said later on to the janitor of Harvard, there was something psychologically interesting in this idea if one could only seize it. But I admitted that I could not seize it and he said he couldn’t either. Naturally it followed as a matter of course that if I couldn’t, he couldn’t: but it is typical of the equality of American life that he wouldn’t see this. Indeed I found so many things in America typical of American life that I found it difficult to get hold of them fast enough. This itself is very characteristic of America.

But I pass over lightly my visits to the various small towns of New England. As my reference to the janitor has suggested, it was my appearance at Harvard University that I anticipated as the chief feature of my tour in the eastern part of the States, in which it lies. I may mention for the benefit of my readers that the eastern half of the United States faces east, and the western half faces west. In between lies the space called the Middle West facing apparently nowhere.

As I said, Harvard was the Mecca of my visit. I recognized in it the intellectual centre of America and was anxious to test it out by trying it on myself. How would it measure up beside me? A great number of English lecturers have tried this comparison but it hasn’t worked. All of them, while speaking kindly of Harvard, are forced to admit that it still lacks something.

In my own case I did not have the pleasure of lecturing at Harvard. This was disappointing, as Charlemagne would have been just the right thing for them, whereas in the smaller towns of New England the confusion between Charlemagne and Lake Champlain had been painfully apparent. But a Harvard audience would have grasped in a minute that Charlemagne, pronounced as I do it with a hard N and a liquid G – and I take my time to it – was a Frenchman. However, the arrangement for a lecture at Harvard fell through at the last moment, that is to say, up to the last minute the lecture bureau hadn’t made any arrangement, and at the last minute it was too late to make any. I have noticed that a great many English visiting lecturers find their lectures at Harvard fall through at the last moment, some even before.

However, I passed a wonderful day of day-dreaming in and around Harvard, first of all in the hotel because I needed sleep after a night’s journey from Pawchunk, Maine, and afterwards at intervals on benches among the elm trees. But I had, at the same time, an excellent opportunity for making a study of the University itself, having the good luck to find a disengaged janitor – it was his day off – who took me round what he called the Yard and showed me the principal buildings, giving me much information in regard to the professoriate and their classes. I was able therefore to make a great many very interesting comparisons as between Harvard and our own universities. The standard of culture at Harvard, though high, is below our own, the janitor not speaking English at all as well as I do. The students at Harvard are marked with great politeness and courteousness, all those whom I met about the entrance of the buildings showing a polite desire to move away instantly on my coming, and a reluctance to answer questions. There were, however, one or two marked exceptions to this, a few students coming forward with information of the greatest use for my notebook – in regard to such things as the new courses on butchering, and the research seminar in hair-cutting for the barbers’ post-graduate course. Of the professoriate, unfortunately, I saw nothing, it being the month of June during which, the students told me, they are all either in Europe, or taking their afternoon rest, or doing research work in Boston.

After leaving Harvard I visited a number of the New England colleges, such as Amherst where there is an excellent lunch room close to the railway station, Williams, from which the buses very conveniently leave every half-hour, and Dartmouth, which can only be reached in the middle of the night but which contains the best barber’s shop I had yet seen outside of New York. At Smith College, devoted only to women, I was unable to obtain an entrée – I mean, to get in. Of Bowdoin I saw hardly enough to form a judgement, merely changing trains at the junction there. Yet I was glad to have had the opportunity of seeing American academic life and comparing it with our own. The janitors are everywhere a fine class of men, very much interested in their students, and proud of their institution. All of them regretted that I did not have an opportunity to lecture in their college, my lectures, owing to the season of the year, being in the towns only.

I pass over, for the moment, the itinerary of my lecture tour among these smaller places – such as Pleasantville, Massachusetts – Pleasantville, New York – Pleasantville, New Jersey, and Pleasantville, Pennsylvania. I pass it over I say for the moment, but naturally I shall come to it later on if the reader waits for it. But for the moment I am anxious to pass on to Pittsburgh towards which my course was directed and which seemed to me hardly second in interest to New York or Harvard. Pittsburgh, I may explain to those of my readers who don’t know the fact already (I didn’t, so a lot of them won’t), is situated at the junction of the Allegheny, the Monongahela and the Ohio, all three of which here come together. At Pittsburgh I found again the same courtesy among the great business men as in New York. Having mentioned to a great leader of industry to whom I presented my card that I had never seen a blast furnace, he at once rang for a clerk and instructed him to take me to one immediately and to pick a hot one.

After leaving Pittsburgh I had hoped to find myself in the Middle West, an expectation all the keener as I was unusually interested in what my impressions of the Middle West were going to be. So many English lecturers have regretted that they were unable to see the Middle West that I hoped to act as a discoverer. But I confess that as far as my own impressions are concerned, the Middle West is non-existent, as I couldn’t find it. In Chicago everyone disclaimed the idea that their City was in the Middle West, they said it was east: so, too, at St. Louis, the Middle West had not begun, and at Omaha, it was all over. In Memphis, Tennessee, I found that I was in the Old South, and in Missouri – among the better-class people – still in the Confederate States. In Minneapolis, I had reached the north, beyond which was only Winnipeg where the price of wheat was too low for me to lecture.

The lecture bureau having arranged this part of my tour in what are called “long jumps,” I was shot up and down all over the country in nightly leaps, and may have passed through the Middle West in my sleep. I don’t mention this arrangement of long jumps in any spirit of criticism or as wishing in any way to discourage other English lecturers. Experience shows that this is the only way to handle an English lecturer in this central part of the United States. He must be moved fast, the people being of a nervous temperament and often acting on impulse.

One peculiar advantage I derived, however, from my transit of the area where the Middle West should begin was that I was enabled to visit the “centre of population” of the United States. I have no idea how this extraordinary place is selected or nominated, whether by general vote, or by means of what are called “primaries.” Nor must I attempt to explain to my English reader what a primary is, because he wouldn’t get it. Suffice it to say that when a person is to be elected to anything in the United States, he is first elected in a primary, then in a secondary, then in a tertiary, and so on. Hence, for all I know, the centre of population may be chosen by the primaries. But the amazing thing is that there are hardly any people in the place at all. The centre, at present – I say at present advisedly, for they keep changing it – is out in the country in a state called Indiana, being almost three miles east of Linton Post Office – the only way of keeping track of it. It is characteristic of this restlessness of American democracy that they keep changing the centre of population. In the past, Baltimore and Columbus and other cities have been selected, but the choice now goes to much smaller places. Indeed enquiry on the spot showed that there weren’t any people on the spot.

It was while making these reflections that I found myself arrived at Chicago, a vast city, situated at the foot of Lake Michigan, one of the chain of Great Lakes which, as British readers will recall, join the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean. Chicago was to be, contrary to my expectation, the end of my itinerary.

The bureau had decided not to carry my lecture beyond Chicago. There were three reasons for this; (1) that I might find the summer heat very trying; (2) the doubt whether the hotels were comfortable enough for me, and (3) the certainty that there was no money in it. This shortening of my tour was to me a great disappointment. I was most anxious to see what impressions Hollywood might make on me and whether I could set it down in words, or merely convey it into acts. It would be of interest, too, to see my reaction to San Francisco and the Alcatraz Prison. Many Americans had very specially recommended me to see the insides of the prisons, and to stay there. Alcatraz, they said, would be the best.

All this, however, was not to be. Chicago was to be my goal, and from Chicago strangely enough my lecture tour was to change from the quiet itinerary which I have described to the extraordinary sensation which has led finally to my deportation from the United States. To think that all this originated from my casual reference to Chicago, in my opening lecture, as a “city of murderers.” The words were used in the most harmless way without the least intention to offend. American opinion, however, is so peculiarly sensitive, one might almost say touchy, that a casual remark of this kind, meant in perfect good nature, is apt to be taken up wrongly. But I anticipate – an inveterate habit of mine when I get interesting.

My reference to murderers arose from very simple circumstances. On my arrival in Chicago a courteous member of the committee had called for me with a car and asked me whether I would prefer to go and visit the university, which he said covered two square miles (I forget if it was two or twenty), at any rate, whether I would visit the university, or pay a visit to the art galleries, or would like to drive downtown and have a drink at his club.

On our way to his club I was immensely struck by the lake front and said so to my host, telling him at the same time that he might make any use of my remark that he liked. The vast boulevards that carried us along Lake Michigan, the lake at that moment being lashed into what I described to my companion as “mimic fury” (told him to put it in the papers if he wished to), gave me the impression of size, of water, in fact the idea of a big lake, which, as I said to my host, I seemed able to seize but not to convey. He told me to hold on to it.

At the club my host introduced me to several of his friends, many of them university men and nearly as well educated as I am. Our talk, that of men of culture, fell on drink, prohibition, women, and naturally murder. One of the men present was kind enough to give me some statistics of the subject for my book, which I wrote down with no intention of using them in my lecture. But my reader will be amazed as I was to learn of the appalling growth of homicide in Chicago: the figures given by my informant reached to one hundred per day and perhaps fifty per night, when they can’t see so well to get at them.

On the strength of this information, on lecturing on Charlemagne that afternoon before the Ladies’ Mandolin and Banjo Club, I used the harmless phrase “your city of murderers.” The effect was extraordinary. I had hardly returned to the hotel before three young men with flashlight cameras came to get my picture and the newspapers next morning carried headlines “A CITY OF MURDERERS.” The next afternoon, by special invitation, I gave a lecture on “murder” at the university, using, of course, my lecture on Charlemagne but making a parallel between Charlemagne and Al Capone, and deriving both their names from the idea of big stuff. The effect was heightened by the Press christening me the “Man with the Poison Tongue.” The civic authorities gave me twenty-four hours to get out of the City, beyond which they could not be responsible.

The time, however, was more than what I needed.

I had already received a telegram from the head office of the lecture bureau “Call Pittsburgh something.” Like a flash, in fact in less than half an hour, I named it “The City of Filth” and received back an answer:

Special lecture arranged with Clean Government League on the platform and filth as the background.

My return lecture at Pittsburgh was to have been, as already indicated, on “Charlemagne, the Boy,” to be delivered before the Young People’s Astronomical Society. But, as I say, the bureau easily arranged a second lecture on the subject, “The City of Filth,” at which I had with me on the platform a number of City aldermen and twenty of the clergy of the City, all of them known to be absolutely clean. I used, of course, my prepared lecture on Charlemagne, the Boy, but dealt with him from the point of view of filth. I made it clear all through, by inference, that if Charlemagne had been as dirty as the average Pittsburgh boy even the Franks would have had no use for him.

My Pittsburgh lecture was followed next morning by a telegram from the Boston office of the bureau which read:

Please send names for Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, and, if possible, for New York. Meantime every one here is delighted by your calling Harvard the “Cesspool of Conservatism.” A lecture has been arranged for you in the big hall of the union, the local committee agreeing that you lecture on Charlemagne, the Boy beside the Cesspool. Arrangements are being made for the students to throw you into the Charles River after the lecture.

This was, indeed, a gratifying prospect. The reader will recall that on the occasion of my previous visit my offer to lecture at Harvard, referring to it as the Oxford of America, had come to nothing. The interest shown in the proposal was very small and the attempt of the lecture bureau to get the students to mob me after the lecture met with complete indifference. But now this generous offer to throw me into the Charles guaranteed me the kind of reception a foreign lecturer does not readily forget.

The invitation from Harvard was followed, as might be expected, by a rival invitation from Yale. I say “as might be expected,” though my English readers cannot possibly tell what I mean until I add that if Harvard is the Oxford of America, Yale, situated at New Haven in Connecticut, may be called its Cambridge. What one does today, the other did yesterday. Hence there followed an invitation from Yale accepting my idea of a lecture on “New Haven as New Heaven” and carrying with it a promise to throw me into Long Island Sound, a greater distance than at Harvard.

I have not space here to narrate my gratifying success, both on the platform and in the river, at Harvard: nor were the Yale students any less enthusiastic: the dean of one of the faculties in introducing me said that he hoped that after the lecture nothing would be done unbecoming to the high reputation of the college for fair play: he had heard, he said, a rumour that the lecturer would be thrown in the river: he hoped not: something has been said of Long Island Sound. Was this wise? But without further ado he would introduce the lecturer.

Unfortunately a students’ dance after the lecture absorbed the attention of the undergraduates and they had no time to devote to me, but at any rate, several of them assured me of what they would do if I came again.

After my conspicuous success in the greater cities and colleges, I need say little of my triumphs in lesser places. The indignation created at Rome by my referring to it as “Water Tank Seventeen, New York Central,” guaranteed a capacity audience. The people of Buffalo turned out in thousands to see the man who called their city the “Old Man’s Home.” In fact, I realized that I had unearthed a profound truth in American psychology. The Americans, if you praise them, fall asleep. Curse them and they are right there. They like it. When I get time I shall hope in my forthcoming Impressions of America (copies may be ordered now before I write it), to develop this idea more fully. At present I just state it as it stands. Hence the contrast between the drowsy audiences that heard me talk on “Charlemagne, the Man,” and the excited crowds who listened to my lecture on “Charlemagne, the Boy.”

The unsophisticated reader (most of my readers are unsophisticated) may wonder how it was possible for me under these circumstances to deliver a lecture on the boyhood of Charlemagne and have it accepted as matter of interest. The reason is very simple. The newspapers always explained that the lecture was filled with veiled illusions to city politics.

Take for example my return lecture in Hicksville, the upstate town where I opened my tour. This was to me the most interesting evening, and the most characteristic of what I have elsewhere called the American temperament (I thought of it myself). I have spoken of the drowsy quiet of the town on my first coming. It seemed now an entirely different place inhabited by another set of people. I had called it, to a Boston reporter, the “moron municipality.” This led at once to an invitation from the town council to speak as their guest. The hall and the adjacent streets were packed with listeners. In my talk on “Charlemagne, the Boy,” every hidden reference to Hicksville went right home. In fact it was understood that “Charlemagne” was just a clever name for “Charlie Maine” who had been superintendent of education the year before last and was to run again. The mayor of Hicksville, who was in the chair, joined good-naturedly in the laugh over my reference to the mayors of the palace. He told me afterwards that my talk would do a lot to clean up Hicksville town politics, which, it appeared, were inconceivably dirty. The mayor got me out of town in his car from the back-stage door of the hall.

My biggest triumph should have been my concluding lecture in New York. I had called the city “God’s Grave” and there had been a protest from many of the clergy against the blasphemy of the term. Success seemed certain when word came from Washington of the order of my deportation from the United States, and the lecture was cancelled. The order was not unexpected. It had been hinted that I was about to call Washington “The Whited Sepulchre,” and was trying to find a name for the President, a thing not yet done. The order for deportation has ended all this, and terminates my American visit.

I have prepared for the Press a farewell interview in which I speak of the great heart of America. Anybody who would like this interview can call here at Ellis Island and get it. Meantime an enthusiastic article in the New York Press under the title Kicked Out, suggests that I might go and say some dirty things about my own country. The idea strikes me as so good that I wonder I never tried it. The only question is whether they are quite up to it at home.

TOC     INDEX

–5–
The Criminal Memoirs
of Napoleon Bonaparte

Note: It was announced by the European Powers, after the escape of Napoleon from Elba, that he was a criminal at large. Acting on this idea, after his defeat at Waterloo, they made him a prisoner at St. Helena. Not accepting the view of himself, Napoleon missed a fine chance to write the first of the prison memoirs now so popular. He could have handed them out in a talk to the visiting delegation of Bigger and Better Prisons Society, St. Helena Branch, and sold them at 10s. 6d. a volume with a foreword by Sir Hudson Lowe, the Governor of the Island. Even now they may be reconstructed for him, foreword and all.

FOREWORD BY SIR HUDSON LOWE

I am very glad indeed to grant the necessary permission to the publication of the memoirs written by the prisoner William Napoleon Bonaparte. At the present time he is serving a life sentence following on his conviction for aggression, invasion, and overweening ambition. During his stay here he has, however, ceased to ween entirely and has shown a most laudable contrition and regret for the past and for everything he ever did. At his own desire he is altering his name to William, in recognition of the late Mr. Pitt.

During his stay here, Bonaparte has shown a commendable desire to learn the English language, and has got as far as the verb “I am.” He has embraced the Protestant faith, as a Presbyterian, and already understands a part of the Westminster catechism. He has been in every way a model prisoner, having earned already enough good conduct marks to remit one year of his life sentence, retrospectively.

The prisoner strikes me as a man of some intelligence and with a certain knowledge of the world. I feel assured that the publication of his memoirs will aid in deterring others from the errors he has made.

THE MEMOIRS AS GIVEN TO THE DELEGATION

Yes, gentlemen, if I had listened to my good old mother, I should never have been here. Again and again, she said to me, “Napoleon, keep straight,” and if I had kept straight, gentlemen, I should never have gone crooked.

Since I’ve been here on the Island I’ve had access to a lot of good books, for which I want to thank the librarian, and I can see things differently about my career from what I could at the time. I can’t thank the English military critics enough for letting me know that I was too fat at Waterloo, too fat, gentlemen, and drowsy. If I had realized, gentlemen, how fat I was, I would never have undertaken that battle. But I just went slamming ahead, the way fat men do, and I lost it.

But you’ve asked me about my story, and how I came to be here, and above all, how I came to see the light after so much sin. So I’ll do my best at telling you. But I’m not much of a hand, I must warn you, gentlemen, at telling a story. I can write a bulletin about battles and victories with anyone; some of you may have seen that one I wrote about the eagles flying from steeple to steeple till they would alight on Notre-Dame. It was good stuff – wicked though it was – and even here, gentlemen, it stirs me, although now I can see the sin of it and how ungrateful I was to the Government of England and other kind friends who had given me a nice home in the Island of Elba.

But perhaps some gentleman would give me a chew of tobacco. It’s dry talking without something to chew. Thank you.

Well, then, father and mother had a farm near Ajaccio Post Office in Corsica and there my brothers and I were brought up. I have always felt that I owed much of my energy to those early years on the farm, to being up at sunrise to drive the cows from the pasture. With such a beginning I ought to have grown up a hundred per cent American as all farm boys do.

But I started wrong. I was sent away to school in France with my brother Joe and if we had come home again with the fine education we received at Brienne, we could have started a goat farm and very likely done well. I have to admit that Joe was all in favour of it. Years after, when I made him King of Spain, he used to say, “I’d rather have goats, they’re quieter.”

But there was a wild streak in all of us, and nothing would do than we must go to Paris, Joe and I first, and afterwards Lou and Luce and the girls, down to Jerry, my youngest brother. Jerry was the youngest and wildest of us all and presently he ran away to the United States, and did well, and married into one of the oldest Baltimore families, a big lift for us Bonapartes. But I made Jerry come home, and he sank back again, went soldiering and I last saw him, I think, at the battle of Waterloo. But I was too fat to keep track of him. But I’m running ahead of my story. I suppose none of you gentlemen carry a drop of brandy? Thank you.

Anyway, we went to Paris just at the time of the excitement over the French Revolution and I think you’ve heard what happened? I joined the army, got in with the wrong crowd, and some of them put me up to the idea of stopping the French Revolution. I stopped it by shooting grapeshot at it, an idea that no one had thought of before. Then I went down with a pretty tough crowd to Toulon and beat up the English, and then one dark night went out with a gang and conquered Belgium. And after that I was always out at night, conquering something, for months together – with the same crowd, Bill Ney, and Joe Murat, and Nick Soult, and dare-devils of that sort.

But you know the whole story, gentlemen, and I needn’t repeat it. The wickedness of it was not so much in anything we did as what we planned to do. Do you know that at one time we actually planned to invade England; another time a lot of the boys went right across Spain and captured Lisbon and made the English sail them home again: and later than that, quite a bit later, a big crowd of us went to Russia and burnt Moscow. Most of those boys, gentlemen, never came back and their poor mothers have no one to thank for it but me. I suppose no gentleman has another drop of brandy? Thank you – I get a little wheezy, you see, with talking. I’m over fifty, gentlemen, and I’ve led a hard life.

But, as I say, I never realized the mistakes I made till it was all over. Looking over it now with the help of books and military criticism, I can see that my career was one long series of fatal errors. I’ve spoken of the battle of Waterloo, where I was too fat. On the other hand when I tried to conquer Egypt I was too thin. My fatal mistake at the great battle of Leipzig in 1813 – I’ve read all about it since – was that I didn’t keep my rear covered. A true strategist always has his rear resting on something. On the other hand at the big battle at Borodino – that’s just outside of Moscow – I lost out by refusing to uncover my rear. In Spain I forgot about the heat. In Russia I miscalculated the cold. In short there was a fatal blunder in every campaign.

Honestly, gentlemen, I don’t think I ever ought to have been born. It was a big mistake. But it appears, from what I read, that it had to be. I represented, so it seems, military autocracy emerging from mob rule, and so I had to emerge. My trouble was, as I get it from reading about my career, that I had to represent a lot of things and got no chance to be myself. I represented the fall of feudalism and the birth of imperialism and the rise of nationalism and the fall of Methodism. What chance has a fellow who represents all that to strike out for himself?

Still, I’m not complaining, at least not in that sense. But since some of you have asked me if I have any complaints to make while you’re here, I’ll say yes, gentlemen, I have. In the first place, I don’t like the way my name is already being used in the newspapers, I mean in connection with their advertising matter. I say to myself if this kind of thing has got started already in 1820, what will it be like a hundred years from now?

I’ll show you what I mean. Here is a journal that’s just come over from the United States with an advertisement for winter blankets. It says, “Napoleon used to say, ‘Keep the feet warm and your kidneys will look after themselves,’” I admit, gentlemen, that I did say that, I said it in Russia one day to Marshal Augereau. He was complaining of the cold and I asked him, “Where does it get you, Augereau?” and he answered, “Right in the kidneys.” I said, “Keep your feet warm, Augereau, and your kidneys will never bother you.” But when I said this, it was as a private remark to Marshal Augereau.

Or look at this one, “Napoleon used to say, ‘Deep breathing sets up a diaduction of the oxygen in the lungs.’” Yes, I said it all right – I said it to the Pope the day of my coronation, for fear he might faint, but I meant it only for the Pope, and not for use in connection with a bathroom exercise machine; and I certainly did not say to the Pope, “Ten minutes on the floor of the bathroom every morning will make a new man of you.” He had no bathroom; never had had.

There’s more than that. I don’t like the way they are starting to call all sorts of people “Napoleons.” Here’s a fellow who is being named “the Napoleon of financiers.” I might stand for that. But I don’t like this other man, in the tailor business, calling himself the Napoleon of trouser-cutters. That’s not fair to me. I never cut trousers. It was all done for me by Marie Louise – she was a good wife, gentlemen, and bred up in Austria as a woman should be. Excuse me, if the remembrance of her affects me for a moment. Thank you, yes, another glass of brandy? You’re very kind. Some day I hope they call a brandy after me.

But just as a last word, gentlemen, I’d like to say that when the time comes for me to leave this world, I expect to turn into a spirit and any of you can call me up and have a talk at about half a crown, or fifty cents United States money, for three minutes. But don’t ask me about the battle of Austerlitz: just ask me if it’s all bright and beautiful where I am and whether Sis and Uncle William are happy. Till then, gentlemen, adieu.

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Model Monologues

–1–
Mrs. Uplift
Betters Society

Oh, Clara! is it you? Do, do come in – no, no, you don’t disturb me at all – I’ve been having such a morning over these wretched accounts of our Social Betterment Association. . . .

You’re a member aren’t you? Yes, I thought you were. Well, my dear, the mess it seems to be in! You’ve no idea – I’m treasurer, you know, so it falls on me; but of course they wanted me to be treasurer as Alfred is in so many things – and the bank has been awfully nice about it – we owe them a lot of money now, you know, but they say as long as they have Alfred’s personal signature and one or two others of our husbands, they’ll let the account run – isn’t it nice of them, I mean, making it a personal matter, like that, so homelike? – people say banks haven’t got souls, but really I think, in some ways, they’re generosity itself. Think of it! You see we owe them about five thousand dollars and the other day I asked the manager, Mr. Bland, what he charged us for lending us the money. My dear, he was almost hurt – “Why, nothing,” he said, “only the interest on the money.” Isn’t it good of them?

—

But dear me, it does seem a mess – the committee is meeting this morning over at Mrs. Gamble’s, the president’s, in fact they’ve had meetings for a week, to think out ways and means for the future, and meanwhile I was trying to get these accounts straight. You see, it goes back two or three years – before you were a member, I think, Clara. It began in such a wonderful way – such sympathy – a lot of us felt so terribly bad about the men without work and the poor little babies without milk and the people in the slums without anything – and the poor friendless girls, and homeless old people and all that, that we simply had to do something – so we started the association and now here we are with a debt of five thousand dollars. . . .

As to the slums – I just don’t know where they are in this city – I’d never been in social work before and supposed there must be slums but I can’t find them. A visiting delegate was here a little while ago and she asked me to drive her to the slums, so I said to the chauffeur, “drive us to the slums.” But he didn’t know of any and he drove all round downtown through a lot of narrow dirty streets – but it turned out to be where the brokers live – we couldn’t find slums – the delegate was quite angry – she said it was scandalous that a city as big as ours had no slums. As for the friendless girls – why, Clara! – there aren’t any – every time we give a treat for them, their boy-friends bring them in motor cars. And the babies have no milk because they all use prepared food – something out of a tin, what is it, Chipso, or is it Nux Vomica? – anyway, what they give babies now – and the men without work all get their money every week. I’m not complaining about it, Clara, I’m only just saying that social work isn’t what it was, and here we have this wretched debt of five thousand dollars and we can’t stop or we’d have to pay it. At first the finance was very simple because we just used to collect subscriptions and use the money for the charities. But we soon found that that was too slow, and then so many of the ladies were so terribly behind in their subscriptions. . . .

So we began – oh, that was at least two years ago – trying to make money. The first thing we did was to bring Signor Stringi, the great violinist, from New York for a special engagement. He was most kind about it: he told us that his regular fee was a thousand dollars, but for us, as it was a charity, he took off ten per cent, and made it nine hundred. But oh, my dear! such a failure! We put the seats at five dollars, but you know, Clara, the people here are simply not musical, or not so musical as that. They simply wouldn’t come. . . .

So there we were with a loss of over nine hundred dollars: of course, the bank was awfully nice about it. They said just to leave it, to pay no attention to it. As long as they had Alfred’s personal signature and two others they said it didn’t matter. . . .

But, naturally, we wanted to get out of it as soon as ever we could, and so we brought that famous pianist, what was his name? I think you were here then – oh, yes, Herr Thumpit – and he reduced his fee ever so much – simply asked what was the most we could pay and took that – and we put the seats at fifty cents each! Would you believe it, people simply wouldn’t come! Not at fifty cents! They were too musical, you see, to attend any fifty cent performance. The receipts were only forty dollars. Poor Herr Thumpit was awfully hurt. He said he felt like giving back the cheque – he said it again and again, and when we wouldn’t take it, he said he’d tear it up – in fact, he did tear a corner off it. But of course the mistake was ours not his. . . .

So there we were with a bigger overdraft than ever – because the advertising had cost such a terrible lot. Do you know, Clara – it seemed to go that way all the time. The next thing we tried we felt sure would make a direct appeal – a concert, just with home talent, on behalf of ragged children. The talent didn’t cost anything, but we spent such a lot of money on the hall, although the manager said that they made a different price for us, from what they would have for anybody else. The idea was – you remember it, don’t you, Clara? – to take up a collection. All the people came in free, and of course all the little children – our hope was that the sight of the little ragged children would appeal to all the fathers and mothers and make them give liberally. But, my dear!! They didn’t look ragged at all! The little girls looked simply sweet in their print dresses, and the boys all so neat and their shoes blacked – and we had spent ever so much on a poster, “HELP THE BAREFOOT KIDDIES!”

Then after that we had the big amateur theatricals at the Opera House! That’s the special mess I’ve been trying to get straight. My dear, it’s simply scandalous what the theatre charged! And the costumes – the bills have been coming in all summer! Those girls – you remember we had a chorus all of débutantes because they would look so fresh and innocent as compared with professionals – the bills those girls sent in for costumes! Would you believe it, one of them bought a dress suit for her father, and another put in a raincoat she got last year – so, of course, there was a terrible deficit.

That’s why the committee are meeting today to see what we can do: in fact they’ve been meeting for a week and making plans, today is just the final. Mrs. Gamble – she’s the president, you know – said she would send me over a note as soon as they make a decision. . . .

Did the bell ring? Perhaps that’s it now. Martha, I think the bell rang. You see she would send the note over by a messenger, it’s quicker – thank you, Martha, that’s it – and I know her writing – now let me see what she says:

Dear Mrs. ———

At our final special finance committee this morning, we have been considering ways and means in regard to our very heavy accumulated overdraft, which the bank now tell us is over five thousand dollars. The universal feeling among the ladies of the committee is that the debt must be lifted at once, and that a special effort should be immediately set on foot in this direction. The proposal has been made that the Association should remove the debt at one stroke by holding a garden party, or rather a fête champêtre, on such a large scale as to cancel the whole overdraft. Mrs. Rollinit has been kind enough to offer the use of her beautiful grounds for the afternoon and evening, as a special contribution to the work of the club, with no other charge or expense than what is needed to pay the extra time of her gardeners and groundsmen and the extra effort involved for her inside staff. Apart from this the committee will be called upon to pay no expense beyond that of the special lighting and illumination of the grounds which are to be turned into a sort of fairyland for the occasion. . . .

Oh, Clara, doesn’t it sound just too wonderful! You know, the Rollinits are simply rolling in it – and the grounds! – think of it, ten acres – they have a quarter of a mile of gladioli alone. Imagine it all lighted and illuminated!

– We have already received a very kind offer from the Hook and Gettit Electric Co. to undertake the whole work as a matter of civic service. . . .

—Isn’t that splendid of them. My husband is one of the directors, you know, and Mr. Rollinit is the president.

– a matter of civic service without any mention of cost beyond the bare sum needed for labour, material and overhead and contingent charges, insurance and deterioration with an addition of a nominal 10 per cent profit. . . .

—Isn’t that kind of them – adding ten per cent extra, after doing all that? . . .

– For the matter of refreshments, the committee think it wise to turn the whole thing over to professional hands. The Philanthropic Restaurants Limited have offered to undertake the contract of refreshments, drinks and attendance at an absolutely minimum figure. Their manager is unable to state precisely what the figure will be, but assures the committee that it will be the very least they feel like charging. There is a point, he says, which they simply daren’t go below, but they guarantee to charge something above this point. He adds that they will regulate their price partly by what funds they know us to have. . . .

—I’m sure nothing could be fairer than that could it, Clara?

– For music the committee have a very kind offer from the Theatrical Musicians Guild offering to supply any quantity of music and to take merely what they can get.

Isn’t that like musicians? So generous always!

It is suggested, too, that we obtain special attractions for the occasion, among which, perhaps, will be Mr. Angus Macfoozle – whose wife is a member of the association – our local bagpipe expert, and who offers to play without any fee at all – merely accepting a honorarium . . .

That’s terribly good, but really they shouldn’t let him, he’s too generous: when he played for our church last winter, he cut his fee down to three-fifths; we insisted on raising it to three-eighths; but he said no, absolutely – only three-fifths.

The suggestion is made that the guests should pay a single uniform fee for entrance to the grounds, music and refreshment, and that this fee should be twenty-five cents with complimentary tickets to the ladies of the committee and their families, and guests and friends; this should easily . . .

Oh, is that the telephone? Excuse me just a minute, Clara – Hullo, oh, is that you, Mrs. Gamble – yes, I’ve just been reading it! I think it’s just too wonderful! Oh, yes, of course, we must start right away, and yes, certainly we must begin ordering the printing, and the decorations – and, of course, we shall need some money shan’t we, to go on with? The bank said – oh, you’re speaking from the bank! They’re letting us have another five thousand? Isn’t that good of them – really banks nowadays do take a wonderful interest in social work. They’re putting five thousand to our credit, you say, and no charge at all, except the interest? Isn’t it generous – and they want our husbands’ signatures – yes, exactly, as a matter of form – I’ll send my husband in to sign after lunch – and I’ll come over and join you at the committee rooms with a cheque-book. Good-bye.

—

Ah, now I do feel that the Association is at the end of all its troubles.

TOC     INDEX

–2–
Mrs. Newrich
Buys Antiques  [5]

Oh, my dear, I’m so delighted to see you! It’s so charming of you to come – Jane, take Mrs. Overworld’s coat, please – do come on in – Jane, take Mrs. Overworld’s gloves. It’s just delightful to see you. Ever since we came back from Europe, Charles and I have been just dying to have you see our things – (raising her voice): Charles! Mrs. Overworld’s come over to see our new antiques. Isn’t it sweet of her? . . . He’s in his study but I don’t know whether he hears. He just gets buried in reading. Charles, you know, has always been so scholarly and so every time he gets a new price-list he just gets absorbed in it. . . .

But there’s such a lot I want to show you that I can’t even wait till you’ve had a cup of tea. . . . This clock in the hall? An antique? Oh, yes, indeed! Isn’t it just marvellous! It’s a Salvolatile! Does it keep good time? Gracious! what an idea! Of course not! It doesn’t keep time at all. It doesn’t go, I understand it never did go. That’s why there’s such a demand for the Salvolatile clocks. You see he was one of the really great clock makers. None of his clocks ever went.

Charles, did any of the Salvolatile clocks ever go? What? Only the imitation ones. Thank you. . . . You see, that’s one way you can tell a Salvolatile clock. If it is genuine, it won’t go. You say, it hasn’t got any hands left. My dear! Why, of course, it never had any – not supposed to. We picked it up in a queer little shop in Amalfi and the man assured us that it never had had any hands. He guaranteed it. That’s one of the things, you know, that you can tell by. Charles and I were terribly keen about clocks at that time and really studied them, and the books all agreed that no genuine Salvolatile has any hands. See what it says on the little label – it was gummed on it when we got it – so we left it still there – (reading):

No. 5661. X Salvolatile Wall clock, no hands, never had, won’t go, never would, no pendulum (breaking off her reading with animation) – of course, I’d forgotten that – no pendulum – that makes it more valuable still. . . .

That break in the side? Ah, my dear, I saw you looking at that – but I won’t try to lie about it . . . the broken side isn’t genuine – we had it broken by an expert in New York after we got back. Isn’t it exquisitely done? You see, he has made the break to look exactly as if some one had rolled the clock over and stamped on it. Every genuine Salvolatile is said to have been stamped upon like that.

Of course, our break is only imitation, but it’s extremely well done, isn’t it? We go to Ferrugi’s, that little place on Fourth Avenue, you know, for everything that we want broken. They have a splendid man there. He can break anything. . . .

Yes, and the day when we wanted the clock done, Charles and I went down to see him do it. It was really quite wonderful, wasn’t it, Charles? (raising her voice). You remember the man in Ferrugi’s who broke the clock for us! I’m afraid he doesn’t hear. But the man really was a wonderful expert. He just laid the clock on the floor, and turned it on its side and then stood looking at it intently, and walking round and round it and murmuring in Italian as if he were swearing at it. Then he jumped in the air and came down on it with both feet . . . with such wonderful accuracy.

Our friend Mr. Appin-Hyphen-Smith – the great expert, you know – was looking at our clock last week and he said it was marvellous, hardly to be distinguished from a genuine fractura. . . . But he did say, I remember, that the better way is to throw a clock out of a fourth-storey window. You see, that was the height of the Italian houses in the thirteenth century – is it the thirteenth century I mean, Charles? Charles! Do I mean the thirteenth century? I mean the proper time for throwing an Italian clock out of the window – the fourteenth? Oh, thank you, darling! – I’m always so silly about remembering the centuries of the Italian things. . . .

Of course, you see, with antiques you simply must know the century or you make the silliest blunders. The other day I made the most atrocious mistake about a spoon – I called it a twelfth-century spoon and in reality it was only eleven and a half – of course my hostess, who owned the spoon (she collects them), was terribly put out. You see, a twelfth-century spoon is practically worthless. None of the great Italian spoon-makers were born till the eleventh century – or have I got it backwards – anyway, till then, my dear, the spoons made were only good for eating with – and then the great spoon-maker – Charles! what was that great Italian spoon-maker’s name – Spoonuchi! of course, how silly of me! – Spoonuchi made spoons that couldn’t be eaten with, and of course that started the craze. . . .

That glass case, that’s very interesting, isn’t it? – I’m afraid you can’t see them very well without a magnifying-glass – there, try this one – they’re signatures, all mounted and framed – some are perfectly wonderful – that’s Queen Elizabeth – of course, you simply couldn’t tell it if you didn’t know. But if you look you can see the Q – or no, I think it’s Peter the Great – you can’t tell any of the really good ones – but Charles has a key to them. . . .

We have a little man in Highgate who picks them up for us here and there and he always tells us what they are – that’s Napoleon! Doesn’t it seem wonderful to think of his actually writing it – or no, I beg your pardon, that’s not Napoleon – that’s P. T. Barnum, he was one of Napoleon’s marshals, I believe – Charles! was P. T. Barnum one of Napoleon’s marshals? His private secretary! – oh, of course. But I’m forgetting your tea – do pardon me – you know I get so absorbed in my antiques that I forget everything. Do come into the drawing-room and have tea – but, oh, just a minute before you sit down, do let me show this tea-pot – oh, no, I don’t mean that one, that’s the one that the tea has been made in – but it’s nothing. We got that here in New York at Hoffany’s – to make tea in. It is made of solid silver, of course, and all that, but even Hoffany’s admitted that it was made in America and was probably not more than a year or so old and had never been used by anybody else. In fact, they couldn’t guarantee it in any way.

But let me pour you out tea from it and then do look at the perfectly darling tea-pot on the shelf beside you. Oh, don’t touch it, please, it won’t stand up. . . . No. . . . That’s one of the tests. We know from that it is genuine Swaatsmaacher. None of them stand up.

Did I buy it here? Oh, heavens, no, you couldn’t buy a thing like that here! As a matter of fact, we picked it up in a little gin shop in – what was the name of that place in Holland? Charles, what was the name of the place in Holland where there was a gin shop? What? Ober – what? – oh, yes, of course, Oberhellandam!

Those Dutch names are all so picturesque, aren’t they? Do you know Oberhellandam? No – well, it’s just the dearest little place, nothing but little wee smelly shops filled with most delightful things – all antique, everything broken. They guarantee that there is nothing in the shop that wasn’t smashed at least a hundred years ago . . . see the label on it. . . . It’s in Dutch . . . Tay poot – I think that is Dutch for tea-pot – gesmosh – that means, smashed – hog – Charles! what is “hog” in Dutch – on the tea-pot darling – hog wort – high value! Oh, of course! . . .

Would it make good tea – oh, I imagine it would make wonderful tea – only it leaks – that’s one of the things to know it by. It’s what the experts always look for in a Swaatsmaacher. If it doesn’t leak, it’s probably just a faked-up thing not twenty years old. . . . Silver? – oh, no, that’s another test. The real Swaatsmaachers were always made of pewter bound with barrel-iron off the gin barrels. They try to imitate it now by using silver, but they can’t get it. You see the silver won’t take the tarnish.

It’s the same way with ever so many of the old things. They rust and rot in a way that you simply cannot imitate. I have an old drinking horn that I’ll show you presently – ninth century, isn’t it, Charles? – that is all coated inside with the most beautiful green slime, absolutely impossible to reproduce . . . really and truly impossible, they say. Yes, I took it to Squeeziou’s, the Italian place in London. (They are the great experts on horns, you know; they can tell exactly the century and the breed of cow.) And they told me that they had tried in vain to reproduce that peculiar and beautiful rot. One of their head men said that he thought that this horn had probably been taken from a dead cow that had been buried for fifty years. That’s what gives it its value, you know. We asked him – the head man, I mean – how long he thought a cow had to be dead to be of use as an antique, and he said it was very hard to say; but it had to be dead for years and years anyway. . . .

That’s what the man said in London, but of course we didn’t buy the tea-pot in London. London is simply impossible, just as hopeless as New York. You can’t buy anything real there at all. . . . So, we pick things up here and there, just in any out-of-the-way corners.

That little stool we found at the back of a cow stable in Loch Aberlocherty. They were actually using it for milking. And the two others – aren’t they beautiful? though really it’s quite wrong to have two chairs alike in the same room – came from the back of a tiny little whiskey shop in Galway. Such a delight of an old Irishman sold them to us and he admitted that he himself had no idea how old they were. They might, he said, be fifteenth-century, or they might not . . . oh, and that reminds me I’ve just had a letter from Jane (Jane is my sister, you know) that is terribly exciting. She’s found a table at a tiny place in Brittany that she thinks would exactly do in our card room. She says that it is utterly unlike anything else in the room and has quite obviously no connection with cards. But let me read what she says – let me see, yes, here’s where it begins:

. . . a perfectly sweet-little table. It probably had four legs originally and even now has two which, I am told, is a great find, as most people have to be content with one. The man explained that it could either be leaned up against the wall or else suspended from the ceiling on a silver chain. One of the boards of the top is gone, but I am told that that is of no consequence, as all the best specimens of Brittany tables have at least one board out.

Doesn’t that sound fascinating? Charles! I was just reading to Mrs. Overworld, Jane’s letter about the table in Brittany – don’t you think you’d better cable for it right away – yes, so do I – and Charles! ask them how much extra they would charge to smash one of the legs – and now, my dear, do have some tea. You’ll like it – it’s a special kind I get – it’s Ogosh – a very old China tea, that has been let rot in a coal-oil barrel – you’ll love it.

[5]  As noted in the Preface, this was revised from “Old Junk and New Money.” (See Short Circuits.)
Related story: “Among The Antiques.” (See My Remarkable Uncle and Other Sketches.)

TOC     INDEX

–3–
Mrs. Eiderdown
Roughs It in the Bush  [6]

Yes, we come up every autumn. We’re both so passionately fond of the open air. Ransome, will you close that window? There’s a draught. . . .

And we love to do everything for ourselves. Ransome, will you please pass me that ash-tray from across the table?

And we live here quite without form or ceremony – that’s what makes it so nice, it’s all so simple. Gwendoline, you may put on the finger-bowls, and tell William to serve the coffee in the card-room. . . .

We like the roughness of it, you know, the journey up, and everything. Of course, it’s not quite so rough to come up now as it used to be, now that they have built the new main highway. This time we were able to drive up both the town cars, and before that it was always a question just what we could bring up.

I do think the big closed cars are so much nicer when one is roughing it – Gwendoline, the cigarettes, please – they keep the air out so much better, and our new one, perhaps you noticed it, is the kind in which you can draw the curtains and arrange it something like a drawing-room on a train. We are able to come up at night in it. I always think it much nicer – don’t you? – to come up through the mountains at night. One sleeps better than in the day.

—

Of course, it is not all so easy. The food up here is always such a question. Of course, we can always get meat from the village – there is quite a village now, you know, though when my husband first came up twenty years ago there was nothing – and we can get milk and eggs and vegetables from the farmers, and, of course, the men bring in fish all the time, and our gardener manages now to raise a good deal of fruit under glass, but beyond that it is very difficult to get anything.

Only yesterday, the housekeeper came to tell me that we had not enough broilers for lunch; somebody had made a silly mistake and we were one short. We had to send Alfred (he drives fastest) back to the city with the big car to get one. Even then, lunch was half an hour late. Things like that happen all the time. One has to learn to be philosophical.

But surely it is worth it – isn’t it? – for the pleasure of being up here in the wilderness, so far away from everything and everybody. I sometimes feel up here as if one were cut off from the whole world – William, will you turn on the radio?

I think there will be news of the municipal elections and, of course, my husband is tremendously interested. His company has been trying to get better city government for so long; they need pure government because of their franchises, and it has been costing them a tremendous lot of money to get. What do you say, William, not working? Then will you please ask Jones to tell the electrician to look at it?

—

Gwendoline, I think you had better tell James to give us more furnace heat and see that there are fires in the upper bedrooms tonight. It’s turning a little chilly.

I always like to see to everything myself. It takes trouble, but it’s the only way. But, I beg your pardon, you were asking me something. Fishing! Oh, yes, there is the most glorious fishing up here. I must tell Gwendoline to tell Mrs. Edwards to see that they give you fish at breakfast. It’s just an ideal fishing country, my husband says. We send William out every morning, and sometimes William and Ransome both. Often, so my husband tells me, when the weather is really clear he has William up and out by four o’lock – my husband is so fond of early rising, though he can’t get up now himself the way he used to – but he always likes to get William and Ransome out early.

They bring back the most beautiful fish. Trout, I think. I don’t precisely know because, of course, I never go myself, but I think trout and sea-bass and finnan-haddock – they keep us beautifully supplied. William caught some finnan-haddie this morning, I think – or did he say dory? . . .

Thank you, William, you can take the glasses; we’re done with them. You see, William knows all about fish, as he comes from Newfoundland, or some place of the sort.

You say, doesn’t my husband go fishing himself? Oh yes, indeed, Peter’s a tremendous fisherman! – simply adores it! But of course, he can’t go in the early morning – the chill, you know, my dear – he has to avoid a chill.

Our doctor, Dr. Slyder, a very old friend, always says to Peter: “Remember, Eiderdown, a chill simply won’t do!” So my husband is positively cut off from early rising, the thing he’d love best to do if he dared. . . . But Dr. Slyder – he comes up here himself, you know, and goes fishing with Peter, Dr. Slyder says – “Absolutely no! I forbid it.” He insists that neither of them get up before ten-thirty and then they go and fish together. Dr. Slyder is just as keen on fishing as my husband is – in fact, they’re both experts.

They go and fish about the middle of the day – they like to go in a very simple way – just in the large motor launch you may have seen as you passed the corner of the lake. My husband would have preferred an ordinary fishing-smack, but he couldn’t get one here – he’s having one made in New York.

They just take Edward, the mechanic, for the engine, and Thomas, the fisherman, to look after the lines (Dr. Slyder forbids my husband to handle his own hooks for fear of infection) – and of course, one of the indoor men for the lunch – even that very simple – a little cold salmon on ice and a bottle or two of champagne – my husband says it’s amazing how little you eat when you are fishing – a little salmon, a salad, and a meat pie – is all that he and the doctor ever take. But they do take champagne because Dr. Slyder insists that in Peter’s case he must take it as a preventative – with just a little spirits – cognac – after it. Dr. Slyder is very strict as to cognac.

They generally fish a little, while the men prepare the lunch on the shore – you noticed the little islands no doubt – and then after lunch, just a little nap. Dr. Slyder refuses to let Peter fish for an hour after a meal, and then off they go again till it’s time for afternoon tea. But of course it’s a little too late in the year now. Several times lately Dr. Slyder has insisted on their playing billiards instead.

You say, “Do we have any trouble getting servants up here?” My dear, it was simply the bane of my life trying to get them, until at last we decided to import them from England and Scotland. The people round here – I really don’t know why – seem quite unfitted to be servants. So, as I say, we bring them out.

You may have noticed McAlister in the garden – or no, perhaps, he was in his greenhouse (he goes there when he doesn’t want to be disturbed) – well, my dear, he’s a perfect treasure – and such a character. I don’t know how we could get another like him. And yet in a way McAlister is a perfect tyrant. My dear, he simply won’t allow us to pick the roses; and if any of us walk across the grass he is furious. And he positively refuses to let us use the vegetables. He told me quite plainly that if we took any of his young peas or his early cucumbers he would leave. We are to have them later on when he’s finished growing them.

Of course we have trouble with McAlister at times, but he’s always very reasonable when we put things in the right light. Last week, for example, I was afraid that we had gone too far with him. He is always accustomed to have a quart of beer every morning at half-past ten – the maids are told to bring it out to him – and after that he goes to sleep in the little arbour beside the tulip bed. And the other day when he went there he found that one of our guests, who hadn’t been told, was actually sitting in there reading. Of course he was furious. I was afraid for the moment that he would give notice on the spot. But we explained to him that it was only an accident and that the person hadn’t known, and that it wouldn’t occur again. After that he was softened a little, but he went off muttering to himself, and that evening he dug up all the new tulips and threw them over the fence. We saw him do it, but of course we didn’t dare say anything. You see if we had, we might have lost McAlister, and I don’t know where we could possibly get another man like him: at least not on this side of the water. . . .

What society we have in a place so isolated as this? Do you know, my dear, people so often ask me that and I simply answer, “none at all.” We don’t need it – we come here to be isolated and what we want is to be just quietly alone by ourselves. Of course, Peter generally brings Dr. Slyder with him because the doctor says he never feels quite comfortable about what Peter eats and drinks unless he’s with him, and very often Major Boozer and Mr. Ace come – you met them before dinner, didn’t you? – because they are Peter’s partners and Peter feels it wise to keep in touch with them and know what they’re doing. But beyond that we bring no one except any odd guests one happens to want to bring – you noticed at dinner that we weren’t more than a dozen – we seldom go beyond that – so here we always are as a sort of life in ourselves.

There are, of course, a few people around. The Upstocks have laid out a very beautiful place at the other end of the lake. And the Brokes have built a really handsome place, done in stone in a simple Roman style that suits the rough country – these and a few others, but, of course, nothing like the crush of the city. And they all get into the same simple ways. Mrs. Upstock always comes over just as she is, and I go over there in the launch just as I am: and Mr. Upstock is terribly informal: often walks over here just in his braces. So you see it isn’t society.

What do you say – our amusements here? Oh, we simply don’t have any. We have always both felt that up here in this beautiful air (that french window at the end of the room needs closing, Ransome) it is amusement enough just to be alive. So we have never bothered to think about amusements. Of course, my husband had the billiard-room built because that is really his one pastime, and this card-room because it is mine, and we put in the tennis courts, though it was hard to do so, so as to have them for the children. But that is all. We have the golf links, of course – perhaps you noticed them as you came up.

It was really quite a triumph for my husband making the courses here. He did every bit of it himself. At one time he had nearly two hundred Italians working. My husband, as you know, is terribly energetic; I often call him a dynamo. The summer when he was building the golf course he never seemed to stop; always sitting with his cigar in his mouth, first under a tree on one side, looking at his Italians, and then on the other side – in fact, he was always somewhere. I used to wonder how he could keep it up.

It was just the same way when my husband was putting in the tennis courts – I must show it you in the morning. Peter was determined that one thing we must have was proper en tout cas tennis courts. But Peter, as I say, is such a dynamo that he went right at it, taking it over and doing it all himself. Do you know that he blasted through ten feet of rock to get the foundations he wanted? Two of the Italians were blown up with the dynamite, but Peter wasn’t discouraged for a minute – he sent for two more and went right on – and of course Peter paid all the expenses of the two he had blown up, funeral, insurance, everything. He said that it was only fair as it was his risk not theirs. Peter is like that.

But, I am so sorry, I am afraid it is time I was ordering you all off to bed. We keep such early hours here that we go to bed at midnight.

But perhaps you’d rather stay up a little and play billiards or cards, and there are always one or two of the servants up – at any rate till about three, and then I think my husband is sending William fishing. Good night.

[6]  As noted in the Preface, this was revised from “Life in the Open.” (See Short Circuits.)
Related story: “Roughing It in the Bush.” (See Over the Footlights.)

TOC     INDEX

–4–
Mrs. Easy
Has Her Fortune Told

Mrs. Easy entering her apartment to find a friend waiting for her.

Oh, my dear Mary, I’m so sorry, I’m just exhausted. Martha, put the chain back on the door, please – I do hope I haven’t kept you waiting long – about twenty minutes? Oh, what a shame!

But I’ve just had such an exciting experience! I’m just done out! I must tell you all about it. But just wait a minute till I ring and tell Martha to make a cocktail. You’ll have one, won’t you? Martha, make two cocktails – no, make four – or no (calling louder as Martha has left) – Martha – make six. My dear Mary, I need it. I’m just all done in.

I’ve just come from having my fortune told, at least I don’t mean that, I mean having my horoscope read. You must excuse my being so breathless, I’m not really breathless, it’s just the excitement. My dear Mary, I must say it, I can’t keep it to myself – I’m going to be kidnapped! Yes, kidnapped, now, at any minute, right here! Martha, is the chain on the door? Don’t open it for anyone. . . .

Ah! thank goodness for that cocktail – excuse me if I drink it right off (noise of drinking) – ah! that’s better: it makes one feel calmer, doesn’t it? I think I’ll take another – yes, my dear (more resignedly), I’m expecting to be kidnapped at any moment.

Did Mrs. Brown say that was my fortune? Oh, goodness, no! I don’t mean I went to old Mrs. Brown, or anybody of that class – she’s all right, of course, Mrs. Brown, I’ve often been to her and she’s a dear old soul. I must have gone to her nearly once a week last winter. But she never says anything, and even what she says is so ordinary, don’t you know.

She prophesied that Henry would live to ninety. That’s all right. I hope he does, I’m sure, and Henry’s as good as husbands go anyway. But ninety! And after all that’s not the kind of thing you pay to hear. Of course, she did prophesy that we’d go to Bermuda at Easter. But that had been in the paper anyway. . . .

But this fortune-teller (sinking her voice to mystery), is utterly different. He’s not just a fortune-teller. He’s a Yogi soothsayer – it’s quite different, he’s Mr. Yahi-Bahi, and he’s a Parsee, you know what that is – it means a sort of Hindu, only higher up. You know how all the Hindus are divided into castes; if you’re in the lowest caste, you have to live on garbage and you mustn’t speak to anyone, and then there are a lot of in-between castes who have to be vegetarians and worship cows. You see, I know all about India because Henry and I were on a round-the-world-cruise and we had a whole day in Bombay, and there was a Chinese gentleman on board with us, a Mr. O-Hoo, and he was all right, he’d been at Harvard for four months and he told us all about the Hindu religion and why it is so far ahead of Christianity.

So that’s how I know about castes and Mr. Yahi-Bahi’s caste is at the top of all. They don’t eat. They don’t speak – they just contemplate. Oh, thank you, Martha, put them down here beside the others. Now that’s not too strong, is it? (drinks). Oh! Goodness! I needed that! Well, I was saying, would you believe it, that Mr. Yahi-Bahi, before he came here, sat on the top of a post for a month – with just a loin cloth on – and just meditated. Think of the flies!

So then he came here (I don’t just know how long ago), and began casting horoscopes – that’s what it’s called – and Mary! such wonderful results! Do you know that he told Mrs. Faith that something dark was hanging over her – and that very month her chauffeur left her; and he told Mrs. Gull that there was a fate over her youngest son, the one at college: and there was. He was sent home for drinking at the end of the term.

Oh, he’s just wonderful. And my dear! No money! He scorns it! That’s the first thing you learn about Yahi-Bahi. You can offer it if you like just as a courtesy, but he just quietly refuses. Money, to him, is just dirt. You see his expenses are nothing; contemplation doesn’t cost anything.

So it’s very hard to get an interview. Why, my dear, I had to wait for ever so long. You see, I couldn’t have my fortune told – only it is not really called that, it’s receiving a revelation – I couldn’t receive a revelation till I was fit to receive it – that’s part of the method.

So I had to qualify by contemplation: I had to send in ten dollars (not to Mr. Yahi-Bahi, of course; to his assistant) and then contemplate for a week. At first it was awfully hard, I don’t mean the ten dollars, that was easy, but to contemplate. You see, you have to think of nothing. And at first I’d keep thinking of shopping I’d had to do and whether Martha had given Ouiji his bath and about telephoning to Henry to be sure to cash a cheque – and about what to wear that afternoon – well, you know, all the regular round of work that makes up one’s day. But I managed to learn fairly well, and at the end of the week, I got a thought message – think of it! a thought message (it was sent by post) to tell me to send ten dollars again and keep on contemplating. So I knew I had succeeded. . . .

Well, after contemplating like that for four weeks they let me become a neophyte – that means a person just starting to be a Yogi – only it takes years. And then I went to see Mr. Yahi-Bahi himself for the first time – such a strange place, at least not the outside – it was just a little apartment on a side street. But I mean, once you got in, all the stairway going up, and the ante-room, where you waited, were hung with curtains with figures of snakes and Indian gods, perfectly weird! And the man who met me – not Mr. Yahi-Bahi himself, of course, but his assistant, the strangest little being. His name is Mr. Ram Spudd, a little round man, a Bengalee, I think. He put his arms across the stomach and bowed ever so low and said, “Isis guard you!” – my dear! it was most impressive.

I asked if I could see Mr. Yahi-Bahi, but Mr. Ram Spudd shook his head and said no, Mr. Yahi was in meditation, and mustn’t be disturbed. I laid down ten dollars on a little side table – just unobtrusively so as not to insult him. But Mr. Spudd just waved the idea aside with his hand, with such a kindly smile and a shrug of the shoulders, and explained that money didn’t enter into Mr. Yahi’s life. Then he waved his hand again, and would you believe it, the ten dollars had gone! My dear! he had de-astralized it! not a doubt of it. I saw it myself. One minute it was there! and next gone!

So I came like that three more times, I mean three days running – and each time Mr. Spudd received me with the same gentle way and shook his head. Mr. Yahi was meditating still. . . . I laid ten dollars on the table and each time it was de-astralized!

Then I got afraid that it was bad taste and might hurt his feelings to force him to de-astralize ten dollars every day – so next day I didn’t put any money down – and perhaps the shock – you see it’s all so subtle, my dear – the shock woke Mr. Yahi out of his meditation – I heard him call to Mr. Spudd in Hindu, I suppose, and Mr. Spudd said Mr. Yahi would see me.

So Mr. Yahi-Bahi came out from behind the curtains – such a strange-looking man, so tall and yet he wasn’t really tall, I suppose it was his long gown, all figured over with sacred snakes and lizards – and his eyes – my dear! so deep – like pools of molasses! and he took my hand flat between his and he said, “Osiris keep you!”

Then he made me sit down in a chair and he looked into my eyes and held my hand a long while and then he said – “You have a soul!” and then he looked at me again and said – “Dark Things are impending over you,” and I said, “What are they?” But he just shook his head and in a minute he was gone! I had just half closed my eyes and he vanished! Perhaps he went behind the curtain.

Well, would you believe it, my dear – (bell rings) – see who it is at the telephone, Martha, and say I can’t come – would you believe it, I went time after time – what do you say, Martha? The Evening Times want to speak to me – say I’m out – I went, as I say, time after time, and Mr. Yahi said he would get my horoscope ready to read but he never got it till today – and, oh, goodness, I’m all shaken up with it; it’s so dark, it’s terrible. But I must tell you first. Each time I went to Mr. Yahi, Mr. Spudd said I’d have to wait a week or two for my horoscope but that if I liked (he was awfully nice about it), he would call up some spirits and I could talk to them.

It was wonderful. He called up the spirit of Napoleon, and I talked to Napoleon, behind a curtain, just as easily as I’m talking to you. I asked him if he had been lonely at St. Helena and he said, “Yes.” And I asked him whether it was the battle of Trafalgar that did most to defeat him and he said, yes, he hadn’t enough cavalry.

And I talked with the spirit of Benjamin Franklin but he seemed a little dull; perhaps his brain got damaged after he was dead, but anyway he said that it was all bright and beautiful where he was. But a funny thing about the spirits, my dear, some of them – they asked such queer questions. Napoleon asked me if I had an extra key of my apartment, and I said I had and he said he might need it and please leave it with Mr. Yahi. So I did, but I don’t want Napoleon coming over and able to get in at night. I said to Mr. Yahi I’d have an extra lock put on – and just imagine, my dear, the spirit of Joan of Arc (next séance) warned me not to. She said it was all right: and of course if she thought so, it was all right for me. But if Mr. Yahi gives the key to Napoleon I hope he lets me know.

—

Well, at last I managed to get a revelation from Mr. Yahi. That was two days ago. First he talked about Henry. He wouldn’t say what is going to happen to him. But it’s something terrible. He said it hangs over him ready to fall and he said the sand is low in his glass. He says Henry must leave town at once, and take nothing with him of any value, leave all his valuables here in the apartment. Osiris will look after them. I called Henry up on the telephone as soon as ever I got home: he was at the golf club and I said, “Henry, Mr. Yahi, the Parsee magician, says there’s something hanging over you,” and he said, “Is that so? Say! I made the fourth hole under par”: and I said, “Mr. Yahi says the sand is low in your glass,” and Henry said, “I fell down badly in the waterhole,” and I said, “Henry, you’ve got to get under the protection of Osiris,” and he said, “What’s wrong with the police?” You know that mocking way Henry has.

But when he came home, I told him all about it and this time he listened, especially about Napoleon having our key. I think he was jealous. But I said, “Henry, Napoleon is only a spirit, and anyway Napoleon was not that sort of man.”

Well, that was yesterday and I went round again today and Mr. Yahi was there – not meditating – and he told me my horoscope. He said I’m going to lose Henry – I’d guessed that already, and then he said – I’m just shuddering at the thought of it – Martha, is that door locked, see that it is – he said that I’m in hourly danger of being kidnapped!

Yes, kidnapped! and held for ransom! Think of it – I asked him for how much and he said he would try to find out and looked into a crystal ball, all dark and shining – looked into it ever so fixedly and said the figures were there but were hard to read and asked how much would I pay, and I said it would depend on Henry and Mr. Yahi shook his head and said the figures looked like a hundred thousand to him. I said I was glad it wasn’t more; and he looked again and said he believed it was a hundred and fifty thousand. . . .

I asked Mr. Yahi what I would do, and he said the first thing was to put myself under the protection of Isis and Osiris. He said to pack up everything I had of value and leave it here, with the secret mark of Osiris – he showed me how to make it – to guard it. He said, put the mark on anything valuable, like jewels, but not on other things and Osiris would look after them, and if I decided for a ransom to leave it, marked plainly RANSOM. Then he said for me to leave town instantly and take nothing with me. You see he explained that protection in the Yogi doctrine is only for the weak – and I must leave behind even all my money, except just enough for a few days – in fact he said to take any cash in my cash account, mark it Osiris and leave it here. He said Osiris would . . .

Is that some one at the door? – don’t take the chain off it, gracious – don’t let any one in, Martha – a young man from the Evening Times, you say, about the “sensational arrest“? I don’t know about the “sensational arrest – shut him out, Martha. But my goodness, “sensational arrest,” does that mean that the kidnappers are caught already? Isn’t Osiris wonderful – just think of divining what they were going to do before they did it! Well, thank goodness . . .

There’s the telephone again, Martha.

—

My husband – yes – of course, I’ll speak. Hullo, Henry, what is it? did you hear about – what are you saying – my two crooks arrested – my two – why do you call them my two? Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd! But Henry they’re not crooks – they’re Parsees! Mr. Ram Spudd is a Bengalee and is one of the most spiritual men, Henry, I’ve ever seen. Just to hear him talk lifts one up. . . . What are you laughing at? You say I should have heard him talk today? – what do you mean? – he’s not a Bengalee, you say, he’s just coloured and Mr. Yahi is Irish – well, what’s the laugh? – what did Ram Spudd say? He said that! Just you repeat that, Henry – Ram Spudd said they nearly caught the old hen! Meaning me! me! An old hen! Well, he’s a dirty little crook and I hope he gets – what do you say – he’ll get five years? I hope so! – but not poor Mr. Yahi; he’s all soul – oh, he laughed too!! What! An “old sheep” – I hope he gets ten.

TOC     INDEX

The Dissolution
of Our Dinner Club

As it is now definitely understood that our dinner club is dissolved, it is proper to let people know the circumstances of its dissolution. This all the more so, as already I begin to hear it mentioned with a sort of regret as “the old Dinner Club,” although the last meeting – the one of the Hungarian Goulash – was only on Tuesday of last week. I remember that it was Tuesday because I was a little laid up on the Wednesday.

Yet, in a way, it is only right to regret the ending of the club, as I never knew of anything that started off with greater enthusiasm, with greater what the French call éclat. The idea of it just came up one day in a sort of spontaneous way among a group of us who were sitting around having a drink and talking in our club – I mean the regular city club to which we belonged. The talk had been really worth while; Merrill, who is a really brilliant talker, had been speaking, I remember, of Mr. Roosevelt, making an analysis of him – we had three or four drinks while he was making it – and someone said that if you want to have really good conversation the thing is to start a dinner club – you know, a club to meet every fortnight or so, and hold a dinner and have brilliant conversation. This man said he’d once been a member of a club like that in Edinburgh – he’s Scotch, his name is Stewart – Cluny Macpherson Stewart – a Scotchman – and one night they’d discuss (I mean this club in Edinburgh) say Greek architecture, or another night perhaps the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, or another night, the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. So hearing all that, we got off to a good start with all of us talking at once.

Of course, everybody agreed that, with a dinner club, you have to hold it somewhere else than in your own regular club. That gives a sort of novelty to the evening and lets you take in other fellows who don’t happen to be in your own club. It was agreed that men get stale if they just stick around with their own same crowd in their own same club, whereas a man in a dinner club gets what you might call mental friction.

Then one of the group, a man called Watergrass, a poetical sort of fellow, said that the idea was to have your dinner club meet at some place right away out in the suburbs, so that you could have a good bracing three-hour walk before you sat down. He said that a walk like that put a man just in shape for brilliant talk – blows away the cobwebs, that was his phrase – and he said that that season of the year – it was November when we began – was just right for walking. What you needed for real walking was rough weather, the rougher the better, wind and storm so that you could turn up your coat collar, grip your stick and just buffet right into it. He quoted the case of men like Tennyson and Longfellow, tremendous walkers both of them. It appears that Tennyson – even to write just a small unimportant poem like Break, break, break – would walk forty miles as hard as he could go: I think Watergrass said forty. Anyway he said that when Longfellow wrote about how he stood on the bridge at midnight, he actually went and stood on it: that, I gathered, was what gave him the idea of standing on it.

Well, of course, that part of the plan was instantly and eagerly adopted. All the more so as one of the men was able to tell us of a new eating-place that had just been opened right outside city limits, ten miles away, an awfully artistic place called The Old Cow-stable. You see, it actually had been an old cow-stable – I mean it really was one before – with heavy stone walls and a high peaked roof – and it had been done over inside and opened up as a sort of roadside restaurant, and somebody had hit on the clever idea of calling it The Old Cow-stable. Clever, wasn’t it?

But the biggest idea of all, the thing that gave the Club its real impetus, was the idea of having the bill of fare for the dinner utterly different each time, and represent different kinds of national dinners. For instance, it was suggested right away that we could have a typical “New England Dinner” – the thing the early settlers used to have, at the time when they had only one big pot over the fire to cook in, and put everything in together; or as someone called it, “a real old-fashioned New England dinner.” Then Des Rois, who is French, said, why not have a typical Marseilles dinner like what they eat in Marseilles: and he told us about bouillabaisse, the great Marseilles dish, along with tripe à la mode de Caen. He spelt them later for the committee. We generally spell Caen as Cannes, but anyway it is close to Marseilles. Des Rois certainly got us going by telling about eating bouillabaisse and drinking the real Marseilles wine pisco, and then driving out along the Corniche Road overlooking the Mediterranean. He said he would arrange a dinner like that, that would take us right to Marseilles.

Then, of course, there was suggested a Mexican dinner – chile con carne with hot tamales – and a Bengal dinner with mangoes and curried duck – in fact I can’t remember them all – and, of course, the Hungarian Goulash, that I mentioned before; that came last, and that we had last Tuesday. I was sick Wednesday.

We limited the club to a membership of twenty – we had to limit it or we’d have had all the city in – and invented for it the happy name of the Dinner Club, to mean that it was just a club for dining. Other names were suggested. One of the crowd, a man called Woodenbean, who lectures in Greek in the Faculty here, wanted to give it a Greek name. Hoi something. Hoi Pants something. I can’t quite get it, but he said it was a delightfully witty name. I am sure it was.

—

Looking back on the Dinner Club now that it is all over, upon my word I find it hard to see why it failed – or I won’t say failed – I mean came to an end. I am inclined to think that it was a case of hard luck; so many little things went wrong with it. For instance, on the day we began – it was in November – the weather was all wrong. Just one of those quiet clear days with a blue sky, no snow, hardly a breath of wind – nothing to buffet. Some of us had met at the town club at four to walk out with heavy coats and big sticks, but it seemed silly to start out like that – still broad daylight in the middle of the afternoon – to hoof it for three hours, when you could go out in a taxi in twenty minutes. So we just sat around the club and had a few drinks and talked – mostly about Mr. Roosevelt – and then went out in a couple of taxis. We found that practically all the other members had come the same way, the weather being no good for walking, but they all had big rough coats on and carried thick heavy sticks, which gave the thing a kind of touch. The only one who had walked was Watergrass and he looked pretty tuckered out, and fed up with being the only one.

So that was the start, not quite in the right key. And it made things a little worse when one of the members – it was Macpherson Stewart, who hadn’t ever seen The Old Cow-stable before – as soon as he came in, said, “Phew!” – like that – “Phew.” Somebody said, “Well, Cluny, you can’t expect to cook a New England dinner and not have a certain smell of cooking,” and he said, “Oh! it’s not the England dinner! Oh, no, phew!” Of course, the idea was ridiculous. The whole place had been renovated, with a beautiful hardwood floor and an open fire-place. I admit that in the little sort of partitioned-off place in the corner where we put our hats and coats, you might notice something – but not really anything. And for the matter of that over in Scotland I’ve been in places like Edinburgh Castle and Carlyle’s Cottage that were something awful! Anyway, Macpherson dropped out.

Still I think it was mistaken judgement to begin with a New England dinner. Those old colonial settlers, you’ve got to remember, were a pretty tough lot, out of doors in the open air all day, and, of course, they’d never been really used to anything; and they hadn’t had four cocktails before they sat down. And I hadn’t realized before what it meant cooking all the stuff in one big pot; it all comes out, meat and cabbage and vegetables and bones, in one great wet flop! I thought of stuff I’d read about Indian dog feasts (that was the same time as the Puritans, wasn’t it?) and I couldn’t eat it. That was all about it. I couldn’t.

Still I don’t mean the evening was so bad. All the twenty members were on hand and there was such a lot of initial enthusiasm it was bound to carry the thing through. Watergrass kept dozing off to sleep from having walked there, and Stewart, of course, was peeved, but on the whole it went pretty well. The conversation was good but not quite of the kind that I’d been expecting. There wasn’t any architecture or archaeology stuff. We talked mostly about Mr. Roosevelt. Merrill made an analysis of him: it was certainly brilliant – I couldn’t follow most of it. But the idea was to show that Roosevelt is a world force and, if I got it right, should have been expected even if he hadn’t turned up. We broke up about ten-thirty, with pretty good feeling all round, and with everybody promising to be on deck two weeks later for the Marseilles dinner that Des Rois was to arrange.

That, I will admit straight out, was a mistake – that bouillabaisse stuff. I don’t say the Marseilles people don’t eat it. They’re fishermen and they’re in sea air all the time and in sea air you can eat anything. But that stuff! Did you ever see it? And the thing after it called tripe à la mode de Caen – it’s French and means “canned tripe” – of all the ghastly-looking mess! Taste? I’ve no notion – I couldn’t touch it. One rather dirty thing was that Des Rois didn’t eat it. He’d ordered an English mutton chop for himself. I had some cheese, all full of holes, and some figs – but, of course, I’m not kicking at that – I ate when I got home. The talk, though, was really good. Merrill got talking of Mr. Roosevelt and made an analysis of him – a new one, it was two weeks since the other one – and that led us to talk of a wide range of things like the New Deal and Mr. Roosevelt’s attitude to the courts and what Mr. Roosevelt would do with “big business” – in fact, we ranged all over the place.

One thing, though, bothered us, which we hadn’t noticed so much the first night – the seats. You see, they had no backs to them. The Old Cow-stable is all done up artistically with long narrow tables of heavy old wood – the kind the monks used to eat at in the place called, what was it? – the refractory, or the penitentiary, or something – anyway, those narrow tables. With tables of that sort the seats have to be just long heavy benches with no backs: anything else would be hopelessly inartistic. But you sit on that thing for two hours and a half and you’ll see where you are. With monks it was different: they were looking for it. But we weren’t. So that meant we broke up about nine-fifteen: and as a matter of fact, three or four of the men – I mean apart from Watergrass and Cluny Stewart – hadn’t turned up at all.

But the next meeting wasn’t so bad. That Mexican stuff, if you only take a little of it, is good. A little of that hot chili-tabasco stuff on a little edge of bread is all right and helps you to wash a drink down. I guess the Mexicans eat it all right; they would. But you see, at a dinner club you don’t really need much to eat – that is not the idea – it’s a way of bringing fellows together and then they can go off and get something to eat elsewhere later. So we just sat around and had smokes and drinks, and dipped bits of toast in the chile con carne. The talk was all right, too. We were discussing Mr. Roosevelt, and some of the fellows were saying that he really represented a sort of world force – well, you know, that we have to put up with him. We broke up at eight-thirty and got back into town in time for a bite at the club – just a snack of cold lobster or something. But I was sorry to see that there were only thirteen present – and even at that several fellows offered to drop out so as to break the hoodoo of thirteen. In fact three went.

The Hungarian dinner was the last, so there’s no use in getting mad about it. That stuff, that Goulash, is just poison! And anyway how can you eat – I mean men of our age, we’re all around forty to fifty – if you’re not getting any exercise, and are sitting around drinking cocktails? You can’t eat! I just hated the idea as I felt that Hungarian dinner getting nearer, that Goulash, I mean! You don’t know how the notion gets you when you belong to a dinner club that you’ve got to eat! Eat? Who wants to eat? I heard after though I didn’t know it at the time that one or two members were knocked right out, knocked flat, after that Goulash! They were crazy enough to eat it. And that sour Hungarian wine – Magyak-Buda – ugh! The Hungarians after all – as somebody said after dinner – are not a civilized people: we were discussing Mr. Roosevelt and that had led up to the idea of civilization. Look at their government! or for the matter of fact, their religion – I don’t mean I know what they are; I mean that the fellow who had eaten the Goulash said, look at them!

Anyway, the Goulash dinner ended it. We all knew it at the time. One of the members who had been in India and knew a cousin of Kipling’s, was supposed to be getting up a Bengal dinner – curried duck with mangoes. But he says he can’t get any mangoes. That’s all right. We understand. The Club is over.

—

And yet, isn’t human nature queer! Within a few months, or a year, they’ll be calling it the “good old Dinner Club” – and talking about the dinners of chile con carne and bouillabaisse with the wonderful talk about Mr. Roosevelt.

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How Teachers Swim

When I was teaching at Upper Canada College, ever so many years ago, some benefactor of the school endowed and equipped a big swimming tank for the boys. So the question arose of getting a swimming teacher.

At a masters’ meeting the principal announced to us that he had found a teacher.

“He seems,” he said, “just the man for the job. He’s young and he’s an athletic-looking fellow, civil-spoken and with the best references. He has certificates for boxing, and several medals for gymnastics. I think he’s just what we want.”

There was a general murmur of assent. No one seemed inclined to offer any objection. But the principal, an honourable man, had an afterthought in his mind and felt that he had to mention it.

“There’s only one possible objection to this young man,” he added, “he has never – he doesn’t know – that is, he can’t swim.”

There was a momentary sensation but not much. We were all experienced teachers. We knew how little that mattered.

The young man was engaged and some of the boys taught him to swim and he turned out a huge success . . .

As a matter of fact there is an educational principle involved in that. You can teach best a thing that you don’t know. That is, you’re learning it yourself.

I remember a similar instance at the same school when I was the senior master and made the timetable. One of my colleagues came to me and said, “I wish you could arrange to put me down to teach German to the lower commercial.”

“I didn’t know that you knew German,” I said.

“I don’t,” he answered, “that’s just it. I studied it a little, years ago, but I’ve forgotten it all completely.”

“All right,” I said, and I arranged it. It worked fine. There were two or three German-speaking boys from Berlin, Ontario, in the class and they told him the pronunciation. He moved with them next year to a higher class and kept nearly even with them till matriculation.

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How to Lose Money

(For Amateurs)

We may define business in a broad, general way as the art of losing money. This is only a rough-and-ready definition to which numerous exceptions will be found.

Indeed, very often business, even if losing a certain amount of money, is carried on for other reasons. As one of my big business friends said to me the other day, “What else can I do?” Many of my business friends – the big ones – ask me that: what else can they do? I don’t know what else they can do.

Or very often a business connection is of such long standing, of generations, perhaps, that it is difficult to stop. I am thinking here of my friend Sir John Overwarp, the big thread man. Sir John is the senior partner of Overwarp, Underwarp, and Shuttle. In fact he is Overwarp, Underwarp, and Shuttle. They are probably the biggest thread people in the world. They are the thread people. They have works in Sheffield, Bradfield, Oldfield – in short, they have so many works they don’t know where they are.

Well, the other day Sir John said to me (he speaks to me): “We’ve been in thread now for five generations. I don’t know how I could get out of it.” After five generations in thread you get all tangled up in it. Somebody told me that Sir John’s shareholders are going to let him out. It’ll be nice of them if they do.

But business habit is business habit. I knew a man, one of the McDuffs of Duff (they came from Duff), who had been in Scotch whiskey, and in nothing else, for years and years. He had travelled round the world in it four times. It seemed to follow him. You could notice it.

Then there’s the sense of responsibility – I mean, responsibility to other people. I know quite well the French financier, the Baron de Citrouille (it is pronounced Citrouille), who brought a great quantity of French money out to America, and lost it here. He couldn’t have lost the half of it in France, but here he was able to do what is called “spread his loss.” Some of the big men can spread their loss over half the continent.

But these, of course, are the big men – what are called the captains of industry. It is not wise to try to begin with discussing such large-scale operations as theirs. It might give the beginner a sense of despair. Some of these men are known to lose a million dollars a day. The business beginner asks, “Can I do that?” I answer, “Not yet, but you can learn.”

One has to realize that these are selected men winnowed out, as it were, from the crowd; they are men who probably had even at the beginning a flair for business and kept on getting more and more flair. The word flair is French. It is pronounced flair and means in a general way more or less what we call in English a flair.

These big men, indeed, are distinguished not so much by what they do as by what they can’t do or won’t do. I once knew (I knew him only once) Sir Humphrey Dumphrey, the big electrical man: he was probably the biggest electrical man in Europe, except perhaps the Italians Nitti and Dotti. Sir Humphrey said to me: “Look at me. I can’t do fractions.” I looked at him. He couldn’t do them.

Or take Sir Hamstein Gorfinkel, the great British financier. He said he couldn’t recite the Lord’s Prayer: couldn’t or wouldn’t.

But these men are in a class by themselves.

When I say I want to talk about business and how money can be lost, even in a small way, I naturally wish to begin with simple things. Young people just entering on life realize that if only they had money now, even a moderate sum, they could find opportunities to lose it that would never come later.

There are so many choices to be made, such a difficulty in selecting a career, that young people need help. “Should I live in the country?” a young lady asked me at a reception. “Yes,” I said, “away in, as far as you can get.”

“My son,” wrote an old friend, “shows every disposition to be a stock-broker. What should I do about it?”

“Shoot him,” I answered.

One should start with some of the simpler ways of losing money, such as chicken-raising, dry duck farming, keeping bees and wasps, along with such things as horticulture and germicide. Bigger things could come later, such as how to build a transcontinental navy. One must start humbly.

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The Familiar Magic of Fishing

A Pullman Car Transformed
into a Trout Stream

They sat together in the smokers’ end of a Pullman car. They didn’t know one another. They were strangers. They weren’t talking to one another – why talk anyway? A man always feels tough and only half alive in the morning on a Pullman car – no need to make conversation with the damn fool, so thought each of them.

Outside, the February snow blew against the windows. One saw dim outlines of trees, mostly spruce. “Where are we?” said one of the men. He said it half by accident. He hadn’t spoken for an hour.

“Just at the end of the bush country,” the other man answered. “That’s Washago Junction. I recognize it by that piece of bush.”

“You know this country?” said the first man.

“Oh, yes, I come up here fishing all the time.”

“Is that so? ARE THERE FISH HERE?”

“Trout.”

“Trout, eh?” said the second man, trying to get his face close to the pane so as to see the trout. “There are trout streams here?”

He spoke almost reverently, as if in a church.

“Oh, yes, lots of them, all through here. There are some little lakes further in, but here it’s mostly streams.”

“You fish with flies?”

“Well, you can all right where it’s a little open but of course there’s a lot of it where the bush is so thick that you can’t get room to cast. I don’t mind admitting it, when I can’t get room to cast, I’ll fish with bait every time, with worms.”

“I’ll say so!” said the other man. “And mind you, there’s a whole lot more skill in fishing with worms than people think. You get a place where the stream takes a sharp turn right under a big log in the water – say, for instance, there was a log over there. . . .” He pointed at the other side of the little room.

“Yes,” said the listener. He could see the log, too. Being fishermen, it was very clearly right there for both of them.

“—now, we’ll say it’s all thick brush—”

“Yes,” assented the other man; in fact, he could feel the brush all round him. He couldn’t have moved his arm if he’d tried.

“—now, you see, you get your line on the bottom – there’s apt to be a little bit of hard sand or gravel in a place like this right in the middle of the channel – and you reach out your line . . .”

The speaker sat forward in his chair till he was – or thought he was – on his hands and knees. The other man bent his back a little – (the brush wouldn’t let him bend much), and they were both on their hands and knees.

“—you get a good bait on your hook, the bigger the better, it travels easier and won’t catch, and you let it just – roll – roll – along with the water. . . .”

There was tense excitement in the little room. Both men followed breathlessly the rolling line. . . . “You’ll never get snagged,” the speaker continued, talking low, as trout are easily frightened, “if you let the line take its own way. It’ll go into the deepest hole – and then, by George! you feel Mr. Trout take a snap at it, and out he comes!”

He landed the trout right on the floor of the room, a perfect beauty with white-edged fins and bright vermilion spots on the deep, firm-fleshed sides.

—

And with that the two men went on to discuss telescope rods and whether the damn things really work, or whether one wouldn’t rather have a bamboo rod in little sections – you can put it all into your valise. And then they talked of whether you can really make a cast with a rod made in small sections, and the second man showed that you could by making a cast right there in the car, of over sixty feet – and landed another trout.

And the man who didn’t know the Washago section said he came from West Virginia, so the first man asked him if it wasn’t too hot for trout down there, but it seems not, or at least not up in the hills. In fact, the second man took the first man away up into the hills above the Kenowsha and cooled him right off, and then fed him on trout with West Virginia bacon that he cooked over a brush fire.

So that led to talk about how a brown trout can stay in water up to seventy degrees; but after all, is a brown trout any damn good anyway: would you call it a trout in the real sense? . . . and for the matter of that even a rainbow trout isn’t in it with a straight speckled brook trout: the colour may be all right, but for sport and for eating, there’s no comparison.

And incidentally they told one another who they were and the first man said that he was in hardware and the second man, it seemed, was in paper boxes; but they weren’t really. They were both in trout.

—

And when the porter came to the door and said to one of them, “Toronto, sir, you change here!” they said good-bye like old friends.

And the first man said to the second man that if he ever got as far down as Buckhannon, he must certainly take him to the Kenowsha; and the second man said that if the first man ever got as far up as Toronto, he must certainly take him up into the Washago country. . . .

And each, when he got home, said to his wife, “I met a hell of a nice feller on the train coming down.”

And that’s why fishermen’s wives are never jealous of them when they leave home.

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Overworking the Alphabet

I admit that this is the age of brevity. Our rapid life demands condensed speech. We have not enough leisure to talk like Daniel Webster. Even our words must be cut to the shortest limits. We have no time to say telephone and débutante and cinematograph and automobile. Not at all: we phone an invitation to the cinema, and our debs ride in cars and planes.

But when it comes to cutting out words altogether and falling back on letters, it is time to ask where we are “at.” I mean is it really O.K. to talk about the C.I.O.? And if the C.I.O. joins with the A.F.L. does the mixture become the C.A.I.F.O.L. or the A.C.F.I.L.O.? Similarly, is a man a D.F. if he finds that he can’t remember what the O.G.P.U. is, and whether it is in Spain or Russia?

Our grandfathers with their pioneer thoroughness knew nothing of this haste. If they founded a farmers’ society they were willing to call it the Oro Township Agricultural Autumn Fair and Flower Show Association, and let it go at that. The more often they said it the better they liked it.

But nowadays three or more people no sooner get together in anything than they fuse themselves with the alphabet. A ladies’ sewing circle formed overnight appears as an L.S.C. in the morning. If the Junior Pygmies of equatorial Africa ever get organised, the Press will call them J.P.E.A. next morning.

I think the Great War started it. Before the War came we made use of alphabet abbreviations but they were kept fairly within reason. We spoke of the U.S.A. and the Y.M.C.A. and with an effort of brain power we could understand what the Y.W.C.A. ought to mean.

Before the War, business used the letters of the alphabet, but not too much. People signed I.O.U.“s or had to pay C.O.D., and business men sent things F.O.B., though no one else knew what it meant. Before the War, teachers in the schools used to make use of A, B and C to work arithmetic, and long ago, 200 years before Christ (B.J.C.), Euclid used to sign his theorems Q.E.D. to mean that that was the end. But the letters were only used to give a touch of finality, just as on a tombstone they put R.I.P., to mean that the man was dead and there was no need to waste words on him.

In fiction, too, especially detective and comic fiction, letters were used to give a touch of mystery, to indicate the unsolvable. I mean, a passage would run something like this:

My friend X had taken the early train to Q where he met Miss M. on the platform accompanied by her uncle, the Bishop of Asterisk, waiting, apparently, to take the down train to H – .

All this excited in the reader’s mind a queer suspicion that perhaps X was not the man’s name and that the bishop was not going to H – .

But beyond such usages the Alphabetical Contractions never extended rill the Great War came and flooded us with them. I think I can see how the War started it. In war time at the front if a man took full time to say “General Headquarters,” he might get shot before he finished it, whereas if he said “G.H.Q.” he still had a chance for his life. So when the soldiers came back, we heard them all talking in the new alphabetical jargon about the G.H.Q. and the C.O. and who gave the D.S.O. to a V.A.D.

Naturally, we started to imitate them and the thing spread till the alphabet invaded all our Government and civil administration, then overwhelmed all corporate business and labour organizations, and now threatens to submerge private life. The United States began it with the N.R.A. (even before F.D.), and when we had learned that, lengthened it to the N.R.A.A. and then hurried us on to the P.W.A. and its fellows. The only trouble is to remember what they all do for everybody. In an emergency, people can fall back on the F.E.R.A.; or enjoy a cosy sense of security under the S.S.B. There’s a peculiar protection against want in F.S.C.C., and a man who wants to break up his home can do it under the F.H.I.B.B.

But many of us now find that we are losing our grip on what these things mean, and when we hear that the Supreme Court has set aside the P.D.Q. we don’t know whether to get mad about it or not. The spread of the same thing across the field of labour has given us the A.F.L. – not difficult if you remember F for federation – and the C.I.O. (not to be confused with the one that means the high explosive).

If things are difficult at home on our own continent, think what they must seem abroad. Tell a foreigner that the allegiance of the United States Navy is undermined by the Y.W.C.A. and he’ll believe it. Offer to give to Hitler the order of a D.F. in the W.C.T.U. and he’ll accept it. The use of the overworked alphabet is creating a sort of new language. We are getting so accustomed to it that things written out in full look needlessly prolix. If we want to keep our history alive, it will have to be rewritten. A new outline of history (O. of H.) will contain an account of the American Revolution (the A.R.) as follows:

SIGNING OF THE D.O.I.
AND THE BIRTH OF THE U.S.A.

The excitement over the S.A. and the B.T. (it means the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party) soon led to open resistance (O.R.). The battle of B.H., outside of Boston, was followed by the appointment of G.W. as C.I.C. of the C.A., and a congress of delegates (F.O.B. Philadelphia) signed on July 4, 1776, the famous D.O.I., written by T.J. The stubborn K.O.E. – G.3 – refused all conciliation, looking upon G.W. as P.E. No. 1 of his Empire. The war ended in a C.V. (complete victory) at Yorktown, presently followed by the drawing up of the T.O.V. in which G.3 recognized the I.O.U.S.A. G.W. became the first P.U.S., and was recognized in history as the F.O.H.C.

But I perceive as I go on thinking about it, that it is not only our history but our English and American literature of the past that must be revised to make it properly alphabetical. Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade – renamed as the C.L.B. – will read:

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward!

Into the V.O.D. rode the S.H.

Gray’s immortal Elegy in a Country Churchyard – the E.C.C. – will explain how the “Curfew tolls the K.P.D.,” while “the ploughman homeward plods his W.W.”

It will reach its climax in the immortal stanza read aloud by General Wolfe to his officers as their boat stole up the St. Lawrence in the dusk of an autumn evening – the evening before the battle of the P.O.A. The stanza, as revised, reads:

The B.O.H., the P.O.P.,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’r gave,

Await alike the I.H.:

The P.O.G. lead but to the capital G.

But one last despairing stand must be made to keep the alphabet of private life. Don’t call your stoker “my S.,” or your dearest friend “my D.F.” Invite your guests to a week-end cocktail party but not to a W.E.C.P. As you grow old let people call you a venerable old gentleman but never a V.O.G., and when you die arrange for a private funeral, but not a P.F.

Stephen Leacock
Self-appointed Secretary Anti-Alphabet Association
(or better, S.A.S.A.A.A.)

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On the Need
for a Quiet College

If somebody would give me about two dozen very old elm trees and about fifty acres of wooded ground and lawn – not too near anywhere and not too far from everywhere – I think I could set up a college that would put all the big universities of today in the shade. I am not saying that it would be better. But it would be different.

I would need a few buildings – but it doesn’t take many – stone, if possible – and a belfry, and a clock. The clock wouldn’t need to go; it might be better if it didn’t. I would want some books – a few thousand would do – and some apparatus. But it’s amazing how little apparatus is needed for scientific work of the highest quality: in fact “the higher the fewer.”

—

Most of all I should need a set of professors. I would only need a dozen of them – but they’d have to be real ones: disinterested men of learning, who didn’t even know they were disinterested. And, mind you, these professors of mine wouldn’t sit in “offices” dictating letters on “cases” to stenographers, and only leaving their offices to go to “committees” and “conferences.” There would be no “offices” in my college and no “committees,” and my professors would have no time for conferences, because the job they were on would need all eternity and would never be finished.

My professors would never be findable at any fixed place except when they were actually giving lectures. Men of thought have no business in an office. Learning runs away from “committees.” There would be no “check up” on the time of the professors; there would be no “hire and fire,” or “judge by results” or standards or norms of work for them: nor any fixed number of hours.

But on the other hand they would, if I got the ones I want, be well worth their apparent irresponsibility: and when they lectured each one would be, though he wouldn’t know it, a magician – with such an interest and absorption that those who listened would catch the infection of it, and hurry from the lecture to the library, still warm with thought.

It must be understood that the work of professors is peculiar. Few professors, real ones, ever complete their work: what they give to the world is fragments. The rest remains. Their contribution must be added up, not measured singly. Every professor has his “life work” and sometimes does it, and sometimes dies first.

I can recall – I say it by way of digression – one such, who was working on Machiavelli. When I first met him he had worked fourteen years. He worked in a large room covered a foot deep with Machiavelli – notes, pamphlets, remains. I asked him – it seemed a simple question – what he thought of Machiavelli. He shook his head. He said it was too soon to form an opinion. Later – ten years later – he published his book, Machiavelli. One of the great continental reviews – of the really great ones; you and I never hear of them: they have a circulation of about 300 – said his work was based on premature judgements. He was hurt, but he felt it was true. He had rushed into print too soon.

Another such devoted himself – he began years ago – to the history of the tariff. He began in a quiet lull of tariff changes when for three or four years public attention was elsewhere. He brought his work up to within a year or so of actual up-to-date completeness. Then the tariff began to move: two years later he was three years behind it. Presently, though he worked hard, he was five years behind it. The tariff moved quicker than he did. He has never caught it. His only hope now is that the tariff will move back towards free trade, and meet him.

—

Not that I mean to imply that my professors would be a pack of nuts or freaks. Not at all: their manners might be dreamy and their clothes untidy but they’d be – they’d have to be – the most eminent men in their subjects. To get them would be the main effort of the college: to coax them, buy them, if need be, to kidnap them. Nothing counts beside that. A college is made of men – not by the size of buildings, number of students and football records. But no trustees know this, or, at best, only catch a glimmer of it and lose it. Within a generation all the greatest books on the humanities would come from my college.

—

The professors bring the students. The students bring, unsought, the benefactions. The thing feeds itself like a flame in straw. But it’s the men that count. A college doesn’t need students: it’s the students that need the college.

After twenty years my college would stand all alone. There are little colleges now but they ape bigness. There are quiet colleges but they try to be noisy. There are colleges without big games but they boom little ones. Mine would seem the only one, because the chance is there, wide open, and no one takes it. After twenty years people will drive in motor cars to see my college: and won’t be let in.

—

Round such a college there must be no thought of money. Money ruins life: I mean to have to think of it, to take account of it, to know that it is there. Men apart from money – men in an army, men on an expedition of exploration, emerge to a new life. Money is gone. At times and places whole classes thus lift up – or partly: as in older countries like England the class called “gentry” that once was. These people lived on land and money from the past – stolen, perhaps, five hundred years ago – and so thought no more of it. They couldn’t earn more, they didn’t know how. They kept what they had, or dropped out, fell through a trestle bridge of social structure and were gone in the stream. This class, in America, we never had. They grow rare everywhere. Perhaps we don’t want them. But they had the good luck that in their lives money in the sense here meant, didn’t enter. Certain money limits circumscribed their life, but from day to day they never thought of it. A cow in a pasture, a fairly generous pasture, doesn’t know it’s in. It thinks it’s outside. So did they.

So I would have it in my college: students not rich and not poor – or not using their wealth and not feeling their poverty, an equality as unconscious as that where Evangeline lived. . . .

Nor would their studies lead to, or aim at, or connect with wealth. The so-called practical studies are all astray. Real study, real learning must, for the individual, be quite valueless or it loses its value. The proper studies for my college are history and literature, and philosophy, and thought and poetry and speculation, in the pursuit of which each shall repeat the eager search, the unending quest, of the past. Looking for one thing he shall find another. Looking for ultimate truth, which is unfindable, they will learn at least to repudiate all that is false.

I leave out at one sweep great masses of stuff usually taught: all that goes under such a name as a university faculty of commerce. There is no such thing. The faculty of commerce is down at the docks, at Wall Street, in the steel mills. A “degree” in commerce is a salary of ten thousand a year. Those who fail to pass, go to Atlanta – and stay there. Certain things in commerce are teachable – accountancy, corporate organization, and the principles of embezzlement. But that’s not a university.

Out goes economics – except as speculation: not a thing to teach in instalments and propositions like geometry. You can’t teach it. No one knows it. It’s the riddle of the Sphinx. My graduates will be just nicely fitted to think about it when they come out. A first-year girl studying economics is as wide of the mark as an old man studying cosmetics. The philosophical speculative analysis of our economic life is the highest study of all – next to the riddle of our existence. But to cut it into classes and credits is a parody. Out it goes.

Out – but to come back again – goes medicine. Medicine is a great reality: it belongs in a school not a college. My college fits people to study medicine – study it in crowded cities among gas-lights and ambulances and hospitals and human suffering – and keeps their souls alive while they do it. Then later, as trained men in the noblest profession in the world, the atmosphere of the college which they imbibed among my elm trees, grows about them again. The last word in cultivation is, and always has been, the cultivated “medicine man.”

The engineers? – that’s different. Theirs is the most “manly” of all the professions – among water power and gold mines and throwing bridges half a mile at a throw. But it’s a school that trains them, not a college. They go to my college but they don’t like it. They say it’s too damn dreamy. So they kick out of it into engineering. For a time they remember the Latin third declension. Presently they forget it. Doctors grow cultivated as they grow older. Engineers get rougher and rougher.

—

What I mean is that our studies have drifted away, away from the single-minded absorption of learning. Our students of today live in a whirl and clatter of “student activities.” They have, in any large college, at least a hundred organizations and societies. They are “all up!” for this today and “all out!” for that tomorrow. Life is a continuous rally! a rah, rah! a parade! They play no games: they use teams for that. But exercise, and air, is their life. They root, in an organized hysteria – a code of signals telling them what to feel. They root, they rush, they organize, they play politics, run newspapers – and when they step from college into life, they fit it absolutely, having lived already.

No one is denying here what fine men and women college makes, physically and mentally alert. Any one of them could operate a lift the day he steps out of college.

But there’s something wanting – do they think, or is there anything after all to think about? – and yet, surely, in the long run the world has lived on its speculative minds – or hasn’t it?

Some who think, or course, there must be. You can’t submerge humanity in two generations. But mostly, I believe, the little poets fade out on their first-year benches, and the wistful intelligence learns to say “Rah! Rah!“ and is lost.

Not so in my college. There will be no newspaper, except a last week’s paper from the back counties of New England. There will be no politics because there will be no offices to run for. My students will control nothing. The whole movement of student control is a mistake. They’re so busy controlling that they’re not students.

They shall play games all they want to, but as games, not as a profession, not as college advertising – and no gate receipts. Till only a few years ago the country that taught the world its games played them as apart from money – as far apart as sheer necessity allowed. If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton (it wasn’t really: it was won in Belgium), there was at least no stadium at two dollars a seat.

One asks, perhaps, about the endowments, about the benefactors of my ideal college. The benefactors are all dead: or at least they must act as if they were. Years ago on the prairies many authorities claimed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. It may not have been true. But it is certainly true that the best college benefactor is a dead one. After all, the reward in the long run is his – those sculptured letters graven in the stone, “To the greater glory of God and in memory of Johannes Smith” – that, in a college among elm trees – that’s worth a lifetime of gifts – given and given gladly. Such things should best be graven in Latin. In my college they will be – Latin and lots of it, all over the place, with the mystic conspiracy of pretence, the wholesome humbug, that those who see it know what it means. Latin lasts. English seems to alter every thousand years or so. It’s like the tariff that I named above – too mobile for academic use.

—

As with the benefactors, so with the managing trustees who look after the money and never lose it. Not dead, these, but very silent: solid men who don’t need to talk and don’t, but who can invest a million dollars over three depressions, and there it still is, like gold in a pot in the pyramids. You find them chiefly in New England – at least I seem to have seen them there more than anywhere else. They are at the head of huge investment businesses, so big that you never hear of them. Mostly, if they don’t talk, it means that they are thinking where to place fifty million dollars. You see, they hate to break it.

—

And women? The arrangements in my college for the women students, and the women’s dormitories? Oh no – no, thank you. There aren’t any women. Co-education is a wonderful thing for women: college girls under co-education leave college more fit to leave college than any others. College girls are better companions, better wives (as your own or as someone else’s) than any others. It’s the women who have made our college life the bright happy thing it is – too bright, too happy.

But men can’t study when women are around. And it’s not only the students. If I let the women in, they get round some of my dusty old professors, and marry them – and good-bye to Machiavelli, and the higher thought.

TOC     INDEX

Removal Problem Solved

Having retired from the service of McGill University, I was invited a little while ago to go out and join the staff of the University of British Columbia.

News of the invitation appeared in the papers and the manager of a removal company called me up by telephone and said:

“Mr. Leacock, we understand that you are making a move to British Columbia. Now you just leave it to us and we’ll arrange to move you the whole way out there.”

I answered, “Oh, no, I’m not going. When I move next it will be much further than that.”

“All right,” he said, “we’ll take you. Where is it?”

“Eternity,” I answered. I thought I had him floored, but not at all. He came back, almost instantly:

“All right. You leave that to us.”

I am still wondering just what he meant. Wonderful thing a removal van, isn’t it?

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Turn Back the Clock

Or at Least, Make It Slower

All of us who are old look back with a sort of wistful admiration to the education that we received long ago – so different from the education of today. I remember many years ago, when I was a junior professor at McGill University, meeting an elderly Scottish divine who questioned me about the nature of our curriculum. He was horrified to find that the students were actually allowed a certain amount of choice, or election, in making up the programme of their studies. “When I was at Edinburgh,” he said, shaking his head, “the whole of the studies were absolutely compulsory.” With that he shuffled off, smacking his lips over the word compulsory, and musing, no doubt, on the degeneracy of the time.

A similar point of view, as I have mentioned in another connection, was expressed once in a discussion at my club about education, involving the topic of the classics. A scholarly English visitor to the club, a bishop, said very emphatically – “Well, all I can say is that I regard Greek as having practically made me what I am.” There was a silence, and then an American present said, “Exactly!” But the bishop didn’t see it – one of the advantages, no doubt, of learning Greek.

Such views of our own past education belong, I do not doubt, to the illusions of retrospect. They have all the soft colour and mellow tints that surround the “good old times,” and the “old school” and reach away back to the distant past of “Merrie England” and the “brave days of old.” The pain and distress dies out of our human record as we look back on it.

But even if we grant that modern education has in the main meant progress, we may still note many things of value that have somehow been dropped by the way – and the faster the pace of progress the larger the likelihood of such losses. One grants, I said, the progress, the improvement. The “little red school house” of sixty years ago, taken as a reality, looks but a poor structure, ill-lighted and unventilated beside the “academy” of today – its windows all to the sun, its rooms as neat and bright as day, its wide corridors decorated with the framed pictures of great men. In it is its teacher, as highly certified and as guaranteed as a patent pump, and at his command a whole battery of instruction by radio and screen, and loud speaker, with apparatus to illustrate everything so clearly as to obviate all thought.

More than that. The new teacher is very different from the old “dominie” and the bye-gone “school-marm,” in that he is a “pedagogue” with a pedagogical certificate to prove it. He knows the principles of education, whereas sixty years ago none of us dreamed that there were any. He knows that education must proceed from the known to the unknown and from the concrete to the abstract. He knows, or he thinks he knows, that learning things is of no value unless you clearly understand what they mean: otherwise your knowledge is just that of a parrot. He does not realize that the bishop and I – I mean the bishop of whom I just spoke – having been very largely trained as “parrots” along with a whole generation of other young parrots, would regret very much to admit that there is absolutely nothing in the bird at all.

—

The field that is suggested is so wide – this problem as to what our rational education may have lost in becoming so – that one can do no more than skirt its outline, or indicate one or two of the eminences or depressions of its landscape that seem of peculiar significance. Here is one broad feature of the prospect – the element of hardship, of compulsion, of disagreeableness. Modern education has set itself to make its processes attractive, to substitute the element of spontaneous interest for the element of compulsion by force. Learning at the point of a stick, corporal punishment, and learning under the threat of detention – the school-world equivalent of the gallows and the jail – are out of fashion now. It is the idea of our education that learning must be free and happy, carrying its own interest, and at least relying more on rewards than on punishments. Seen thus the interest of each bright little school building becomes for the child a vision of what the world might be, could we so order it; and above all, for the children of poverty, some little taste of the warmth and amenity of life.

These tendencies and these ideas must in the main be true. I may say, indeed, that I am sure they are, for I can look back over sixty-four years of school and college classrooms and I have seen the change. I recall that when I first went to school in England, as a child of four, there had newly come into use a little text called Reading Without Tears. Observe the revolutionary title. Older people shook their heads at it. Till then, the tears that fell upon the page softened it to its value. The Beth-el of education was built of the stone blocks of hardship. The steeper the road to Parnassus the more was the body fortified in climbing it.

We are at too great pains now to make our education easy, at too great pains to avoid sustained hardship. We prefer to give to the children the pretty little mechanical fancies that belong to the nursery in place of tears. Our text-books multiply the devices of ease – the little résumé that replaces the ensemble, the quick and easy “selection” that reduces a poem to a verse and a stanza to a line; the total omission of factors that seem “too difficult,” such as the “quantities” of Latin words. In place of Plato, students study a “Plato-made-easy” – by ceasing to be Plato. I know of a great university – I won’t name it; it begins with an “M” – which gave up first year physics as a compulsory subject because “the girls couldn’t learn it.”

Every foot of this ground, of course, is uncertain with doubt, and undermined with controversy. But I incline to think that we overdo now the elements that were of such high value when they came as over-needed innovations. The point is that our new mechanical environment – radio, motion pictures, the voices in the air and the figures on the screen – make presentation so direct, so easy, so physical that they tend to put the human imagination to sleep. The sheer rapidity of them precludes depth; the multiplicity of them defies memory. There are no “indelible impressions” left.

To the child of fifty years ago the world of books was one of intense imaginative creations – the work of its own responsive mind. What child could forget its conjured vision of Robinson Crusoe bending over the yellow sand that bore the imprint of Friday’s foot? What reader of Tom Sawyer could forget the gloomy horror of the great cave – with Indian Joe walled up in it – the great cave of which he himself – his own imagination – was, under Mark Twain’s guidance – the sole architect? All of our pictured world was ours. But compare with it the typical modern child of the cities, lolling at his movies, saturated and unsurprisable, impervious, after the age of about ten, to further impressions of scenery, an expert in murder, a cynic on women – for whom all the world’s masterpieces have been done over into flickered sensationalism.

What such a child needs when he goes to school is not the primrose path of ease, the escalator to Parnassus, but a touch of the good old hard stuff such as the bishop and I got, and the Edinburgh divine. If he doesn’t, there will soon be no more men left like us, and that would be too bad.

TOC     INDEX

Quality Does It

A man who had served in the War once said to me – “Your books were just a godsend to us in the hospital!”

I thanked him.

He then added – “You see, in the shape we were in, we could only read rot.”

—

A parallel compliment was once paid to me years ago, by that charming and courtly scholar, Dr. B———t W———l, of Harvard. He himself moved on such an exalted plane of English literature that it was difficult for him to descend to the level of a mere writer of burlesque and such nonsense. But he did his best, when I was introduced to him, to recognize my merit.

“I’m so glad to meet you,” he said, as he shook hands, “my children love your books.”

“And my mother,” I answered enthusiastically, “is just crazy over yours.”

TOC     INDEX

Come Out into the Garden

PART ONE: A MEMORY OF SPRING

No, don’t trouble me with the afternoon newspaper. I’ve no time to read it. I want to get out into the garden and get in some good licks before it gets too dark. You say the news from Czecho-Slovakia looks pretty ominous, eh? Well, let it. You tell me that the Czechs will very likely declare war against the Latts? Did you say the Latts or the Slatts? I mix these people up. But it doesn’t matter, I want to hustle out into the garden. Wait till I tie these trousers up: no, I never use braces in the garden; just trousers like these tied up with an old necktie.

You just sit there, Bill, and take a drink while I finish getting ready; there’s soda just near you on that tray. . . . And light your pipe, and then come out with me to the garden and you can get a smoke out there while I work.

Yes, this is my garden suit. No, I didn’t buy it. You can’t buy suits like this. Oh, I know that makers advertise what they call garden suits but they’re not the real thing. You see this suit was originally made much too large by mistake, so I didn’t care to wear it and then by accident the moths got at it – not much, I don’t mean they really hurt it – and then when it was out on a clothes line someone put a charge of bird-shot through it, and so I thought I would just keep it for the garden. See the way it sets behind – look – you see when you’re working on your hands and knees a suit gets bulged like that, in the seat, I mean, and at the knees. There’s no waistcoat, of course, just a loose shirt. Now if you get that suit on and then take the coat off, why, there you are! Get right down on your hands and knees and you can move! You’re free, you don’t choke.

Say, don’t fidget with that darned newspaper, Bill. You say it looks as if Che-Foo would have to fall? Fall where? Oh, Che-Foo in China – going to fall, eh? Too bad. Mind you the Chinese are darned good gardeners. Did you ever hear of the way they plant seeds? I’m trying it out this year. They crumble earth up between their fingers, fine, ever so fine, and keep crumbling it till it’s like dust, and put the seeds into that. I heard about that last winter, one night at a banquet. I sat next a man who was a Ph.D. – no a D.D., or a D.D.F. – anyway he’d been a college missionary in China – seemed dumb as a nut, till he got talking about how to grow cucumbers, and then he was fine and told me about how the Chinese plant seeds and all about bird manure. These missionaries learn a lot, eh – I guess we ought to support them.

There, I’m ready. Finish your drink and leave your paper there – all right, stick it in your pocket, if you like. Now, we’ll go out through the kitchen and by the back door, if you don’t mind, and into the garden. . . . You might just pick up that spade, if you will, and I’ll take this hoe. . . . I’ll hold the door for you. . . . Oh, thanks.

Now, this little space you see behind the kitchen, I fenced off so as to have it for a sort of yard for drying clothes, and that sort of thing, and then I ran the hedge and fence across to separate off the rest of the ground as a garden. This hedge – of course it doesn’t show to much advantage yet as the leaves are only starting to bud – this hedge is quick-set, or quick-something, I forget what. I put it in five years ago; it hasn’t come along very fast, but when it does – it’ll reach high up overhead – away up as high as my hand or higher – fine, isn’t it?

Just excuse me a minute, this darn gate doesn’t seem to be working this spring – you have to pick it up and lift it. There! I’ve been meaning to fix up a patent rig so that the gate would pull open and then shut of itself. I thought it out one day in church last winter.

Now, there we are! Quite a lay-out, isn’t it? I forget how many feet this way and how many that. But, of course, at this time of year, before the leaves are out, it doesn’t look so large. The first evening – five nights ago when I started work – Gee! it looked small. But it’s getting bigger now. And, you see, later on you don’t see the other premises at all. All those bushes are right out in leaf, and the apple tree at the end – you wait and see it in blossom in June – in fact, the whole place is literally what you’d call a bower. And I always put a heavy row of sunflowers across that end! – just what you’d call a blaze of colour. But hold on now, sling down that spade and you sit down on this rustic bench and light up a pipe and just make yourself easy. I made the bench myself – I like making things like that – solid and heavy, no pretence at art, but – oh, say, I’m sorry – you’re not hurt? – it’s that darn end leg. It did that last spring, too. Wait, I know how to fix it in a minute; or, all right, sit at the other end, it’s as solid as anything.

Now, you light up your pipe and be comfortable and I’ll just smoke a cigarette while I sort out some seeds before I get to work – no, no, you keep the bench, I’ll just turn this box up and sit on it. . . . There!

Do I do all the garden myself? Oh, yes! there isn’t any fun in it if you don’t do it yourself. That’s the whole idea of gardening. Dig it? No, I didn’t dig it. That’s pretty darn heavy work. Every spring I get a man to dig it. Of course everybody finds that there are different things round a house you have to get a man for. I tried last week fixing the tap in the kitchen sink but I had to get a man; and for the electric stuff, it’s always best to get a man, and for anything round a garage you need a man – in fact, for anything, don’t you know, that’s a little complicated or needs brain, it pays to get a man. So you see even round a garden, for a thing like heavy digging – it’s really back-breaking work – I get a man. He’s a queer old character, old William, sort of crooked-backed old fellow, I don’t know how old he is – but you should see him dig! He’s not round here tonight or I’d show him to you. I suppose old fellows like that they just don’t mind digging, eh? Anyway I get him to come and do the digging, and then a boy for the weeding – it’s mean work, you need a boy for it – and perhaps now and then I get a woman in to do the picking – you know, gooseberries and currants – and things like that. It’s tiresome work – you need a woman for it. But beyond that I do the whole thing myself: especially the planning. You see in a garden there’s a whole lot of planning to do; where everything is to go and a sort of timing and rotation. I made out a whole card of it one night last winter but I can’t find it. I made it out one evening during a show given by our Repertory Theatre Company – ever see them? – they’re great! I took nearly the whole evening to do it, on the back of the programme, and I put it in my dinner-jacket pocket, and I forgot it and I suppose it got thrown away. Anyway, I know it pretty well.

Now these seeds – look at the packet – see these are Bordigiana! They’re for flowers all along the path (to make a border) and they come out in those beautiful masses of dense flowers low and close to the ground – no, I never grew them before, never heard of them till a fellow told me about them one day last winter at a funeral – but look what it says – “form a heavy border of deep calceolaria“—what the hell is it? Latin, perhaps – anyway you can see the effect. It explains, see, that you make a sort of little trench by pulling out all the stones – William’s doing it tomorrow – and that’s where they go. So I have to get this packet out marked ready, as you see, with a label Bordigiana, and such and such a date – that’s tomorrow – he’ll put them in then – and that’s what you call system.

I wonder if you’d like some kind of a cool drink, eh! perhaps something with a stick in it? You take these packets of seed, if you don’t mind, and mark the date on each – no, not tonight, tomorrow: I’ll let the old fellow plant them; he’ll be flattered to death. And I’ll just go back into the house and fetch out something to drink. Just a second. . . .

—

Now, I’ll put the glasses and the bottle on this rustic table – neat, isn’t it? Solid but sort of artistic too – I made it myself – stop, steady! I’m afraid the damn thing’s a little shaky. You don’t mind if I set the stuff on the ground? There! Ice in it, or not? Say when! Right! . . . You see, I always feel when I get out for an evening’s gardening, there’s nothing like an odd drink, just to keep a man from feeling tired: and anyway it’s nice to have it here out of doors in the evening, among all the foliage, or where it’s going to be – I just love nature, don’t you? – Here’s luck!

Now let me just have half a smoke and explain to you the layout. You see it’s partly flowers and partly vegetables! Do I grow vegetables! Well, I should say so. You see that’s the mistake made by so many fellows – amateurs, I mean – to think that gardening means only flowers! Not at all, there’s a fascination about growing vegetables – I mean really fine prize stuff. I had some lettuce here last year that I wish you could have seen: great big heads of it – I was so proud of them I took two of them over to my grocer, perfect beauties – he gave me five cents each for them – and took two more next day. Well, you might say that that was just partly because I have a big account there, but all the same that kind of thing mounts up. Last season I took him over a cucumber, a perfect prize, I never saw anything like it – he gave me fifteen cents for it – and said that any year I had another like it, he’d be glad to take it. And early peas – very often, in fact, only four or five years ago, I had a whole basket of the earliest in town – I sold them to our club: you may have eaten some of them – forty cents, thank you, for that one little transaction! So you see that kind of thing keeps adding up. It all cuts down your overhead.

But mind you, mainly I grow vegetables just for the pride and beauty of it. You see that flat patch over there, all smooth, just planted – well, those are early peas, English marrowfat peas – unless William forgot to put them in this morning. I never saw them before, I never heard of them till a man told me about them at a board meeting last winter. Here’s the packet I took them from to give them to William: I wanted to keep the picture. Aren’t they lovely?

See what it says – “English marrow peas, full-podded variety, reach a height of five to six feet, carrying pods eight to ten inches in length!” Get that! Now those peas by July, they come on early, will just fill that space up so that you can’t see over them. Just wait till July. I’ll grow them on high sticks – it’s a lot of trouble but I don’t mind it. I’ll get the boy – the kid that does the weeding – to go and cut a lot of brush – I’ll tell him just the kind of brush to cut, and there you are!

Of course, I admit that vegetables would be nothing without flowers mixed in. I always have them here in borders or patches: right over there along the side I had a patch of nasturtiums. You ought to be here in July to see them, just a blaze of colour! and down that way a line of dahlias. You ought to see them in August. You just wait till August! . . .

Sweet-peas, you say? Well, no, I never had any luck with them. The damn things don’t ever seem to come up. I’ve tried again and again. But I’m going to have another go at them. A friend of mine was telling me about them one day last January. It was up at the college at the inauguration of the new president – I think I saw you there – and the president made his inaugural address, you remember? – fine, wasn’t it? I call it masterly – and we were right away at the back of the hall – and my friend was telling me about sweet-peas. It seems you make a deep trench – oh, just as deep as you can – and then put in a base of old rotten manure – and then some earth, and more manure as rotten as you can get it – the real stuff – and then the sweet-peas! And will they grow! Five feet is nothing! and blossoms as big as saucers. You wait till about the end of August and you’ll see! I’ll have a centre line of them right across the garden. Oh, I’m going to go right at it! No half measures – I’ll have William dig that trench right slap across the garden from side to side. If you garden at all you’ve got to be thorough about it.

Ah, here’s William now! Isn’t he a queer-looking bird? No, he’s not so old, not seventy or only just. That’s his own shovel he’s got over his shoulder – a shovel with a long handle. These old birds never dig with a spade, always with a long shovel – excuse me; I’ll just call to him a minute – William, you might just be getting that patch ready for the early corn where I showed you last night. I’ll be talking to my friend here for a while. You just go ahead, eh? Where to make the line? Oh, just make it – make it – oh, I tell you – just make it where it seems about all right, eh! all right.

Now, what about just another little tinkle of the ice, eh? Isn’t it great out here in the garden on a night like this – so soft, eh? – and yet the light seems to fade so soon, doesn’t it – going already – thanks, that’s plenty, whoa! stop! . . . You were asking me do I grow asparagus? No, I don’t, I’m sorry to say. I always mean to and I don’t. You see, there are a lot of things like asparagus that you have to start last year – or for asparagus itself, you have to start the year before last. You lay down a bed the year before last and then let it grow its first year untouched and even the last year only just trimmed, and the third year, this year, there’s your asparagus! I was thinking only last night that if I had started three years ago I could have had a good bed all along the bottom side of the garden – that way – just under the sunflowers – I mean, where the sunflowers will be – I showed you, you remember. But I’ll get at it this year all right. You have to make the bed in August, and I think I’ll hire old William for the whole of August (I’ll be away at the sea, myself), and I’ll go right at it.

—

What! You say you have to leave? – no, no, don’t go. It’s hardly dusk yet. I can work later. Often I come out here and work when it’s practically dark, or sit and smoke on the bench. Stay right on. You have to go round to the club. Jack Conway there! No! not old Jack who was at college with us? I haven’t seen Jack for years. Darn, I wish I could go over! You’re going to have a game of poker, you say: but then, I’d be one too many? No? Is that so? I’d love to go over too. Wait till I just call over to William – or no, to hell with William, let him dig. Come on. Drink that up and we’ll go into the house and I’ll get these darn-fool trousers off: it won’t take a second. . . . No, no, that’s all right. You didn’t upset my gardening. I’ll be at it again tomorrow – it’s Saturday, and I’m planning a regular field day! Old William is to bring another old fellow like himself and I expect to have them digging from right after lunch (my lunch) till dark. It’s an exercise like that, I find, that keeps a man fit. Come on!

PART TWO: A MEMORY OF AUTUMN

“Another year,” he said, “I mean to get at it a little earlier in the spring, so as to get the weeds out of it.”

We were standing looking at the autumn wreck of what he called his garden. It was a little angle of ground about so far this way and so far that – you know how big – a quarter of an acre? I guess so, or no, not that much – well, just a garden. The hedges and trees about it must, I suppose, in the summer have made it look like a bower. But now the leaves were mostly fallen, or thin and yellow. The wind whistled through it. Running across it were some ragged stalks of corn still standing – the leaves – or whatever you call them – a faded brown with streaks of mildew. It all seemed pretty empty and forlorn.

“A snug spot, isn’t it?” said my gardener friend. Lord knows he didn’t seem to see the desolation of it. To him it was the same little embowered enchantment where he had worked on his hands and knees in the long June twilight, his wife holding the trowel for him while he planted – what was it? – oh, yes, the Dutch bulbs for a border, the ones that grow six feet high – no, they didn’t come up. He thinks he planted them too deep.

“Another year,” he said, “I’ll set them just almost on the surface.” “Another year” – that’s always the tenor of his and other gardeners’ talk. “Another year!” And each year they try again, and the garden ends in weeds, and frost and wind, and little clumps of half-sized beetroots under a mist of fox-grass, and a thick patch of long grass that to their fond eye is still the strawberry bed, and still they say, “Another year!” Our human kind, so we read in the scripture, began in a garden. So we never want to leave it. I have no doubt that Adam said to Eve, “Another year I’ll try pruning the apple trees earlier.”

“These strawberries,” said my friend, pointing to what I saw as a patch of grass and what he saw as a bed of strawberry plants with invisible weeds, “would have done better if we had kept the grass down. I really meant to cut the runners off and make a new bed, but I didn’t get time. Another year I certainly will.”

“Did you have any strawberries this year?” I asked.

“Oh, my! Yes, lots, or well, at any rate, once or twice my wife and I had a great bowl of them – all we could eat.”

I know just how much a loving wife can eat, or fail to eat, under those circumstances. She reaches repletion at a cost – if they bought the strawberries – at about two cents. But there’s no use applying cost or accounting to amateur gardening. It won’t stand it.

“Those beets,” began my friend.

“Which beets?” I asked.

“Here, you see them – just along past your feet in a row. They go right across the garden.”

Then I saw them, the half-withered tops above the fox-grass and the roots, or bodies, or bottoms, or whatever you call them, just feebly out of the ground.

“The beets,” continued the gardener, “are a failure.” It is characteristic of amateur gardeners that they like at times to admit failure in an offhand way. It seems to indicate huge success elsewhere.

“I think,” he said, “I gave them too heavy a dose of nitrate.”

“Nitrate” is the name of a white powder that my friend keeps in his “garden house” (a little shed four by three at the corner of the lot). I have noticed him often in the spring when the gardening is at its height, and green bursting out everywhere, crawling along on his hands and knees and dusting on nitrate. If nothing else will kill the stuff, that will.

But it seems that you don’t need in such a garden to take steps to kill everything. The birds, it appears, will look after a lot of it.

“These were the peas,” he said, “the birds got them.” He pointed to a sort of trellis work of lath sticks with fragments of dried yellow vines, or leaves, clinging to them or even tied to them. It must have taken hours and hours to make that trellis. But it has the effect, I believe, of holding the peas down from growing. All amateur gardeners use it.

“Didn’t you have any?” I asked. “Oh, goodness, yes, we had one elegant feed of them – all we could eat – and then a flock of birds cleaned them out. Another year I’m going to put a sort of cover over them, a kind of movable net that I’ve invented.”

I have long since observed that my gardening friends live on invention. They never make the things. They just invent them, mostly in winter time – as sorts of ingenious contrivances for automatic watering, for bleaching celery, and spraying with nicotine where nitrate couldn’t reach.

“These beans,” said my friend, “were fine.” This time I didn’t ask which beans. I knew there must be beans in the grass somewhere.

“The only trouble with beans,” he added, “is that they get old so soon.”

It is a common trouble in life. But I have often noticed its application in the gardens of my gardening friends. One day the beans are too young to pick, and a day passes and they are too old to eat. There is something about it, or like it, in the Epistle to the Corinthians. I think I’ve heard it at funerals.

A colder wind rustled through the little garden, shaking the leaves.

“Another year,” said my friend, “I think I’ll put in a cedar hedge. It will keep the garden warmer, either that, or a sort of movable fence in sections, that I invented one day on the way to work.

The wind blew again, colder and with a fleck of rain in it. The branches shook as if in denial of the fence or hedge.

“Come into the house,” he said, “it’s a little cold here.” “A little!” I had been half frozen ever since we looked at the first empty hotbed. “Come into the house,” he said, “and I’ll give you a Scotch and soda.”

We went into the house. There was a flaming fire of crisp autumn sticks burning in the grate. It was warm and bright. Glasses and a decanter glittered on a tray. The light shot back in amber streaks from the whiskey in the decanter.

“Now then,” said my friend, “a Scotch, eh?” as he moved to pour it out.

“Do you grow your own whiskey?” I asked.

“Good Heavens, no!” he laughed. “What an idea!”

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All Nice People

The word “landlord” generally carries a bad significance. It seems to mean a man eager and grasping for rent, and putting the screws on delinquent tenants. But the truth isn’t always so. There are landlords and landlords.

I had a proof of this some years ago, one summer when I was house hunting – visiting old houses and new houses, and going through apartment buildings – brand-new, half-finished, or not finished at all. Everybody who has done it knows how fatiguing it is. There’s no fun in it. But if you want to get what you want you have to go through with it.

One hot summer evening I came across a new apartment building, just about the type I was interested in. It wasn’t quite finished, at least the lower part was pretty complete, but the top mostly ladders and platforms.

It was getting towards dusk but there were a few carpenters or workmen still around. I asked where the landlord lived.

“He’s right here,” they said, “sitting over there.” I went over to him. “I’d like to have a look over these apartments,” I said, “if it’s not too late.”

“Not too late at all,” said the obliging man, rising and slipping on his coat, “not a bit too late. You don’t mind climbing one or two ladders, do you?”

“Not a bit,” I answered.

“Now this,” he said, showing a ground floor apartment, “is, I think, a pretty good affair. You’ve got an open fire in both the living-room and the dining-room, and you see the way the service pantry is arranged.”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “I couldn’t rent that one. It’s a little too large.”

“Oh, it’s rented,” said the genial landlord, “a little couple from Pittsburgh, nicest people I ever saw. They’ll be in on the first of next month.”

“But look at this,” he continued, as we climbed up one flight, “this one’s practically ready. Isn’t that pretty complete? How do you like that kitchenette, eh?”

“Very good,” I said, “this is more what I wanted. How much is it?”

“Oh, it’s taken,” he answered, “a little couple from Cleveland, mighty nice people.”

We were climbing again. “But here’s the mate to it, see – wait while I open this folding door, this is practically the same thing, except for the bow window . . . fine view out of that, eh, if it was more daylight.”

“Could I have this one at the same price as the one below?”

“No – it’s gone: lady and her brother from Schenectady: nicer people I never saw . . . but I think I can show you the very thing you’re after, if you don’t mind climbing up three more floors to the top – just watch those ladders. Eh? On this floor? No, not this one, nor on the floor above, they’re taken – but up here at the top is the one I especially want to show you.”

“Now,” he said, himself a little out of breath, as we got to the top floor, and stood on the unfinished studding and gaping doorways. “This is the apartment, living-room, kitchen, bath and two bedrooms, about as complete a little layout as you can fancy. That’s the sort of thing you’re looking for, eh?”

“Yes,” I said, “It is. But if I take this, how soon could it be finished?”

“Oh,” he answered, “you couldn’t take it. It’s been let a month back, a little couple from Winnipeg, musical both of them, never met nicer people, oh, no, you couldn’t take it, but I thought you’d be interested to see it.”

“Why, thank you,” I said, “but I’d rather look at the apartments that are still to rent.”

“Oh, I haven’t got any,” answered the landlord, “all gone weeks back. But I thought you’d like to have a look over them anyway. Watch that ladder; it doesn’t seem quite firm!”

We climbed down.

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The Anatomy of Gloom

To bring this essay into line with the dignity of a professor I have at least to pretend that it is part of the “psychology of business.” As everyone knows, there has grown up now in the colleges an entire department of wisdom called by that name, the “psychology of business.” This shows how you can sell insurance to a “prospect” by looking him in the eye; or find out the saturation point of the sale for braces – what’s called the elasticity of the demand – by saying to a number of men in succession “your trousers are slipping.” There are other tests for women.

So, in a way, this essay dealing with the business value of cheerfulness as a collective business asset is not to be ruled out as a mere attempt at humour, a thing not to be tolerated.

Let me first put in a few words what I want to say with all the dignity and seriousness that befit a professor – and then try to say it over so as to make it worth hearing. I think that we, speaking collectively for about a hundred million people, are greatly adding to the burden of our world by our new mentality of distress. Anxiety is becoming a habit. We cultivate the expectation of disaster. This attitude works towards our destruction. We are all afraid together. We have lost courage. Mediaeval superstition, with its fear of hell, wasn’t in it with our new fear of depression, our new alarm of war. We see it everywhere. Bankers tremble. Newspapers croak. Professors prophesy. Farmers whine. Business slackens. Credit shrinks. Even the criminals are discouraged, losing nerve.

We are only kept going at all because youth will have its way: will ride in motor cars: will spend money in cabarets – and because at all ages pleasure beckons: people take trips and buy what they can’t afford. The pump sucked dry with fear, is primed extravagance. Never mind the economics of this. Just take it as a fact. It always has been so. Nero, it is said, fiddled while Rome was burning; quite so, and saved the violin industry. We are dancing, it is said, on the edge of a volcano. Good, keep it up! “Forward and back, and doh-see-do!” as they called out in the barn dances.

I think we get the theme, or shall I say it over again? – business and industry are being paralysed by apprehension. The world is becoming too serious today, even to do its serious work properly.

Take first, as the most obviously striking example in the present instance, the case of banking. What a serious trade it has become! As I first remember it in my home town of Mariposa (population 4,000 but locally estimated more) it was a profession calculated to enlarge the amenity of life. A bank manager was supposed to turn up with the key of the bank about ten, the clerks dropped in soon after. The manager only stayed till a customer asked him out for a drink, the usual civility after receiving a loan, or until he asked a customer out for a drink, the usual courtesy after refusing a loan.

This kept the manager in and out of the bank all day, seeing the public all the time, always pleasant and agreeable – why not? And thus gathering business without trying for it. For business, like happiness, comes easiest when least sought. The banker’s clerks never studied books on banking – there weren’t any – didn’t bother with graphs or charts – except for the races, went home at three o’lock, played tennis till dark, and poker (ten matches to a cent) till daylight. And yet, in the words of an old song, “the world went very well then.”

Take, if you will, the terrible change that has come over journalism. The old-time newspaper – I’m thinking of the country type – told the best of everything. The huge city papers that we read now tell the worst of everything – a daily scare of apprehension of approaching war, of imminent disaster, of deepening depression. We get to expect it, to ask for it, like martyrs asking for suffering. The old-fashioned country newspaper tried to find pleasant news such as: “We see that Mr. Silas Aimes of the Fourth Concession has got the frame of the new big barn up. Well done, Si!” – or – “We learn that Mr. Lemuel Crowder and his daughter Posie are back from a trip to the old country. They spent a week going all over England and Scotland, and report the old country a great place, right up to the modern standard!” Now, why can’t we train our journalists to give us a little of that sort of stuff! If we must talk of foreigners let’s get them on to the Fourth Concession. Like this: “Mr. Adolf Hitler is putting a new tin roof on his house at Berchtesgarten. Well done, Alf, you’ll need it.” Or this: “Dooce Mussolini, of Appian Way Corners, has stocked in a new line of gent’s shirting, done in a heavy black material, and well suited for chores and dirty work. Dooce’s slogan is, ‘You can change later.’ A lot of the boys are buying.” Or this one: “Advices from northern Spain show that Frankie Franco’s circus will be on tour all through Catalonia in early summer. The little ones are on the look-out already. Give them something good, Frankie!”

I don’t mean to say that old-time newspapers in the city didn’t contain sensation and disaster. Of course they did. But it was other people’s disaster. We just got the sensation. We read, for example, that a subterranean earthquake had destroyed an island in the Pacific, killing over a thousand Kanakas – poor fellows! Some of them were blown a hundred feet in the air – poor lads! Quite a lift, eh? Or we read that the Russians had overrun Turkestan and that General Itch had executed Fatash Pasha, the rebel leader. It was all so far away: just quiet reading for breakfast. But now the daily newspaper is the day’s anxiety.

Our trouble is too much fuss over foreigners. A generation ago if we had heard that they were making a new anschluss – or anschlitz – what is it called? – we would have thought it had something to do with beer. Let’s let it go at that.

Our trouble is statistics. We do everything with charts and graphs. A baby starts with a chart, where it used to get a kiss. All through our lives, charts follow us, to show how depressed we are, how much in debt we are, how much married we are, and how criminal we are becoming: at the end, a little chart beside a hospital bed, runs out with us to zero. But the real things of life – the endeavour, the hope, the will, that make it – are things no chart can show.

Our trouble is prophecy. We are too much troubled about the future. It sticks in my mind that there is a warning against that in the New Testament somewhere, but it is little read now. We attempt to peer into the future with a little apparatus of statistics, like looking into a fog with opera glasses. Prophecy is all right in its way, but to get the good of it you have to make it bold and long. When I was a professor – an occupation I followed for thirty-five years – I dealt freely in my lectures in prophecy. “Mark my words, gentlemen, in a hundred years you will see the structure of our Government basically altered,” or – “The continent of America, gentlemen, is understood to be moving westward away from Europe and towards Japan at the rate of nearly fifty feet a year. I venture to prophesy that we shall find means to alter our foreign policy in time to meet this new rapprochement.“ Unfortunately I made some of my prophecies a little too short and just got out of college in time before they were due.

But I am saying, make your prophecy long and bold and it’s good, if only as a stimulus to thought. One recalls the weather prophecy of the old farmers’ almanac, a whole year of weather at a time – “July, wind, with rain and sun. No snow. Fair with spells of heat and cold. The sun in Sagittarius.” Putting the sun in Sagittarius was a good touch: not so much where it was, but knowing it was there.

The truth is we can’t see far. Life is veiled. It has to be. Biology has long since exploded all the nonsense about “signs of a hard winter,” and so forth, that used to be the stock-in-trade of trappers and hunters. One remembers Longfellow’s Evangeline:

“All of the hunters predicted a winter long and inclement

Seeing how thick was the fur on the back sides of lynxes and foxes.”

The quotation is not exact but it will do, especially as there’s nothing in it biologically. The fur on the animals has only to do with what is past and not with what is coming. You might as well say:

All of the brokers predicted a terrible slump in the market,

Seeing their clients arriving no longer in seal-skins but coon-skins.

Yet we fret ourselves needlessly with our unending preoccupation over tomorrow. Wiser men in older time have warned us to seize the present moment while we can – to “eat, drink, and be merry.”

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying,

And that same flower that smiles today,

Tomorrow will be dying.

But I am saying more than this. I am saying that it is good business to do so. Let me stress again the main theme I am trying to follow, and as difficult to walk as a tightrope: I am saying that there is money in cheerfulness, business salvation in hope and collective security in collective forgetfulness.

That cheerfulness is good business I was once called upon to prove (to a law court) as an economic expert. I was commissioned to prepare a “factum” to that effect on behalf of a great corporation which had been foolish enough to subscribe money to a sick children’s hospital. This seemed a pretty dirty thing to do. No wonder a shareholder complained and brought suit. The only possible rebuttal was to show that charity was good business. The corporation repudiated all idea that they cared about sick children, a ridiculous thought – or took an interest in hospitals: they claimed they were just out for money. And I proved it. I showed that even hardened economists like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill had admitted that there’s money in charity and profit in good will. Any firm in the toy and Christmas business will see it at once: so what we want is more toys and more Christmas.

The corporation for whom I wrote the factum were so delighted with my argument that they were going to give me a fountain-pen with an inscription on it, till I showed them a better idea.

Incidentally – I say it as an obiter dictum, a digression father against my theme – I got in this connection an instance of the practical working of the law as an instrument of prophecy. The lawyer in charge of the case showed me a pile of typed sheets. “That’s the evidence of our witnesses,” he said. “Have they given it already?” I asked. “Oh, no,” he answered, “they won’t give it for a month.” “Oh, I understand, you mean they’ve written it out beforehand.” “Oh, no,” the lawyer said, “they haven’t seen it yet.”

—

As I look about me I seem to see a gathering pall of over-seriousness pervading all our civilization: of over-apprehension, over-anxiety. We take too much thought for the future. In fear of life we drag out our preparation for it, our education, too long. When it is done, life itself has passed by: apprehension of the future makes everything too late – marriage ten years beyond its time, children ten years late, and Grim Death reaps down too soon what should have lived as a grandfather.

We are losing the key to happiness. I realized this anew and vividly when I went the other day to see, as all the world has, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. What a wonder of light and colour and, above all, what a world of happiness! One could feel the audience reach forward as if wanting to step from our world into theirs – the fawns, the little animals, so kind in every gesture, in every tremor, the merry melody of the dwarfs’ evening gaiety, the mutual willingness and goodwill – oh! give us that – and we can afford to have all our evil segregated into one hideous witch – forgotten as soon as gone.

If it is true that a heavy pall of gloom is spreading over us: if it is true that it debilitates our collective energy, and lowers our collective confidence, what is there that we can do about it? Nothing that I know of – or nothing by rule, line, or statute. Changes are made not by the law but by the spirit. The law merely registers the fact. The law against theft proves that the world hates stealing. A compulsory law compelling cheerfulness – forcing a banker to smile and compelling a professor to stop talking – would fail of its end. But it is at least something to know what’s wrong with us.

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A Dip into Psychology

It struck me one morning with sudden apprehension that I was growing deaf. It was not a thing to neglect for a moment. The mere notion of it set all my senses alert. I telephoned at once to an old friend of mine, a specialist, to make an appointment. Then I started to walk to his office.

The distance was about a mile. The day one of those bracing autumn mornings that just put life into your veins. By the time I entered the doctor’s office, I felt fine.

“Henry,” I said, “I think I’m going deaf.”

“Eh?” he said mildly.

“I think I’m going deaf,” I repeated.

“Oh, deaf! Well, we’ll soon see about that.”

The doctor picked up a little sounding fork and made it twang.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

“Why, of course,” I said. “Hear it? I could have heard it half a mile away.”

“Try this,” he said, and made it lower.

“Why, yes, it sounds quite loud.”

He tried it lower still.

“I hear it quite easily,” I said.

“Impossible,” he muttered, with a kind of anxiety in his voice, “now then, this one.”

It was faint, but I could hear it.

“You can hear that?” questioned the doctor.

“Can’t you?” I asked.

“Why, no, damn it, I can’t hear any of the last three!”

“You don’t say so!” I said. “Give me the sounding fork! Now! Can you hear this, Henry?”

“No!”

I hit the fork harder – “And this? Try now, can’t you get it?”

Louder still – “No!”

I hit the fork harder – “And this? Try now, can’t you get it?”

Louder still – “No!”

“By gosh!” my specialist friend said in alarm, “I believe I’m going deaf: strike it again – no, I don’t hear a thing!”

“Henry,” I said, as I laid the fork down, “your hearing is in a bad way. Whether it comes from drinking or merely from a general breakdown of your system, I don’t know. But what you need is air, vigorous exercise. Good-bye!”

I left him, having learned, if I didn’t know it before, that ophthalmologists are always deaf, that oculists are blind, that sailors can’t swim, distillers hate whiskey, and barbers are all bald.

There’s a psychological law for this, but I forget it.

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Then and Now

Were We Happier
Fifty Years Ago?

Old people always think that the world is going to pieces and young people that it is just beginning. To old people things are closing in; to young people they are opening out. To old people of today the world seems filled with dangers, terrors, with imminence of world war, and world destruction, of social revolution and social catastrophe. I suppose it always did. I suppose that fifty years ago people thought of Nihilists and Anarchists in the same terms of terror; and fifty years before that all England shuddered at “Chartists,” at “Trade Unions,” and “Agnostics,” and “Rationalists,” and wondered what the world was coming to.

So, on general principles, the apprehensions of old age are a mere part of old age itself and the world is not coming or going anywhere in particular except round its orbit, first turn to the left and straight on. But exceptions prove a rule. I’m not just so sure that in our own day, this present moment, we have not a bad case of a world greatly changed for the worse in ever so many things in its last fifty years.

Now I make, of course, great reservations here. I leave out of count all sorts of things. I admit that human life now averages fifty-five years whereas it only used to be thirty-five. Hence the expectation of life is now longer, but then few people expect to reach it anyway, like the farmer whose crops hadn’t turned out so well as he thought they would – but then he didn’t think they would. I admit that the hideous poverty of the slums of 1887 is alleviated a lot. But then I don’t live in the slums and don’t care to know people who do. I admit that prisons are greatly improved and that a first-class penitentiary now is as good as a club. But I have a club of my own just as good anyway. I admit that the old saloon is gone and I’m sorry. I admit that women have largely emancipated themselves from the dominance of men and I’m sorry for that too, and I don’t believe it anyway. I acknowledge all the progress of machinery and science but I fail to see that it has got us anywhere. As far as the explanation of the universe goes, science is utterly hopeless. As far as its application to human wants goes, it has reached an absolute deadlock. As far as the means of death goes, science is triumphant over human happiness.

But I am thinking of the ordinary life of ordinary people, then as now, fifty years ago and today. Then it was all so simple; now so complex. Take the earliest thing – education. Then it was relatively short, a prelude to life. Now it stretches out into an appalling vista of years, an unspeakable prospect of expense. Fifty years ago a course in medicine was all accomplished in three years – one in a sawmill and two at college. You got admitted to the church by putting in four summers on a farm and one winter in a divinity school. Entrance to the bar was by hanging round the bar, or bars, in the city for three or four years and defending a negro in a police court. Teachers became teachers without any technical qualifications except that they needed the job and had nothing else that they could do. The entry to journalism was by setting type, and a banker became one by being able to add two columns at a time and live on twenty dollars a month. These are not exaggerations or attempts at pleasantry. They are just facts. Few people realize the tremendous burden of added cost, of added complexity that fifty years has piled on to the average life of those not rich and not criminal.

Turn from education to the softer aspect of opening life – love and courtship and marriage. Fifty years ago, you didn’t take a girl out in a taxi, there weren’t any. And you didn’t take her in a cab. Cabs were only used for weddings or when people were knocked down in the street. No, the girl walked. And if you made a hit with her at the party then you asked if you could take her out for a walk next day. Some of those girls, the popular ones, must have walked a hundred miles a week. And after a party you didn’t have to take her to supper to a night restaurant or cabaret. There weren’t any. You took her back to her own house and she – not you – had to supply lemonade and bread-and-butter sandwiches. Of course her mother was there. I admit that you had to see far more of a girl’s mother in those days than you do now. But perhaps it was just as well; you knew the worst sooner. You also took her out to the big football games and the cricket matches – no admission to pay for either of them. Can you wonder that lots of fellows spent practically all their time with girls?

The result was early marriage. You see you didn’t have to save up to buy a car, or a radio, or a refrigerator – you rented a house for $8.00 a month and had all the rest of your money over. An evening party (Euchre, beer, and cold turkey) cost $1.50 and a summer vacation (spent in a canvas tent) cost $25.00. Life was all so simple. Can you wonder that people died at thirty-five? They’d finished it.

Or the outside world? How beautifully far away. No submarines, no airplanes, no bombs, no gas. War was adventure, far away. It had no meaning in home life.

Social revolution? For most people there wasn’t enough to revolve. There were of course, a few big cities, with occasional upheavals – but it didn’t touch your life or mine. You read that it had been necessary to charge the rioters with cavalry; or fire a volley into them – or perhaps a couple of volleys – too bad, nothing else to do. That the riot could spread, could engulf the world, could spread death in the last corners of the countryside – no, no one ever thought of it.

And the far away countries. China! One read – I mean it literally, and I remember it though I forget the year – that a million Chinese were drowned in a flood. Hard luck, eh? One didn’t think they had so much water power in China.

Fun! Amusement! But that all depends on your capacity for it. The moving pictures have made every little snipe in the city brain-drowsy at twelve years old. He’s seen earthquakes, shipwrecks, riots, bombs, kings, courtesans, savagery – he’s finished. You couldn’t knock another spark of intelligence out of him. His little flint has finished all its fire; there’s nothing left for him now except over-effect, perverted sensation, crime . . . It is quite possible indeed that the world will swing upside down, like a revolving pyramid, with crime, the criminal class, at the top.

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Thrown Out

I was sitting in the rotunda of the hotel, one of those old-fashioned rotundas – it was years ago – where the chairs were in a sort of big horseshoe, with a huge open fire-place in the centre. It was the custom of the guests – these were called “guests” in those days – to sit around the rotunda in their off hours and the manager would sit among them.

I was at the end of the row but one, and the end one was the manager. He and I were old friends. I said to him, “What’s the matter with you tonight? You look as if you had something on your mind.” I knew him as well as that.

“I have,” he answered. “I’ve just had a mean business to get through, one of those things that you’ve got to do in the hotel business, whether you like it or not.”

The manager spoke in a low, throaty tone, as soft and easy as a gargle. He was too heavy a man to shout. Anyway hotel men talk low. They have to.

“What was the trouble?” I asked.

“Case of getting rid of a loafer,” the manager continued in his low, confidential tone. “Fellow you may have seen round – been here for two months or more – never paid for his room, not a cent, hung up the dining-room, and as for the bar, he seemed to think he could drink free in there all day.”

The manager’s rising indignation began to raise his voice with it. He began to speak with animation and anger, looking me right in the face as he spoke. Some of the guests had half turned to listen.

“So at last I said to him,” the manager said, dropping as best he could into his quiet tone, but losing it entirely as he continued, “Look here, you loafer!” As he said this, the manager stood up, turned squarely in front of me and smacked one hand with the palm of the other (that made every one turn and listen), as he went on, “Listen to me. You’ve loafed round this hotel for two months. You haven’t paid a cent on your room or your board – and I’m sick of it. Out you go, tonight!”

With that, the manager put his hands in his pockets, and walked off about his business, cooling down as he went.

But the news round town that I’d been thrown out of the hotel for debt nearly cost me my job!

TOC     INDEX

What I Read Then;
What You Read Now

An Essay for the Young

I am sixty-eight years old. Sixty years ago, able to “read for myself,” I first passed through that magic gateway into the Garden of Imagination. How greatly has it changed in sixty years to become the very different garden, the very different world that you young people know today.

The world in which I lived, as compared with yours, was vast and empty and voiceless. Look at the map of it as it hung on the walls of our school-room. There was Africa, a huge continent with nothing but an outside rim to it, rivers that seemed to come from nowhere, and queer names along the coast now mostly vanished – Mozambique, Zanzibar, Sofala; Asia, a lot of it just about as empty, with a great desert smeared across the middle, with its northern coast, inaccessible and unknown, washing into the Arctic Sea. Over the heart of the continent were still inscribed such queer and romantic names as Turkestan and Bokhara and the Kurghis Steppes. Arabia was marked as a great empty desert, closed and forbidden. Of our own continent great stretches were still one vast emptiness of prairie and forest, the Rocky Mountains infinitely far away, as yet pierced only with the thin thread of two or three railway lines; in Canada still huge and impenetrable. South America seemed on the map, as far as its insides went, an unexplored jungle.

In such a world the sense of distance, of mystery and of the unknown was far more impressive than is possible today. Your little world is shrunken, crowded – noisy and quarrelsome – it is like a street alley where was once a silent wood.

I went the other day to the “pictures” and there before me on the screen was the young King Farouk of Egypt in a tarboosh and his Queen Farida in a Paris dress, just bowing themselves off in time to give the Japanese a chance to bomb Shanghai – also in a hurry, because Dartmouth was going to play hockey against McGill in a minute. The game was timed to allow Mussolini to come out on the roof of the Vatican (it went fast, I’m not sure what roof it was) and give a talk meant for Hitler, who appeared on the terrace of the Tiergarten – followed by the last minute of a fight in Madison Square Garden. . . . What a world! Rushing with voices that come from currents of cosmic force running through our very bodies themselves – quivering with power we cannot control, dangers we can see but not avoid.

I am not placing my world above yours – I am only exchanging one mystery for another. Our life, in any case, is framed in mystery, floating in the unknown; but the world of today seems to me, as an old man, in a way terrifying, like a thing rushing to its doom! But don’t worry over that, my young friends. Old men have always thought the world was hurrying to its doom: and the joke is, it wasn’t the world at all, but just the old men themselves.

But at least the contrast is great. Oh, to be back in the silent world of sixty years ago, in which a little boy with a book under an apple tree could be transported to the Rocky Mountains, and there sit with Trapper Ben and Siwash Jo, beside a crackling fire of resinous pine, over a dish of buffalo meat. You can’t sit there, you see, because if you did, Trapper Ben would say to Siwash Jo, “Turn on the radio, Jo and let’s hear what’s doin”!” and Siwash Jo would say, “Me thinkum King Farouk of Egypt he marry one nicey piece-Squaw.”

—

From such a setting you will easily understand that our reading of sixty years ago was based on the “bigness” and mystery of the world, of adventure in “distant lands” and “overseas,” of people disappearing on long voyages to return as heroes or millionaires – back from the “diggings” or the “Cannibal Isles,” or places like that. Notice the queer, fascinating names of our world. You’d call the “diggings” the “Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company,” and the “Cannibal Isles” the “Municipality of Honolulu.”

But of course we were strongest of all on “desert islands.” The height of every boy’s imagination was to share the fate of that lucky man Robinson Crusoe and be shipwrecked on a desert island, with one or two “other fellers” – no girls and no grown-up people. Desert islands always contained in abundance everything needed for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, such as bread-fruit, yams, mangoes, coconuts – the stuff we never got at home except at Christmas. Of course, the world’s best desert island story was Robinson Crusoe, and no doubt you still read it. But it’s really upside down. Defoe, who wrote it in 1719, meant it as a picture of loneliness and hardship, but the story, as stories do, turned into something else. Hence all boys envy Robinson his island and his goats and his parrot, and above all his man Friday. What they like is the fun of being there. When the Spaniards come into the story and the “adventures” begin, it is all off.

The second best-known desert story, written a hundred years ago, was the Swiss Family Robinson. Its author was a Swiss professor of philosophy so that shows how much he knew about desert islands. His story was no good after you were ten years old – too namby-pamby: the Island too easy. And then how silly to have Mr. and Mrs. Robinson there! If you’re lucky enough to hit on a desert island, you don’t want your father and mother around.

But the best island story of the lot was Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. Verne was a Frenchman, but the boys of England and America adopted him so completely that his books that ran from about 1870 to 1900 were put into English as soon as written. Everybody has heard of his “prophecy” stories. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Clipper of the Clouds, both come true, and his Journey to the Moon, still waiting. But best of all was the wonderful island on which there lands a group of castaways carried in a great storm in a balloon – days and days in dark and wind and clouds, and blow to land – heaven knows where, over such great spaces as we knew and you can’t ever know. They all landed empty-handed. They begin as children of civilization, from nothing, make and contrive everything, melting iron for tools and mixing gunpowder – but read it. It’s still good.

—

Of course, our adventures turned mainly on the sea. Say what you like, the sea can never be the same again since steam and wireless and radio.

Where are now

. . . The Spanish sailors with bearded lips,

And the mystery and beauty of the ships

And the magic of the sea?

Never again can be reproduced the wonder and beauty of the great sailing ships outward bound in the sunset a hundred years ago. Kipling has tried, in his MacAndrew’s Hymn, to lift the huge floating machine called a steamship to a par of mystery and wonder. But it can’t be done. The things are different. The one is man, the other is machine.

Never again can literature have such a romantic basis as in those great days of the sea. You can read it now but it’s all altered by your knowledge of radio and wireless. To you all great sea stories suggest the idea, what a pity they didn’t have wireless! But as for us, we just plunged from shipwreck to shipwreck, buffeted, tossed about, battered by a rush of nautical terms that we didn’t understand! We saw the Grosvenor strike on the breakers and founder off the coast of South Africa – infinite desolation! – foundering with all hands – well, perhaps a few did reach shore to wander among the savages. We saw the Indiaman Kent burned to the water’s edge, and the Dunbar beaten to pieces off Sydney Heads in the dark, and Masterman Ready in the wreck of the Pacific. Such writers as Captain Marryat, Fenimore Cooper and Clark Russell went literally round the world.

You can’t read them now, my young friends, I am sure. But don’t call them slow: the reason is not in them but in you. You are not, I say it very politely, fit to read them. You see, you are a child of machinery and electricity and so you want machinery at every turn. In my day, for example, in a sea story we used “to sweep the pirates off the deck with our cutlasses” – just a loud “Hurrah!” and over they went still gnashing their teeth and biting their nails. But you would want to defeat them with “heat ray” or a “detonating bomb” or some such deviltry as that. Poor creatures! We just swept them off the deck – surely that doesn’t hurt anybody.

But above all we loved the technical language of the sea – the hundred ropes with every one a name, and all the parts of the ship that we knew so well by name but only vaguely by location. The “bitts,” the “main chains,” the “scuppers” – were they parts of the “binnacle” or of the “taffrail”? The “tops,” the “cross trees,” the “main-royal-yard” – how high up are we? Don’t look down!

When your teachers teach you Shakespeare they explain to you what a wonderful knowledge of the sea Shakespeare had, just because of a little biff of sea language, or an attempt at it, in a play called The Tempest.

Master: Good, speak to the mariners: fall to’t yarely, or we run ourselves aground: bestir, bestir.

Boatswain: Heigh, my hearts! Cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! Take in the topsail; tend to the master’s whistle. Down with the topsail, yare!

Tut! That’s poor stuff, as Mark Twain once showed (I am quoting his example) – just elementary. Compare it with the language of a real sailor like R. H. Dana, who wrote for us Two Years before the Mast.

Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt of each sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at a word the whole canvas on the ship was loosed, and with the greatest rapidity possible everything was sheeted home and hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under headway.

But of course for you today there is no more “cat-heading” and “sheeting.” Here is the kind of passage that you would expect in one of your books:

Ned brought the radio message to the captain. “A radio message, Sir,” he said, “in code.” “Decode it,” cried Captain Carburettor. Ned, who was a skilled decoder, decoded the coded radio.

“What does it say, Ned?” asked the Captain.

“It’s from an airplane, Sir,” said Ned, “warning us that they can see an enemy submarine approaching us at a narrow angle.”

“How narrow?” asked Captain Carburettor.

“One degree, two minutes, log 5 1/2,” answered Ned.

“How long have we got?” asked the Captain.

“Forty-six seconds, Sir,” said Ned.

“Plenty!” said the Captain. “Pass me a depth bomb. Or here, boy,” he added, putting his hand, not unkindly, on the youngster’s shoulder, “you jump over with it yourself.”

—

But don’t think for a moment that our adventure books were all and only on the sea. Not at all. We were just as much at home on land – in the heart of the forest or out on the prairie, with just enough savages “lurking” round to make things creepy. What they did was always called “lurking”: they never came straight at you, in an open manly way, they “lurked.” The only notice you got of their approach was of the snapping of a dry twig: if you heard that, watch out! – there was “a pesky red-skin” somewhere around. Not that you yourself could hear it, but it was heard by the quick trained ear of your guide and companion, Old Pigskin or Deerskin or whatever he was. I am thinking here, as you guess, perhaps, of Fenimore Cooper, whose books went all over the world in all the languages. Sixty years ago our continent was still young enough and open enough to keep Cooper’s books near and intelligible; the prairie was still there and Sitting Bull’s massacre of Custer’s force recent enough to thrill us with its horror. It is strange to think of the marvellous vogue and influence of writers like Cooper, Scott and Dickens, writing for all the world. What they did can never be done again. The times forbid it. A writer nowadays may make a huge hit with a “best seller,” Gone with the Tide or Off with the Wind – half a million copies in a year, and in five years as dead and forgotten as dry grass.

Compare that with the world significance of The Last of the Mohicans. For the sake of that book, little boys in France and Germany dressed themselves up in what they meant for “leggings,” with feathers and scalp-locks, and crawled round in the bushes of suburban gardens, avoiding the snapping of a dry twig. Remember the name if you don’t know it already – The Last of the Mohicans, and don’t pronounce it, as we always did in England, as if Mohican rhymed with “Joey can”: it’s “Moheegan – with a sort of Irish sound to it.

—

Later on, of course, we moved from pure adventure to adventure-romance – Walter Scott for all time the master of it. I am afraid that many young people, perhaps most, can’t read Walter Scott today. They find him too “long-winded.” That seems a queer accusation from a generation that makes its novels longer and longer, and thinks nothing of 600 pages. I admit that our books were “long-winded,” but so are the books of today. Only they are long-winded in a different way. We took our “long-wind” in the beginning, in the way of an “introduction”; nowadays you get the “long-wind” all through: the book just goes on and on, like sawing wood. There’s no need for it to stop: the end could be the beginning: just like films in the cinema, where we come in late and take the story backwards. We see the final death scene and then learn who it is that died and what killed him. In fact the “pictures” have shown us that a story is a circle. You begin anywhere.

But in our good old books you began at the beginning. Very much so. In fact, away before the beginning. If the story was laid in the Highlands you had to have first the history and description of the Highlands and how they got high. Then as the hero of the story is going to be Hoosh McQuoosh, you have to learn quietly and slowly all about the ancestry of the Hoosh McQuoosh family, one of whom fell at Bannockburn, one at Flodden – in fact they fell all over the place. But the reward was that by the time you got, slowly and gradually, into the story, you were right at home in it; it felt like part of you.

—

In one department I am willing to confess our books of sixty years ago were weak. That was in the matter of the heroines. I am afraid, as I look back at them, that our heroines were “simps.” True, they were given large “lustrous eyes” like a startled fawn, mouths like “rosebuds” and a complexion that shot over with blushes as rapidly as a neon sign. But they were “simps.” There was no sport in them. They wouldn’t go out at night. If you dared to touch them they cried out, “Unhand me, foul villain!” In fact their rhetoric – talk like that, only longer – was their strong point, their chief defence. Alone with a foul villain in a ruined castle they could blast him with it. Even in the forest they could knock out an Indian at ten yards. “Despicable man,” cried Ethelinda, as the fierce Mohawk raised his tomahawk, “alone and defenceless, beyond human help, a prey at once to treachery and menace, with nothing on which to rely save only the promptings of my own innocence, I command you to restrain your hand!” The Mohawk lowered his tomahawk with a groan: a blush as of shame (it really wasn’t) mantled his dusky countenance, and with a couple more groans, he vanished into the brush!

When I compare those heroines with the kind of girls I see in the films today, skipping around on beaches and eating midnight supper under rubber trees, I feel sorry to think what we missed.

But you must excuse my writing further – there’s a film I must go to see – racketeers, gangsters, murders, trials, jails, all our bright new world spinning at its best.

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Feeding Time

Feeding time at the Zoo is said to be most interesting to watch. But it’s pretty good too in any first-class hotel. You notice that man, at the little table by himself, who has just called the waiter to him. You observe the suffering look on his face, the peculiar whine in his voice. What is it he’s saying?

“Waiter, when I asked for the toast well browned, I didn’t want it all burnt up like that, into a black crisp!”

Poor fellow, how he must have suffered! Got black toast instead of brown, too bad! But as a matter of fact, that type lives on suffering like that. He can’t eat without it.

If the waiter could talk back he’d say, “Got burnt toast, did you, you poor fish – well, even at that, it’s too good for you!”

But the waiter can’t talk back, he just says, “I’m sorry, sir.” He isn’t really. He hopes the fellow chokes.

But look at this other man, pink and complacent, and smiling at the bill of fare. “Waiter,” he is saying, “I want a nice lamb chop – and some nice fried potatoes, with a nice piece of toast and a nice pot of hot tea.”

The proper answer from the waiter to say to him would be, “I’m sorry, sir, we have no nice lamb chop. It’s no good!” But he doesn’t give it. He says, “Yes, sir,” and writes it all down. He knows this man has such a good digestion that his breakfast seems nice to him before he eats it.

The most usual type of man in the room, representing, at least, three-quarters of them all, is the man who sits with the menu card in his hand and holds a dialogue with the waiter like this:

“Waiter, is there fresh fish this morning?”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“How is it?”

“Excellent, sir.”

Here there falls silence and a little more study and then:

“How’s the steak this morning?”

“Very good indeed, sir.”

More study:

“Are there codfish-cakes on the bill of fare today”?

“I’ll just go and see, sir.”

“No, wait a minute. What about liver and bacon?”

“Yes, sir, always; very good indeed, sir.”

The man puts down the bill of fare.

“Bring me bacon and eggs,” he says, and picks up his newspaper.

As a matter of fact this man has eaten bacon and eggs every day for ten years, never eats anything else, and he knows it and the waiter knows it.

But he can’t help having a sort of longing look at the things he would eat if he didn’t eat bacon and eggs. It’s like thinking of having married someone else instead; not exactly regret, just wonder.

“Waiter! Is my order coming?”

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Hand Me Down that Book

It is an old dispute whether fancy is greater than fact, fiction superior to reality, and the creation of the imagination more significant than the literal truth of the intellect. To put it more simply – which do you find more real, Mr. Pickwick whom you know from the garters up and from the heart out, or Mr. Jones, next door? Night after night you’ve talked with Mr. Jones while he sprinkled his lawn with a hose. He has expressed his opinion on the extent which grass can be kept green all summer and he has agreed with you that after all the City in the summer is the best summer resort that there is. But apart from that, do you know him? No, practically not. Would he lend you money? Oh, no! Would Mr. Pickwick? My dear sir, you’d only have to ask. He’d send it over by Sam Weller within ten minutes with a warning that there must be no thought of repayment.

That’s what “people in books” are like – real people to whom your heart responds and who mean more to you than the people of your everyday life. Many of them have come down with you from your childhood. With some of them you have faced danger on the sea, when one more crack in the top-gallant-mast might mean instant disaster – or in the pathless woods of North America where the careless cracking of a dry twig under the foot of either of you could have brought an arrow whizzing past your head. It wouldn’t have hit you, of course. In the glorious world of books, arrows never hit you, they just “whizz past”; and bullets “sing”; or even “rattle” when thick enough – but you come out of it all right, always. Another contrast this with real life, whose poor disasters are so mean, so desolating, so shabby and so unrelieved.

What a cavalcade they form, these “people out of books” as they come from away back down the centuries. Some are in the very dawn of history, the mist still all about them. Here is Hector with his tall helmet, and Achilles who dragged him around the walls of Troy – or, wait a bit, was it Achilles who dragged Hector, or was it Hector who dragged Achilles? And, let me think, were they dragged or drugged? – I’m afraid I’m mixing it up with the latest film; did you see it? I can’t quite remember the name – anyway, the one where the Chinaman, Hong something, drugs the detective – at least he thinks he’s a detective.

The trouble is, of course, that in these later days – nobody’s fault – the old outlines are getting dim – all sorts of other and newer and quicker impressions are being written over them. The flash of the cinematograph fuses our history like a burnt-out wire, till the pictures melt and run and mix and somehow reform to make a kaleidoscope of moving mice, flying rabbits, of dancing scenery, of rushing trains, fleeing criminals, detectives . . . and throughout all, today’s news, crashing with bombs, louder than the ten years’ siege of Troy, and forgotten in a week.

Those of us old enough can still look through this foreground of the moment to the cavalcade of giants, heroes, warriors, knights, and ladies, that gradually made the literature of the world. We can still hear the laughter of Chaucer’s Pilgrims of Canterbury, easy and sauntering, with always time for a joke, the worse the better – how different from the hurrying tourist of today with his radio in his ear as he sleeps. We can still wander with Don Quixote, driving full speed at windmills, with the haunting feeling that there’s a double meaning in it all if we could only catch it. Or here, closer at hand is Falstaff – it’s a pity the young people of today don’t know him; they’d find him “some boy.” Or here is Sir Roger de Coverley – never read it? Oh, you must – and The Vicar of Wakefield – and then round the corner into the full noonday sun of the nineteenth century, with its whole procession of Waverleys and Ivanhoes, its Pickwicks and its Wellers, Pendennises, and Newcomes. Lord bless us! How the sun once shone on them. And with that what a marvellous side procession to join from America, brought over in stately ships by Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper, on rafts by Huck Finn, and as (first-class) Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain. On these, as on their British peers and predecessors, it seemed as if the illumination would never fail, and that there never could be a boy who hadn’t heard of Mr. Squeers or a girl who hadn’t wept over Evangeline.

And now, how great a change! It seems – so I am credibly informed and so I constantly notice – it seems that a great many of the young people of today (young people anywhere from six to sixty) have never heard of the Knights of the Round Table or at least mix them up with Ten Nights in a Bar Room. They think that Robin Hood was “Doug” Fairbanks when he was younger, and that Lady Godiva is the name of a flesh paint.

There is no need to get angry over it. No need even for a professor to lecture about it. The fact is that the world today is so closely interconnected on the surface, that it loses its connection downwards with the past. Let me try to say that more simply, and then I’ll get it better myself. In the world in which we live you may “sit in” at any aerial bombing going on in Barcelona or Shanghai, you can watch and hear the French people going crazy over King George VI, get all the wars in fifteen minutes, three wars going on and four practically guaranteed, get prize-fights, horse races, beauty shows – all hot over the wire or the wireless and fused again into nothing in a moment, as printers melt up type to use the lead again, and so convert a sermon into a love story. Thus does the type of life melt and run over the radio and the cinema. Now I think we all get it.

And yet – even granting that this hurrying world exceeds and surpasses the older one – its technique, immeasurably superior, in its possibilities of vivid depiction, its power of annihilating time and distance in the interest of narrative, and, perhaps, in many ways surpasses it in imaginative power – if only in its command of the grotesque, the lurid, the pathological forms of literary creation – grant all that, and yet something is irretrievably gone if we let go the thread of connection with the literature of the past.

We cannot live in a world of two dimensions, and literature, like life, must have its third. Our literature, common more or less, in its greatest sense, to all Western Europe, and laid as a present in the cradle of America – goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. It has to. It is a continuous growth. Mr. Pickwick, don’t you see, is directly descended from Sir Roger de Coverley, and Charles O’malley, and Masterman Ready (never mind who they were: ask someone eighty years old), all such, and a host of heroes like them, are the Knights of the Round Table, still seeking for adventure. As the professorate would say, the continuity of a national literature is an essential condition of the continuation of national life.

Fetch me the old books and the old favourites – a whole real collection of them. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, if you will. I’ll start all over again, beginning with the Trojan war, with Flaxman’s illustrations, and then live over again the Last Days of Pompeii (look out for the lava, it’s dangerous): we’ll sit and watch the hundred coloured bannerets that flaunt in the breeze on the tourney ground of Ashby de la Zouche: drink sack with Falstaff; smoke long pipes with my Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim: and, in our heroic moods, wrap our colours round our breast (over our vest) on the fields of Spain, or climb the mast right up to the royal flush (I forget its exact name) and listen to the guns thunder on the deck below!

And, do you know, I think that such perusal, lost and absorbed in the fancied creature of which our own imagination must supply one half – and gives more than, if we sit, full of peanuts and popcorn, allowing flickering shadows, created by someone else, and sound and melody, contrived by someone else, to fill us up with a story – as you feed porridge to a duck.

Fetch me the books. I’m going to read.

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Who Knows It?

Our Passion for Information

The other night I heard a voice on the radio in my living-room asking who was King George’s great-grandmother. I felt terribly pleased – because I knew the answer – Queen Victoria! In fact I remember her quite well. Then it asked how high is Mount Popocatapetl, and I was clean out of it. In all these years I had never stopped to enquire. When the voice went on to ask how many gallons there are in a cubic foot, and who fought the battle of Actium, I had to switch it off.

Odd, isn’t it, this sudden new passion for information that seems to have swept over us like a wave. Questionnaires, intelligence tests, quiz classes held by Professor Knowit, puzzles, problems – anything that can stand for information given and received, knowledge checked up and proved. And even when we are listening to other people being questioned, it’s really ourselves that we are checking up on. “Who was the bosom friend of Damon?” asks the radio – and we know it: Pythias, eh, what? Where was Napoleon born? Corsica! – we got it the first time – ask us another.

The wave of questions sweeps the whole coast of human knowledge. Sometimes it’s history: “Where was General Burgoyne defeated?” That’s just a sort of come-along, made easy, to coax us into the water. “In what year was America discovered?” That gets us right in up to the neck; and then, “Who was John Wilkes?” “Who was Vasco da Gama?” “Who defeated Hannibal?” “Who were the Sumerians?” We’re swamped and drowned.

Often the questions branch into poetry, “The curfew tolls the knell” – of what? “The boy stood on the burning deck” – what boy? “Father, dear father, come home with me now” – home from where? “The shades of night were” – doing what?

A person who stands up to questions like that feels that he’s getting a grip on literature.

Sometimes we drop into straight mathematics, which has the same attraction as playing with fire; for example: If a frog falls into a sand-pit twenty feet deep and gets up the side in jumps two feet at a time, but slips back one foot on the sand while taking his breath after each jump, how many jumps would it take him to get out of the pit?”

There, be careful with it. Don’t say you can do it by algebra – that’s cheap stuff – and anyway you can’t.

—

A side-line of this new question-and-answer craze is the “information-questionnaire” as used in business.

The idea of it is to find out all about a person by reducing him to a set of questions and answers. As a recommendation of a candidate for a job we no longer want a few words of glowing praise, but something by which we can “measure him up” on a scale. Perhaps as the light of the spirit grows dim, we turn on the artificial lamp of science.

Fifty years ago, if a business house wrote to a college for a recommendation of a young man seeking a job, they merely asked in general terms what sort of young man he was. They received in reply from a dean, or other academic authority, a letter which said that Mr. Jones was “a young man of high Christian character who had earned the esteem of his teachers, both for his assiduity and his intelligence.” But nowadays, that kind of recommendation wouldn’t get the young man very far. The business house want him “measured.” So they send out a printed form of questions. It says:

“We understand that Mr. Jones was at your college. Kindly fill up the data as requested in the questions below.

(1) What percentage of character has he got?

(2) What is his percentage of Christianity?

(3) How is his assiduity (state how many hours he can sit still).

(4) How would you class his intelligence – (a) normal? (b) super-normal? (c) subnormal? Compare him with a higher ape.”

The college, of course, meets the situation on its own terms. It keeps books like ledgers in which Mr. Jones is reduced to credits, merits, hours per week, and weeks per year. They can fill him out in five minutes as sixty per cent Christian, forty-five per cent normal, assiduity guaranteed up to fourteen hours a day – saturation point – and intelligence tested five times under high pressure and never burst.

Some of the question sheets (I’ve filled in dozens of them) go further. They want to know not only what Mr. Jones is and does, but what he would be and do under circumstances that haven’t happened yet. Such questions as:

(1) How would Mr. Jones measure up in an emergency?

(2) If we left a hundred dollars on our office table would he steal it?

(3) If not a hundred, at what sum would he reach the stealing point?

(4) If burglars entered our office and shot at him, how would he react?

(5) If they hit him, what then?

—

As a natural result of this “questionnaire” system, once it got started, there arose the “intelligence test,” as applied direct to an applicant, the last word in the attempt at quantitative measurement of human capacity. It has since run riot. It proved a godsend to college psychology just at the time when the lamp of the old metaphysics burnt dim. It overspread business. It invaded the army. There was no end to it.

It works like this – you want to know what a piece of steel is like. Test it. You want to know what a young man is like – test him. Here, for example, is a young man who wants to marry your daughter. All right – have him tested. Send him up to the college psychological laboratory and let the professor test him. Don’t send your daughter up, though – just the young man.

To test him they find out whether he can remember how many windows there are in the corridor he passed through – how many steps he came up to get in – and what kind of trees he passed by in the college grounds. In reality, anybody who remembers windows and trees and steps has a mind as empty as a dried nut. What he needs is furniture. A hen, which can see, but can’t think, would pass an intelligence test in Class One . . . Isaac Newton couldn’t touch it. To my mind an “intelligence test,” if it means anything more than talking to a person as a way of getting to know him, is just a piece of pretentious nonsense, as ineffective as it is ancient.

—

But what does all this mean, this everlasting searching of our brains, testing our knowledge of fact, this passion for information, this desire for accurate measurement? Does it mean that there’s something going wrong with us? “Is civilization a failure, and is the Caucasian played out?” asked the Truthful James of Bret Harte seventy years ago. Indeed, every nation is always asking itself if it is getting played out. The Greeks complained of it. The Romans talked of it so much that at last they got it. Every nation likes to hark back to the “men of old” and pity themselves as degenerate descendants. Just now we are running through a phase of pretending that western civilization – the name we give ourselves – is playing out; that presently it will “crash” – a new metaphor brought down from the air – and when it “crashes” we’ll pass into a form of nebula called “world-chaos.”

Seen in this light, the present craze for “questions,” for “facts” means that earlier faith having gone, the minds run to seed in meaningless intellectuality; that “purpose” is being replaced by purposeless capacity, just as the “helmsman” is replaced by the gyro-compass, and machines with steel fingers replace the human agent.

There’s no end to it. People can get as mournful as ever they like about it, but if you come to the reality of things you will find that the present puzzle-and-quiz-and-fact craze has no particular meaning and no particular novelty. It’s the kind of thing that comes and goes and always has come and gone. The trouble with humanity is not that it changes so much but that it changes so little. The “men of old” never existed, or, when they did, were pretty much like ourselves. Later on, we’ll be the “men of old” – rugged, honest, but all dead.

So what I am saying is that the new “question-and-answer” mentality is just a passing phase, not so new as it seems, and, in one form or the other, often in the world before.

—

Let me start at some of the simpler phases of it. There are people, and always have been, who have a weakness for “facts” rather than “fancies”: and others who prefer “fancies” to “fact.” Some people read romances and others prefer an almanac. Some lose themselves in a poem, others bury themselves in a railway folder. But the motive is one and the same, the desire to escape from the little prison of our consciousness in which we are compelled to dwell. Some attempt to fly out on the wings of the imagination, blown up as light as helium, and others make an airplane of the solid metal of facts.

But it was always so. The biggest encyclopaedia ever written was compiled in China several thousand years ago: the “romances” of the troubadours took a week to sing. Archimedes was as deeply buried in thought as Omar Khayyám was lost in imagination. Fact and fancy have always divided us.

—

Personally, I am willing to plead guilty, along with thousands of other people, to this passion for facts. Say what you will against statistics, I must admit that I like them. I can open a guide book or a compendium or a digest at any time and get absorbed in it; absorbed, for instance, in that marvellous and vivid description of the United States (who hasn’t read it with delight?) which says:

The United States has a continental area of 3,026,789 square miles with a non-contiguous territory of 711,606 square miles, making a total area of 3,738,395 – think of that! Just by adding them together the continental population at the census of 1930 was 122,775,046. The national wealth was $361,800,000,000 or $2,977 per capita.

Everyone had a share. That’s great stuff: it’s vivid – and with it are mixed streaks of higher colour, such as:

The number of children enrolled in the public schools in 1934 was 27,157,601 (that one boy may have left since); the number of mules in the United States was 4,925,000. There were on July 1st, 1933, 50,000 miles of natural gas-pipe lines.

After you’ve read an account like that you feel you know the country. So, too, with its people: what you want is their actual statistical measure. The old-fashioned way of talking about them was in such general terms as: “The average American is a volatile individual, restless, energetic, and with a passion for novelty and experiment.” How much superior is the newer method; “The average adult American is 5 feet 7 1/2 inches in height; he weighs 138 lb., with a chest measurement of 30 inches. He has (approximately) two ears, one on each side of his face. He has 2.1 children and dies at 51.” There – with that you feel you know the fellow, or, at least, lots like him.

But certain statistical figures appeal not so much by their exactness as by their size, by their very magnitude. People like to be staggered with huge figures, just as they like exaggeration in humour and in romance. The little child who reads of the dog with eyes as big as the Round Tower of Copenhagen (see under Hans Andersen) will grow into the man who reads that the estimated original natural stock of coal in the United States was 3,214,898,000,000 tons.

But if you want to get a real stagger you have to turn to astronomy. That’s where you get the real stuff! How’s this: “The diameter of the star Betelgeuse is estimated at 240,000,000 miles.” How’s that for size? Almost difficult to visualize, isn’t it? Or take this one – “The beams of light from the great nebula in the constellation something or other, which started during the Trojan War and have been moving ever since at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, are not here yet.” It makes you feel like going out and watching for them to come.

—

But what I am saying is that this passion for big figures is as old as humanity. In earlier times they had no statistics and so they had to fall back on lies. Hence the huge exaggerations of primitive literature, giants, miracles, wonders! It’s the size that counts. They did it with lies and we do it with statistics: but it’s all the same.

—

In the same way our present passion for puzzles and puzzle-questions is nothing new. The puzzle-man is probably a type as old as humanity. They must have had him in Babylon and on the Nile.

Everybody knows him as we see him with us today – never happy unless he is working out a puzzle. He carries it round with him, as men used to carry a chew of tobacco. You see him sitting in a railway train gazing fixedly out of the window. But he sees nothing. He doesn’t know whether he’s going through the Adirondacks or over the Susquehanna. He’s got a puzzle inside him: he’s trying to think how a farmer with a ten-gallon can and a three-gallon can and a two-gallon can, manages to measure out six gallons of milk.

These puzzle-men, when you understand them, are singularly easy to entertain if you have them on your hands in your house. Just throw them a puzzle. All you do is to say to such a man – “Bentley, I saw a good puzzle the other day but I couldn’t solve it. It said, ‘A shopkeeper has a piece of linoleum twelve feet by twelve feet, and a customer wants a piece sixteen feet by nine feet – same number of square yards but different shape. The shopkeeper says, “All you need to do is to cut this twelve by twelve piece into two parts and place them together.” “Only two parts?” asks the perplexed customer. “Only two,” says the shopkeeper.’ Now how could he do that, Bentley?”

And with that Bentley is off. You don’t need to think of him any more all evening. He’ll just sit round and murmur, “Sixteen feet by nine, eh?” Then he won’t speak for a long time, till he says, “Linoleum, eh?” You don’t need to talk to him, or amuse him, or to let him cut in at bridge. Just turn from the card table now and then to say, “Linoleum, that’s right, Bentley.” If he gets restless, give him a Scotch and soda and let him walk up and down, and mutter, “Twelve by twelve.” He’s all set for the evening.

But be sure to tell him the answer before he goes home. Even if he protests, tell it to him. Otherwise he’ll call you up by phone at two in the morning, jubilant, to say he got it. He thinks you’ll be too glad to sleep.

But this puzzle stuff, as I say, is as old as human thought. As soon as mankind began to have brains they must have loved to exercise them for exercise” sake. The “jig-saw” puzzles come from China where they had them four thousand years ago. So did the famous “sixteen puzzle” (fifteen movable squares and one empty space) over which we racked our brains in the middle eighties. The mathematical puzzles come from the Greeks who left some behind them never yet solved. For example: If Achilles is chasing a tortoise and moves at such a rate that he catches up half the distance in the first minute, and half the remaining distance in the second minute, then, as he is always moving faster than the tortoise is, he must sooner or later catch up with it. But as there is always half the distance left at the end of each minute, it is equally certain that he will never catch up with it. The Greeks died without knowing the answer.

Or take all the “crossword,” “catchword” stuff. That carries back to the Middle Ages, otherwise the Muddled Ages, when all life was one big puzzle. The monks and the few people who could read used to divert themselves with “acrostics,” “anagrams,” and “magic squares.”

Even the word “puzzle” is so old that nobody knows what it’s derived from, and they think “puzzle” must go back to the twilight beginnings of human thought. Most people know, by reproduction in pictures, the wonderful statue of a primitive man, made by the French sculptor Rodin, and called Le Penseur. The figure is that of a huge creature, just emerged above the ape – seated – the narrow head bent on the hands – the rude face immobile and furrowed with a fierce attempt at constructive thought. In looking at it one realizes that the man is probably muttering – “Linoleum, eh? Twelve by twelve.”

—

As to the “intelligence test,” ask anybody old enough to recall the Spanish American War of 1898 to tell you the famous story of the Message to Garcia. Then work back from that to the story of King Solomon and the undistributed baby – and you’ll realize that tests are as old as intelligence.

No, no – it’s all old stuff come back again in a new form that suits our ideas. Let’s turn on the radio and hear Professor Knowit asking about Christopher Columbus.

TOC     INDEX

How Much Does
Language Change?

About forty years ago one of England’s ripest scholars – you know what that means: they get so ripe, they fall off like pumpkins – said that as far as grammar and structure went, the English language was “probably a finished process.” He admitted that new words might come and old words might go, but as for language-making, in the structural sense, it is all over. “The grammar will remain for centuries what it is now.” Odd, isn’t it? the way old men have of thinking that things have reached the full stop of betterment in their own time! John Stuart Mill thought that political economy was as fixed as Euclid: and now, political economy is a wreck and Euclid is called Einstein.

How does it stand with this idea of an unchanging language? In the forty years since the ripe scholar ripened, has grammar “stayed put,” as he expected, or has it moved on?

Of course, in one sense there is an aspect of language that can’t change. It has a vertebrate anatomy that is, and always has been, the same. The distinction of “parts of speech” rests on fundamental modes of thought, not on shifts of language. A noun will still be a noun in heaven; and a verb is a verb, even in Japanese: put the two together and, even in Japanese, you get what can be charitably called a sentence.

The general notions implied in “parts of speech,” and “parsing,” and “analysis” are of a fundamental and unchanging character. But “changes of grammar” mean new modes of structure inside this frame. To give an example, the Latin language, the kind we learnt or nearly learnt at school, was succeeded by what was called “low Latin,” which we understood was beneath the notice of decent people. The kind of change involved was precisely a change in grammar. Thus in the classical days at Rome, somebody – I forget who – said of his own achievements, “monumentum exegi aere perennius,” i.e. “I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze.” But a “low Latin” got down low enough to say, “habeo monumentum erectum,” “I have a monument erected” – and the thing proved such a hit that a flood of auxiliary verbs was let loose on Latin and broke it up as rain breaks ice.

In the same way in English, “I speak,” widened into “I do speak” and “I am speaking,” and, quite in our own day, “I am praised” could be expanded into “I am being praised,” and we can even say, without taking a fit, “I will be being praised” – a usage which would have made Addison or Gibbon feel faint.

The point then is, are there any more such changes to come? We leave out of count the mere changes of words and phrases that make vocabulary. These, of course, in their own place are of extraordinary interest and often of marvellous curiosity, and at times contain within themselves a whole irony of history. It is strange to think that a word that once meant “to go on a sacred pilgrimage to the Holy Land” (sainte terre) now means “to loaf” (saunter): or that the “hocus pocus“ of a modern conjurer is the “hoc est corpus“ of a mediaeval bishop.

Yet these developments of language are aside from the present discussion, and indeed, in many cases, are but shifting metaphors that come and go, lose their initial force and pass out or sink into a common-place. The eighteenth century called a bad young man a “rake” or a “blood”; we call him a “lounge lizard” or a “lobster.” But it’s all the same thing: he’s no worse or better. The Stuart generation called a young woman a “jade” or a “wench.” Nowadays we – or, at least, people younger than myself – call her a “skirt,” or a “doll,” or a “flapper.”

Indeed, the power of making new words has been accelerated by the continuous need for them. Who ever dreamed, a generation ago, of the “social hostess of a passenger plane”? What landscape painter ever thought of a life insurance “prospect” (meaning a human being)? I defy the Duke of Wellington to guess what a “gas-mask” is, or a “dug-out,” and Lord Nelson wouldn’t know what a “depth bomb” was till you dropped one on him.

These new words are a fascinating study. They seem to indicate a vitality in our spoken language never equalled before. They not only embody a wealth of metaphors but they seem at times to dive down into the fundamental undertones that preceded definite language, and bring up treasures as from an ancient cave. Consider such words as “stooge” and “boob” applied to a “dumb” young man, or words such as “zoom” to indicate descent through the air accompanied by noise. It is a pity that most of our discussion of such new forms has not reached beyond the stage of making a catalogue, without further interpretation. Such a catalogue is just on the surface as botany was when still confined to the classification of flowers by a ladies’ school.

But what about changes in grammar itself? Was the ripe scholar correct about them? I am willing to suggest for the consideration of other scholars – and the school returns of the United States show a total of two million coloured scholars alone – that the ripe English authority was all wrong: he was, to use a new term for it, “all wet.”

Proof can only be by examples. Let me proceed to gather and present a few. I will begin with a very simple one, that of beginning a sentence with a verb first and its subject after it without using an introductory word such as “there,” or “now.” For example, instead of saying, “There followed a moment of intense anxiety,” ever so many writers of today put, “Followed a moment of intense anxiety.” Compare: “Came October” . . . “Broke disaster” . . . “Ensued a pause.” They do this not once in a while, but they do it all the time, they do it on purpose, for effect, with the idea that it is stronger than what we used to write.

Personally I hate this innovation with all the unreasoning conservatism of old age. I quite admit – to halt an idiotic objection at its first step – that of course fifty years ago, when I was young, and even the ripe scholar not too old, many writers used such a form sometimes, and it was frequently used in poetry by what was called “poetic licence,” an indulgence as wide as a “liquor licence” in Chicago. But it was no part of regular writing. It is now rapidly becoming so and is helping to add in the new casting of sentences from the continuous flow that was the ideal of Cicero or Milton to the step-by-step prose of today. Thus one of the old-fashioned three-decker love stories which flourished three generations ago, would contain a sentence:

The sudden entry of Elizabeth afforded to John an opportunity for a bold invitation that was no sooner extended than embraced. . . .

The author’s ghost might read it now, or soon, in such a rewritten form as this:

Came in John. Appeared Elizabeth. Spoke John, “What about it, Lizzie?” Pondered not Elizabeth. “I’m on,” she said.

Call it grammar, or call it what you like, the change in speech is here about as complete as the difference between the famous Strasbourg Oaths of early French (A.D. 842) and an election speech of M. Daladier in 1938.

That, then, is that, a phrase in itself suggestive of a new era. I pass to another case of usage, very wide and working great change in our colloquial speech. If I wanted to indicate it in a pedantic way so as to give it all the peculiar force of obscurity, I should say that we are reintroducing forms similar to the old Greek reduplicated aorist – a vanishing form belonging in the dawn of written speech whose original force had apparently disappeared. I should then apologize for the lack of Greek type in this book and slip out of proof like Houdini out of handcuffs. But let me say it instead in simple, vulgar language. We have got into the way, colloquially, of putting in front of our verbs such peculiar modifications as “sort-of (pronounced “sorta”) and “kind-of” (pronounced “kinda”). Such usages as “I sort-of thought he would come,” “I kind-of-suspected he was here,” are ghastly as logic, impossible to parse – in fact, utterly unfit for use in the House of Lords. On the other hand they are replete with meaning and they fulfil the entrance test needed for admission into language that they express something that needs expressing and that nothing else will express so well.

It is clear to anyone of unclouded vision that we are to have a new kind of mood, made after the fashion of the Greek “reduplicated aorist” tense – a noble ancestor that will make it respectable. The grammar out of which the Chinese conquerors of Europe will learn their old twentieth-century English will have a section to read:

Any verb may be removed from the indicative to the dubitative mood by the addition of the prefix “sorts” (derived according to Dr. Woo Hoo from “soror” a sister, but perhaps an abbreviation of “so-it-ought-’er”). Thus the verb “to think” has as its dubitative past:

I sortathought
You sortathought
He sortathought, etc., etc.

The negative form, which is difficult for foreigners and should be avoided except by writers of special taste and purity, runs:

I sortadidn’tthink
You sortadidn’tthink, etc., etc.

Only people who know nothing of language, its origin and its vagaries will find anything odd in this. Let me refer the doubting reader to any grammar of the Zulu language: he will there find verbs with an interpolated middle part of much this sort. But if he has no Zulu grammar, and won’t go to Zululand, let me refer him to the more accessible example of Japanese language. He will find there that the Japanese verbs have a great variety of these internal modifications. Thus the Japanese for “put” (OKU) has a tense called (for short) the indefinite probable past, which means “I think-I-very-likely-put,” “you think-you-very-likely-put,” etc., etc. But in Japanese it has to undergo a second cross variation to distinguish whether I am talking about myself or about you. If I talk of myself it must be indicated in Japanese by some form of change or particle to mean “humble worm,” “low form of existence.” But if I talk of you, it must imply “august-presence-gentleman-Mr.,” or have the initial “GO” in front of it which implies “Just listen to this.” So that the tense of which I speak, conjugated out for actual use, would run as far as it is possible to say it:

First person: “Humble worm thinks humble worm likely put.”

Second person: “Listen to this! August gentleman mister thinks high presence likely put,” etc., etc.

Can you wonder that the Japanese verbal form grows long! I have in front of me a Japanese textbook (Chamberlain, page 150) in which the author indignantly complains that foreigners mistake for verbal roots forms which are nothing but the “indefinite potential of the causative conjugation.” Simple, isn’t it, once you’re on to it? And all this out of Chamberlain’s Colloquial Japanese – before you get to the real language.

Let it be observed that the colloquial introduction, and future literary adoption of such a form as “I sort-of-thought” is entirely different from such a form as “I rather thought.” The latter is grammatical as it stands with the adverb “rather” to modify the verb “thought.” But “I sort-of-thought” breaks the mould. It is grammar in the making.

Nor can we smugly brush aside these changes by dismissing them as “colloquial.” All language was so, originally. And even now only a small part of our language comes in by the front door of literary creation – such as “cinematograph” and “automobile.” Even these get beaten out by “cinema” and “car.” In fact there is no front door. Open it as you will it keeps banging to, and cutting off the half of a word as it comes in – leaving us “phone” and “bike,” and such. Meantime the crowd of new words, the real ones, squeeze in as best they can at the back door and brush up into respectability.

Verbal changes are being greatly helped by that insidious thing called the “split infinitive”: “insidious” because it has a way of enlarging its consequences like a split in a hemlock log. Personally I am all for it. I would as soon split an infinitive as split an egg. But grammarians used to shudder – shuddering is their business – at such forms as “to fully understand,” “to entirely agree,” and to collapse at such extensions as “to more than half believe.” But the split infinitive has made its way into our language by sheer merit. It can say what nothing else can. Even so distinguished a grammarian as Otto Jespersen of Copenhagen, who knows more of our language than a Dane has any business to (see his Essentials of English Grammar), is willing to give it his parting blessing in his Final Remarks on Infinitives. But all grammarians warn us to be careful with split infinitives, as with petrol or live electric wires. The unthinking public – it is its business to unthink – never heeds the warning and into the gap of the split infinitive pour a host of new verbal forms, like soldiers into a breach. Hamlet could have solved his maddening doubts whether “to be or not to be,” if he had made up his mind “to more or less be.”

Dr. Hubert Jagger in his Modern English cites the case of the Staffordshire County Council being brought up all standing (1924) by a split infinitive that held up the question of slaughtering cattle. They seem to have been perplexed as whether to “ask the ministry seriously to consider it“ or “to ask the ministry to seriously consider it,” or “to seriously ask the ministry to consider it.” Evidently the thing needed was a higher sense of fun in England.

Another wedge is being driven deep and always deeper into the grammatical structure of the English language by its prepositions. All foreigners realize that our prepositions are our chief glory. They can only admire without understanding them – like George III with the British Constitution. For example: “to break out,” “to break up,” “to break off,” “to break in.” Thus if a riot “breaks out” in a meeting, the speaker “breaks off,” the police “break in” and – what does the meeting do? – it “breaks up.” After which there are arrests and the prosecution “breaks down.” And just as the foreigner thinks he understands it, he finds Tennyson writing, Break, break, break, without telling him whether it was “up” or “down,” or “down and out.”

The prepositions once started loose on their evil course, instead of being tightly imprisoned as in Latin, have permeated into our verbal forms like a chemical solution.

“What say the waves?” is Latin. “What are the wild waves saying?” is Victorian English. But, “What are the wild waves being said to?” is something else. Or consider this: “The patient was brought to, but did not know what he was brought to for, nor what he was brought to by.” The Japanese for this (much superior) is “Honourable-sick-man-mister-as-for-much-better-cause-non-existent.” Dr. Jagger quotes a still better example in the form, “Whatever did you choose that book to be read out of to for?” He says it is comic: I think so too.

In other words, stated simply and softly, our prepositional compounds have broken out of any grammatical frame that existed when grammar “became fixed.” True their vagaries had begun: but they hadn’t ended, and we don’t know yet what they will “pass on over into.” As yet no one has fitted a logical grammar around them.

The revolt of the prepositions has been accompanied by an insurrection among the pronouns. It is not yet fully recognized by the grammarians, but has at least acquired belligerent rights. Who is there who still says, “It is I”? Or who would be ashamed of saying, “It is me”? Consider such a dialogue as this: “I think you said you lost your gloves. Are these they?” “Oh, thanks awfully, that’s them.” One would almost prefer the Japanese form, “August-mister-gloves-as-for-humble-worm-offer-from-below.”

In short the time has come to bring all these revolted pronouns back under the aegis of grammar by giving them a name, as the French do, and calling them disjunctive forms and forgiving them. The French have used them for so long that in French the other forms, the ones we try to use, sound silly. Compare in the well-known play Ici On Parle Français the immortal dialogue, “Qui est la personne ici qui parle français?” – “Je”!

—

Oddly enough some few grammatical changes are reversions to old, old types, so old as to be long forgotten and hence not conscious reconstructions. Thus, professors (who know everything) know that “if” meant “give.” “If he comes here,” was equal to saying – “Give this (let it be granted), he comes here.” Compare “Gin a body meet a body coming through the rye” – where “gin” means “given” – and “rye” means only what it says.

Now our language, our colloquial language, in its effort to shake loose from the shackles of long sentences and subordinate clauses can reach back to the dim ages and revive the remote form. In the most colloquial of English, the English that is almost back-alley and gangsters’ English – instead of saying “If you stay here, the police will get you,” the thought is expressed, “Look – you stay here, the cops get you – see?”

The underlying reason is, of course, the impulse we have today to break up speech so as to make it intelligible step by step as it goes along. This is intensified by the fact that our language is more than ever under the stress of the demand for brevity. We live in an era of traffic-signs, street directions, police radio calls, telegrams, and air mail. We have no time even for the old-fashioned politeness that would say, “Gentlemen are requested not to sit down on the wet paint.” We just put a sign, “wet paint,” and they can sit on it if they like. This pressure extends from the language of written signs to the language of written literature. Our writers begin to find that they need little but a noun and a verb. In fact, even the verb can be dropped. Thus Longfellow wrote, The shades of night were falling fast. A free verse poet of today would just say, “Night.”

And in the same poem, where Longfellow writes, “Oh stay!” the maiden said, “and rest,“ the same idea can be admirably expressed now with the sign, “Tourists” or “Fresh eggs.” Incidentally, Longfellow’s young man in the poem was away ahead of his time, for instead of saying, “I’m so sorry but I really must be moving on,” he says, “Excelsior.” This was bad Latin, as it ought to be neuter, but was wonderful condensation. This single-word brevity, or rather our consciousness of it, can easily be reduced to parody, as in the familiar verse:

A little boy,

A pair of skates,

A hole in the ice,

The golden gates.

Nor is it only in this way that the isolated use of nouns, substituting images for abstractions, grows upon our language. Two nouns in juxtaposition can, by acting as adjective and noun, replace two nouns connected with verbs and prepositions. A “steam-boat” means a “boat moved by steam.” A “steamboat company” means a “company operating boats moved by steam.” This mode is as old as Anglo-Saxon, but has grown now to dimensions unrecognizable fifty years ago. We can say, and we do say – “Steamboat Company Dock Agents Life Insurance Department . . .” and so on endlessly. If we ran out of new ideas to tack on to the end, we could begin again at the beginning and say, “Lake Shore Steamship Company . . .” and so on. No Anglo-Saxon could have said that: he couldn’t hold it; a Roman would have taken a page to say it; and a Greek would be talking yet. Our minds have been trained to a new habit of suspended animation, so to speak, waiting for the end before we make an image. We do with these compounds what the Romans used to do, when they read a long sentence of Cicero’s intricate prose. They waited till they got it all. We find Cicero hard to follow because we have long since broken up our prose to make it intelligible as it goes along. The Romans would find our “Steamboat Agency Head Office” stuff quite impossible.

—

But then what’s left of our ripe scholar? Nothing. What with new model verbs, and pronouns, split infinitives, interpolated prepositions, traffic-sign nouns, and buried verbs, our grammar seems to have about as much stability about it as a French franc, or a Japanese treaty, or an over-the-counter share in a gold mine, or any other up-to-date phenomenon. No, our ripe scholar has fallen off his stem.

TOC     INDEX

How Far Can We Plan?

An Excursion into Economics

I remember many years ago on a Sunday morning, meeting an old-time Presbyterian friend of mine, just emerging from his church and drawing on his gloves with an air of great satisfaction. “Our minister,” he said, “preached a great sermon this morning.” “What was it about?” I asked. “About the poor.” “And what did he say about them?” “He gave them hell.”

That, I repeat, was many years ago. We can’t solve our social problems quite so simply now. The time has gone by when we can believe that the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor, and the rich enjoy their wealth because they created it themselves, or inherited it from those who did.

Yet this was, in the main, the simple creed that was good enough for George Washington and George III, for John Adams and Adam Smith. Leaving out a few uncomfortable people like Thomas Paine – and crazy people like the French – it was, a hundred years or more ago, the general theory of society entertained by a gentleman. It could be reduced to a few simple ideas. Here first was property – especially property in land – a thing so obviously admirable that no property-owner ever questioned it. With this was free contract in buying and selling, with a guardian government and law to keep it all straight and prevent fraud and violence. Labour, both in England and America, was equally free, that is, leaving out plantation slavery, a domestic institution, existing under both flags and concerning negroes not men. Labour had been emancipated from the old restrictions about moving from place to place. It had full liberty to go where it would, like the liberty granted to Mr. Pickwick by the Pickwick Club on the proviso that he paid his own expenses. This system was undoubtedly capitalism though they didn’t know it as such at the time, and called it common sense, natural law, or the workings of providence. In England there was supposed to be something not only moral about it, but peculiarly hearty and British. In America, with land free and opportunity wide open, it fitted like a glove. Who cared if George Washington owned 150,000 acres? There were lots more. In the old world the fit was better at the top: at the bottom the poor got badly squeezed. But they could be explained away, first on the ground that they were always with us, and secondly that theirs was the Kingdom of Heaven. With all that in sight they had no right to kick.

A few had qualms. Adam Smith, who owned no land, was not quite sure about landlords, and Bentham, who had no children, felt uncertain about inheritance; and John Stuart Mill was poor for so long that he grew doubtful about the rich. But mainly the social system of the earlier nineteenth century appeared to those who prospered under it as the natural and only order of society.

More than that, it had in it, in the form of its new and wonderful machinery, the prospect of continual betterment, increasing happiness. Hence even the misery of the slums seemed only a dark corner waiting for the light. People lived in the sunrise. It was always morning.

—

A hundred years has clouded it all over. The sky is darkening into night, and livid with hidden lightings. The air has fallen hot, stifling. Something is coming – we cannot tell what – and far off perhaps in the darkness our ears seem to catch the roaring of a great sea.

What is coming? Where can we stand! Is the old basis gone on which we build our foundation, and must we look for higher ground or perish in the gathering flood? . . .

—

Let us pace over again, in broad strides down a hundred years of history, the ground that has been traversed. This age of Hope, what happened to it?

Well, in the first place poverty, that should have disappeared, showed no signs of doing so. It seemed that the poor couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get rich, and they wouldn’t go to Heaven, all lit up and waiting for them. It isn’t true that the poor got poorer. It is only that the aspect of poverty grew worse. A slum is more appalling than a desert. The Hottentots were poor and never knew it. A Hottentot thought he was rich because he had two wives. We know better than that.

Of course, as long as there was America to go to, it wasn’t so bad. If the poor wouldn’t go to Heaven they could go to Pittsburgh. Then America filled up and the “free world” was all finished.

At the same time “free competitions” began to be all grown over with a web of monopoly. Machinery and company organization seemed to create monopolies, and monopoly prices were not the same as “free” prices. It is not true that a monopolist can “ask what he likes” – or rather he can ask it, but he can’t get it – but a monopoly price differs from a “free” price in that it is based on the interest of the seller – “what the traffic will bear.” “Leave the consumer to us,” said a great monopoly-sugar magnate forty years ago. But the consumer said, “Please don’t.”

With monopoly prices came all kinds of queer prices of which Adam Smith, who slept well, never dreamed, and John Stuart Mill, a light sleeper, only caught a vision in a nightmare. These were prices specially made for competition’s sake, temporary prices of business strategy to kill the “little man” (meaning perhaps a huge local butcher or a heavy drayman); prices as by-products, or prices under a cost so multiple and divided, that no one could measure it.

All of this simply overwhelmed John Stuart Mill’s world. All that he said about it was true, but there ceased to be any such place.

On the other hand, the only effective thing to raise wages and shorten hours turned out to be the thing that the economists of a hundred years ago called futile. Ricardo said that wage laws couldn’t possibly lift wages, neither could strikes. The economists approved of labour unions only in the form of burial societies, those for mutual improvement or recreation. “Oh, what a world of profit and delight is open to the studious artisan!” So sang some dead jackass of the period. The workers could improve themselves (with such things as algebra), have a good time and then bury themselves.

But it turned out that Labour organization could and did raise wages: not by making the social cake bigger but by making other people’s slices smaller.

But there was worse than that. As the machine production system widened over national industry, it developed a habit of going alternately fast and slow, and every now and then coming nearly to a full stop. This was the familiar “cycle” which the world tried to ignore and which is now the world’s bogey, the world’s ghost, the assassin behind the arras. The economists tried to pooh-pooh it. They said it always righted itself; so does human life – at the end. The famous economist Jevons said it came from periodical over-brightening of the spots on the sun, which affected the Indian rice crop, which affected English investment in India, which affected the London market, and so on. It was like the house that Jack built, whose causation got longer and longer. Perhaps it’s not the spots, exactly, but Jevons was right about the causation idea, and of the notion of one thing knocking down another and so on. We do live in a house that Jack built; it’s like a card house that’s fine as long as it stands up. When it falls then Brazil coffee knocks down cotton and cotton knocks down wheat and away it all goes.

What a place! What a world! After all the bright hopes that gave it birth.

—

So can we wonder that very early in the day a lot of people began to think that the only thing to do was to sweep it all away and build up another kind of society. They forgot that there’s only one kind of society that we can build, a society made up of men and women – as they are. Give me saints and angels – and I’ll build a fine one. . . . But even at that it would be dull. Women, as they are, are better for the purpose than angels; saints and women could be a fine combination but you couldn’t keep it. The women would corrupt the saints. What I mean is that we have got to deal with people as they are, not with people as they might be – the dream-people of the academic socialist.

—

Modern socialism came in with the middle of the nineteenth century. It had nothing to do with the earlier mediaeval socialisms of the inner light – the socialism of friars and monks, or of Rappites and Oneida Shakers. These, as economics, succeeded – because they aimed at renouncing the world. A man in a hair-shirt is easy to please. But new socialism aimed at achieving the world. That’s different.

It spoke through such epoch books as Louis Blanc’s Organisation of Labour and Karl Marx’s Capital and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. It has spoken through a thousand tongues since, but the voice, though in a thousand tones, is still the same. Academic people with long ears and loose ties now pooh-pooh all connection with the older socialism. They said it is replaced by guild socialism, or gradualism, or syndicalist-socialism, or by the peculiar Tom Tiddler’s ground beginning to be called totalitarianism. Not so: as they say in French, “the more it changes the more it’s the same thing.” The central idea is wonderful, simple – and utterly hopeless.

A British Prime Minister once said that he could write out “free trade” on half a sheet of notepaper. I am sure I could write out socialism on the space left at the bottom of the page.

Socialism merely means everybody working along with everybody else for everybody’s good, in cheerful co-operation and equality, instead of each selfishly working for himself in a world of inequality and injustice. The idea is grand. I’m all for it. But I’m not fit for it. At least I might be, but I doubt you other people. I’d hate to give up my house and my shares in my latest get-rich-quick gold mine (over the counter, tenpence a share) – till I am a little more sure of the rest of you.

—

Consider how socialism is supposed to work, by a real socialist or communist. Never mind the difference between the two: it’s only that a socialist shares the workroom and a communist shares the bathroom. For the present purpose they are all the same. There isn’t, of course, any such thing as real socialism in existence, and never has been and never will be. But you will find it existing as a vision in the mind of any enthusiastic second-year student, bright with light and iridescent as a soap-bubble. It is part of his native endowment of generous imagination which the college will presently remove in fitting him for life.

This is what he sees.

In his happy world a group of awfully decent old men (many of them as old as forty) sit together as a sort of board of directors and arrange how much of everything ought to be produced so that everybody will have conveniently enough of it. How do the old fellows know it? Oh, they think it out – or no, perhaps they calculate it from graphs and curves that indicate what is called “saturation.” The old men are supposed to know when they are saturated. Not all old men do, but that doesn’t matter. These are supposed to, and anyway these old men are so decent and so public-minded that they don’t mind how long they sit there and saturate. Real old men (I am one) might want to have a whiskey and soda brought in, and a box of cigars – or perhaps want to know what there was in it for themselves; and crooked old men (I’m not one, but a lot of my friends are) would start to fix up the plan of production all crooked.

But anyway pass on from the old men. The idea then is that all the “comrades” are allotted to various tasks. One says, “Please may I be a policeman?” and the board says, “Certainly!” And another says, “Can’t I have a hat like his?” and the board says, “Why, of course.” Because, you see, they’re all so kind and so considerate. They’re just dream people, not real at all. And so the dream-people drift off into all their jobs – and some are butchers, or bakers, or tinkers, or tailors – my, it’s fun! – they all love it! – and some are engineers on trains and go “Toot! toot!” Don’t you remember when you were a child and had no economic ideas and thought that a policeman was a policeman because he liked being a policeman, and an engineer was on a train because he liked to make the whistle toot? Well, that dream world that you lived in was the socialist’s world: and if you grow old enough and silly enough you can get back into it, and think of it over a bowl of gruel.

It just can’t be. The motive is wrong. We are not like that. We don’t, we can’t care enough for one another’s welfare. I’ll look after my grandmother, but I won’t look after yours. She’s not worth it. I’ll pay for the education of my own children because they are bright little fellows and it’s well worth while, but you’ve only to look at yours to see the difference.

As to dividing up work, by cheerful goodwill and free discussion, you can’t do it. I’ll take an example from the simplest thing that I understand – farming.

On a socialist farm, run by free discussion comrades, you’d get scenes like this – held in fence corners under an elm tree on a June morning. The hour is early, but not too early as some of the comrades like to take an extra snooze, when it’s fine, and the other comrades hate to start without them.

One speaks, “I move, gentlemen, that it would be a good thing today if we were to pick Colorado Beetles.”

“You’ve heard the motion, gentlemen, that we spend today in picking Colorado Beetles. Any seconder?”

“I second it.”

“Any discussion?”

“I’d like to offer an amendment to the effect that we don’t pick them off by hand but use a spray of Paris green dissolved in water—”

“I object – it’s no good – it don’t kill “em. I propose arsenate of lead—”

“It’s no use – Paris green!” (shouts of “arsenate of lead!” “Paris green!”).

Chairman: “Order, order, gentlemen!”

Senior member, rising – that is, half sitting up in the grass: “Mr. Chairman, in view of the heat I suggest that we adjourn the discussion and have a drink of lemonade under this elm tree.”

“I suggest an amendment to make the motion read, ‘beer and pretzels.’”

Amendment carried.

—

But suppose you say that in a co-operative commonwealth of course everybody would have to work; wouldn’t be allowed extra sleep just because he felt drowsy; wouldn’t pick his own trade – if it was full – or set his own hours, or wages, or conditions. All this would be done by authority, by those over him. The officials of the state would decide how and when and where the work was done. And if a man wouldn’t work? What then? “Those who will not work shall not eat,” wrote up Captain John Smith in Virginia. But the Virginian had at least the wilderness. The modern communist worker has the loom on the left and the jail on the right. Work or get punished. And those who direct it are the bosses – elected, selected, or forcing their way to the top. The strongest rules.

What a picture, this world of iron rule with the worker called, and if need be driven, to his task. This is no pleasant hay field in the morning sun. But if you know of any state where this cap fits, put it on. There is no escape from the dilemma. Freedom in a socialist state means idleness and confusion: order and authority means economic slavery.

Nor is there any solution to be found in the half-way house called a totalitarian state: in this the workers are ordered and grouped in huge economic divisions with wages and profits unified in the groups. But the totalitarian state faces exactly the same dilemma as described: the moment it passes a certain line it turns to economic slavery. In it, or in any other state, political and national enthusiasm can render tolerable for a time an economic system impossible in the long run. But this is just the hair shirt of the mediaeval socialist. A similar devotion for a time can carry a nation, or at least many of its people, into the sacrifice of individuality, the consciousness of mass welfare, that goes with war. But this is the agony of mankind, its martyrdom, not its life.

—

What is left? We must go on as we are, with our every-man-for-himself individualist state, patching it, fixing it, somehow making it go. Call it capitalism if you like and kick it, but it is all we’ve got.

But observe that after all we are at least getting on a little. We won’t let one another starve: doles, and pensions, and relief, and all that goes with it take the place, for the poor, of the Kingdom of Heaven. We try to regulate our industrial system by wage laws, welfare laws, school laws, and all that goes with parks, playgrounds and libraries and community life. We give more and more collectively from the rich towards the collective enjoyment of the poor. We seem slowly to be devising not a new society but a better regulation of the old, not a new game, but a new set of rules.

Such a conclusion seems perhaps dispirited and discouraging. As I see it, it’s the only one. What we have is all we are fit for. Change us and you change it. The two go together, spirit first, body after.

TOC     INDEX

College as
Comic Stuff

Every age and every generation has its own particular line of humour, its own ideas of what things are supposed to be funny and form the subject of its jokes. A generation ago all Irishmen were funny; in fact, the whole of Ireland was supposed to be a sort of fun shop – with horse-fairs and wakes, and fist fights – something doing all the time. On the comic stage the Irishman in green twirled a shillelagh tied up with ribbons and joined in alternate laughter and tears with a “colleen” whose short skirt came up so high that it met her pigtails coming down. The Irishman – older people please recall it – would hold up a sod of earth, so green you could see it from the gallery, announce it as from his mother’s grave, break down and cry, and then forget it all in a dance with the colleen. In short, the place was full of fun. Nothing is left of it now except the thin conventional jokes beginning “Did you hear what Pat said?” Ireland as the home of merriment has gone to the bad; there’s no fun left in it – just a people who talk Gaelic, sit in the League of Nations, discuss their tariff policy, and buy their laughter over the radio.

Ireland has gone, and along with it a lot of other old landmarks: the comic Jew now turned into one of the world’s tragedies, the comic Yankee of the days of Sam Slick and Major Downing, now turned into a New England trust company, fast asleep.

But in place of these, since the world never stops spinning, arises new scenery for our humour, and above all, as the latest, the best and the most delightful, the Comic College. You can see it, if you don’t know it already, in a hundred moving pictures, in a hundred magazines. Look! There it is! See the “Co-eds” skipping around in shorts! You didn’t think college girls were like that, did you? And “Prexy,” the president, isn’t he just done to the life, eh? That is to say, you’ve perhaps never really seen a college president, but isn’t he just like what they all are – I mean all the other “Prexies” in all the other college movies? And the “Profs” – aren’t they simply killing? And the rah! rah! students playing on ukeleles.

The Comic College! I’m all for it as the most delightful, most enchanting Garden of Fun that ever opened upon our vision.

I have spent my life, except my school days, in college – was myself a “Prof” for thirty-five and a half years. And when I see the Comic College, I half recognize it and half not. It seems half true and half nonsense – or at least truth reflected through apparent falsehood as it always is in art.

Where did they come from – the “Co-eds,” the “Prexies,” and the “Profs”? How did the Comic College appear, and why wasn’t it here before? Well, you see, a generation or two ago, a college, whatever else it was, wasn’t comic. There was no fun in it. Then all sorts of changes came over the old college and turned it into the new college. This opened the eye of the artist to things that no one ever saw before.

For the wonderful thing about the Comic College is that it contains just that exact relation of fact and fancy, reality and romance, truth and exaggeration which makes for artistic creation. Take some of its chief items, for example, “Prexy,” the comic president of the Comic College, with his mortar-board, and mock dignity, ridiculous in his overdone decorum, his offended majesty, his fuss and anger. Is a college president really like that? Not in the slightest. A college president of today is approximately more and more, as is everyone else, in the type of a “business man.” If the twelve apostles came alive today they’d look like “business men.” It’s what the biologists call the “survival type.” Anything else like the old-fashioned college president that used to be, the biologists call a “sport.” You see the world at large only caught on to the fun that was in the old-fashioned college president after he was gone. It is always like that. We can only see literary colour in retrospect; for colour in the life around us we are as blind as a horse in blinkers. We only discover when its light is fading. Chivalry only began in literature when it was dead in fact; a war only gathers its romance when the soldiers who fought in it are dead. And so the world never discovered the college “Prexy” till in reality he was gone. The president of today, dictating in his office, filling appointments, granting interviews, is quite different.

Witness this little experience.

A classmate of mine of long ago came back after many years to see our college. He said he’d like to go in and see the president, see him just a minute. “I don’t want to let the old geyser pin me down there and shoot Latin at me for half an hour; do you remember the way old ‘Prexy’ used to get people in his office and they couldn’t get out?” “So he did,” I admitted. “Well, look,” said my friend, “if this old buster starts saying anything about showing me round the college and inviting me to lunch, then I’ll say that I have to catch the 11.30 for New York, see? We just go in and shake hands and then beat it.”

We waited our turn, were announced, and went in. The president rose from his chair, with my friend’s card in his hand. There was no “Prexy” stuff about him – neat and smooth, a man of the world, his manner polished, his voice composed, nothing comic in him. “Ah, yes,” he said, as he shook hands, still with his eye on the card, “Mr. – er – Mr. Maclennan of – er – Arizona – class of – er – ninety-four . . . I’m extremely glad!”

My friend gurgled. He didn’t find words because he was knocked sideways to realize that the president was twenty years younger than he was.

“Having a look round the old college?” continued “Prexy,” and my friend made another noise in his throat to mean retrospect. “I’m sure you will be most interested. You must see our new dormitories – I’m so sorry” – he took out a gold watch and snapped it – “that I can’t offer to go around with you – but the fact is that I have to get the 11.30 for New York.”

Two minutes later we were out of the room again, my friend pledged to go and look at the dormitories and not to miss the hydraulic apparatus.

That seemed very different from the comic “Prexy” who does the dance with the “Co-eds” in shorts. In reality it was the change from one to the other that enables us to hatch out the old college president, and to turn him into art.

It was the same law of evolution that also hatched out the “college man” from the “student” of fifty years ago. The old-fashioned student lived on midnight oil, worked sixteen hours a day, and only took a “night off” once in ten months; even when he did, all he thought of doing was to go and drink enough beer to excite him to upset a horse car. The “college man” of the comic college plays the ukelele, burns gasoline, roots at football, “flunks” his exam., “bones” his father, “cuts” his classes, and above all gives the girls a good time. Study! Bless my soul, how can the man get time to study? What for, anyway? You don’t have to. All you do is to “elect” a “snap,” “flunk” an oral, “fake” an “aegrotat” and “get by.” You observe that it takes a whole new dialect to express the college man. But anyone in college knows what this jargon means. People outside may interpret it as meaning that students don’t study. If they work, it’s in the summer in a logging camp in Wisconsin, or preaching to an Eskimo mission. But at college they don’t work; they live.

With the students are the “Profs” of the comic college, as seen by the new imagination. And these, too, are not the actual professors of today but just the ghosts of the professors that were, in their own day, not appreciated as fun, but now “cashed in” as literature, like an investment made in the past. Look at them! See them at their professors’ committee meeting in the movies, all in mortar boards! Real professors haven’t worn them for thirty years. So absent-minded that they chase a fountain pen through fourteen pockets and find it behind their ear. But try and rob a real professor of a nickel and see him react. The real professor of the newer type, sits like the president in an office and dictates, plays golf in plus fours and makes money out of the stock exchange and his knowledge of geology. A few of the older type, one admits, still survive; too preoccupied to have their hair cut, calling the same student by six different names in one morning – college “characters” that justify to that extent the creation of the comic college.

—

But first, last, and always, the very soul of the comic college is found in the “Co-eds.” They are the force that made it – the Delilahs that cut Samson’s hair so short that he couldn’t upset a street car – that hurried students into “college men” and first made professors conscious of odd socks.

College girls in the comic college have a greater aversion to study than even the college men. In fact, they don’t study. They “elect” a course in “religion,” or a half course in “maternity,” or an “option” on “marriage.” They live in motor cars, drive in shorts, eat only after midnight, and dance on any and every occasion.

Are they truth or falsehood? I haven’t an idea. Are college girls really like that or getting to be like that? I guess they are partly. The early college girls wore spectacles, learned Greek, and married the professors. The newer college girls are descended from them, but how much they retain of their heritage, or how much they correspond to the reflection in the new mirror, goodness only knows!

—

The fact is that we are seeing it so close at hand that it is almost impossible to judge it.

This new imaginative creation of a “comic” college is the reflection of a profound transformation in our social life, in the part of it we call education. I don’t want to get prosy about it, but the meaning of this would be lost if we didn’t look for the social interpretation of it. Education, past and present, has pursued various goals. It has never quite known what it was after. In early times it fitted people to die; but this made them want to live. Later it fitted them to learn Latin and Greek; this had the effect of making them love English. Later still, education taught people to be citizens. This made them crooks. Later still, it taught them to be practical, to learn how to make money; this landed them in gaol.

With all these changes college has pretty well ceased to mean, for the average individual student, the pursuit of learning, the search after absolute truth. A few, of course, in the realistic studies of physical and natural science, turn to real study for study’s sake. On the backs of these is carried the future of scientific knowledge. And another few, in what is called “liberal arts,” turn into writers and playwrights and creative artists – but they would have, anyway. The real “student” where he exists today is a “sport” in the above biological sense; and the other students are “sports” in the real sense.

At present, as I see it, college education is coming to be looked upon as a sort of prelude to life, a little intermission before work and sorrow begin. Broad-minded parents send the boys and girls to college, because – what else can they do with them? Let them be happy while they can. Let them dance a little in the sunshine. The shadows will fall on them soon enough. So it comes that people say with a sort of pride, “Yes, my son and my two girls are at college,” meaning they are happy in the land of the blest, the land of chocolate creams, hot dogs after midnight, of cut classes and flunked courses. So when such parents go to see a college movie, with “Prexy,” with “Profs,” and the “Rah rah!” they don’t realize what a queer amalgamation the picture is, made up of the old dead college of hard study, turned into romance and combining its shadows with the shifting colours of the new. Seen through the two must lie, somewhere out beyond, the vision of the future college. But we cannot see it: the light is too bright.

TOC     INDEX

All Is Not Lost!

A Recollection

I was just starting out trout fishing one day last week when I saw from a headline in an afternoon paper that war in Europe was just about a dead certainty – anything within twenty-four to twenty-six hours. The Lats (I think it was) had sent what was practically an ultimatum – the nearest they could write to one – to the Slats, and there was no likelihood that a high-chested people like the Slats would swallow it. As I say, I think it was the Lats and the Slats, or it may have been the Checks and the Shorts; at any rate, some of those high-chested people that fill the centre of Europe, who used to be content before the Great War to play the hand-organ and make toy clocks, and who now fill our whole foreground.

Of course, on top of news like that I couldn’t fish. A lump rose in my throat at the idea that unless the Slats (a high-minded people) would back down, that meant war, and everybody knows that war means “world chaos” and that “world chaos” means the end of trout fishing. What chance would a trout have in that?

So I came home feeling pretty sick; and then, after all, it turned out the Slats hadn’t “picked up” the affront – by lucky chance – and, of course, if you don’t pick up a European affront right away, it goes bad.

It was too late to go trout fishing when I got the news in the evening paper that the Lat-Slat “crisis” was over. But I got all set again for the next day to go with a friend of mine, all set with everything in the motor car – rods, tackle box, bait, fish baskets, lunch, flask. You know, perhaps, what fun it is getting it all packed, and the good old jokes about what gets forgotten and what never does? Then, just as we were starting, bang came the news that Mussolini had called Neville Chamberlain a “stiff,” and that a first-class “crisis” was imminent, and that England had recalled all the household troops from the saloons!

Well! Our hearts sank. Who could fish after that? It’s all right to try to disregard the smaller powers like Latvia and Czechoslovakia and Lithia and Seltzer, but when it comes to the great civilized nations like Italy and England, that’s different. So we didn’t start. And then it turned out in a few hours that the “crisis” had blown over. It appeared, after an exchange of diplomatic notes, that Mussolini had not called Chamberlain a “stiff” in the English sense, but had said he was a “stiffo”: that, in Italian, means something fine, and so the crisis passed, but it left everyone, even 4,000 miles away, pretty well prostrated. Even the British Cabinet itself lost half a day’s grouse shooting.

It seemed all the more pity to lose our trout fishing, because it was just an ideal day: bright summer weather, but a wisp of cloud in it; dry, but with a touch of wetness; what you’d call warm, but with just a little chill – if you are a trout fisherman you will know just the day I mean! And the place I go to – a stream just not big enough to be a river, or rather a river just too wide to be a stream, with open patches of sun and shadow (you must come with me some time). Wander along at that stream on an afternoon in early summer and you won’t care whether the Sudeten Germans go Nazi or go crazy.

But, on the contrary, once get your mind mixed up with the Sudeten Germans and you’re not fit to go fishing. You’re disqualified from the start. It’s the same with golf. You can’t go round the links with a man who says on the first green, “What about Albania?” and stands with his club in the air, waiting to putt, while he tells you that if Daladier can form a bloc he may make a front, and on the ninth green is still murmuring, “If Hitler . . .” No, the only way to deal with such a man is, when he says, “What about Albania?” to say, “To hell with it.”

My friend and I, as I say, lost about a week of our trout fishing over Europe. The war crisis was no sooner gone than there was a sudden crash of the French franc, then a terrific naval scandal at the British Admiralty – not a damn gun would shoot – the whole Ministry were called back from Norway over the week-end! Well! You know what the European news is: once get sunk in it and your home life, your peace of mind, is all over.

Europe certainly can destroy your peace of mind; but, set all by itself, that’s not quite a fair statement. You can destroy it right at home if you try. Lots of people can collect just as much distress at home over the market news as people fetch back from Europe. Take, let us say, “base metals.” What they are, I don’t know, but every now and then it seems base metals which have been buoyant and lively get dull, then stagnant, then collapse.

You’ve perhaps often gone through that yourself; but base metals seem to get it specially. I was out at a bridge party the other night, just after the last crash in “base metals.” Half of the people, in spite of every effort, looked wretched; a lot of them had been hard hit with copper and others had had a terrible knock of manganese. They could hardly hold their cards. Yet here they were in a lovely house in the leafiest part of the city, in a huge room, something between a library and a living-room, the evening warm enough for early summer, but cool enough for a fire – how delightful it might have been – but “base metals” had crashed that afternoon, and it was only by a brave hysterical sort of struggle that things could be kept going at all.

Even as it was, the men would drift into little clumps in the corners and gurgle about manganese. . . . And then, after all, two days later, “base metals” got “buoyant,” kicking up like a cow in the pasture – in fact, everything would have been great except at that very moment the sudden backfire of Congress against the T.V.A. decision of the Supreme Court – or, on, the other way – the backfire of the court – anyway, another explosion in Washington as sudden and arresting as the sound of a lamb chop blown up in a lunch wagon.

Remember, too, that during this same period of distress of which I speak wheat fell ten cents – a thing that simply spells disaster – and then rose eleven cents – meaning, of course, national ruin. Dust blew all over the Missouri Valley and the Canadian West, and then blew off again, leaving the farmers a perfect sight! And in with this background of imminent disaster there was an anvil chorus of sit-down strikers and stand-up agitators, money sterilized, credit paralysed, confidence pulverized, and ten million unemployed sitting in a row eating sandwiches with no proper psychological conception of the value of their leisure.

This, I say, is the background. But the funny thing is that the foreground isn’t like this at all. The foreground has all the beauty of summer-time, with leaves on the trees and trout in the streams, with every golf course an artistic dream, a vast lawn of green, gay with bright costumes of red and white, with every shimmering summer lake dotted with its pagodas and its canoes, and splashed with bathers, with every street of every little town gay as a mediaeval fair with its multiform gas signs, with every corner packed with the glistening cars of the people crowding into the magic world of the films. Just gods! If the pioneers who fought for economic life upon this continent could see this picture of colour and luxury that was to cover its surface, what would they think of us, its discontented, timorous, trembling inhabitants, shuddering at the fleeting shadows that fly over a landscape bathed in bright sunshine! Surely, all is not lost.

Let us take an inventory of our distress.

The world has got into a kind of mass idea, a mass gloom, mass apprehensiveness. Psychologists of today tell us that we live on one idea at a time and all get it together. The idea just now is distress or worry over the imminence of something that is just going to happen – but perhaps won’t. There is a Greek name for this, but I forget it. If translated it means “fear of the front page of the newspaper.” Here, for example, are the things of which we are all scared to death just now: the French franc, the Sudeten Germans (section B, apartment 6, Czechoslovakia), the United States Supreme Court, base metals, drought, rain, over-population, under-population, over-production, death, life, dust.

Here, on the other hand, are the things of which we ought to be thinking – trout fishing, golf, chicken dinners, cool drinks, mixed bathing, summer hotels, wayside cabins – and if young enough, taking girls out so far in motor cars that they never come back.

Here is the European news that we read: war, more war, Mussolini, Hitler, crash of the franc, agony in Spain, bombs, cruelty, and the fall of freedom.

Nonsense – that’s all illusion! Here are the real things, the French news, for instance:

Summer tourists in Paris break all records. . . . Folies Bergère with standing room only . . . bathing costumes at Deauville simply scandalous . . . French ping-pong team beats all Germany . . . Daladier opens pup show . . . President of the Republic bets a dollar on horse race . . . champagne vintage reported best in twenty years.

All about us is a beckoning world – ample as never before in its abundance: a little out of gear, just for a spell, but only because, speaking collectively, we are like the sudden heirs of a rich estate quarrelling over their inheritance.

All of us, I think, in some half-conscious way, chafe at this false distress of our submerged world. We long to escape to another one. Mathematicians – to ease their particular troubles as mathematicians – take refuge in the world of a fourth dimension, where there is no friction. So we, at a word, at a happy fancy, seek escape into an imaginary world. Witness how we have all flocked to the country of the Seven Dwarfs, a better world than our own – a world of simple and sweet little animals, just our own style, and waving trees and dancing sunlight, and music of voices that drips with the waterfall, a world of kindness and co-operation each with all. We are drawn to this because we know it is ours, and yet we cannot reach it.

Or take, to parallel the example, that queer, bright, next-door world that we see pictured in our advertisements. Here, indeed, is the country of human fancy, marvellous with the green of its grass, the utter blueness of its water (see any travel booklet) and the shimmer of its sand; marvellous with its motor cars glistening in the sun, its people – youths as straight as arrows and as broad as gods, girls with hair as golden as gamboge, and frilled children, clean enough to eat.

If you want to get relief from the French franc and the Czechoslovak, turn to the advertising pages, and there, among green lawns and glistening cars, trim bungalows and furnished libraries and vellum volumes, you may see again humanity reaching into the world of imagination for what the actual world denies us.

But the truth is that this, our actual world, would be as good as the bright world of imagination if we would only let it be so. Everything is there, the smiling abundance of our unrealized paradise, the goodwill toward men that all men feel and none dares act upon. It is all there for the asking, if we can only cast aside from the gateway the evil spirits of fear and apprehension and distrust which keep us from our kingdom.

TOC     INDEX

Too Much College

—or—
Education Eating Up Life

(1940)

~

Preface
Education Eating Up Life
The Machine at Work
What Good Is Latin?
Mathematics Versus Puzzles
Parlez-vous Français?
Has Economics Gone to Seed?
Psychology: The Black Art of the College
Teaching the Unteachable
Rah! Rah! College!

Kindred Essays in Education and Humour

When Men Retire
As History Grows Dim
Twenty Cents’ Worth of Murder
Reader’s Junk

Little Stories for Good Luck

Three on Each
Nothing Missing
Thinking of Tomorrow
Information While You Drink
No Place for Gentlemen
“We Have with Us Tonight”
A Humble Lover
The Magic of Finance
He Guessed Right
Electric Service
Our Vanished Industries
Couldn’t Sleep a Wink
Go to Mother
Five Dollars, Right Now
Are Professors Absent- Minded?
Wanted: A Gold-fish
Mushrooms
Help Wanted
Atmosphere
Freedom of Thought
His Better Self
Oh, Sleep! Oh, Gentle Sleep!

Epilogue

Bass Fishing on Lake Simcoe with Jake Gaudaur

Preface

This book is based on an experience of nearly twenty years of school and college training, ten years of school-teaching, thirty-six years of college lecturing, and three years of retirement, to think it over. The opinion that I have reached is that education, in the narrow sense of school and college attendance, is taking too heavy a toll of the years of life and that the curriculum should be shortened. But, in the wider sense, what I want to advocate is not to make education shorter, but to make it much longer – indeed to make it last as long as life itself.

What I find wrong is the stark division now existing between the years of formal education and entry into the work of life. Education has become to a great extent a mere acquirement of a legal qualification to enter a closed profession, in place of being a process undertaken for its own sake. All that is best in education can only be acquired by spontaneous interest; thus gained it lasts and goes on. Education merely imposed as a compulsory prerequisite to something else finishes and withers when its task is done. Real education should mean a wonderful beginning, a marvellous initiation, a thorough “smattering,” and life will carry it on.

A part of the present difficulty is that our school and college curriculum in its one thousand years of development from the church schools of the Middle Ages has taken on a mass of subject matter beyond the range of any one mind. We have not yet learned to condense to useful essentials the things beyond study in detail. The best part of any subject is the general view, the thorough smattering just mentioned, that carries to the individual the results for which others have given the work of their lives. The outline of the world’s history can occupy half an hour, or half a session, or half a century.

We have further encumbered the curriculum with the attempt to teach things that cannot be imparted by classroom work – too practical for anything but actual practice, or too vague and general for anything but general reflection.

Nor is it only the subject matter of the curriculum that needs reduction. A saving of time perhaps equally important can be effected by altering the form and method of its progress. To a very great extent all our school children and students in America and in England move along in a system of one-year promotions, all advancing together – or staying back to join the next consignment.

Thus, by the time the student has reached middle high school on his way to college, he has already joined a sort of “convoy” that moves slowly down the widening stream of education, always at the pace of the slowest. It sweeps along majestically, working puzzles, muttering declensions, answering quizzes and translating “parlez-vous.”

Any ordinary bright boy could strike out from the convoy, like a sloop from a fleet, like a fast motor boat from among freighters, and distance it by two years. By the time the heavy convoy reached its goal, he would have been there already for years, married, with one and a half children, an established position, whiskers, debts, life. He would watch the convoy discharging its spectacled neophytes, thirty years old, timid in the daylight, shuddering at life, having lived for thirty years on other people’s money. That’s a little exaggerated, but it’s good enough.

The practical person asks how we are supposed to bring about this vastly altered program. To abolish overnight our whole system of examinations, promotions and graded classes moving all together would leave our education a hopeless mess. And to this the only answer is that there is nothing that we can do about it, nothing particular and all of a minute.

It is our current fault always to think in terms of deliberate regulation and ordinance. We seek to accomplish friendship with a league, Mother’s Day with a statute, welcome with a by-law and sobriety with a code. Without the spirit, all falls in a littered heap. If education is to change, there must first come the consciousness of the need of change.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Professor Emeritus McGill University,
B.A. (Toronto),
Ph.D. (Chicago),
Litt.D. (Brown, Dartmouth and Toronto),
LL.D. (Queen’s and McGill),
D.C.L. (Bishop’s).

McGill University

October 1, 1939

Education
Eating Up Life

Education longer and longer – Life ten years too late, and Death on time – Where we got our Curriculum – Mediaeval Schools with Modern Extension – A Scholar and a Gentleman, plus a Scientist and a Business Man – The Straws on the Camel’s Back

In this discussion of education, I am addressing myself to plain people. By this I mean people who shudder at mathematics, go no further in Latin than E Pluribus Unum and take electricity as they find it. As opposed to these are the academic class who live in colleges, or in the shadow of them, and claim education as their province. But the plain people are of necessity interested in education because their sons and daughters go to college, or, more important, can’t go to college.

Now the plain people have noticed that education is getting longer and longer. Fifty years ago people learned to read out of a spelling-book at six years old, went to high school at twelve, and taught school (for money) on a third-class certificate at sixteen. After that, two years in a saw-mill and two at a medical school made them doctors, or one year in a saw-mill and one in divinity fitted them for the church. For law they needed no college at all, just three summers on a farm and three winters in an office.

All our great men in North America got this education. Pragmatically, it worked. They began their real life still young. With the money they didn’t spend they bought a wife. By the age of thirty they had got somewhere, or nowhere. It is true that for five years of married life, they carried, instead of a higher degree, bills for groceries, coal, doctors and babies’ medicine. Then they broke out of the woods, into the sunlight, established men – at an age when their successors are still demonstrating, interning, or writing an advanced thesis on social impetus.

Now it is all changed. Children in school at six years old cut up paper dolls and make patterns. They are still in high school till eighteen, learning civics and social statistics – studies for old men. They enter college at about nineteen or twenty, take prerequisites and post-requisites in various faculties for nearly ten years, then become demonstrators, invigilators, researchers, or cling to a graduate scholarship like a man on a raft.

At thirty they are just beginning, ten years too late. They can’t marry till it’s ten years too late; they have children ten years too late, and die ten years too early. They know nothing of the early life of the man who worked in saw-mills, practiced medicine at twenty and married six months later, with no other property than a stethoscope and a horse and buggy; or of the young lawyer who married in debt, and lived happy in it ever after.

“Safety first” has put its stamp on life. Population begins to die at the top. And, all the time, education grows longer and longer. This does not deny that the average human life is now longer. It means that paternity is shorter. People do not see enough of their grandchildren – the sweetest prospect in the world. Life has all too little evening. It has all run in arrears and never catches up.

All this, you will say, is exaggerated, is overcolored, is not truth. Very likely. But a half truth in argument, like a half brick, carries better. High colours show up where neutral tints blend to nothing. Yet the main truth gets over. Education is eating up life.

In the above paragraphs I have formulated the plain man’s accusations against the continued lengthening of education; or, rather, I must not say his accusation. The poor fellow hasn’t the spirit to accuse. It is not an accusation that he formulates or a grievance that he voices. It is just a burden that he carries.

He carries it because of the prestige of education. Round the idea of education, as effort and opportunity, there have clustered centuries of tradition and association. These are stamped in such words and phrases as “the little red schoolhouse,” “the midnight oil,” “the eager student,” “the kindly dominie,” “the absent-minded professor.” With this has grown up the notion – no doubt partly true – that the harder the path of learning the higher the achievement. “There is no royal road to learning” still cheers those who are unaware that the public road itself has become over-grown with a jungle of underbrush.

In other words, people don’t complain. On the contrary, they are often proud of the burden that they carry. Parents have no regrets for the fifteen years of sacrifice that they made to give their children the education they should have had in half the time.

It is a tradition with us that education opens opportunity. To send a boy to college is an ambition that wakes to life beside a cradle. “How is your son doing at school, Mr. McGregor?” I once asked of a Scotsman of the traditional type. “Fine!” he answered. “If he keeps on as he is, we’ll have to put the college to him.”

Even in the clutter and failure of youth’s career among the blocked avenues of our misfit world the college comes into its own as a sort of refuge. “My son,” said another parent, “doesn’t seem to have any particular ability, so we think we’ll have to send him to college. He seems no good for anything else.” The one anxiety of such parents is, “Can he get in?” Beyond that no need to look. It’s like being dipped in the Jordan.

But even if the plain man were to raise his complaint against the lengthening road and the increasing burden, he would be laughed out of court by the academic class. He would be told that our education is all too short. The teachers in the high schools would say that the children come to them hopelessly unprepared and ought to stay a year longer in public school.

Every professor will tell them that the first-year students at college are simply hopeless and ought to have stayed at least a year, or call it two, at high school. The students in the second year ought never to have left the first; the third-year men haven’t the proper grounding for their work; and the fourth-year are so rotten that they have to be given degrees to get rid of them. As for the graduate school, the students in it should never have been admitted; they are not yet fit for advanced work. Their minds are immature. And even when they do get out of the graduate school, by sheer lapse of time, it seems ridiculous to think of them as fit to teach, or do anything. Oh, no; they have to go to Germany for a year – anyway, to somewhere for a year – and come back with whiskers and look like something.

I once put the question of shortening the college curriculum to my old friend Dean Elderberry Foible, dean of the Faculty of Arts. You didn’t know him, but there was a dean at your college just like him. “Preposterous,” he said, “preposterous!” And that settled it.

If we turn from the general view to the particular subjects, the case against any attempt to shorten the curriculum becomes simply overwhelming – so much so that we are crushed and humbled in presenting it. Imagine trying to leave out mathematics – the queen of sciences; or history – the very basis for understanding our modern life; or English literature – our legacy common to England and America, dear as the very hearthstones of our homes – who dares touch that?

Or who will dare disturb Latin, the bedrock of our culture; or foreign languages, the amenity of polite life; or geology, deep as the caverns of thought; biology, life’s interpretation; or the social sciences, the key to the padlock of happiness still closed. Help! Nothing but pretentious ignorance could suggest leaving out anything. As to any shortening, ask again my friend Dean Elderberry Foible and he will tell you that you can’t. “My dear sir, you may wish to, but you simply can’t” – with that academic finality with which professors dismiss the ideas of students.

So it appears even to ourselves on a first survey. Take mathematics. How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasture – nothing but years of effort can extract it. You can’t hurry the process.

Or pass from arithmetic to algebra: you can’t shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Indeed, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon. So died, for each of us, still bravely fighting, our mathematical training; except only for a set of people called “mathematicians” – born so, like crooks. Yet would we leave mathematics out? No, we hold our cross.

Latin too: do you want your son to grow up not knowing what a sine qua non is, and who wrote Virgil’s Aeneid? Then he not only needs the whole present curriculum but more! At present the student learns just enough Latin not to be able to read it; he stops short of the saturation point – just gets wet with it and no more.

But why recite the entire list? The same truth holds, for the academic profession, of every one of the subjects of the school and college course. The student is not saturated, when he ought really to be soaked.

A parallel resistance blocks the pathway leading to the professions. The idea of any immediate entry into them, for a young man just out of college is ridiculous. A hundred years ago a man just out of college looked as good as a coin fresh from the mint, a sickle from the whetstone. At twenty-seven he was a Member of Congress, had four or five children, owned three or four thousand dollars’ worth of property in his own right – and owed five thousand dollars. But nowadays! Imagine trusting a serious case of illness to a young fellow of twenty-seven barely out of college, and till yesterday an interne in a hospital. Out of the question!

And, later, when at last his turn comes, it is but a brief acme of success, and then, all of a sudden, it seems people are saying, “He’s too old for the job, losing his grip – in fact, he’s nearly fifty.” He’s an “old doctor” – once a term of esteem and confidence but now equivalent to an “old horse.”

Thus in our ill-fit world youth and age jostle and hurry one another together – too young and then too old. Those who follow gardening know that green peas are first too young to pick and then, overnight as it seems, too old to eat. So with our educated people. Homer long ago said, “As is the race of leaves, so is the race of men.” Make it college graduates and garden peas and it still holds good.

How did all this come about? Our system of education arose out of the mediaeval Latin schools of the church. It still carries, like a fossil snake in a stone, the mark of its original structure. Not that this was the earliest kind of education. But the others were different. Greek education included music and dancing and what we call the arts. It was supposed to fit people to live. Mediaeval education was supposed to fit people to die. Any school-boy of today can still feel the effect of it.

Greek education was free from the problems that have beset our own. It didn’t include the teaching of languages, the Greeks despising all foreigners as barbarians. It avoided everything “practical” like the plague, and would have regarded a professor of Engineering as a child of the devil, misusing truth. Mathematics, crippled by the want of symbols, became a sort of dream – intense, difficult and proudly without purpose. Greek education carried with it no “exams” and “tests” for entry to the professions. A Greek dentist didn’t have to pass in Latin. He used a hammer.

Thus philosophy, “the love of knowledge,” came into its own, in talk as endless as on the porch of a Kentucky country store.

“Scholars” would deny the truth of this summary and talk of Archimedes, the world’s first engineer, and Hippocrates, its earliest physician. But the proof of what I say is that Archimedes found no followers and Hippocrates waited five hundred years for Galen. Scholars always see exceptions where a plain man sees an even surface. But even a billiard ball, if you look close enough, is all covered with bumps.

Our education, then, comes down to us from the schools of the Middle Ages. These were organized by the church and the first aim was piety, not competence; the goal was the reading of the Scriptures and by that the salvation of the soul. On this basis, Alfred the Great planned schools for Saxon England. So, too, in France did Charlemagne, who couldn’t read or write and felt a religious admiration for those who could – the same as an oil magnate of today feels toward a university.

So presently the monastic schools arose, and from their oriel windows came forth among the elm trees the sound of Latin chants intoned by choristers; and in the silent scriptorium the light from a stained window fell on the quiet “copyist” rewriting, letter by letter, in pigment upon parchment, “In the beginning was the Word.” Thus passed monastic life in its quiet transition to Eternity.

These were the earliest schools – secluded, scholarly – born ancient like the “old-fashioned” children of aging parents. For the date, place them anywhere in the four hundred years from Alfred and Charlemagne to the days of Oxford and Paris.

These later schools – Oxford, Paris, and such – came when study no longer taught people how to die and keep out of hell, but how to live, as lawyers – two ambitions with an obvious relationship. Law hatched out under the wings of the church, as a duck hatches under a hen, later to horrify its parent.

Here again the vertebrate structure is still seen in the rock. Lincoln’s Inn and Grey’s Inn were originally, in a sense, works of God, the defunct Doctors Commons till its end a spirituality. Law, in England at least, struggled long before it shook off the hand of ghostly guidance. Even now the connection between law and religion remains in the quantity of oaths by which the business of the law secures its righteousness.

So there came, then, such schools as Oxford and Paris, which seem to have been at first huge random gatherings of students – mediaeval exaggeration puts 30,000 at Oxford in pre-record days. They had, before printing, hardly any books, and no examinations. The curriculum ran to endless discussion – more Kentucky. These “disputations” begot “tests” and awards (degrees) and brought into the world that child of sin, the written examination. A few odd people like Roger Bacon began digging into black knowledge about gunpowder, and so forth, and got put into jail for it. The lamp of learning still fell only on the Kingdom of Light, with lawyers dancing in the shadow.

The curriculum of these schools, the bedrock on which ours still rest, was the famous trinity of study, the Trivium, which meant grammar, rhetoric and logic; to this was supplemented the four further studies called the Quadrivium – music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. All were based on the use of Latin; they comprehended the whole circuit of human knowledge, and the supreme purpose of it all was salvation. The monk Alcuin, who was Charlemagne’s “specialist” in education, has described for us how he taught his students:

To some I administer the honey of the sacred writings; others I try to inebriate with the wine of the ancient classics. I begin the nourishment of some with the apples of grammatical subtlety. I strive to illuminate many by the arrangement of the stars, as from the painted roof of a lofty palace.

The whole extent of human knowledge was still within human comprehension. In our own day we meet men who think they “know it all.” In the Middle Ages there were men who were sure they did. Of course, where knowledge ended superstition began, and that was infinite.

It was this curriculum which in the course of centuries has been expanded beyond recognition like the toad in Aesop that would be an ox. And still it has not burst. It drags along its huge amorphous outline, flabby as a dinosaur, over fifteen years of life.

Here is what happened to expand it. The revival of learning resuscitated Greek, a study forgotten by all but the Arabs. The rising kingdoms that replaced feudalism brought national States and set people to learning one another’s languages. The English, having forgotten French, had to learn it again. Italian became “polite.” Milton suggested that one ought to learn it, “in an odd hour.” Modern languages were still not a part of education, but a sort of annex; so they remained till yesterday in England where all Englishmen were supposed to “know French” from a governess and a copy of Ollendorff’s Grammar and a trip to Boulogne. But, till yesterday, Eton, Rugby and Oxford never heard of it.

Printing, once in real use, expanded both opportunity and obligation. Students henceforth had books. Contacts with the Arabs revealed a system of decimal notation that made arithmetic a reality and algebra a power. Mathematics in the time of the Stuarts, with logarithms and the calculus, ceased to be a dream. Physics converted Alcuin’s wonder of the sky into classroom formulae.

But even though mathematics in the sixteen hundreds, in the days of Newton and Descartes, had become a real and intensive study – far transcending in reach and in difficulty anything within the range of the ordinary college man of today – it was still regarded rather as an annex to learning than as learning itself. The place of priority still lay with classical study, with the literature of Greece and Rome. In this America was a faithful child of England. Our earliest college education was stamped with Roman letters, and its passion for the Bible in the wilderness made it even revert somewhat to the mediaeval type. The rules that were promulgated in 1642 for admission to Harvard College lay down the qualification thus:

When any scholar is able to understand Tully or such like classical Latin author extempore, and to make and speak true Latin in verse and prose, suo ut aiunt Marte: and to decline perfectly the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue: let him then and not before be capable of admission into the college.

For readers whose Latinity has slipped away from them, let it be explained that Tully is not Irish, but means Cicero. Earlier generations properly called Romans by their names, and not, as we have come to do, with many of them, by their nicknames. Tully was called “Cicero” (or bean-head) as one of us might be called “Shorty.” Harvard Latin in 1642 was still undefiled.

On the terms indicated few of us now would get into Harvard. Fewer still would get out, since, for that, every scholar had to be

“found able to read the originals of the Old and New Testaments into the Latin tongue and to resolve them logically: withal being of godly life and conversation.”

On the outside edge or fringe of the classical studies, of which mathematics and logic formed an adjunct, were such things as natural philosophy, destined to vast and rapid expansion, but of which the classical doctors of divinity remained ignorant.

By the time of Queen Anne, some scholars already admitted that they didn’t know everything – not many, though, or at least they qualified it by saying that what they didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.

What they referred to by this last phrase was this natural philosophy, the new range of knowledge that the eighteenth century was gathering, item by item, fact by fact. These grew into the sciences of life – botany and zoology, later to get their true name of biology. Reverend classical scholars, full to the throat with declensions, set them aside as a disturbance of the Book of Genesis. But they wouldn’t down.

Beside them grew, equally despised by the classicists, the electric science drawn by Franklin from the clouds, the oxygen distilled by Priestley from water, the geology of Lyell, dug up from what was once called Hades. All the world knows the story. Within another hundred years a vast series of studies known as the natural sciences – at first opposed, derided and left to mechanics and steam-engine drivers – broke at last the barriers of the schools and flooded wide over the curriculum.

But the barriers, in England at least, did not break until the waters had risen high and the pressure had become overwhelming. In the middle nineteenth century, as Professor Huxley complained, the so-called public schools had still a curriculum of the Middle Ages.

Until a few years back [he wrote in 1893], a boy might have passed through any one of the great public schools with the greatest distinction and credit and might never so much as heard of modern geography, modern history and modern literature,, of the English language as a language, or of the whole circle of the sciences, physical, moral and social; might never have heard that the earth goes round the sun; that England underwent a great revolution in 1688 and France another in 1789; that there once lived certain notable men called Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller.

With this protest of common sense went a certain protest of spite – as against aristocratic culture by those unable to share it. Witness Herbert Spencer’s diatribe against “The Education of a Gentleman.”

Men dress their children’s minds as they do their bodies in the prevailing fashion. As the Orinoco Indian puts on his paint before he leaves his hut . . . so a boy’s drilling in Latin and Greek is insisted on, not because of their intrinsic value, but that he may not be disgraced by being found ignorant of them – that he may have the education of a gentleman.

But when at last the barriers broke, the new science came in a flood, till every high school student, in America more even than in England, turned alchemist, and every class-room sputtered with electricity. And with this, in the colleges first and spreading downwards to the schools, came a still newer set of studies – the social studies, economics and politics, the mingled brood of happiness and despair, of progress and poverty that Mill and Spencer and such people let loose upon the world. So deeply have they spread that little children learn “civics” first and find out what it means after; and so widely that the Japanese have studied it from Europe and teach it to the Chinese.

And as if civics and social welfare were not enough for the already overburdened curriculum, a chariot creaking up the rough slope of Parnassus, “Business,” in the form of schools of commerce, must needs leap on top of the load. It handed so heavy a tip to the driver that it could not be put off, and more than that it began to demand that the oldest and most respectable of the passengers be thrown out to make room for it.

—

So there we stand, or rather move slowly onward, the ascent of Parnassus turned into a ten years’ journey during which the passengers must amuse themselves as best they may with the cards and dice of college activities.

Meantime it is only to be expected that the conditions of the journey react upon the minds of the passengers. In other words it is only natural that this vast burden of an increasing curriculum sets up a reaction in the minds of the pupil and the student. From their earliest years they become accustomed to reckon up the things that they have done and finished with. “We’ve finished Scripture,” says a little girl in a child’s school; “we had it last year.” For her the mould of religious thought is all set. Don’t ask her the names of the twelve Apostles. She’s had them – last year. She is not responsible for the Apostles any more. So does the high school student count up his years still needed for matriculation as eagerly as a mariner measures his distance to the shore. The college student opens his career by classing himself not according to the year in which he enters but according to the year in which he hopes to get out. The class matriculating in 1940 call out in their infant breath, “Rah! Rah! Forty-four.”

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, “When I am a big boy.” But what is that? The big boy says, “When I grow up.” And then, grown up, he says, “When I get married.” But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to “When I’m able to retire.” And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone. Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour. So it should be with education.

But so it is not; a false view discolours it all. For the vastly great part of it the student’s one aim is to get done with it. There comes a glad time in his life when he has “finished” mathematics, a happy day when he has done philosophy, an exhilarating hour when he realizes that he is finished with “compulsory English.” Then at last his four years are out, his sentence expired, and he steps out of college a free man, without a stain on his character – and not much on his mind. . . . Later on, he looks back wistfully and realizes how different it might have been.

—

It is the purpose of this book in the chapters that follow to discuss this discrepancy between education and life. The field of education here discussed is that of “general education” and the liberal arts which occupy about twenty years of the life of the great majority of college students. The work of technical and professional schools – engineering, medicine and law – lies apart. Here the adaptation of the means to the end is sufficiently direct to lessen the danger of wandering into the wilderness as liberal arts has done.

This wandering into the wilderness has made the journey of education too long, too cumbersome and too expensive. Worse still, at the end of its wandering it comes to a full stop. The road comes to an end just when it ought to be getting somewhere. The passengers alight, shaken and weary, to begin, all over again, something else.

TOC     INDEX

The Machine at Work

Strategic progress: no advance without security – Spelling costs two years – Classes and credits; the moving convoy – The end of the pavement, of examinations – History finds a magic mirror – Need of a thorough smattering of science – And of a snug corner of ignorance

I am a familiar guest in a household where there is a little girl, now rapidly lengthening into a big girl, who is attending what is called a ladies’ school. In return for help with Latin sentences and such things, I get much casual information about what educationalists call class method. I said to this young scholar the other day, “I thought, June, you were in the fifth declension?”

“We were before Xmas,” June answered, “but she’s gone back to the second. We’re reviewing.”

She is, of course, the teacher, and where she leads, June and her associates follow. I gather that their education in Latin takes the form of a series of forward rushes, from which they fall back and entrench themselves again on safe ground. A year ago at Easter they reached the passive voice, only to be beaten clear back out of it again. They are now reconsidering amo and closing up the ranks for a new attack. But as the term ends there will be a regular review in which they will fall steadily back toward the beginning of the book. Last year she gave them some prepositions, but there has since been a retreat that has entrenched them behind the safe lines of bonus.

The same method, I gather from June, is pursued in algebra. Last year they got as far as equations, but the ground proved shaky under their feet and he (mathematics is masculine) took them back for a review of factors and division. They needed, he said, more drill. They are drilling now and getting ready for the big algebraical mid-term review that will shove them clear backward out of the book – to re-form in the shelter of arithmetic.

At the beginning of each new term, of course, there is full review of last year’s work – at the very time, perhaps, when the class below are in a bold forward skirmish into next year’s work. Thus do June and her companions drift back and forward, like a star cluster moving among the constellations. In the course of time they will fortuitously drift out of the ladies’ school into college – a sudden effort and over the top. Meantime they seem to move around in a circle, like fish in a trap, among quadratic equations and moods and tenses, going past the same opening of salvation again and again and not seeing it.

It is their expectation that, when they get into the enchanted waters called college, they will swim right on. But not so. Ask any first-year student in Arts in the month of October what he is doing, and he will say that they are not doing anything much yet. The professor is “revising.” After Xmas he will be “reviewing” and by April they will pretty well be back to matriculation. There will be no advance without security. The second year will then review the work of the first, and so on. In a graduate school the students revise their undergraduate work, and admission to a Ph.D. degree, as I recall it, involves a general review of everything since the cradle.

—

Here then is the educational machine at work, grinding its way up the long slope of Parnassus, from its first loading up its freight of little children, all fluttering with kindergarten ribbons, till it finally stops among the debris and slag piles marked END OF TRACK, where it lets out its sad-eyed Ph.D.’s, looking for a job, five years too late, and engaged to be married five years later.

—

The first jolt in this upward ascent is when the children start to learn to spell and strike our crazy alphabet. Look what happens.

The eager child begins “N-O, no.” “S-O, so.” “All right so far,” thinks the child – like the man who fell out of the high window. Indeed, it’s more than all right. The thing is a pleasure. “N-O, no.” “S-O, so,” with a good hiss on the letter S. “It’s a delight,” says the child. “Show me more of it.” In fact the logic of it has all the appeal that goes with what is called “the inevitable” in art.

Then something happens. “D-O, do,” says the teacher, and a lifetime of trouble begins. Forty years later, the child, grown up but still unable to spell, will be calling to his wife from his writing-desk: “Mary, how do you spell ‘dough’? I mean what you make bread with.”

But there, I refuse to discuss phonetic spelling. It’s too wearisome. People get tired at the mention of it. They themselves have learned to spell, or pretty nearly, and look on spelling as part of the troubles of childhood, like measles and Sunday school and having to obey father. They don’t suspect that there is coiled up in it the loss of perhaps two years of human life.

If spelling were rational, universal and authoritative, an intelligent child would, in a month, be able to read any word that it could say. After that it would spell by reading. Best of all, it would enter at once into the magic garden that reading opens up. When one realizes the endless hours, the tears, the bad marks, the soiled, paper blotted by little inky fingers, one might think it worth while to make the effort. But the effort would have to be great; a vast inertia would have to be overcome in order to effect an international agreement for uniform, simultaneous action. Nothing else would do. The Turks can do that (they did it), because they are only Turks. But we, Americans and English, can’t; and, if we could, the Irish wouldn’t. They’d demand free spelling and die for it.

—

We grown-up people are so habituated to our crazy alphabet that we do not realize the full enormity of its imperfection. When we learn that a Chinaman must retain a recollection of five thousand distinct picture-form-combinations before he can do advanced reading, we are divided between amazement and pity. In reality we are doing much the same thing. We have, for instance, to learn the thirteen different ways of indicating, by our spelling, the sound of long o – the simplest, the earliest, and the last of all our utterances. We must choose as among the following competitive methods represented by the rival words: note, boat, toe, yeoman, soul, row, sew, hautboy, beau, owe, floor, oh, O, – Very fittingly the list ends in oh, O! Since each of the thirteen words could have been spelt in any of twelve other ways, the list alone involves 169 choices. When we add to it all the other words that have a long o sound, the choices will run into thousands, and the educated persons must remember by sight every one of them. Conversely we have to remember by sight the varying pronunciations attached to the combination ough, a thing which a Chinaman, with only a few thousand pictures to recognize, thinks atrocious.

These are not isolated vagaries, things of exception. The confusion and effort involved run all through our written language. What we are doing is in reality memorizing a vast multitude of picture forms. The Chinaman sooner or later learns to read. So do we. We can appreciate his ghastly loss of time. When we learn to spell we are too young to understand about our own till the thing is done.

The trouble is all with the instrument – our wretched alphabet made worse by our use of it, a deterioration spread over centuries that multiplied its original faults by thousands. The European peoples got lost in the maze of their own phonetics – so many rival forms, so many duplicate ways, so many alternate choices that spelling came to depend, as Mr. Weller said, on the taste and fancy of the speller.

When the explorers of America tried to write down in European spelling the Indian name now admitted to be Chicago, they wrote it in no less than twenty-one different fashions. Among these first prize may be awarded to Stktschagto, with honourable mention for Tschakko. A Chinaman starting with the Indian meaning of the word and not the sound would have made a little picture of a skunk, and scored one. Yet the alphabet, in its prime, was one of the great triumphs of the human race. It took its place beside the wheelbarrow, the dug-out canoe, and the iron pot, the stone ax and the great achievements that foreshadowed rotary motion, navigation, rum and conquest, and carried civilization round the world.

The other inventions went on. The wheelbarrow is an airplane and the dug-out a Queen Mary. The alphabet lagged behind. Its youth was its brightest period; the signs and the sounds probably fitted far better for the Phoenicians than for us. Our alphabet got into trouble. As it moved west and north it ran into new sounds and had no signs for them. The northern barbarians had a sound that we mark th which they got perhaps from the whistle of the wind at sea. Perhaps also they didn’t. They had no sign for it, so they marked it with a t and an h, neither of which had anything to do with it, which perplexes still today the nascent minds of ten million children. The Greeks had a sign something like th, which probably sounded as something else, and that made further confusion.

Other letters crowded in, not needed. Q, with u always in attendance, stole the whole business that it gets from the letter k. The letter c, a mere cuckoo in the nest, took right and left from both k and s. In retaliation x crashed in as a sort of abbreviation that turned into a letter and fairly put k out of business, except that x couldn’t start anything. W arose as a letter of despair: few people have a good enough sound-sense to hear what it really is. P and h joined in an illicit combination to steal from f – so that nowadays such words as filosofy look funny, nearly as funny as funny itself would if we spelt it phunny.

In other words our alphabet is a wreck. We could reform it easily enough if we were all of like mind and wanted to – easily enough, that is to say, with a few years’ effort traded for a millennium of ease. But it would have to be done internationally, by authority, with finality and at a stroke. As it is, the way is blocked partly by the cranks in the foreground, but more by inertia in the background. Here for instance is the crank who explains that the gradations of vowel sounds are infinite and that no phonetic representation of them is possible except with an alphabet or system of infinite complexity. Of course the gradations are infinite. But so are the colours that run across the spectrum; yet we talk of a blue hat and a green light without any trouble. Anyone with an ear and tongue for linguistic phonetics can shade the broad sound of the letter a all the way from the parent called “father” at Oxford to the one called “fether” in Inverness. But a phonetic alphabet hits at a middle average which the individual varies at will in reading.

More pretentious is the scholarly crank who complains that phonetic spelling would hide the etymology of our language and draw a veil over its history. He likes the b in the word debt to carry him back to the dear old Latin debitum. He would rather sing a psalm in good company, than a sam with the ignorant. A fotograf, so spelt, would rob him of the Greek Photos, light, and grapho, I write, and make a mystery of clarity itself. But these objections rest on little more than the pang of novelty. We should all get as used to it in no time as we do to false teeth. In any case if one wants to play at scholarship and make a row over it, our spelling very often misleads, and hides the real origin of the word. Who put the false u in honour and the mistaken s in island? If the g in reign cheers us up by reminding us of rego, the g in sovereign, a false analogy, lets us down again. But all of this can be left for the scholars of the future to use in making theses.

A far more dangerous opponent is the advocate of “gradual spelling reform,” who spoils a cause by accepting half of it, as if one should advocate being half drunk as a remedy for intemperance. He would have a thousand enthusiasts bind themselves together with a pledge to spell cat with a k. He lacks the visual imagination to see what a hopeless confusion gradual reform would introduce. It would be mending a coat of many colours with pieces from a patchwork quilt.

The only possible mode of introducing a new spelling of our common English and American language is by international agreement, authoritative and final, and done, after the ground is duly prepared and the method accepted, at a single stroke. Given ink enough and authority enough, we could do it in a year.

It would mean, it might be said, scrapping our present books. But we do that anyway. Few people, outside of college, read books more than five years old. All that are worth reading – the Macaulays and the Emersons, the Dickenses and the Mark Twains – would be re-spelt and re-printed. As for journalism, even as it is, last week’s paper looks like ancient history. The newspapers could change their type as easily as they do their politics; and the machinery, as with politics, wouldn’t need to change at all.

But it’s no use. The dead weight of inertia puts it out of court. The change will only come as a side effect of some great issue which we cannot foresee. It took a whole world war to introduce “daylight-saving time,” a thing advocated for two generations and as obvious as daylight itself.

—

Our crazy spelling is at least free from one of the greater obstructions on the road to Parnassus. Each child learns to spell for himself. He is not held back to join a convoy of others for a joint attack on the letter q. And as soon as he can spell and read, the magic world of books, the enchantment of stories, the fascination of the past, are all open to him. This, in the world in which we live – a world of Sunday feature papers and cheap reprints and public libraries – has become the heritage of all. We are not like the pioneers who treasured in their log cabins a few tattered volumes, and whose children never saw a children’s book.

And at this point education for oneself branches off from the beaten path of compulsory school. Arrived at this point a person of sufficient energy and individuality has power to educate himself. Even a university, as Carlyle or somebody said, is only a set of books. With sufficient interest and sufficient insight, a reasonable modicum of time free from work, and such advice as one can gather by the way, the path is open. But for the generality of people the path, though open, is too steep. Such overtime training of the mind, such individual effort and foresight are not for all. Yet, even for the laziest and the least gifted, at this point some measure of individual interest and urge must supplement the school and college curriculum. If not, the rest is vain.

But whether or not the average youthful scholar reads and studies for himself, he still belongs in the great convoy that moves forward year by year and class by class, in a measured phalanx of credits and units, its ranks checked into alignment by the current drill of examinations. It is difficult to see how it can be otherwise – for the education of the mass of the nation. We cannot afford a tutor for every child, and in any case you cannot feed with a spoon forever. But a realization of the tedium and delay of class education and of the false perspective given by examinations and credits will at least serve as a beginning for better things.

Class and credit work makes for overslowness by the very attempt to be “thorough,” to cover every bit of ground before moving on to the next. This attitude toward education, though the students don’t know it, comes to them as a legacy from the Jesuits in the opening period of modern education. Their maxim and practice of absolute thoroughness, the building in of every brick so that the wall shall never fall, was and is excellent within its scope; that is, when all else is disregarded – time and preference and individuality. It has in it all the grim infallibility of a machine.

In this it contrasts with the spontaneity of natural self-education, which stumbles eagerly forward, spells badly, but drives on to the hard words with the easy ones only half learned; pushes its elementary arithmetic on toward fractions with a shaky multiplication table bending under its feet like a trestle bridge over a canyon; picks up its history as a hen pecks for grain, its literature for the love of it, its art for art’s sake.

It is the difference between a spirit and a mechanism, a substance and a shadow. And in the long run there is no education worth while, none with any meaning, except what we give ourselves or at least make our own. All that the best college can do is to offer opportunity and inspiration. I remember a bygone colleague of mine, a teacher of literature, who used to say to his class every year (professors always say everything once a year): “Gentlemen, I spread the banquet. You can take it or leave it as you like.” The banquet was his notes on Comparative Literature and looked a pretty lean diet, but at least the idea was sound.

All that is best in what we call the liberal arts – all the flowers of poetry and drama, literature and history, imagination and inspiration – becomes distorted and disturbed by the system of examinations and credits which deflect it from its proper semblance, like the comic face seen in a convex mirror. Literature looks in the mirror and reflects back as a “credit” – a comic credit with a wide grinning mouth, hair stuck out sideways and a brain-pan down to an inch and a half. But this Credit is the real master for the student, controlling degrees, the entry to professions, jobs – all that he came to college for. No wonder the figure is grim – the joke on literature is so rich. The fellow is like those malicious evil spirits that carry on our humour in the next world, as malevolent buffoonery. He says to the student, “Divide the beauty of poetry into six elements and say them over to me, and I’ll give you a degree as a horse-doctor.” Or he says, “Name the six excellences of Shakespeare that your professor told you out of his notes last October!” – and he roars with laughter. “If you can’t,” he says, “I won’t let you out of college; you’ll just stay shut up there till you do. No law for you!”

The key to salvation is found by admitting once and for all that a large part of knowledge cannot be tested by written examinations, except to its own harm. Things that are matters of appreciation, of feeling, of taste, can be discussed, encouraged – fostered like a plant in the sunlight of good teaching and interesting reading. But turn them into examinations and you defeat your own end.

I would make the school and college program consist of a maximum of stimulation and a minimum of examinations. Reading aloud, discussion, encouragement – something to kindle a flame, to light a lamp, to give the opportunity and the desire to read more. That is all that school can accomplish. To do this no great time is needed – not fifty per cent of what we give now – but more reality of purpose; in other words, not more quantity in the current of words, but a higher voltage in mental interest.

If I say that I would “shorten English literature” it is not because I would disparage a subject that has been for many years my life and livelihood. What I mean is that our teaching it is largely an attempt to teach the unteachable, to substitute text knowledge for literary appreciation, and the question-and-answer of a written examination for that “reading-for-reading’s-sake” which is the only literary training worth talking about.

It is difficult to make one’s meaning clear without slight or disparagement toward the thousands of earnest teachers giving excellent lessons and lectures on English literature. But their efforts are distorted out of their proper meaning by being set in a frame of “exams,” “promotions,” “matriculations,” “degrees” and entrances to the “professions.” That is enough to poison the love of literature at the root.

The teaching of literature should mean, at the beginning, reading of worth-while books to little children who can’t read. Without false sentiment, it may be said that most people carry as their chief literary asset the remembrance of “What mother read aloud to them when they were kids.” But then “mother” never held exams, or asked the children to name the six chief beauties of Robinson Crusoe, or to give parallel passages to Old Mother Hubbard and the Snow Queen. The reading was for reading’s sake, and it led the child into the magic garden to which presently, able to read, he could resort of himself; out of the garden the school-teacher afterwards chased him with a written exam.

This is the fact of the matter. There is a certain utility and a certain scope for written examinations. But there is ground upon which the written examination cannot touch without withering all that grows on it. At the beginning of learning, for the sake of its later love and enjoyment, there are certain things that must be committed to memory. These things are not so much education as the frame in which education is set. Children must learn the multiplication table. Medical students must learn the names of the three hundred odd bones of the human body. Not that the names in themselves are anything. But they are necessary for familiar reference. One recalls the enthusiastic young lady who said that the astronomers must be wonderfully clever to have found out the names of the stars. A medical man must be at least as wonderful as that; and any kind of examination, any “yes”-and-“no” test is in order so as to see if he really is. So, in history, examination is in order on lists of the dates of kings and of battles. These are not history but are the necessary pegs on which to hang it. The historical knowledge of many people is badly damaged by not remembering whether the French Revolution or the American Revolution came first, and just where Peter the Great came in and whether he was Peter the Hermit.

It is the fashion today to discredit kings even as pegs. We are told to think of history as the movement of peoples; but it’s hard to peg history on that: “movement No. 1,” “movement No. 2,” “fine movement about 1066,” and so on. The older method of treating the death of Queen Anne as a landmark is far better. But of course when all that is done and learned, real history is yet to begin.

So with literature. It is proper no doubt for pupils and even college students to answer questions – straight “yes”-and-“no” as to who lived when and who wrote what. But the moment you go further and give examination questions of the six chief beauties of Wordsworth, and the six chief sillinesses of Milton, education has run to a dead end. Much of liberal arts in the best sense is not ground for written examination. We must alter the curriculum so that a lot of it is only for students who want it. The practical difficulty is obvious; since mere attendance, and perhaps not even that, would be needed for a credit. But at least students could be encouraged to write, not on examinations, but on what they thought about what they read; and their work could be estimated from that.

But the main contention is that education in literature must, after its first initiation, be self-prompted, that is must depend on individual appreciation, or it is no good. If it stops with college it should never have begun. It should grow into the student’s life till it becomes part of it and remains with him till old age, the period in which people no longer read, but re-read what they have loved before.

Contrast with the dilemma thus offered, as between spontaneous interest and mechanical drill, the fortunate position of history. Here is a subject which by happy circumstance is coming into its own. The moving picture has proved a fairy godmother, giving to each of us a magic mirror to replace the dusty pages. . . . Look! Here comes Charlemagne; notice how he is dressed, see the queer twisted suit of iron made of little chains! . . . and the way the men wear their hair on their shoulders and their long pointed spears! And here’s Henry VIII; of course you recognize him; he was here last year as Charles Laughton. Funny breeches they used to wear, eh? . . . And so we sit under the enchantment of half darkness, and before us a magic scroll unfolds and the dead voices speak, and all the pageant of the past rolls down before us. Here, indeed, is America discovered! See the Spanish caravels tossing on the waves and the huge banners all purple, crimson and gold . . . and so on downward. We are comrades in arms with Washington . . . we refight the battle of New Orleans . . . and, far out on the plains among the painted Shawnees and Cheyennes, we drive the last golden spike of the railways that unite a continent.

No such page in education was ever turned. It shows what all education might be, if desire and opportunity ran thus together. It has its dangers. One might have thought that the picture people would be too careless of fact, too much like the Shakespearean “producer” who would put up a board and mark it Athens. There was indeed such a tendency at first. In a first picture of the battle of New Orleans of 1815, so I have been told, an electric street car moved sedately through a British regiment. And I have it on the authority of Mr. Irvin Cobb that an early New England village scene of the Revolutionary War had a huge street sign in it: Joe’s Garage, Gasoline at All Hours.

But the tendency turned the other way. It seemed that the public revelled in the new accuracy of history. They liked to see Charlemagne’s hair and Napoleon’s coat just as they were and watch Talleyrand take snuff out of the very kind of box that Talleyrand used to take snuff out of. And the moving picture people, good fellows, asked nothing better than to give the people what the people wanted and gave it to them.

Historians whose turn for accuracy exceeds their limit of tolerance have it the other way and tell us that the moving pictures are distorting history. One of Harvard’s best tells us, for example, that “the clownish posturing of film heroes has obscured the authentic American cowboy.” It may be so – a little. But the historian must realize that there must be a little distortion in all art; the colours must be a little heightened to make the object visible. Dante had to make hell a little more spiral than it really is; all heroines must be too beautiful and all heroes a little overbrave.

The moving picture, so far, has not sinned beyond the legitimate exaggeration of romantic art. What it will do next, we don’t know, except that it will give the people what the people want. If they tire of accuracy and want Charlemagne to be a little more comic and wear a tuxedo; or if, as is likely, they presently want the epochs mixed up, so as to have Abraham Lincoln and Julius Caesar in the same film, they’ll get that also.

Meantime history has fallen heir to a wonderful legacy, to treasure or to squander. All the world is back at school, as it ought to be, for school in the proper sense should last a lifetime. People who had “finished” history at high school are taking it up again in the dark, at fifty cents per epoch.

—

Natural science is almost as happily situated as history. There is no doubt about its place in the curriculum and no difficulty in awarding it. Every educated person needs a “thorough smattering” of science, a little piece off the top, so to speak; and no one but a specialist can hope for more. The time for that is gone. The last man who knew everything died about the time of Professor Huxley. As was said in an earlier chapter, the learned men of the Middle Ages “knew it all.” The scholars of the Renaissance knew it all and asked for more. The professors of the nineteenth century knew it all and could just hold it. In the twentieth, it ran over at the top.

At the present day the educated man must be content with that “outline” of science which gives us the cream without our aspiring to milk the cow. The prevalence of popular “outlines,” “digests” and “abstracts” is evidence of a world seeking nature’s remedy for the overcrowding of the human mind.

But science is peculiar in that the top is the best of it, like the rose which crowns the thorns or the South Sea island that rises in beauty from the laborious coral below. I know no better hours than those that take flight into the majestic distances of astronomy, the mysteries of four-dimensional space-time and the vast atom filled with agitated nothingness. “A tale, told by a scientist, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.” Here science fades away to mysticism, and knowledge reverts to its second childhood and dies as ignorant as at its birth.

In natural science – I like the old-fashioned term, no doubt quite indefensible – I include, first, physics. This in its plain sense of motion and force, mass and momentum, can be taught without mysticism and without reference to the later difficulties as to where is here, and when is now, and what is action at a distance. This newer perplexity is not needed for the study of phenomena. I understand that the old-time physics of absolute space and time breaks if you stretch it far enough. Light, it seems, gets whisked round the edge of a planet like a hat blown round a windy corner. Isaac Newton didn’t know this, but students can still dream it off for a century or two and still take their physics straight. It is better for a pupil to learn physics without afterthought as to absolute space and time, just as it is better for a child always to think of its parents as happily married, and not learn the truth till later.

This program of physics can be tucked in under mathematics and used as material to make the kind of legitimate problems to which I referred above. It can serve, so to speak, as the handy man of mathematics.

Where physics branches off into the wave-world – electricity, light, radio, and cosmic emanations – a special teaching is necessary. But in this the ordinary student can never go far. The investigation is too vast. Yet a year of school and a year of college should keep him from the ignorance that was, and should make of him and his fellows a sort of seed-bed, a plot of selection, from which are chosen the real scholars and physical scientists to whom we entrust our guidance in the knowledge needed for our life and for the death of our enemies.

The ancient science of the rock is simple in its outline, but it makes no demand on the curriculum that is not amply justified and it carries with it as yet no fool appendages that need curtailing. The science of life – the whole “biology” – fills a larger field. But it can be cut loose from the additions that make it appear larger than it is, from the “bogus” attempts to make science where none is – as with the unsurveyed empire staked out by sociology, and the bottomless mine put on the market by psychology. Apart from these things, the outline of biological science, vital as it is, puts no undue strain on education.

In the matter of physiology, the knowledge of the human body (for people who are never to be students of medicine), I think I would go slow. I would be inclined to leave it out altogether. This is a heretical opinion, no doubt, and very different from the dogma, current since Huxley, that the wise child must know its own body. I doubt whether it is good for society that the ordinary plain man should know much of the details of how his body works. The man who has learned to think of his heart as a pump, with an intake in it as valves that get out of order, is on the way toward having a weak one. Better let him think of it as the seat of love and generosity, and it will beat away happily till it stops. Let him think of his stomach as where he puts his dinner, not as a fierce chemical furnace where acids are tearing up tissues and sending up exhaust gases like the back end of a tannery. Let him think of his bowels as the bowels of compassion, as gentle as the New Testament, and his blood as part of his lineage, not as the battleground of a myriad of good and evil corpuscles, some on his side and some dead set against him. Any man who has realized that he has in him about twenty-five feet of colon and semi-colon – a sort of string of sausages – can never think the same of himself again.

These little scraps of knowledge, you see, are of no practical use, and the mental effect of them is to turn the man, in his own eyes, from the vague image of God that he was to the dirty contraption full of mess that one year’s physiology makes of him. There he sits on his bench in the doctor’s consulting room, full of rumblings and inward visions. Cure him? You can’t. That’s just the trouble. Ask any of your medical friends. The man is all in the wrong frame of mind to be cured. To cure him you have to revert to that image of God which, to higher vision, turns out to be true after all, and which heals an ailment with a thought. This man can’t. He knows too much, or too little. His first-year physiology sends him to his death when a peasant or a sailor or a child, being still an image of God, would go on living.

It is easy for a student, as for anybody else, to learn the few simple laws of health – to come in out of the wet, not to eat more than he can pay for, to wear a hat in the sun and to sleep with his window open and his mouth shut. Public health, also – if you like, teach that in college, even to ordinary students. That sewers stink, phew! that mosquitos carry yellow fever; that people died of the Great Plague because of dirt, and that everybody needs fresh air every minute, indoors and out – all of this you can study and feel all the brighter and more wholesome for knowing it. But this, or as much of this as educated people need, a student, apart from a medical student, can learn in a few afternoon lectures as a listener-in, and stay convinced and be a clean, well-ventilated citizen ever afterward.

For physiology at large – as for certain other things that masquerade as sex-education and which I leave out of this book as not fit to go into it – I put in a plea for a snug corner of ignorance. But the topic is too large to treat here, and I leave it for a later opportunity.

TOC     INDEX

What Good Is Latin?

The vitamins of education – Latin the mainstay of the technical study of language – Latin as ballast – Greek only for philologists and Apostles – Latin composition for business correspondence – Mediaeval versus stream-lined Latin – You can’t read Latin? Neither could the Romans

Our medical people of today talk much of vitamins. Just what they are I do not know, but they are subdivided and named, with the rich imaginative fancy of the scientist, Vitamin A, Vitamin B, and so on as discovered. These I understand enter into our diet and have a peculiar importance in it. If we are misguided enough to stop eating any one of these vitamins, it is all over with us. When I first learned this, I was inclined, if only for precaution’s sake, to give up bacon and eggs and roast beef and adopt an exclusive diet of vitamins as everywhere freely advertised at a price equal merely to what we have got. But I have since been told by an eminent medical authority that it would be very hard for an ordinary human being, fed in the ordinary way, to avoid eating all the vitamins that there are; in fact, he can’t help eating them. The good they do is so universal and so unobtrusive that for thousands of years it was never analyzed and specified.

Now, I regard Latin as one of the vitamins of education. If mathematics is Vitamin A, and reading and writing is Vitamin B, Latin can certainly get in somewhere not far down the alphabet. The study of Latin has in two thousand years so worked itself into the living tissue of our education that we only realize on reflection the peculiar part it plays. It gives us our first real consciousness of what language is. We discover that language is not, as it must seem to savages, “inevitable.” After its first twilight beginnings in onomatopoeia and muscular grunts, it becomes a mere convention between sound and significance. Readers of Mark Twain will recall how Huck Finn and Nigger Jim fell into a linguistic discussion as to whether or not it was believable that a Frenchman didn’t call a cow a “cow.” Jim easily proved to Huck that, if he knew it was a cow he’d have to call it so. The humour of the passage rests on the missing postulate as to what language is. Unconsciously students of elementary Latin acquire this new detachment from words. With it they begin to change from the servants to the masters of language. They can reset, remake it, and turn it to new use.

And here in the technical study of language, with a view to improving our mastery of our own, I find Latin of incomparable utility. It is sufficiently near and yet sufficiently far from our own idiom to turn translation into an art, involving a nice sense of language meaning and a nice ingenuity in handling language forms. To translate back and forward two kindred modern languages is of little linguistic value. It only occasionally involves translation in the higher sense. It is simply mere substitution. On the other hand, as between our languages and an agglutinative Asiatic speech, like Japanese, the distance is too great for the form of exercise of which I speak. I remember years and years ago in teaching elementary French in school asking a pupil how you say in French, “Give me some bread.” He answered, “You can’t say it; you have to say something else.” So it is with Japanese; you must get the idea, start over again, and “say something else.”

But with Latin the translator finds a phrase – let us take a simple one such as “Quae cum ita sint,” of which the meaning is clear and the single words ridiculous – for our use. He beats about the bush until he finds at quite a distance in a different thicket such a phrase as “This being the case.” Anyone not capable of a glow of intellectual pleasure at such an achievement is not fit to study language.

Words, of course, are nothing as beside things. The philologist and the grammarian seem to their active brethren to be groping among the dead. Yet even for them there must be moments of exultation, of despair, of triumph – as of Browning’s dying grammarian who settled “the enclitic De, dead from the waist down.” And I think, too, of the wonderful work of King James’ translators, balanced between literalism and innovation, and often conveying truth at its best when furthest from it in substance. Consider the verse, as it was written in the Greek, “O Death, where is thy sting, O Hades, where is thy victory?” Literal translation becomes either irreverent or comic. But how wonderful when they wrote, “O Death, where is thy sting, O Grave, thy victory?”

—

So much for the value of Latin as a mainstay for the technical study of language. But, to my thinking, a further reason for retaining it as the base of our education is because it can serve, so to speak, as ballast. It is the ballast in the hold of a ship, down in the dark and unseen, which governs every graceful dip and dive of the flag at the masthead and guarantees against disaster. Or we may take another metaphor from one of those odd little mantelpiece figures of mandarins or patriarchs whose nodding head rocks back and forward but never falls because of a controlling ball of lead suspended in his belly. For those of us trained in a classical education Latin is the ball of lead in our bellies which keeps our eyes properly focused on the horizon.

What I mean is this. We are in danger now, in our rushing mechanical world, of rearing a generation with no backward outlook, living in two dimensions only, without thought of the past. For such people history only goes back as far as the last presidential election, with dim figures such as Grover Cleveland and Queen Victoria as a sort of mythology. Yet for all wise thinking, for all careful social control, it is necessary to see things as they have grown, to look on our institutions in the light of their past. Such dim vision as we can have of the future depends absolutely on this. Cut off the human race from the knowledge and comprehension of its history, and its government will just turn into a monkey cage. We need the guidance of history. All our yesterdays it is true have only lighted fools the way to dusty death. But we need at least the dates of the yesterdays and the list of the fools.

Now a great deal of our necessary education of today consists of matter that has nothing to do with the past. Mathematics is eternal. Astronomy runs eternity a close second. Physics – dynamics, electricity and all that – is as instantaneous as a flash of lightning. These things are taught as existing simply “here” and “now”; and even “here” and “now,” since Einstein, must hurry up to get over. Other subjects there are which are certainly historical and old but fail to serve the purpose of a balanced outlook. Geology is old, but it is too old. Not even an English conservative can take a geological view of politics. Even the most cautious must move a little faster than palaeontology.

But ballast there must be. If the “instantaneous” subjects are left alone, the world of an intelligent school-boy becomes all present and no past, a huge shop window with no depth to it. One recalls the story of the man who knew himself to be addicted to boasting and exaggeration and used therefore to check himself suddenly and correct his statement. “My greenhouse,” he said, “is twenty feet high and a hundred feet long”; then he paused and added, “but it’s only a foot wide.” Such in aspect would be the kind of razzle-dazzle world of scarcely more than two dimensions that our practical and scientific education must tend to make. The other dimension that must be added to it, the ballast that must give it stability, is found in the historical subjects and in Latin, as a sort of open door leading into the great world of the past. Even the dullest draws his lesson from the millennium of its history.

It could be desired that every subject could be taught historically. The student might learn his mathematics from the counting of fingers and toes, that gave us our repeating ten, and our “score”; the “abacus” and the “counter” of the mediaeval shop; the Hindu-Arabian decimal system; Napier’s bones and Descartes’ co-ordinates and Newton’s calculus. Still better, if physics could be learned step by step and stage by stage as it was disclosed by the great minds that revealed it; and so with all the rest. Thus would the individual mind repeat the intellectual evolution of the race, as the individual body does from embryo to adult. But time forbids. Ars longa.

Yet within a possible degree the same effect on outlook may be produced by ballasting our education with the past world and with Latin as its representative tongue. For Greek I hold no brief. It is only for philologists and Apostles. It can no longer be a part of the education of every college man. Professors tell us that Greek literature is vastly superior to Latin. It may well be, without hurting itself, since Latin literature, apart from its setting in history, amounts to very little. It is claimed that Greek philosophy and the Greek drama are superior to modern. There is no way to disprove this. People who have never learned Greek are outside of the discussion. Those of us who learned Greek and dissent from it are ruled out of the argument. The dead judgment of authority rules. Personally I only know one department of literature in which I feel the full right to an opinion; that of the literature of humour. To my mind the wit of Aristophanes is about as funny as the jokes of a village cut-up. To name him in the class with people like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and A. P. Herbert and Bob Benchley and myself is just nonsense. This statement is absolute and without appeal.

But for the rest of Greek literature, let it pass. The world has no time for it, excepting only those, the fortunate few, who go to college and stay there for ever, whose happy lot I eulogize in the concluding chapter. For them, the real scholars, trustees of the world’s heritage of learning, let there be Greek. For them the six cases, and the three numbers – you, and you two, and you all – and all the moods and voices and tenses that fill a book as large as Goodwin’s so full that no student ever sees the last page. For that, and for our heritage of the New Testament, Greek must stay. But for the ordinary scholar, none of it. You can’t learn a little Greek; it won’t divide; it’s like a billiard ball. Half of it is no good.

—

But even taking Latin on the terms of the plain business man, who wants to see the dollars and cents in everything, there is a great deal to be said for it. I know no better asset for a young man entering business life than the ability to express himself well in speech and in writing. Anyone with enough of this ability and training need never wonder where to find a living. Not everybody can be a literary genius or an orator. But everybody can learn to speak and to write to the full extent of his natural endowment, just as everybody can learn to swim, and nobody can swim without learning. A course in Latin is about the best training in this direction. Boys learn to write good English sentences by writing bad Latin ones. The notion that there is a special technical language for use in business correspondence is a myth sedulously fostered by commercial colleges. Technical business language consists of a few such things, as “F.O.B.,” “ex-dividend,” “your Mr. Smith,” “our Miss McCarthy,” “yours of the third ult. received and would say,” etc., etc. A Latin student could learn it all on one page. As for writing, so for speech. Practice and opportunity are needed, but the basis is words. Salesmanship, or the art of over-persuasion, can be learned as Latin prose composition.

—

But granting that we are to teach Latin in the schools and colleges and make it in a way the bedrock basis of linguistic study, we have to try to get rid of some of the dead weight that has carried down the ages. Latin comes to us from earlier days when it was the one great study, the very ground on which education stood. So it was taught, as they did everything in the Middle Ages, regardless of time and with one eye on eternity. In the Middle Ages when they built a wall they built it as for five hundred years to come; and when they taught Latin, they did it in the same way, with the foundations laid away down below ground, and “underpinned,” like the wall of a cathedral resting on a bed of white oak.

That is to say, in the schools of the past, when they taught the third declension, they taught it all; not the genitive and the gender of some of the nouns but the genitive and the gender of all of the nouns. There is something absolute and admirable in the very completeness of it. They did it with infinite repetition and with little rhymes and tags, what they called memoria technica, such as:

Substantives in do and go—

Genus femininum show;

But ligo, ordo, praedo, cardo,

Are masculine, and common margo.

Such a system was all right for the people of the age. It took an infinity of time, but there was little else to learn.

People who underwent the same kind of training as I had fifty years ago learned their Latin on this mediaeval system. They came away from it with the impression that they had nearly reached the promised land but failed to get there, shipwrecked in sight of port. A little more and we would have “known Latin.” As it is, we only carry with us still a lot of little tags and lists from which the meaning has gone but which still keep their outline like the gossamer skeleton of a dead dragon-fly.

A, ab, and absque, cum, coram, de,

E or ex, prae, pro, tenus, sine—

What about them? I don’t know.

Die, due, fac, fur – what’s wrong with them? Something crooked there, I’m sure, but I forget it.

Now I think I could get all the result we want as mental and literary training and cut out at least fifty per cent of Latin instruction. I would teach Latin grammar in a plain way with very little attention to oddities and exceptions. Let the pupils live and die without knowing that bobus can also be written as bubus; that the Latin for “liver” is irregular and the verb “I drink” is peculiar in the past. Let them wait a while to learn that the dative plural of dea is deabus; wait till they meet goddesses in actual life. People taught in this way will be reading Caesar almost as soon as they begin the language and writing plain Latin sentences as regular as a Roman wall.

I say that I think that I could get all the cultural result needed and cut out fifty per cent of the time taken. But I admit there’s a certain doubt about it; my friends who are today professors and teachers of Latin tell me that the antiquated system of which I speak has quite gone out. It has been superseded by newer methods which some of them like to call “stream-lined” Latin. The phrase is typical of our day; we all move in the mass, holding one idea at a time. Because the airplane had to be “stream-lined,” on account of its excessive speed, we stream-line everything, down to a hearse. The metaphor spreads like a ripple in a pond. A professor teaches stream-lined Latin to a class of stream-lined girls. But let the phrase pass and take it for what it means, Latin learned quickly.

Now in the first place I don’t believe there’s as much stream-lining in the schools as its chief advocates believe. There are many teachers who by instinct value an exception more than a rule. Hide the exceptions at the back of the grammar, after the index, and they’ll find them as a cow finds water. So with the examiners; they lived on a diet of exceptions too long to swear off. You never know when they may break out into irregularities. Better learn them.

In the second place stream-lining is apt to go so far that there’s nothing left. You get the pupil so flattened out that he has become caseless, voiceless, tenseless, and moodless. For him there is no joy in the ethical dative or the genitive of value or the accusative of nearer definition. They’re all one to him. He may be all right in an airplane because there’s no friction left in him. But his “Latin” has just turned into a bunch of “roots,” like the language of pigeon Chinese, or Pottawatamie English. When a Chinaman speaking “pigeon” (that is, business language) wishes to indicate the Episcopal Bishop of Hong Kong he calls him the “A.1. top-side, Heaven-pigeon man.” That is exactly how Latin must look to the stream-lined student, just a collection of chunks of language to be sorted out for significance.

Nor does ready-made translation help. If we read Pliny in English and Virgil in prose, that’s English not Latin. But never mind. There must be some way of compromise, to set us free from the dilemma, that steers between the Scylla of too much and the Charybdis of too little. The problem is to preserve enough of the old rigid discipline of moods and tenses, rules and exceptions to strengthen the mind without arresting it.

—

I revert again in conclusion to the objection that so many of us might make that we learnt Latin for years in school and college and never got anywhere with it, never got to be able to read it straight off. Of course we didn’t. Nobody ever does. Not even the professors; no, nor the Romans themselves, not in the way that we read English. This is of course a sort of official secret handed down for generations, and I am really violating here the obligation of my profession by divulging it. But perhaps the time has come to remove the veil. Hitherto it has been better for the world to pretend that at least somebody could “read Latin straight off.” Now it is better to have the truth. The Romans themselves couldn’t.

I am prepared to support this statement. Written language in Roman days, before printing and newspapers, was on a quite different footing from what it is now. There was the ordinary speech of ordinary people, jabbering away all day, just as we do now, with fragments of sentences, exclamations, phrases, false starts and short circuits. Except on the stage, conversation is never done out in full periods, unless by old maids, professors, and garrulous village philosophers; and done thus it is always either ludicrous or tiresome. But we moderns have a written language also of easy and rapid comprehension because we need it for the daily news and the love romances and the crime stories of which the Romans had no current supply. For them one love story had to last a thousand years, from Dido till the fall of Rome. So when they wrote, it was different. They took up the pen as a man puts on his Sunday clothes; they were not trying to be easily intelligible. They wanted to get the full effect, and expected it to take a few moments’ reflection to grasp it. I am quite sure that if one read out an oration of Cicero to a Roman who had never heard it he would soon get mixed and interrupt to say, “Read that last paragraph again, will you?” Just as you yourself would do, if someone read you a section of Browning without fair warning. The parallel is exact. Browning and Cicero were doing the same thing, proposing to sacrifice immediate comprehension for the sake of deeper comprehension when comprehended.

But, you say, some of Cicero’s writings were speeches made in court? Not at all; in court they didn’t sound like that, and they were retouched afterwards. A glance at the pages of the Congressional Record will show what is meant.

I remember once when I was a master at school giving a prize of a cake, specially made, with all sorts of icing and emblems – a joy to look at. The baker showed it to me and received my congratulations with obvious pleasure. But he was an honest man, and he said, “I’m not saying, sir, that it will be much of a cake for eating.” I assured him that no one would think of doing anything as brutal as that. So with the Roman writings – not much of writings for understanding.

All this I say by way of comforting those who, like myself, studied Latin for years and never were able to read it – unless we had read it already.

TOC     INDEX

Mathematics Versus Puzzles

Are mathematical judgments synthetically a priori – The multiplication table a fair hand-to-hand fight – Puzzles a fraud – Mr. Brown and the equation – Mathematics and mystifications; Two gazinta four – Can we improve our mathematical sense?

I remember being taken as a boy of twelve years old to listen to a “paper” at the University of Toronto Literary and Debating Society, on the question, “Are mathematical judgments synthetically a priori?” In those simple days before “pictures” and radio and motor-cars and emancipated girls, to go and listen to a “paper” or to a debate between two black-robed students, sipping water off a table, was presumed to be first-class fun. When they discussed mathematical judgments and whether or not a priori, I felt that I didn’t understand it, but that I would when I grew up. That’s where I was wrong.

I am still very vague as to what mathematical judgments being synthetically a priori means. I imagine it refers to the question how do we know that one and one makes two, and if it does, what do we mean by it? But at any rate it bears witness to the profundity of mathematics – I mean, its reach toward the infinite and the unknowable.

This element of fundamental mystery has been expanded in our own day by the glorious confusion introduced by Professor Einstein into all our notions of distance, time and magnitude. How far is one thing from another? The question becomes unknowable. It may be twice as far away as something else is, or half as far; but, beyond the relative number, there seems no such thing as solid distance. What is a foot? Twelve inches. What is an inch? One twelfth of a foot. Similarly where is here? And when is now?

I only refer to these mysteries in order to explain why I still have to speak of mathematics in a reverential whisper, like a Christian entering a Mohammedan mosque, in wicker slippers. He knows it’s a reverend place though he doesn’t understand it.

My attitude toward mathematics, indeed, is that of nine out of ten of educated people – a sense of awe, something like horror, a gratitude for escape but at times a wistful feeling of regret, a sense that there might have been more made of it. Everything, therefore, that I say about mathematics is tempered by so great a humility as to rob it of all controversial aspect. But I do think that as far as a practical school curriculum goes I could shorten it by at least one half. What I would do, to express it in a single phrase, would be to separate true mathematics from mathematical puzzles.

If mathematics is for many students the dragon in the path, these puzzles are the dragon’s teeth. Take them out and the dragon is as easy to handle as a cow. Children learn to count and add and multiply, and feel that it is all plain and straightforward; the multiplication table may be tricky, but it’s fair. Then presently comes a “puzzle” problem. “What number,” says the teacher to the child, “is made up of two figures, the second meaning twice as many as the first, and the two adding up to nine?”

Now, this is not mathematics in the proper sense; this is a puzzle. The only true mathematical operation here would be to set down all the numbers of two digits, from 10 to 99 in turn, and see which one fitted it. But when it comes to guessing and choosing, to ingenuity, that’s a puzzle. Half our school mathematics in algebra and geometry consist of “puzzles,” freak equations and inventive geometry. Students are not discoverers. Pythagoras solved the problem of the squares on the right-angled triangle. I’m willing to “take it as read” and learn it in ten minutes.

This puzzle “bunker” is built right across the mathematical fairway and down the middle of it. “Scholars” pound the sand in it and wonder why they can’t do mathematics. True mathematics means a process learned and used; hard to learn, but later, second nature. Show me how to extract a square root and I’ll extract it as neatly as a dentist. Tell a ship’s captain how to calculate the angle of the sun’s declination and show a broker’s clerk how to use logarithms for compound interest. But don’t expect a student to be a discoverer, working out “problems” which Isaac Newton or Copernicus might solve or miss.

Now at the present time all school-books on mathematics are mixtures of what may be called “sums,” “problems” and “mathematical puzzles.” A sum is an operation dealing with numbers and following a definite and known routine of calculation. When a waiter adds up a restaurant cheque he performs a sum. A calculating machine can do a sum. But it can’t do a problem. For a problem is an operation involving a selection of methods of calculation, of which only certain ones will fit the case. A school-boy calculating when the hour hand of a clock will overtake the minute hand is working out a problem. There are plenty of wrong ways of working at it, as when Achilles tried to overtake a tortoise, and kept the Greeks guessing for generations. But the school-boy soon finds that there are a whole lot of problems dealing with motion and time which all fall into a definite and known method of solution that becomes itself as familiar as the waiter’s addition table. Now the extension of a problem in difficulty and intricacy, to where only one method of many will bring a solution, turns it, at some point, into a puzzle.

When Archimedes jumped out of his bath and shouted “Eureka,” what he had solved was not a problem but a puzzle. He had been asked by some king or other, had he not? how to tell whether a gold crown was really a gold crown or was made of two metals melted together. A modern chemist would find this out with an acid. But Archimedes found a way without chemistry. Yet a professor of mathematics might take a bath every morning for years and never think of it. Since there was no way of forcing a solution by an inevitable method, the thing was not a problem but a puzzle.

Such a puzzle is legitimate enough, though it is no true test of mathematical knowledge. But further out on the field are puzzles that may be called illegitimate, since they present the added difficulty of misleading or paradoxical language. For the information and perhaps the diversion of the reader, let me illustrate the difference. Here is a legitimate puzzle. A man wishes to buy a piece of linoleum that is to cover a space 12 feet by 12. A dealer offers him a piece that is 9 feet by 16 feet. Obviously each piece contains 144 square feet. The dealer tells the customer that all he needs to do is to cut the piece that is 9 feet by 16 feet into two separate pieces that can then be fitted together to cover 12 feet by 12 feet. This of course – or rather not of course, for few people can do it – is done by drawing lines across the 12x12 piece, 3 feet apart in one direction and 4 feet in the other. Start 9 feet east from the top north-west corner and cut along the lines alternately south and west, and there you are. But such a puzzle does not belong in mathematical education although it corresponds in nature to a lot of the things called “problems” that wreck the lives of students.

Here however is a sample of an illegitimate puzzle. A man has 17 camels. He leaves them in his will to his three sons, 1/2 to the eldest, 1/3 to the next and 1/9 to the youngest. But these fractions won’t divide unless you cut up the camels themselves. When the sons are still in perplexity a Dervish happens to pass by, riding on a camel. Dervishes always ride by on camels at convenient moments in these Arabian problems. The sons tell him of their dilemma. After deep thought – Dervishes always think deeply – he says, “Let me lend you my camel to make eighteen instead of seventeen. Now take one half which is nine, and one third which is six, and one ninth which is two, and you each have your proper share. And as nine and six and two only add up to seventeen, you may kindly return my camel.” With which the Dervish departed, and the sons no doubt told the story all the rest of their lives.

Now this problem is of course as full of fallacies as a sieve is full of holes. In the first place the sons didn’t get one half and one third and one ninth of 17 but of something else: and when the father left them these fractions, a little arithmetic – beyond them, no doubt – would have shown that 1/2 and 1/3 and 1/9 of a thing don’t add up to the whole thing but only to 17/18 of it. There was still 1/18 of each camel coming to somebody.

Here is another type of puzzle problem turning on misleading suggestion. Three men at a summer hotel were going fishing and were told they must pay 10 dollars each for a license. They each put up 10 dollars and sent it by a hotel-boy to the inspector’s office. The boy came back with 5 dollars and said that the inspector had made a rebate of 5 dollars out of 30, because it was understood they were all one party in the same boat. The men, greatly pleased, gave the boy 2 dollars out of the 5 and kept one each. One of them then said: “Look here! This is odd. We expected our fishing to cost ten dollars each (thirty dollars) and it has only cost us nine dollars each, and two to the boy. Three times nine is twenty-seven, and two makes twenty-nine; where has the other dollar of the thirty gone?”

The reader no doubt sees the fallacy instantly; but some people wouldn’t.

Now I admit that text-books on mathematics never push the problems quite as far as this on illegitimate puzzle ground – unless indeed they do it on purpose, as in the book of Mathematical Recreations once compiled by the celebrated Professor Ball. But what I claim is that the element of the problem, and even of the puzzle, looms far too large in mathematics as we have it. Indeed for most people it overshadows the subject and ends their advance.

The ordinary straight “discipline” of school mathematics should consist of plain methods of calculation, like division, square root, highest common factor and so on, or such problems as conform to a recognized method of regular solution. All that goes in arithmetic under the name of the “unitary method” is of this class. If A in one hour can do twice as much work as B does in two hours, then – well, we know all about them. Yet few people realize that this beautiful and logical unitary method is quite new – I mean belongs only in the last two generations. When I first learned arithmetic it was just emerging from the “rule-of-three” in the dim light of which all such calculations appeared something like puzzles.

In algebra also a vast part of the subject can be studied as regular calculation, or at least as a problem of regular order, such as the motion and time illustration mentioned above. I gather, also, that another large section of algebraical calculation, though capable of being effected by short, ingenious, or individual methods, can always, if need be, be submitted to a forced operation, clumsy but inevitable – as if a person wanting to know how many squares there are on a chess-board counted them one by one.

To illustrate what I mean, let me call back, from nearly sixty years ago, the recollection of our Sixth Form class in mathematics at Upper Canada College. Our master, Mr. Brown, was a mathematician, the real thing, with a gold medal in proof of it, and gold spectacles through which he saw little but x and y – gentle, simple and out of the world. The class had early discovered that Mr. Brown, with a long equation on the black-board and his back to the class, would stay there indefinitely, in his academic cap and gown, lost in a reverie in which the bonds of discipline fell apart. So the thing was to supply him with a sufficiently tough equation.

This became the special business of the farceur of the class, a large and cheerful joker called Donald Armour, later on the staff of the Rush Medical College and a distinguished Harley Street surgeon. Armour would approach Mr. Brown in the morning and say: “I was looking over some Woolwich examination papers last night, Mr. Brown, and I found this equation. I can’t make anything of it.” “Oh!” said Mr. Brown with interest. He accepted without question the idea that Armour spent his evenings in mathematics. “Let me look at it, Armour.” Then another spirit in collusion would call out, “Won’t you put it on the board, Mr. Brown?” And in a minute there it was, strung out along the black-board, a tangled mass of x’s and y’s and squares and cubes, with Mr. Brown in front of it, as still as Rodin’s penseur.

Meanwhile the class relaxed into easy conversation, and Armour threw paper darts with pins in the end to try and hit Mr. Brown in the yoke of his gown. Presently, without turning round, Mr. Brown spoke. “Of course, I could force it . . .”

“Oh, please, Mr. Brown,” pleaded Armour, “don’t force it!” and there came a chorus from the class, “Don’t force it, Mr. Brown,” and subdued laughter, because we didn’t know what forcing it was, anyway. “I assure you, gentlemen, I shall not force it until I have tried every expedient.” A chorus of thanks and a renewed reverie. Then presently Mr. Brown would suddenly turn toward us and say excitedly:

“Did you try a function of m, Armour?”

“I never thought of it.”

“It may resolve it.” And away rattled Mr. Brown’s chalk, line upon line, till there stretched the equation, solved! To us it looked bigger than ever.

I won’t swear that it was a function of m that did the trick. It may have been one of the other mystic agents such as a “coefficient of x,” or perhaps pi, a household word to us, as vague as it was familiar.

But what I mean is that when Mr. Brown said he could “force” an equation he referred to a definite mathematical process, as certain as extracting a square root and needing only time and patience.

What I am saying, then, is that school mathematics, and college mathematics as far as made compulsory, should be made up in great proportion, in overwhelming proportion, of straight calculation. I admit that the element of ingenuity, of individual discovery, must also count for something; but for most people even the plainest of plain calculations contain something of it. For many people the multiplication table is still full of happy surprises: and a person not mathematical but trained to calculate compound interest with a logarithm can get as much fun out of it as Galileo could with the moon.

Now to many people, mathematicians by nature, all that I have said about problems and puzzles is merely a revelation of ignorance. These things, they say, are the essence of mathematics. The rest of it is as wooden as a Chinese abacus. They would tell me that I am substituting a calculating machine for a calculating mind. I admit it, in a degree. But the reason for it is perhaps that that is all most of us are capable of. We have not been made “mathematically minded,” and hence the failure of our mathematics.

I am of course stepping out here on ground where wiser feet might hesitate to tread. But I think that for most of us something goes wrong, very early in school, with our mathematical sense, our mathematical conceptions – or rather with the conceptions that we fail to get. We get lost in the symbols of mathematics and can’t visualize the realities – visualize or dramatize, or whatever you do with them. Mathematics is always, for most of us, a sort of mystery which we don’t even expect to understand. Let me illustrate the attitude by recalling a joke of a stage “review” of a few years ago. Some boys are seen coming out of school, comically overgrown and comically under-dressed, grown too long and dressed too short, so as to make them look funny.

“Well, my little man,” says a stock stage gentleman, in the stock voice of a stage question, “and what are you learning at school?”

“Reading and writing,” says one of the comedian boys, his immobile face a marvel of wooden imbecility, blank as the alphabet.

“Reading and writing,” repeats the stock gentleman, so as to let the audience get it, “and anything else?”

The “boy” answers, with no facial movement, “We learn gazinta.”

“You learn what?”

“Gazinta.”

“But what is gazinta?”

“Why,” explains the boy, “like ‘two gazinta four’ and ‘five gazinta ten.’”

The roar of the audience’s laughter ends the mathematics. They laugh because in the contrast between the clarity of reading and writing and the mystery of “gazinta” they see their own experience. For them all mathematics is, and always will be, “gazinta.”

Here is a particular example, familiar to all school and college people, of what I mean by our failure to get a proper grasp of mathematical thought. We all learn that the attraction of gravity exercised on or by a body varies in direct proportion to its mass, and inversely as the square of its distance. The square? That’s the sticker for most of us. What’s the square got to do with it? We understand, or we think we do, that of course the more “mass” a thing has the more it pulls. In reality this is the real philosophical difficulty, since mass means power to “pull,” and “pull” means having mass. But we don’t look into it so far as that; the bigger the mass, the bigger the pull, all right. But the square of the distance we accept, learn it by heart, use it, multiply it – in short, it becomes “gazinta.” It seems an odd thing. Why the square? Why not the cube, or the anything else? We don’t see, till we learn to get it straight, that the thing is self-evident.

The pull varies with the amount of surface, a thing of two dimensions, broad and long. A tower at a certain distance (don’t call it x or we’ll get mixed) looks a certain height and looks a certain breadth. A tower twice as far away would have to be twice as high to look level with it and twice as broad to look of the same breadth. So the far-away tower at twice the distance of the near one, in order to look the same size, would have to be twice as high and twice as broad and would present to the eye four square feet to one, in order to present an apparently equal surface. The attraction is in proportion to the surface and gets less and less for any given size of surface as you go further away. And it doesn’t matter if the surface is square or round or triangular, or any other shape, since they are all proportional. Here I believe is where pi comes in – but don’t let us go too far with it.

There are ever so many of these mathematical conceptions that turned into mystification because we never got them right at the start. The trigonometrical ratios – sine, cosine, etc. – seemed just an arbitrary iniquity. If we had thought of them as moving arms, like traffic signs, we would have felt them to be the natural and inevitable way of measuring an angle.

—

It seems to me therefore that something might be done, at the very opening of education, to strengthen our grip on the mathematical idea. This would bring us back, I presume, to those mathematical judgments synthetically a priori with which I started. The question involved is the nature of number and magnitude, and why does one and one make two? and the consideration whether a statement of that sort is just a fact or an inference from one judgment to another. I imagine that if we could see into one another’s minds we should find a great difference in our grasp on the sequence of numbers. A hen, it is understood, can distinguish two from one but is lost at three. Primitive languages count a little way and then say “a whole lot.” Here figures end and lies begin. Even the Greeks used to say “a myriad” to mean not an exact number but ever so many.

We have fallen heirs to the wonderful ingenuity of what we call Arabic notation. In reality the Hindus started it, but the Arabs made it plainer still by writing into it a “cipher” or “zero” to mark a blank place. We learn it so early in life and so artificially that we don’t appreciate it. We think of ten as an arbitrary point, whereas the shift to a new “place” could have been set anywhere, and would be better if set at something more divisible than ten. If the people on Mars have brains as much better than ours as their planet is older, they may use a set of numbers that would go thousands at a jump and write the population of the United States in three figures. We couldn’t of course do that. The multiplication table used for it would be beyond our learning. But I am sure that we, the non-mathematical people among whom I belong, would get a better grip on mathematics if we had a better conception of the relationship of numbers and symbols.

I am aware of course that there are many recent books that attempt to shed new light on mathematics. But the light seems dim. One or two well-known “series” contain what are really admirable presentations of the philosophy of mathematics. But, for the ordinary person, to mix philosophy with mathematics only makes it worse. Other popular works undertake to bring mathematics to the intelligence of the millions; it would be invidious to name the books, but, apart from their optimistic titles, I cannot see much success in them.

I am aware also that various new methods of teaching mathematics are adopted, especially in teaching mathematics to beginners. But in any that I have seen there is little else than one more example of the present tendency to turn children’s education into fun. Kindergarten children waving little flags, forming themselves into squares and cubes and separating themselves into fractions, may look very pretty, but they are no nearer to the mysteries of number. Singing the multiplication table doesn’t make it less relentless.

Here on my desk, for instance, is a widely known pretentious book of “new method.” It undertakes to “individualize arithmetic” by teaching the children what the author calls “number facts” by the use of numbered cards. “Cards,” says this authority, “are invaluable for learning number facts.” Many of us found this out long ago. The children “individualize” their arithmetic by sitting in a ring, dealing out cards with numbers and pictures on them, and then seeing whose “number facts” win out against their opponents. The children might learn poker from this but not mathematics. What they are doing sounds like a “show-down” of “cold hands,” a process as old as California.

The basic idea of my discussion is that somehow we don’t get our minds mathematically adjusted as they might be. I am aware that there are great differences of natural aptitude. We are told that Isaac Newton when he was a boy took a look through Euclid’s Elements and said it seemed a “trifling book.” That meant that, when Euclid said, “the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles,” little Newton said, “Why, of course, obviously so.” Probably the Pythagorean theorem about the squares on the sides of a right-angled triangle only held him back a minute or two. These things took the rest of us a year of school. But, all said and done, I think that it is not only a matter of aptitude but of approach. We don’t “go at it” right.

With that I leave the subject, with the hopes that at least it may be stimulating to professors of mathematics. A little stimulant won’t hurt them.

TOC     INDEX

Parlez-vous Français?

—or—
Why Can’t We Learn Modern Languages?

Sit down, Gentlemen – The annual mass attack on French and its repulse – How to learn French: forget English – Never learn a rule: learn to think subjunctively – Swallow the phrase whole – Read for reading’s sake – When you get it, it’s like swimming

I remember that when I was a student taking German at college, a criticism reached the ears of our good old professor to the effect that the students never spoke German and never heard it. He was hurt at this, and so at the end of that term he put on what was announced as an oral examination. We were directed, four at a time, into a little room, where the professor and two “outside examiners” were sitting in state as a board of examination.

I went in with three other students and we lined up across the room.

“Setzen Sie sich, meine Herren,” said the professor, very impressively. This means, “Sit down, gentlemen.”

We stood right there.

“Meine Herren,” repeated the professor, as casually as he could, “nehmen Sie, bitte, Platz.”

No, sir; not us; we never budged.

“Sit down, gentlemen,” said the professor curtly.

Down we sat, all together.

After that year there weren’t any more oral examinations.

—

The same thing could have happened in any North American university, and could have been carried out in any of the modern languages – except in French in French Canada. Yet any of us, with the instruction we received, could have translated ordinary German or French into English, and even put English sentences into French or German by a process like working with a hammer and saw.

I have selected French as the main object of discussion in this chapter because I have had over sixty years of dealing with it and enjoy the advantages for observation that go with residence in a bilingual province. But all that is said here about learning French could be said about learning German, Spanish, Russian or Norwegian.

The fault with our teaching of modern languages is not so much that we teach them wrongly as that we don’t succeed in teaching them at all. Ask anyone who “took” Freshman French at college, or learnt French in high school. Only don’t ask him in French.

Every year in English-speaking North America a vast phalanx of high school and college students, millions of them, gather for a mass attack on French. They come on against a heavy barrage of declensions, conjugations and exceptions; they are beaten back, gather again and re-form each year till their school-days end in defeat – as glorious and as hopeless as Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. Twenty-five years later, when the pupils and students have grown up into adult life, there will be practically nothing left of their French except a few fragments and a little wistful regret and wonder. Ask your friend, the father of a family, what French he knows, and he will say that he knows such things as, “Donnez-moi un bock, s’il vous plaît” and “Garçon, encore un bock.” But he learned those on a trip to Paris, in the proper way, by eating and drinking them in.

Let me speak here on my own experience, not from vanity over it or egotism in telling it, but because I think it is typical of that of thousands of others. I learned, or mislearned, my French in the English-speaking Province of Ontario; but what I say of Ontario, for which I have nothing but affection, is not directed against it singly. I am certain that its faults are shared by practically all our English-speaking continent. Of England I am not speaking for the moment; over there the proximity of France and the fact that languages were learned for generations before the schools spoiled the process make things a little different. But not altogether so.

Let me then explain about my experience in Ontario. I am not offering here any criticism against the efficiency and the industry of the many hundred people who teach French in the schools of Ontario. They do what they are compelled to do to meet the strange and disastrous kind of test applied to their pupils. They have to prepare their pupils to pass the matriculation examination of the universities; and they do so. Some of their pupils even pass with distinction; others carry away what is called honours, and are so badly damaged thereby for learning French that a residence of ten years in Paris would hardly effect a complete recovery of their native faculties.

And the amazing thing about the situation is that if Anatole France or Victor Hugo had been sent up to write on an Ontario matriculation examination in French there is not the slightest chance that either of them would head the list; they would be beaten right and left by girls from Seaford High School who never saw the red wings of the Moulin Rouge, and by boys from the Hamilton Collegiate Institute who wouldn’t know enough real French to buy a boiled egg in the Café de la Paix. Indeed it is doubtful whether Anatole France and Victor Hugo would have passed at all. The whole examination being a test in English, they would probably have been ploughed and have had to be put under the care of an Ontario special teacher for six months to enable them to get through.

The point that I am endeavouring to make and reinforce with all the emphasis of which I am capable is this: the ability to translate French into English in writing is not a knowledge of French. More than this, it is the very opposite of it. It involves, if exercised persistently and industriously, a complete inability ever to have a knowledge of French. The English gets in the way. The French words are forever prevented from acquiring a real meaning in connection with the objects and actions indicated, because the mind has been trained always and for ever and hopelessly to associate them with English words instead of with things. The process is fatal. The whole system is not only worthless but it is a fraud and an imposition practised upon all those who learn French in such a school method; and the schools are driven to use the method because the colleges impose a written examination of translation and grammar as the criterion of a knowledge of French. For the proof of it I appeal to the candid confession of all those who were trained in this machine. I appeal to such people for corroboration of what I say. All that they learned was directed toward nailing the English word so tight to the French one that nothing can ever prize them apart.

I, myself, speak of what I know. When I was a little boy in England I learned to use a few small phrases in French, such as “Bonjour, Monsieur” and “Au revoir,” in the proper and real way; not connecting them with any link to English words but letting them spring out of the occasion. Anybody who understands the matter will understand what I mean. Later on I learnt French in Ontario and entered, traversed, and left the Provincial University with all sorts of distinction in it. Part of the teaching, like part of the curate’s egg at the Bishop’s table, was excellent no doubt, but the base of it was worthless; it had all been undermined and spoiled and forever rendered futile by the unspeakable matriculation examination which preceded it and which was a necessary preliminary to entrance to the French classes.

I mean it literally and absolutely when I say that I knew more French in the real sense of knowing it when I was a child of six years in England than when I was given first-class honours at graduation by the University. In the first case I knew a little; in the second case I knew not a single word that was not damaged by false association and contact. All the energy and industry and determination that I had put into my college work, all the interest and fascination that I felt for the language, all the pride that I could have felt in really knowing and using it – was dashed to pieces against the stone wall of the barrier erected in my path.

When I graduated I could not use a single word of French without thinking of English. I had to begin painfully and wearily all over again at the very bottom. Somehow I had stumbled upon the secret of a true beginning, and I began to try to collate in my mind the French words and the objects and ideas and to exclude the English. But it was hard work. The college had left its fatal mark deep stamped upon my brain. But at last, many years after my graduation, and with advantage of residence in Montreal, the light began to break.

If I live long enough to forget a little more of what I learnt at school I shall soon be able to speak French as well as a Montreal cab-man talks English. More than that I do not ask. But for my academic education I might have spoken French with the easy fluency with which the girls behind the notion counters of the Montreal department stores rip off their alternative languages. For such higher competence I can only have a despairing admiration. It is not for me. Yet let me speak as the cab-man and the car conductor speak, and I am content to depart in peace. For I shall know that if a French angel (such is the kind I should prefer) opens the gate to me and says “D’où venez-vous?” I shall answer “Je viens de Montréal,” without first framing the thought in English.

Let us consider a little further the matter under discussion. The whole of the teaching of school French is directed toward passing the matriculation examination of the colleges. This examination is conducted on paper in English. It has therefore absolutely no connection with the use of the ear as a means of hearing language. In fact, the language is regarded as a thing seen but not heard. I am told that people thus taught, when they land at Calais or Dieppe, are often seen to grasp their ears at the first tingling of the new sensation of hearing a language spoken. Moreover, the examination in question consists, entirely, or almost so, of writing out English translations of French words and of translating written English words into French ones.

The typical form of a French examination test is to hand out to the candidate a rapid-fire series of silly-looking little grammatical difficulties involving a queer sequence of pronouns or something of the sort. Some such exercise as this is given:

Translate into French:

Speak to us of it. Do not speak of it to them with me. Let him have some of it for them. Lend it to us, but do not lend it to them. Etc., etc., etc.

I should like to put Victor Hugo and a Montreal cab-man down in front of this and see what utter hash they would make of it. The truth is that ability to do this kind of translation-gymnastics, this leaping in and out in a kind of egg-shell dance among the pronouns, can only be accomplished at a dreadful expense of damage in other directions. The wretched literalism involved is absolutely fatal.

I do not say that a person who really knew French and knew English could not translate these things. He might. But the prospect would make him tired. And probably in about half a page of this stuff he would make a slip or two in whichever language was not his mother tongue. But notice. The highly trained girl from Seaforth High School who has never seen the sails of the Moulin Rouge will make no slip at all. She will translate with absolute accuracy every last one of these rotten-looking sentences. Yet if the examiner said to her in French, “My child, you have answered admirably, come and have lunch with me at the Café Americain,” she would blush the ruby red of detected ignorance.

But this juggling with pronouns and idioms is only a part of the idiocy of the school translation system. There is plenty more of it. The pupil is not only taught to translate the ordinary common words that he would really need if he were ever, poor soul, actually going to use French, but he is taught right at the outset of his instruction a string of words, or rather the translation of a string of words, that he is never conceivably going to use at all. Just because these words have a peculiar plural they are dragged in at the very opening of the pupil’s acquaintance with the language. Most of them he will never see again, except of course on an Ontario examination paper.

Bal, carnaval, chacal, nopal, regal, cal, have, so it appears, irregular plurals. Who cares if they have? The way to learn an irregular plural is by happening to want to use the word often enough to learn it. That is the way in which an English child learns that the plural of foot is feet, and a French child that the plural of bal is bals. Similarly the words bail, email, corail, soupirail, vantail, vitrail, have irregular plurals. But what of that? Wait till one wants to use them or runs up against them in the course of speaking or reading French. It is awful, and it is futile, to learn them in a list; and it is still more awful to parade the list on an examination paper as if knowledge of it were a real test of the degree of attainment of a person learning French.

But since the examination has to be faced and since the examination is sure to contain some of these specimens as a test, the little books of instruction carry exercises that run:

Have you the opals of the jackals?

No, but my father has the enamels of the leases.

This kind of thing used to give me the idea that French conversation must be awfully silly. The two Frenchmen who had just asked about opals and jackals would suddenly break off in a terrible flurry to say:

“Where are the stained glass windows? Where are the folding doors?”

Many school-boys must have thought the French a peculiarly unstable people, incapable of fixed attention.

Or turn from nouns to verbs. The school pupil learns these in a list. The Montreal cab-man learns them by their use. When the school pupil proposes to say “We shall see” in French, he starts off from the English “to see” – French voir; future, je verrai, tu verras, il verra – Ha! ha! – he’s getting near it now! Nous verrons, “we shall see”! Triumph! Now the cab-man (whether French by birth or English) has learned that group of sounds, nous verrons, in a lump, associated with the idea. Or else he hasn’t learned it at all. But if he has, he knows it and uses it in the real true sense of language. The college matriculant, wanting to use it, stands dumb with a perfect fury of rapid conjugation boiling up in his mind till it boils over as nous verrons – half a minute too late for use.

—

It might of course be claimed that even this defective method of teaching at least opens up the language as literature and leads the way to the study of its history and philology. People who never expect to talk French may still, it is claimed, enjoy the pleasure of reading the great masterpieces of French literature without a translation, and the advantage of reading the French books and journals of the hour for which there is no translation. There is of course something in this argument, but far less than one might suppose. Experience shows that people who have learned French without being able to pronounce it decently, without any power of understanding it by the ear and without the ability to read it without the English words showing through the French print, seldom go on reading it at all. For technical purposes they may puzzle it out; in rare cases – I have known such – they make of the unspoken, unheard language a sort of bridge to the literature of the past; but in the vast majority of cases such French, as far as culture goes, gets nowhere. The appreciation of literature is too dim, when the words are mere mechanical symbols lacking life; even parchments of philology rustle dry when a living language is thus numbered with the dead.

But let me turn from the negative to the positive. Finding fault is one thing, and improvement is another. So far, I admit, I have merely spoken of how not to learn a modern language. But I am prepared to go in the other direction and show how to learn it, with less difficulty, ever so much more reality and far happier results. I will undertake to teach anybody any modern language perfectly in five minutes – not the whole of it, which nobody ever knows, but just a little bit of it; and with that beginning he can go on as far as he likes. For example I would take him out from my house where I write this book and have him meet on the road an Ojibway Indian from the Reserve near by and call out to him “Aneen! b’jou!” After he had said that quite a few times to quite a few Indians it would begin to seem a natural thing to say to an Indian when you met him. After he had said it a year or two he would go on saying it in his sleep. But if he asked what do the words mean, I would not tell him. If he starts breaking them into fractions of English, it’s all over with Ojibway; all he needs to know is that that is what you say when you say it.

The little bits of foreign language that we really make our own – such as carte blanche and pâté de foie gras and eau de vie – come to us just that way. English is shut out; we never think of “white card” or of “pastry of fat liver.” Still less do we deliberately make blanche feminine to fit with carte. In fact we don’t notice that it is feminine. A person fitting the genders together gets left behind in conversation. Gender forms are only things that you notice, and group together perhaps, after you begin to acquire the language. It is of no help whatsoever to learn them in lists; each one must be used with any combination it comes into. There is no royal road and no way of shortening it.

I am not here merely advocating the use of what is often called the “natural” method – the plan of learning languages by talking and hearing them. Few people ever have the opportunity to talk them enough and hear them enough to go very far. Few people can go to France and stay there for ten years, and for people at home “conversation” lessons, unsupported by any other form of effort and instruction, break down of their own weight. They begin in a burst of enthusiasm, gradually turn into something like annoyance. The teacher is so fluent, the pupil so helpless, the sense of progress is soon changed for a sort of expanding horizon of ignorance. There comes a happy moment when the lessons are dropped, and nothing remains but “Bonjour, Monsieur” and “Oh, oui.”

Nor am I, for the present, trying to explain how the learning of French, or any other foreign language, can be fitted in as a class exercise in school or college. What I am here talking of is how you get it into your own head. In this, as in the whole scope of education, it is overwhelmingly your own effort, your own initiative that counts. What people learn best is what they teach themselves, what they learn of their own prompting.

One recalls in the Pickwick Papers the statement of Mr. Weller Senior that he had taken a good deal o’ pains with the education of his son by letting him run in the streets when he was very young and shift for himself. It is the grain of truth in this that makes it funny, the incongruity between what appears to be utter neglect but is described as calculated foresight. As usual the humour turns on the revelation of truth by incongruous contrast. If the little Weller had had no native gift for seeing and learning, for storing up experience and profiting by it, the whole opportunity of the streets would have been wasted on him. And if little Weller had attended a sociological class on Life in the Street (half course, half term, one credit), he would have been unfitted to live on them.

The beginning of learning is the urge to learn. The teacher and the class exercise are just a supplement and a help, but never can be the motive power. Wisdom cannot be poured into the pupil out of a jug. What I have in mind is a process that supplements any conversation method used, and any reading done – a process, carried on in one’s own mind, of excluding one’s own native language, of setting up a direct connection between the sound of the words and the things and actions that they stand for. A person trained in this way, if he cannot express himself in the foreign language, can at least be silent in it; what is meant is that his own language, English let us say, will not rise up in his mind and choke him. That is why cab-men, hotel waiters and ticket collectors seem to talk French so easily. Nothing else comes into their minds. If they’re stuck for a word or a phrase they must find one; but at least no English will “butt in” as it would with us.

But before developing this idea more fully I want first to indicate how very great, in the learning of languages, are the limitations of what can be accomplished by ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. A great deal of misunderstanding and myth and legend surround the acquisition of foreign languages. People of humble minds outside of academic circles imagine that there are various other people who speak half a dozen languages perfectly. As a matter of fact there are none, and never have been except on the plan explained above for the use of the Ojibway language – perfect as far as it goes.

We read in history of the famous Scottish scholar, the “Admirable” Crichton of three centuries ago, that he possessed twelve languages and that once when journeying to Paris he invited “the university” to meet him in disputation at nine o’clock on such and such a morning when he would be ready to dispute in any one of them. We are told by Milton that a man may pick up the Italian tongue in an odd hour. Similar myths run all down our history and are matched by current references to people who can speak three or four languages perfectly, and especially to Russians to whom an extra language is an easier matter than an extra suit of clothes. I remember having been told of an official interpreter in a magistrate’s court in Toronto who had to deal with nondescript Europeans of all sorts of languages. He had such a gift for languages that if a man turned up whose language he didn’t know he would ask the magistrate for a couple of days’ delay and then go home and learn the language. It sounds easy, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately the learning of a language is a much more arduous matter than that. It must begin in a humble way with nouns and phrases – never with grammar and sentences. And from the very beginning the learner, and here everything depends on himself and not on the teacher, should try to connect the foreign word (sound and letters) with the thing, the idea, that it stands for and to break it away from what appears to be its English equivalent. As a matter of fact there are probably no two words that are exact equivalents in two different languages. A house is not une maison and a hotel is not always un hôtel. Drinks in America are sometimes said to be “on the house”; they are never “sur la maison.” A French duke, no matter how impoverished, always tries to keep a hotel in the city. An English duke, no matter how rich, refuses to.

Words and phrases are the beginning. But they must be carefully divorced from grammar and grammatical rules about changes for the plural and so on. Those things come later on, as they did in learning our own language in infancy. Most of us can remember reading out of a grammar that “oxen, children and brethren make the plural in n,” and thinking: “Why, so they do! How interesting!” Tables of verbs will never teach a person to say je viendrai, and je verrai, and je voudrais; you have to know them first, word by word, bit by bit, and afterwards looking over a table of them helps to give them a sort of consistency.

The case is still stronger with phrases. To analyse them out and put English to them spoils them as French. In nearly all phrases there is not one single English equivalent for the French or one single French equivalent for the English. Take the most overworked phrase in the French language, that joy of the conversational tourist, “Ça ne fait rien.” This means, word by word, “That doesn’t make nothing,” and by sense, “That doesn’t matter; that makes no difference; it’s all the same to me; not at all, my dear chap; that’s all right” – and so on for a page. A person who has learned to say “Ça ne fait rien,” as arising from circumstances and not from translation, is already talking French.

The most extreme case of the futility of translation methods is found in the use of moods and tenses, as in the employment of the subjunctive. This, for us, is the most difficult thing in the grammar of a foreign language because in English we have almost lost the subjunctive – that is, almost forgotten how to think in the subjunctive. Patriots are often trained to “think imperially.” Linguists have to be trained to “think subjunctively.” In English we have drifted so far away from the use of the subjunctive that our sense of its value has grown dim. It is like a lost or decaying faculty, as is the sense of smell in the human race. In English we put everything into the indicative mood as if it was a fact. We write, “They say that he is very rich” – whether we mean that he really is, or only that people claim he is. We say, “They charged against Socrates that he was corrupting the youth of Athens.” A Greek or a Roman would interject, “Do you mean that that is what they charged, or that that is what he was really doing?”

In French the indicative has to some extent replaced the subjunctive but scarcely at all as compared with English. French people can still feel a subjunctive. When they say, “Il faut qu’il soit bien méchant,” they are not saying that he is a bad lot, but only that he would have to be to fulfill certain conditions. English people in talking French try to work out subjunctives from a rule, without ever having really got the idea of them. I remember hearing an English lady at Calais request a customs official to let her pass with the words, “Permettez, monsieur, que je passasse.” The polite Frenchman bowed and said, “Passassiez, Madame.” The lady moved on with a gratified feeling of bilingualism achieved. A friend of mine once told me that in leading up to a proposal to a very charming French girl, he asked her if she would mind crossing the ocean. She replied, “Ah, non! si j’étais avec quelqu’un qui me fit oublier les ennuis du voyage.” His astonishment and admiration of her use of the preterite subjunctive struck him silent so long that he lost her. Two lives went astray over a lost mood.

English people can, with effort and difficulty, reacquire the subjunctive sense. But if not, the only thing to do is to go ahead without it; trample it down and forget it. After all no Frenchman, and few Irishmen, can ever learn to use shall and will. The subjunctive must either be used instinctively and through the sense of it or left alone. Seen in this light how terrible is such a thing as a “grammatical exercise” beginning with the dictum, “In French, verbs of fearing, avoiding, denying, forbidding, etc., etc. govern the subjunctive. Ne is inserted before the verb in the subordinate clause to indicate an affirmative conclusion; ne pas, to indicate a negative.” Then follows an exercise. Translate: “I am afraid he is coming. I am not afraid he is coming. I am afraid he is not coming. I am not afraid he is not coming.” Enough of that stuff puts a student of languages beyond resuscitation.

The time comes presently when the pupil in learning French on a proper method may begin to read it. And here again the secret of learning is to try to say good-bye to the English translation as rapidly as possible. “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” is what the French call our “Little Red Riding Hood.” But having said “Little Red Riding Hood” once in this connection, never say it again. Call up the vision of the little girl picking flowers in the wood, her red cloak falling back from her shoulders, and connect with the picture the words Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Learn what a little bit of the French story means and say it over and over again; get it away from the English and as you go further on with reading never bother as to what a French word “means” (in English) provided you can hit the general sense and go on. Better one half the sense in French than all of it in English.

When you read French in this way there will come a time when you find that you can read it, more or less straight ahead, without thinking of English. It is like learning to swim. It comes to you, after the hard initial effort that made it possible, with a warm glow of accomplishment. After that the language is yours. You have set up in your mind a division into compartments in one of which is English, in the other French. Henceforth they will not interfere. When you read French in this way a lot of the words will carry vague meanings that gradually clarify; but it doesn’t matter much whether they do – just as, in English, people go on reading sea stories all their lives without knowing what the “lee-scuppers” are except that people fall into them, or whether the “binnacle” is what the captain sits in or where the men sleep.

The French speech of a person trained in this proper way and the French writing of a person properly taught are necessarily for a long time filled with inaccuracies; children in learning to talk English at first are apt to run their words to a pattern, for example to make all the verbs “weak” – to say, “I bited the apple,” “He sawed me coming,” and so on. This clears away of itself, not by learning rules but by continuous and unconscious imitations.

But what is utterly unnatural is the false and overdone standard of excellence of the student of French in a grammar class, writing out twenty sentences of subjunctives without an error, finding feminines for blanc, for beau, for turc, for tourangeau and so forth, as easily as picking flowers. The method of teaching French here shares in the fault that goes with all examination discipline – the pressure to put on the last increment of excellence that only comes at an inordinate cost, an inordinate sacrifice of other things. A steamer whose economic speed is sixteen knots can perhaps be forced up to twenty at a double cost, and even beyond that, at an expense utterly disproportionate. A pupil who takes over ninety per cent in French grammar is like a little tug raising enough steam to move a freighter, at the expense of being all boiler and no cargo.

I admit the full difficulty of turning what is here said to its practical application in re-forming the curriculum of a school. But just as the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, so a clear sense of what is desired, of the goal to be achieved, will sooner or later find the means of achievement. But even without attempting in any degree to lay down a school curriculum in French, one or two generalities may at least be hazarded. Students ought to begin with nouns and names, learned off picture-placards by the oral method of fifty years ago – spelling and sound together. Follow these pictures by phrases, and plenty of them, learned as far as possible without connection with English: Voici un hibou; Voilà un cheval. . . . Steal from bygone Ollendorf one or two question-and-answer forms endlessly repeated: Voyez-vous le cheval! Oui, je vois le cheval. . . . Let at least all class-room directions be in French: Asseyez-vous. . . . Fermez la porte. . . . Écoutez bien. . . . And exhort the student at the start to try to get away from his own language.

A little further on comes reading out loud by the teacher; here enters such a story as Le Petit Chaperon Rouge – the English of it only explained once, just as little as is necessary, and then endless repetition of the reading. Dictation of French, to be written and spelled by the students as best they can and turned back and forward into Ollendorf questions, is a true linguistic discipline, the best there is, and the one, I imagine, the most nearly abandoned by our colleges in their entrance tests. And most of all it is necessary to realize that a percentage examination, carried on in writing, and calling for a false degree of excellence in detail, in this as in nearly every other part of education, spells frustration and defeat. But of that I speak in more general and fuller terms in another chapter.

In what I have said about the teaching of French I have been referring to the situation in North America – the United States and Canada – where it is probably the worst in the world. The whole power of a vast, expensive and enthusiastic public education is here directed along false lines of effort. In Liberia, where they make no effort at all, I am sure they do it better.

In England for various reasons the situation is different from ours. The proximity of France across the Channel, the fact that thousands of people learn their French from actual contacts and the fact that “native” teachers are everywhere available counts for much. So too does the fact that French was widely taught in England before the era of modern “translation” text-books, before analytical sentence-translation, and was taught largely in phrases and on a “natural” method. Even the earlier translation texts were not like ours. If anyone will glance at the famous Ollendorf of a hundred years ago he will see that it aims at a constant repetition of similar French forms by means of questions and answers. “Avez-vous le chapeau de mon père?” “Non, Monsieur, je n’ai pas le chapeau de votre père.”

Ollendorf seems to be wrong in admitting English as the medium. But the intention of his famous “method” was that the pupil would, by the repetition system, jump out of English to French; each French sentence would suggest a new one; each French thought would reproduce itself in a slight variation. “Avez-vous mangé votre déjeuner?” “Non, Monsieur, je n’ai pas encore mangé mon déjeuner.”

It has been only more recently that up-to-date textbooks on the model of their own begin to swamp out older and better methods.

Now the English are naturally the worst linguists in the world, but they carry down from their insular history the remains of a contempt for foreign nations, including foreign languages. The Eskimos are accustomed to call themselves “the people” and the English in many things share the Eskimo attitude. This sense of superiority, in point of language, carries advantages and disadvantages. English people are apt to consider that they “know French” when they are able to pass a few phrases back and forward across the lunch counter at Dieppe, or call out in a confident voice, “Garçon, l’addition, s’il vous plaît!” They are seldom interested in shades of pronunciation; they pronounce tenez and savez as if written in English tenny and savvie (to rhyme with “many” and “navvy”), and are willing to let it go at that. On the other hand, use and custom have enabled them to grasp far more easily than we do what a Frenchman is trying to say and to answer him with some such apposite phrase as “Très bien, Monsieur” or “Cela ne fait rien.”

I remember, as an illustration of this attitude, the visit to my university, McGill, about forty years ago, of Andre Siegfried, then an unknown and inquiring young Frenchman, since known to all the world. He stood and talked in easy effortless French to one of my elderly colleagues, an Englishman of the Oxford type. As Siegfried talked my colleague stood first on one foot and said, “Oui – oui – oui – ah, oui,” and then on the other foot and said, “Oh, non – non – non,” and then back to oui. Afterwards I heard him telling of the interview: “Delightful young man, speaks really excellent French. We chatted away for a long time – all in French, of course.”

This easy unconsciousness of the very problem of language gives a sort of reality to French in England, vastly different from the anxious, pathetic failure of French in America.

As a matter of fact, a full mastery of even two languages is a very rare thing. It can only come as the result of a special environment, the opportunity to talk both, the will to do so, and therewith a certain aptitude. What is ordinarily thought as bilingualism falls away below this.

Compare, for example, the “bilingual” city of Montreal, of whose one million people, some seven out of ten are French. All the French people of any education understand English, and all of them speak it in a way to make themselves easily understood for business and for ordinary conversation. But with a very few exceptions their speech falls far short of the range and power of people speaking their own language. They can say what they mean but they can neither adorn nor embellish it. Their pronunciation, of course, while pleasing enough, is not the same as ours; it may be better but it is not the same. Even their understanding of English of necessity falls short in point of appreciation of our literature; so much depends, especially in poetry and in the drama, on the full connotation of the words, the shades of meaning which they have taken on with us from infancy.

Can a foreigner fully distinguish the curfew “tolls the knell of parting day” from “rings the six o’clock bell”? Can he feel the appeal of a tide that “drew from out the boundless deep” and “turns again home”? “In Flanders fields the poppies blow!” Can any foreigner appreciate the delicacy of blow? We have no measure of the intimacy of their comprehension, but it is not unfair to doubt it.

As to the bilingualism of the English people of Montreal there is hardly any of it. Most of them learn a little French in school, recognize a lot of French words, especially those on sign-boards and know that “Guy Street!” as called out by the bilingual car-conductor is in French “Ghee!” The exceptions are too few to matter. Yet here is a city where an unobservant visitor, haunted by a myth, would say, “In Montreal, of course, everybody talks both English and French.”

People who have devoted attention to the subject of foreign languages may be inclined to differ from me as to their valuation of translation. They may argue that translation represents as it were the last word, the supreme exercise in language. The extraordinary difficulty of finding idiom for idiom, of carrying over from one language to the other an absolute identity of meaning with an equal excellence of diction, such difficulty is only matched by the attraction of doing it.

Now this is quite true. But such translation comes at the end not at the beginning of study.

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Has Economics
Gone to Seed?

Economists end to end – Knowledge that falls asleep – Political Economy as world gospel – The bottom falls out of it – The Spendthrift saves society – Bad money saves national trade – The colleges meet the situation – A catalogue of dead opinion – Economists dig in behind a barrage of x and y – Economics joins the Chinese Classics

Some years ago when I was the dinner guest of a famous club in Boston, the chairman of the evening introduced me in the following words: “Our guest tonight is an economist. I need hardly remind you, gentlemen, of the large part played in our life of today by our economists. Indeed it has been calculated that if all the economists were laid out in a line, end to end, starting at the Mexican border, they would reach” – the orator paused impressively and added – “nowhere.”

That, I say, was a few years ago. What was a genial joke then is plain fact now. In my opinion that is exactly where college economics stands. At a time when the world is in danger of collapse from the dilemma of wealth and want, the college economists can shed no light – or rather only a multitude of cross lights that will not focus to a single beam – in place of a lighthouse, wreckers’ signals, or, at best, fireworks, elaborate and meaningless.

The time has come to ask, has economics run to seed? Consider what we mean by the phrase. There comes a time in the life of plants and flowers, when bloom and freshness have passed away. The blossoms are gone, the green of bud and leaf has withered to a faded brown; on the shrivelled stem once bright with bloom there remains nothing but the ragged seed-pods, sear and unsightly. In these, indeed, lies resurrection, the hope of future life, but, for the moment, use, purpose and beauty are gone. Let the wind scatter the seed for a new start on other ground.

So it is with the growth of human knowledge. It rises in new force, vigorous in life, brilliant in expression and beneficent in power. Time passes. New growth has stopped. Knowledge, like a withering stick, becomes rigid and formal. Adaptability has gone. Leaf has become wood; speculation has turned to authority. The doddering thought has run to seed. The hand that holds the pen is dead.

So it was vast centuries ago when the Chinese, a brilliant nation in the sunrise of intellectual growth, invented a system of symbols, of little pictures, that permitted the written communication of thought. It was a marvellous advance. But over these little pictures the Chinese fell asleep for five thousand years, mumbling and reciting the “sacred books,” sacred only in their primitive simplicity, like an idiot among savages.

The Babylonians measured out the sky and baked their knowledge on clay, in wedge-shaped characters. They moved, stopped – and then the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold and Babylon was buried in the sand.

In Alexandria the new Greek science and medicine ran its course for over five hundred years. There the Ptolemies built a great library of half a million books, a lighthouse four hundred feet high with beams focused far out at sea, a wonder of the world. Here were the triumphs of Euclid, of Aristarchus and of Galen. Then knowledge slowly crystallized; life and inquiry died out of it; the great weight of opinion of the dead suffocated the living. The conquering Arab overran it all, and the Caliph Omar burned its books in the name of a Mohammedan God.

When Greece and Rome declined, the Barbarians came, but among them grew up the schools of the Christian church, the schools of Alfred and Charlemagne, like beautiful little plants in the forest. These grew into the cloistered learning of the monastery, copying its parchment books in the quiet of a scriptorium, a sanctuary all still within, noise and battle without. Then the learning of the church, over-weighted and encrusted with age, turned to scholasticism, substituting words for things and grammar for thought, formal and worthless.

The Renaissance swept all this away, to put in its place the “humanities” and the classical scholarship which was the mainstay of our learning and our literature in England and America for three hundred years. The education of a “gentleman” was based on conjugations and declensions; young ladies’ minds were sweetened and enriched with Greek mythology, and America named its rising towns from the Rome and Syracuse of antiquity.

As the modern world of industry and machinery and democracy grew up, the world of classical education failed to notice that it was there and dozed quietly to rest, murmuring Latin quotations in its sleep.

As it slept, there rose up beside it, alert and eager with life, the new science of political economy. This, as fashioned by Adam Smith and Ricardo and their American disciples, seemed a wonderful dogma, fit to rank with Galileo’s telescope and Isaac Newton’s apple. It was so simple that it could all be written in a few pages. It told the poor exactly why they were so. Work, industry, liberty, free competition and a police force were all that was needed for social welfare. Every man got what he was worth and was worth what he got, and the world went of itself.

Not that this bright new dogma was taught in the colleges. Gentlemen didn’t need it and the poor couldn’t afford it. But the Cobdens and the Brights and the Manchester School put it round the world. It seemed like a gospel of light. Russian nihilists in the Siberian mines hid copies of John Stuart Mill under their shirts, like early Christians with a gospel.

Of teaching, I say, there was little. The East India Company first taught political economy in their college at Haileybury. Their cadets were supposed to need it, to work it on the Hindu. The first lecturer was Malthus, the apostle of the empty cradle; but he had a hare-lip; the students couldn’t understand him; so no harm was done. In Scotland also political economy was taught in college before and after Adam Smith; not under that name but as a branch of philosophy and the theory of moral sentiments. As such it turned into a sort of dream, like philosophy itself, bankrupt since Plato but garrulous as an aged patient in a workhouse ward. When political economy joined it, that made two. But as far as political economy meant practical precept – work, save and take what you can get – the Scotch didn’t need it in school. They had it as home work.

With the modernization of our education which began about fifty years ago, economics came sweeping in as a college-subject. Students cried for it. Benefactors died for it. It reached and swelled till it filled a B.A. curriculum, turned into a graduate study and after that students could go to Germany and get more of it, and keep on with it until they died.

But even then, though no one realized it, the bottom was out of it. Political economy had taken too much for granted. Property, and above all property in land. Where did that come from? asked Henry George. And inheritance? Loosen the dead hand and let us see what it holds in its fingers. What? Is that fair? All that vast wealth! And labour, asked Karl Marx, does it get all it produces? If so, why hire it? And competition, asked a thousand complaining voices, as the complexity of our machine industry grew, why is competition fair, if the strong can crush the weak and vested interest take its toll of necessity?

Even the theory of the matter turned upside down like a capsized boat. Does cost of production really govern the value of a thing, or does the value of a thing dictate its cost? And with that the theorists were off to a new start, perplexed as Milton’s arguing devils, who “found no end in wondering mazes lost.” Thus did the experts wrangle and jangle in their own Paradise Lost. With the new century, economics, with the bottom knocked out of it, was carried forward floating on the mud, like Stephenson’s first railway.

As a result, economic science has got itself into the tangle in which it is tied today. Of all the “economic truths” of a hundred years ago, I do not know of one – literally, not of one – that would pass unchallenged. Lord Bacon tells us that Pontius Pilate asked in jest, “What is truth?” and “would not stay for an answer.” If he asked the question of the economists of today and waited for an answer, he would have to arrange his board for a long time in advance.

Nothing stands. John Stuart Mill was convinced that “productive labour” was the basis of social welfare – that and nothing else. Labour spent on producing mere luxuries was wasted. The spendthrift was an enemy to society. What he did was to call for velvet clothes and champagne. Mill was a simple man, and a velvet suit and a bottle of champagne seemed to him the last word for a wild time. We could show him something now. But the idea was that Mill’s spendthrift, by calling for workmen to make him his suit and fix his drink, diverted them from producing real things that do not pass away – such as bridges, machines and factories. “A demand for commodities,” said Mill, “is not a demand for labour.” This he made one of his “four fundamental propositions” that held up the whole structure like the pillars of the mediaeval firmament.

But where is the argument today? Smashed to fragments. The loudest of our complaints are the voices calling for more spending of money. Anything to start it going. Prime the pump. Pension the old men. Give everybody in Alberta $25 a month. Don’t produce, spend. Cut production down, limit it. Let the hog die unborn and pay the farmer for the corn he doesn’t raise, on the sole condition that he will spend the money and not save it.

There again, saving! That, with all the economists from Adam Smith to his latest imitator, was the prime force in progress. There the interest of the individual and of society focused to a single light. If everybody worked hard and saved money, then everybody would get rich, the future would be provided for, and rainy days be stalled off till every place would be as good as Nevada.

They never stopped to ask what happens if everyone sells and nobody buys – if we save enough to build so many machines that there’s nothing for them to do. What if we do provide for the future? It hasn’t come yet. How are we to get along till it does? Hence all the wrangle and jangle over “technology,” technological improvement and technological unemployment, the waste of abundance and the superfluity of productive power.

I am not proposing to unravel the tangle – only to indicate it, coiled all over the ground on which we try to advance. In fact, it begins to look as if a “rainy day” were one of the best things in nature, and the more sudden the shower the better. Come on, loosen up and spend something! Have a cigarette.

So it seems that the bottom is out of the saving theory. That particular pillar is undermined and falling over. You may for the moment help yourself by saving money, but you’re a poor pup in the social sense if you do. Go and buy a velvet suit and order a quart of extra dry.

Saving money! And there again the moment you say “money,” off goes another explosion and up into the air a whole new mass of charred fragments. Scarcely a sentence is left intact of the old monetary theory that seemed as solid as bedrock. There it lay, the basis of our economic life and international trade – the doctrine of sound money. It seemed as if half the economic evils of the past had come about for lack of the knowledge and practice of it. Every student read in his economic scriptures of the evil of the Continental Dollar, the madness of the French Assignat and of how the Greenback was fought, slain and redeemed, as the dragon was fought by St. George.

Where is all this theory now? Nothing left, after the war explosion that blew it up, nothing except fierce, hot blasts of contrary opinion rushing into the vacuum. Monetary theory, or at least monetary practice, denounces solid, sound money, and calls for money at least as bad as and if possible worse than that of other nations. “If you devalue your pound, remember we’ll devalue our dollar. You can’t work that stuff on us!” To cling to sound money would be to become a Christian all alone in the arena.

Of all these doctrines I am not attacking one. Of all these problems I am not solving any. I am only drawing attention to the hopeless muddle in which economic thought and practice has involved itself. It has become a mass of contradiction. Every nation is calling in one breath for freer trade and economic nationalism, for a sound currency as debased as possible, for rigid economy with plenty of spending – in other words, calling out, “High!” “Low!” “Up!” “Down!” “Begin!” “Stop!” – till all is a mere babel of voices.

Perhaps the best index of what has happened to the science of economics is what has happened to the teaching of it in our colleges. The colleges have a system for meeting such difficulties.

When opinion gets confused – living opinion – the colleges can always fall back on the opinion of the dead. If living men can’t think, let’s have a catalogue of all that dead men ever thought, and the students can learn that. In fact, economics can be all dosed up with history, as doctors dose a patient with iron. And statistics. If we don’t understand the industrial world, at least let us have statistics. The continental area of the United States is 3,026,789 square miles and the number of spindles in Lowell, Mass., is 201,608 (or is it?) That’s the stuff. Make a four-year course and give a degree in it – a D.F.

And with that, of course, goes the familiar therapeutics of putting in “qualifications,” what is called the “relative” view – that a thing is partly so and partly isn’t so. Any book of what is called “general economics,” after indicating the continental area of the United States and the number of spindles in Lowell, Mass., proceeds to a series of propositions as to why wages partly rise and partly don’t, why prices may fall, or perhaps leap up, proving that black is in a sense white, except that where it is white it is partly black. This course is called Economics 1. From it you get to first base.

And, most of all, if we can’t understand it, let’s at least see that outsiders don’t. Let us dress economics up in esoteric language, give it a jargon of its own, and break away from plain terms like labour and profit and money and poverty. Let’s talk of “categories” and “increments” and “margins” and “series.” Let’s call our appetite for breakfast our consumer’s marginal demand. That will fool them. And if I buy one cigar but won’t buy two, call that my submarginal saturation point for nicotine.

Above all, let us call in the help of the psychologist. He’s the fellow with the technique. Turn him onto the theory of value, and grandfather Adam Smith won’t know his own offspring.

Accordingly, the theorist of today, following in the tracks of the dead scholasticism, the lost Babylonian and the Egyptian dozing in the dust of the pyramids, runs his economics to finer and finer distinctions that have lost all meaning for everyday life. He can no longer talk of our wants; he must have marginal wants, degrees of wants, increments of satisfaction, curves of desire meeting in an equilibrium. The difference as between plain language and this jargon is as between digestion and a stomach-ache. To the college economist a boy standing in front of a pastry shop represents a submarginal increment of satisfaction. Give him ten cents and he comes out with a consumer’s surplus in him. You can see it sticking out.

If anyone thinks this argument overdone, this language strained, let him open with me the latest of the books on pure economic theory, the books that have such titles as the Theory of Value, of Capital, of Investment, anything like that. It would be invidious to name them singly since this is an attack not on a man but on a method.

Here before me on my desk is one of the latest, a book that will be pronounced by the reviewers as one of the really “big” things – an “outstanding contribution,” that’s the phrase. The ordinary person can no more read it than he can read Chinese. Here is a sample of how this outstanding contribution stands out:

The slope of the curve passing through any point p has indeed a very definite and important meaning. It is the amount of y which is needed by the individual in order to compensate him for the loss of a small unit of x. Now the gain in utility got by gaining such an amount of y equals amount of y gained multiplied by marginal utility of y; the loss in utility got from losing the corresponding amount of x equals amount of x lost multiplied by marginal utility of y (so long as the quantities are small). Therefore, since the gain equals the loss, the slope of the curve

| am’t of y gained | | marg’l utility of x
== | _________ | == | _________
| am’t of x lost | | marg’l utility of y

The author naïvely adds:

“Have we any further information about the shapes of the curves?”

No, I hope not.

I was once the guest of that merry institution, the Savage Club of London. Among the mock stunts of the evening was a speech supposedly in Chinese with an interpreter to explain it. After the bogus Chinese guest had spoken about half a dozen sentences, the chairman politely interrupted, and asked of the interpreter, “Now, what has Mr. Woo-hoo said?” “Nothing, so far,” said the interpreter.

The same is true of the quotation. It only means that when you have enough, you don’t want any more.

A thousand chapters have been written similar to that sample. Take enough of that mystification and muddle, combine it with the continental area of the United States, buttress it up on the side with the history of dead opinion and dress it, as the chefs say, with sliced history and green geography, and out of it you can make a doctor’s degree in economics. I have one myself.

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Psychology:
The Black Art of the College

The Black Art in all ages – Hypnotism enters college – Psychology’s department store – Deep Thought counter – Minds tested free – Psychology and school education – Child expression by ink-throwing – The Psychology of Salesmanship looks the Prospect in the eye – Intellectual test for Willie Worm as a calliper

Among the arts in every age there is one that is the Black Art – mysterious, fearsome, a thing to dread. The Black Art comes and goes – now this, now that. Savages have their Black Arts of incantations, Voodoo rites and medicine men. Earlier Christianity had its attendant devils, its witches and its sorcerers. Along the edges of the light that it gave the world was a dark cloud of superstition, fear, exorcism, persecution, terror. The early learning had its astrologer, in a cone-shaped cap and a gown figured with the Zodiac, pointing with his finger at horoscopes and disasters. But time turned him into a professor of astronomical physics, quite harmless. Beside him was the alchemist, working with crucibles, to transform lead to gold, and seeking the Elixir of Life. He was an awesome being, but has faded long since into a high school chemistry teacher, not so much concerned with how to live forever, as with how to live next winter. As Christianity dropped its devils and its daily miracles and its exorcisms, it faded, for college purposes, into “comparative religion,” a first-year subject, popular as a snap. Students elect religion as cheerfully as they did in Scotland three hundred years ago. And it never fails them.

But a Black Art there has to be. Somewhere plain truth must fade to mystery; somewhere life must meet its border line; somewhere mind and matter present their irreconcilable contrast. Where one art abandons this shuddering mystery, another takes it up. One can see the Black Arts of the past and present moving and changing like the belts of light and shadow in an electric sign. Some day physics, that began in the sunlight of the new solar system as the very embodiment of clarity and fact and measured space and ponderated matter, may be the Black Art. For with the breaking of the atom, the disappearance of solidity, the change of matter into force, the old mystery is all back again and ready for a new astrologer.

But at the present hour and in the colleges all around us psychology has turned into the Black Art.

Now when I was at college, fifty years ago, psychology was an entirely innocuous subject. It was taught by a venerable professor in a long black gown – all senior professors at that date had to be venerable – and he taught it as he had imported it in the wood straight from Scotland thirty years or so before. I didn’t take the subject myself but those of us outside of it understood that it dealt with such things as the “association of ideas” and whether mind was just a form of matter or matter merely a form of mind and how the mind “worked.” It seemed quite harmless. It ranked along with ethnology, and the brand-new subject, just imported to Canada, political economy, as things by which students could take honours without having had a long previous training, like the five days a week in Greek for four years that made us “honour matriculants” in classics, able to translate four or five lines of Homer without stopping. It never seemed then that the lean kine of psychology and economics would one day eat up the fat, and pick the dead bones of Greek.

But there existed then, outside of college, in the dark, a mysterious and evil thing called “hypnotism.” This wasn’t taught. It was practised by “professors,” far from venerable, and exhibited at ten cents a seat in third-rate public halls. The “professor” invited members of the audience to step up on the platform and be “hypnotized” and put through various antics. The audience didn’t know whether it was jest or earnest, all faked up, or all real, or partly both. Certainly the exhibitions always contrived to have a certain amount of buffoonery like the “comic relief” of our ten-twenty-thirty theatre.

I went one night with four or five fellow students to such an exhibition. The “professor” appeared on a stage, with a row of empty chairs, and a background of ropes and pulleys and apparatus grimly mediaeval. He invited members of the audience to step up. I asked my fellow students if they would step up with me. All but one refused. They had a wholesome contempt for hypnotism and a secret fear of it. Curley Wood, who went on the platform with me, was a nervous-looking youth who lived on cigarettes.

We were given two end seats, and various other “subjects” came clumping up onto the platform. The “professor” then announced that he would look into the eyes of each subject and decide whether he was hypnotizable. He began with me as end-man. He stooped forward and looked fixedly in my eyes. I didn’t like it. I was sorry I had come up. I wanted to get out of it. Then I remembered that in the Middle Ages the devil couldn’t reach you if you kept reciting the pater noster in Latin. I didn’t know that but I started reciting to myself the 47th proposition of Euclid, about the square on the hypotenuse. That beat the “professor.” “You can step down,” he said. I did, with a great gladness.

He looked at Curley’s eyes and Curley turned as pale as his own cigarettes. “You can stay,” said the “professor.” He kept a few others. To judge by the absurd things he presently made them do – too absurd for likelihood – I should imagine they were hand-picked. But Curley Wood wasn’t; there was no collusion in his case. Yet the “professor” seemed able to take a mortgage on his will power. “Tell the audience your name,” he said. “Curley Wood,” answered my fellow student quite clearly. “Now try to tell it to them again and you can’t,” said the “professor” with a Rosicrucian gesture. Curley couldn’t. Vox faucibus haesit.

“Now I’ll throw a rope round you and drag you to this side of the stage. Resist if you like, but you’ll have to come.” . . . All that and more, till at last he let Curley go and a tom-fool comic effect replaced him. I said nothing to Curley that night. Later he said, “He had me rattled.” He never gave any further explanation.

That kind of thing was outside of college. With it there went séances, and colloquies with the dead (such as there have been since Adam died) and attempts at thought transference, with doses of Madame Blavatsky and theosophy. A new occult world was growing up like weeds among the tombstones of dead superstitions. Naturam expellas furco, tamen usque recurrit.

Then came the Psychical Research Society and the attempt to reduce the occult world to scientific experiment and demonstration. And with that opened new fields of medicine, mind-cure, therapeutics, as old as mind itself but breaking to new life in our own century. Physiology, now better equipped with magnetism and electricity, moved on from Galvani’s dead frog with the salt on its leg to delicate experiments that called aloud for new theories of mind and matter. This new medical physiology reached out its hand, and psychology took it, and the dusty old professor in the long gown turned into Psyche the Soul.

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In other words psychology from being nothing in the curriculum but a humble branch of metaphysics, itself a subdivision of philosophy at large, expanded till it became a whole department, with all kinds of affiliations and extensions, and broke outside the bounds of college to invade life in the open.

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Psychology has overrun the curriculum by the sheer audacity of its onslaught. It has expanded in all directions at once. It has taken over the dream of the metaphysician and the micrometer of the physiologist. It’s an art and it’s a science. It’s a theory and it’s a practice. It’s an experiment and a dogma. It is business. It is religion. It has become a regular academic department store with a Deep Thought Counter, Practical Experiments in the basement and Minds Tested Free near the front door.

In the college which I know best, and, I am sure, in many others, if a benefactor leaves money for a scholarship “in liberal arts,” psychology says: “Let me in on that. I’m an art. I’m the biggest dream you ever saw. I’m all thought.” If it’s for science, psychology says: “Take me in on this. I’m science straight out; look at this testing machine. Stick your brain under it.” And if it is a medical gift: “Count me in. Therapeutics is my second name.” If it’s for theology, psychology slips on a white surplice and points to its courses on the psychology of religion.

Audacity wins. The other subjects stood meekly by and watched psychology take over their fields. To physiology it said: “You take the knife and do the work and I’ll make the talk.” To economics: “Give me anything your students don’t understand about value and demand and I’ll fix it so that they don’t need to understand it.” And to the college at large: “Hand me over the students and I’ll test their brains. That’s all you need.” . . . And it hinted behind its hand, “I can test the professors, too, if you like,” and in a lower voice, “What about the President?”

Having conquered the college, psychology turned to business, set up courses in the Psychology of Business Relations, and gave lectures at luncheon clubs on the Psychology of Advertising. It frightened the business world into submission by threatening it with a course on the Analytical Measurement of Human Personality, a thing no business man would want done to himself, though he might like to have it worked on his employees. It let the business man know that it had its eye on him by announcing courses on the Observation of Social Behaviour, and it tempted his alliance by hinting at a course on leadership. The business man capitulated, had his employees measured on the Analytical Plan, and young women applicants tested by the Orthogenic Method instead of by being taken out to lunch.

Then psychology turned to administration and began testing soldiers by asking them to multiply three by three and watching their “reaction” to it. It has invented for us a world of “reactions” and “complexes” and “fixations” and “inhibitions.” It has its eye now on the criminal law, for which it aspires to be the star witness, replacing the finger-print expert and the toxicologist and the chemical-solution man by the psychiatrist holding the scales of life and death on whether murder was done as a “fun-impulse” or as part of an “inferiority complex.”

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How much does this whole pretentious claim amount to, and what room is there for psychology in sound education? In my opinion, very little. Put back all that is mere common sense; restore to medicine what is medicine; leave business to business men, and psychology will be back again with nothing but its original mystery and its black gown.

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Psychology “butts in” on our educational system at the very start. It begins to reduce the world, even of little children, to a maze of “complexes” and “suggestions,” “fixations” and “behaviours.” Plain right and wrong, common sense, goodness and badness get mixed up in a world that has a terrifying aspect of dark forces working through the individual and not of him. The psychology school child is possessed of new devils, which are working through him to expression. It is not he who threw the ink at the teacher; it was a complex that had got inside him. The teacher is not faced with a case of discipline but with a “behaviour problem.” She must wipe off the ink and think it out.

Let me quote from a recent educational book, one of a multiplying many:

John F—— in school made life miserable for his teacher and also for the other children. He threw erasers across the room. He threw snowballs through the window. He dumped the waste paper all over the floor. He erased all the things the teacher had on the board.

The old-fashioned teacher [the author adds] would say he needed a good thrashing.

I must confess that it seems to me that the old-fashioned teacher would not be far wrong. In the days when I taught school, half a century ago, I think I could have solved the John F—— problem to ten places of decimals with three feet of bamboo. But it appears from the text before us that I would have been all wrong. What John F—— needed, we are told, is love. It was the lack of this that made him throw the erasers round. He was “expressing himself.” What he was trying to put across was “Love me, or I’ll sock you with this eraser.” It is somewhat the same idea as the Nazis have over in Central Europe.

Why did John F—— need love? Because, apparently, he had picked up a complex, a little sister complex. At home his little sister Clara had been the family pet and he hadn’t. Who wouldn’t sling ink under provocation like that?

Or consider the psychology of business. This, with its sub-divisions on salesmanship and such, fills many courses. Is there any such thing? No, of course not, or only in the sense in which there is a psychology of conversation, or psychology of fishing, or of taking a motor ride, or a psychology of silence.

And salesmanship! Open any of the manuals on it (I admit they are getting fewer; it has been a flop) and you will be introduced to a nut called the Prospect. This doesn’t mean a landscape; it means the man to whom you are going to sell something. The nut called the Prospect doesn’t want it, but you are going to make him take it. You do it partly with your eye (the nut wilts when you look at him), partly by “suggestion” and partly by “personality.” This last attribute will sell anything, but to acquire it you need at least three hours a week for half a year, and must put up about a hundred dollars. This salesmanship psychology has invaded our language; people talk now of “selling an idea” – that is, making it popular. If you want to get up a club picnic you must get some live fellow to “sell fresh air”; if you’re going to help a church you’ll have to have a group of canvassers to go and sell religion. The last stage is when you are so smart that you can sell yourself. They did it in the Middle Ages and the idea is back again.

The psychology of politics – another piece of nonsense. I knew once a wealthy old Ontario lumber-man who said, “If any man can change his politics after an election quicker than I can, I want to see him.” You can, if you like, make a book of that sort of thing; but you don’t need four hours a week, four months a year (Mon., Tues., Thurs., Sat.) to understand it.

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With that go the psychology tests and questionnaires:

As our firm has an application from Mr. William Worm for a job as a calliper, will you kindly give your (confidential) opinion as to his (1) Personality (2) Malleability (3) Obesity (4) Mortality. . . .

In reply to which the Department of Psychology assigns to William Worm his proper percentage in each.

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The psychologist, in other words, has managed so to impose himself on the world that he is now “called in” in a difficulty, like an emergency plumber. When he takes the final step of being “Open Day and Night,” his status will be complete. Meantime, as far as we are concerned with a curriculum for people who don’t want to lose a year of life over the futilities of behaviour and will take their chance on personality, psychology should be put back to where it was.

But we’re all afraid of it. It might put a curse on us, or an inhibition.

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Teaching
the Unteachable

The barnacles on the academic ship: Fake courses for the feeble-minded: Clothing Analysis, Dry Skiing and the Theory of Girls’ Sports as College Courses; Pedagogy and a year’s loss of life; Teaching Business; the Lotus Land of Idle Talk

In my opinion the great majority of the colleges of the United States and Canada contain in their curriculums of liberal arts an accumulation of courses which are little more than an attempt to teach the unteachable; which substitute for the rigour of real study a make-believe activity and a dilettante idleness; which try to make theory out of the commonplace and to turn the obvious into the intricate; which are as pretentious as they are futile and which in the extreme cases are the mere bogus coin of academic currency.

These courses are carried along as a dead weight, like the barnacles that gather on the bottom of a sailing ship. The only purpose that they serve is to enable young people to come to college who could never have done so in the sterner days of the old-time curriculum – young men who can study tap dancing and social behaviour but not Latin and physics; young women who can’t learn algebra but can manage archery; and young people of both sexes whose minds are nicely fitted to a course on the Theory and Practice of Badminton, or a course on Marriage, open only to seniors and pursued intensively in the spring quarter.

I cannot speak of what the situation is in Great Britain, but I am inclined to think that at any rate the newer British colleges have to some extent followed our false lead. Nor am I speaking here of the purely technical schools of medicine and applied science. I am certain that they have enough real subjects of study, of increasing interest and intensity, to make it unnecessary to fake up false ones. I am talking here of the schools of liberal arts and the associated schools of social science, commerce, education, journalism, and home economics which have invaded and overrun its territory.

The result is deplorable. Much of our study is turning to mere wool-gathering, to pretentious nonsense. The rigour of it is melting away like butter. A lot of it is so easy, so vague and so silly that anything nicely above an anthropoid ape can get a degree in it.

What are we to say, for example, to a course on Clothing Analysis, which the college curriculum says is “designed to create in the student an enthusiasm for possessing individuality in clothes”? What an awakening of genius must this course occasion! One imagines some young inspired dreamer, waking in the night and leaping from his couch to seize a piece of chalk and sketch out an idea for the shape of his pants. Graduates returning to the farm with a gold medal for individuality in clothes would be pretty expensive to keep. Yet the course is given in a university with an honoured name and a hundred years of history.

Let us set beside it, from the program of one of the largest of the State universities, a course in Kinesiology. What this is, I don’t know. I never got as far as that in Greek. But the context shows that it is for men only, and the derivation seems to indicate that it is for fast men, or perhaps for men who need speeding up. They get it three times a week – right after lunch. It must be a great strain.

And here, taken from the curriculum of a great Pacific institution, but findable in many other colleges, is an Introduction to Religion. Most of us got that at our mother’s knee. But these people get it every Tuesday and Thursday at eleven. The danger would be that they might go all to the devil by Monday night.

In the same college is a department of Physical Education for women which has among other things a set of “activities” courses. These include Dry Skiing, which ought to call for a balancing course in Wet Golf. In the list also appears “life-saving,” a thing which, in my day, students left to the bartender at seven o’clock the next morning. But these people evidently have a good time all the time; they do tennis, sailing, archery, tap dancing and wind up with tumbling. It is only fair to add that various colleges list tap dancing and archery, and one has the hardihood to announce a course on the Fundamentals of Golf for Beginners. One can imagine the boy who is taking the individual study in pants going out in plus fours to get his fundament in golf.

Even there the academic sin is not so unpardonable as in the creation of courses with made-up names that are a mere burlesque of scholarship such as Kinesiology. Put beside it, as drawing cards, taken from the 1939 calendars of various colleges, the courses in Eurambics, in Choric Speaking, and Human Ecology! This last sounds like being sick. But apparently there are students today prepared to take a course on anything with a name with a proper sound, such as Rheumatics, Spondulics, or Peritonitis.

The courses I have cited above are all actual. Indeed, everything said in this chapter about these newer studies is based on an examination of the latest program of study issued by fifty American Universities, selected among the best known, among the largest and the most characteristic. I did not include any institutions of a purely freakish character. The examples that I have cited can be duplicated over and over again till even the fun squeezes dry out of them and leaves nothing but the fraud and the shame. Nor do I know of any university in the United States or Canada entirely free from this sloppy degeneration. Seven of them, Toronto, Chicago, Brown, Dartmouth, Queen’s, Bishop’s and McGill, I have the right to call my Alma Mater – either a mother under whose care I studied or at least as the wet-nurse of an honorary degree. But not even my gratitude toward these institutions can lead me to deny that they have gone astray in the wilderness with their sister colleges. Nor is this, I think, the mere complaint of an old man – Laudator temporis acti – to whom the grass was green and the sky blue fifty years ago. Some things that old men think might be true, even in this age of Youth.

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All this false attempt to teach the unteachable has grown up in the last fifty years. When faith in the older classical curriculum began to weaken in a new world of science and industry, it seemed proper to expand the studies of a college to meet the expanding needs of the hour. The original motive was at least sound and praiseworthy. The idea was to make the college practical, to harmonize it with a practical world, to bring the college to the student and to teach him the things on which his livelihood would depend. A classical scholar of the older type began to appear singularly inept. He didn’t know how to drive a motor-car, or put a washer on a kitchen tap, or go down to the cellar to replace an electric fuse. For things like this you had to get “a man.” The classical scholar couldn’t go near the Stock Exchange unless a trustee held him by the hand, couldn’t read a balance sheet and didn’t know what F.O.B. meant. A mathematician was about as bad, useful to make insurance tables and the nautical almanac, but no personality, no magnetism. What the world began to need was “dynamos,” “live-wires,” “executives.”

So a new stream of studies began to flow into liberal arts – at first as a leak in the classical dam, then as a flood that swept the dam away and left only a few fragments of it as islands in the new water.

Political economy came first, highly respectable, with credentials from Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. After it came sociology, a sort of windy first cousin to religion, with a letter of recommendation from Herbert Spencer. Then came education, hitherto only practice but turned now to a theory and a discipline, which not only invaded college, but set up a college of its own. Schools of commerce sprang up and flourished on the aid of business men, flattered by being automatically turned into a profession. There was now the same fervour to break away from Latin as with the Protestants to break away from Rome. With commerce came journalism and physical education, by which high jumping and skinning-the-cat were turned into theory, and home economics whereby such things as cooking, marketing and nursing the baby were dressed up as college courses, as African natives dress up in plug hats and soda water bottles on string.

In all these changes there is of course a certain modicum of reason, of sensible adaptation of older study to newer life. But the essential point is that the practical goal which they propose to reach cannot be reached by that road. Education, in the sense of the power to teach, is learned by becoming a teacher; commerce is learned in an office or a warehouse, and banking in a bank. Journalism is learned in a newspaper office and nursing the baby is learned by getting married.

College is meant to train the mind, not the thumb. A certain modicum of discussion and attention can be given in pauses of the sterner studies to such things as lectures on society at large (sociology) or to the theory of how best to learn and to teach (education). But these things as they stand are exalted and expanded out of all proportion to their usefulness. When a student turns his whole course into journalism it is as if he proposed to make his whole diet on sugar. If a student having had an Introduction to Religion goes ahead and takes ten more courses in it, I doubt if he is getting much nearer to the Kingdom of Heaven. If religion is what I think it is – a communing of the spirit with the unseen, an imminent sense of life beyond death and of duty laid upon us – I don’t see how you can take a “course” in it, unless you don’t believe in it. Human life itself is the only course in religion. What colleges call “comparative religion” would have seemed, in an age of belief, rank blasphemy.

Consider education. By this is meant not the body of knowledge itself, but the manner and mechanism of imparting it. Schools of education constantly forget this little distinction, and keep themselves well nourished by stealing over the fence. Kept within its own fields, the diet is pretty scanty. The notion that a student must spend one fifth of all his college life, one fifth of all his parents’ college money in learning how to teach the things he has learned already (four years arts, one year pedagogy) is just a sham and a fraud. If the idea is only designed to help keep the teaching profession closed, to help keep up the market, let us do it some other way, as they do in France with the closed shop called the Aggregation. But the pretence that “pedagogy” is worth a year of life is wicked.

I have a certificate in the stuff dating back to 1888. In those happy days we escaped with a three months’ sentence. I put in my time, aged eighteen, at the old Collegiate Institute of Strathroy, Ontario, and had among the pupils on whom I practiced General Sir Arthur Currie, then a boy of thirteen just entering high school. We had to study a book or two on the history of education, interesting enough, but as easy as mud pie to anyone trained on Greek and mathematics. We studied also a text or two on the theory of education, all of it as obvious as coming in out of the wet. We were taught that education must proceed from the concrete to the abstract, from the known to the unknown, and so forth.

In later life, with forty-six years of teaching, I have realized that, obvious as it is, a lot of this isn’t so. It is often very good business as a short cut to begin with something abstract and unknown, and for the moment unintelligible, and later come out into the sunlight of understanding. It is like going through a tunnel under a hill instead of wandering miles round it. All the side issues that are taught in education courses, such as school ventilation and the care of the teeth, should be left to a plumber or a doctor. Beyond these again are the excrescences, such things as a course on the list in front of me, called Field Practice in Guidance and Counselling. These are just sin against the light.

Education, as theory in a general sense, is interesting to read about and to think about. Like sociology it is fit reading for old men. But it isn’t a college course. Education, as practice, begins when you really start to teach, as I did in Uxbridge High School on a February morning in 1889. All that Strathroy had done for me was to break the ice; the plunge had still to come. A couple of months’ initiation into practical teaching, taken while still in the arts course, is all that any teacher can ever need or benefit by. To steal a year of youth is robbery. One recalls how Emile Zola in the Dreyfus case kept repeating J’accuse! That is how I feel. J’accuse Pedagogy.

Now hand me down commerce. We’ll take it on next. It is wholly impossible to teach “business” in a school or college. You can teach certain things useful as a training for an intelligent business man, such as how to read and write well, and express himself properly. In this, Latin is excellent, and enough mathematics to heighten his power of concentration. And alongside of his real education you can, if he wishes, give him a knowledge of book-keeping, though few business men know anything about it; and company organization, which most people leave to lawyers; and shorthand and typing, usually bought by the week. But the main part of the education of a business man is not to fit him for his business but to fit him to live. If a boy is to be trained for the coal and wood business, just for that, with no life apart from it and no soul, then he needs no college and college has nothing for him. Rub coal-dust on his face and put him to work at fourteen. Don’t cheat him into taking a six months’ credit on the Theory of Nut Coal.

The subject of journalism occupies an enormous space in the newer college curriculum, especially in certain universities in the Middle West. In more than one of them the courses number as many as forty, and would occupy, if taken as a total, several years of a student’s life. They range from such obvious things as the History of Journalism to special courses on writing editorials, city reporting, small town newspapers. One large institution situated among the oil wells offers a special course on reporting gas and oil, including, no doubt, explosions, a subject needing apparently an intensive training in lurid language.

Now anyone whose activity in life, in whole or in part, consists of writing must feel a certain sympathy with the attempt to bring college training to the aid of a prospective writer. That the college can be of enormous use to a young man who wants to be a journalist there is no doubt. But essentially what such a person needs is English – both literature and composition – and history with a special view of our contemporary era and our current government and a certain training in one or more modern languages, with Latin always as the background. In science he needs what is elsewhere described in the book as a “thorough smattering.” In other words a journalist must be a man with a wide education and a ready knowledge of the world in which we live. Such subjects as proof-reading and make-up and the handling of dispatches can be learned in a newspaper office, and can’t be learned anywhere else.

The notion that there is a special training in English needed for writing editorials and another for writing obituaries and another for writing up local items is not only erroneous but injurious. A person who writes for a newspaper very soon learns certain tricks of the trade, arising out of necessity. Thus he must learn to call a murderer an alleged murderer, and the King of England the alleged King of England. This forestalls libel suits. In writing up local events he must learn to state what happened, the whole of it, in one long breathless sentence, called a “lead,” at the very start, so that the reader need go no further. He must learn to avoid personalities and give the sources of his information as coming from “a leading oil interest,” or from “rubber circles,” or “a reliable pulp and paper source.” In this immaterialized world of oil and rubber and pulp there is no fear of offence. But even when a journalist has become familiar with all these tricks and tags, the question still remains, can he write? And for this there is no royal academic road, and an alleged training in alleged journalism, if it cuts the student out from a proper share in wider, deeper culture, is dearly bought.

Other subjects again, such as sociology, are excellent things in their way but have not sufficient body, definiteness or order in them to make them a subject of curriculum study. They represent reflection, not training. Take out of sociology all that is history or belongs with such anterior studies as geology, palaeontology, and anthropology, and what is left? Nothing but general speculation that expresses itself in the announced courses in such forms as “Social Trends, a study of the factors and forces involved in the organization and continual modification of society.” Now you can’t take a boy off a farm and teach him a social trend, at the rate of four hours of trend per week, ending up with one credit in Social Trends. A wise old man like Plato or a wise young man like Herbert Spencer might muse on the topic and write on it, and other wise people might read it and enjoy it and profit by it. But you can’t teach it. It isn’t college.

If all this pleasant dilettante discussion, this mimic make-belief could be had for nothing, if it did not involve the loss of time and money and opportunity, it would not matter. In a world where it was always afternoon young men and women might sit among the lotus leaves, or in the shade of the catalpas and talk of “social trends” and “personnel psychology” till they nodded off asleep. In the world as it is there is no room for such a slumber, for such a sleep, for such a folding of the hands to sleep. We have it on authority what may happen next.

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Rah! Rah! College!

Niggers in a compound – The college that was; oatmeal and anatomy – The college that is: Co-eds and snap courses – The charm of college life – College activities – Pep Clubs and Poultry Clubs – Student executives – The fortunate few – Education that never dies

I remember noting, when I was in South Africa thirty years ago, how certain great mines on the Rand were shut in as compounds with tall metal fences, so that the Portuguese East African “niggers” working in the mine might be persuaded to stay on the job. When they came up from under the earth, in the pauses of their labour, there arose in the compound the sound of music and the banjo and the loud laughter that marked the African’s appreciation of the vaudeville troupe hired to entertain him. It was not philanthropy that led the mining companies to entertain the niggers with vaudeville, and to drive away their sorrows with the banjo. Without that, the niggers wouldn’t work, would pine away and die. It was hard enough to get them there anyway. Nothing did it but the prospect of getting out a couple of years later, with money enough to go home and buy two wives and a spy glass and a case of gin. That was their graduation day.

—

The students in our colleges are the niggers in the compound. From inside the college fence rises the sound of “Rah! Rah! College!” as they carry on their student activities which correspond to the nigger’s vaudeville! Listen! You can hear the Banjo and Mandolin Club practising in Convocation Hall for the big show tomorrow night put on by the United Sororities League in honour of the big victory at the big game on Saturday. Most of the profs have cancelled their lectures this afternoon to get ready for the holiday tomorrow. You can’t hold a class the day before a holiday. A class is as delicate to “hold,” anyway, as the bubble in a spirit level. Listen again! In the pauses of the banjo and mandolin you can hear the Rooters’ Club, away across the campus in the gym practising their cheers for tomorrow. “Prexy” himself let them off classes today to practise, but he said he wanted the cheers to be clean and spontaneous. Well – as the Rooters’ cheer leader said – you can’t get a spontaneous cheer without spade work. That’s it – spade work! There’s a lot of it going on all round, in the buildings and in the campus. Committees are meeting to do spade work on the program of welcome, and inside groups are doing spade work to get the committees into line. Bright, busy – such a happy scene, all autumn leaves and colour.

Such a happy place is college, made so by the college activities that serve as the niggers’ vaudeville of the students. If it were not so, how could the students reconcile themselves to the long ten years of preparation for life that they must face in coming in, and pay off year by year – in years counted out one by one – their promissory note discounted on the future.

In earlier days this was not so. College was short and stern; it was like a prayer before a battle, in the days when one year in a saw-mill and two years in a winter class made a doctor, there was not time for college activities. The banjo – or was it the bagpipes? – hung silent on the student’s wall. The Edinburgh “medico” ate his oatmeal and counted his anatomy bones, grim and determined. But his eye was on the promised land.

—

Few people realize how agreeable is college life, how halcyon its days, and how stern and rugged it has been elsewhere and in other days. Not, of course, always so; there have been times and places in the past where college life meant little more than wine and cards, driving in “drags” and having “rags” and keeping it up till one was sent down. Here and there, undisturbed by the rags, classical dons annotated Greek texts, or the individual studies of an Adam Smith or an Edward Gibbon redeemed the torpor of the mass.

But in most places, sixty years or so ago, in Scotland and on this continent at least, college life was stern, its studies a veritable sentence to hard labour. Take this for example, a reminiscence of the late Sir James Barrie, as evidence of the student life in Edinburgh as it once was.

“I knew three undergraduates,” said Barrie, “who lodged together in one room in a dreary house at the top of a dreary street. Two of them used to study till two in the morning while the third slept. When they shut up their books they woke No. 3 who studied till breakfast time. Among the advantages of the arrangement the chief was that, as they were dreadfully poor, one bed did for three. Two of them occupied it at one time and one at another.”

There is nothing attractive in such a picture; little in it but a shudder, with a certain admiration of the staying power that could stick it out. But it represents one extreme of which “college activity” of today is the other. The Scottish student overdid his poverty. He could have worked a year for wages – he had at least a year of life to trade – and changed his penury to relative affluence. Thus have I seen students of the Middle West working their way through college with long hours of menial labour as the price of study. Their case, in a way, is worse than the lot of the Scot, since our long curriculum makes it hard to add on a year. Nor could anyone wish college life back to where it was, with so little diversion, so rigorous in its work, so cut off from the society of the other sex, life’s solace and life’s danger – cut off as a dead sea, stormless in a chasm.

—

All different is the picture of college life now. Only those of us who have lived in college – not merely studied there for four years; that’s nothing, but lived there – can fully tell of the charm and amenity of college life. The college years pass by, from autumn leaves to autumn leaves, in a measured cadence that substitutes the college calendar for the Zodiac. Here are the seasons all reversed and defied, where autumn is springtime, bright and eager with the hopes of a new college year, where December is the very noon-time of effort and activity, and so onward, till the fading year melts into spring and vanishes with the flowers of June.

Little do we note the flight of time, as the college, itself immortal, drifts toward eternity. What to us is weather or the storm? We have our lighted classroom, and the February snow outside the window can but render it more inviting – the professor at his desk, expounding, for the thirtieth winter, his notes on Kant’s estimate of Aristotle’s view of Plato, and the class, their heads bent over their desks, writing it all diligently down – as their fathers and mothers did thirty years ago, when the prof was a sessional lecturer and wore a flower in his coat and worked each night to have the next day’s lecture ready, as busy as a baker making bread.

That’s the life, the college life, of the class-room, and of the outside “college activities” for which the class-room serves as a pleasant recuperation.

—

I know no more attractive scene than the campus of a college on the autumn day when the students gather for the new session – the commencement of another academic year. The sky is never so blue nor the still, fleecy clouds so white, nor the autumn leaves so bright with red and russet and yellow, as on that day.

Bright as they are their colours are dimmed beside the reds and whites of the college blazers of the co-eds, grouped with their fellow students in happy greetings and reunions under the trees, or moving about as busy and as aimless as an ant-hill. Here and there moves also a “prof,” a queer mixture of summer tan and academic dinginess, to lend a contrast of age to this surrounding world of youth.

Inside the halls all is crowding and jostling, activity and eagerness and laughter. The students are trying to register and can’t, and so they stand waiting in long queues outside the offices of Deans and Women’s Supervisors. No college ever manages a system of registration that works; each has one, a marvel of theory, invented by Professor Angle (see under Department of Psychology) fifteen years ago and as out of date as the professor himself.

But the students don’t mind. They wait endlessly, bandied about from Dean to Dean, from Supervisor to Supervisor, or falling into talk and breaking off to shout a greeting to Bill, the janitor of Liberal Arts, the only efficient man in the university.

The students, of course, are concerned with their courses, their “elections” and their “options” – what they are to take for the coming session. It’s like the babble of a stock-market. Professor Dim is said to be offering a new course in Greek Archaeology; very few takers; it’s rumoured that he ploughed a student last year. There’s a big rush for English Seventeen, the Drama, but the prof has a notice up that he won’t let in any more – still you might try to see him in his office. There’s the usual mob for Sociology One, and there are three students, so they say, in Fourth Year Honour Mathematics, where there have been none for five years.

Here in one of the groups is a pretty girl in a college blazer, cursing, with a happy oath that wouldn’t take the skin off a peach, at the Dean of Women, because the old cat won’t let her elect Religion; says she hasn’t the prerequisite. And she swears she has – really swears.

Here are a couple of football men gravely discussing with a junior prof, himself an ex-quarter-back, what they had better take. Archaeology looks likely, as the lecturer never takes the roll and no one has failed in it within memory, but there’s a new course on Delinquency, under psychology, that is better, because it has no prerequisite, no roll-call, attendance left to student’s honour and the credit is given on the professor’s own say so.

—

But of course more than all, most of all, the students are discussing the clubs and societies and activities. Who’s to be editor of the Daily Hoot? What freshmen are being canvassed for the fraternities – the Oh, Few, Few, and the Mew, Mew Fie and so on. There’s a general notice of the first meeting of the Glee Club, all up! and the organizing meeting of the Discussion Club, all up! and the first lunch of the Dutch Treat (basement of the cafeteria), all down!

And so, endlessly and happily. If life offers any collective thing better than this day, which I have seen come and go more than forty times, then I’ve missed it.

—

Such is college activity. But, as with all good things, the only question is, how far do you go with it? A wise old Greek once took as his life motto, Do nothing too much; and I remember a similar case in point when the town council of my home town, in pensioning an old employee, made the pension “for life, but not more than five years.” So with the activities. If education is eating up life is it not possible that “activity” is eating up education?

The difficulty about the students’ activities and the clubs and societies under which they are organized is that every one of them – or nearly every one of them – taken by itself, seems not only justifiable but admirable. A Literary and Debating Society – excellent! What college could be without it? A Glee Club! Why shouldn’t a student sing, just as why shouldn’t a soldier drink? A Dramatic Society, A Cercle Français to talk real French, a Deutscher Bund to eat pretzels! Fine.

Even when the list gets a little doubtful we can perhaps turn an indulgent eye, as upon a good idea gone astray. Here, for example, is a Pep Club – not in one college but in several. The purpose of it is defined by one of the colleges in its calendar by saying, “This club is composed of young women who are associated for the purpose of generating enthusiasm for inter-collegiate athletic contests.” One thinks of Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships, and shudders to think of the dangers into which the Pep Club may plunge the fated boys. In one college the Pep Club has an offshoot, the “Green Peppers,” under the supervision of the Pep Club. This is composed of “freshman girls,” and is prepared to make trouble by generating enthusiasm among school-boys. . . . Odd, isn’t it, that the underlying idea of so many of these societies is that you can’t get enthusiasm unless you generate it, can’t hold, can’t feel anything till you wave your arms. . . . You must go into life body first and drag your head in afterwards. But perhaps it is only part of “mass method” on which we now live. . . .

Here is another college with a Poultry Club and a Dairy Club that sound as warm and friendly as a barn-yard but are offset by a Cosmopolitan Club that wouldn’t know a cow from an antelope. Compare with these peaceful activities the Scabbard and Blade organization, an honorary military fraternity of various colleges, prepared to demolish the enemies of its country either seriatim or in the mass. Put beside it the Quadrangle Club, a “religious society” whose purpose is the “development of the four-square man” or, so to say, the man of four dimensions – “spiritual, mental, physical and social.” Presumably he is hard to develop and needs isolation in a club, like a bacillus in a culture.

The parent source of all was, I imagine, the old-time Literary and Debating Society. Pretty dim its meetings were. In the one I remember best the college rule forbade all debate that touched on religion, politics or contemporary affairs. The usual topic was one such as “Resolved that the execution of Charles the First was justified.” Charles had his head resolved on and off him at a hundred college sessions.

Beside this went the College Glee Club, as natural and as mournful as lost Tasmanians singing on a rock. On the side, of course, were the Greek Letter Societies that are not under discussion here. In colleges without resident life they were one thing; in colleges equipped with dormitories and furnished with three hundred social activities they are another.

With the Debating Society and the Glee Club was the original College Journal, appearing about once a month, more or less, in a sort of arctic twilight, discussing “The Genius of Shakespeare,” “An Autumn Walk,” with Latin verses, “Tu, Tulle, tute meo,” etc. No one followed it further.

The change came in a rising tide that turned to a tidal wave. The newer subjects, political economy and such, started “clubs” which compelled the old ones to break out in the same spot – the History Club, the Philosophy Club, the Physics Club, right back to Bible Clubs and Old Testament Societies that scored a bull’s-eye on creation. All, be it noted, were excellent in idea. Then the old College Journal expanded into the new College Daily, with editorial rooms, reporters, everything up to murder. With it came subsidiary sheets and organs. The Glee Club extended into musical societies, choral societies, folk song societies, and, best of all, gave birth to the Dramatic Society, the most justifiable of all college institutions, except of course the Old Testament Club. The work done by dramatic societies, making and producing plays, is real education, with the true prompting of spontaneous interest that is lost elsewhere. It is not based on the mere “camp-meeting” enthusiasm of the “Let’s all shout” organizations.

Side by side with these grew up another set of organizations to remind the student of his home – in the Eastern universities, Western Clubs and in the Western universities, Eastern Clubs, and everywhere, in Canada at least, Maritime Province Clubs, because everybody comes from the Maritime Provinces, and nobody goes there.

The names of the clubs and societies, if you put them all together, is legion. One of the largest of the State universities writes proudly of itself, “Practically every type of American college student organization is found among the three hundred clubs, societies and associations represented upon the University campus.”

—

There would be no great harm done if each one student followed only one activity; if he staggered home late from his chess club but was at his books early in the morning; if he blew his whole face into his trombone from four to six but was at his desk in the evening; if he wrote a brilliant article on “The World’s Awakening,” in the Student’s Daily and then fell asleep over his trigonometry.

But it is not so. Even the average student follows half a dozen activities, and all the most efficient and capable are so immersed in them that they turn into executives and committee men, with their day full, no time to turn round. Capable indeed they are – far quicker of comprehension than real business men, with more enthusiasm and more precision in their minds. They need to have enthusiasm and energy, too, for there are so many activities to be kept going that the leaders must do a terrific lot of organizing, initiating, committee work, spade work, to keep the others up to it. All up! for this, and all up! for that, till college life becomes a sort of permanent “resurrection day.” And for such a day, spade work is the first requisite.

One recalls how a famous French general looked on at the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava and said, “It’s magnificent but it isn’t war.” So with these student leaders – it’s wonderful but it isn’t study. It is making of them fine and efficient men and women. But the toll of years taken is too heavy, and the life of the college, as they lead it, would never keep alight the lamp of learning.

—

But there are those who trim it.

Here and there in this moving and happy world there are among the students the few who leaven the lump, the few who really study. You remember how Edgar Allan Poe said, “And the people, ah, the people, they that live up in the steeple.” Well, there are students up in the steeple of the temple of learning, or higher still, up in the clouds. These are the ones who come to college and never go away, whose lot it is, thrice blessed, to stay at college all their lives – demonstrating first, and then lecturing, and then moved up to be an associate, and later on a professor, a real one. Somewhere in such a professor’s life he has picked up, more or less unnoticed, a wife, as a beaver picks up a mate away off in the woods. Married or single it makes but little difference; life flows on from session to session, smooth and unruffled as seen by the outside eye, but, as seen from within, full of its eager struggles, its triumphs and its landmarks. Such is, for instance, the occasion when the professor reads his first paper (all typed by his wife) before the Palaeontological Society, or has his article on the “Diphthongs in Chaucer” accepted by the Philomathic Journal.

For these people, study is study; its foundation is laid deep and its crown is never set. For their sake I gladly take back everything said in this book, of shorter methods, fewer declensions and less exceptions. They need them all. No “smattering” for them. When they tackle an author they dissect him from the head down and hang up the skin. They follow the tide of human thought from Plato downward till they almost, never quite, reach yesterday. Each carries with him his life work, like that of Professor Dim with the Odyssey described elsewhere in this book. And his life work – on the geography of Ninevah or the place names of Yucatan or the coleoptera of the British Isles – is seldom complete, usually but a fragment and often never begun. They need time, these men; they need eternity. Collectively they get it, and the college goes on, maintained, as far as its soul is concerned, by the men who work in it, and not by the bricks and mortar that house their labours.

I have written elsewhere that, with the right men and a few elm trees and some books, one could have, at a generation’s notice, the most distinguished college in the world. I repeat it here so that the animating idea of this book may not be obscured. This is not a plea for cheaper, shorter education in the mean sense, but for education that does not end with college and for learning that never dies. Rah! Rah! College! Let’s go and see what’s happening in the campus.

TOC     INDEX

Kindred Essays in Education and Humour

–1–
When Men Retire

My old friend Mr. McPherson retired from the flour and feed business – oh, quite a few years ago. He said it was time to get out and give young Charlie a chance – even then “young Charlie” was getting near fifty. Anyway old Mr. McPherson said he wasn’t going to keep his nose to the grindstone for ever.

I don’t mean that he absolutely dropped out of the business; but, as he himself said, he took it easy. The McPhersons had a fine business, two or three big mills and a central office in our home town. Always, before he retired, Mr. McPherson would be down at the office sharp at eight – the flour and feed is an early business. When he retired he gave all that up. He’d loaf in anywhere round ten minutes past, or sometimes even twenty. It was the same way after lunch – or at least I mean after “dinner”; they don’t have “lunch” in the flour and feed business; they have dinner at noon. After dinner if Mr. McPherson didn’t feel like getting up and walking to the office at one o’clock, he’d drive down in a cab. And at five o’clock, when the office closed, if he didn’t feel like going home right away, he’d stay for a while and run over some of the day’s invoices. Or perhaps, if he felt like it, he’d go over to the mill, because the mill didn’t close till six, and just fool around there a while helping the men bag up some of the farmers’ orders.

One thing, though, that Mr. McPherson insists on, now that he’s retired, is that, as he himself says, he never interferes. The business, as he explains, belongs now to the children. That means young Charlie and Lavinia – bless me! Lavinia must be not far from sixty; she keeps the house. To those two and a married daughter in Scotland. The old man has never transferred the business in any legal sense. He says it isn’t necessary as long as he’s alive. But it’s theirs just the same, and he tells them so. And, as I say, he doesn’t interfere; “young Charlie” is the general manager, and all his father does is just to look over the contracts to see what’s doing, and keep an eye on the produce market to advise young Charlie when to buy – but only, mind you, to advise.

What’s more, as Mr. McPherson himself loves to explain, he’s not like a man who can’t cut loose from business and enjoy himself. Oh, my no! Every year there’s the St. Andrews dinner in the Odd Fellows’ Hall, regular as clock-work, and every year Burns’ birthday, when a few of them get together and have a big old time and read Burns out loud. And only four years ago Mr. McPherson took a trip to Scotland and saw his married daughter and Burns’ grave and the big flour mills at Dumbarton, and paid for it all out of a commission on No. 1 wheat. Oh, no, Mr. McPherson says he never regrets his retirement: he can’t think what it would be like to be back in harness.

—

My friend McAlpin was a banker – assistant general manager of a bank. He retired in the natural, normal course of things in accordance with the bank regulations. He made no plan or preparation for retirement. He said that it was enough for him to be rid of the strain of work. He’d have his mind free. So he would have had, if it hadn’t happened that, on his first morning of retirement, as he walked downtown, he felt a sort of wheeziness, a kind of, well, not exactly a pain, but a sort of compression. Anyway, a druggist gave him some bicarbonate of bismuth – he’s told me about it himself ever so many times – or was it bisulphate of something? Anyway it fixed McAlpin up all right but it left him with a sort of feeling of flatulence, or flobbulence (he’s explained it to me) that bothered him all morning till a friend told him to drink Vichy water, two or three quarts at a time. Now as a matter of fact you see, McAlpin had had that wheeziness every morning for years back when he went to the bank. But as soon as he opened the mail and began dictating, the wheeziness vanished, and the flobbulence never started. But the moment he retired, the wheeziness brought on the flobbulence; and Vichy water is all right, but there’s so much chalk in it that if you take it you must follow it with an anticalcide of some sort. I don’t know the names, but McAlpin has told me about them – bigusphate of carbon or any other antiscorbutic.

In fact, as McAlpin tells me, he has come to realize that his diet while he was in the bank was all wrong. He used to take bacon and eggs for breakfast, whereas now that he has looked into things he finds that bacon has no food value at all – contains no postulates. Eggs would be all right if taken with a germicide, but they lack vitamins. So what McAlpin eats now – he tells me this himself – is a proper balance of protein and carbohydrates.

McAlpin spends a good deal of his time in the drug stores. He says those follows know a lot. Do you realize that if you take a drink of mineral water every half hour, with a touch of salt in it, it keeps your sebaceous glands open?

When McAlpin takes a holiday he goes down to Nugget Springs where the thermal baths are. It’s a new place and he says that they say that the doctors say that the water has a lower alkali content than any other. That’s why he goes there, for the low alkali content. You take a bath every hour and in between you drink the water and the rest of the time you sit in it. McAlpin says that when he comes back he feels a hundred per cent more crustaceous than he did before. He attributes this to phosphorus.

—

My friend Tharpe, who was in Iron and Steel, retired to Paris. He retired at fifty-eight. He said he wanted to retire while he was still fresh enough to enjoy life – feel those muscles. He wanted to have a little fun in life, before he sank into old age. So he went over to Paris to have, as he himself so fervently put it, “a whale of a time.”

I saw him there six months later, in a night-supper restaurant. He had with him something that looked like an odelisk – isn’t that the word? – anyway something Moorish with slanting eyes and a crescent diadem. Tharpe came over and spoke to me. He looked like a boiled lobster, all red and black. He said he felt fine. He said he was just starting out for the evening. He felt, he said, A.1.

I saw him in the hotel next morning. He was in the barber shop. The barber was fixing him up. He looked about four colours, mostly black and yellow. He said he felt great. The barber was steaming him, boiling him and squirting things over him. Then he went up to the drug store and the druggist “fixed him” – washed him right out – and then into the bar and the bartender “fixed him” – toned him right up with a couple of “eye-openers.” Then he started off. He had on a pongee suit and a panama hat and a French silk tie, and he looked pretty slick, but battered. He said he felt fine. He said he was going out to play baccarat with two men he met the night before – Russians – he couldn’t remember their names – Sonovitch or Dombroski or something. Anyway one of them was a cousin of the Czar. He said he felt elegant.

Tharpe is in a home just now, in England – a rest home. He’s taking the rest cure, and then he is to take the gold cure and after that a brain cure. A big English doctor took out part of his skull. He says he feels A.1. He has lost most of his money and he’s coming back to the Iron and Steel business. He says it beats Paris.

—

A peculiarly interesting case of retirement has been that of my long-time friend the Senior Professor of Greek at the college here. When he retired the Chancellor of the University said at the Convocation that our regret at Professor Dim’s retirement was tempered by the fact that we realized that he would now be able to complete the studies on Homer’s Odyssey which had occupied him for so many years. Notice, to complete. The general supposition was that in all these long years, in all the evenings of his spare time he’d been working on Homer’s Odyssey, and that now all that he needed was a little time and breathing space and the brilliant studies would be consolidated into a book. To complete – and I was the only one who knew that he hadn’t even started. He had begun, ever so many years ago, when we were fellow juniors, talking of Homer’s Odyssey. There was something he wanted to do about it – I forget just what; either to prove that there was never any Homer or that there was never any Odyssey. At any rate it was one of those big academic problems that professors select as a life work. It began to be understood that he was “working on Homer’s Odyssey“; then that he was doing a book on Homer’s Odyssey, and then that he had nearly done it, and only needed time to complete it. And all the time he hadn’t started. Professors are like that.

—

The years go by so easily – Commencement Day and a new session – you can’t begin anything then – mid-session, impossible – final exams and the end of the session – out of the question to start anything then; a man must rest sometime. And you don’t start Homer in the long vacation on the coast of Maine.

So when Professor Dim retired, people on the street would stop him and ask, “How’s the book coming on?” And he could only turn pink and gurgle something. I’m the only one who knows that he hasn’t started it. He’s been getting pretty frail the last two winters; some of his old pupils sent him south last winter, so that he could finish his book. He didn’t. They gave him a trip up north last summer – but not far enough. They talk now of sending him to Greece where the Odyssey began. They’re afraid, some of them – this, of course, they say very gently and kindly – they’re afraid that the old fellow may not live to finish the book. I know that he won’t. He hasn’t started.

But as to this retirement business, let me give a word of advice to all of you young fellows round fifty. Some of you have been talking of it and even looking forward to it. Have nothing to do with it. Listen; it’s like this. Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone? You hadn’t realized it. And you notice that the sun has set already, the day gone before you knew

TOC     INDEX

–2–
As History Grows Dim

(All that will be left of our Forgotten Worthies in a future dictionary)

Gladstone – a bag, travelling-bag with a specially wide mouth.

Victoria – low carriage, with a broad seat.

Prince Albert – a stuffed coat, very long, formal and never unbuttoned.

Bismarck – a specially fat German rump steak, not popular now.

Salisbury – another steak, English, made of what was left over from a Bismarck.

Chateaubriand – a French beefsteak, made of something else.

Goethe (pronounced goat-ee) – a form of chinbeard once worn in Arkansas.

Lincoln – a kind of car, formerly very popular.

Wellington – a long boot, high sole.

Blucher – short boot with a low sole.

Cardinal Wolsey – a brand of gents’ underwear.

Henry Clay – a cigar.

Jefferson – a hotel, avenue, or post-office.

Napoleon, Washington, Caesar, Samson – trade names used in the plumbing business for bath-room fixtures.

Marie Antoinette, Josephine, Marie Louise, Eugenie – trade names used in ladies’ underwear.

King Edward, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Claverhouse, Robert Bruce – stallions with a pedigree.

Matthew, Mark, Luke & John – side streets in Montreal.

TOC     INDEX

–3–
Twenty Cents’ Worth
of Murder

I am one of those who like each night, after the fret and worry of the day, to enjoy about twenty cents’ worth of murder before turning off the light and going to sleep. Twenty cents a night is about the cost of this, for first-class murder by our best writers. Ten-cent murder is apt to be either stale or too suggestive of crime. But I am sure that I am only one of uncounted thousands of crime readers who feel that the health and enjoyment gained is well worth the price, and share my gratitude toward the brilliant galaxy of crime writers who supply our needs. I could name them if I wished to, but everyone knows them so well that it is needless.

They will not therefore take it amiss if I offer them a few suggestions, endorsed I am sure by the same thousands of readers, still uncounted, as to what we want and what we don’t want in our current reading.

In the first place – if you don’t mind – don’t kill the victim too soon. We like to get to know him a little first. I mean, don’t start with his body. Don’t have Inspector Higginbottom summoned hastily in paragraph 1 of page 1 to the Mansions Apartments because there’s a dead body just found upstairs. The thrill is too short. We lost interest. Even when it turns out that there’s been “foul play” it doesn’t rouse us; we expected it. Nor even when it turns out that the dead man is a leading member of the Stock Exchange; that’s all right, we never heard of him anyway.

Oh, no, give us a chance to learn to know the man a little, and like him, and then his death is like that of a friend; or let him be such a mean hound that we get to hate him; then when his body is found, who is happier than we are?

Now another little point. When you do find his body, don’t have a string of people, a houseful of them, who have to be under suspicion one after the other, so that we can see it all coming – the butler, the private secretary, the French maid, the handy man (too handy, perhaps) – well, everybody knows the standing list. All these people commit murders. To these are added the guests; after all, do we really know them? And, now we think of it, even the family lawyer there over night – family lawyers are often crooked. So every one of these has to be “eliminated,” one after another. All right for the author at ten cents a word for elimination, but poor stuff for us, even at a cent a page.

And, oh, yes, with this, please cut out the diagram that goes with it, called Plan of Arundel House, Ground Floor, Upper Floor. It’s a bum drawing, anyway, done by the author, of course, to make it look circumstantial. But it’s the same plan, as a matter of fact, that I’ve seen for twenty-one years – Arundel House, or Wisteria Lodge, or No. 1 Jefferson Avenue. It’s all cut into little rooms with gaps for doors, marked “study,” “bedroom,” “bath” – one bath for all those people – and in one room is a little diagram like a sausage marked “body.” Well, I can’t study all that out; I have no time. Never mind explaining what window “gives” on the lawn and what other windows “give” on what; windows always “give” in detective stories. In real life they are made to go up and down. And the French windows on the ground floor of Arundel House (Plan I), never mind explaining which side they’re bolted on; I can’t follow it.

Oh, yes, and fingerprints. Don’t have any. Really we’re all tired of them. As a matter of fact I’m glad to notice that a good many of the best people are cutting them out. Inspector Higginbottom shakes his head and murmurs “gloves.” It seems that practically all people who are thinking of murder go round in gloves. I’ve noticed them on the street.

The same with footprints – though I am not so sure about them. The old footprints that Sherlock used to trace are, of course, clean out of date. But the new scheme of Sherlock’s scientific successor – you all know who it is I mean – the new scheme of blowing powder into a footprint of mud, filling it up with cement and then taking out a perfect overshoe; that’s still good stuff.

Now as to your detective himself – but no, I almost despair of trying to give advice. All I can say, and I speak for all of us, is mostly negative. Don’t, of course, make him long and thin; that’s dead; but, for Heaven’s sake, not fat. Don’t have him go without sleep, or go without food, often for three or four hours at a stretch. Keep him decently fed, and, for our sake, not for his, give him drinks, plenty and often. Do you remember how, under prohibition, all the sleuth hounds had to begin to drink tea? You remember how the great detective would sit and think things out, “stirring his tea”! I don’t believe you can do it. Take some whisky and, my! you’ll begin to think fast.

There’s one standard English crime writer, to whom I can never be sufficiently grateful, who makes a point, at every emergency in his story, of giving his characters a “stiff whisky and soda.” Inspector Higginbottom, as soon as he realizes that the body is that of Sir Charles, goes to the sideboard and pours out a “stiff whisky and soda” all round! That’s the stuff! I can read that all night. . . . And the criminals themselves get it even better. The moment they feel themselves in a corner – what’s that word we use? Oh, yes, “trapped” – they pour out a drink, a whole tumblerful of neat brandy. Then they don’t feel “trapped” at all. You can’t trap a man full of that.

Of course you would ask why just whisky and not champagne? It’s too expensive. There is, as everybody knows, one prince of mystery story tellers who never conducts a crime without giving us at least half an hour at Monte Carlo, with “frosted champagne cocktails” and a Rumanian princess to look at! But it feels extravagant, for anybody brought up in a plain home with just whisky.

And yet such is the contrariety of things here in this author – I mean the one with the whisky and soda (all my associated readers know exactly who it is I mean) so fine about the drinks and yet falling into another fault that always exasperates us – I mean filling his books with descriptions and scenery. He begins, practically always, with a “market town” – Hellborough, or some such place, where they talk broad something. We can stand for a street or two, but when it comes to the town hall, dating from Edward the Confessor, we pass. Scenery we don’t need at all, except to take it fast, like a tourist in a picture gallery. You see, those of us who have read crime stories for twenty or thirty years have got in our minds a collection of scenes like what they call the “sets” in a ten-twenty-thirty theatre. “Market town of Hellborough” – correct, we have it; “purlieus of Chicago” – right, here you are; “drawing-room of the rectory” – that’s it – or not, not that, that’s a “bar-room in Denver.” But anyway we’ve got all our “sets” and a collection of weather; it’s odd the junk we carry in our minds as an equipment for reading. However, that’s another topic.

—

And there’s this. As you get nearer the end of the story, don’t have them all chase one another round. I mean all the characters, bandits, detectives, etc., in a sort of grand climax. You know the kind of thing I mean – in and out of cellars, down rat holes, out through outhouses. Poor old Edgar Wallace – there, I hadn’t meant to mention names, but never mind – could never get away from this: the sleuth trapped by the bandit, thrown into a cellar, water turned on, reaches his throat, dives out through a sewer, runs round in front, nails up the door, bandit trapped, goes to the attic, detective follows, detective trapped, bandit on roof, leaps into an airplane, detective crawls through a fly-screen, leaps into another airplane – zoop! They’re both gone. We have to begin over again.

And here’s a point of importance for the conclusion itself. Don’t be afraid to hang the criminal at the end. Better lay the story, if you can, in a jurisdiction where they hang them, because, to us readers, the electric chair sounds too uncomfortable. But hanging is old and respectable, and if you like you can use such a phrase as “went to the scaffold” or “went to the gallows.” That’s as simple as Old Mother Hubbard. But I mean we want him hanged; don’t let him fall into the sea out of his airplane. It’s not good enough. Hold him tight by the pants, till you get him to the gallows. And don’t let your criminal get ill in prison, or get so badly wounded or so heavily poisoned that he never gets tried because he is “summoned to a higher court.” Honestly, you can’t get a higher criminal court than the State Court of Appeal. There isn’t one.

I’ll stop there. Other readers may have suggestions.

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–4–
Reader’s Junk

In writing about detective stories as above, I stated that, for me, it wasn’t necessary for the writer of such a story to put into his book a plan of the house that was the scene of the murder. I said that I carried in my head, from much reading of crime, a plan of the house already made, cut up into bedrooms, with a passage-way, and one “bath” (for everybody) and a shape like a sausage lying loose in one room and marked “body.” Sometimes the house was called “Wisteria Lodge” and sometimes “Arundel House” or No. 1 Jefferson Avenue. It would do for any of them.

I had no sooner written this than I realized that it was only one sample of the quantity of junk which any reader carries round in his mind, ready to use, like the “sets” of a repertory theatre. In fact everybody has picked up a whole lumber room of them – country houses (for murder); shooting-lodges (for mystery); castles, for use in the Middle Ages; and a collection of city sets, such as a “midnight restaurant,” an “Alhambra Grill,” an “obscure tobacconist’s,” a “den of vice,” a “purlieus” (or do you have to have two of them?), the “left side” of Paris, the West side of Chicago. Everybody knows them and keeps a collection of them. Most of them no doubt are a long way off reality.

A shooting-lodge, for instance – I’ve never seen one. What do you shoot in it? And why lodge? I always picture it made of cedar in the rough, set up end on, with a lot of gable corners. My shooting-lodge is really a compound made of a half-and-half mixture of Old Vienna and a Canadian lumber shanty. A den of vice! For that I use a lot of smoke, a guttering candle, with plenty of grease; that makes it “murky.” Or dear old Monte Carlo – I’ve never seen the place, but I have it there all ready for use like slipping in a lantern slide. There’s the Casino, come in. I built it when I was about ten years old and had never seen one; I can’t ever get it straight; it’s too much like a barn. They are playing “baccarat” in it, but I am afraid the baccarat table is too much like a barn supper (I was brought up in the country). All around Monte Carlo are a set of huge flowers that I keep – taken as names years ago and never seen – such as hibiscus and climbing rancenculus and flowering funeraria. No doubt you have a lot of them too. The effect is vague but gorgeous. The flowers and shrubs are used to bury the bungalows, because from my earliest recollection bungalows are always “buried in flowers.” My bungalows are a bum lot; they were copied originally from summer cottages on Lake Simcoe, and it’s hard to get them plastered and put “plinths” on them and cornices. No, they’re all wrong. I admit it.

But the point that I am groping toward is the inquiry as to the effect on literature, I mean on the appreciation of it, of this accumulation in the reader’s mind of a set of preconceptions, pictures and ready-made characters. It seems to me that it must act on the mind as hardening of the arteries does in the body. Presently nothing can get through. What’s the good of trying to tell a desert island story to a reader like you or me, who has owned a desert island for fifty years, yellow sand, a rivulet of pure water (that was a piece of luck) and a banyan tree, a form of bread and of which the “fibres” can be used to make fish lines.

It’s the same with the characters. We all have a stock of them ready for use like marionettes in a child’s theatre. For example a “benevolent old gentleman” – what a peach he seemed when we first read of him at twelve; what a nut now. You see no new benevolent old gentleman can get a chance with us; the minute the author names him we say “Right oh!” and substitute our own. Personally I always, in reading fiction, use my own benevolent old gentleman, my own family lawyer, my own curate, my own ship’s bosun and all the rest of them. I take them to each new book as people take their own food to a basket picnic.

—

If someone of a critical turn were to follow up this train of thought perhaps it might prove interesting – help to explain why interest flags in age, and why authors rise and fall. This much is certain. Whenever we can get away from preconceptions and stock pictures and take our fiction straight, as children do, it stands out with marvellous clarity and interest. I find an instance of this in the great vogue that the “Western Picture” enjoys all over the world. You will see an English audience (right out of the purlieus, or of the bungalows) sit enthralled as they watch the sheriff’s posse chase through the sage brush, see the desperado shoot up the saloon, and the real train fall through the actual trestle bridge.

The reason is that it’s all new, or still new enough. It hasn’t – not yet, or only partly – been all raked over like a dust heap and used again and again. That’s why, for the present, even for English audiences, it beats things out of English history ten ways. Don’t show me Queen Elizabeth getting into her barge off the stone steps beside the Thames. Bless me, I’ve seen the woman, and the same steps, since I was eight. And the courtiers, in the queer little puffed pants, why, I keep a set of them given me by Alexander Dumas in the middle eighties. . . . But the sheriff’s daughter, shooting Lobscouse, the Indian brave, with her father’s derringer (18 inches long)! – ah! There’s a girl for you!

Of course it can’t last. Already the new generation are gathering up their sets of scenery and their characters on strings. The Sheriff of Cheyenne, Wyoming, will soon be as dead flat as Henry of Navarre, and Lobscouse the Indian will fall back into second class with Queen Victoria, and Mollie of the Ranges (who shot him) will just look like Charlotte Corday or Marie Antoinette.

And then, of course, something else will turn up, to catch again the colours of the morning. If it didn’t, our literature would fall asleep, like the dead classics of China; would turn into “sacred books,” read in the dust of pyramids. But that time is not yet. As a civilization we are still only just past sunrise.

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Little Stories for Good Luck

Three on Each

When I was teaching at Upper Canada College fifty years ago, we took corporal punishment for granted. I myself had been “licked” at school and as a master I “licked” the boys without any compunction or afterthought about it. As a matter of fact corporal punishment, which is after all the same thing as physical torture, can only exist on those terms – that nobody thinks about it.

But even in those days there were some people who found the idea revolting and couldn’t bear to think of it. One of my college friends felt like this. So I said to him one day, “Fred, if you’ll come down to Upper Canada College this afternoon at three o’clock when school ends, I’ll be certain to have two or three boys who have to take a caning and you’ll see how simple and normal it is.”

But that day something seemed wrong in class. Not a boy “did” anything all day – just quiet ordinary behaviour and lessons all first rate.

It looked at three o’clock as if I would have no one to “lick.” But I didn’t want to disappoint my friend. So I said to the “worst” boy in the class, one of those fine young toughs who are really the best:

“Urquhart, you’ll stay in after three when the class goes.”

“Please, sir,” he protested, “what’s that for?”

“That’ll be all, Urquhart,” I answered, “don’t be impertinent.”

At that moment my friend arrived and I said to him very gravely: “I’m afraid I have a delinquent boy to deal with here before I can go. But if you’ll just sit down I won’t be a minute.”

“Please, sir,” clamoured Urquhart as I got out the cane, “what’s this for?”

“Urquhart,” I said, “please don’t make things worse by lying about it. You’re to have three on each, or I must report you to the principal for refusing to take a caning.”

That was enough for a decent boy like Urquhart. To refuse to take a caning and go and blab to the principal was pretty low business for a boy of his spirit.

He stood up and took his three on each, like the little man he was.

I would have felt pretty mean about it if it hadn’t been that after he had had his licking Urquhart said:

“I want to apologize, sir, for trying to lie out of it. Only I didn’t see how you knew about it.”

But I never knew what Urquhart had done: except that, as all schoolmasters know, a high-spirited boy has always done something.

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Nothing Missing

I was saying the other day how absent-minded professors are and how simple-minded – I mean in the good sense of the term. They have no notion of the narrow exactness of business.

A case in point is that of my friend Cartwright-Trope who was a lecturer in the University of Chicago at a time when I was a graduate student there, many years ago.

Trope and his wife were going away for the summer and were moving their furniture out of their flat into storage. Trope came to me and asked me if I would do him a favour and I said, certainly.

“We’re going away by this evening’s train,” he said, “but the furniture men don’t come till tomorrow afternoon. I was wondering if you would mind” – here he produced a long paper with a list of things written on it – “it’s really a lot to ask – but would you, perhaps, go over to the flat and just sit around while they move the things out – it’s only two loads – and just check them off on this list and then you could post the list to me, and I’ll know it’s all right.”

I said it was a mere nothing, and that I’d do it gladly and Trope went away much relieved.

Next day I didn’t bother to go near his flat. I just took a blue pencil and made a little mark against each item on the list, some slanting one way and some another, and some a little light and some a little heavy. Then I posted the paper to Trope.

A month later in Toronto we met at an afternoon tea and Trope told of how kind I’d been. “Every item!” he said, “every item, and there must have been a hundred – and every single one checked off!”

I’ve often wondered since what happened.

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Thinking of Tomorrow

I was grieved to see by the papers a few weeks ago that the world has lost that kindly Irish poet, W. B. Yeats. I knew him a little bit, years ago. Unlike most literary celebrities, he looked the part. His face would assume at times a look of far-away abstraction, such as only a poet would wear.

One time when “Billy” Yeats was in Montreal lecturing, I gave a supper party for him at the University Club – a large round table filled with admiring women, and silent husbands. There came a lull in the conversation during which Yeats’ face assumed the far-away look of which I speak. The ladies gazed at him in rapt admiration. At last one said:

“What are you thinking about, Mr. Yeats?”

“Thinking of tomorrow,” he answered in his rich musical voice, “and wondering!”

You could feel the ripple of sympathetic interest among the ladies: the word “tomorrow” carries such infinite meaning.

“Wondering what?” someone ventured in a half whisper.

“Wondering,” said Yeats, “if there is breakfast on the Boston train.”

—

After all, poets have to feed.

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Information
While You Drink

Among the figures of the vanished past whom I regret, is the old-time bartender – I mean, the bartender at his best.

There he stood behind his bar, mopping up the foam, urbane, polite, neat in his wicker sleeves and with his hair flattened with oil – courteous, obliging, tireless.

He never drank.

“Have one on me, Billy?”

“Thanks, I’ll take a cigar.”

But his especial forte was information – the latest horse race, the coming ball game, the time of all the “shows” and the “records” of the sprinters and scullers – in short, all any “sport” could need.

Beyond that he handed out general information, and beyond that conversation to order as desired.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson informs us somewhere that Eskimos always tell you what they think you want to hear; they answer a question according to what they think you’d like.

Well, the bartenders were like that.

“Fine day! Billy.”

“It sure is.”

“Looks like rain, eh, Billy?”

“It certainly does.”

But I am thinking here of a specially illustrative case of bartenders’ information that happened within my own experience. It was in Montreal away back in 1902 or 1901 – at any rate in the year, whichever it was, when Émile Zola died.

I had gone into the bar of the old Prince of Wales Hotel to get a drink before dinner, and stood reading the evening paper while I drank it.

My eye suddenly caught a news item and I looked up – forgetting in my surprise just who I was talking to – and said to the bartender:

“Billy, you don’t mean to tell me that Émile Zola’s dead?”

Billy shook his head sadly and went on wiping the bar with his cloth as he said:

“I think he must be. I ain’t seen him round anyway for a week or more.”

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No Place for Gentlemen

Everybody knows how hard it is in English to use the word “gentleman” in any fixed meaning. I have heard it defined by a Sunday School boy as meaning “a man with a gold watch who loves Jesus.” But the test seems a little too exacting. On the other hand, I remember a bygone citizen of my home town, an industrious man with a large family, who used to say, “My motto is, no gentleman in this family.”

But the most definite beam of light I ever got on it reached me forty years ago when I lived in Chicago as a student, and had the honour of meeting a friend of my brother Jim, a Mr. Donnegan, who had just finished three months in one of the state prisons in Illinois, for failing to grasp the idea of the new pure food law.

Jim and I went into a bar to get a beer and Mr. Donnegan was standing in the centre of a group of admirers.

He beckoned to Jim and we joined them and Jim said proudly, “Stephen, meet Mr. Donnegan. He’s just come back from three months in Joliet.”

Mr. Donnegan shook hands, but he said: “Not in Joliet, though, Jimmy. No thank you; I was in Elgin.”

“All right,” Jim said, “but I don’t see that it makes much difference.”

“All the difference in the world, Jimmy,” said Mr. Donnegan. “I don’t want to knock any place or any crowd; but I’ll just tell you the fellows in Elgin, Jimmy, are a set of gentlemen. I won’t say that for Joliet.”

The lapse of forty years has prevented me from being sure as to which is this. But the warning stands that one of these two is no place for a gentleman.

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“We Have with Us Tonight”

Public speaking is more or less of an ordeal even for those who have to undertake it constantly. Worse than all is speaking at a dinner, because you have to wait your turn and feel it coming for hours. Next time you are at a public dinner notice the men at the head table who sit and eat celery by the bunch and never stop. Those are the men who are going to speak.

I don’t say that trained speakers are nervous. No. They wish the chairman would announce that the rest of the meeting is cancelled because of smallpox, or that the hotel would catch fire, or that there would be an earthquake. But they’re not nervous.

But if speaking is an ordeal to them, what it is to those who have never spoken. Some men go through life and never have to speak; they rise to wealth and standing with the fear of it in the background – fear, with an element of temptation.

Such a one was my senior acquaintance of long ago, Mr. Gritterly – no harm to name him – general manager of one of the Toronto banks. He had just retired, without ever speaking in public, when a Bankers’ Three Days Convention came to town and they invited Mr. Gritterly to speak at the dinner.

He accepted, hung in the wind, flew round the flame – and finally, on the opening day, sent a note that he was called out of town for the evening.

I saw him round the hotel next morning. He was telling me how sorry he was to have missed the opportunity. He told me a lot of things he could have said about branch banking. He said, too, that he would like to have had a sly joke, very good-natured of course, about the American Treasury system. It was too bad, he said, he’d been called out of town. He had even intended, just in an offhand way, to get off one or two quotations from Shakespeare (he had them in his pocket). One read – “I know a bank whereon a wild thyme grows—” Gritterly thought that would get a laugh, eh? Too bad, he said, that he couldn’t get that off.

“But, Mr. Gritterly,” I said, “you’re making a mistake. They didn’t have the dinner last night. The trains were so late they only had the inaugural address. The dinner’s tonight. You’ll probably get an invitation—”

And as I spoke a boy brought it to him on a tray.

“So you see you’ll be able to tell them about branch banking.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Gritterly, “yes.”

“And the jokes about the U. S. Treasury.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Gritterly, “quite so.”

All day Gritterly was round the hotel pulling the little bits of Shakespeare out of his pocket.

But the thing beat him.

In due course at the dinner the chairman announced: “I regret very much that Mr. Gritterly will not be able to speak. His speech, of which he gave me an outline, would have been a great treat. Unfortunately he had to leave tonight” – the chairman consulted his notes – “for Japan. With your permission I will take on myself to cable our representatives and I am sure they’ll be glad to get up a dinner for Mr. Gritterly at Tokio.”

Gritterly got the invitation on board ship and went right on to Hong Kong. The bankers there received a cable and organized a lunch. Gritterly had gone on to Singapore but the bankers followed him up, and he left for Calcutta. They lost him somewhere in Thibet. He may have entered the monastery there. For many people that would be preferable to speaking.

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A Humble Lover

Have you ever noticed how much attracted we all are by humility? From vainglorious people, conscious of talent, of power, we turn aside. Let them have success if they will. It’s theirs for the asking. But appeal they cannot have; that is for the meek, for the failures, for the people who might have been but never were.

This is especially true of love. The humble lover, aware of his own nothingness, goes to our hearts. The pathos of unrequited love, devotion without return, is among the oldest of human stories.

One such humble lover I knew and here chronicle. I set him down as he was. Judge him for yourself.

He had reached the age when he felt that it was time to get married. Other fellers did. Joe – that was his name – was close to thirty.

He said to me one night, “I think I’d like to get married.” Then he said nothing for quite a time and presently: “There’s a girl on the next street—”

That was as far as he could get for a while, but no doubt it meant a lot. It has, to many of us – “a girl on the next street.”

So I asked:

“Do you know her, Joe?”

“Mother does,” he answered. “She belongs to mother’s morning musical club and mother often invites some of the girls to play music at the house.”

“And you haven’t met her?”

“Yes, I have in a way. The other afternoon she left her guitar here by accident and mother asked me to take it home to her; so I took it round to her house and a maid came to the door and I said ‘This is Miss Carson’s guitar,’ and she said ‘Thank you. Do you want to see Miss Carson?’ and I said ‘No.’”

“And that’s all you’ve seen of her?”

“No,” Joe said, “the other day when she came to the house I was just outside and she said to me: ‘How do you do? It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘It sure is!’ – just like that – ‘It sure is.’ And she went in and I went on out.”

From then on my friend gave me details of his humble courtship.

Miss Carson, it seems, left her rubbers at the house and Joe fetched them home and gave them to her father. Her father said, “It’s a nice night, isn’t it?” So that would seem to mean that he looked on things pretty favourably, eh?

I asked Joe, a little later in his courtship, if he had spoken yet to Miss Carson about marriage. He said no, but he had discussed it with his mother. His mother was all for it. He was going to wait awhile and then talk to his father. If his father was for it and his mother and if I was for it, that made three. He told me that the other morning he had ridden downtown in the same street car as Miss Carson and she said, “Isn’t it a lovely morning?” and he said, “It sure is” – just as easy as that. Too bad, he had to get off the next street after she got on.

Soon after that Joe read me a letter of proposal that he had prepared. It began: “It is no longer possible for me to restrain the expression of the sentiments with which our intercourse has inspired me—” “Fine, isn’t it,” he said. “I got it out of a book. I’ll start it again. It’s good. . . .”

I was not surprised when Joe sent me word a day or two later that he wanted to see me.

“Did you get an answer from Miss Carson?” I asked him.

“Fine!” he said. “A dandy letter. Everything’s O.K. It seems that she isn’t thinking of getting married, so it’s all right; and she thanked me for writing to her and said my letter was swell.”

My heart began to sink with sympathy.

“Too bad, Joe,” I said.

“I’m not so sure,” he answered. “I find there’s another girl on the same street, two houses nearer, that perhaps I can get. I’ve talked with mother about it; she’s all for it.”

—

After Joe’s case, I have never felt quite so sure about the humble and the meek. Perhaps they’re just slow, eh?—

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The Magic of Finance

I have an artist friend who is the best portrait painter in Canada. This will at once identify him to himself. But as it will also identify about a dozen others to themselves, I will simply call him Jares and let it go at that.

Jares told me this story about the beginning of his making his fortune.

The time came in his upward rise when he got several hundred dollars for each portrait, then passed into the thousands and presently he got his first real order – a commission to paint the portrait of a New York millionaire stock-broker for five thousand dollars.

The “sittings” in New York went along very pleasantly and satisfactorily. The millionaire stock-broker evidently took a fancy to the rising young genius.

When the last sitting came he said to the artist:

“Mr. Jares, I must see about having your cheque made out. But, tell me first, what are you going to do now for the next two or three months?”

Jares said that he was going to take a holiday in Brittany.

“Good,” said the broker. “I have a proposal to make. Suppose you leave this money with us and see what we can do with it while you’re away. Mind,” he added as a caution, “I don’t say we’re wizards you know; people get exaggerated ideas. But suppose you just leave it and see?”

Jares assented with delight.

He went away to Brittany, had a three months’ holiday and returned to New York.

He went round to the broker’s office and sent in his card. The millionaire, after a moment’s hesitation, received him most cordially.

“Mr. Jares!” he said. “Why, yes, of course! You left five thousand in an open account with us – of course, of course!”

He pushed a bell button and gave a few words of instructions to a lady secretary. “Just ask them,” he said, “to send a memorandum.”

In a few minutes the lady secretary returned and gave a paper to the broker with a few words in a low voice.

“Well, well,” said the millionaire, “is that so! Mr. Jares, this is very interesting. We lost that five thousand – it seems. That’s the way things go, you know. It’s lost – very interesting. Well, well – I mustn’t keep you. Drop in some time when you’re in New York again.”

Jares left – he had seen what they could do with it.

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He Guessed Right

There is a certain line of anecdote which often goes under the name of “grim humour.” This means humour that turns on actual injury or death. Personally I’ve always felt doubtful about it.

To explain what is meant, here is a story, actually true, of a happening in Toronto at the old Rossin House, long ago. The baggage man who was putting trunks into the elevator (from the service chute) was called away from his job and didn’t realize in the poor light that the elevator had gone up a couple of stories and was above him. He swung the door open, called in a cheery voice, “All right, Bill, down she does,” jumped in – and broke his leg two stories below.

In this kind of “grim humour,” as I say, I find little attraction. Yet the Scotch seem to like it – they love the familiar stories of Scotchmen at their wives’ funerals, or the story of the Scotch judge who sentenced to death a man he used to play chess with, and said – “And that’s checkmate for you, Andrew.”

But one such story I can quote from memory, not actually of my own but of my brother George. It concerns the death of a man in the power-house of a western Ontario town (I’ll name it no closer than that) where George was working, installing electrical equipment. In those days electricity was new and consequently dangerous.

One morning the assistant man of the power-house came running to the workers on the line to say that his boss had been killed.

They went down with the chief of police to the power-house and there was the unhappy man, dead, laid out flat on the cement floor, his arms extended.

They looked at him in horror.

“How do you suppose it happened, Joe?” asked the chief of police.

“Why, I can’t see how it could,” said the assistant – “the only possible way it seems to me is that he may have picked up this terminal with one hand” – as he said it, Joe picked up the terminal – “and then put his other out in contact with—”

Bing! And the second man was laid out beside the first. Joe had guessed right.

—

Now as a matter of fact I am glad to record that the second man, though knocked unconscious, was not really killed.

But when my brother George, who is a real story-teller, tells this story, he not only kills the second man but the chief of police – who undertook to explain it to the mayor of the town, and then the mayor and half of the town council.

Nothing like Art for Art’s sake.

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Electric Service

I was talking the other day about “grim humour,” and told the story of the man who was killed in the Ontario power-house.

I afterwards remembered another example of grim humour that is recalled from the days when I used to go on lecture trips in the United States.

I was to lecture in an Ohio city and a local lawyer kindly met me at the train and drove me to my hotel. On the day he indicated points of interest.

“That’s our jail,” he said, stopping the car for a minute beside a grim building that walled one side of the street and he added, “I had a queer experience with a man in there a month or two back.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “this feller was in there under sentence of electrocution, and our firm got a letter from a law firm in Chicago which read:

“‘We understand that Mr. Joseph Smith is a client of yours, in which case please inform him that if he does not pay the account for $18.50 on which we have been suing him, we must proceed to more drastic measures.’

“We wrote back in answer,” continued the lawyer – “‘You are correct in supposing that Mr. Joseph Smith is a client of ours. He is at present in the jail here awaiting electrocution, but if you can think of anything more drastic, please proceed to it right away.’”

—

The lawyer, having told his story, proceeded, after the American fashion, to hang another piece onto it.

“Yes, sir,” he continued, “that feller was up in that corner cell, and I went to see him – when we knew he’d no chance – and asked him if there was anything we could do for him.”

“‘Yes,’ says he, ‘there is; I don’t exactly like that electric sign I see across the street every time I go to the window.’”

The lawyer stopped speaking and began to start his car.

“And what was the sign?” I asked.

“It’s still there,” he said. “You can read it.”

He pointed, and I looked up and saw a sign that read, Something in Electricity for Everybody.

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Our Vanished Industries

Most of us, I think, admit that in their way the Maritime Provinces are the finest part of Canada. I don’t mean by reason of their resources, but on account of the inhabitants themselves. You get there that fine, sturdy type of people from the British Isles – a type that was rather than is – honourable, courageous, content with little, and valuing intellectual and moral life rather than material. Indeed the making of men and the “export of brains” has always seemed a leading industry of the Maritimes.

I had a very special opportunity to learn this when I was invited there for a week’s lecture tour after I had been appointed to my chair at McGill. I not only had occasion to appreciate the type of men bred in that environment, but to form some idea of the process and method of making them.

At my first lecture I was the guest of a bank manager in Moncton, and at the close of the evening we sat together over a pipe in his comfortable study, and we fell to talking of his earlier days.

“. . . And how did you get your bank training?” I asked him.

“I learned it,” he answered, “as a boy on a Nova Scotia schooner of the old days. Every time I was told to do anything I had to do it right off and without any question or I got a swift kick in the backside. That’s the training that fitted me later for a bank.”

The next day when I had moved on to another town, I was talking with the mayor of the town about his life and career. “Yes,” he said, “I’m a self-made man and I’m not ashamed of it: or rather I won’t say I’m a self-made man – I’ll say that the beginning of my success was made for me as a boy working on a Nova Scotia schooner.”

“How was that?” I asked.

“Well,” said the mayor, “if I was told to do something I had to hop to it and do it or I got a swift kick in the backside.”

As I went on through the Maritime Provinces I began to realize that this early start in life had been shared by most of the leading men. One of the judges had, according to his own statement, got his first grasp on the principles of law by getting a swift kick in the backside. The same treatment had started men in medicine, education, and public life, and for business it was universal.

I struck only one doubtful case. I had met a most cultivated man, well up in years, a professor of divinity in a church university. He talked to me modestly of his early struggles.

“Life was for me,” he said, “a very arduous path. I doubt if I could have walked it if I had not had – I hope you won’t think my reasoning absurd—”

“I know,” I interrupted, “you had a swift kick in the backside on a Nova Scotia schooner.”

The old man looked at me calmly.

“No,” he said quietly, “I was going to say, a belief in the efficacy of prayer . . .”

I felt that I had got in wrong and was humiliated. But it was all right. The old man was silent for a moment and then he said:

“The other may have helped, too.”

You see they can’t tell a lie in the Maritimes even if they try to.

So I’ve been thinking about this treatment; perhaps there’s something in it. So many of our public men are accused of inefficiency and indifference. Couldn’t we try the idea – eh?

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Couldn’t Sleep a Wink

I often think that all this “insomnia” business is about ninety per cent nonsense; I mean – the people who come down in the morning and tell you they “couldn’t sleep a wink,” “never closed an eye,” and all that. They may think so but as a matter of fact they probably had their eyes closed up for hours at a stretch.

Years ago when I was a young man in a boarding-house in Toronto, my brother George came down to stay the night. There was no spare room in the boarding-house, and, what was worse, only one bed – although it was a double one – in mine. But the trouble was that we both hated “sleeping double” and knew that there was mighty little chance of getting a decent night’s rest that way.

However, we took it in good part, went to bed, and decided just to lie there, sleepless, and let it go at that.

In the morning, after it got to be real daylight, I spoke and said to George, “Did you get much sleep?” “Not a damn minute,” he said. “Neither could I,” I answered, “so I just lay here; I could hear every sound all night.” “So could I,” George said.

Then we put our heads up from the bed-clothes and noticed for the first time that the bed was covered about two inches deep with plaster. The ceiling had fallen on us in the night.

But we hadn’t noticed it. We had “insomnia.”

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Go to Mother

Many years ago, when I was teaching at Upper Canada College and was still young enough to go to the races and that sort of thing, I struck a holiday and started off for the Woodbine Races.

When I got to the place just north of Toronto where the cars branched in different ways, whom should I meet but my old friend Canon Drone, waiting for a car.

He stopped me with a pleasant inquiry of where I was heading for.

“Why, Canon Drone,” I said, “I was just going to make up my mind whether I’d go out to the Woodbine Races or take the Radial Railway and go up to Sutton and spend the day with mother.”

I hadn’t had the least intention of going up to see mother. But it sounded a good thing to work off on a clergyman – like handing him something.

But the old Canon took it up too seriously.

“Stephen,” he said, lifting his hand in the air and speaking in his best pulpit voice, “Go-to-mother!”

You know what a quiver a really good clergyman can put into the word “mother!”

“Resist temptation,” said the Canon; “get on that car – that’s the one – and go to mother.”

He had me beaten. I saw no way round it. He wasn’t going to move, so I ended by getting on the car and going up to Sutton to spend the day with mother. That is – I spent it in painting the garden fence. Mother never wasted a visitor.

That evening when I got back to the city I met a friend of mine at the car junction.

“You weren’t at the races?” he said.

“No, I spent the day up at Sutton with mother.”

“Too bad,” he said; “you missed a big day. By the way, I saw your old friend Canon Drone out there having a whale of a time. He’s a great old sport. He told me he’d made twenty dollars.”

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Five Dollars,
Right Now

Some time ago, quite a few years back, we had an “old home week” in my town of Orillia. Among those who came back was Eddie Foote who had been away at Napanee, or somewhere, for about twenty years.

Like all people who come back for home week, he was just brim-full of interest in all old acquaintances.

He stopped me on the street and shook hands enthusiastically, and began asking about my brothers and where they all were. I happen to have a lot of brothers – we were six at the start – and, like all large families, we scattered all over. Some of my brothers went west and some to the States; I was the only one who didn’t go far.

So Eddie began, “Where’s your brother Charlie, now?”

I said, “Oh, Charlie went out to B. C. about four years ago and—”

“Is that so?” Eddie cut in. “Good old Charlie. Say! I’d give five dollars to see Charlie right now. And where’s Teddy?”

“Teddy lives in Calgary.”

“You don’t say! Good old Ted! I’d give five dollars to see Teddy right now.”

I realized that Eddie Foote had only one formula for the language of delight; for all earthly joys of reunion he’d pay five dollars right now. He went right on and put another five dollars on my brother Jim in Chicago. Then he said:

“And where’s your brother George? I’d give five dollars right now to see old George again.”

“This is George,” I answered, “coming up the street; and that’s Jim with Teddy coming up behind him. That’s fifteen dollars for the three, Eddie, and Charlie’s coming in on the afternoon train; that’ll be twenty. They’re all back for the home week.”

Eddie didn’t pay up. He laughed it off; but he took the story back with him to Napanee, or wherever it is, and tells it as one on himself. I understand that he adds that he’d give five dollars to see Steve right now! He’d better watch out.

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Are Professors
Absent-Minded?

Years ago when I lived on the Côte des Neiges Road, in Montreal, I used often to have a little group of my fellow professors up to dinner. Sometimes their conversation in the study upstairs after dinner was really good.

I recall one evening when we fell to discussing the old question, are professors really absent-minded. All the men present, alert, intelligent men of today, utterly ridiculed the idea. They admitted that the professors of a generation back – the old fellows under whom they had studied – were ludicrously absent-minded, but claimed that the professor of today is another kind of man. One of them told an amusing story of his old professor at Edinburgh, an old man who never, never went out in the evening but had been persuaded to break the rule and go to a big evening reception.

He arrived at the house about eight-thirty – the first guest, nearly half an hour ahead of fashionable time – and was shown up into a bedroom. He didn’t come down for so long that the hostess sent up to look for him. He’d gone to bed and was asleep.

Another professor told of an old Oxford don who was out for the evening and was given a bundle of letters – about a dozen of them – to post on his way home. He forgot them, went away to Iceland on a geological trip for six months, then found the letters and posted them. Inside the letters were invitations to dinner “the day after tomorrow.”

The professors laughed at the stories but said that the idea was nonsense.

Yet next morning my telephone was kept busy for half an hour. Two of the professors had got the wrong overshoes, one had two walking-sticks and my little terrier had eaten a lecture on Cicero.

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Wanted:
A Gold-fish

I told a story in this series about absent-minded professors. But here’s a true one that I can vouch for out of my own experience at McGill.

One of our professors of physiology was out visiting one winter night, and the people at the house showed him a gold-fish that had died because the water that it was in had got frozen. The professor looked at the fish and said, “Let me take it home and I think that tomorrow I can treat it in the laboratory and revive it.”

So when he started for home they wrapped the goldfish in a bit of tissue paper and Professor Floyd put it in his overcoat pocket. It was a cold night, very late and with lots of deep snow along the street. On the way home Floyd put his hand into his coat pocket and accidentally flipped out the gold-fish and it fell into the snow.

Floyd knelt down to pick it up, but he couldn’t find it and stayed there on his knees groping for it. Just then a policeman came along on his beat and stopped and said, “What are you doing there?”

Professors hate to be questioned. Floyd just looked over his shoulder and said, “I am trying to find a goldfish.”

The policeman then understood that he was dealing with a mental case, and he said, coaxingly, “Now you just come along with me and I’ll take you to a place where we’ve a whole lot of gold-fish – all you want.”

“All right,” Floyd said, “only just help me to get this one first.”

To humour him the policeman knelt down and began groping in the snow and, first thing he knew, out came a gold-fish! He was absolutely flabbergasted.

“Great heavens!” he said. “Are there any more?”

“Maybe a whole lot,” Floyd said. As the professor started off for home again, the policeman was still on his knees looking for gold-fish.

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Mushrooms

I am very fond of mushrooms. Often I go out from my home town to where there are some big open pastures on the third concession and gather up a whole basketful, carry them part of the way home, and then – throw them away.

Sometimes I carry them only as far as the pasture fence and throw them away there; at other times I take them part of the way home and throw them away beside the road or in a culvert. Sometimes I go alone, or sometimes with another man – someone also keen on mushrooms – and then we perhaps carry them further and don’t throw them away until we are nearly back to town.

Your trouble is, you see, are the darned things mushrooms? You feel all right about it when you pick them, and then later, perhaps quite suddenly, the doubt comes – are they really mushrooms, or are they that deadly thing, what’s it called, the culex americanus? or the codex siniaticus? – anyhow the kind that poisons you in less than five minutes.

Yet it seems such a shame to throw away beautiful mushrooms, without at least trying them out, that at times I carry my mushrooms right into town and give them away to any friends I meet.

And that reminds me of the day I gave the mushrooms to Arthur Hart, or rather, to use the name that he gave himself, Art ’Art. Art was a little Cockney Englishman. He was a friendly little fellow as all Cockneys are, and liked to be called by his Christian name, Art, rather than by his surname ’Art.

As soon as he felt that he had made an acquaintance he would say, “I sy, don’t call me ’Art; just call me Art; that’s good enough, ain’t it?”

Then he would explain himself in more detail. “I down’t like formality. When people start, ’Art this and ’Art that, I always sy, ‘Look ’ere, ole chap, never mind that ’Art business, just call me Art.’”

Well, I was coming back one day from getting mushrooms and had just thrown my basketful into a culvert outside the town when I met my friend Webber on the street, and he gave me another basketful. I couldn’t throw them away while Webber was in sight, and I was still carrying them when I met Art.

“My ’at,” he said, “those are fine mushrooms!”

I realized that there are a lot of Englishmen who know all about mushrooms. So I said, “Take them, Art, I have some at home already.”

“I certainly will,” Art said readily and away he went with the mushrooms.

And the next day, first thing I knew, somebody said to me on the street:

“Did you hear about Arthur Hart? They don’t think he’ll live.”

“Great Caesar!” I said. “What’s the matter?” – though I felt I knew.

“Poisoned, so the doctors say; something he must have eaten, only Arthur says he didn’t eat anything in particular at all.”

It occurred to me that if Art was going to say nothing about the mushrooms, I wouldn’t mention them either, not even later on. Life has to carry these buried recollections.

However, Art got better. I saw him on the street a few days later and I said, “Art, I’m terribly sorry about giving you those mushrooms that poisoned you, and it was fine of you to say nothing about it.”

“Ho, no!” Art said, “I didn’t eat the mushrooms. I threw them away as soon as you were out of sight. I always do.”

“But what poisoned you, Art?” I asked.

Art looked all around and put his hand to the side of his mouth and said in a low voice:

“’Ootch!”

—

Funny, isn’t it? We all throw away mushrooms, because a chance of one in a hundred, and take a chance (or used to in the days of which I speak) on “hootch,” with the odds a hundred to one against us. There seems a sort of moral to this, but it might work the wrong way. I won’t try to draw it: I’ll leave the cork in it.

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Help Wanted

Very many women can’t listen. And least of all, pretty women. In a way they don’t need to. They can get along without.

I am not thinking here of women who talk all the time. There are lots of those. They don’t listen because they never stop talking. But I refer to the class of charming women, in society, who don’t listen, especially when they are hostesses, partly because they would find it a little hard to follow, and partly because their minds are on other things.

Your delightful hostess beside you, while you tell her about your trip to Czechoslovakia, is looking you in the face with every appearance of interest. In reality she is wondering why the maid hasn’t started to pass the second vegetable, or whether you know that the olives are beside you within easy reach.

No harm is done as a rule by these charming lapses of attention. Just now and again something happens. As in the following case.

I was at a supper party in Toronto – it’s a good while ago – and our young hostess was so pretty that she didn’t need to be anything else, and so modest that she thought everybody wonderful, and seemed to be listening when she wasn’t.

The guest of the evening was a large-scale Englishman just back from West Africa. He sat on his hostess’s right and presently began telling of what must have been, I am sure, a terrific adventure in the great forest of the Congo.

When he had suggested telling of his experience, our hostess had said, “Oh, do, Mr. Rawlinson!” and as he told it she had sat gazing into his face with every sign of rapt attention. She seemed to be hanging on every word.

So she was – in a way. In her right hand she had a spoon ready to help a silver dish of trifle, and she wanted to be quite sure when Rawlinson had done, so as to give him a spoonful. The little flashes of animation that he saw pass across her features were merely false starts that meant that once or twice she had thought he was through and he wasn’t.

With such encouragement Rawlinson carried his story toward its climax with increasing dramatic effect, so much so that the rest of us at the supper table were all listening to him. He was telling how he himself and a single companion were hopelessly lost, at midnight, in the great woods of the Congo, shuddering under the dripping forest, when – so related Rawlinson – “All of a sudden, as we sat there, we heard the most piercing shriek for ‘help’ echoing through the woods.”

Rawlinson paused, and sat back to enjoy the dramatic effect.

Our pretty hostess reached out and helped him to a spoonful of trifle, and said very quietly and comfortably, as if carrying on the topic still further:

“Of course when we go to the woods we always take our own help.”

At which, whether it was good manners or not, we all burst out laughing, so much so that our hostess looked across to her husband in charming perplexity and asked:

“Now, what have I said?”

There was something childishly appealing in the confession, but as her husband just went on laughing, I explained to her:

“You said nothing. Rawlinson’s lost in the woods on the Congo, but let him stay there. Go on with the trifle.”

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Atmosphere

Hotel keeping, I can assure you, is a highly specialized art. Not every man can do it. You have, in a way, to be born to it. It is a matter of character, and atmosphere. You either have it, or you don’t.

Many Montrealers of the older generation will recall the memory of the genial Mr. Klick, the manager of one of our most select hotels. It was Mr. Klick’s standing illusion that the “guests” were his guests, in the personal sense. “We had your brother George with us again last week,” he would say to me. “It was a great pleasure to have him.” To Mr. Klick, George’s visit was directed personally toward himself, and the illusion – since life is built up on such – created a certain atmosphere of reality.

Another such I knew for whom a similar illusion was extended even to the creature comforts that he dispensed. The old-fashioned bar of the Somerset House in Toronto, where he presided – a bar glistening with mahogany and redolent of lemon and spices – was for him not a hired place of commercial entertainment but a sort of sanctuary where the connoisseur was met and matched by an art equal to the measure of his appreciation.

“I hear you have some new ale out from England, Mr. Hopkins,” I once said to him. “May I have a glass of it?”

“Sorry, Mr. Leacock,” he said, “I can’t serve it to you – not for another three weeks – not fair to the ale, sir, not fair to the ale.”

To Mr. Hopkins, ale was a living, breathing creature, with rights and sentiments of its own.

Knowing this of hotel atmosphere, I was interested in being able to witness, a couple of summers ago, the very process by which such an atmosphere is brought into being.

I entered the “rotunda” of one of those pleasant little frame hotels, newly built, that dot the inner channel of the Georgian Bay. When I had duly registered, I said to the proprietor, who seemed to be the only person around:

“You have a charming spot here. Do you get a nice class of people?”

“Very nice class of people,” he assured me. “Mostly professional men up from Toronto, men like Judge Barracot who is with us just now.”

“Have you good fishing?” I asked.

“Very good, indeed; our guests generally take a guide and go up toward Parry Sound. Judge Barracot was out this morning.”

“Do they get many?”

“Generally get a very fair catch. Judge Barracot was saying he got a dozen bass this morning.”

From which the proprietor went on to talk of golf and said that the improvised course of nine holes seemed to give excellent satisfaction. Someone, he thought it was Judge Barracot, had gone round yesterday under fifty.

“Will it be possible to get a game of bridge in the evening?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t think that will be any trouble. One of our guests, Judge Barracot, was talking this morning of getting up a table.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “as I’ve an hour or so before supper, you might introduce me to one or two of the guests, if you don’t mind.”

“Why, yes, certainly. Now let me see, I wonder who you’d like to meet. Come with me to the lounge.”

He led me from the rotunda into a side room, where an elderly man was seated reading a paper.

“Judge Barracot,” he said, “I want you to meet Professor Leacock. . . .”

“You’ve been here often before?” I asked the Judge.

“No,” he said. “I just came up from Toronto yesterday. As far as I know you and I are the only guests; the hotel only opened on Monday.”

—

But at any rate we were not left long as the only guests. Even while we were talking I was aware of the entry of a new guest into the rotunda, and through the open door I could hear our host say:

“Oh, yes; our guests are very largely professional men and college men. We have men like Judge Barracot and men like Professor Leacock . . .”

Now don’t ask me the nearer address of this little hotel. It would be not good if you did, for it’s all booked for summer, as it deserves to be. Atmosphere has settled on it.

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Freedom of Thought

In these days when there is so much discussion of dictatorship and the suppression of free thought, it is well to get any light one can on what free thought and free speech should properly mean.

Now it is generally understood that the people of the Southern States, especially the generation of “the war,” whatever their faults may have been, were at least conspicuous for their chivalrous sense of honour and fair play. So I am glad to be able to contribute to the vexed discussion of free thought a personal testimony as to how they look on it in Arkansas.

There came from that State, to spend the summer in my home town, a gallant old Southerner, at that time Attorney General of Arkansas, and a veteran – an ex-general – of the Confederate Army. It was in my earlier days at McGill and I was lecturing on American history, and, when I met General Morsy, it seemed wonderful to me to talk with a man to whom the Civil War was a vivid personal recollection, and who bore the marks of it, in his stilted walk and his stiffened arm.

I took the General out sailing on Lake Couchiching, and the old man sat on the gunwale of the boat, as easily as on a gun-wagon, but he never saw the waves, and he never felt the wind nor noticed the blue of the cloudless sky, for he was talking of the battle of Shiloh and was telling how Albert Sydney Johnston died. I took him out for a drive – there were no motors then – and he never saw the woods nor noticed the ripening fields of grain, for his talk was of Pemberton’s stand at Vicksburg, and before his eyes, as he spoke, the Mississippi rolled below the bluff.

Now it so happened that that summer I received a suggestion about an appointment to the University of Arkansas – one of those tentative half-offers that whisper in the ears of young college lecturers. Naturally I wanted to know about the place, and whether my opinions, as an economist, would be free, would be my own. So I asked General Morsy about it.

“Sir,” he said, “if you come to our State, as I hope you may, you will find with us the most complete academic freedom. We make it a point of honour. You can think and talk entirely as you like.”

The General paused, and, after a minute’s reflection, he added:

“We shall, of course, take it for granted, sir, that you believe in free silver.”

—

Simple, isn’t it? Solves the whole problem. After all, if a man’s salary is good enough, surely he can believe in anything.

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His Better Self

It is strange the devious ways in which drink affects different men. Some grow quarrelsome, others optimistic and merry, and others again sentimental and reminiscent.

But the oddest form of “bats” or “jags” I ever knew or heard of were those of my old Toronto classmate, Walter McLellan, whose drunks brought on an access of morality.

I was reading the other night in a book on psychology about what is called the “super-consciousness” or the “super-self.” It is held that in moments of danger, of emergency, some people rise to another and higher self that never comes to the surface in their daily life. It is argued that drink, too, may at times exercise this effect.

This “super-self” must have been what was wrong with Walter.

I would come at times into his office in the morning – Walter had finished Varsity and was trying to practise law – to find him with his head in his hands in a fit of depression.

“I feel awful,” Walter said. “I went into the Dog and Duck last night and had four or five drinks and it started me off.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I took mother up to the Church of the Redeemer to the choir practice; I was full as a fly—”

“And where did you go after the choir practice?”

“Into the rectory with mother for supper,” said Walter with a groan.

“And after supper?”

“Played chess with the rector – full as a bug.”

That was the peculiar nature of Walter’s outbreaks. He took it all in one load, like a camel, and lived on it all evening, without any outward sign at all. He never talked much anyway. He himself knew he was “plastered,” but the rector didn’t.

I remember another afternoon on which Walter went on a terrible bat and took his aunt to the art gallery: and another day when there came to his office a card of invitation from the college to a lecture on palaeontology, and Walter got so full that he went and listened to it.

Xmas always hit him hard. “I made a perfect darn fool of myself with drink yesterday,” he said, in telling me about it the day after.

“What did you do, Walter?” I asked.

“I got an awful skate on quite early in the morning over at Clancy’s.”

“Yes, and what then?”

“I went up to my married sister’s house and went to morning service with her and the children – I certainly was soused – and what did I do but give the three children twenty-five dollars each!”

“That’s all right, Walter,” I said; “it’s fine for them.”

“Oh, I know,” Walter said, “but that wasn’t the whole of it. I signed a subscription for a hundred dollars to rebuild the darn chancel.”

—

Of course if a man goes downhill like that it can’t last forever. Walter’s law business was getting all shot to pieces with choir practice and taking his aunt to lectures and his mother to the Church of the Redeemer.

It was clear that his “super-self” was driving Walter to ruin.

His last outbreak practically cleaned him out. He was full all day – at a church committee meeting and with his mother at a lecture and ended by giving his sister a cheque to pay the eldest boy’s fees for a year at college.

That ended Walter. He quit his practice and started off for the Yukon in the gold rush of 1898.

Walter got to the Yukon, by the Edmonton trail, safe enough, and within a year we’d heard in Toronto that he had struck it rich and was cleaning up a fortune. But right on the heels of this intelligence came the news that Walter had gone on a terrible bat in Dawson City and lost practically everything in a gift to start a Church of England mission.

After that I heard no more of him. They said he had moved to Colorado or some other mining place.

But in the last number of the magazine of my old college, I saw that under the will of somebody whose name seemed meant for his, the College received a gift of a hundred thousand dollars.

So Walter must have drunk himself to death somewhere.

TOC     INDEX

Oh, Sleep!
Oh, Gentle Sleep!

Sleep is a great thing, there’s no doubt of it. And it’s always at its best when you take it at an improper time, as forbidden fruit. That is why sleep is so beautiful during a sermon, and why college students crowd into classes on philosophy.

Sleep is also partly a natural gift.

The most naturally gifted sleeper I ever knew was my classmate of long ago at Toronto, Walter Allen. Walter had such a bright mind that he could sleep for sixteen hours a day and still have mind enough for everything. He took a double course in Greek and metaphysics, impossible for a light sleeper. Later on he rose to eminence on the bench and bar of Illinois. The Americans admired his power of sifting evidence in court with his eyes shut.

But I’m telling now about how Walter went from Toronto to New York for the Yacht Race – the American Cup Race – between the Defender and the Valkyrie. That must have been back in the nineties.

To save money – we were all hard up in the nineties – Walter took no Pullman but sat up awake all night, a thing he hadn’t done since he was born. This economic travel brought him among the first on the tugboat that you took to see the race. It was not to start for an hour, a breezy morn of wind and sun, with sleep in every breath of it. Walter found a huge coil of rope in a sheltered corner astern; just the place for a snooze; time enough to get a good place at the bow later on.

He lay down. Sleep breathed upon him. He had a confused idea of motion, of sea breezes, of trampling feet – and then a man, a deck hand, bent over him and shook him and said:

“You’ll have to get up, please, sir. We’re back at the dock in New York.”

Next morning when he reached Toronto someone asked:

“Who won the Yacht Race, Walter? I forgot to look in the paper.”

“So did I,” said Walter.

TOC     INDEX

Epilogue

Bass Fishing on Lake Simcoe
with Jake Gaudaur

(It ought to be the privilege of an author to reserve some part of his book as his own, and to put into it whatever he likes. Especially in the present volume, of which the earlier part contains so much that is controversial and might arouse anger and disagreement, is it fitting to end with a discourse on fishing where no anger is and where disagreement is only on the surface – which in fishing is of no account. —S.L.)

Among the pleasant memories of my life is the recollection of my fishing days on Ontario’s Lake Simcoe with Jake Gaudaur – little excursions that extended over twenty or twenty-five years. If you don’t know the name of Jake Gaudaur it only means that you were born fifty years too late. Half a century ago Jake was for several years the champion oarsman of the world – a title won on the Thames at Henley. In those days, before motor-cars and airplanes, rowing was one of the big interests of the nations, and Jake Gaudaur was a hero to millions who had never seen him. The fact that his name was pronounced exactly as Good-Oar helped to keep it easily in mind.

Jake was of mixed French and Indian descent but belonged in the Lake Simcoe country and English had always been his language – the kind we use up there, not the kind that they use at Oxford. I can talk both, but the Lake Simcoe kind is easier and, for fishing, far better. It cuts out social distinction. Jake was a magnificent figure of a man; he stood nicely over six feet in his stocking feet – the only way we ever measure people up there. He was broad in the shoulders, straight as a lath, and till the time when he died, just short of eighty, he could pick up the twenty-pound anchor of his motor boat and throw it round like a tack-hammer. Jake – standing erect in the bow of his motor boat and looking out to the horizon, his eyes shaded with his hand – might have stood for the figure of Oshkosh, war chief of the Wisconsin Indians.

When Jake’s championship days were over he came back to Canada and “kept hotel” in Sudbury. That was the thing for champions to do; in the unregenerate days of the old bar, thousands of people spent five cents on a drink just to say they had talked with Jake Gaudaur. I wish that retired professors could open up a bar. It must be a great thing to be an ex-champion, or a quintuplet, and never have to work.

So Jake made his modest pile and then came back to our part of the country, the Lake Simcoe district, and set up at the Narrows, at the top end of the lake, as a professional fisherman, taking out parties on the lake for bass fishing.

Now, who hasn’t seen Lake Simcoe has never seen a lake at all. Lake Simcoe on a July morning – the water, ruffled in wavelets of a blue and green and silver, as clear as never was: the sky of the purest blue with great clouds white and woolly floating in it! Just the day for fishing! – every day is, for the enthusiast.

The lake is just right in size to be what a lake ought to be – twenty to thirty miles across in any direction – so that there’s always a part of the horizon open where you can’t see the land. The shore is all irregular with bays and “points” and islands and shoals, so that any roads thereabouts are away back from the water, and the shore line of trees and sand and stone looks much as Champlain saw it three hundred years ago.

Over it in the summer air of July there hovers an atmosphere of unbroken peace. When I think of it I cannot but contrast it with the curse that lies over Europe where mountain lakes are scarped and galleried for guns, and every church steeple on their shores a range and target. I wish I could take Hitler and Mussolini out bass fishing on Lake Simcoe. They’d come back better men – or they’d never come back.

—

So here we are at ten o’clock in the morning helping Jake load the stuff out of our car into his motor boat! Notice that – ten o’clock. None of that fool stuff about starting off at daylight. You get over that by the time you’re forty. The right time to start off bass fishing is when you’re good and ready to. And when I say ten o’clock, I really mean about ten-thirty. We just call it ten o’clock and when you look at your watch after you’re actually started, it’s always ten-thirty, or not much past it. Anyway there’s no finer time in the day on the water than ten-thirty – still all the freshness of the morning and all the day in front of you – half way between windy and calm with little ruffled waves in the sunlight, and a cool breeze, partly made by the boat itself.

As for the bass, they bite as well at any one time as at any other. The idea that they bite at daylight and don’t bite after lunch is just a myth. They bite when they’re ready to; the only reason they don’t bite after lunch is that the fishermen are asleep till three.

Jake’s boat is no “power” boat, to hit up twenty-five miles an hour. That fool stuff came to our lakes later and is out of keeping with bass fishing. Jake’s is a big roomy open boat with a front part for Jake and a big open part at the back where we sit – a broad stern seat with leather cushions and wicker arm-chairs on a linoleum floor. Solid comfort. No rough stuff for us: we’re not sailors. And no cover to keep off the sun; who cares a darn about the sun when you’re fishing; and nothing to keep off the wind – let it come; and no protection against the rain. It won’t rain. Any man who thinks it’s going to rain shouldn’t go fishing.

“Will it rain, Jake?”

“I don’t think so, Professor; not with that sky.”

We’ve gone through that little opening dialogue, I suppose, a hundred times. That’s the beauty of bass fishing: always doing the same things in the same way, with the same old jokes and the same conversation.

“I was thinking we might go out and try the big rock at McCrae’s point first, Professor,” says Jake.

Seeing that we’ve never done anything else in twenty years, it seems a likely thing to do.

This gives us two miles to go – down from the Narrows to the open lake and then sideways across to the first point. For me this is always the best part of the day – the cool fresh air, the anticipation better than reality, the settling into our wicker chairs and lighting up our pipes, with the stuff all properly stowed around us, the fishing-gear, the lunch and the box with the soda on ice. Not that we take a drink at this time of the day. Oh, no! We’re all agreed that you don’t need a drink on a beautiful fine morning at ten-thirty – unless perhaps just as an exception today because it’s such a damn fine day that you feel so good you’d like a drink. There are two reasons for taking a drink when you’re out bass fishing – one, because you feel so good, and the other – because you don’t feel so good. So perhaps this morning, “Eh what?”

“Well, just a starter.”

“Jake, can I pass you along a horn?”

“Thanks, Professor, I don’t mind.”

There are four of us, mostly, apart from Jake, so it takes most of the time of the run to mix up and serve the drinks. I am thinking here especially of one party, though really it was just like all the others. There was my brother George and George Rapley, the bank manager (a tear to his kind memory), and Charlie Janes, the railroad man of a Lake Simcoe town. George Rapley always came because he could fish, and Charlie Janes because he couldn’t. You may have noticed that bank managers are always good fishermen; it’s something in their profession, I think, a kind of courtesy, that gets the fish. And I am sure that everybody who goes bass fishing will agree that to make the party right you need one fellow who can’t fish. In fact in any bass fishing party of friends who go out often together, there is always one who is cast for the part of not knowing how to fish. No matter how often he’s been out, he’s not supposed to know anything about fishing and he good-naturedly accepts the role. If he loses a fish, that’s supposed to be because he didn’t know how to land it; if we lose a fish it’s supposed to be because it was impossible to land it. It’s these little mutual understandings that fit life together.

—

So almost before the “horn” is finished, here we are bearing down on the big rock off McCrae’s point. It’s nearly a quarter of a mile from shore and six feet under water, but Jake steers to it like a taxi to a hotel door. The anchor goes down with a splash, our swing on it timed to throw us right over the rock! There it is! See it – big as a wagon! – and in another minute down go the baited lines trailing to go under the edge of the great rock.

This is the great moment of fishing, the first minute with the lines down – tense, exhilarating. It’s always the same way – either something big happens, or nothing. Perhaps – bing! the lines are no sooner down than a bass is hooked – by Charlie Janes, of course – just like the luck of the darned fool! And while he’s still hauling on it – biff! there’s another one – and Jake, it seems, has quietly landed a third one when the other two were plunging round. With which there’s such a period of excitement and expectation that it’s nearly three quarters of an hour before you realize that those three fish are all there are – or rather two fish: George Rapley lost his – too bad! he was playing it so beautifully. Charlie Janes, the darned old fool, flung his over the side of the boat, right slap into the ice-box.

Or else – the other alternative – the lines go down and nothing happens.

In either case we fish on and on under the rock till excitement fades into dullness, and dullness into dead certainty. That’s all. At last someone says, “I guess they ain’t biting here any more.” Notice “They’re not biting“; we never say, “they’re not here.” Any man who says, as I have heard some of our odd guests say, “Oh, hell, there are no fish here,” is not fit to be brought again. The only theory on which bass fishing can be maintained as a rational pastime is that the bass are everywhere – all the time. But they won’t bite. The wind may be wrong, or the air just too damp, or too dry, or too much sun, or not enough – it’s amazing how little will start a bass not biting. But the cause must always be one that can change in five minutes, or with a move of five yards. These beliefs are to a fisherman what faith is to a Christian.

“We might try out past Strawberry Island,” says Jake. This means a change farther out, right out in the open water of the lake with the whole horizon of wind and wave and sun open for twenty miles all around to the south. This is not exactly a shoal. The bottom of the lake drops here from twelve feet to thirty feet of water – like the side of a hill. Jake explains it all fresh every time, and he makes each new spot seem so different and so likely that we go at each with new hope eternal. If we don’t get any fish as each half hour stop goes by, Jake tells the story of how he and I fished once and never had a bite till after sundown and then caught thirty-three bass in half an hour off McGinnis’s reef. “You mind that evening, Professor?” he says (to “mind” a thing is to remember it). “It was thirty-three, wasn’t it?”

“Thirty-four I think, Jake,” I answer, and he says, “Well, mebbee it was.” We’ve brought those fish up a little every year.

Or else Jake tells the story of the young girl from Toledo who came up with her father and had never been fishing before and never even in a motor boat, and it was a caution how many she caught. This story, of course, conveys the idea that if inexperienced fishers, like the young lady from Toledo, can catch fish, experienced people like ourselves could hardly expect to.

—

Then all of a sudden as it always seems, comes the idea of lunch – all of a sudden everybody hungry and ready for it. And does ever food taste better than out in the wind and sun in a motor boat? – salmon sandwiches, cold chicken in a salad, chunks of home-made bread, mustard pickles; all eaten partly off a plate and partly with your fingers and with bottled ale to wash it down.

People who go fishing but are not real fishermen land on shore for lunch, light a fire and, I believe, even cook the fish caught. Some of them go so far as to have a game of poker or, in extreme cases of mental derangement, go for a swim. All of this to a proper fisherman is just deplorable, just lunacy. The true fisherman eats right in the boat with the lines still hanging in the water. There seems to be a sort of truce during lunch time; I never knew a bass to touch a hook till it’s over. But lunch on the other hand isn’t hurried. It’s just eaten in the natural way. You put into your mouth all it will hold; then eat it; then start again. Eating in the open air knows no satiety, no indigestion.

The whole point is that the longest day is all too short for fishing, and no one who really loves bass fishing can bear the thought of knocking off from it even for an hour. As a matter of fact, we do take time off but we never admit it. For there also came in our fishing with Jake a drowsy part of the day when we took a sleep. Not that we ever called it that deliberately. The sleep was just a sort of accident. A little while after we’d eaten all the lunch we could hold Jake would say: “I thought we might go and try for a spell down round the corner of that shoal – just off that way apiece. You mind we was there before?”

“Yes, sure, I remember it, Jake.”

The place is a sort of convenient little nook among the shoals – nothing showing on top of the water. We always reckoned as if the bottom were in sight. It had the advantage that the waves couldn’t reach it, because of the shallows, and it was always quiet, and no fish ever came there. Jake could anchor the boat where there were just enough waves to rock the boat gently and just enough light breeze to murmur a lullaby – and with the two-o’clock sun to make you pull your straw panama away over your eyes, a man seated like that in a wicker chair, with two pounds of sandwiches and six ounces of whisky in him, is as drowsy as a flower nodding on its stem, and asleep in five minutes. The lines dangle in the water; there is no conversation, no sound but the breeze and the lapping of the little waves. Up in front we could see only Jake’s broad back, but there was slumber in every line of it.

It didn’t matter who woke first. After about an hour anybody could straighten up and say: “By Jove, I believe I was almost asleep. Were you?” And the others would answer, “Darn near!” And then Jake would say, as if he’d never stopped talking, “I was thinking we might go out and try the dry shoal.”

This rouses us to a new search for bass, hither and thither half a mile, a mile, at a time. Even then we are only covering one corner of Lake Simcoe. The lake is just big enough to seem illimitable.

Bass fishing on Lake Simcoe is not like the bass fishing you can get a hundred miles north of it, on the rivers in the bush, out of easy reach. Up there it’s no come-and-go business in a day; you must stay at least two nights. You catch one hundred bass in the first day and the next day you don’t even keep them; you throw them back. The third day you hate the stinking things; a bass two days dead, with its skin discoloured, would sicken even a cannibal.

Not so Lake Simcoe. There are just not enough bass, just never too many – some dead, dull days without any – they’re there, but they won’t bite. But even on the deadest, dullest day, always the hope of a strike.

You might wonder, if you don’t know the life, why the afternoon never gets dreary, what there can be to talk about – especially among men often and always out together on the same ground. That’s just ignorance. In bass fishing there are vast unsettled problems, to be discussed forever. For example, do you need to “play” a bass, or is that just a piece of damn nonsense imitated out of salmon fishing? The school to which I belong holds that “playing” a bass is just a way of losing it. What you need is a steel rod with the last section taken out and an “emergency tip” put in – making a short firm rod about six feet long. When the bass nibbles, wait – then wait some more – then strike – with such power as to drive the hook right through his head – then shorten the line – not with a reel; that’s too slow – haul it in beside the reel with your left hand and hold it firm with your right – shove the rod close to the water, if need be under the water – by that means the bass can’t jump out of the water, there isn’t line enough – drag him against his will till someone else holds the net – and in he comes.

Contrast this with the artistic “playing” of fish that looks so skilful – paying out line – the fish leaping in the air thirty feet from the boat – and all that show stuff – only good for a picture book!

Now can’t you see that the discussion of that point alone can fill an afternoon?

Personally I am always an extremist for a short rod and rapid action – the bass right in the boat in twenty seconds. I think that in his heart Jake Gaudaur agreed with this. It’s the way all Indians fish and always have. But Jake’s calling demanded compromise. He favoured both sides. Rapley, like all bankers, played a fish as they play a customer with a loan, taking it in gradually.

—

We always knew that the afternoon was closing to evening when Jake said:

“Suppose we go out and try that big rock inside McGinnis’s reef. You mind, Professor? The place where you caught all them bass, that night; thirty-four, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, or thirty-five, Jake. I’m not sure. Let’s try it.”

This sunken rock is the triumph of Jake’s navigation of the lake. It’s a mile from even the nearest point of land, and sunk six feet down. Beside it the big rock at McCrae’s is child’s play. That one you can find if you keep on looking for it. This one, never. It’s all very well to say that you can do it with “bearings”; any amateur yachtsman that ever wore Panama pants will tell you that. But try it. Try to get bearings that are good at all hours and all lights and shadows on the shores, good in rain and good in mist, and you soon see where you are – or are not.

Jake, erect at the bow as he steers, is as straight as Oshkosh; the boat gathers speed in a curve that picks up one of the bearings and then straight as a pencil line over the water for a mile – then a stop with a reversed engine, without a turn, or the bearings would be lost, and there we are – right over the rock. In a clear light it’s as plain as day, but on a dull day you can just make it out, a great rock sunk in a wide basin of water for the bass to get in.

Here we try our final luck. We can’t leave. If the bass are there (I mean if they are biting) it’s too good to leave. If we don’t get a bite, we just can’t leave.

We haven’t realized it, but the afternoon has all gone. The sun is setting behind the hills on the west side of the lake. Just before it goes its beams light up for a moment the windows of unseen farm-houses ten miles the other side of us – and then, before we know it, the sun is gone. But we can’t leave. It’s still broad daylight yet.

“There’s two or three hours good fishing yet, Jake, eh?”

“All of that, Professor.”

Somehow it seems as if the day were suddenly all gone. “Have another horn, Jake?” Surely that’ll hold the daylight a little, giving Jake a horn. Anyway we can’t leave. The light is fading a little. A cold wind begins to move across the lake; the water seems to blacken under its touch as the boat swings to it.

“The wind’s kind o’ gone round,” says Jake. “I thought it would.” It’s not surprising. The wind has gone round and the air turned chill after sundown every evening of the sixty years I’ve known Lake Simcoe. But we can’t leave. Charlie Janes has had a bite – or says he has. We never take Charlie’s word, of course, as really good; he may have caught in a crack of rock. But Rapley thinks he had a nibble. That’s better evidence. So we stay on – and on – till the dark has fallen, the shores have all grown dim and then vanished and the north-west wind is beginning to thump the waves on the bow of the anchored boat.

“I guess, gentlemen, it’s about time to pull up,” says Jake. If we had caught fifteen or twenty bass he’d have said, “Boys, I guess it’s about time to quit.” But “gentlemen” brings us back to the cold cruel reality.

So the anchor is up and the motor boat at its full power set for home. It’s quite rough on the water now; the boat slaps into the waves and sends the spray flying clear astern to where we have our chairs huddled together, back to the wind. It’s dark too. You have to use a flash-light to open the soda for the “consolation drinks” that mark the end of the fishing.

“Have a horn, Jake?”

“Thanks, Professor.”

Jake, with his oil clothes on, can’t leave the wheel now; he sits there all in the spray with one hand for steering and one for the drink.

—

It’s amazing how a lake like Lake Simcoe can change – a few hours ago a halcyon paradise, still and calm – and now with the night and the wind gathering over it—

“Oh, well, Jake knows the way,” and anyway it’s only three miles till we’ll be in shelter of the Narrows! – Whew! that was a corker, that wave! “Here, put these newspapers behind your back, Charlie, they’ll keep off the spray.”

Just enough of this to give one a slight feeling of night and mimic danger – and then, in no great time, for the distance is short, we round into the shelter of the Narrows with just a mile of water, smoother and smoother, to run.

All different it looks from the morning; what you see now is just lights – a perplexing galaxy of lights, white and green and red here and there on the unseen shore – and great flares of moving white light that must be the motors on the highway.

“What’s the red light away up, Jake?”

“That’s the one above the railway bridge.” We always ask Jake this and when he answers we know we are close in. The water suddenly is quite smooth, a current running with us – the summer cottages and docks come in sight, with “young fellers” and girls in canoes and the sound of a radio somewhere discussing war in Europe.

We’re back in the world again, landed at Jake’s dock with a little crowd of loafers and boys standing round to see “how many fish Jake got” – not us, Jake. We unload the boat and take a look at the string of fish. “Let’s see that big one that Rapley caught, eh?” But where is it? Surely it can’t be this small dirty-looking flabby thing – I’m afraid it is.

We divide the fish. Jake won’t take any. We try to work them off on one another. Fishermen want fishing, never fish – and end by slinging them into the car all in one box. “Well, we certainly had a fine day; good night, Jake.” And another fishing day has gone – now never to return.

I can only repeat, in tribute to a fine memory, “Good night, Jake.”

TOC     INDEX

My Remarkable Uncle
and Other Sketches

(1942)

~

Some Memories

My Remarkable Uncle
The Old Farm and the New Frame
The Struggle to Make Us Gentlemen.

Literary Studies

The British Soldier
The Mathematical Problem of the Lost Chord
The Passing of the Kitchen
Come Back to School
What’s in a Name?
Who Canonizes the Classics?

Sporting Section

What Is a Sport?

Why Do We Fish?

When Fellers Go Fishing

Eating Air

Studies in Humour

The Saving Grace of Humour
Laughing Off Our History
War and Humour

Memories of Christmas

Christmas Rapture
Christmas Shopping
War-time Christmas: Santa Claus
War-time Christmas: 1941

Goodwill for America

Cricket for Americans
Our American Visitors
A Welcome to a Visiting American
Uncle Sam: An Allegory

Among the Antiques
The Transit of Venus
Migration in English Literature
Three Score and Ten
The Perfect Index
L’envoi: A Salutation Across the Sea

Some Memories

–1–
My Remarkable Uncle

The most remarkable man I have ever known in my life was my uncle, Edward Philip Leacock – known to ever so many people in Winnipeg fifty or sixty years ago as E.P. His character was so exceptional that it needs nothing but plain narration. It was so exaggerated already that you couldn’t exaggerate it.

When I was a boy of six, my father brought us, a family flock – to settle on an Ontario farm. We lived in an isolation unknown, in these days of radio, anywhere in the world. We were thirty-five miles from a railway. There were no newspapers. Nobody came and went. There was nowhere to come and go. In the solitude of the dark winter nights the stillness was that of eternity.

—

Into this isolation there broke, two years later, my dynamic Uncle Edward, my father’s younger brother. He had just come from a year’s travel around the Mediterranean. He must have been about twenty-eight, but seemed a more than adult man, bronzed and self-confident, with a square beard like a Plantagenet King. His talk was of Algiers, of the African slave market, of the Golden Horn and the Pyramids. To us it sounded like the Arabian Nights. When we asked, “Uncle Edward, do you know the Prince of Wales?” he answered, “Quite intimately,” with no further explanation. It was an impressive trick he had.

—

In that year, 1878, there was a general election in Canada. E.P. was in it up to the neck in less than no time. He picked up the history and politics of Upper Canada in a day, and in a week knew everybody in the countryside. He spoke at every meeting, but his strong point was the personal contact of electioneering, of bar-room treats. This gave full scope for his marvellous talent for flattery and make-believe.

“Why, let me see,” he would say to some tattered country specimen beside him, glass in hand, “surely, if your name is Framley, you must be a relation of my dear friend General Sir Charles Framley of the Horse Artillery?” “Mebbe,” the flattered specimen would answer, “I guess, mebbe; I ain’t kept track very good of my folks in the old country.” “Dear me! I must tell Sir Charles that I’ve seen you. He’ll be so pleased . . .” In this way, in a fortnight E.P. had conferred honours and distinctions on half the township of Georgina. They lived in a recaptured atmosphere of generals, admirals and earls. Vote? How else could vote than conservative, men of family like them!

It goes without saying that in politics, then and always, E.P. was on the conservative, the aristocratic side, but along with that was hail-fellow-well-met with the humblest. This was instinct. A democrat can’t condescend. He’s down already. But when a conservative stoops, he conquers.

—

The election, of course, was a walk-over. E.P. might have stayed to reap the fruits. But he knew better. Ontario at that day was too small a horizon. For these were the days of the hard times of Ontario farming, when mortgages fell like snow-flakes, and farmers were sold up, or sold out, or went “to the States,” or faded humbly underground.

But all the talk was of Manitoba now opening up. Nothing would do E.P. but that he and my father must go West. So we had a sale of our farm with refreshments, old-time fashion, for the buyers. The poor, lean cattle and the broken machines fetched less than the price of the whisky. But E.P. laughed it all off, quoted that the star of the Empire glittered in the West, and off to the West they went, leaving us children behind at school.

They hit Winnipeg just as the rise of the boom, and E.P. came at once into his own and rode on the crest of the wave. There is something of magic appeal in the rush and movement of a “boom” town – a Winnipeg of the ’80s, a Carson City of the ’60s . . . Life comes to a focus; it is all here and now, all present, no past and no outside – just a clatter of hammers and saws, rounds of drinks and rolls of money. In such an atmosphere every man seems a remarkable fellow, a man of exception; individuality separates out and character blossoms like a rose.

E.P. came into his own. In less than no time he was in everything and knew everybody, conferring titles and honours up and down Portage Avenue. In six months he had a great fortune, on paper; took a trip east and brought back a charming wife from Toronto; built a large house beside the river; filled it with pictures that he said were his ancestors, and carried on in it a roaring hospitality that never stopped.

His activities were wide. He was president of a bank (that never opened), head of a brewery (for brewing the Red River) and, above all, secretary-treasurer of the Winnipeg, Hudson Bay and Arctic Ocean Railway that had a charter authorizing it to build a road to the Arctic Ocean, when it got ready. They had no track, but they printed stationery and passes, and in return E.P. received passes over all North America.

But naturally his main hold was politics. He was elected right away into the Manitoba Legislature. They would have made him prime minister but for the existence of the grand old man of the province, John Norquay. But even at that, in a very short time Norquay ate out of E.P.’s hand, and E.P. led him on a string. I remember how they came down to Toronto, when I was a schoolboy, with an adherent group of “westerners,” all in heavy Buffalo coats and bearded like Assyrians. E.P. paraded them on King Street like a returned explorer with savages.

Naturally, E.P.’s politics remained conservative. But he pitched the note higher. Even the ancestors weren’t good enough. He invented a Portuguese Dukedom (some one of our family once worked in Portugal), and he conferred it, by some kind of reversion, on my elder brother Jim, who had gone to Winnipeg to work in E.P.’s office. This enabled him to say to visitors in his big house, after looking at the ancestors, in a half-whisper behind his hand, “Strange to think that two deaths would make that boy a Portuguese Duke.” But Jim never knew which two Portuguese to kill.

To aristocracy E.P. also added a touch of peculiar prestige by always being apparently just about to be called away, imperially. If some one said, “Will you be in Winnipeg all winter, Mr. Leacock?” He answered, “It will depend a good deal on what happens in West Africa.” Just that; West Africa beat them.

—

Then came the crash of the Manitoba boom. Simple people, like my father, were wiped out in a day. Not so E.P. The crash just gave him a lift as the smash of a big wave lifts a strong swimmer. He just went right on. I believe that in reality he was left utterly bankrupt. But it made no difference. He used credit instead of cash. He still had his imaginary bank, and his railway to the Arctic Ocean. Hospitality still roared and the tradesmen still paid for it. Anyone who called about a bill was told that E.P.’s movements were uncertain and would depend a good deal on what happened in Johannesburg. That held them another six months.

It was during this period that I used to see him when he made his periodic trips “East,” to impress his creditors in the West. He floated, at first very easily, on hotel credit, borrowed loans and unpaid bills. A banker, especially a country banker, was his natural mark and victim. He would tremble as E.P. came in, like a stock-dove that sees a hawk. E.P.’s method was so simple; it was like showing a farmer peas under thimbles. As he entered the bankers’ side-office he would say, “I say! Do you fish? Surely that’s a greenhart casting-rod on the wall?” (E.P. knew the names of everything.) In a few minutes the banker, flushed and pleased, was exhibiting the rod, and showing flies in a box out of a drawer. When E.P. went out he carried a hundred dollars with him. There was no security. The transaction was all over.

He dealt similarly with credit, with hotels, livery stables and bills in shops. They all fell for his method. He bought with lavish generosity, never asking a price. He never suggested pay till just as an afterthought, just as he was going out. And then, “By the way, please let me have the account promptly; I may be going away,” and, in an aside to me, as if not meant for the shop, “Sir Henry Loch has cabled again from West Africa.” And so out; they had never seen him before; nor since.

The proceeding with a hotel was different. A country hotel was, of course, easy, in fact too easy. E.P. would sometimes pay such a bill in cash, just as a sportsman won’t shoot a sitting partridge. But a large hotel was another thing. E.P., on leaving, that is, when all ready to leave – coat, bag and all – would call for his bill at the desk. At the sight of it he would break out into enthusiasm at the reasonableness of it. “Just think!” he would say in his “aside” to me, “compare that with the Hotel Crillon in Paris!” The hotel proprietor has no way of doing this; he just felt that he ran a cheap hotel. Then another “aside,” “Do remind me to mention to Sir John how admirably we’ve been treated; he’s coming here next week.” “Sir John” was our prime minister and the hotel keeper hadn’t known he was coming – and he wasn’t . . . Then came the final touch, “Now, let me see . . . seventy-six dollars . . . seventy-six . . . You – give – me” – and E.P. fixed his eye firmly on the hotel man – “give me twenty-four dollars, and then I remember to send an even hundred.” The man’s hand trembled. But he gave it.

This does not mean that E.P. was in any sense a crook, in any degree dishonest. His bills to him were just “deferred pay”, like the British debts to the United States. He never did, never contemplated, a crooked deal in his life. All his grand schemes were as open as sunlight – and as empty.

In all his interviews E.P. could fashion his talk to his audience. On one of his appearances I introduced him to a group of college friends, young men near to degrees, to whom degrees mean everything. In casual conversation E.P. turned to me and said, “Oh, by the way, you’ll be glad to know that I’ve just received my honorary degree from the Vatican – at last.” The “at last” was a knock-out – a degree from the Pope, and overdue at that!”

—

Of course it could not last. Gradually credit crumbles. Faith weakens. Creditors grow hard, and friends turn their faces away. Gradually E.P. sank down. The death of his wife had left him a widower, a shuffling, half-shabby figure, familiar on the street, that would have been pathetic but for his indomitable self-belief, the illumination of his mind. Even at that, times grew hard with him. At length even the simple credit of the bar-rooms broke under him. I have been told by my brother Jim – the Portuguese Duke – of E.P. being put out of a Winnipeg bar by an angry bartender who at last broke the mesmerism. E.P. had brought in a little group, spread up the fingers of one hand and said, “Mr. Leacock, five!” The bartender broke into oaths. E.P. hooked a friend by the arm. “Come away,” he said, “I’m afraid the poor fellow’s crazy! But I hate to report him.”

Presently his power to travel came to an end. The railways found out at last that there wasn’t any Arctic Ocean, and anyway the printer wouldn’t print.

Just once again he managed to “come East”. It was in June 1891. I met him forging along King Street in Toronto – a trifle shabby but with a plug hat with a big band of crape round it. “Poor Sir John,” he said, “I felt I simply must come down for his funeral.” Then I remembered that the prime minister was dead, and realized that kindly sentiment had meant free transportation.

—

That was the last I ever saw of E.P. A little after that someone paid his fare back to England. He received, from some family trust, a little income of perhaps two pounds a week. On that he lived, with such dignity as might be, in a lost village in Worcestershire. He told the people of the village – so I learned later – that his stay was uncertain; it would depend a good deal on what happened in China. But nothing happened in China; there he stayed, years and years. There he might have finished out, but for a strange chance of fortune, a sort of poetic justice, that gave to E.P. an evening in the sunset.

It happened that in the part of England where our family belonged there was an ancient religious brotherhood, with a monastery and dilapidated estates that went back for centuries. E.P. descended on them, the brothers seeming to him an easy mark, as brothers indeed are. In the course of his pious “retreat,” E.P. took a look into the brothers’ finances, and his quick intelligence discovered an old claim against the British Government, large in amount and valid beyond a doubt.

In less than no time E.P. was at Westminster, representing the brothers. He knew exactly how to handle British officials; they were easier even than Ontario hotel-keepers. All that is needed is a hint of marvellous investment overseas. They never go there but they remember how they just missed Johannesburg or were just late on Persian oil. All E.P. needed was his Arctic Railway. “When you come out, I must take you over our railway . . . I really think that as soon as we reach the Coppermine River we must put the shares on here; it’s too big for New York . . .”

So E.P. got what he wanted. The British Government are so used to old claims that it would as soon pay as not. There are plenty left.

The brothers got a whole lot of money. In gratitude they invited E.P. to be their permanent manager. So there he was, lifted into ease and affluence. The years went easily by, among gardens, orchards and fish-ponds old as the Crusades.

When I was lecturing in London in 1921 he wrote to me. “Do come down; I am too old now to travel; but any day you like I will send a chauffeur with a car and two lay-brothers to bring you down.” I thought the “lay-brothers” a fine touch; just like E.P.

I couldn’t go. I never saw him again. He ended out his days at the monastery, no cable calling him to West Africa. Years ago I used to think of E.P. as a sort of humbug, a source of humour. Looking back now I realize better the unbeatable quality of his spirit, the mark, we like to think just now, of the British race.

If there is a paradise, I am sure he will get in. He will say at the gate, “Peter? Then surely you must be a relation of Lord Peter of Tichfield?”

But if he fails, then, as the Spaniards say so fittingly, “may the earth lie light upon him.”

TOC     INDEX

–2–
The Old Farm
and the New Frame

When I left the old farm of my childhood which I described in talking about my remarkable uncle, I never saw it again for years and years. I don’t think I wanted to. Most people who come off farms never go back. They talk about it, cry about it – but they don’t really go. They know better.

If they did go back, they would find, as I did, the old place all changed, the old world all gone, in fact no “farms” any more, no cross-road stores, no villages – nothing in the old sense. A new world has replaced it all.

I went back the other day in a motor car to have a look round the locality that I hadn’t seen since I left it by means of a horse and buggy more than half a century before. I came to do this because I happened to have been looking at one of those typical “motor ads” that you see in the coloured illustrations, motors glistening to an impossible effulgence, a gravelled drive, impossibly neat, beside wide lawns of inconceivable grass and unachievable flower beds. In and beside the motor car were super-world beings as impossible as the grass and flowers around them; youths as square in the shoulders as Greek gods, girls as golden as guineas, and even old age, in the persons of the senior generation, smoothed and beautified to a pink and white as immaculate as youth itself. And as I looked at the picture of this transformed world not yet achieved, but at least existing in the creative mind of the artist, I fell to thinking of all the actual transformation that new invention has brought into our lives.

I thought particularly of how it has changed the aspect of what we used to call the country – the country of the horse and buggy days that I so easily recall. So I went back.

Our farm was up in a lost corner of Ontario, but the locality doesn’t particularly matter. They’re all the same from Ontario to Ohio.

We lived four and a half miles from “the village.” To get to it from our farm you went down a lane – heavy going – up to the hubs in bad weather, then on to a road and up a hill, the same hill really you had just come down only on a different angle; then along a splendid “spin” of at least three hundred yards where you “let the mare out,” that is, made her go like blazes (eight miles an hour); then, whoa! steady! another hill, a mighty steep one, to go down. You had to take it pretty easy. In fact, for the hills you had far better get out and walk, as we generally did; it eased the mare to have us walk up the first hill and it eased the buggy to have us walk down the second.

After the second hill, a fine spin of about four hundred yards, good road and “room to pass.” You couldn’t “let the mare out” all along this, as it might “wind” her; but she could keep going at a pretty smart clip Just the same. Then came the “big swamp,” about three-quarters of a mile or more; in fact, I never knew a road from Maine to the Mississippi that didn’t have a swamp in it. A lot of the big swamp was “corduroy” road. The word means corde du roi, or king’s rope, but the thing meant logs laid side by side with dirt shovelled over them. In the swamp there was no room to pass except by a feat of engineering in chosen spots.

After the swamp you went on over a succession of “spins” and “hills,” the mare alternately “eased” and “winded” and “let out” – and at last, there you were, in the village street – yes, sir, right in the village, under an hour, pretty good going, eh? Cover the mare up with a blanket while we go into the tavern or she may get the “heaves” – or the “humps” – or I forget what; anyway it was what a mare got if you stayed too long in the tavern.

And the village street, how well I remember it. Romantic – well, I don’t know; I suppose it was. But it was just a street; stores on each side with a square sign over each. Trees here and there. Horses hitched to posts asleep; a grist mill at the end where the river hit the village or the village hit the river, I forget which. There were no fancy signs, no fancy stores. The sole place of entertainment was the tavern – beer 5 cents, whisky 5 cents, mixed drinks (that means beer with whisky or whisky mixed with beer) 5 cents. Food, only at meal times at a York shilling a meal, later raised to a quarter.

Such was the typical farm road and village of fifty years ago – a “social cell” as I believe the sociologists would call us.

Now look at the change. I visited it, as I say, the other day in a large smooth-running motor car – this “social cell” from which I emerged fifty years ago. Changed? The word isn’t adequate. It just wasn’t there any more. In the first place, some one had changed our old farmhouse into a “farmstead.” You see, you can’t live any longer on a farm if you are going to have people coming to see you in motor cars – golden girls, Apollo boys and Joan-and-Darby elders. You must turn the place into a “farmstead” – with big shingles all over it in all directions – with a “loggia” in front and a “pergola” at the side.

And the road? All gone, all changed. A great highway swept by in its course and sheared lane and hills into one broad, flat curve; threw aside the second hill into a mere nothing of a “grade,” with a row of white posts; and the swamp, it has passed out of existence to become a broad flat with a boulevard two-way road, set with new shingled bungalows with loggias and pergolas, overgrown with wistaria and perugia, and all trying to live up to the passing motor cars. There’s a tearoom now where the spring used to be, in the centre of the swamp, the place where we watered the mare to prevent her blowing.

But you hardly see all this – the whole transit from farmstead to village by the sweeping, shortened concrete road is just three minutes. You are in the village before you know it.

And the village itself! Why, it’s another place. What charm is this, what magic this transformation? I hardly know the place; in fact, I don’t know it. The whole length of it now is neat with clipped grass and the next-to-impossible flowers, copies from the motor-car advertisements; there are trim little cedars and box hedges, trees clipped to a Versailles perfection and house fronts all aglow with variegated paint and hanging flowers . . . And the signs, what a multitude of them; it’s like a mediaeval fair! “Old English Tea Room”! I didn’t know this was England! And no, it isn’t; see the next sign, “Old Dutch Tea Room,” and “Old Colony Rest House,” and “Normandy Post House”! No, it’s not England; I don’t know where it is.

But those signs are only a fraction of the total, each one vying with the last in the art of its decoration of the angle of its suspension. “Joe’s Garage.” Look at it – built like a little Tudor house, half-timbered in black and white. Joe’s grandfather was the village blacksmith, I remember him well, and his “blacksmith shop” was a crazy sort of wooden shed, out of slope, with no front side in particular and a forge in it. If they had it now they would label it “Ye Olde Forge” and make it an out-of-town eating place.

But these new signs mean that, for the people who ride from the city in the motor cars, the village and its little river has become a “fishing resort.” You see, it’s only fifty-six miles from the city; you run out in an hour or so. You can rent a punt for $1 and a man to go with you and row for another $1 – or he’ll fish for you, if you like. Bait only costs about 50 cents, and you can get a fine chicken dinner, wine and all, for about $2. In short, you have a have a wonderful time and only spend $10; yet when I was young if you had $10 in the village no one would change it, and $10 would board you for a month.

And the people too! A new kind of people seems to have come into – or no, grown up in – the village. I find on examination that they’re really the grandsons and granddaughters of the people who were there. But the new world has taken hold of them and turned them into a new and different sort of people – into super people as it were. Joe Hayes, for example – you remember his grandfather, the blacksmith – has turned into a “garage-man,” handy, efficient, knowing more than a science college, a friend in distress. What a horse-and-buggy doctor of the countryside was to the sick of fifty years ago, such is now the garage man to the disabled motor car and its occupants towed into his orbit. People talk now of their mimic roadside adventures and tell how there “wasn’t a garage man within five miles,” as people used to tell of having to fetch the doctor at night over five miles of mud and corduroy.

And Joe’s brothers and cousins have somehow turned into motor men of all sorts: taximen, and even that higher race, the truckmen. What the draymen of Old London were – admired for their bulk and strength even by the fairest of the ladies – so today are the “truckmen” who have stepped into their place in evolution . . .

Nor is it one sex only that the motor has transformed. People who live in a village where motors come and go must needs take thought for their appearance. See that sign, beauty parlour! You’d hardly think that that means Phoebe Crawford, whose great-aunt was the village seamstress. Or that other sign, Georgette: Lingerie, that’s Mary Ann Crowder. Her grandfather was Old Man Crowder up the river.

Changed, isn’t it? Wonderfully changed, into a sort of prettier and brighter world. And if a little “social cell” has changed like this, it’s only part of the transformation that has redecorated all our world.

The only trouble is to live up to it – to be as neat and beautiful as a beauty-parlour girl, as friendly as a garage man, as bold and brave as a truck driver and as fit a guest to sit down to a frogs’ legs dinner in an Old Mill chop house.

Alas! This happy world that might have been, that seemed about to be! The transformation from the grim and sombre countryside to all this light and colour, had it only just begun to be overwhelmed and lost in the shadow of War?

Perhaps the old farm had something to it after all.

TOC     INDEX

–3–
The Struggle
to Make Us Gentlemen

A Memory of My Old School

I mentioned above that I had gone away from the farm where I lived as a child to a boarding-school – the old Upper Canada College that stood half a century ago on King Street in Toronto. It has all been knocked down since. I look back at it now with that peculiar affection that every one feels for his old school after it has been knocked down and all the masters dead long ago.

But certain things that I was reading the other day in the English papers brought the old school back vividly to my mind. What I was reading belonged in the present English discussion, which the war has so much accentuated, about social classes, and whether “gentlemen” can go on finding a place. For it seems there is a good deal of alarm now in England over the idea that “gentlemen” may be dying out. In an old civilization things come and go. Knighthood came and went; it was in the flower, then in the pod and then all went to seed. Now it seems to be gentlemen that are going. It appears that the upper classes are being so depressed and the lower classes so pushed up, and both shifting sideways so fast, that you simply can’t distinguish an upper birth from a lower. In fact it is hard to make up their births at all.

I wasn’t meaning to write on that topic. The thing is too big. Everyone admits that if gentlemen go, then Heaven only knows what will happen to England. But then Heaven only ever did. But the point here is that the question has got mixed up with the fate of the public schools; I mean, of course, public in the English sense, the ones the public can’t get into. The best solution – it is generally admitted – in fact a solution “definitely in sight,” is in the idea that if you throw the big board schools into the public schools and then throw the small private schools into both of them, then you so mix up your gentlemen with your others that they all turn into gentlemen. Of course you can’t face this all at once; a whole nation of gentlemen is a goal rather than – well, I mean to say it takes time. Meantime if it is “definitely in sight,” that’s the place where the genius of England likes to leave it. It can roost there and go fast asleep along with Dominion Status for India and the Disestablishment of the Church.

So, as I say, this talk of “gentlemen” in England turned me back to our old Upper Canada College on King Street sixty years ago, and the desperate struggle there to make us gentlemen. We didn’t understand for a while just what they were trying to do to us. But gradually we began to catch on to it, and feel that it was no good. There was a kindly and oratorical principal, whom I will not name but whom the affection of Old Boys will easily recall – a kindly principal, I say, with a beautiful and sonorous voice that used to echo through the Prayer Hall in exaltation of the topic. “This school, I insist,” he would declaim, “must be a school of gentlemen.” We used to sit as juniors and think, “Gee! This is going to be a tight shave! I’ll never make it,” but presently we learned to take it more easily. We noticed that the gentlemen question broke out after a theft of school books, or the disappearance of small change foolishly left in reach. Not being yet gentlemen, we made a distinction between “stealing” a thing and “hooking” it. A gentleman, you see, classes both together. He’d just as soon steal a thing as hook it.

But, bit by bit and gradually, we were led towards the ideal. We were often told, by oratorical visitors, that Upper Canada College was founded as a “school for gentlemen.” When I entered the school there was still a few old, very old, boys around, who belonged to the early generations of the foundation. We felt that the school had been fooled in some of them. They seemed just like us.

Personally, however, I got by on a side issue. In those days there was none of the elaborate registration, the card index stuff, that all schools have now. Any information that they wanted about us they got viva voce on the spot by calling us up in front of the class and asking for it. So there came a day soon after I entered when the Principal called me up to be questioned and a junior master wrote down the answers. “What,” he asked, “is your father’s occupation?” I hesitated quite a while, and then I said, “He doesn’t do anything.” The Principal bent over towards the junior master who was writing and said in an impressive voice: “A gentleman.” A sort of awe spread round the room at my high status. But really why I had hesitated was because I didn’t know what to say. You see, I knew that my father, when in Toronto, was probably to be found along on King Street having a Tom-and-Jerry in the Dog and Duck, or at Clancey’s – but whether to call that his occupation was a nice question.

Slowly we learned the qualifications of a gentleman and saw that the thing was hopeless. A gentleman, it seemed, would take a bath (once a week on bath night) and never try to dodge it. A gentleman would not chew gum in St. George’s Church, nor imitate the voice of an Anglican Bishop. A gentleman, it seemed, couldn’t tell a lie – not wouldn’t, just couldn’t. Limitations like these cut such a swath through our numbers that in time we simply gave up. There was no use in it. Mind, don’t misunderstand me. Of course we could behave like gentlemen – oh, certainly – act like gentlemen. At first sight you’d mistake us for it. But we knew all the time that we weren’t.

So, like the other boys, I left school still puzzled about the gentlemen business, and as the years have gone by the perplexity has only gone deeper. What is, or was, a gentleman, anyway? I remember that a little after I left school, while I was at college, there was a famous Canadian murder case that attracted wide attention because the murderer, who was presently hanged, was a gentleman. He was a young Englishman who enticed another young Englishman into a dismal swamp and for the sake of his money shot him in a brutal and cowardly way from behind. I met and knew afterwards several of the lawyers and people on the case, and they all agreed that the murderer was a gentleman; in fact several of them said, “a thorough gentleman.” Others said, “A perfect gentleman.” Some of them had the idea that his victim was perhaps “not quite a gentleman” – but you’d hardly kill a man for that.

This shows, if any demonstration is needed, that a “gentleman” is not a moral term. As a matter of fact, all attempts to make it so break down hopelessly. People have often tried to sort out a class of people whom they call “nature’s gentlemen.” These are supposed to have it all, the honour, the candour (you can see it in their candid faces), all except the little touches of good manners and good English and the things that lie, or seem to lie, on the surface. They may be. But gentlemen don’t mix with them.

Hence you can’t qualify for being a gentleman by being good, nor by being honest, nor by being religious. A gentleman may be those things but, if he is, he never talks about them. In fact a gentleman never speaks of himself and never preaches. All good people do; and so they are not gentlemen. See how perplexing it gets? No wonder it worried us at school. For example, can a clergyman be a gentleman? Certainly, if he keeps off religion. Or, for example, would a gentleman steal? He would and he wouldn’t. If you left a handful of money right on a table near him, with no one in sight, no one to find out, he wouldn’t steal it. Of course not; it’s not the kind of thing a gentleman does. But if you left it in a bank account he might have a go at it; but, of course, that’s not exactly stealing; that’s embezzlement. Gentlemen embezzle but don’t steal.

And, of course, it goes without saying that being a gentleman isn’t just a matter of wearing good clothes. You can’t make yourself a gentleman by going to a good tailor. There is all the difference in the world between a man dressed like a gentleman and a tailor’s dummy. No gentleman ever lets a tailor have his way with him. After the tailor has a suit measured to what he thinks an exact fit, a gentleman always has it let out six inches behind. You can tell him by that; and just when the tailor has the waistcoat what he calls “snug,” the gentleman has it eased out across the stomach. You see, if you give a tailor his own way he carries everything too far; his profession becomes a mania. All professions do. Give a barber his own way and he’ll roll a man’s hair into little ringlets, like a baby’s coqueluche. That’s why foreigners, as seen by a gentleman, are never well dressed and well shaved. They are too submissive to their tailor and their coiffeur. Hence, instead of being well dressed and clean shaven, they are overdressed and parboiled. This is what a gentleman means by a “French Johnny.”

So one understands that a gentleman may dress as he likes.

I noticed an excellent example of this as related in a recent fascinating book of Australian travel. The scene was in that vast Australian empty country that you are not allowed to call desert. They speak of it as the “never-never country,” or the “walla-boo” or the “willa-walla” – things like that. Out there – or in there – I don’t know which you call it – there is nothing but sand and cactus and spinifex and black fellows, with occasional excellent shooting – shooting at great flocks of cockatoos, and an odd shot at a partridge or a pastoralist.

It was away off in this country that the travellers in the book I speak of came across a queer lost specimen of humanity, who had been living there twenty or thirty years – “a hairy, bushy-whiskered, unkempt individual. Grey hair grew on every part of his face. The only place where there was no hair was the part of the head where hair usually grows. That part was as bald as an egg. He had elastic-side boots but no socks. He had trousers but neither braces nor belt. The trousers were loose about the waistband, and whilst he talked, when standing, he spent most of the time grabbing them and hitching them up just as they were on the point of falling down. It was constant competition between himself and the trousers-the trousers wanting to fall down and he wanting them to keep up.”

But the odd thing is that when they came to talk to this man, there is no mistaking from their narrative that he was a gentleman. It was not only his contempt of a tailor that showed it. He had been to a public school, in the proper English sense as above. He still talked like a gentleman and, like a gentleman, had no word of complaint against a little thing like twenty years of sand.

When we say that this man “talked like a gentleman,” how then does a gentleman talk? It is not so much a matter of how he talks but how he doesn’t talk. No gentleman cares to talk about himself; no gentleman talks about money, or about his family, or about his illness, about the inside of his body or about his soul. Does a gentleman swear? Oh, certainly; but remember, no gentleman would ever swear at a servant; only at his own friends. In point of language a gentleman is not called upon to have any particular choice of words. But he must, absolutely must, have a trained avoidance of them. Anyone who says “them there,” and “which is yourn” and “them ain’t his’n,” is not a gentleman. There are no two ways about it; he may be “nature’s gentleman,” but that’s as far as you can get.

The more I look at this problem of the gentlemen the more I realize how difficult it is, and yet, in spite of everything, there seems to be something in it. One recalls the story of how Galileo was bullied and threatened by the Inquisition till he took back and denied his theory that the earth went round the sun. Yet as he came out from the tribunal he muttered to himself, “But it does really.” So with the gentleman. There’s something in it. This quiet man who never breaks his word and never eats with his knife; never complains of hard luck and wears his pants as he wants them; deferential to those below, independent to those above; the soul of honour, except in embezzlement; and when down and out, goes away and looks for a wallaboo and enough sand and cactus to die in.

It’s a fine thing. I’m sorry they failed at my school. I must have another go at it.

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Literary Studies

–1–
The British Soldier

“Soldier, soldier, will you marry me,

With your knapsack, fife and drum?”

The war brings the British soldier back into his own, as the nation’s defender and the nation’s hero. The only change is that in one sense everybody in Britain is now a soldier, and in another sense nobody is. The old “soldier” who spent his life in barracks, busy in war, boozy in peace, is now hard to find. In his place are a mass of “combatants,” “mechanized units,” “pilots,” “bombers,” “ground-men,” “flying-men” and “tank-mechanics.” After the war they will be absorbed back again into the nation. It will turn out that the bomber was really a stockbroker, and that the submarine-torpedo man was studying for the ministry – between shots. In other words, the old-fashioned soldiers will have vanished, along with so many other old-fashioned things of England that we are told are to vanish after the war.

Poor old British soldier! He had only had about two and a half centuries of existence – since Charles the Second took over Oliver Cromwell’s standing army. He was never welcome. The nation only accepted him on sufferance; drank his health in war time, and kicked him out of the pub in peace.

The little verse above, a fragment of a Victorian nursery song, gives the measure of what a worthless fellow the nursery understood the soldier to be. Here he was, verse after verse, cadging and sponging on the poor girl, evidently a housemaid, lured to ruin by his red coat. First she sings to him:

“Soldier, soldier, will you marry me,

With your knapsack, fife and drum?”

And he sings back, miserable fellow:

“Oh no, my pretty maid, I can’t marry now,

For I haven’t got a shirt to put on.”

So the pretty housemaid gives the soldier a shirt and sings again for matrimony. But the soldier sings back for boots . . . and then for a hat, and so on endlessly. If there was an end, a final gift, it was not one for the nursery to hear.

After popular ballads had had their crack at the soldier, the comic poetry of the day took its turn in laughing at him Here is Tom Hood, England’s comic poet par excellence:

“Ben Battle was a soldier bold

And used to war’s alarms,

But a cannon ball took off his legs,

And he laid down his arms”

It appears that Ben Battle had “left his legs in Badajoz’s breeches,” an amusing memory of the fun of the Peninsular War. This may perhaps have been mere superficial laughter without malice. But there is a certain underlying meaning in it. An old soldier was taken for granted as a pauper, an object of charity. People may still recall the game, “Here comes an old soldier to town, pray what will you give him?”

All that represents not what the British soldier was really like, but the character that the Victorian generations insisted on fastening on him. Kipling never wrote truer lines than the ones in which he speaks of the treatment of Mr. Thomas Atkins at the hands of his fellow-citizens:

I went into a public house to get a glass of beer,

The publican, he up and say: ‘We don’t serve soldiers ’ere.’

For it’s ‘Tommy this’ and ‘Tommy that’ and ‘chuck ’im out, the brute! – ’

But it’s the thin red line of heroes when the guns begin to shoot.

The British public ever since early Victoria days, and, indeed, for a century more or less before that, has always looked on soldiers of the ranks in that same way. In time of peace it resents their existence, deplores their low morals, and at first threat of war suddenly discovers that they are the “nation’s defenders,” the “boys in blue, or in khaki” or the “thin red line of heroes” – made thin, no doubt, by low feeding in peace time. When the war ends they are welcomed home under arches of flowers, with all the girls leaping for their necks – and within six months they are expected to vanish into thin air, keep out of the public-houses and give no trouble.

This attitude is all the more strange as contrasted with the typical British attitude towards the “sailor.” Fact, fiction and fancy have enveloped the British sailor with qualities as endearing as those of Mr. Thomas Atkins are, supposedly, offensive and discreditable. The sailor is a “Jolly Jack Tar” – the more tar on him the better. It is his business to be perpetually drunk and “to take his Nancy on his knee” – the same Nancy who, as a housemaid, won’t walk out with Mr. Atkins because she “doesn’t hold with soldiers.” But the Jack Tar stuff gets the girls every time. In return, they are supposed to take all his money, clean his pockets out and when it’s all gone, send him off to sea again. The Jolly Jack Tar is supposed to have “a wife in every port,” but if Tommy Atkins in barracks ever ventures on having a Mary or two, there’s a terrible fuss about it.

Think of all our ballads, poetry and songs that exalt the life of a sailor:

“In No. 9, Old Richmond Square,

Mark well what I do say

My Nancy Dawson, she lives there,

She is a maiden passing fair,

With bright blue eyes and golden hair,

But I’ll go no more a-ro-o-ving

For you, fair maid.”

Turn on the gramophone of recollection and over it comes a mingled melody of ballads in exaltation of the sailor and the sea – “Stretch every stitch of canvas, boys, to catch the flowing wind”. “Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main, Full many a stormy wind shall blow ere Jack comes home again.”

And as the sounds die lower and fainter one seizes among them the requiem of the dead, the dirge for the sailors claimed by the sea:

“Here’s to the health of poor Tom Bowling,

The darling of the crew!

No more he’ll hear the wind a-rolling

For death hath broached him to!”

How deep the sounds echo and reverberate like the boom of the sea itself.

And all this – this national tribute of romance, of affection, of gratitude, how much has the soldier? Little, mighty little – at least in life. Our poets, apart from Kipling, always sing of his death, never of his life.

“Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs but to do or die.”

Exactly. Theirs not to make any trouble! Neither in life, nor in death.

Students of literature will think to contradict me by reminding us of odd notes that sound in our poetry in praise of the soldier’s life. Here’s Shakespeare. He always is, right on the spot. Is it Iago singing? I forget.

“Then clink to the cannikin, clink,

Why shouldn’t a soldier drink?

For life’s but a span, so enjoy it who can,

And clink to the cannikin, clink.”

But better students of literature will tell us that this apparent exception proves the rule. Such drinking songs as these are meant to show what a wicked fellow the soldier is, how essentially without serious thought of a future life – in short, hell for him.

To understand this attitude we have to look back into history. The English, historically speaking, always hated “soldiers,” “paid men,” as the word literally means, men hired to kill instead of fighting for anger’s sake. An Englishman could look after himself; his house was his castle. There were no regular soldiers in England till Charles II, as said above, kept over some of Cromwell’s standing army as a permanent force (the Coldstream Guards, etc.). William of Orange added to it. But, even with that, the power to keep an army was granted by Parliament so grudgingly that it went on only from year to year. The Supply Act only granted money, and the Mutiny Act only sanctioned discipline by legislation renewed every year. Without that, the army would come to a full stop for want of pay, and the officer’s authority vanish for want of legal sanction. Without the renewal of the act, if an officer said, “Eyes right!” the soldier might answer, “Don’t disturb me; I’m looking at something pretty good.” This was true, in all peace time, up to the advent of the present war.

So the unhappy soldier had to pay for the sins of an evil profession. His treatment and his pay reflected this so late as the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the soldier lived in barracks without heat or ventilation; slept two, and even four, in a bed and was swept off by disease like vermin. There was little public heed of it. There were so many paupers and people of despair in the “Merry England” of a century ago that recruits were always findable; the Queen’s shilling could keep pace with Death.

The Victorian soldier’s pay was twopence halfpenny a day, but there were so many odd charges and deductions at the start that a recruit might not get any pay at all for four months. The soldier lived under a savage code of flogging and punishment. He got no education. Before the Board schools of 1870 most soldiers could not read or write. The recruit was given (after 1829) a little record book (which he could not read) with a sample name in it – Thomas Atkins. That stood for him. Later he turned it to glory.

Thus a soldier was supposed to be a disreputable sort of person, whose aim in life was to get housemaids “into trouble.” Soldiers, not officers! That was entirely different. Just as common soldiers had too little, so officers had too much in the long stretches of Victorian peace. These were days before modern inventiveness had turned an officer’s life into industry and algebra. An officer in between wars was supposed to do nothing – except to go to lawn parties, hunts, drags – God knows what – I forget the names of their entertainments – and accept the role of the pampered darling of the ladies. Every now and then there came along a “little war,” and thither the officer went to play his part with infinite courage and no algebra; conquered the natives till they said, “Quit!” then taught them how to play cricket.

How the times have changed! One thinks now of European expansion, and the expansions imitated from it, as one vast horror of flaming gas and tearing detonations – how different it was when Quanko Sambo, laying down his assegai, took up a cricket bat to develop his marvellous native ability at a cut to the off, and his permanent native inability to stand firm against a fast leg break . . . Of the “little wars” of the time of which I speak, were the Abyssinian and the Ashanti, and the second Afghan and the first Boer – all of that enough and plenty, if all mixed with a period of service in India to give the officer his right to tea and muffins and the favour of the fair sex in the intervening intervals of leisure; enough to rank him above the curate, the doctor, the lawyer and the banker; the “business men” they were not yet respectable. The officers, all feathers and whiskers, ruled the roost.

But, oddly enough, the reasoning that created the social esteem of the officer was not applied to Mr. Thomas Atkins. He was in all the wars, big or little, just as much as his officer – but he got no thanks for it at home. I think one reason was that in the “Victorian” period of peace from Waterloo to the Crimea – there was, literally, a generation who went into the army as young men after 1815 and served a whole lifetime, from subalterns to colonels, and never heard a shot fired except blank cartridges at a review. And here was a corresponding British public – the public of Charles Dickens’s time, who had grown to forget war, who were absolutely removed from all possibility of invasion or civil war, who could not foresee in fancy the days of falling bombs – such a nation, sunk in the utter security of peace, sunk, by millions, in the utter hopelessness of poverty, what could they know or realize of soldiers? Soldiers! To the working men of the Chartist days, soldiers meant the men with guns called out to shoot down workmen in the massacre of Peterloo (1819). Soldiers, Yah! just a butcher with a red-coat. Honestly, ever so many workmen in England felt like that in the period of Victorian Peace. And officers! to the plain people, outside of society, great and small – officers, just fuss and feathers, India and hot curry!

Turn over the pages of Punch, which began its life as a radical paper of protest and grew with years to the mellowness of saddened wisdom – and there you will see the officer and the soldier, in their Victorian feathers and in their Victorian “pubs.”

No pages reflect this attitude more than the volumes of Charles Dickens, a repository of social history. Dickens had, with all his genius, the narrow short sight of his day and class, sentimental tears for poverty but no vision to remove it except by inviting everybody to be as noble a fellow as himself. War to Dickens was needless and silly; foreigners, comic people, who lacked stability; officers, fops; soldiers, loafers. Here and there, I admit, are bright exceptions (for I know my Dickens as a Scottish divine knows his Bible); I can recall, of course, Mr. Bagshot and Trooper George. But speaking by and large, the whole military art was, to Dickens, either needless or comic. Witness the famous Chatham review in Pickwick, or the stock figure of the “recruiting sergeant,” as in Barnaby Rudge and elsewhere – the Sergeant with the King’s shilling – an engine of temptation and corruption to the young – seducing young men into “going for a soldier”.”

It was only as the old standing army was passing away, at the close of the century, to give place to the new Nation under Arms, that the “soldier” began to come into his own . . . The South African War rediscovered Thomas Atkins as a “Soldier of the Queen,” and sang invocations to him, “as a good ’un heart and hand, as a credit to his calling and to all his native land.” But before the change had time to be more than begun the Great War of 1914 swept away the foolish complacency of Victorian Britain and set in a true light the values that had been disregarded.

But why – as the comedians say – why rake all that up now? So that we’ll know better next time.

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–2–
The Mathematical Problem
of the Lost Chord

Everyone is familiar with the melodious yet melancholy song of the Lost Chord. It tells us how, seated one day at the piano, weary, alone and sad, the player let his fingers roam idly over the keys, when suddenly, strangely, he “struck one chord which echoed like the sound of a Great Amen.”

But he could never find it again. And ever since then there has gone up from myriad pianos the mournful laments for the Lost Chord. Ever since then, and this happened eighty years ago, wandering fingers search for the Lost Chord. No musician can ever find it.

But the trouble with musicians is that they are too dreamy, too unsystematic. Of course they could never find the Lost Chord by letting their fingers idly roam over the keys. What is needed is method, such as is used in mathematics every day. So where the musician fails let the mathematician try. He’ll find it. It’s only a matter of time.

The mathematician’s method is perfectly simple – a matter of what he calls Permutations and Combinations – in other words, trying out all the Combinations till you get the right one.

He proposes to sound all the Combinations that there are, listen to them, and see which is the Great Amen. Of course a lot of the combinations are not chords at all. They would agonize a musician. But the mathematician won’t notice any difference. In fact the only one he would recognize is Amen itself, because it’s the one when you leave church.

He first calculates how many chords he can strike in a given time. Allowing time for striking the chord, listening to it and letting it die away, he estimates that he can strike one every 15 seconds, or 4 to a minute, 240 to an hour. Working 7 hours a day with Sundays off and a half day off on Saturday and a short vacation (at a summer school in mathematics), he reaches the encouraging conclusion that if need be – if he didn’t find the Chord sooner – he could sound as many as half a million chords within a single year!

The next question is how many combinations there are to strike. The mournful piano player would have sat strumming away for ever and never have thought that out. But it’s not hard to calculate. A piano has 52 white notes and 36 black. The player can make a combination by striking 10 at a time (with all his fingers and thumbs), or any less number down to 2 at a time. Moreover he can, if a trained player, strike any 10, adjacent or distant. Even if he has to strike notes at the extreme left and in the middle and at the extreme right all in the same combination, he does it by rapidly sweeping his left hand towards the right, or his right towards the left. There is a minute fraction between the initial strokes of certain notes, but not enough to prevent them sounding together as a combination.

This makes the calculation simplicity itself. It merely means calculating the total combinations of 88 things, taken 2 at a time, 3 at a time and so on up to 10 at a time.

The combinations, 2 notes at a time, are:
88x87 / 1x2 =
3,828

For 3 at a time:
88x87x86 / 1x2x3 =
109,736

For 4 at a time:
88x87x86x85 / 1x2x3x4 =
2,331,890

For 5 at a time:
88x87x86x85x84 / 1x2x3x4x5 =
39,175,750

For 6 at a time:
88x87x86x85x84x83 / 1x2x3x4x5x6 =
541,931,236

For 7 at a time:
88x87x86x85x84x83x82 / 1x2x3x4x5x6x7 =
6,348,337,336

For 8 at a time:
88x87x86x85x84x83x82x81 / 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8 =
64,276,915,527

For 9 at a time:
88x87x86x85x84x83x82x81x80 / 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8x9 =
571,350,360,240

For 10 at a time:
88x87x86x85x84x83x82x81x80x79 / 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8x9x10 =
4,513,667,845,896

For all combinations:
5,156,227,011,439

This gives us then an honest straight-forward basis on which to start the search. The player setting out at his conscientious pace of half a million a year has the consoling feeling that he may find the Great Amen first shot, and at any rate he’s certain to find it in 10,000,000 years.

It’s a pity that the disconsolate players were so easily discouraged. The song was only written eighty years ago; they’ve hardly begun. Keep on, boys.

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–3–
The Passing
of the Kitchen

I have a friend in my home town in front of whose modest house on the highway appeared a little while ago the sign “Tourists.” Meeting him casually, I asked, “How are you getting on with the tourist trade? Are you getting any?” “Fine,” he answered. “You see, it’s all in the way you treat them. Tourists come to the house and we show them up to their bedroom, and after a while the wife goes up and says, ‘Now you come right down to the kitchen. That’s the place for you.’”

With which, as my text, I will venture to assert that the kitchen is, and has been for generations and centuries, the most human part of any establishment.

Personally, like all my ageing generation, from actual experience I know what a kitchen used to mean. In the Canadian country setting in which I was brought up sixty years ago, the kitchen was par excellence “the room” of the house. It was the only room with any size to it and the only room where it was always warm. A kitchen stove well filled with split hemlock maintained a heat of anything from 100 Fahrenheit to about 1000 Centigrade. You regulated the heat you wanted by the distance you sat from it. I am told that a kitchen of today can be regulated to an even 70 degrees by automatic stoking that is done in the cellar. On the other hand, we had the fun of moving our chairs backwards and forwards. These old kitchens when the farmhouses were laid out were practically the one room of the house. The others were just small spaces built off it. Later on, as the farmers got richer – or no, I don’t quite mean that, as they got a little further into debt – they added a room called the “parlour.” This was a swell room with an oilcloth on the floor and what was called an “organ”, on which the girls of the family learned to play “Pull for the Shore, Sailor.” But the “parlour” proved a false start – it was too good for daily occupation; so after a while it was used only for funerals, and the kitchen came into its own again.

The typical Canadian “cooking stove” of those days was a broad, flat affair with six “lids” on its top and two divisions to it underneath, the firebox and the oven. It didn’t have any of these gadgets and contrivances that turn the kitchen range of today into a marvellous piece of machinery. I have before me as I write a beautiful little booklet of a modern kitchen firm, containing pictures of all sorts of these contrivances of our up-to-date day.

Here, for example, is a wonderful little thermostatic dial which tells you the number of degrees of heat in the oven, without having to open it and put your face in as we used to. We couldn’t have used that; if the kitchen stove was too hot there was nothing for it but to eat your dinner half an hour sooner. Cooking in those days was like navigation – a lot of chance to it. Here in the same booklet is a “ventilating fan above the stove to prevent cooking odours from reaching the rest of the house.” The apparatus would have made no hit sixty years ago. The “cooking odours” were often the best part of the dinner.

After dinner, in the old days, came the “dishwashing” with a commotion on the scale of a charge of cavalry. The women worked at it with spirit; the dishes, like the cavalry, coming together with a glorious crash and with the casualties counted afterwards. Nowadays, in the pretty little kitchen I’ve been admiring in a picture, it’s all different. Hot water runs at the turn of the tap. The dishes, as soon as they pass into the gleaming enamelled cabinet sink, seem instantly again things of beauty – just, as Burke said, “vice lost half its evil when it lost its grossness.” A little “treatment” in the roomy looking basin and on to the drain boards, and the dishes will be clear back to virtue.

The kitchen, as I say, was the real house in our pioneer days. Indeed, if you have a taste for what is called archeology and go farther back than that, you find that houses only came to be built as a shelter around the kitchen fire. Primitive men cooked their food at an open fire built on stones. But that meant that, if it was windy, the smoke would blow all over the place. So after, let us say, ten thousand years (their minds moved slowly) it occurred to some one to make a sort of wall of earth and stones on the windward side of the fire to keep the wind away. After this brilliant novelty had been popular for another ten thousand years, the device was found of building the wall around all four sides. From that to putting a roof over it was a mere step – not more than a thousand years! After that most primitive men “rested” and their houses – a wigwam, an igloo or what-not – remained at that, a cooking fire walled in and fairly well covered over.

Now, if you don’t believe this theory, that the kitchen was the house, you can go and see the proof actually in England, in the famous kitchen of the Abbot of Glastonbury. It still stands as a beautiful eight-sided stone house, with a roof tapering up to a peak where hung a lantern. It has size to it. When you undertake to feed a mediaeval abbot and a hundred monks and lay brothers who have nothing to do all day but sing and eat, you have a real job. The abbot’s kitchen was about forty feet across each way. Even at that it was only one of a lot of celebrated kitchens of the Middle Ages. Several Abbeys, like those of Durham and Gloucester, had kitchens over thirty-six feet wide. But the triumph of all is found in the kitchen built by Cardinal Wolsey for the college that he founded, Christ Church, at Oxford, still the marvel of the tourist. Wolsey, like all great men, when he did a thing, did it on a big scale. Just as Cheops of Egypt needed a pyramid as his gravestone, and Cecil Rhodes about a hundred square miles on the Matoppo Hills, so Wolsey, when he made a kitchen, saw to it that it was a kitchen. He had no use for underfed students. Learning, we are told, maketh a full man, and Wolsey’s idea was to make the students full first so that they’d learn more easily. So the kitchen was made on such a proportion that you could roast an ox whole over one of its fires; and over another was a huge “turnspit” on which you could spike about one thousand birds at a time.

If you think these details were mere display, you only show that you don’t understand the great part eating played in the Middle Ages. What else was there to do? No movies, no radio, no lectures on Cosmic Evolution – nothing but to fight and make love and eat. And as you kept running out of enemies and running out of girls, it left nothing but eating.

The size of the feasts was appalling. When King Edward IV. (1467) wanted to express his delight at the consecration of Bishop Neville as Archbishop of York, he felt that a fitting religious touch would be given to it by a feast – all free for everybody. He invited 6000 guests, and they all came. (They will every time!) The menu included roast mutton (1000 sheep), a veal entree (504 calves), a side dish of 504 hogs, an “entremets” of 2000 geese and 1000 capons, along with a trifle of 15,500 birds. For anybody who wanted “another helping” there were 1500 hot venison pasties and 15,000 fancy tarts and jellies.

That sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it? But it is all in an old Latin book called Antiquitates Culinariae. Of course, the feast went on for days and days, lasted till the guests began to leave because they had an engagement at another feast.

Now the odd thing was that when they cooked these vast banquets in the mediaeval kitchens, everything was done by hand labour in the simplest fashion. It never occurred to these people to look for mechanical contrivances, such as “mincers,” “mixing machines,” “cutters” and “parers” and the fancy cookers that replace human hands. The huge ox was hoisted up on a hook over the fire, and a group of “turnspits” – unhappy little kitchen devils who lived and slept in the refuse – turned it round and round. The birds – the light stuff – were spiked together, a hundred or more at a crack, and turned on a spit in the same way. The furniture and appliances of the kitchen were of the same primitive simplicity. One or two enormous tables of oak planks hewed flat were placed to hold the huge copper cauldrons. Into these the head cook threw everything he could think of – nothing was measured, nothing was timed. Up went the cauldron over the fire, and when it was done – perhaps he knew what it was!

Compare with these our modern experts. I’d like to read this (I’m quoting again the latest “Kitchen Notes”) to Cardinal Wolsey or Archbishop Neville:

“In the kitchen of today the work centres for preparation and storage, washing of food and utensils, and cooking and serving are arranged around the walls in proper sequence. The food comes in the back door and goes into the adjacent refrigerator and storage cabinets. Next in line comes the all-important sink, complete with ventilated cupboards for the storage of vegetables and utensils, providing hot and cold tempered water to any part of the basin, a concealed spray fixture for rinsing on a rubber hose which pulls out from a niche and pops back when let go, and a removable cup-strainer in the outlet which catches crumbs and parings.”

And yet I don’t know whether that kind of thing would have made much impression on the Archbishop or the Cardinal. They had their own way in the Middle Ages. They didn’t care much about mechanical exactitude. What they liked was the personal touch; and they had a grip on the cook which we have since lost. If anything went wrong with the banquet – well, there’s no need to go into details – just say he never cooked again!

Yet, while he went strong, he was a person of great importance, even of rank or wealth. He had the privilege of walking into the hall in the procession, along with real gentlemen who had never worked in their lives and couldn’t boil an egg.

The evolution of the kitchen seen from early times is odd enough. But odder still is the evolution of the cook. Take the cook of the Middle Ages with the long spoon and the turnspits and the cauldrons and what did he turn into, as mediaevel civilization faded away and the modern era replaced it? The cook of the great families, by the time of Queen Victoria and till yesterday, turned into a woman, usually a large, stout woman weighing from two hundred up, as shapely as a wet Bologna sausage dressed in a black costume tied into divisions. She was called Mrs. Jennings, or Mrs. So-and-so, but nobody ever heard of her husband. Familiarly she was called “cook,” and generations of English children got from her surreptitious tarts and delicacies meant for the grown-up people.

Then slowly “cook’s” job began to be undermined. A woman called Mrs. Beaton conceived the daring design of feeding her own husband. Mr. Beaton died. Nothing, however, could be proved, and the matter was presently allowed to drop. Mrs. Beaton found no second husband and devoted her widowhood to making a list of all the things she had fed Mr. Beaton on. She published it under the name Cook Book. Other rivals followed in her wake, and cooking, which had been, like the church, a closed profession, was thrown wide open by the new “cook book.”

The cook book, though nobody foresaw it at the time, did away with the cook. Anybody could be a cook now. All you had to do was to follow the directions. “Take a pound of steak; beat it for an hour; and then add half ounce of mace, half ounce of dice and beat it again for an hour; strain it, jump on it and add a gill of rosemary and anything else you haven’t got . . . and then give it to them.”

So, with the cook gone, and these simple directions to follow, and gadgets to do it with, the result has been that the kitchen, the real old kitchen, has gone too. There isn’t any. Go out to dine in any of the new apartment households that Cupid opens every day, and the only cook that you find is the charming little hostess, who has just served the cocktails, dainty, as if she never worked a minute in her life, and cool as a lobster salad. She just turns on a “control” to keep its eye on the roast, sets the soupometer for 70 degree, turns on enough electric heat to freeze the cocktail, and there you are! Nothing to do but start the radio and wait for the guests and hope her husband gets shaved in time.

And when the little dinner is served, believe me, Cardinal Wolsey and his whole ox are just nowhere!

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–4–
Come Back to School

For the last few years before the present war, the British Isles, so it was understood, were being swept by a wave of Adult Education – the same wave which was almost washing the United States into the Gulf of Mexico. Washing by waves – crime waves, drink waves, waves of enthusiasm and of disillusionment – is a part of the progress of our great democracies. After the wave comes the back-wash of common sense that levels the ground again.

But this adult education; I’m all for it. For some it means carrying on school all through life, never ceasing to learn; for others, beginning late what they had not the chance to begin early; making opportunity by overtime effort; supplying, by their own initiative and will, the defects imposed by adversity. That is adult education, and that is what it does for the community at large. I am, I say, all for it. If I could think of anything I didn’t know, I’d take classes in it right now, at seventy-two.

Only I don’t like the name – adult education. I wouldn’t want any one to call me an “adult.” That word never seems quite right; it always sounds like a half-wit. Don’t they have homes for adults? No? Well, surely there are adults in some of the homes, and you can hang an adult, can’t you? And, of course, “education” is a tainted word. It carries still its old false suggestion that it is something everybody had as a child, like measles, and doesn’t need any longer. Say to any man, “Look here, don’t you think you need a little education, the kind they give to adults?” and see how he reacts to it.

But the reality of adult education, which is what I want to talk about, is one of the big things of the world today. What it means is that all the world is going back to school.

Now here is one of the reasons for it. People are no sooner out of school than they have a wistful longing to get back to it. Boys and girls take school as an accepted routine, understood by convention to be a sort of hardship, a violence to be done to youth. The teacher, if a man, is understood to be a pretty hard lot, and if a woman, a mean kind of cat. The child who says “I love teacher” is the odd one out, and will go to heaven early. At best they say, “She’s not so bad,” or “He’s all right out of school.” But school is no sooner over for the last day than they begin to weave round it a gossamer web of retrospect.

Each year that passes adds to their wistful illusion. They go back after three years, and there are the same old bricks (still there) and the same old desk with their names cut on it – look, see it! And when they hear, after four years, the sound of the same old bell, at the old hour (no change), they almost break down. As the years go still farther, and get really on, they find out that the teacher (dead) was a grand man, a scholar of the real old type. All the real type are dead. In fact, as with the Indian, the only good teacher is a dead teacher. As for the woman teacher, they discover later on that she wasn’t a woman at all, just a girl – young and timid. How it must have distressed her – the rough horseplay, and the classroom cut-ups. Too bad!

It is the same, of course, with college, only on a much bigger scale, just as a three-ring circus eclipses a local Fall show. All through college the students are counting up the time to get out of it. The minute they enter, they call their class not by the year it comes in but by the year in which it hopes to go out. “Rah! Rahl “46!” they shout. Just as if a baby was christened “Old Jones.” They count each course; they number each credit; they “finish” trigonometry; after the second year they are no longer “liable” to history; after the third “not responsible” for Shakespeare; at the end of the fourth they are all signed off and paid off like a ship’s crew from a long voyage. They shout “Rah! Rah! “46!” But the sound weakens in their throat. Open the gates again! Isn’t there any way to get us back?

So that is why, as they get on in life, people form all sorts of service clubs and luncheon clubs and go and hear speeches. They pretend, of course, that what they want is current information; that they want to get posted – but it isn’t so. They want to get back to school, just as an old sailor wants to get back on a deck, and an old actor to get back on the boards. So there they sit, listening, back on their school benches, and the tougher the subject, the better they like it.

In my city, as in everybody else’s, the luncheon clubs prefer a lecture on “Egypt Before Christ” to a talk on “England After Churchill.” A week or two ago, I met a group of my acquaintances coming out in a flock from their weekly gathering. “What was it today?” I asked. “Great stuff!” one answered. “Professor Drydout was talking on Babylonian inscriptions. I couldn’t get it all; in fact, I missed a lot of it, but it was great stuff.” You see, there’s a peculiar charm in “missing a lot of it.” It takes you back to the class in geometry at high school.

So the clubs, though the members wouldn’t admit it, are really a sort of school, a branch of “adult education.” You can prove it by realizing how unwilling they are to permit a “humorous” lecture. In their hearts they’d really like something funny instead of Babylon, just as they like a joke in school. But dignity won’t allow it. Fun isn’t education. If you want to give them a humorous lecture you must call it something else – pretend that it’s on “The Later Tendencies of Democracy,” and fill it with stories about Pat and Mike, and what Bill Nye said to Josh Billings.

Meantime the clubs go on expanding information like ripples on a pond, and “expanding” with it the capacity to listen, the desire to know, the sense of interest – in short, all those things which are the very soul of real education.

All power to the luncheon speeches. I only wish I could hear them. But like all old professors, I lost the power of listening years ago. I couldn’t listen to Mohammed for more than four minutes.

One must remember that, after all, the continuance of education, the process of learning, or of trying to, brings its own reward. Human knowledge at large, in the huge philosophical sense, may indeed be more or less lost and bankrupt.

It was the custom, in the far back days that we now call Victorian, to insist that knowledge, in the sense of the contemplation of the universe, brought a sort of warm satisfaction. The stars sang together. A harmonious world fitted its parts like nickel-plated joints. Knowledge, so the poet said, unfolded to their eyes its ample page rich with the spoils of time. Study was even recommended to the Victorian working class, as a kind of sedative to put them to sleep.

“Oh, what a world of profit and delight,” sang one blithering poet, “is open to the studious artisan.” It may have been in 1842. At present, he wouldn’t get much of a feed out of it, not in a universe of matter that has dissolved into atoms which are now merely “fields of force” – the whole physical world just a sort of disturbance, a universe “expanding” with terrific rapidity, not where you think it is, “out there,” but in a “time-space continuum,” which beats the studious artisan right to the balkline. In short, there’s nothing left except a mathematic frame – inside of which a world agonizes, while what we called civilization fights for its life. No, my poor artisan, go and look at another peep-show. Ours is no good.

But while that is true of the general outlook, the humble individual satisfaction in learning something still holds good. If there is conceit and vanity in it, it is too pardonable to notice. If there is mingled with its excellence a little false assumption of superiority over one’s fellows, the recording angel will easily blot it out with a tear.

At least the conceit of learning is better than the boast of ignorance that used to vaunt itself as an aid to success. I say “used to”; it was in the days before the great depression chastened the great conceit. “Look at me,” once said in my hearing a big business man, a great big one. “I can’t do fractions.” I looked at him. He couldn’t. But I felt that even a small decimal would have done him good.

But education, unless we carry it forward, dies out of itself. It is like a flood stream that runs away in the sand, like a garden choked under weeds, like a dim lumber room covered deep with dust. Such becomes education, even for the college graduate, if he never goes on with it. What’s left? More wreckage. He has heard of an isosceles triangle and remembers that you mustn’t produce the sides, or God knows what happens. He remembers that the third declension of Latin was a heller, and that Plato thought what Aristotle didn’t think, and Aristotle didn’t think what Plato thought. That’s the grand old education that Oxford and Harvard used to sell, and it’s all right too, on condition that you keep it in repair.

Otherwise, don’t try to “fall back on it.” You’ll hurt yourself behind.

Compare with such neglect the bright and eager conceit of the “graduate girls” of, say, forty, who are “following a course” on Persian literature this Spring, at one another’s houses; they “took up” Dostoievsky last winter, took him up” and skinned him alive. And they’re all right as a class too, the graduate girls of forty, far better than a class in school. Far too much has been said of the bright mind of youth and far too little of the ripened sympathy of the adult. It is the difference between light flashed from the surface of the water and the shadows that lie below. Not even youth can have everything as its part. Give adult life its share. Take, for example, all that goes with the appreciation of literature, of poetry. Children have not lived long enough yet, have not yet known, thank God, enough of sorrow and of disillusionment to draw the full meaning from the page in which the world has written and cross-written the record of our lot.

Children, bright children, exult in the clash of words and revel in sentiment of which the reality is as yet unknown. Look at them as they gather round the piano, little children of ten and twelve, to sing “In-the gloaming-oh-my darling” – dragging out the words in a whine of ecstasy. “Will-you-think of-one-who loved you-loved-you-dearly-lo-o-ong ago!” That’s all right, dears; now run along to bed. People who look back across the years to lost love have no song for it; it lies too deep.

Children at school may exult in the boy’s standing on a burning deck rhyming with wreck. They may climb in the shades of night with the “Excelsior” boy – “going up,” Heaven knows where or why, except as a prevision of the elevator. But when one reads such lines as “and the stately ships go on to their haven under the hill; but O for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still” – the echo of that is not for minds still in the opening of the pilgrimage of life. That is why, to my thinking, the class of adults – or no, I won’t call them that; I mean grown-up people – is better than a group of children.

This only means that “school” from its very nature has a lot of limitations – much of it must be more or less mechanical, cannot call forth the spontaneous interest and the power of reflection that later learning does. It is hard to be terribly keen on the alphabet. The ancient Phoenicians may have been so when they made it; but children up against S-O-so, D-O-U-G-H-do, fall to get the same thrill. Nor can you reflect much on the multiplication table. You may try to sit and think how queer it is that 9x6 is 54, but you’ve got to be sure that it is, first. In other words, education that stops with school stops where it is beginning.

There are certain phases of adult education which give it, in a sense, a sterner aspect than when seen in the voluntary class taking the hide off an author, every winter evening on Wednesday. I refer to the cases where people have to work overtime, study in the hours that are meant for recreation, as part of a determined drive against adversity. But even there it’s not as bad as it seems. Some of our greatest minds have done their life-work in that way.

One case is that of John Stuart Mill. People think of Mill as the author of On Liberty and Principles of Political Economy, and do not realize, or never knew, that Mill’s “day’s work” in life was not literature. All that was overtime. In the day Mill worked in the London office of the East India Company, in the department of correspondence with Native States – making abstracts of the company’s dealings with Ram Jam of Mysore and Dim Jim of Bengal. But by doing literary work he at last got free – to do literary work.

As a matter of fact, I may say with all modesty that I am myself another case. Fifty years ago I was a resident master in a boarding school, a sort of all-day-and-all-night job, with a blind wall in front of it. To find a way out of it, and on, I took to getting up at five o’lock in the morning and studying political economy for three hours, every day before school breakfast. This process so sharpened my sense of humour that I earned enough money by it to go away and study political; and that, you see, kept up my sense of humour like those self-feeding machines.

But I didn’t mean to speak personally.

Anyway, what’s the good of talking about it? Come on. Let’s get busy. Give me a book. I want to study something. I realize I don’t know a darned thing. Hand me that multiplication table. I’ll begin all over again.

TOC     INDEX

–5–
What’s in a Name?

The titles of books that have come down from the past as part of the world’s literature carry with them a sort of inevitability, as if they could not have been anything else: the Canterbury Tales, Pilgrim’s Progress, Alice in Wonderland. This is especially so of the titles of the works of the Greeks and Romans. Their idea of a title was to name a thing exactly what it was. When Cicero proposed to write on Friendship he called his Little treatise On Friendship. When Livy wrote down the history of Rome he called his volume The History of Rome – not Meet General Hannibal. Indeed, for many, many centuries the aim of the writer in giving a title to his work was to indicate what it was about, not to make a sensation over its appearance. This was the prevailing fashion which led Dante to call his poem on Hell, simply Hell, as it was, as plain and straight as Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium. Hence the earlier vagaries of titles only consisted in an anxious attempt to indicate not only what it was about, but all about it. Thus arose the elaborate explanatory titles that began to come into vogue in the seventh century. These were much stimulated by the writing of religious tracts and controversies, since, notoriously, a preacher finds it hard to stop. Compare – “Meat out of the Larder, or Mediation concerning the necessity; End and Usefulness of Affliction with God’s children.” Even the moderate and sagacious Adam Smith would have thought “The Wealth of Nations” far too snappy a title and called his immortal treatise an “Inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of Nations”. Malthus who followed Adam Smith with his Essay on Population which became and remained one of the world’s books, presented it to the world with the title, “An essay on the principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society, with remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, Mr, Condorcet and other writers”.

It was perhaps in the realm of the drama that titles, at least in England, broke away from literalism to figurative and allusive forms. Henry IV is as plain a title as who should say George VI, but As You Like It is up-to-date as next week. Unlike Shakespeare, Moliere sticks to titles as self-evident as those of Caesar or Cicero – Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le Malade Imaginaire, Le Medecin Malgre Lui. From Shakespeare on we have a string of such play-titles, so familiar in their celebrity that their first peculiar novelty is forgotten, such as Every Man in His Humour or She Stoops to Conquer.

As the writing of fiction grew and stories multiplied it was inevitable that a lot of them would run to the form of The Story of John Smith, or The Adventures of John Smith – and hence simply John Smith, the familiar form of a proper name as a title: compare the long list that begins with Humphrey Clinker, Roderick Random, Masterman Ready, Harry Lorrequer, David Copperfield, When these have been sanctified by use and canonized by success we forget how purely neutral they are of themselves. At times the sound of the name carries aptness, either as a trifle comic (Peregrine Pickle) or as suited to the character, as Charles O’malley for a dashing Irish soldier. Many such titles have originally something in front of them, that got dropped from common citation, forgotten and very often not now inserted on the title pages of reprinted books, as with Fielding’s two novels The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, and History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams. The book that we commonly call Gulliver’s Travels had as its real title the legend, “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, first surgeon and then a captain of several ships.”

Very often, too, the neutral personal title of a book was pieced out with a sub-title, as with Fenimore Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln, the Leaguer of Boston. But the use of sub-titles, or rather, second titles, is as fatal as the drink habit. They are apt to keep on and on till they get to comic forms, like: James O’ooligan, or the Irish Patriot, or Dagger and Dog in Donegal. This example is imaginary but the real ones are just as good.

It remained for Mr. Robert Benchley, whose humour is one of the bright spots of a stricken world, to catch the full value to the humorist of these alternative and unconnected titles. With the simple direct vision of genius he christened one of his books of sketches, “David Copperfield or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” The point is that there is no way for anything to be both that at once. The reader was lost between indignation and curiosity, bought the book and therewith forgot all about the title. A similar trick of the ingenuity of inventive genius is seen in Mr. Benchley’s latest title. After 1903 – What? The reader is under the impression that we know what, and he can’t see why Benchley doesn’t. The humour of wilful imbecility lives for ever.

If a gold medal were awarded for the most idiotic of titles, Victor Hugo would have received it, by acclamation, were it not that the advice of his horrified friends saved him from it. Hugo, living in exile in the Channel Islands, had just completed the striking story which he proposed to call and later did call by the fine title The Toilers of the Sea (“Les Travailleurs de la Mer”). All readers recall in it the desperate struggle under water of the fisherman seized by an octopus. But it so happened that Hugo’s bottle of ink, a large one, with which he had begun the opening page of the story, ran out just as he wrote the concluding pages. Nothing would do but he must re-name his book, “A Bottle of Ink and Its Contents”. Hugo, with the egotism of authorship, could not see the trivial vanity of such a title.

Almost on a par with this idiocy are titles which are made out of some well-known phrase of familiar allusion, with which there is no real connection and which is merely dragged in because it is well known. Thus Frank Stockton, widely known as a novelist and humorists fifty years ago, used the title A Bicycle in Cathay. This was supposed to make a merry contrast with A Cycle in Cathay, a phrase taken out of Tennyson’s poem (“Locksley Hall”) and often quoted in those days: “better fifty years in Europe than a cycle in Cathay.” But the story was not laid in China and the application is so forced as to be painful. Take any well-known phrase, or short quotation, and you may be sure that somebody has already used it, or that somebody presently will. We either have already, or will have soon, novels called To Be or Not to Be, What’s in a Name, Coming Through the Rye, and so on endlessly.

But turning back a minute to the use of reinforced titles, with sub-titles and appendages, we may note that perhaps the most colossal example of this sort of thing is found in the original title of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. The book is now, or was even in Dickens’s lifetime, printed with just the name as a title. But when first written, in instalments, the title read. The life and adventures of Martin Chuzzlewig (not yet Chuzzlewit), his family, friends and enemies, comprising all his will and his ways with a historical record of what he did and what he didn’t, the whole forming a complete key to the house of Chuzzlewig.

Talking of Dickens, it may be recalled that no one gave more thought to titles and names, or attached more importance to them. He himself would have strenuously denied – and was fond of strenuous denials – that David Copperfield was a neutral name; he would have drawn our attention to the various trial and error titles that the book carried at its inception. He would have shown us that both David Copperfield and the story which embodied his life were first very differently christened: “Mag’s Diversions, being the personal history of Mr. Thomas Mag the Younger of Blunderstone Hall.”

Indeed Dickens – an artist in the phonetic significance of names – felt that sounds and syllables carried undercurrents of meaning. Vocal tones, the philologist tells us, antedate speech: names and sounds have queer buried values like the growls of dogs, the satisfied grunt of feeding hogs and the murmur of the turtle dove – lenis sussurrus sub nocte. Thus, when Dickens saw the word Pickwick on a coachmaker’s sign, he felt it was just the name for the kind of man he had begun to think of. When he wanted a name for a young man round whose fate are to gather dark clouds of mystery and murder, he called him Edwin Drood. But he did not name him so until he had tried out and rejected an assorted list of names, fitted into a list of suggested titles (as shown on next page).

As a matter of fact Dickens presently adopted the rather mechanical method of writing out for himself a list (there are two hundred and thirty names in it) of Available Names from the Privy Council Education Lists – drawn up and headed Girls, then Boys, more Boys, and more Girls. Thus does genius itself fall back on artifice; but not, be it noted, till genius has first shown where artifice may operate. Some of the names are quite unbelievable, such as William Why and Sally Gimblet and Sophia Doomsday. Among the actual surnames is Sapsea, which was used in Edwin Drood and which no doubt many readers dismissed as impossible.

We spoke above of historical titles and how Mr. Woodward in his admirable biography invites us to Meet General Grant. No doubt if he had called it The History of Ulysses S. Grant we might have missed meeting him. Indeed it seems to be the case that readers nowadays won’t take their history “straight.” The “History of England” is all right but Mr. Andre Maurois put a new slant to it and turned it into a best seller by calling it, “The Miracle of England.” “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” did well enough for Gibbon, but a new history of the Byzantine Empire appearing this autumn is called, “Emperors, Angels and Eunuchs” It sounds more exciting.

TITLES

Edwin Drood

The Loss of James Wakefield

James’ Disappearance

Flight and Pursuit

Sworn to Avenge it

One Object in Life

The Kinsman’s Devotion

The Two Kinsmen

The Love of Edwin Brood

The Loss of Edwin Brude

The Mystery in the Drood Family

The Loss of Edwin Drood

The Flight of Edwin Drood

Edwin Drood in Hiding

The Loss of Edwin Drude

The Disappearance of Edwin Drude

The Mystery of Edwin Drude

Naturally enough in the vast market for popular storybooks today there is a tremendous pressure put on writers to try to find titles which attract at sight – “Mysteries” so mysterious that the very name of them ties us in a knot; “Horrors” so horrible that they can reach us through a bookstore window. In Wilkie Collins’s day such a title as The Woman in White sent a chill down the Victorian spine: today we have to ring the changes on The Murder on the Links, The Murder on the Express, The Murder in the Sky – if there’s any new place to “lay” a murder, let’s have it and get it over.

Such is the craze for novelty in titles that now-a-days when the reviewers of the magazines review a book they won’t even write it up over its own title – they make up a new one. If the author calls his book Six Months in Mexico, the reviewer heads up his talk on it as “Down Under the Rio Grande.” “Across Czechoslovakia” reappears as “Checking Up on the Czechs.” This is especially so when the reviewer and his magazine do not find enough “pep” in the original title; “Notes on Insect Life” has to become “Revelations of a Bug Man.”

Some time since I amused myself by reconstructing what would have been the effect if this method had been applied to some of the great masterpieces of the past. The results, as far as I recall them, converted Caesar’s “Bellum Britannicum” into “An Old Campaigner’s Log: new volume of Memoirs on Savage Life in the British Isles,” and changed Milton’s Paradise Lost into Raising Hell, or Pen Pictures of Battles in the Sky.

But of course the reviewers too, like the authors, must keep up to date and be novel or get trampled under.

TOC     INDEX

–6–
Who Canonizes the Classics?

According to the practice of our oldest church, it takes about four hundred years to make a saint. That is to say, during that period one can’t be just sure whether he’s a saint or not. But if at the end of four hundred years his apparent saintliness has withstood the wear and tear of time, then a saint he is, indubitably and for ever. Many of us no doubt received a pleasant shock of surprise a year or two ago when the venerable victim of Henry VIII, beheaded in 1555 and known in our school books as Sir Thomas More, became henceforth Saint Thomas. I say a pleasant surprise – as helping to emphasize the continuity and permanence of society, a thing grievously in doubt just now.

If therefore in the Spiritual Kingdom there are saints that last, there must be in the Republic of Letters authors whose work remains. But in this case we have no definite process of canonization. In a general way, the world at large refers to certain authors as “classic”; but how they got to be so, and who makes them so, and what – becomes more mysterious the more you look at it.

As everybody knows, the word “classic” used to be used to indicate merely the literature of Greece and Rome. It was held commonly to include all the Greek and Roman books that had survived – no very great amount in any case, as a quite small library would hold the lot. But the Romans themselves had used the word a little differently. They meant by “classics” the best of their books. The word was the adjective from classis – an assembly, a fleet, a class. Oddly enough, when someone introduced for us the cheap word “classy” he reproduced exactly the old Latin “classicus.”

But the meaning of the word “classic” and of “the classics” has, within a generation or two, been altered, or rather expanded, to mean not only the ancient books, but also all such books of our own time as deserve from their excellence a prominence and permanent place in our literature. Thus Macaulay’s works, no one doubts it, are “classics”; so too those of Emerson and of Hawthorne. So are not, if one may say it with all gentleness, those of the late Edgar Wallace. On the other hand everyone thought, forty years ago, that George Meredith’s books would prove to be “classics”: and they haven’t.

What, then, makes classics? Who decides what is on the list and what not? Are classics being written now, or will there be no more of them? Does the list indicate the books that are read, or the books that ought to be read, or the books that keep on being read? Must classics be serious, or have heaviness and lightness nothing to do with it? Do the Bab Ballads get in along with the Rubaiyat, and Tom Hood sit beside Robert Browning? Does the mere fact that a vast number of people read and enjoy a book make it at once a classic?

Now I do not think that any of these criteria indicate the test as to what is or what is not a classic. The most widely read book in all the history of the world (as referring to one year’s reading) was published only a year ago. Where will it be in five years? Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad is a classic and yet is as light as innocence itself. Karl Marx’s Capital, another classic, is as heavy as gold. Maria Chapdelaine is a classic and was written yesterday. Chaucer’s Tales, on the shelf alongside of it, are older than printing.

Many people are apt to presume that the classics have their place given to them by scholars and professors, that they are canonized over the heads of the plain people by the academic class. Those who think this feel a certain resentment. It is part of the general objection to what is called highbrow – a sort of assumed superiority which sweeps the area of art, music and literature and takes away from the plain man the pleasure of his plain enjoyment. He stands condemned because he likes to hear his daughter at the piano play In the Gloaming, or to read aloud Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Rock Me to Sleep, Mother. Meantime the professor who condemns him reads Browning’s Sordello, and goes into ecstasies over it.

The basis of this resentment of what is highbrow is no doubt sound: subconsciously, people know that a vast mass of aesthetic superiority is false, a substitution of affectation for reality. Very few people can stand the strain of being educated without getting superior over it. Everyone must have noticed how professors of literature annex Shakespeare, and professors of history take over Napoleon, and leave the rest of us out. What we think doesn’t matter.

But in the present case I don’t think for a moment that professors make the classics. Indeed it is the other way round. In the field of letters, as apart from medicine and science, professors do not lead but follow. Their wisdom is always that of a post-mortem. They made political economy after the industrial revolution, not before it. They explained democracy after the people created it, and it is not till the people have read a book for a hundred years that the professors can explain why. In other words, the cart doesn’t go before the horse. Not at all. The horse, the mass of human intelligence, draws along the cart of history in which stands the professor, looking backward and explaining the scenery.

This is not said unkindly. If he looked forward he wouldn’t see any more than the horse does; and the horse sees nothing.

Not the professors, then, nor yet the favour of courts and clergy, of kings and noblemen, can make a classic apart from merit. Louis XIV’s “Academie” only recognized what was there already. “You may admit Moliere,” wrote the king. But Moliere didn’t need it. There is no royal road to learning, nor to authorship. One recalls Queen Victoria presenting to Charles Dickens with pathetic modesty her little book, “Leaves from a “Life in the Highlands,” and receiving in return Dickens’s entire works.

Consider, if you like, how some of the classics came to take rank as such. Take Shakespeare. Here was an unknown person who had a wonderful trick of putting old stories together, so as to turn them into plays. There were lots of people doing it, or trying to. It was the chief creative art of the day: play going, play writing, strolling players, mummers – it was the chief answer, among a nation who couldn’t read, to the age-long demand of humanity – “Tell me a story!”

And Shakespeare could not only put a play together, but he had an extraordinary gift of language. When a thing is well said all ears listen to it. When Shakespeare’s actor said, “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in life’s petty pace from day to day, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death” – even the people in the cheap seats, the groundlings, must have said, “God save us!” And the thing went on and on. No board of judges, no favour of a court made Shakespeare Shakespeare. As far as I know, no professor ever sat on him till the Germans, the Schlegels, got at him, nearly two hundred years later.

Or take Walter Scott. There came a day when the people in Edinburgh walked up and down the street with their eyes glued on a book called Waverley, and looked up to ask perfect strangers, “Have ye read it?” Professors don’t do that. And about twenty years after that, all England was roaring over Pickwick – except the professors, who haven’t started yet. They will, though; in about fifty years more they’ll discover Dickens, as the church discovered Thomas More.

No, no – the classics are made so by the appreciation of the people at large. You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people, etc. – we remember what Abraham Lincoln said. Yet not even appreciation will always do it. At times appreciation springs up as fast and withers as quickly as the seed in the bad ground. All the polite world once read Aphra Behm, thrilled over Ossian and shuddered at Mrs. Crowe. In our own time one has seen George Meredith pass to oblivion, and one sees every day the “Best Sellers” spreading as wide as sunshine, and passing as quickly as the day itself.

And what is more, even appreciation with the lapse of years may shift from its true basis to a false. Shakespeare is admired now, by the “highbrows,” for things he never thought of, for effects he never planned. Scholars dissect Chaucer and sew him up again all full of “purpose.” The taxidermists of the colleges have a whole museum full of stuffed authors. In the end it doesn’t matter. Native appreciation lives on after the stuffing has fallen out.

The matter stands like this. There is a certain class and kind of literature that has the quality of universality. It has something in it that reaches the high and the low, the wise and the foolish, the educated and the illiterate. This quality in it makes it ring as true as a bell. After all, in this transitory life, we are all, high and low, educated and illiterate, on one and the same pilgrimage. The essential frame of life is the same for all. The Anglo-Saxon who spoke of life as a bird passing a moment through a lighted hall and out again into the darkness, spoke down the ages to twenty generations. When Shakespeare said, “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” the words were as good yesterday as today.

What we call the classics are the books that have enough of this universal appeal to give them their place and keep them there. One might wonder why it often comes about that books that seem written for but one class, or in language largely out of common understanding, yet reach and hold a wide enough world to make them classics. The reason is, I think, that appreciation is a queer thing running in sympathetic channels. Children listen, enthralled with things they cannot understand. Clergymen love sea-stories and sea-captains read theology. When a man sits buried in a book, it is not the man that you see and know that is reading: deep down in him are antecedent generations – soldiers, pirates, martyrs, fading back to cave men. As he reads, the “universal” book is calling to one of them.

I remember, years ago, how an old gentleman of my acquaintance, the father of one of my class-mates at college, but himself a plain business man, picked up one evening his son’s copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He sat down and read it with absorption. “Fine,” he said. He sat up late that night reading it; didn’t finish it, so he told us next day, till nearly one o’lock. Always afterwards he said it was a great book. It must have hit him somewhere. Perhaps he was a far down descendant of the sculptor Rodin’s Thinker – who could think without words.

And now I will say one further thing about the classics. There are not going to be any more. We have them all now, all that there are ever going to be.

I cannot imagine any judgment more likely to meet with instant dissent, and to be dismissed with contempt or laughter. It sounds like the opinion of an ageing man, for whom the world is running out with his own years. Such judgments are familiar. But I do not think that this is one. As I see it, the pre-eminence of written books reached its height in the nineteenth century, when for the first time all the world went to school, and before all the world went to moving pictures and “listened in” on the radio.

In the nineteenth century it was still possible in a world as yet under-developed and under-explored, to reach with a new book a mark so far beyond the previous record that the book became a heritage. There is no such opportunity now. No one can be in political economy an Adam Smith, or in political philosophy a John Stuart Mill, in fiction a Walter Scott or a Charles Dickens. The world of letters now moves forward on a broad front, millions and millions all talking and reading, together. Each little increment of new excellence carries some one a moment into sudden notoriety – greater than that of the Mills and the Darwins – but a notoriety, “gone with the wind,” vanishing as soon as achieved. We live in an age where universal competence is replacing individual eminence: or rather, since “eminent” is a comparative word an age in which the eminent man only “sticks out” a little. I know a little boy who told me the other day that he could easily have won a race at his school except that there was another boy who could run faster. Of such stuff is present eminence made. One recalls Dickens’s America, in which every other man was “the most remarkable man in the country”. So it is in the republic of letters.

Not that you or I and the rest after us will ever realize that the classics have gone, that the list is closed, the booking office shut. Best sellers will still sweep over the landscape remarkable books will convulse society, new works of philosophy will revolutionize human thought, and no one will live long enough to know that they didn’t last, and that behind them in the receding landscape of history, Chaucer will be still telling tales – not better, but prior to other people’s – and John Stuart Mill remain part of the world’s history, having had the good luck to live a century before Professor Jones. So my prophesy of a classicless age to come is a safe one. By the time it’s due, it won’t matter. “You said at the last election,” complained once an old farmer to me, “that the price of marsh hay would go up.” “Yes,” I answered, “but the election’s over.” So let it be with the withering grass of literature.

TOC     INDEX

Sporting Section

–1–
What Is a Sport?

Just what is a “sport”? There’s a thing I’ve wondered about more or less all my life. What do you mean by a “sport”? Mind, I am not saying a “sportsman.” Everybody knows what he is. A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something. Not that he’s cruel. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’s not big enough. But he has that instinct from away back in the centuries that he’s got to get out on the water or in the bush and kill something; or rather, not so much that he wants to kill it, as to crawl round after it, crawl under brush and stoop under boughs – noiseless, alert – pretending that he’s a “bushman” of ten thousand years ago and that he wants to kill this thing and eat it. He won’t eat it really; he’ll give it to the chauffeur or the man at the petrol station. As a matter of fact he doesn’t need to kill anything at all, only just to put on an old pair of pants and pretend that there’s something in the bush, even when in his heart he knows there isn’t. In my part of the country – Simcoe County, Ontario – all the “keen sportsmen” (that’s the word, “keen”) go out after partridges every autumn though there hasn’t been a partridge seen for nearly twenty years. You don’t really need them for partridge shooting, just old pants, half a dozen cartridges and a hip flask. A sportsman who’s a real sport will be quite satisfied with that.

Ah! there it is – a real “sport.” Because it doesn’t follow that every sport is a sportsman. For instance, a fisherman who comes home and tells the truth about the size of the fish that the other fellows lost is no sport. I don’t mean that a sport is a liar; but there are times when you can’t get the truth out of him.

So you see that there is no use trying to understand what a sport is by defining a sportsman. Nor does the dictionary help. The one I have beside me says, “Sport (biol.)” – that means, I imagine, a “biological term” – “an individual variant from a general class. See also under freak, nut, etc.” In other words, in that sense, scientifically a sport means such a thing as one of the citrons that sometimes grow on a melon plant, a single black raspberry among red, and so on. In this sense the son of a Presbyterian minister who turns out a drunkard is a “sport,” and another “sport” is the son of a lawyer who becomes a missionary. But none of that helps us very much.

The dictionary goes on to talk of “sport (etym.).” That means – I looked “etym” up in a dictionary to the dictionary, in the back, and it means “etymologically, or “by derivation.” And in this sense sport means, “a departure, a relaxation, a getting outside of oneself. See also under ecstasy, idiocy and mental alienation.” That doesn’t help either, does it? I don’t think a sport is an idiot. He might be, I admit, and as a matter of fact lots of half-witted fellers are darned good sports. Several of the friends I like to go fishing with are only about half-witted, and some even more.

So you see, when the dictionary says that a sport is a freak or an idiot, it’s all off the track. Neither will the recollection of individual cases help you much as to what a sport is. They all got mixed up with special circumstances. I remember that when I was a boy as school I thought a “sport” had to mean a man who kept a saloon, or at least never came out of one, weighed two hundred pounds, had a face like an angry sunset and wore a big diamond where his chin should have been. This notion of a sport as connected with loud neck-ties, pants with a check pattern as big as a Mercator’s map, led many of us astray in those days. To be a “sport” seemed to mean taking a huge interest in prize fights, discussing when anyone would lower the record of Maud S. and J. I. C. – no no, they weren’t women, but they were the fastest things outside of women, that had turned up in the eighties. Let me see, Maud. S. “did it in 2.40” – you ask, “Did what in 2.40?” What? I don’t know. I never knew. I was only a little boy at the time and it may have been kilo-watts, hours or miles to the gallon. Anyway, it’s what she did it in. And it always made me feel that if a sport had to sniff around stables all day, and talk mysteriously of whether the cops would break up the cock-fight next Friday, and which nigger beat who – then I didn’t want to be a sport. Yet those of us who thought that way, felt that that couldn’t be the whole of it. Surely a sport didn’t have to be full all the time to qualify.

There’s another point occurs to me in this connection – Must a sport drink? I admit it’s a pretty nice question. I wil try to illustrate it from actual fact. I remember a case in point years and years ago, of three “fellers” who went out to spend their vacation camping round Lake Simcoe, with a tent and a canoe. They dragged along with them a big jar of whisky, Lord knows they didn’t need it; the fresh air was enough. They were just of the age between boys and men, at the time when a feller likes to stretch his limbs and say “makes a man feel pretty good, eh? this fresh air.” But being “sports” they felt that open-air life would be incomplete without the jar of whisky. “What about a little snort, eh?” one of them would say, and the others, being challenged, had to say, “Right you are,” though as a matter of fact they were half sick with it already. In the morning as they crawled, red-eyed and bleary, out of their little tent, one would say, “How about a little snifter?” and they had to begin again. Being sports, and out in the open where sports belong, they had to have “snorts” and “snifters” and “jolts.” all day. Any one of them could have refused, but he’d have been a pretty poor sport if he had, wouldn’t he? How glad those fellers were to get back to work in the city, when the vacation was over, and have oatmeal porridge and coffee for breakfast with no one to say, “What about a little stick in it?” They certainly were glad. I know it, because I was one of them.

So you don’t get much light there on a sport, or at least only a kind of will-o”-the-wisp effect to connect a sport with open air, and a sort of comradeship that won’t say no.

You would think that you would get a truer idea of what a sport is if you consider the way in which we use the word in regard to games. But I am not so sure that you do. You get either too much light or too little. Our games are either “out to win” to the verge of ferocity, or willing to lose to the verge of vacuity. In cricket, for instance, you have a case in point. Here I speak of what I know. I played cricket, at least I had a cricket bat and played something, for years and years. As a matter of fact I once played in a big match at Ottawa, on the Government House grounds and made what they told me was a record for the ground – going in first in the first innings and being bowled out by the first ball, and going in last in the second innings and being bowled out by the first ball, that is, the last ball. The full technique of this is explained in an article below, but cricketers will understand it anyway.

So I may properly say that I speak as an expert when I talk of cricket. And there the code of “sport” is high; if the umpire says “out” you’re “out”; you mustn’t even hit him with your bat. If you’re made to play square leg and get hit in the stomach with the ball because you were thinking of something else, you’re supposed to say, when you can speak, “Sorry, old man,” not sorry for yourself, but sorry for the bowler. You have to take it in the stomach. There are a lot of things like that in England. It isn’t cricket to complain. If you get cheated at poker, left out at golf, overhandicapped at billiards, or sandbagged on the street – if your broker makes off with your money, and your friend runs away with your wife – you don’t say anything. It’s not cricket.

So the further you look into the problem of the sport the more perplexing it becomes. But after all is said and done you feel there must be something in it. Out of this queer figure, with a check waistcoat and a loud tie, drinking snifters for manliness and taking a cricket ball in the stomach for the game’s sake, emerges a kind of something that we would all like to be. Civilization has patterned and stamped us into its mould till each is much like each and lives as the others do. But embedded in each of us is a sort of original man, a higher cast of being, that in moments of danger and emergency takes control, and flames out into something far beyond our wonted range.

It may be that the “sport,” who is in us all to a certain degree, is a sort of pale reflection of this superman. For the sport, after all, never complains – if he’s sick with his snifters he doesn’t say so; if he’s afraid he mustn’t say so, and if he wears a loud tie it is only from a humble sense that without a loud tie he wouldn’t be loud enough; just as a savage paints his face to make himself look savage.

Oh yes. I guess a sport is all right. Here’s to him – have a snifter!

TOC     INDEX

–2–
Why Do We Fish?

The Complete Philosophy
of the Angler

This chapter is intended to put the reader to sleep, put him fast asleep – in a motor boat anchored out on the still water of a still lake on one of the stillest days of the summer, at the drowsiest hour of the day – fast asleep, his hat fallen over his eyes, his line dangling in the water, but with this book across his lap to show that his brain made a fight for it.

Everybody who goes bass fishing in a motor boat on such waters as our Canadian lakes in midsummer knows of this drowsy hour. No one admits its existence. No one acknowledges that he ever falls asleep. But the fact is there. So the best way is to carry along “something to read” – and then not read it.

This bringing things “just in case” is quite in accordance with fishing standards. It is wise always to take a lunch (and not eat it), to put a cigar in your pocket (and not smoke it), or carry a flask – no, that’s the exception that proves the rule. But every fisherman ought to carry along something to read – so as not to read it. You see, if you didn’t have it you might wish you had something to read, and if you do, then you don’t – see? It’s not very clearly explained, but I am sure you understand.

So, as I say, it’s well to have something along in a motor boat for the drowsy hour. Some men use a magazine, but others think a better thing is a list of a hundred years of the Cabinets in Whitaker’s Almanac. Another good thing, if you can get hold of it, is the Statistical Abstract of the United Kingdom. The things are grand reading for a summer’s day. Such things help to make the proper environment, the peculiar detachment from the world that is the real charm of fishing.

Let it be understood right away that real fishermen don’t go fishing for the sake of the fish. They pretend they do. It is a good excuse for paying two pounds for a new rod and a guinea for a new reel to say that after all fishing cuts down the housekeeping bills. Not at all. No true fisherman ever wants to eat the darned things. At the close of the day he tries to give them to the other fellows. They won’t take them. He tries to give them to the guide. But the guide has plenty; he compromises on a cigar. It ends with sending the fish in a basket to a friend – especially to a clergyman. In my part of the country the clergymen eat little else all summer.

To me as to ever so many other people there is a singular and abiding charm about fishing. I began it as a little boy, fishing below a mill dam in the roar and foam of the water. Now, as an old man, I fish above the dam. It’s quieter there. That’s all the difference.

And of course I admit that I only know of fishing on a somewhat limited and humble scale. I know nothing, for example, of the “big stuff” of salmon fishing. In that, I gather, you throw a fly into the mouth of a salmon in the middle of a boiling river, then let out half a mile of line, then run hard half a mile down stream, passing the salmon as it runs up, and so on, back and forwards. You do that up and down. It’s called landing the salmon. An expert can take half a day at it. Nor do I know anything – or rather I know all I want to, for ever – of fishing in the real Canadian wilderness, where you stay out for three days at a time and catch so many bass the first evening before sundown that the next day you just throw the fish back, and the next day you play poker and the third day go home a day before you have to.

My fishing is beside a mill dam, or the remains of what once was one, a place with old beams of fragments of machinery sticking out in the wreckage of a bygone mill; there or along the banks of the stream that feeds the pond; or better still in a motor boat that is neither wilderness nor civilization, neither multitude nor solitude, with enough bass in it to keep hope alive and not enough to make continuous trouble. For fishing, as I see it, is in reality not so much an activity as a state of mind.

I can give you an idea of what I mean about this peculiar tranquility, this peculiar atmosphere of fishing, by speaking of a little episode of three years ago – yes, the year before the war – on one of my Lake Simcoe motor-boat fishing days. There were half a dozen of us in the boat, and one was just out from England, an English writer and lecturer. He was fascinated, as everyone is at first sight, with the kind of scene, the beautiful clear water and winding channels of the islands near the shore, and the clear, open lake with just the breath of ripples wafted over it in moving patches here and there.

Yet, being a writer, our visitor carried his trade with him all day. He couldn’t help it. After we had been out two or three hours he said to me, “Do you know this gives me a great idea for a detective story – absolutely new setting.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. I saw no way to stop him.

“Why,” he said, “in a way it’s the ordinary type of story where you get six or seven people isolated and there’s a murder, and one of them must have done it, because there have been no other people there.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know the kind of story. You have to sort them all out one by one.”

“Exactly. One of them has committed the murder, but the difficulty is, which? Then just as they’re speculating and suspecting one another, there’s a second murder, see?”

“Yes,” I said, “I know the type.”

“All right – but the point is that I’ve put them on a boat like this, this kind of party – and after they have been out about an hour one is missing – then a little later another – think of the rising horror of it . . . and then presently a third . . . a perfect agony of fear! See! . . . the way I’m going to work it will be that the hired man who runs the boat – like him, there, what’s his name, Jake? . . . Well, like Jake – is really a – Oh, who do you call it – you know—”

“A dipsomaniac?” I suggested. That’s the worst I can think of any fisherman.

“No, no – a monomaniac, a criminal monomaniac. You see you start out with the beautiful, peaceful setting – then you gradually build up the horror. As each new one disappears, don’t you see, the horror deepens—”

“My dear fellow!” I said, “there wouldn’t be any horror. It just shows you don’t understand fishing. Let me explain to you how it would happen. We’d have been out half an hour or so, clean away from the dock and down the narrows and just out on the lake when someone – we’ll say the doctor, there—”

“What’s that?” said the doctor from his seat in the stern end. “Did you get a bite?”

“No, no,” I said. “I was just saying, suppose you were murdered.”

“Oh, all right. I thought you had a bite.”

“Well,” I continued to our guest, “someone would say, ‘Where’s the doctor?’ and everybody would look up; and somebody else would say, ‘I certainly saw him on the dock, he certainly came in his car,’ then there would be an awkward silence; it’s hard to give up a day’s fishing. Somebody would say, ‘I guess he got off the boat again. The doctor got off the boat again, didn’t he, Jake?’

“Jake would turn round from his steering wheel, ‘I think he did.’ he says. Jake agrees with everybody. He used to be a bartender.

“Then an hour later,” I continued, “another one would suddenly have disappeared. Of course this time he couldn’t have stayed on the dock. So when someone says suddenly, ‘Where’s Charlie Jones?’ there is a mighty uncomfortable moment. It looks as if the fishing were spoilt after all. But, luckily, someone says, ‘Didn’t Charlie get off the boat to fish on the big rock beside Grape Island?’ ‘Yes! he must have. We left him behind, but we can pick him up on the way back!’ It’s pretty thin, of course, but when someone else says, ‘Hold on, I’ve got a bite,’ the second disappearance passes off. Then a little later one man would whisper to the one next him, ‘I’m afraid George has fallen overboard.’ The other would nod and whisper back, ‘All right.’ Well now, admit that it gets down to two – just two left with Jake, but by that time the day would be pretty well over. So one would say, ‘Look here, Jake, you can’t work this thing on us any more. You’ve thrown three of our friends into the lake. On the other hand, we’ve had a real good day’s fishing and are not inclined to make too much of it. You can head back for the dock, Jake, but we’re certainly not going to pay anything for the boat.’ ‘That’s fair enough,’ Jake would say, and the mystery would fade out into the idea that they swam home – the atmosphere of the evening would soften, with all the horror out of it like beeswax. Did you ever use beeswax for a bamboo rod?”

That’s the way I argued it out with this English visitor. But the odd thing was the peculiar sequel which came near making a real story out of it. I wish I could tell a lie – I mean in print – and stretch the point a little – but, anyway, what happened was pretty close to it.

It had grown dusk, too dark to see decently, and we were just getting ready to pull up the lines and the English visitor was standing up, fishing over the stern of the boat, a silly thing to do on the smooth convex hardwood decks they put on them now. Anyway as the boat started forward, he fell off into the lake in the dark . . . Yes, I admit we picked him up; that’s the pity of it. It would have been a fine story if we hadn’t. Especially as we didn’t notice him for a minute. I said to the doctor, “Where’s our friend?” and he said, “Up forward,” and I said, “Are you sure?” and he said, “Quite.” . . . Then the motor stalled, or something – anyway we got him. Hard luck, wasn’t it?

But at least it illustrates the point – the peaceful atmosphere of fishing – good will towards man, eh?

TOC     INDEX

–3–
When Fellers Go Fishing

If I were writing this as a scientific essay, I should put as the title, The Reaction of Fishing upon the Psychology of the Individual. That would guarantee that no one would read it. But if I label as above, “When Fellers Go Fishing,” that enlists the sympathy of everybody, at least that is, of everybody who matters – all the people who go fishing.

From time immemorial, fishing has had this peculiar, sympathetic claim. King James spoke of fishing as “the apostle’s own calling.” And long before King James, in the earliest twilight of our literature, in all old tales and legends, a fisherman was supposed to be a kindly fellow, poor but likeable, whereas a merchant was a cheat, and a lawyer, when he presently appeared, stood for a crook. It was always a poor fisherman who found an emerald in the belly of a fish, a poor fisherman to whom a Saint appeared, or a poor fisherman who saved a little drowning maiden who turned out to be a princess. Think what a thrill of interest Charles Kingsley gives us in his famous poem that begins, “Three fishers went sailing, out into the west—” But suppose he had said, “Three lawyers took the train to the east.” Not the same at all. Even now, when the writer of a crime story wants to indicate that one of the characters concerned must be all right at heart, he describes him as “passionately fond of angling.” It is to be observed that “angling” is the name given to fishing by people who can’t fish.

Now here is why fishing has this peculiar appeal. In the far-away past, fishing played a far larger part in human life, inconceivably larger, than it does now. It outdates agriculture by centuries. All of the people from whom we descend lived beside and on the waters. In each of us, is buried, thirty generations down, the soul of a by-gone fisherman. And our city office men, when you take them away from their desks and get them out with the sound of the waves and the song of the wind in their ears, turn back again into fishermen. “I’ve never been out fishing before,” says such a one as the motor boat bears him out on the lake, the tackle and gear all stowed and ready for the day’s work. What, never before? Yet look at the queer far-away look that comes into his eye, turning to the horizon, seeking back unconsciously the lost memories of a thousand years ago. What, never before? Why, have you forgotten how you and I went fishing off the coast of what we now call Norway, in the days of Hengist and Horsa? That’s what you’re listening for, my dear sir, the sound of the waves beating on the broken shoals among which our great boat with its single sail is driving. Sounds like these still echo in the ears of infant children, before the age of speech and conscious memory. The child that stirs and murmurs in its sleep is hearing the waves of the North Sea, and calling to you to pull hard on the steering oar, to keep the boat from the breakers.

Mere fancy this? Imagination? Not at all, plain scientific fact. Ask any biologist and he’ll tell you that it’s plain truth, only he’ll use such a maze of scientific terms that he’ll take all the simple meaning out of it. He’ll admit that the “ichthyological impulse is part of our Mendelian heritage” – then he will pause and correct his statements by saying that perhaps “piscatorial urge” would be a better term than “ichthyological impulse.” So you can have your choice. What he really means is that every man, deep down, is a fisherman.

So when people go out fishing, or are taken out fishing, this “piscatorial urge” gets hold of them. You know what is meant by “atavism,” by “throwing back” to the characters of far-away ancestors. Well, that is what they get. The transformation is best seen – and this is in accordance with scientific law – is best seen in the case of beginners, of people doing a thing for the first time with only instinct to guide them. Observe this man whom you have asked out for a day’s fishing – what did you say he was by profession? A stockbroker. Oh yes! – well, he’s looking through his clothes cupboard for a suit to wear out fishing. Don’t interrupt him, don’t disturb him. He knows better than you what he wants. He’s looking for that old suit of tanned leather that he wore in the North Sea, a thousand years ago. Hush, let him look – there! He’s found it. I admit that what you see, or think you see, is the old pair of ginger-brown pants that the tailor cut too big by accident and that his wife has tried to throw away a dozen times already – but what he sees is a suit of seal-hide that he wore when his name was Leif Hellslinger, and he smashed through the foam off the Faroe Islands.

That is why when you take men out fishing they turn up in such queer costumes. Here’s one with a red coat on and a red knotted band round his waist – old junk from his snow-shoeing days very likely – but to him it’s the stuff he wore as a Carthaginian fisherman off the coast of Tunis in the days of Hannibal. See the feller with the huge rubber boots (a plumber left them in his cellar) he wears those, though he doesn’t know it, so that an octopus can’t bite him.

This is the deep hidden reason why a party of “fishermen” always look so queer. The stores try to make these things but they can’t. Patent rubber jackets and Norfolk coats with side flap pockets, and pancake waterproof hats – oh no! you can spend a couple of hundred dollars on this stuff and all you look like is an American millionaire who has rented a Scottish salmon stream – you’ve seen him in pictures a hundred times. Beside him, by the way, is a Scottish “gillie – the real thing – with clothes that go back to the Picts and Scots of the Emperor Hadrian’s time.

As with the transformation of clothes, so with the transformation of character. It seems to me that men out fishing take on, as it were, a new character, or at least resurrect one buried long ago and lost under the surface of daily life. I spoke a moment ago of the transformation of my friends when out fishing – bass fishing for example – in a motor boat on one of our lakes where they turn back into Saxons of the North Sea. But take the same men out fishing on a river-stream “out in the bush” nicely out of the beaten path of highways and civilized meals, and they’ll turn back farther still. They’ll go clear back to the ancient Britons in the woods – suddenly become ingenious, subtle, silent, full of woodcraft. When you see such a man go into the bush you realize that it is a pity he ever came out of it. Watch him squatting beside the fire that he is managing to make burn out of wet twigs in a drizzling rain. The ground is sodden. Does he know it? The smoke puffs in his eyes. Does he feel it? No, of course not – this man is clean back to the days of Boadicea; after three days in the bush he’ll tan as dark as an Iberian Celt; he’ll be stained with woad (from his cigarettes), and he’ll eat a pound and a half of meat at a sitting, and be out at sunrise, fishing in the foam below a fall. Stand it? Why, he can stand anything! Yet, this is the same man that last week was breakfasting on half a grapefruit with bromo-seltzer, who sent the waiter to tell the head waiter to tell the management of the hotel that the room was chilly, and who could quarrel and get angry over a trifle, or a mis-statement, a contradiction, that out fishing he couldn’t hear and wouldn’t notice if he did.

Quarrels, arguments! – no, that’s another thing about fishing. There’s no room, no time for that. A little genial discussion, if you will, as to whether a gut leader on a bass line is any good, or no damn good. That’s all right, that’s science. But to think of quarrelling over the things men argue about in ordinary life – such as whether Sir John A. Macdonald died in 1891 or 1892; whether John L. Sullivan was born in Ireland, and whether the Scott Act came first, or Local Option!

Oh no, a man fishing is too broad-minded to dispute over these things. What does that matter? And anyway you can’t hear what the other fellow is saying for the noise of the fall. Look, Ed’s got another over there. “Attaboy, Ed! only, darn it, he can’t hear.”

—

But remember – just one last caution. After you have been out with a “bunch” of darned good fellows for four days on Lake Maganetawan, or in the bush country north of Lake Nipigon – don’t – no, very particularly don’t, ask that group of men to come and all dine together at your club in the city on their return. If you do, you’ll find that the magic has all gone! There they are! – not a bunch, but a group – back in their little dinner jackets, shaved each as pink as a dressed hog, precise, formal – and eating like sick hens pecking damaged grain. The magic is all gone! The enchantment has vanished, as enchantment always does, vanished and gone over night. The North Sea, and the Carthaginians and the Britons squatting beside the smoky fire – oh no, those are not these men . . . Maid, will you tell the steward, we’ve been waiting five minutes already for our coffee!

TOC     INDEX

–4–
Eating Air

A Discourse on the Magic
of Eating Out of Doors

I want in this chapter to talk about eating in the open air – about the joy and exhilaration of it, about the health of it. I’m enthusiastic about it. I’m crazy over it and have been for years. I think that eating air is the greatest tonic, stimulant, restorative – I can’t think of enough words for it, but those will give a first idea.

I’m so enthusiastic about it that I’d like to get out on the street and talk about it – under a naphtha lamp on the street corner in the evening, with just a little table with a beefsteak pie on it, and I’d say, “Oh, friends, I want you to gather round this evening and watch me eat this pie!” and then, “and, oh, dear friends, I want you all to go and get a pie of your own (not mine) and take it away and eat it somewhere in the open, somewhere in the great spaces, in the woods, out in a sailboat on a lake, or in some snug corner of rock and sand beside the sea.”

Or I’d like, if I may put the imagery another way, to be a spirit and appear in the office of a business man, one of the kind called executives, who can’t digest anything and live on toast. I’d be a spirit and I’d appear in his office just about one o’lock. He could see me but no one else could. His stenographer couldn’t see me – though, of course, I could see her – oh, certainly. Anyway I’d appear and I’d say, “I want to take you out to lunch,” and he’d look up and say, “To lunch, where?” and I would whisper in his ear, “Below the mill dam!”

He’d say “What?” and I’d say “Close your eyes and listen. Call back the picture of the snug corner among the broken stones just below the mill dam, close to the roar and foam of the water, where you used to fish when you were a boy. That’s where you always ate the packet of lunch you carried in your pocket, there on a pile of rocks and the broken debris of an old mill . . . Well, that’s where we’re going to eat. Come along – you don’t need a hat.”

So, come, my dear reader – close your eyes, come along with me, and we’ll call up in fancy some of the ways and; places of eating in the open air . . . I’ll tell you what I’ll do – I’ll take you out fishing in my sail-boat and we’ll eat lunch right on the boat, as we always do, with the boat at anchor with about a hundred feet of cable out and just enough sea running to make her lift to it a little. There is a fresh breeze blowing just fresh enough so that it’s snug to keep out of it, and yet you can’t keep out of it.

You notice those terms, the “cable” and the “sea.” That’s the nautical touch. The “cable” means the anchor rope, and the sea” is those little waves that are rocking the boat – well, they’re not so darned little. And I always call the boat “she” unless I forget and call her her “it”. She’s the old-fashioned, heavy-boat, sloop-rigged – none of your dinghy stuff, and it holds four (she does) just nicely, one on the starboard side pretty well forward, one abeam to port and two abaft in the lee-scuppers. (I’m sorry if you don’t get all that – one sits each side of the centre-board and two on the broad back-seat.)

So, now, that’s enough for the forenoon’s fishing. We didn’t get any fish yet, though we lost a beauty. Anyway, it’s time to eat. Time? Oh, boy, is it time! Well, I’ll say so . . . Yet only half an hour ago, when I asked, “What about lunch?” you answered, “Oh, not for hours yet!” . . . But now! let’s get to it . . . Turn that side-flap up and it makes a table over the centre-board . . . That’s it . . . Now, haul out those boxes from under the forward deck and we’ll unpack them . . . What have we here? There’s a cold beef-steak pie, with the whole rattle of plates and knives and forks that goes with it . . . Yes, unroll that; that’s a ham, or rather, half a ham, because I find that with only four of us, if we have a beef-steak pie we only need half a ham, I mean if we have a cold chicken . . . we may eat the cold chicken or we may not, but I like to see a cold chicken all rolled up in a napkin with lettuce leaves almost as pale as itself . . . Looks nice, doesn’t it? All right, just cut me a piece while I set the bottled beer out . . .

Not that I mean to imply that on my boat we go in for anything elaborate, still less for anything gluttonous . . . never too much, is the rule. In years and years on the boat I have never had too much to eat and drink; can’t get it. We generally take just the plain stuff I’ve mentioned – a meat pie, a ham and a chicken and with that a plain salad already mixed in a bowl with plenty of hard-boiled eggs in it, bread and plain rolls, always a bottle of mixed pickles and the little things like salt and pepper and a bottle of sauce . . . and that’s the whole of it except the cheese and perhaps a little fruit, and to drink (apart from a nip of whisky before lunch) bottled ale or for those who don’t drink bottled ale, bottled beer.

There! Let’s sit down and eat. Here, take this napkin – napkins? Why, of course! I like to have them, large and big and white as snow – they give a touch to lunch on a boat. There – tuck your legs in beside the centre-board – or, all right, if you like, take your plate and stuff up forward on the half-deck . . . Now, say when! . . .

Tastes good? Doesn’t it! Digest it? Why, my dear sir, with that fresh air blowing into you, you could digest a chunk of sandstone rock . . .

You see, if I may interrupt myself to say it again, the point is, not that you are eating in the open air, but that you are actually eating air. As every chemist (every good one) knows, air is made up of equal parts of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, iron and alcohol, with just a little touch of the rarer elements argol and gargol, though these last were only found a few years ago. Now, these are the very things that support life, and these are what is found in fresh air. Only the air must be fresh. The ordinary indoor air that you breathe is filled with dust, feathers, dried ink, powdered leather – heaven knows what. You need only to let a full streak of sunlight break into a room to see what the air in it contains. Now when you’re out in the open, in the straight clear open, you’re breathing the pure oxygen, taking in argol and alcohol with every breath. Look at people who live in the open. Have you ever seen one of those ruddy-looking Highland gillies who spend their days on the wind-swept moor and the open braes and breeks? You haven’t! Well, neither have I, but I’ve seen the pictures of them, in the Scotch whisky advertisements. What makes them ruddy? What makes them live till they die? The fresh air, the alcohol.

But don’t let me seem to imply that eating in a sail-boat out fishing is the only kind of eating in the open air. There are ever so many others. My friends who go out duck-hunting tell me that food never tastes so good as the snack of breakfast they carry in a side pocket, to eat when out in the early morning. You go out, as you know, just about daybreak or a little before, so that the ducks don’t know you’re there, and you stand in the dark in a marsh among the reeds and wait patiently till the ducks fly over, and then – bang! bang! You’ve missed them, but that doesn’t matter. The point is, so I am credibly assured, that no home breakfast ever tastes so good as the snack you eat just at about sun-up – a cold sausage with a jam roll, washed down with a little gin and marsh-water. A man who, in his club, couldn’t eat a chicken-patty-a-la-Reine without getting melancholy with indigestion, who gets heavy after lunch, soggy after dinner and dull all day, can get out in a marsh and eat a chunk of cold Bologna that would choke a cannibal – yes, and feel bright and happy over it, and think the world a fine place – Bang! Missed another duck by talking so much.

But much better – and this is one of my own – try eating lunch, individual lunch, along a trout stream; carry it with you on your hip, and let each of the other fellows do the same. That’s the way I do on my stream. I have rights along about three miles of a nice little river that runs among woods and fields and over banks, stones and around corners, divine under fallen trees and sunken logs – hurrying on to nowhere – and always as cold and clear as when it started. I am lucky enough to have “rights” (not trout-rights) on about three-miles of this. It’s like all other trout streams. There used to be a tremendous lot of trout there. So there must be some now. But we won’t go into that. Anyway, for fishing of that sort the individual lunch is the thing; just a neat packet done up in greaseproof paper – cold chicken sandwiches – that kind of thing. Of course, it’s not enough . . . That’s the point of it – but, oh my! how good it tastes, eaten as you sit on a big rock beside a pool in the river . . . That, with a dash of cold clear water from the stream itself. I am so keen personally on cold water that I always like to supply each of my fishing quests with a good glass tumbler to carry along with him – no scooping up the water with his hands or with the greasy-looking “cup” of a flask – no, sir, clear-cut glass, clean as crystal and the water sparkling in it, fresh from the river bed! There, hold it steady and pour in just enough whisky to preserve the clarity of the water. How much? Well, there’s the point. Be careful . . . not too much or you’ll spoil it . . . and not too little as that fails to bring out the clarity of the water. But, after all, it’s very simple . . . If you have too much whisky, put in more water, then try if it’s right, and if you get it a little wrong the other way, put in more whisky. If you keep trying it out with a little more of each every time, you’ll soon get it . . .

I know that some readers might object that eating in the open air is all right, but why connect it with the rough stuff? – pounding up and down in a sail-boat or standing in a stream? The answer is that you don’t have to. Eating air is eating air, and if you like you can eat it with as much luxury and comfort as ever you want. For instance, on my trout stream we don’t always have lunch in the way I have described. Sometimes, when I want to do the thing properly, I have a pre-arranged general lunch at a fixed hour, with a real table made up of all sorts of things.

Of course, when I do this I have to take a “man” along – I mean that, apart from the half a dozen men that I have asked to fish, I take along a “man” to fix the table and do all that. I am sure that everybody knows that rather perplexing use of the word “man.” You’ve often heard a woman say that for such and such a thing round the house that her husband couldn’t do, she had to get a “man.” Every married woman knows that a husband just goes so far. After that you have to get a “man.”

Well, in the same way, when I want to do things up in style I take along a man. And my man, who is an old soldier, is a most handy fellow. Take him out that way, leave him under a shady tree and wander off up the stream for a couple of hours’ fishing and then come back, and, there! Look! There’s a whole table with seats somehow rigged up under the tree, with a cloth spread over it and an array of bottles and dishes and plates and things half seen, half hidden, ends of green cucumbers peeping out from beneath a napkin – and at the side, well, I’m darned! – an improvised ice box! – ale on the ice! – cocktails cooling! Oh, boy, life in the woods for me!

And at such a table you can eat and eat – never mind your digestion. You can’t get heavy if you try – have some more cucumber, they’re light as froth . . . Because, you see, and I can’t repeat it too often, you are eating air – I mean literally and physically eating it with your food, actually taking in all those things – the argol, the gargoyles, oxygen. The air that you eat with the food breaks it up into vitamins.

I wish I were a scientist enough to explain it physically. I once asked a professor of physics how it stood, and he said that you could put the thing very simply. Mechanically, he said that a man’s stomach is practically a sphere – I admit that some look it – and that from a very elementary formula we know that its volume is exactly four-thirds of a little over three times half the distance across his stomach cubed. This means that, like all spheres, it expands equally in all directions provided the pressure is constant and uniform. Well, there you are! When you eat out of doors it is. So you can eat all you like.

But, someone might say, I have talked only of eating cold food out of doors and left out all question of cooking in the open – left out, some people would say, the finest part of it. Don’t I know it? But it’s only through sheer lack of time and space. Cooking out of doors – over a fire made in the bush! How I would like to give a whole lecture on it! I’d like to get the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Librarian of the British Museum – I mean people who always live indoors – and take them out into the Canadian bush and cook them a steak! My! wouldn’t they be surprised when I showed them that the point is that you don’t make a big fire but a little fire! I’d like the Pope to watch while I laid down two small logs side by side. I’d like the Archbishop to say, “But, surely, the logs are rather too green to burn!” And I say, “No, no, you are wrong; ask the Pope; I want the logs green so that they won’t burn.” Now, watch me cook the steak – see it jump – see those ashes falling into the pan? That’s what puts the taste in . . . Excuse me, I must upset it once. Now, Pope, you’re the senior, here’s yours. Eat it on a shingle . . . Now watch me boil the tea . . . Yes, boil it, the only way to make real tea, boiled from the cold water up . . . But stop, the Archbishop wants more steak.”

So there’s the topic, it is – real as real, and one of the greatest things in the world. Eat more air. Never mind vitamins. The air is full of them. Eat the air. Take it in with every bite, breathe it in with every morsel . . .

Tell the doctors about it? You don’t need to. They know it. Don’t you know that every doctor, the moment he gets a few days off, beats it for the bush. Any time you go into the rough country, in the bush and round the lakes, you find it full of doctors, eating steak beside a log . . . But you’d hardly expect them to bring their patients.

TOC     INDEX

Studies in Humour

–1–
The Saving Grace of Humour

Is There Any?

Now especially, in the distress of war, the familiar reference is made to the saving grace of humour as a consolation in adversity. But I am afraid there’s not much in it – I doubt if any saving grace of humour can help us – at any rate not against personal discomfiture.

I recall here, from years back, once hearing an academic colleague of mine say, “Thank Heaven, I can fall back on my sense of humour.” He was speaking with the quivering, ruffled dignity of a professor – you know what they’re like – after some little academic tiff or dispute; a small, precise man, myopic, over-polite and sensitive as a mimosa plant. “In fact,” he added, “I can even afford to laugh about it, ha! ha!” and he gave an imitation of a man laughing an easy, careless laugh – as nearly as he could register it. If he had a sense of humour I never saw it; he never seemed to get any nearer to it than telling long stories about Talleyrand at professors’ dinner parties. You know the kind. But yet he carried with him the idea that he could always fall back on his sense of humour – like throwing himself into a fireman’s net.

Strange, isn’t it? how we always try to have some refuge of this sort, something to fall back upon. An old friend of mine once told me he could always fall back on his classical education. I’d as soon fall back on a cucumber frame as on mine. Other people fall back on their family. “After all,” I heard a mother say to her son, “you can always remember you’re an O’rien.” Personally I could see no consolation in that, except that it was easier than trying to remember you were an O’laherty.

But so it is, in our sorely beset pilgrimage; we like to have something to fall back upon – a second line of retreat from the slings and arrows. And the belief is familiar that this refuge can be found in a sense of humour.

The world loves to read stories of how humour sustains people in moments of emergency and in the supreme hour, Thus it is told of the aged Sir Thomas More, beheaded by Henry VIII., that as he went up the steps of the scaffold he leaned on the executioner with the words, “I pray you give me your aid in going up; as for my coming down I can make shift for myself.” It is told of him, presumably on the same occasion, that as he laid his head on the block he moved aside his snow-white beard. “Pity to cut that,” he said; “that has not committed treason.” In fact the only trouble with these Thomas More stories is that there are getting to be too many of them. Where did I read one the other day that said, “Every time that Sir Thomas More was executed he used to have a clean shave, ‘Pity,’ he said, ‘to get my beard spoiled.’” I felt when I read it that there was something wrong with that story, though it’s hard to see just what. Or was it an advertisement that I read? Sir Thomas More said, “I know nothing like Silver-Glass soap; nothing like it for a hasty shave before execution.” But I doubt whether in reality Sir Thomas More got much consolation or fun out of any of it. The executioner probably got more than he did. “Certainly,” said the executioner, laughing, as he swung up the axe, “you are the most humorous gentleman I ever—” Chuck!

Such stories of humour in the presence of death, don’t go. Here is Rabelais, for example, saying, “I am about to take a leap into the great perhaps!” And here is the story of O. Henry’s last hour on which those of us who love his writings have lingered with wistful affection. “Turn up the light,” he said, as the room darkened, “I don’t want to go home in the dark.” Yet this is not humour. This is pathetic, tragic; this is just the mind still functioning in a worn groove, reverting back, like Falstaff when he “babbled of green fields.” The cold reality of death cannot be exorcised with a joke . . .

But if you want to see death and danger treated with absolutely unconcerned laughter turn back again to the stories of adventure that you used to read when you were a boy. Open again the pages of Ned Dashaway or Adventures on the Spanish Main. See where it reads “‘Warm work, Ned,’ laughed Captain Bilge, as a volley of grape cleared three men out of the maintop. ‘It certainly is,’ roared Ned, as a volley of canister swept the bos’n and four men off the maindeck. ‘I’ll say so too,’ chuckled the mate, as a round shot bowled him into the lee-scuppers.”

You notice in these stories, now that you can look at them with the eye of experience, that to keep up the laugh they have to avoid all gruesome details of blood and butchery. What happened to the men in the main-top? They got cleared out of it, that’s all – and only cleared with “grape!” That’s nothing – and the bos’n and his crowd? They got swept off the deck. No harm in that – just a sort of “Excuse me, gentlemen, we want to sweep this deck.” Reality is very different from that.

Do you remember how good old Mark Twain wrote a book that he called Joan of Arc and really thought was Joan of Arc, and wanted to bring in mediaeval hand-to-hand fighting; and he couldn’t do it; unconsciously, I mean, he couldn’t. He tried to and it came out like this, in a passage meant to describe a fierce and bloody assault. “We had a long and tough piece of work before us, but we carried it through before night, Joan keeping us hard at it.” Kept them hard at it, eh? Spirited girl. It sounds like cotton-picking time.

No, there is no humour in the realities of emergency, danger and death.

Nor can I feel that it could in anyway soften or redeem the character of bloodthirsty and awful people if they showed a high sense of humour. If I have to think of Ivan the Terrible, I’d rather think of him as Terrible and let it go at that; I don’t want him funny. I’d rather take Blackbeard the pirate as straight Blackbeard and not understand that though he made people walk the plank, he could always enter into the fun of the thing. I wouldn’t think any better of Blackboard if I heard that he used to roar over the Pickwick Papers. This is the principle on which are based those masterpieces of humour, the Ruthless Rhymes of the late Captain Harry Graham. The humour of them lies in the ridiculous incongruity as between the actual tragedy and the cheerful unconcern of the spectators. In other words, the saving grace of humour produced, like the parallel lines of Euclid, “ever so far both ways,” reveals its weakness by failing to meet. Readers who know the Rhymes already will forgive me for quoting an example:

“My son Augustus in the street one day

Was feeling quite particularly merry,

When someone asked him, ‘What’s the quickest way

To get me out to Highgate Cemetery?’

‘The quickest way?’ replied my little Gus.

And pushed the feller underneath a bus.

I will say this about my son,

He does enjoy a bit of fun.”

But in reality when tragedy steps in, humour moves out. It is too soft a plant, too soft a blossom for such a soil. Humour springs best from happiness, bubbles forth with the champagne around the festive board. A jail is no place for it. It belongs either with happiness, or with the remembrance of bygone happiness, or with that long retrospect into a past so far away that the pain is out of it. “Battles long ago” are different. I can laugh at Jack the Giant Killer and the Welsh Giant . . . but that’s far away.

Yet, I admit, we have to make a pretence at humour in moments of trial. It is a sort of survival quality that came down with us through the ages that we must take adversity with a smile or a joke. Tell any man that he has lost his job and his “reaction,” as they say in college, will be to make some kind of joke about having lots of time now for golf. In each of us is the dim conception of being a “sport,” a survival, I do not doubt, of bygone ages when of necessity courage was the highest virtue. So it is that collectively and singly we still keep up a brave little show of “laughing it off!” or “clink to the cannikin, clink!” a whole repertory of little verses saying that we don’t care – when our hearts are broken . . . Yet this is not humour; this is courage, that makes a pretence of it.

I spoke of the Pickwick Papers, written, as I am sure someone interrupted to remind me, nearly a hundred years after Blackbeard’s death. Now there, I admit, that’s different. This is humour not as a saving grace for the maker of it, but handed out as salvation, or at least consolation for mankind. All Dickens’s humour couldn’t save Dickens, save him from his overcrowded life, its sordid and neurotic central tragedy and its premature collapse. But Dickens’s humour, and all such humour, has saved, or at least greatly served, the world.

One thinks of the Pickwick Papers – read in all corners of the world, in the loneliness of exile, in the vigil of the sickroom, in the pauses of toil and the breathing spaces of anxiety, and bringing with it at least a respite of escape, a vision of the lanes and hawthorns of England, of the Christmas snow and the dim sound on the ear of the bugles of coaches. Nothing else is read like that. Civilization’s best legacy, thus far, is the world’s humour.

In fact, on reflection, I’ll go a little further in regard to his saving grace of humour. It helps to supply for us, in its degree, such reconciliation as we can find for the mystery, the sorrows, the shortcomings of the world we live in, or say, of life itself. Consolation is hard to find. You recall perhaps the haunting verses, written years ago, that ran, “There, little girl, don’t cry.” They have broken her dolls, yes, and later on it will be her heart that is broken, but, “there, little girl, don’t cry.” It is all that we can say to one another.

Now humour in its highest reach turns on just such feeling as this. It is not funny. It no longer rests on quips of language, the oddities of situation or the incongruities of character – but on the incongruity of life itself. The contrast between the eager fret and anxiety of today, the angers that pass and are forgotten and in retrospect, like children’s quarrels, provoke only a smile – this is the basis on which the world’s greatest books of humour appeal to us. This mellowed vision even though not interpretation at least contains reconciliation and consolation.

Not that I mean that a person with a sense of humour can sit and chuckle over it all. That is given only to idiots. You can’t slap your leg and roar with laughter at how funny it is the Romans are all dead. But at least – well – there’s an idea that I am groping for, but as Sir Thomas More would say to the executioner, “Pity to spoil it.”

TOC     INDEX

–2–
Laughing Off Our History

As I said in the chapter above, it does not seem to me that there is any particular saving grace of humour as applied by the individual to his own fortunes. A humorous person, I think, would be apt to be cut more nearly to the heart by unkindness, more deeply depressed by adversity, more elated by sudden good fortune, than a person with but little of that quick sense of contrast and incongruity which is the focus of the humorous point of view.

But what the individual cannot do the nation can; not only can, but does. As a nation we perpetually “laugh off our history”; finding amusement in each phase that passes, oddity in every retreating custom and silliness in each forgotten craze. Our attitude to the past is one of mingled reverence and amusement. The good old times are either a heroic age or an amusing aberration, Valhalla or Vaudeville, as you care to see it. A knight in armour is funny to a child, curious to an antiquarian and inspiring to a poet. King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table were heroic to Tennyson and comic to Mark Twain.

Hence it is that all national history marks down, as it descends the decades, a track of bygone jests, the deep ruts of bygone humour. If other record of history failed we could find it here.

I am reminded of the familiar quotation: “Give me the making of the songs of a nation and I care not who makes its laws,” Just what that means I don’t quite know, except that it has a fine sound. But I could see a lot of meaning in saying: “Let me hear the jokes of a nation and I will tell you what the people are like, how they are getting on and what is going to happen to them.” Indeed, the idea could be applied to all the world’s history and followed down, from the jokes in Egypt about the graft on the contracts for the pyramids to the jokes on the New Deal of today.

Without going so far and without leaving North America, it occurs to me that one might reconstruct the reaction of the history of our North American Continent on its humour during the past forty or fifty years. Let us go back as far as the period of the “Gay Nineties,” still within pretty easy memory, and to the period, a little dimmer, of the “Eighties. Let me see, what was happening in the United States? Grover Cleveland, railroads, graft, trusts, octopuses. Populists with one brace south-west to north-east. Knights of Labour, farmers and more farmers, and the South still sorrowing. America was just moving off the farm to the factory, from the rural town to the metropolitan city.

The city then was not made up of skyscrapers and apartment buildings and residential flats superimposed ten storeys high. It was all made up of boarding-houses. To make a city you had to have a “depot,” a main street of shops and then miles and miles of boarding-houses, to which went horse cars with tinkling bells – cars warmed with straw. All people lived in boarding-houses – young people, too young to have homes; old people, too old to keep them; students burning midnight oil; store clerks, as soon as they had regular jobs; and theatrical people whenever they hadn’t.

So, of course, a whole lot of our current jokes of those days turned on the boarding-houses; on the landlady (poor, maligned soul); on the boarder who couldn’t pay; on the food; the accommodations, and the warmth maintained by one stove pipe that passed each room in turn like the knight’s move in chess. Any people who recall those days will remember jokes as

“Mr. Smith,” said the landlady. I’ll just give you three days to pay your board in.”

“All right,” said Mr. Smith, “I’ll take Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July.”

Or this one: “Are you boarding now?” “No, only dieting.”

Part of the standing boarding-house joke was the frequency of moving from one boarding-house to another. Here belongs the story, apocryphal or true, of Mark Twain being seen, in his San Francisco days, carrying under his arm a cigar box tied with a string.

“Buying cigars?” asked a friend.

“No,” said Mark, “moving my room.”

The essence of the story, at any rate, is not exaggerated. I can speak here from personal experience. During my student days, in Toronto, I lived in fourteen different boarding-houses (all marked now, no doubt, with tablets – aspirin tablets) and I moved so frequently that I had a special rate of twenty cents, instead of twenty-five, with Crashley’s Express. Notice “express” did not mean in those days “express company.” “Crashley’s Express” just meant a man and a horse. I forget which was Crashley. An expressman was not a huge fellow like a modern truckman. He was just a little shrimp of a man, but he used to put on his shoulder a trunk three cubic feet each way (you know what I mean) and carry it up to the top floor. In his mid-agony, the landlady would call: “Be careful with that trunk against the stove pipe.” You see, if he hit the pipe, the whole heating installation was dislocated.

But the boarding-house joke was only one of the kinds of jokes that marked the days when America was moving from the farm to the factory, from doing things by hand to doing things by machinery. We had a whole field of fun with a standard crop of jokes about laying carpets, putting up stove pipes and starting balky horses. Try this:

The horse standing outside the drug store refused to start. “Hold on,” said the good-natured druggist, coming out of his store to the aid of the man tugging at the horse’s bridle, “let me blow some of this powder in his ear. It’s a new dodge.” “Pouf!” went the druggist and away went the horse and buggy! His owner watched him to the skyline. “Now blow some in mine,” he said.

The picture, when you think of it – the street dozing in the sunshine, the horses at the hitching posts, the low buildings and the disappearance of the main street over the horizon – the picture is that of a vanished world.

Change in transport, indeed, effected the first great changes that came over our humour as the new country opened. On the drowsy world of the horse and buggy broke the motor car – the horses reared and balked, the motor honked, a battle was engaged. And now, forty years later, you can look over the field that was and dig up jokes as they dig up steel cuirasses in Belgium. Here is a jest that dates the period:

“What shall I do,” said the new driver, “if I meet a skittish horse?” “Well, I tell you,” said the expert, “you’d better stop the car and then stop the engine, and if the horse keeps on being skittish you’d better take the machine to pieces and hide it in the grass.”

Presently this world of new transport, of rapid communication, of pictures that moved and wires that talked, went sweeping into the World War of 1914, and with that came, I will not say “War Humour,” for there is no such thing, but the humour in despite of war. For mankind, after the first wave of emotion, of anger, horror and fascination – mankind had to find humour to help forget the agonies of war or break under the strain of it. Far away, indeed, these War Jokes seem now – quite unknown to the generation that has risen up since.

Such humour to the mass of the people in America was as new as war itself. For the older wars, humour and all, had drifted into history. There had been the jokes of the Civil War – all long dead – jokes about army contractors, draft evaders and “contraband” negroes, done out in the quaint misspelling of the immortal Artemus Ward and of Orpheus C. Kerr. These, in 1914, lived on only as history.

The humours of the Spanish War had already faded. “When you hear those bells go ting-a-ling-a-ling.” One recalls the verses about the Spanish ships and the snowballs in hell, or the jokes on the impecuniosity of Spain.

“Charge!” shouted the Spanish officer. “No,” answered the manager of the arms factory. “C.O.D.”

All that came and went so quickly that there was no time to develop a school, or mode, of jest or a reaction from jest to bitterness. But compare the World War in relation to humour. Its earlier jokes turned on the organization and discipline of war, all new to the public, all different from civil life.

A private in camp called out to a passing figure in khaki, “Hey, Buddy, give me a match.” Then he realized his mistake. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he stammered, “I didn’t see you were a general.” “That’s all right,” said the general, “luckily for you, I’m not a second lieutenant.”

But presently there came the jokes that turned on the disillusionment, the world weariness bred of years of war, the sentiment of its futility, the question, “What price glory?”

Here is such a one, related, so it is recorded, by General Perishing:

A dilapidated soldier, his clothing in rags, a shoe missing, his head bandaged and his arm in a sling, was heard to mutter to himself as he shambled away, “I love my country, I’d fight for my country, I’d die for my country. But if ever this damn war is over I’ll never love another country!”

The “saddened” smiles with which people tried to “laugh off” the war were followed by the barrage of jests with which the nation greeted prohibition. These cracked like machine gun fire along the trenches of the vaudeville stage from New York to Los Angeles. The cherished right to drink, down and outlawed, entrenched itself behind the right to joke. A new language sprang up – speaking of speak-easies, bootleggers, hi-jackers and hip flasks – and a new set of jokes with it.

But here a new problem arose. Was it wicked to joke about prohibition? If it was law now, shouldn’t it be illegal to make fun of it? In England, it has always been forbidden – by a taboo – to make fun of the King, or of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In America, by a taboo with a kick behind it, it is equally forbidden to make fun of the President. You may make game of him but not fun of him. Of these three the Archbishop is now out of it. You can have all the fun with him you like. But the other two hold.

So, as I say, a lot of people claimed it was wicked to laugh at prohibition. And in any case the laugh threatened to monopolize too much of the field. A lot of theatres put prohibition jokes on the ban. The poor low comedian saw his livelihood cut off before he got it. Many of the newspapers cut out all jokes on drink and, most typical of all, writers of popular fiction and crime stories had to cut all boozing out of the narrative. The great detective, hitherto eating nothing but all to the good on drink, had to work on tea, and looked pretty sour on it.

Yet oddly enough, in earlier days, as every joke book shows from Artemus Ward to Mr. Dooley, drink had formed the chief subject of the American joke for half a century – men coming home tight; men too tight to come home; men wondering where home was; there was no end to it. Second only to it were the perennial jokes on quaint negroes, comic Irishmen and Scotsmen from Aberdeen. Some graduate research student should work it out into percentages of frequency or – no, if he did he would make it so dry that even drink wouldn’t keep wet.

Then came the jokes on the failures of prohibition – open laughs with obvious meaning.

“Look at that man,” said the lady at the window; “he’s fallen down in the street; he must be drunk.” “How can he be drunk?” said her friend. “It’s prohibition.”

And after that came the jokes that spelled good-bye to prohibition, and it was all over.

But when that huge figure with the feet of clay toppled over, down fell another beside it. This was the colossus called “Big Business” – the American Image before which we had all bowed down, which founded colleges and held on the palm of its hand the little shrimps called Science and Learning and the Ministry. Business had taken everything over, and then down went business in the depression – like Humpty Dumpty. When it fell off the wall of Wall Street the outside world laughed. “Oh yeah!” and after that nobody said any longer “A business man told me.” And if anyone said, “Business men think—” the interruption was, “Do they?”

Thus, in the saddened world of business disaster people try to “laugh off” the depression.

“My husband,” said the professor’s wife to the family lawyer, “has had a complete breakdown and must do absolutely nothing for six months. His old students want to help him. What would you suggest they might do?” “They might buy him a seat on the Stock Exchange.”

So there we sat in our Post-War world of the “Thirties. It was really a Pre-War world but we didn’t know it. We kept ourselves as merry as we could with the old perennial jokes – the negro has been Heaven’s blessing to America – and the jokes of the hour on depression, hard times, Hitler’s hair and Mussolini’s hairlessness.

But did the subject of our humour really change through all these passing decades? No, not in its reality, but only in its latest embodiment. Mankind laughs at its troubles and jests at its oppressors. Children make fun of father, schoolboys laugh at their teacher, students at their professors and prisoners at their guards and turnkeys. Laughter is the last refuge of sorrow or oppression. Our new oppressions of the moment – industrial collapse, the war danger and such – only stepped into the place of the old ones.

With which it suddenly occurs to me that I have left out the most perennial topic of all, one that in 1959 was running as strong as it was a hundred years before. Women! Did that graduate student, counting up his percentages, touch me on the elbow and whisper “women”? Why, of course, women, women – the second most important thing in the world and, like all its treasured possessions, the object at once of its flattery and its jests. Jokes on women! Here is change indeed!

Many people can look back with me from memory, and all from hearsay and reading, and recall the “comic” women of the “Eighties and the “Nineties. Here was the Old Maid, that butt of jokes that never ended from the Pickwick Papers on. An “Old Maid” – any years over thirty made her that – wore curl papers and frilled pantelettes. You remember the one who wanted the conductor to stop the train at Poughkeepsie because she had to take a pill! There were thousands of Old Maid jokes. But she’s getting her own back now all right, with a lip-stick and a vanity box and her pantelettes thrown away when she goes on a “necking party.”

Comic women – they’re all gone. Women are emancipated, they have all been sophisticated (a Victorian Old Maid would have denied that she ever had), and the emancipation is written broad across the pages of humorous literature. Where, now, is the Suffragette and the Woman with the axe, the Temperance Woman and, best of all, the Blue Stocking? A woman who learned anything out of a book was funny in those days; a girl at college must be an awful frump! Algebra! Good God!

But now, look and see. College girls – Oh my! The public just eats them up! Here they are, in their “shorts,” all over the funny pages, getting off their he-and-she jokes and leaning out of their dormitory windows. The blessed damozels who leaned out from the golden bars of heaven were not a patch on them. And their language!

He: “I love to think of you as the old-fashioned girl – sweet, beautiful, adorable, innocent.”

She: “Yeah! big boy, what kind of chump are you?”

How much has it all really changed, our humour? I only wish I had the time and space to talk about it. Believe me, fun didn’t die with Mark Twain and Josh Billings. There are a lot of solemn people among us today, but so there were in Mark Twain’s time. Pericles said – or let’s be exact – Thucydides said Pericles said: “All the world is filled with the graves of brave men.” Senator Tom Corvin – you’ve heard of him, from Ohio, long ago – improved on this and said:

“All the world is filled with the graves of solemn jackasses.”

They are still mooning round among us, and they get a sort of false admiration. But mainly we can laugh them off. For after all, we still have our sense of humour and our jokes.

But while we were still making as merry as we could with Depression Jokes and College Girl Comics, all of a sudden – sudden for the honest people of the world – Depression, Collapse, Jokes and all were swept aside with the new tempest of war.

What price humour now?

TOC     INDEX

–3–
War and Humour

I am quite sure that when Adam and Eve were put out of the Garden of Eden, Eve said, “Well, thank goodness, Adam, we’ve got our sense of humour!” And Adam, trudging along deep in thought, paused and said, “How’s that?” and took a first step towards getting one. “I certainly had to laugh at that snake,” said Eve with a toss of her head and a false snigger. “At the snake?” said Adam, and went on with his reflections.

Years after Adam used to tell the whole story with the greatest humour. Eve didn’t like his bringing it up. They had come up in the world since.

So does many a brave descendant of Adam today, overtaken by disaster in life, still say, “Well, thank heaven I still keep my sense of humour!” But this really shows that he hasn’t got any; what he means is a brave defiance of adverse fate, which is quite another thing.

All of this in connection with the present world of war and distress and the question of how we stand towards it, and whether, as so many people express it, we can still keep our sense of humour in spite of all the disaster, the death and destruction, and, worse still, the outbreak of brutality and cruelty that has come over mankind. There is no danger that bravery cannot face, there is no suffering that fortitude cannot bear, but are we to think that there is no disaster that humour cannot alleviate? There are mental qualities that can be taken on at will to meet emergency, or at least increased in each of us by will – a sort of power in reserve. We can heighten our resolution and harden our endurance, but is humour such a quality? Must we try to enlarge and stimulate our sense of humour so as to get more and more fun out of less and less material? Personally I think not. Humour is not a weapon against war. Humour is one of the things that war can kill, that could not survive in the world if it were under the domination of force and cruelty that now lies upon Europe.

Yet here is an odd thing. All our traditional notions of war for generations back are somehow mixed up with ideas of fun and adventure, of jolly Jack-tars and comic “bosuns” and a sort of rip-roaring devilment that turns danger into a picnic. I say “for generations back,” but let it be noted that I only mean our modern generations. The ancient world knew nothing of this attitude. The Old Testament hands out slaughter and lots of it, but it never calls it fun. It relates, “And of the Amelecks there were slain four thousand, and of the Abimilecks were slain five thousand,” but it doesn’t add, “but the biggest joke of all was on the Bullnecks who were all slain.” So with the Romans and Greeks. They write calmly of putting a whole army to the sword, of passing them “under the forks,” or pushing them over a cliff. That was, for them, just a plain fact – business, as it were. But neither Livy nor Tacitus would write, “One of the most amusing, indeed comic, episodes of the massacre was the drowning of Vercingeotix in his own horse-trough.”

I imagine it was the age of chivalry, when knights fought on either side or both sides, at so much a throw, that turned war into a game and first opened up the idea that a battle was first-class fun.

Once started, the idea ran riot as it descended down our literature. No doubt this presentation of a gay and gallant, glorious and uproarious aspect of war helped to stimulate courage. But even at that one may doubt if it was the best sort. The courage of the Cromwellian Ironsides on their knees before battle could beat it out every time.

Yet it became, I say, a traditional attitude. Till yesterday, at least till the Great War, and that is historically yesterday, all our war memoirs and war fiction were written up with this queer false hilarity. In fact it became a convention that military episodes of death and danger must be written up as if they were one huge laugh. Take as a sample such a passage as the following, which every reader of one generation back has read a hundred times. It is taken from the book called by some such title as “Bullets, Buckshot and Bombshells, or The Memoirs of War Correspondents in the Karroo” – that or something else.

It runs:

“I was standing between Lord Kitchener and General Roberts, looking through our field-glasses towards the enemies’ lines which were only a hundred yards away, and laughing and joking as we always did when the enemy were about to open fire on us.

“Kitchener, whose wit is as keen as his sense of fun, said, ‘Well, why don’t they start?’ To heighten the joke, he had hardly tittered the words when a veritable hail of bullets drove at us. The air seemed absolutely black, with them. In fact, I very seldom remember seeing the air quite so black with bullets. General Roberts, who has a deep sense of humour which sometimes comes to the surface, turned to Kitchener with a quiet smile and said, ‘What do you know about that?’ . . . ‘Yes,’ said Kitchener, putting up his eyeglass with the greatest nonchalance, ‘let’s go.’ We moved off, laughing heartily. The joke was that, as we went, a volley of grape shot hit Kitchener in the stomach; luckily it was sideways.”

One admits that that kind of writing largely passed out with the Great War. The people who used to write it have been replaced by the newer, the realistic writers, who would probably transpose the episode just described, as follows:

“As the first roar of grapeshot zoomed past us, my stomach suddenly sank. I walked to the edge of the mound and vomited. My stomach turned. I was sick. I threw up. ‘Did you vomit?’ asked Lord Kitchener. I said I had. ‘Well, I’m going to,’ he said. He went and vomited. He was sick. ‘Did you vomit, Kitchener?’ said Roberts. ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, move aside and let me.’”

These newer writers, who may be described as of the “blood and guts” school, had pretty well transformed the surface of all our fiction before the present war began. They took humour out to put worse in. Later on, when in some happier day this present war turns to history and lives again in fiction, it is not possible yet to know how it will be told. But what I am discussing here is not what will be made out of the war afterwards but what is to be made of it now. And I say, there is no humour in it.

I do not for a moment disparage the current “humour” of the London press, written in the light of incendiary fires and in the imminence of death. It’s brave stuff. It is a tradition of the English people not to cry; they hate sentiment; and the Scots go even further; they keep not only their sorrow but even their jokes to themselves. This refusal to whine, this make-believe of laughter in the face of death is grand. But there is no “humour of war” in it; nothing but resolution and pathos. And those of us far from the danger that inspires it have no right to share in it.

Indeed the more we think of it the more we realize that humour is itself one of the things at stake in this war. If the war goes wrong, there will be no more humour left in the world. It will be all crushed and beaten out of it. A child will whisper, “Mother, I’ve thought of a joke,” and will be answered, “Hush! darling, or the Gestapo will hear you.” Or a bold-hearted boy might ask, “Father, who was Josh Billings?” and his father will answer, “A very wicked man, my son; never speak of him.”

Humour cannot share its ground with cruelty. It may be that in its earliest twilight our humour and our laughter arose out of a savage exultation over a beaten enemy. The savage cracked his enemy’s head with a tomahawk and said, “One on you!”

It is only now when we are in danger of losing our good old democracy that we can see how fine and free it is and how individual character responds to it. Till the war came we spent our time growling at the imperfections of democracy. Democracy, of course, was inefficient; so it ought to be. Efficiency is an unnatural strain, like Sunday School, or company manners. Democracy was more or less crooked; so is humanity; so are you.

But democracy was everywhere permeated with humanity, and humour was the very atmosphere of its life. It presented everywhere that rare combination of humbug and sincerity which makes the world go round. It evolved the “politician” as the master genius of democracy. Chivalry evolved the Knight, looking for the Holy Grail. Monarchy evolved the gentlemen, hunting foxes. Democracy, in America, evolved the politician, hunting votes. This meant a man who really loved his fellow-men could stand for them all day and would give everything to everybody, or promise it, and had no principles that he was not willing to sell for better ones. The politician, and our democratic politics, moved, if you like, in an atmosphere of humbug, of make-believe anger and mock denunciation. A politician could boil with indignation as easily as an egg on a heater. He could stand appalled at anything he needed to stand appalled at. The country was alternately saved and lost every two years; it moved on the brink of ruin, it rounded a corner, it emerged into the sunlight – something doing all the time. But with it all how utterly and vastly superior it has been to anything that despotism can ever offer to Europe.

Humour in Europe is dead. There hasn’t been a joke in Germany for twenty-five years. Germany turns its tongue and pen to vitriolic satire, to coarse denunciation as far from humour as blasphemy from blessing. Mussolini, it stands on record, was once an enthusiastic student of Mark Twain. He couldn’t pass now.

We must keep our sense of humour till after the war. Some day we may be back again in a world of peace, in the sunshine of unprepared democracy, in the ease of inefficiency, in the out-of-door sport of politics, and humour will come into its own again.

Won’t everything seem funny then? What a laugh we’ll have, eh?

TOC     INDEX

Memories of Christmas

–1–
Christmas Rapture

(Pre-War)

Well, well, here’s Christmas time again, and Christmas almost here! There’s always a sort of excitement as it gets near, isn’t there? Only this morning the postman was saying – there’s a genial fellow, if you like, that postman – was saying that Christmas is right on top of us. I said; not yet, but he said, oh yes, as good as here. He said it was real Christmas weather, too. I thought, not yet, but he insisted. He said that why he likes Christmas is that he has three kiddies, all boys. He always takes them out on Christmas. My! I hope he takes them a good long way this Christmas! Florida, eh?

The furnace man was talking too. He says I’ll be having company round Christmas and so he’s going to drive the furnace a bit. I tell him I don’t expect much company but he says he is going to coax her along anyway. The furnace man comes from the old country and where he worked, the gentleman he worked for – this, of course, was a real gentleman – used to give him a goose every Christmas. Never missed. That was nice, wasn’t it? The furnace man has four kiddies, all boys; he says it’s a great business for him and the missus thinking what to give them all . . . I do hope they can think of something good this year.

But, as I say, as Christmas gets near there’s a sort of excitement about it. Such a lot of things to go to – concerts, entertainments, all sorts of things. I don’t know how I’m going to manage them all. Here’s this big Police Concert, one of the first. A policeman brought tickets for it to the door yesterday – such a big, fine-looking fellow – with a revolver. I took two tickets. My, that will be a great evening, all those policemen singing together. But I don’t know whether I’ll go. Such a lot of police, eh? . . . But I’ve got the tickets up on the mantel alongside of the Firemen’s Entertainment, and the Musicale for the Deaf and Dumb and a lot more. That one on the right is a new one – the Garbage Men’s Gathering. I got that from the garbage man early this morning. My goodness! It was a piece of luck. He told me he had rung the bell twice and was just going away when I came down in my dressing-gown. Wasn’t it a lucky chance! And, do you know, he says it’s a new thing this Christmas, the first time the garbage men have got together. Think of it – ever since the birth of Christ.

But the bother is it’s the same night as the Archeology lecture at the university, and I mustn’t miss that. Mrs. Dim – she’s the wife of Professor Dim who’s giving the lecture – sent me a ticket. I had sent her an azalea and she sent back the ticket right away – pretty thoughtful, eh? – and afterwards I met her on the street and she said I really must come. She said this is his new lecture. He’s only been giving it since 1935. So there’s the ticket on the mantelpiece. The Record of the Rocks, it reads – Great title, eh? you’d wonder how a man could get a title like that. Mrs. Dim told me that Professor Dim thought and thought and thought, before he got it. I’ll say he did, eh?

But of course there’s one thing I certainly won’t miss and that’s church on Sunday morning. I’m not much of a church-goer as a rule but I never miss Christmas morning. Canon Bleet always preaches himself. He’s past eighty now, but my! he’s a vigorous old man! He preached an hour and a quarter last Christmas – and such a sermon. He just took the text, “Come!” – just that one word, “Come” – or, no, wait a minute, it was “Up!” . . . It was about the Hittites. He went back to Genesis, then right down to the apostles and half way back again. So I’m not going to miss that. I don’t know what it’s going to be this year. I hope it’ll be the Hittites again, eh?

So when you put it all together it begins to look like a pretty big day, doesn’t it? And naturally the biggest part of it is Christmas Dinner! Such a dinner as I had last year at the Dobson-Dudds, a real, old-fashioned dinner, right after church. Eat! I never ate so much in my life – turkey, plum pudding, everything. You see what makes you eat at their house is they don’t have anything to drink. They are against it. Dudd told me so himself, right after we got into the house, after I’d taken my coat off. He said they’re against it, on principle. Mrs. Dudd said so too, in the drawing-room.

They have a lovely place, perfectly beautiful, and so hospitable! Mrs. Dudd says she calls it Liberty Hall, because she lets people do just as they like. But as she said she’s against having anything to drink because of the children seeing it. You see Mrs. Dudd was a Dobson and all the Dobsons were against it. Old Mrs. Dobson, Mrs. Dudd’s mother, was there at the dinner – that was good, wasn’t it? – She sat next to me, and she told me she had always been against it. She told me she didn’t know where the young people were getting to now; she said you go to dinner where young girls are drinking cocktails and wine till it’s just awful! Say – think if I’d got into a dinner like that!

But, of course, there’s one good thing about not having anything to drink, you can certainly eat. I mean, not only the turkey and that but a lot of extra things. I ate celery all the time I was waiting for the turkey. You naturally do if there’s no sherry. I ate bunches of it, and afterwards a lot of parsley and part of a table wreath by mistake.

Such a dinner! We went into the drawing-room afterwards and it was great. We didn’t smoke because Mrs. Dudd doesn’t believe in gentlemen smoking when ladies are present. She thinks that the ladies’ company ought to be good enough without. So it ought, oughtn’t it? However, we had a fine time looking at photographs taken of their summer place – Liberty Cottage. I had to leave about five o’lock for Canon Bleet’s Happy Sunday Afternoon (he has it on Christmas, too) for the Newsboys. I just made it.

Of course, naturally the great excitement before Christmas time is the question of buying presents. It takes a tremendous lot of thinking about because the real thing in giving is to think just what people would like and what would be suitable and acceptable – the kind of thing a person would like to have and to keep. Often it’s puzzling to know what to give. Now there’s Horton. He’s a stockbroker downtown, and I see him often at the club and I must give him something this year because he sent me an azalea. It was the one I sent on to Mrs. Dim. Horton got the azalea, I think, from Noyse, another man at the club, who is a lawyer. At any rate I saw it come into the club. Noyse is a lawyer for a florist, and of course that started it. Now, you see, if I have to give a present to Horton – he’s the one I say is a broker – I can’t really tell what I ought to give as it all depends on the market. I had thought of giving him a Turkish rosewater Narghile pipe – but if the market all goes bad again, it might be a winter overcoat.

I say I had thought of giving – because right there is another of the pleasures of Christmas giving – thinking of something to give, even if in the end you don’t feel quite sure and don’t give it. For example. I am giving Canon Bleet an encyclopaedia. Isn’t that just exactly, absolutely the thing for a scholarly old clergyman? Can’t you just see him starting right in at Capital A, and reading it all! But wait, he mustn’t have it yet! You see encyclopedias get so quickly out of date.

Wait! – patience! – till the very year when there’s a new one. For example, the Britannica came out in 1927. So Canon Bleet knows all that happened up to then. I’ve been waiting each year to hit it right. So far no luck. But I happen to know, on the inside, that there’s to be a new edition out three years after the end of the war. That’s the one for him, eh?

On the other hand, some presents I’ve got. I have them right here in the room – things that I wanted to make sure of. This dressing-gown (the one I have on) is for my brother George. When I got it, a little while ago, it looked a little bit too new. So I’ve been taking the edge off it, and of course I can easily have any buttons sewn on or the ink taken out. Then here’s this present for Teddy. Teddy travels a good deal, so guess what I’ve got him – a travelling bag. Pretty good idea, eh? – the kind of bag you take when you travel. It’s made of pigskin. The man said so, but to look at a pig you wouldn’t think it. It’s too clean for a pig. I’ve taken a trip or two with it just to get it more like the natural pig before Teddy gets it.

And yet somehow I now and then think that perhaps this Christmas I’ll break away a little. After all, a man ought not to get into a rut. So much church-going (every year) is apt to get a man stuck in a groove.

And the Christmas dinner stuff! The Dobson-Dudds have invited me to come again for Christmas dinner this year. But I don’t think I can go. Oh no, I mustn’t. It would be imposing on them. A man mustn’t always be taking the hospitality of his friends. I think this year I’ll just go down and have a bite to eat at the club, with just a glass of sherry and just a bottle of red wine or a quart of Scotch whisky. Just that.

No, I’m not sure I won’t alter it all. It’s too exciting, too wearing – concerts, sermons, I can’t keep up with it. Perhaps I’ll pack up George’s dressing-gown into Teddy’s pigskin travelling bag and beat it out of town. Where? I don’t know – perhaps I’ll go up north, eh? or down south? or, say, out west, or perhaps back east – anyway, somewhere!

TOC     INDEX

–2–
Christmas Shopping

(Pre-War)

Let me say right at the start that I am devoted to Christmas – no time in the year like it. It’s all brightness and light and Christmas trees with candles, and holly berries – with little children dancing in a ring and every one pretending to be a fine fellow, and pretty nearly succeeding in it.

I was brought up on it; weren’t you? It was a sort of family tradition – house all hung with mottoes of MERRY CHRISTMAS, and cotton wool and red flannel . . . You had all that in your family, too, didn’t you, and your brother Jim always gave your brother Dick a necktie every Christmas, just the same as the one Dick gave to Jim, and your mother paid for both of them – didn’t she, so as to teach the children to be generous?

Quite so; and in that case you’ll agree with me that of all the side issues and extras that go with Christmas and make it what it is, there isn’t one that for warmth and character is in it with Christmas shopping! The pleasure of anticipation, that warm glow about the heart, eh! That joy in generous giving far ahead of getting anything for yourself. That’s you, isn’t it? Yes, I’m sure it is.

And, of course, as we all know, the anticipation of pleasure has in it a higher quality, in reality, than the pleasure itself. Packing a picnic lunch is better than a picnic, getting fishing tackle together is better than fishing, and looking over a travel folder called Five Days in Sunny Jamaica is better than living there,

So, come on out into the street in our imagination and let’s go Christmas shopping.

What a picture it all calls up – the clean fresh air, the streets as light as day and all full of people, the big snowflakes falling – never so big and never so slow in coming down as at Christmas time – they hate to land and miss the rest of it . . . Snowflakes falling on the laughing crowd, on the little “tots” holding their mothers’ hands, and falling on the coloured hoods and the glistening hair of the pretty girls – it takes a snowflake to pick out the prettiest . . . All moving, swaying, laughing, talking, and going more or less nowhere! . . . Such is Christmas shopping on a winter evening.

Notice, while the picture is still before us, how all the people in the Christmas crowd of the streets are somehow lifted out of their common selves and idealized. Sour old devils of “fathers” have dropped off thirty years of age and thirty pounds of sin, every woman looks like mother, and all the girls – I swear it’s not the snowflakes – have turned pretty – and the little “tots” just mentioned – it’s hard to realize how often in our home life we’ve called them “little pups.”

Christmas shopping for me! As I sit here in my club writing about it, the thing gets hold of me. I’m going to do it this year. I’ve purposely left it all till this, the last evening before Christmas, when I am free to go at it, and as soon as I have scratched off this writing I shall go out and join the glad throng,

First – be very careful about that idea of starting shopping early in the year, right back in January or February, when things are being sold off. I tried that a year or so ago. There’s nothing in it. People had so often showed me things that they had “picked up” in January! Well, you know how words impress you and the idea of just “picking things up” makes you feel terribly superior.

People talk also of getting things “for a song,” though that’s mostly when they go abroad and bring back some pottery from Italy. That’s too far to go for Christmas.

Anyway, I went out in January and picked up a bird-cage and a book called The Bible Lands of Palestine and a pair of braces (boy’s size). I admit the things were cheap. The birdcage was only three and six and it was worth thirty shillings. The man in the shop admitted this himself, but it’s been no good to me. I know no one with a bird. People don’t seem to keep birds now. Yet this is a fine cage, big enough for a penguin, with a bar for it to swing on and little places where you put in food and water, and other little places where you take out whatever you take out. Too bad, I can’t use it. I may offer it in a raffle for a charity . . . however, let it go.

The Bible Lands of Palestine was a beautiful-looking book, fine binding and lovely illustrations – one of someone bathing, not naked, of course, in a lovely flat river with lovely sand beside it and lovely little sheep or lambs nibbling the daintiest of grass – you know how pink and yellow and dainty Palestine is. There was another picture of men in a boat on a lake, with tossing waves; in fact it’s getting pretty rough. I couldn’t quite make out the idea. It might have been a dinghy race, only the boat looked too round and slow. Perhaps they were just out for a sail . . . All I mean is that it was a lovely book, and I was just wrapping it up to give away when I saw on the front blank page, very dim, but still readable, the inscription. The Reverend James Peabody from his Mother . . . I started to rub it out and had got it pretty well off, but I went on rubbing too far and saw another inscription, The Reverend John Somebody from his Mother . . . and under that another. The Reverend Thomas Something from his Mother. I thought of cutting the page out, but it was no good as there were more half-rubbed out inscriptions on the next one, to more clergymen from their mothers; and beyond that there seemed to be, still more dim, inscriptions that ended “from her affectionate son.” So they must have passed the book round both ways . . . Of course, I still have the book and have the pleasure of looking at the pictures – that one I mentioned of the dinghy in rough weather and another of a man carrying a huge bed on his back – for a bet, evidently . . . But it’s no good for Christmas.

The other item was the braces – three shillings and worth ten shillings, suitable for a boy of fourteen, but with a little wheel to jack them up to a boy of sixteen. Boys grow so fast; all mothers and fathers will get the idea of that little wheel. But I want to speak about these three-shilling braces, and I want to speak seriously and especially to mothers and fathers. That’s no present to give to a boy, and you know it! You don’t understand me? Oh yes, you do. You’ve no right to give a boy something useful – something he’s got to have. To give a boy for Christmas a pair of braces, or six collars, or an overcoat, or a pair of winter gloves, or anything that’s useful and that he has to have and that you’ve got to buy for him sooner or later, is just a low-down trick unworthy of the spirit of Christmas.

With little girls, of course, it’s quite different. They’re easy. You see, the little pups love finery, and you can give them ribbons, laces, shoes – anything. They’re just inexhaustible. But when a boy thinks of Christmas he knows just what he wants. I mean, not the particular thing, but the kind of properties and qualities that it’s got to have. It has to be something more or less mechanical, more or less mysterious, with either wheels in it or electricity, a something that “goes” – you know what I mean. Well, next time you want to buy a Christmas present for a little boy, you go to the toy department of any big store and say to the man – now remember, not to a woman, she can’t understand – “I want to buy for a little boy something that goes when you start it, has mechanism and an element of the mysterious, either cogged wheels or a battery . . .” And he’ll say, “Exactly!” and lead you right to it. There it is, take it out of its box – boys’ presents have to be big – it’s marked COGGO! The New Mechanico-Thermic Wonder! . . . Can’t you see the fascination of it?

That reminds me – you don’t mind my telling a story in the middle of an essay; I’m just writing as I go – years and years ago I got one of those things to give to my little son at Christmas. It was sent up to the house that evening when the child was asleep. But three (middle-aged) professors were dining with me, when the big parcel with COGGO was handed in, and one, a professor of mediaeval history, said, “Let’s look at it.” Then another, professor of Roman Law, said, “How does it go?” and the third, a professor of mechanics, said, “I think this way.” So I said, “Wait a minute, we’ll clear the table.” But they said, “No, put it on the floor – more space.” We had a fine time with it, till we broke it.

So you see – I’m speaking here to fathers only – if you do buy the boy one of these big mechanical toys remember that even if they are expensive you yourself can have a lot of fun with them. That ought to count, eh? And not only yourself. Ask in your clergyman and any J.P. or general or Member of Parliament that you know. They’ll enjoy it . . .

But I repeat – don’t buy the useful things. Those braces – I never gave them away. I have them still. As I stood with them in my hand thinking where to send them, my mind conjured up a picture of how I felt, long ago, over sixty years ago, when I opened my stocking one Christmas and found, all wrapped up in boxes and parcels that might have been filled with magic, just such junk as that. There was a little round hard box with a tight lid that might have opened out to be magic music, or goodness knows what – for a child’s imagination outstrips reality – but it was only collars. I had hard work to choke back tears. And after that – flat and long and mysterious – was a box that might have held – why, anything! Derringer pistols, Cherokee daggers, anything . . . But did it? No. It had in it a pair of braces just like these, wheel and all. That broke me down . . .

There is no blame; all parents do it, must do it, in such a crowded family as ours was, with a census that went up each year. But at least let me plead for some one present, however trivial, with the true touch in it of the magic of the mysterious . . . My own case I wrote up and wrote off long ago, as a story, “Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas,” in my book Literary Lapses, where it stands as a warning.

Did I give those braces away? No, sir. Give them to some poor child? No, sir, there is no child so poor that I should wish that evil gift upon him. I wear those braces myself, wheel and all between my shoulder blades, as a monk wears a hair shirt, to remind me of the true spirit of Christmas . . .

But, per contra, in the other direction, never make the mistake of asking a boy – I mean a little, little boy, too young for discretion – of asking him what he’d want for Christmas. If you do, he’ll say right off, no hesitation, a horse, and a baby motor-car, and a big radio, like grandmamma’s. Then, where are you? But come back again to the street. Let’s go shopping.

And here we reach the question of buying Christmas presents at any time through the year, just when you happen to see anything that looks nice for somebody. It is a good plan, only don’t you find – I speak just as between you and me – that the things you see, or at least, that attract your attention, are the ones that are just right for yourself? You see in a shop window a pipe, a beautiful thing in a case, and you say to yourself, “The very thing for a Christmas present.” Your conscience says, “Present for whom?” But you stifle it. At first you try to call it “Charlie’s pipe,” meaning it for your brother. But, well, Charlie never sees it. It’s gone the way of George’s fishing-rod, the nickel-plated cigar-lighter your nephew never saw. Still, it’s all right. You can make it up to them later. You can do as I am doing tonight the moment I finish this writing, just go out and have one big grand unselfish burst of present buying, among all the little tots and the laughing crowds I spoke of. Something for everybody this time! No one forgotten, I think I’ll write them down on a list – you’ve tried it, haven’t you? George and Mary (something for their house, they haven’t been married long); Charlie, a pipe; my great-niece Nancy (three and a half; you ought to see her), either a pearl necklace, or, no, I’ll see when I get there . . .

And this time there must be no hesitation, no doubt.

That’s fatal to Christmas shopping. I look back over bygone years and I think of all the presents I meant to give but didn’t. No doubt, as you’ll say at once, I’m all the better man for meaning to give them. I admit it. But I think in that respect I don’t need to get any better still.

Everybody, I am sure, has had the same experience of presents never given. There was a man many many years ago who did me a great kindness. He took my classes when I was a schoolmaster and enabled me to get off for three weeks to write on college examinations. When I went to pay him he wouldn’t take anything. It meant a lot to me, both ways, But I didn’t thank him over effusively or show too much emotion. I meant that actions should speak louder than words. I decided to give him a watch at Christmas. Then I went a little further and decided on a gold watch, the kind of watch he would never buy for himself, for he was not well off – one to last all his life. The watch being gold, I couldn’t give it to him that Christmas; but what’s a year, or what was it then? His watch was coming, and it gave me pleasure, whenever I met him, to think that once given he had his watch for life. So he would have had – but he didn’t. The Christmases went by; the time never came when I could quite, or not without – well, you understand. I never gave it to him. And now I never can; where he is, he’s too happy to need it.

But it was a kind thought, anyway. I’ve had quite a few like that. There is a man going round in Montreal wearing, for me, though he doesn’t know it, a smoking jacket that I nearly gave him the Christmas after he got married. There is, or was, a retired clergyman who nearly qualified for an encyclopedia; and ever so many of my young married friends have imaginary sets of Shakespeare. But I needn’t explain it. I am sure that you yourself, and everybody else, have a list of these gifts that never were given. It is very sweet of you to have thought of them. Perhaps this Christmas you might make good on one or two. Change the encyclopaedia to a fountain-pen or, if you like, to a pencil sharpener; only give it, don’t wait. But it is getting late – the shops will close soon . . .

I append this note to what I wrote above. Too bad. Another Christmas gone wrong. I had no idea that the crowds were as thick as that, and as noisy. And the children – the ones I called tots – I don’t think people ought to be allowed to bring out children in such bunches as that! And those things the little devils blow into! That’s against the law. The noise, all yelling at once and laughing! What is there to laugh about? Get into the shops – you can’t! They’re jammed to the doorway. Why can’t they let a man with a list just walk in and pick out what he wants and go home? No place for him. I didn’t even try to get through the crowds; in fact, I didn’t get more than fifty feet round the main street corner.

Now that I’m back in the club I’ll have to do the best I can about presents. I have, right here in the club, a bottle of Scotch whisky for George and Mary – John, the hall porter, suggested it; he’s from Scotland. At any rate, I have the bottle all wrapped up to take home with me, and the birdcage I spoke of, I’ll find someone for that. Later, Charlie can have The Bible Lands of Palestine, and for little Nancy – either a bottle of port or two hundred cigarettes.

I’ve spoiled another Christmas by too much planning and romancing, a mistake we all make, loading it up with sentiment instead of getting down to facts. Next year I’ll know better.

Yes, John, put the port under my other arm and the cigarettes in my overcoat pocket. Good night . . . Merry Christmas!

TOC     INDEX

–3–
War-time Christmas:
Santa Claus

I once asked a Christmas Eve group of children if they believed in Santa Claus. The very smallest ones answered without hesitation, “Why, of course!” The older ones shook their heads. The little girls smiled sadly but said nothing. One future scientist asserted boldly, “I know who it is”; and a little make-strong with his eye on gain said: “I believe in it all; I can believe anything.” That boy, I realized, would one day be a bishop.

Thus does the bright illusion of Santa Claus fade away. The strange thing is that it could ever exist. It shows how different from ours are children’s minds, as yet unformed and nebulous and all unbounded, still bright with the glory of the infinite. As yet physical science, calling itself the truth, has not overclouded them. There is no reason for them why a bean should not grow into a beanstalk that reaches the sky in one night; no reason why a dog should not have eyes as big as the round tower of Copenhagen; no reason why a white cat should not, at one brave stroke of a sword, turn into a princess. Are not all these things known by children to be in books, read aloud to them in the firelight just when their heads begin to nod toward bedtime and the land of dreams more wonderful still?

We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand – happy ignorance – that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty: the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a bypath in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.

This Land of Enchantment of the child – with its Santa Claus and its Magic Grocer – breaks and dissolves slowly. But it has to break. There comes a time when children suspect, and then when they know, that Santa Claus is Father. Worse still, there comes a time when they get to know that Father, so to speak, is not Santa Claus – no longer the all-wonderful, all-powerful being that drew them on a little sleigh, and knew everything and told them about it. Father seems different when children realize that the geography-class teacher knows more than he does, and that Father sometimes drinks a little too much, and quarrels with Mother. Pity we can’t keep their world of illusion a little longer from shattering. It’s not Santa Claus only that fades out. It’s ourselves.

Then at last there comes to children the bitter fruit from the tree of economic knowledge. This shows them that the furnace man works for money, and that the postman doesn’t carry letters just for the fun of giving them in at the door. If it were not that new ideas and interests come to children even in this dilapidation, their disillusionment might pass into an old age, broken-hearted for ever at its farewell to giants and fairies. One thinks of the overwise child of Gilbert’s Bab Ballads: “Too precocious to thrive, he could not keep alive, and died an enfeebled old dotard at five.”

Yet even after disillusionment, belief lingers. Belief is a survival instinct. We have to have it. Children growing older, and their mothers growing younger by living with them, cling to Santa Claus. If he is really not so, he has to be brought back again as a symbol, along with the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark. No longer possible as a ruddy and rubicund old man with a snow-white corona of whiskers, he lives again as a sort of spirit of kindliness that rules the world, or at least once a year breaks into any house to show it what it might be.

But does he? Is there such a spirit in our world? Can we believe in Santa Claus?

All through life we carry this wondering question, these tattered beliefs, these fading visions seen through a crystal that grows dim. Yet, strangely enough, often at their dimmest, some passing breath of emergency, of life or death and sacrifice of self, clears the glass of the crystal and the vision is all there again. Thus does life present to all of us its alternations of faith and doubt, optimism and pessimism, belief and negation.

Is the world a good place or a bad? An accident or a purpose? Down through the ages in all our literature echoes the cry of denunciation against the world. Sunt lachrymae rerum, mourned the Roman poet – the world is full of weeping; and Shakespeare added, “All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.” Yet the greatest denunciation is not in the voice of those who cry most loudly. Strutting Hamlet in his velvet suit calls out, “The time is out of joint,” and egotism echoes it on. But far more poignant is the impotent despair of those whose life has wearied to its end, disillusioned, and who die turning their faces to the wall, still silent.

Is that the whole truth of it? Can life really be like that? With no Santa Claus in it, no element of mystery and wonder, no righteousness to it? It can’t be. I remember a perplexed curate of the Church of England telling me that he felt that “after all, there must be a kind of something.” That’s just exactly how I feel about it. There must be something to believe in, life must have its Santa Claus.

What’s more, we never needed Santa Claus so badly as we do at this war-time Christmas. I’m going to hang up my stocking anyway. Put yours there beside it. And I am going to write down the things I want Santa Claus to bring, and pin it up beside the stocking. So are you? Well, you wait till I’ve written mine first! Can’t you learn to be unselfish at Christmas time?

So, first I’ll tell Santa Claus that I don’t want any new presents, only just to have back some of the old ones that are broken – well, yes, perhaps I broke them myself. Give me back, will you, that pretty little framed certificate called Belief in Humanity; you remember – you gave them to ever so many of us as children to hang up beside our beds. Later on I took mine out to look what was on the back of it, and I couldn’t get it back in the frame and lost it.

Well, I’d like that and – oh, can I have a new League of Nations? You know, all set up on a rack that opens in and out. I broke the old one because I didn’t know how to work it, but I’d like to try again. And may I have a brand new Magna Carta, and a Declaration of Independence and a Rights of Man and a Sermon on the Mount? And I like, if you don’t mind, though of course it’s more in the way of a toy, a little Jack-in-the-Box, one with a little Adolf Hitler in it. No, honestly, I wouldn’t hurt him; I’d just hook the lid and keep him for a curiosity. I can’t have it? Never mind.

Here, listen, this is what I want, Santa Claus, and here I’m speaking for of us, all of us, millions and millions. Bring us back the World We Had, and didn’t value at its worth – the Universal Peace, the Good Will Toward Men – all that we had and couldn’t use and broke and threw away.

Give us that. This time we’ll really try.

TOC     INDEX

–4–
War-time Christmas:
1941

After all – it’s Christmas. It may seem to us the most distressed, the most tragic Christmas of the ages – Christmas in a world of disaster never known before. But yet, it’s Christmas. And we ought to keep it so, as the old glad season of good will towards man, and kindliness and forgiveness towards everybody. Notice, towards everybody – even towards Adolf Hitler. What? You say you’d rather boil him in oil – oh, but, of course, I include that; boil him, and then forgive him boiled. So with all the Germans – I’d like to drown them all in the Rhine, and then forgive them and send the Rhine to the wash.

A tragic Christmas – and yet, I don’t know. When I begin to think of it, I am not sure whether it is tragic. Tragedy passes away and is gone. But for the things that do not pass away, the permanent forces in human life, perhaps this Christmas is to be for us the most ennobling, the most inspiring of all there have been since the first Christmas announced salvation to the world.

I am thinking here of what has been done in England – the steady heroism of a whole nation that has gone out as a new light to lighten the world. This inspiration from England may prove, and I think it will, the first guidance towards a new world.

And when I say England, I must at once explain that I include Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland and, naturally, the Isle of Man. People are so touchy on this point, especially since the war began, that I should not wish to hurt anyone’s feelings. When I speak of England and an Englishman, to me every Manxman is an Englishman, and every Welshman a Scotsman, and both Englishmen. For what else can one say? You can’t say “a British”; that’s not sense; nor a “Briton,” because that means an Ancient Briton, stained blue, and studying with an axe to be a qualified Druid. Let him stay in the mistletoe; we don’t want him.

So in the sense I mean, we can say that the word “Englishman” has taken on for the world a new meaning. Some people saw it long ago. W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, showed it to us fifty years back in his immortal verse:

“For he might have been a Russian,

A Turk or else a Prussian,

Or an Ital-ey-an.

But in spite of all temptation

To belong to another nation,

He was born an Englishman.”

People thought at the time that this was meant to be funny, and laughed at it. But we see now that Gilbert was just stating the quiet truth and was laughed at for it, as humorists always are.

“He was born an Englishman.” . . . Who wouldn’t be? – And all the world is being reborn into that heritage – which is the real, the spiritual meaning of this Christmas.

For me, I must have it so. For I cannot let Christmas go. Christmas has always seemed to me a day of enchantment, and the world about us on Christmas Day, for one brief hour an enchanted world. On Christmas morning the streets are always bright with snow, not too much of it nor too little, hard-frozen snow, all crystals and glittering in the flood of sunshine that goes with Christmas Day . . . If there was ever any other Christmas weather I have forgotten it . . . Only the memory of the good remains.

Into this enchanted world I step on Christmas morning, to walk the street and meet and greet at once, it seems, an enchanted friend. God bless the fellow! How happy and rosy and friendly he looks, as he draws off his glove to shake my hand – rosy and handsome in his silk hat (why doesn’t he wear it every day?) and his white neckerchief . . . He must be sixty if he’s a day, but on Christmas morning he looks a boy again, and he and I are back at school together. I must see more of him; true, I saw him at the club yesterday but he didn’t look like this; something grouchy about him, taciturn sort of fellow – but on Christmas morning? I can see him as he really is . . . But I no sooner leave him than I seem to run into half a dozen like him – the street seems full of them, all silk hats and white neck-cloths . . . and “Merry Christmas!” here and “Merry Christmas!” there . . . old boys hauling sleighs with little granddaughters done up in furs . . . or with a little convoy of grand-nieces and grand-nephews. “Merry Christmas, children!” . . . Upon my word, I hadn’t realized what a pleasant lot of friends I had.

No doubt you feel the same enchantment as I do? And it follows you all through Christmas Day – at the dinner with the enchanted turkey, with everyone a good fellow, and every good fellow wearing a tissue-paper hat . . . the dinner followed by an enchanted sleigh-ride . . . with old friends – and meeting new people as you go – and everyone of them so delightful – the world so generous, so bright . . . And then somehow the brightness passes, the light fades out, and it’s tomorrow. You are back in the dull world of every day – anxious – suspicious – every man for himself – friends? Which of them would lend me fifty dollars – come, I’ll make it five!

This enchantment of Christmas always seems to me to be a part of that super-self, that higher self that is in each of us – but that only comes to the surface in moments of trial or exaltation and in the hour of death. The super-self is always within call, and yet we cannot call it. I don’t mean here the thing called the sub-conscious self, that evil, inward thing, that can take my sleeping hand and write upon a slate, that can tell me where I lost my umbrella, or through a psycho-analyst betray by my dreams that for years I have had a complex to murder my aunt . . . Not that hideous stuff; nor any of the “complexes” and “behaviours” and “reactions,” the new hideous brood of the new Black Art. Oh no, I mean something infinitely more open, more above-board, more radiant than that . . . the light that shines in people’s eyes who clasp hands and face danger together . . . the surge of sacrifice within the heart that lifts the individual life above itself . . .

All lovers – silly lovers in their silly stage – attain for a moment this super-self, each as towards the other. Each sees in the other what would be there for all the world to see in each of us, if we could but reach to it. “She thinks he’s just wonderful,” say her mocking friends. “He thinks she’s an angel,” laugh his associates. She is an angel, and he is wonderful – till the light passes and is gone. “All the world loves a lover” – of course; one can see easily why.

It is towards this higher self – not as momentary exaltation – but as sustained endeavour, that this Christmas of disaster is calling us: “Come up!” it beckons. “You must. There is no other way. This is the salvation of the world – come!” . . . And on the answer is staked all the future of mankind.

For this altered world is not like anything that went before. Think back, as all people even in middle life can do, to what the world was like while world-war was just a dream, the vague theme of a romance. To realize this alteration, come back with me in recollection, to church together – to an evening service, on Christmas Eve . . . Quiet and dim the church seems, the lights low – and from the altar comes the voice, half reading, half intoned, and from the dimness of the body of the church the murmur of the responses . . . Give peace in our time, O Lord . . . Peace! why, it was always peace! What did we know then of world war, of world brutality, of the concentration camp and the mass-slaughter of the innocent . . .

The responses echo back – because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God . . . but what meaning could the words convey? Nothing, or little – just a compliment murmured in the dark . . . Strengthen her that she may vanquish and overcome all her enemies . . . yes, but what enemies, had she? Only a few poor Matabeles and Afridis, and such . . . Vanquish them? Yes, of course, but then teach them to play cricket and mix a gin-fizz, and be part of the British Empire and ride in a barouche at a Jubilee, and then go out and help us conquer more . . .

From plague and famine . . . The voice is intoning the Litany now, the prayer for deliverance . . . from plague, pestilence and famine, from battle and murder and from sudden death . . . and the murmured response through the church . . . Good Lord, deliver us . . . The words are old, far older than the rubric of the church that uses them, handed down from prayer to prayer, since the days of the Barbarian Conquests of Europe, when they first went up as a cry of distress, a supplication . . . But can the ear not catch, in this new hour, the full meaning that was here – the cry of anguish that first inspired the prayers . . . to show thy mercy upon all prisoners and captives . . . In this too is now an infinity of meaning, of sympathy, of suffering . . . and as the service draws to its close . . . while there is time . . . intones the voice from the half-darkness, while there is time . . . What? What is that he’s saying – while there is time? Does it mean it may be too late?

Not if we can listen, each of us, to the call, the inspiration of this darkened Christmas . . . this call to our higher selves. Up! Up! We have no other choice. We’ve got to.

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Goodwill for America

–1–
Cricket for Americans

At the present hour all of us who are British are anxious to cultivate cordial relations with the United States. It has occurred to me that something could be done here with cricket. Americans, I fear, do not understand our national British game, and lack sympathy with it. I remember a few years ago attending a county match in England with an American friend, and I said to him at noon on Wednesday (the match had begun on Monday), “I’m afraid that if it keeps on raining they’ll have to draw stumps.” “Draw what?” he said. “Draw out the wickets,” I answered, “and call the game ended.” “Thank God!” he answered. Yet this was a really big game, a county match – Notts against Hamps, I think, but perhaps, Bucks against Yorks. Anyway it was a tense, exciting game, Notts (or Bucks) with 600 runs, leading by 550, four wickets down and only another six hours to play.

Ever since that day I meant to try to put the game in a better light, so that people in America could understand how wonderful it is.

Perhaps I should explain that, all modesty apart, when I speak of cricket I speak of what I know. I played cricket for years and years. I still have a bat. Once I played in an All-Canada match at Ottawa before the Governor-General. I went in first in the first innings, and was bowled out by the first ball; but in the second innings, I went in last, and by “playing back” quickly on the first ball, I knocked down the wickets before the ball could reach them. Lord Minto told me afterwards that he had never seen batting like mine before, except, perhaps, in India where the natives are notoriously quick.

Let me begin with a few simple explanations. Cricket is played with eleven men on a side – provided you can get eleven. It isn’t always easy to get a cricket team, and sometimes you have to be content with ten or nine, or even less. This difficulty of getting men for a side really arises from the fact that cricketers are not paid to play. They wouldn’t take it, or rather, they do take it when they can get it, but then they are professionals. This makes a distinction in English cricket as between players and gentlemen, although, as a matter of fact, a great many gentlemen are first-class players, and nowadays, at any rate, a good many of the players are gentlemen, and contrawise quite a number of the gentlemen are not quite what you would call gentlemen. I am afraid I haven’t brought out the distinction very dearly. Perhaps I may add when we play cricket in Canada there is no question of gentlemen.

So, as I say, although cricket is properly played with eleven on a side, it is often difficult to get enough. You have to be content with what you can bring and pick up one or two others when you get there. When I played in an All-Canada game at Ottawa we had nine at the start, but we got one more in the hotel and one in the barber shop. When the All-England team goes to Australia they easily get eleven men because that is different. That’s twelve thousand miles. But when it’s only from one village to the next it’s hard to get more than seven or eight.

But let me explain the game. Cricket is played by bowling a ball up and down a “pitch” of twenty-two yards (roughly sixty-six feet, approximately), at each end of which are set three upright sticks called wickets. A batsman stands just in front of each set of wickets, a little at the side, and with his bat stops the ball from hitting the wickets. If the ball hits the wickets he is out, but otherwise not. Thus if he begins on Monday and his wickets are not hit on Monday, he begins again on Tuesday; and so on; play stops all Sunday.

Of course, when you are looking on at a cricket match, you are not supposed to shout and yell the way we do over baseball on our side of the water in Canada and in the States. All you do is to say, every now and then, “Oh, very pretty, sir, very pretty!” You are speaking to the batsman who is about two hundred yards away and can’t hear you. But that doesn’t matter; you keep right on, “Oh, well done, sir, well done.” . . . That day of the county match in England that I spoke of, my American friend heard an Englishman on the other side of him say, “Oh, very pretty! very pretty, sir.” And he asked the Englishman, “What was very pretty?” But, of course, the Englishman had no way of telling him. He didn’t know him. So he turned to me and asked. “What did he do?” And I explained it wasn’t what he did, it was what he didn’t do.

A great many things in good cricket turn on that – what you don’t do. You let the ball go past you, for instance, instead of hitting it, and the experts say, “Oh, well let alone, sir.” There are lots more balls coming; you’ve three days to wait for one.

In the game of which I speak the really superb piece of play was this: The bowler sent a fast ball through the air, right straight towards the batsman’s face. He moved his face aside and let it pass, and they called, “Well, let alone, sir.” You see if it had hit him on the side of his face, he’d have been out. How out? Why, by what is called L.B.W. Perhaps I’d better explain what L.B.W. is. I forget what the letters exactly stand for, but we use them just as in the States you use things like P.W.A., A.A.C. and S.C.E. and R.I.P. You know what they stand for. Well, L.B.W. is a way of getting out in cricket. It means that if you stand in front of the ball and it hits you – not your bat, but you – you are out. Suppose, for instance, you deliberately turn your back on the ball and it rises up and hits you right behind in the middle of your body – out! L.B.W.

There was a terrible row over this a few years ago in connection with one of the great Test Matches between England and Australia. These, of course, are the great events, the big thing every year in the cricket world. An All-England team goes out once a year to play Test Matches in Australia, and an All-Australian team comes once a year for Test Matches in England. So far they only play Test Matches, but as soon as they know which is really best they can have a real match. Meantime they keep testing it out. Well, a few years ago, the Australians started the idea of bowling the ball terribly fast, and right straight at the batsman, not at the wickets, so as to hit him on purpose. Even if he started to run away from the wickets, they’d get him, even if he was half way to the home tent. I didn’t see it myself, but I understand that was the idea of it. So there was a tremendous row about it, and bad feeling, with talk of Australia leaving the British Empire. However, outsiders intervened, and it was suggested (the Archbishop of Canterbury, I think) that the rule should be that if the bowler meant to hit the man and put him out, then he wasn’t out, but that if he didn’t mean to hit and he hit him then he was out. Naturally the bowler had to be put on his honour whether he meant it. But that didn’t bother the Australians; they were willing to go on their honour. They’re used to it. In fact the English agreed, too, that when they got the ball in their turn they’d go on their honour in throwing it at an Australian.

That, of course, is the nice thing about cricket – the spirit of it, the sense of honour. When we talk of cricket we always say that such and such a thing “isn’t cricket,” meaning that it’s not a thing you would do. You could, of course. There’d be nothing to stop you, except that, you see you couldn’t. At a cricket game, for example, you never steal any of the other fellows’ things out of the marquee tent where you come and go. You ask why not? Well, simply that it “isn’t cricket.” Or take an example in the field and you’ll understand it better. Let me quote with a little more detail the case to which I referred earlier in the book. We’ll say that you’re fielding at “square leg.” That means that you are fielding straight behind the batter’s back and only about twenty-five feet away from him. Well, suppose you happen to be daydreaming a little – cricket is a dreamy game – and the batter happens to swing round hard on a passing ball and pastes it right into the middle of your stomach. As soon as you are able to speak you are supposed to call to the bowler, “Awfully sorry, old man”; not sorry you got hit in the stomach, sorry you missed the chance he gave you; because from the bowler’s point of view you had a great opportunity, when you got hit in the stomach, of holding the ball against your stomach – which puts the batter out.

So you see when you play cricket there comes in all the time this delicate idea of the cricket spirit. A good deal of English government is carried on this way. You remember a few years ago that very popular Prime Minister who used to come to the House of Commons – and say, “I’m afraid, gentlemen, I’ve made another mess again with this business of Italy and Ethiopia; damned if I can keep track of them; that’s the third mess I’ve made this year.” And the House wouldn’t vote him out of office. It wouldn’t have been cricket. Instead, they went wild with applause because the Prime Minister had shown the true cricket spirit by acknowledging that he was beaten, though, of course, he didn’t know when he had been licked. And, for the matter of that, he’d come all the way down from Scotland just for the purpose at the very height of the grouse season – or the fly season – anyway, one of those insect seasons that keep starting in Scotland when the heather is bright with the gillies all out full.

Looking back over what I have written above, I am afraid I may have given a wrong impression here and there. When I implied that the two batsmen stand at the wicket and stop the ball, I forgot to say that every now and then they get impatient, or indignant, and not only stop it but hit it. And do they hit it! A cricket ball is half as heavy again as a baseball and travels farther. I’ve seen Don Bradman, the Australian, playing in our McGill University stadium, drive the ball clear over the seats of the stadium and then over the top of the trees on the side of Mount Royal, and from there on. They had to stop the game and drink shandygaff while they sent a boy to get the ball. They almost thought of getting a new one.

And when I talked of hitting a cricketer in the stomach with the ball, I forgot to explain how awfully difficult it is to do it. Now that they’ve no stomach – no, indeed, plenty! You don’t train down for cricket, you fill up. But the point is that the cricketer will catch any kind of ball before you can hit him. And can they catch! You’ll see a fellow playing cover-point – that’s north-east half a point east from the bat, distance twenty yards – and a ball is driven hard and fast above his head, and he’ll leap in the air with one hand up, and, while still in the air, leap up a little farther still and smack goes the ball into his one hand. Can you wonder that the spectators all murmur, “Oh, very pretty, sir.”

And in point of excitement! You think cricket slow, but can’t you see how the excitement slowly gathers and all piles up at the end – two totals coming closer and closer together – fifty to tie, fifty-one to win – then twenty to tie, twenty-one to win – then three to tie, four to win – one smashing hit will do it now! – Ah! there she goes! – high above the pavilion, a boundary hit for four! Oh, very nice, sir, very nice!

Oh yes, cricket’s all right. Let’s have a shandygaff.

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–2–
Our American Visitors

No, it’s not just a matter of money, although of course we’re always glad to get it, and the more you bring of it the better. But that’s not the real point. Let me explain it. Did you ever meet an innkeeper, one of the real old-fashioned type, dating down from the days of the stage-coach? You have, eh? Well, what is his animating motive? Money? No – hospitality – genuine, open-hearted hospitality. He really thinks that all these people are staying with him, as his guests – that’s how the word got into the trade – they’re his guests, see, staying in his house and he’s trying to make them comfortable . . . no trouble is too great.

In fact, a real hotel man can get into a sort of permanent mental delusion on this point. Such a one I recall in particular as exceeding even his own class. His fixed impression, irremovable after years of habit, was that his “guests” had come into town to pay him a personal visit; they might, of course, have a little business on the side, but the main idea was that of a friendly renewal of acquaintance. He would say to me, “We had your brother and his wife with us for a few days last week. We’re always so delighted when they come – I wanted them to stay for the week-end but they couldn’t.” . . . His hotel, and no wonder, was always full; indeed, he loved to have to give up his own sitting-room, then his bedroom – sleep in a cupboard, anything – at the call of hospitality.

Well, that’s how we feel about the coming of our American visitors in Canada. They’re our “guests.” We have the delusion that we’ve invited them up and that nothing is too good for them. I admit to the feeling myself; my impression is that I am entertaining, personally, about 50,000 a week. I insist that they must see the Laurentians. I can’t let them go without having them go down the St. Lawrence and see the old-fashioned French country of the Island of Orleans and, of course, up the St. Lawrence to Lake Huron, and sideways from the St. Lawrence and then edgeways from it. I insist on their seeing a lot of things that I have never seen myself. I wave my arm around a thousand miles of scenery and give it to them.

And of course the Americans reciprocate. If I tell them they simply must see the Georgian Bay, they say they certainly will. I tell them that it has 53,000 islands, and they say “think of that . . .” “Mother,” says the man at the driving wheel. “I guess we won’t miss that,” and they’re off for it. Last year I sent some to the Great Bear Lake. I forgot the distance. I don’t think they’re back yet.

Now I’ll tell you what I think is the main idea at the back of all this – this coming and going, this pleasure in giving away and receiving scenery, this pleasant make-believe of host and guest. It’s that old-fashioned urge called peace on earth, good will toward men. The more it is darkened over in Europe, the more brightly does it shine with us. This solid unity of North America, put behind the heroic cause of Britain, is what is saving the world, visibly already saving it. But you could never get it by mere treaties and agreements and such; not even common interest would bring it, or not in its most real shape. It has to depend on personal feeling, on mutual acquaintance, on seeing and knowing one another.

Come on up. I’ll show you the Island of Orleans – I’ll show you Niagara Falls, or no, I forget, half of it is yours! I won’t show it; it’s not so much anyway; we just keep it for English visitors. But I’ll show the new mining district round Noranda, and I’ll take you to the wild country along the Algoma Central – that is, if you fish. You do? You’re crazy over it? Well, say, get right into your car and come on up. I’ll have the bait ready.

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–3–
A Welcome
to a Visiting American

At the Canadian National Exhibition

Well now! That’s fine to see you! I felt sure I’d run into American friends here at the Canadian National Exhibition. I’ve been writing so much in the papers to invite them up that I felt sure I’d find some of them here. When did you come up? Just here, eh? And got a fortnight for a trip to Canada? That’s good. Let me take you round and I can tell you about everything here and talk about your trip.

You don’t want to listen to the speeches in the Grand Stand, do you? No, of course not. You get them at home. Of course you must have a Fall Fair much like this in your state at home, I suppose – you do, eh? – with farm machinery and prize hogs – same as we have, eh? – and a Midway with a troupe of Syrian Dancing Girls from the Palmyra desert – think of those same girls getting all the way out to you.

No, I haven’t seen the machinery yet, nor the hogs, have you? I meant to, in fact I have been meaning to for some forty-odd years. So it’s the same with you, eh?

You ask, what was that song they sang at the opening? That’s “God Save the King.” You thought it was “Sweet Land of Liberty.” So it is. You Yankees took it from us and put new words to it. As a matter of fact we took it from the Ancient Britons – they had it “England-may-go-to-Hell” – and the English liked it so much, they took it over and made it “God Save the King.”

Hard to get new music, isn’t it? Unless you’re a Dago. Of course we have a fine song up here – “O Canada”.” – but most of us don’t know the words, and those that do don’t know the music, and most people don’t know both, so the song generally fades away after a line or so. Then there’s another, “The Maple Leaf”. You may have heard it. It runs – “The Maple Leaf, the Maple Leaf, for ever,” and it goes on like that for ever.

But God Save the King is the best. It’s so darned patriotic, and it’s easy. Once you get it going you can fairly shout it. “Send him vic-to-rious, hap-pee and glo-rious,” eh, what? . . . The only bother is it’s hard to start. At the close of our meetings the chairman always says, “Will some one please start God Save the King?” There’s a long silence. Then some man hidden in the audience starts, away down in his throat, “G-o-d!” He gets no takers. Another one a little way off and a little higher, begins “G-o-d . . .” then two or three more, “G-o-d,” till all of a sudden, you never know how, out they come, “God save our—” and they’re off.

So you’re going to take a drive into the North Country? Yes, I certainly recommend that – wonderful wild country, all lakes and islands, and, of course, the new mining district. The Dionne Quintuplets? Yes, you pass them on the way, at Callander, so I suppose it’s worth while. But personally I think they’ve been greatly exaggerated. There are still only five of them.

But the North Country – now that is worth while. And I’ll give you a piece of good advice. Take your fishing tackle along with you. Whatever people go up there for, it always turns sooner or later into fishing. I saw a university professor going up last week to make a report to the government on Indian dialects. Say, you ought to have seen the trout he brought back . . . Not one under three pounds; and he said he’d been sending them out by express for days; in fact, he said he did nothing else. And just before him, there was a young divinity student, just out of college, drove up in an old car of his own. He told me that he was going to hold mission services all the way from Temagami to James Bay. He said there were people up there who never had a chance from one month’s end to the other to hear the Word of God; people, he said, living on lonely little lakes and rivers in the woods where practically no one had ever been. I noticed that he had a couple of fishing rods in the back of the car; and a landing net; in fact, he showed me a new rod he had, one that folds up, you’ve seen them, I guess, they’re called telescope rods. This fellow said that when you get right out like that in the real bush, beyond the Word of God, you need a telescope rod.

There was another fellow, too, an Englishman that I met starting out north, just a fortnight ago. He seemed an awfully aristocratic feller – as a matter of fact he was called the Honourable So-and-so, but he was all right just the same – you know – nothing wrong with him, except of course his manners were pretty aristocratic – but he couldn’t help that . . . and, of course, his way of talking was pretty high-toned . . . yet, do you know, he’d never been educated beyond a Public School – he told me so himself – no high school.

This young Englishman was representing a big English investment syndicate. His father, the Earl of Something, is the head of it – a big financier – not a crook, I mean, and was going to get English money put into it, nothing shady about it, perfectly honest deal. His father, as I say, is an Earl, but I met a man who knew him and said that he’s all right. Anyway, when this Englishman came down again he said he’d had no time for anything but fishing. He’d been in as far as Lake Ohoopohoo. (Do you know it? Well, say!)

But the funny thing is that these visitors going in as such different people, all come out looking the same – all tanned, sunburnt and bitten up with the flies and smeared with bacon and half-ragged – you know, you’ve been fishing.

But, of course, you must take in French Canada too . . . There’s a sort of old-world charm about it. Go, of course, first to Montreal – oh no, you don’t need to talk French. The hotels are all English – fine hotels too – English cooking, and you will find that all the shops speak English. Oh, there’s no discomfort to it, just a sense of history.

You keep saying to yourself, “Now, I’m in Montreal.” Only remember part of it isn’t Montreal; it’s Westmount, and it’s very touchy about it. Still you can say to yourself, “Now I’m in Montreal, unless it’s Westmount.”

But wait till you see the city of Quebec! Now, there is history for you! Three hundred and thirty-three years old. Yet with one of the most modern hotels in the world. You can sit in the lounge of the Château Frontenac (it’s like a sort of terrace overlooking the river); they serve anything you want right there – as I say, you can sit there (after you’ve given your order) and say:

“Here I am looking at the very view that Count Frontenac looked at, except that it is about a hundred feet higher up than he was, and a little sideways. There right near the bar is the place where the American General Montgomery fell – sideways from the bar and a little lower . . . There’s where Wolfe climbed up – behind the bar and about five miles back. The whole thing is what you’d call a panorama. The great Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759 that shaped the destinies of this continent was fought right exactly where you’re sitting, but five miles north-west of it. Ask the bartender for a picture postcard of it.”

Of course you ought to have a look at the rest of French Canada, the Manoir Richelieu at Murray Bay and the Seigneurie on the Ottawa, all English, you know – no trouble about French – and with fine golf everywhere, with Scottish professionals and with Irish caddies; oh, French Canada is charming. It’s too bad that you won’t have time to see much of the Maritimes . . . not only wonderful country but great people. A fine stock, half-Yankee loyalists who wouldn’t stay home, and half Scottish Highlanders who couldn’t.

It made a fine people, and then living as they do upon fish, that made for brains and so that became their chief industry, the export of brains. They export Presbyterian ministers, college presidents and trustees for banks and financial firms – men who wouldn’t steal anything, not even money. They wouldn’t steal a cent. I once left one on purpose near one of them. He gave it back, a week later.

But after all, you know, all the time you can spare on your way back should be spent in driving round in this good old province of Ontario – or Upper Canada, as they used to call it. It’s the part of Canada most connected with your country and your history and everything. You drive along the St. Lawrence and lake highways and there’s Chrysler’s Farm where we licked the Americans, and there’s the Stoney Creek where the Americans licked us; there’s York that they burnt and there’s Detroit that we burnt. Things like that make for friendliness. People get to know one another that way.

In fact we’ve come to realize that in everything but political institutions we are just one people. It was the Americans who settled Upper Canada under the name of United Empire Loyalists.

They brought with them a lot of institutions that are there still – Thanksgiving Dinner and the “little red school-house,” the spelling-bee and the township and all the rest of it. Why, you can go back and forth across the frontier, at Windsor, at Niagara Falls, at Gananoque – Watertown and at Prescott – Ogdensburg, and sample Canadian ale on one side and American lager on the other – till, honestly, you can’t tell which is which.

But say, come along back to the midway! That’s the bell ringing for the Syrian Girls.

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–4–
Uncle Sam:
An Allegory

I wonder how the United States came to be the United States? I mean – how it came to take on its peculiar national character, as a sort of “neighbour” to all the world. As the years and the decades, and now even the centuries have gone past, we can begin to see this peculiar aspect of the United States, unknown anywhere else in history.

It is not imperial dominion, in fact it’s not dominion or domination at all – just a peculiar result of mingled merit, destiny and good fortune. People all over the world – Chinese in Chow Chow and Patagonians in Pat Pat – “look to the United States” as a sort of neighbour to appeal to, and to borrow from just as among the earlier settlers in this country . . .

Ah! That’s it! I see it now – the early settlers. That’s where they got it from.

I think there must have been, I mean away back in early settlement times, a country store at a crossroads – you know the kind of place I mean – a store and post office and farm combined and this one was called Sam’s Place. And the man who kept it, they came to call Uncle Sam.

There were always one or two loafers in the store, sitting on nail-kegs and whittling sticks. Uncle Sam sold pretty well everything, but as a matter of fact the neighbours seemed to do far more borrowing than buying.

In comes a raggedy little girl, very swarthy, with very black hair in pig-tails.

“Mister Uncle Sam,” she says, “Ma wants the loan of a tea-kettle.”

“Now let me see,” says Uncle Sam, as he takes a kettle down off a shelf. “Which are you? Oh yes, you’re little Guatemala . . . Here, run along with it. But tell your Ma she ain’t sent back the last kettle yet.”

“Kind o” shiftless folk,” says Uncle Sam as she goes out. “They live down below there . . . Spanish . . . fine land for all sorts of stuff they’ve got, but they don’t do anything with it . . . Sometimes think I might go down there sometime.”

In flounces a big dark girl, all colour and style. “Uncle Sam,” she says, “let me have another yard of that red calico.”

Uncle Sam takes his scissors. “Are you paying for it, Miss Mexico?”

“No, charging it.”

“Well, I suppose you got to have it, and tell your Pa that I paid him for the coal oil and he hasn’t delivered it yet.”

Yet Uncle Sam prospered – oh, ever so much! You see, the farm was a wonderful bit of land, and he owned a tannery, and a sawmill – oh, he had everything. Money just seemed to come without trying. “It is a good location,” he said.

So of course all the neighbours seemed poor as beside Uncle Sam, and it was just natural that they borrowed his things and charged things and didn’t pay, and ate candy (conversation lozenges) out of the open barrel. He took it easily enough. They were, after all, his neighbours. He treated them all the same way; except that there was one special lot that used to come now and again, who were evidently favourites. These were settled up north and would come down in sleighs in winter and in democrat buggies in summer. “They’re folk of my own,” says Uncle Sam, “they settled back north but mebbe they’ll come home again some day,”

To this good neighbourship there was just perhaps one exception – call it a special case. The reference of course is to old Squire Bull, who lived on a fine, big place, at quite a little distance because it was separated from Uncle Sam’s corners by the whole extent of a big mill-pond, so big it was like a lake. From Sam’s place you could just see the tops of Squire Bull’s grand house and stables.

John Bull was his name and he liked to call himself “plain John Bull,” but as all the neighbours knew that was just nonsense, for everybody saw that he was “stuck up” and couldn’t be “plain” if he tried. Uncle Sam just couldn’t get on with him; and that was a funny thing, because they were cousins, their folks having originally come from the same part of the country. Sam used always to deny this – at least when he was young, “He’s no cousin of mine,” he said. Later as he got older, he said, “Mebbe he is,” and later still, “Oh, I shouldn’t wonder.” But he said it grudgingly.

For one thing Squire Bull irritated Uncle Sam by always referring to him as if he were just a boy—"that young man," or "young Sam," and yet here they were both old men, or getting close to it. And Squire Bull didn't like to admit that, in point of money and consideration and standing. Uncle Sam was just as good as he was.

That’s the way they lived, anyway, till a reconciliation came about in the queerest way. It happened there came a gang of bandits to the settlement, or, at any rate, the rumour of them. They were reported as robbing here and plundering there. People began to lock up the doors at night – as they never had done before – and you couldn’t be sure of travelling the roads in safety. Quite a few had been robbed and one or two killed.

Some people wanted to organize and get together and hunt the bandits down. But Squire John Bull wouldn’t believe in the stories about bandits. “All nonsense,” he said, “and if any such fellows come round my place they’ll get a dose of cold lead.”

Uncle Sam didn’t do anything either. He was a peaceable fellow, never liking to interfere. “Keep out of quarrels,” was his maxim. Yet he had a musket and powderhorn hanging in the store, and they said that when it came to shooting he was the best shot in the section.

Well, one day, late in the afternoon, towards dusk, some of the children came rushing breathless into the store. “Mr. Sam, Mr. Sam,” they called, “the bandits have come, the gang of bandits. They’re over at Squire Bull’s place.”

“What’s that?” said Uncle Sam, all confused.

“The bandits, they’re over at Squire Bull’s. We saw them smashing in the gates of the yard. We heard the shots. Oh, Mr. Sam, will they kill Mr. Bull?”

“Eh, what?” says Uncle Sam, “smashing in the gates?” – he seemed hesitating – “Hold on!11 What’s that? By gosh, that’s gunshots, I heard them plain.”

In ran another child, wide-eyed with fright. “Mr. Sam, come quick, they’re over at Mr. Bull’s and they’ve shot some of the help!”

“Is Squire Bull killed?”

“No, he ain’t killed. He’s in the yard with his back to the wall – his head’s all cut – but he’s fighting back something joyful.”

“He is, is he?” said Uncle Sam, and now he didn’t hesitate at all. “Hand me down that powderhorn, Sis.” He took the musket off the wall, and he took out of a drawer a six-shooter derringer that no one knew he had.

The children watched him stride away across the field faster than another man would run. Presently they heard shooting and more shots, and then there was silence.

It was just about dark when Uncle Sam came back, grim and dusty, his hands blackened with powder. The children stood around while he was hanging up his musket and his powderhorn.

“Did you get the thieves?” they ventured timidly.

“The gol-darned scoundrels,” the old man muttered, “there’s some of them won’t ever steal again, and the rest will be safe in jail for years to come.” “Too bad,” he added, “some of them came of decent folks, too.”

“Squire Bull; is he killed?” the frightened children asked.

“Killed, no, sir!” laughed Uncle Sam, “he’s too tough a piece of hickory for that. His head’s tied up in vinegar but he’s all right. We had a good laugh over it. He allowed I needn’t have come but I allowed I won the whole fight. We had quite an argument. But here, don’t get in my way, children, hand me that clothes brush and reach me down that blue coat off the peg, the one with the long tails – now that hat.”

“But you ain’t never going out again, Mr. Sam, are you?”

“Sure, I am. I’m going back over to Squire Bull’s. He’s giving a party. How hand me down those cans off that shelf.”

And with that Uncle Sam began pulling canned salmon and canned peaches off the store shelves. “I thought I’d bring them along,” he said, “that darned old fool – why didn’t he say he was getting hard up. I don’t believe the folks in his home have been fed right for months . . . Pride, I suppose! . . . Still he’s a fine man, is Squire Bull. My own cousin, you know, children.”

TOC     INDEX

Among the Antiques

An Adventure of Afternoon Tea

A maid opened the door. But Mrs. DeCarteret came flying down from upstairs in that impulsive way she has. “Now that’s so nice of you to come,” she said. “Let me take your coat and hat. Never mind, Milly . . . You see, I don’t put them on the hat-rack; we have pegs for them over here. But you must look at the hat-rack before you go up. Isn’t it just a darling?”

“I suppose—” I began.

“Yes,” she answered, “it’s one of the things we got in Italy. It’s a genuine Amain, you can tell it by the worm-eaten wood; of course it would fall to pieces at a touch. They guaranteed it would. But do come along upstairs to the den. I’m so glad to have got you here at last; you’ve been so naughty about coming . . . But, if you don’t mind, just lift your feet a little higher as you step over the rug—”

“Is that—” I asked.

“Yes,” said Mrs. DeCarteret, “it’s a Louis Trieze. How did you know? But then, of course, you know antiques. It’s too old of course to step on. We picked it up, just ran into it by chance in France, at Ouen, in the Dordogne, just this side of Quon. Do you know Ouen?”

“As far as I—” I began.

“Oh, you ought to go there,” said Mrs. DeCarteret. “Now do come up and we’ll have tea. James will be home in a minute, because he knows you’re coming. But before we go up, do just look at this clock on the landing.”

“Is that—” I asked.

“No, that’s Dutch. It’s an Artemus Yoops. Do you know his work at all?”

“I don’t believe—” I began.

“James and I think that there is nothing like a Yoops. So of course when in Holland we kept looking all the time for a genuine Yoops, and at last we ran into this one – in the quaintest little shop, in Obersloopendam. Do you know Obersloopendam, at all?”

“No,” I said, “I’ve never—”

“But you really should go there. Now this clock, you can see – I mean a connoisseur can see – is an Artemus Yoops, because you can see his name scratched on the case. The A is quite plain, isn’t it? It has only one hand, that’s another mark of its being genuine. I get so amused sometimes when people – people who don’t know, ask if it keeps good time! Of course its works were removed long ago; that was one reason for the high price. But now come along into our den! James and I call it our treasure house.”

The “den” of the DeCarteret’s is a room spacious enough for Daniel and all his lions. All round it and in it and through it are “treasures” – on four legs, three legs or two legs, or leaning or resting. None are for use. On the mantel are two Grecian ash trays, Phrygian, not for ashes. There is a Sevres china tea set, not for tea; chairs not to sit on; and glasses not to drink from.

Mrs. DeCarteret sat down beside the tea things, the real ones, and asked, “One lump or two,” and I said, “Two,” and she said she was so glad to have me there because she did so enjoy clever conversation.

I said, “Don’t you think—”

But Mrs. DeCarteret was already talking about the Sevres teapot; and after that about the little statuettes from Athens; and after that about the spinning wheel from Britany; and after that she was just beginning about the Boticelli miniatures from Italy, when DeCarteret came in.

“Ah, here’s James!” she said. “James can tell you all about these. We got them in Italy. We got such lovely things in Italy. Of course there is really nowhere like Italy. We got that in Milano. Do you know Milano?”

“No,” I said, “I’ve never—”

“Oh, you really ought to go there! That particular miniature was one of the things that had belonged to the Sforza family. They’re one of the old Italian families, of the old nobility of the Church. We met Prince Sforza, the present one. Do you know him?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think I ever—”

“Oh, you ought to meet him – such a charming man. He has such a wonderful Palazzo in Milano, right near the Duomo – wasn’t it, James?”

“Yes, just between the Duomo and the Corso, in fact right on the Via del Sploggio itself—”

“Such a dilapidated old place,” interjected Mrs. DeCarteret, “and yet so perfect.”

“Of course,” DeCarteret went on, “they’re all terribly hard up in a way, the Italian nobility. When we met Prince Sforza, he was wearing just a plain gun-metal watch – showed it quite openly – said it was all he could afford – said it quite simply, just like that. So I thought it over,” continued DeCarteret, “and I sent away to Paris and got the most beautiful gold watch that could be bought. I was terribly afraid, of course, of hurting Prince Sforza’s feelings.”

“Did he take it?” I asked.

“At first not; he hesitated quite a time; insisted that I must take it away; he said he had no chain fit to wear with it.”

“And so—”

“So I didn’t say a word. I took it away and came back next day with the watch and a gold chain.”

“And the Prince took it?”

“He did. He said that now he couldn’t refuse – such considerazione, he said; that’s the word he used. Italian is such a beautiful language, isn’t it? You can hardly say it in English. No, the Prince said he could have wished he had a proper jewel box to lock up the watch and chain at night, but that be must take a chance on that.”

“And so you—”

“So we got a lovely jewel box, and this time we took no chance on a refusal, just shoved the box into the pocket of the Prince’s dinner-jacket when we dined with him at the Restoranto del Re – that is, he was dining with us, but he showed us where it was.”

“And he was so charming afterwards,” Mrs. DeCarteret broke in. “He introduced us to quite a lot of the nobility, particularly to his cousin, dear old Cardinal Paulzi – have you met him?”

“I am afraid—” I began.

“Oh, you really ought to; just the dearest old man, so frail, but as I said to James, he seemed to me the very picture of apostolic sweetness; so unwordly, like a child. He showed us his rings, and he admitted, dear old man, that they are his one worldliness. ‘If I only had a diamond,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I never shall.’ So what do you think we did? We went right away and that very same day brought back the most beautiful diamond!”

“And did he take it?”

“Take it? Why, of course, he was just like a child over it, just overjoyed! ‘Oh!’ he kept saying, ‘how beautiful! – and if I only had an emerald to go with it.’

“So you—”

“So we got him an emerald ring. I wish you could have seen him, the poor old man – he quite broke down. Great tears rolled down his face. He could hardly speak. He just whispered when we were leaving him, ‘If I only had a sapphire!’”

“Did you give him one?”

“Later, we sent one to him, when we could get one. They’re not easy to find. So we sent it later on to him, sent it by Count Chiaro Chianti, a most delightful man, so soldierly, in fact an aide-de-camp to the king—”

“No, dear,” interrupted DeCarteret, “that wasn’t Count Chianti; that was Count Fosco di Bosco—”

“No, James,” said Mrs. DeCarteret. “I mean the one we gave the fur coat to—”

“That wasn’t the fur coat,” said DeCarteret. “We gave Chiaro Chianti a rifle – or was he the one in the navy that we gave the rubber boots to?”

“I’m afraid I get them mixed,” said Mrs. DeCarteret, with a resigned sigh, “but they were really so charming, the Italians, I mean those of the old class with the high traditions. Such a pity we have so few people like them . . . What, are you getting up to go? I’m so sorry. It’s so rare that one can enjoy worthwhile conversation. Won’t you have some more tea?”

“No, thank you!” I said.

Then Mrs. DeCarteret remembered something. “Oh, James,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I forgot to offer you any tea. Won’t you have a cup?”

“No, thanks,” said DeCarteret, “really not. I’m going to have a Scotch and soda in a minute.”

He meant when I was gone. It was hard to bear. But the Italian nobility have nothing on me.

“Good-bye,” I said.

TOC     INDEX

The Transit of Venus

A College Story

“And now, gentlemen, that is, ladies and gentlemen,” concluded Professor Kitter with a slight blush, “having considered the general nature of the Copernican System and the principles underlying it, we shall in our next lecture pass in review the motions of the individual planets, with especial reference to Kepler’s Law and the mathematical calculation of their orbits.”

Little Mr. Lancelot Kitter, Professor of Mathematical Astronomy at Concordia College, had delivered this elegant sentence in much the same form for sixteen years – that is to say, at the close of each opening lecture of the course – and had never been seen to blush over it. But this time he did so. The pink suffusion of his cheeks was visible even without a spectroscope.

Now, there is nothing in the Copernican System to cause a scientist, in these enlightened days, even if he is a bachelor and close on forty, to blush for it. Therefore it must have been something in the class itself.

There were only six students in the class. There was one on the professor’s right with a pale face and a head shaped like a bulb, who held a scholarship and had been covering sheet after sheet with mathematical formulae. Professor Kitter had taught him for four years, so the blush couldn’t have been for him. There were two students with ruddy faces and long ears who took Astronomy as a “conditioned subject” and wrote notes in diligent despair like distressed mariners working to keep a boat afloat. The blush was evidently not for them. Then there was Mr. Bill Johnson, otherwise known as “Buck” Johnson, who took Astronomy. It was considered almost as big a “cinch” as the Old Testament, or the President’s lectures on Primitive Civilization. All these were recommended by the trainer. Hence Buck Johnson had joined the class and had sat looking at Professor Kitter with the hard, irredeemable look of a semi-professional half-back, wondering if he had been wise to take the stuff. But the blush was not for him.

The reason of it was that for the first time in sixteen years there were women in the class. Professor Kitter had never lectured to women before. He did not even know whether to refer to them as “women,” “girls” or “ladies.”

To the debonair Professor of English Literature, who wore a different tie every week, college girls were as familiar as flowers are to the bees. To the elderly Dean of the Faculty they appeared as if merely high-school girls. But into the calm precincts of mathematical astronomy no women had ever wandered before. Yet there they were, two of them, sitting on the front bench, writing notes and making diagrams of the planets. How daintily their little fingers seemed to draw! From his desk Professor Kitter could see that when Mr. Johnson drew the moon, he drew it in a great, rough circle that even a carpenter would be ashamed of. But when Miss Irene Taylor, the girl with the blue serge suit and the golden hair, drew it, it came out as the cutest little moon that ever looked coquettishly across its orbit at the neat earth.

By the way. Miss Marty, the plain, short girl in brown – either brown or scarlet. Professor Kitter hadn’t noticed which – may have drawn the moon, too. Very likely she had. It is not part of a Professor’s duty to observe the figures drawn by the students of the class.

Professor Kitter gave a final bow, gathered up his books, and the class dismissed.

How did you like it, Maggie?” said Mr. Johnson to Miss Marty. He called her “Maggie” because they came from the same “home town.”

“Fierce, isn’t it!” said Miss Marty.

“I almost wish I had taken the Old Testament,” said Mr. Johnson dubiously.

“Oh, you can’t tell,” said Miss Marty, and then she added: “Irene, I don’t think you know Mr. Johnson. Let me introduce Mr. Johnson, Miss Taylor.”

Mr. Johnson looked at Miss Taylor, and Miss Taylor looked at Mr. Johnson.

“How do you do,” they both said, All of this, however, was happening after Professor Kitter had left the room and he neither saw nor heard it.

A little while after this, the great bell of Concordia College began to toll for afternoon prayers in the college chapel. Whereupon all the population of the college went trooping down the elm avenue without waiting for the prayers, their day’s work being done, except, of course, the Professor of Comparative Religion, three students who were officials of the Y.M.C.A. and the two Japanese students of the second-year class who were studying Christianity with a view to introducing it into Japan.

Down the avenue walked Miss Taylor in her blue serge suit, and Miss Marty, either in brown or scarlet, and beside them was Professor Kitter, who had joined them at the college door, walking sideways and talking as he went, and bumping into the passers-by, and apologizing.

“I trust. Miss Taylor,” he said, “that you were able to understand from today’s lecture the general outlines of the Copernican System?”

“Oh yes,” said Miss Taylor, “quite nicely.” The Professor didn’t ask whether Miss Marty had understood. Miss Marty was short and plain. She could take her chance.

“I was afraid, perhaps, that I hadn’t made it quite clear that the sidereal day” – here he bumped into someone else on the other side – “that the sidereal day differs from the solar day merely in the ratio of its fraction of the earth’s orbit.”

“Oh yes,” said Miss Taylor, and Professor Kitter couldn’t but notice what a receptive mind the girl had.

“Of course,” he went on, “we are for the moment hampered by our lack of mathematical formulae,”

The thought that he and Miss Taylor were hampered – both of them together – gave a new resilience to his step. Miss Marty may have been hampered too. If so, let her look out for herself.

“But later,” he said, “we shall call in the calculus to our aid.” No knight ever offered help to a lady with a more chivalrous air.

“Oh, shall we?” said Miss Taylor. At the foot of the avenue, where it joins the street, the two girls turned off sideways toward the women’s residence, and Professor Kitter left them with such a sweeping bow and such Spanish courtesy that an express cart nearly ran over him as he did it. But a mind accustomed to the collisions of the asteroids thinks nothing of these things.

“We shall resume our discussions on Monday,” he said. Being a Professor, he knew no other form of farewell.

The girls turned a moment and watched him as he disappeared.

“Isn’t he the hangedest?” said Miss Marty.

And they both laughed.

That evening, at supper with his maiden sister. Professor Kitter talked so much and so continuously that she wondered what had come over him. And that night, in the college observatory, where Professor Kitter on a revolving stool gazed at the heavens through a huge telescope, the stars appeared of a brilliance and a magnitude never before witnessed, and Astronomy itself seemed more than ever the noblest and grandest of sciences, and there was such a sweep to the celestial orbit of the moving earth that you could almost hear the heavens humming in glad unison to the rushing movement of it.

So thought and felt Professor Kitter, and with all his science was not aware of the simple thing that had happened to transform the heavens. Yet happened it had, and that swiftly.

For when a man of thirty-eight, who has spent his years since he was seventeen in gazing into the deep blue spaces of the heavens, falls in love, he falls swiftly and far. No lost asteroid seeking in cold space its parent planet falls faster than fell Professor Kitter.

And that same night, while the Professor gazed into the sky, Mr. Bill Johnson, of the college football team, took Miss Marty and Miss Taylor to a fifty-cent vaudeville show.

During the months of the college session which followed his opening discourse on astronomy. Professor Kitter – though he was unaware of the fact – lectured to, at and for Miss Irene Taylor. For her sake he swung the planets round in sweeping orbits. For her sake he projected beams of light into space at the rate of 186,000 miles a second and brought them back to her feet. And for her sake he drew upon the blackboard an equation as long as a snake, seized a bit of chalk, and solved it with the rapidity of a conjurer.

We are told by those who know about such things that the male human being when in love likes to “show off.” It appears that this tendency has been evoluted in him through the countless ages of his ascent from the earthworm to the scientist. The male bird displays his brilliant feathers. The nightingale sings. The savage displays his strength. The athlete jumps over a tape.

So what more natural than that a professor of astronomy should call in the heavens to his aid? Professor Kitter practically annexed the whole stellar system to make it show what a man he was.

“You may be surprised to learn,” he told the class (he meant that Miss Taylor might be surprised to learn), “that although a ray of light moves 186,000 miles every second, nevertheless, so vast is the distance of open space, the light from our nearest neighbour, Arcturus, takes no less than three years to reach us.”

The class were not really surprised. College students never are. They have lost the art of it. They merely wrote down “186,000” and “three years” and let it go at that.

“But what shall we say to this fact,” continued the professor, “that the light from one of the great spiral nebulae with which we shall become more familiar after Christmas requires for its passage to the earth at this same appalling rate of speed no less than a million years?”

The professor had the right to feel that any girl ought to be impressed by such a fact as this, even though the edge of the effect was taken off by Mr. Johnson looking up from his notes to ask, without any malice, whether the professor had said a million or a billion years. To him it was all the same as long as he got it down right.

Nor was this the only way in which Professor Kitter, unknown to himself, sought to impress the mind of Miss Irene Taylor. His dress during the college session underwent a notable change. Professors as a rule dress queerly. They take no heed of the variations of seasons and of fashions, and their costume knows nothing of the harmony and symmetry of those of the stockbroker or the real-estate man.

A professor of poetry presents perhaps a more flowing appearance, and a professor of comparative religion maintains a certain sombre dignity in his dress. But the rank and file of professors of Concordia College wore straw hats in October, morning coats in the afternoon, and Sunday suits on Wednesday with complete indifference.

From this unconsciousness Professor Kitter awoke at the touch of love. His dress, article by article, was transformed. He appeared in a grey suit, brand-new, three-quarters ready, which fitted him admirably so long as the man in the shop gathered up in his hand all the part of it behind the neck and held it. To this was added a brown overcoat that had a red check wandering through it. It was exactly one size too big, but Professor Kitter had been thinking of something else when they tried it on him. He had also bought a new Derby hat that was nearly as shallow as a soup plate, and as a finish to his costume he wore a neat little tartan tie in four colours that must have been designed by its maker for a boy scout at a Scottish picnic. Altered like this the professor felt himself distinctly saucy.

On the first day of this completed costume Professor Kitter met Mr. Johnson and the two girls of the class in the college avenue, and he bowed to them with a sweeping flourish of his hat such as Christopher Columbus used to Queen Isabella.

After he had passed, the three turned and looked at him.

“Ain’t he the queer little guy?” said Mr. Johnson.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Miss Marty.

Miss Taylor said nothing.

During this same period of time the professor, by a process of rejuvenation similar to his change of dress, had appeared at various college functions at which he had not been present since he was a junior lecturer fifteen years before and had to attend everything that happened. He had sat half-frozen at a hockey match looking at Miss Taylor (seated beside Mr. Johnson) across the rink. He had attended a college play, at which he had also observed Mr. Johnson seated between Miss Taylor and Miss Marty, and he had handed round tea at a perpendicular reception at the President’s house, from which he had the pleasure of escorting Miss Marty to the women’s dormitory while Mr. Johnson walked beside Miss Taylor. From all of which things Professor Kitter, who prided himself on being an observant man, concluded that Mr. Johnson was greatly improved from what he had been in the lower years, and showed a commendable desire to mingle in society.

Nor was social intercourse the professor’s only outlet of expression. He wrote to Miss Taylor during this period no less than three separate letters. In point of the sentiment that was behind them they were love letters – the first and the last that ever came into the life of the little man – but in form they were far from it.

The first of these letters read:

Dear Miss Taylor – I fear that I made a rather ridiculous slip in my lecture of this morning in speaking of the proper motion of the sun. I implied that there was a drift of the solar system toward the star Arcturus. I trust that you did not gather from this that there was the least fear of a collision. Let me hasten to correct this error in case it has led to any misunderstanding on your part.—Yours faithfully,

“Arthur Lancelot Kitter.”

To this reassuring letter the professor received next morning an answer which he opened and read as he sat at breakfast with Miss Catherine Kitter, his maiden sister.

“Dear Professor Kitter – I was so much obliged to get your letter about the sun. It was very kind of you to send it, and I am very glad to know that there is not any danger of colliding with a star.—Very sincerely,

“Irene Taylor.”

On reading which the little professor sat lost in bliss – enraptured at the thought that Miss Taylor and he were drifting together through stellar space, while he guarded her against an astronomical disaster.

“Who is your letter from?” asked his sister.

“A note from Miss Taylor,” he said, “in regard to the motion of the sun.”

On which his sister looked at him through her spectacles with a fixed look in which wonder gradually faded into certainty.

The second letter, which arose in a similar way, dealt with the retrograde movement of the satellites of Jupiter. The third was concerned with the precession of the equinoxes. To the second Miss Taylor answered, “I was so glad to know about the satellites of Jupiter,” and to the third she answered, “I was so glad to know about the precession of the equinoxes.”

Teaching so small a group, it was but natural that a professor should find himself from time to time walking down the avenue after the class with one or more of the students. At times Professor Kitter walked down with the student with the head like a bulb, and with him he talked astronomy; in fact, he simply went on with the lecture, the only form of conversation possible between a professor and a student. But sometimes he walked with Miss Marty and Miss Taylor, and once or twice by good fortune he walked with Miss Taylor alone.

Now, by this time he was well aware that there were other things than astronomy that he wanted to say to her ever so much. He wanted to tell her how pretty her cheeks looked in the bright, frosty weather, and how the sun seemed to glint from the snowflakes into her blue eyes, and how cosily the fur that she wore seemed to cling about her neck. This is what he wanted to say. But what he did say was to tell her that the revolution of the earth is not circular, but around one of the foci of an eclipse.

To which she said, “Oh, is it really!”

Once, as they happened to walk together thus, he had a real chance. “Isn’t it just lovely,” Miss Taylor said, “to feel the spring coming?”

Here surely he might have said something real. For instance, he could have told her that to him she was the spring and the sunshine and the flowers all in one, some simple remark of that sort. A first-year student would have said it so easily. Just for a minute he turned and looked at her, and it seemed to Miss Taylor as if he were really about to say something. Perhaps he was. But when he found words what he said was:

“The inclination of the earth upon its axis.”

And he knew that he had failed again.

Now, while the college session ran from autumn into winter, and from winter onward toward spring, various other things were happening in and around Concordia College which escaped the notice of Mr. Kitter. One was that Mr. Johnson rang the bell of the women’s dormitory – where Miss Marty and Miss Taylor lived – so often that even the hall porter who answered the bell was in no doubt as to why he came. Male students at Concordia were not allowed inside the women’s dormitory – except on set occasions as, for example, to listen to a lecture on Palaeontology, which their presence could not contaminate. But nothing prevented them from calling to leave notes or flowers or messages of invitation. In this college session Mr. Buck Johnson was incurring at a local florist’s a deferred debt on chrysanthemums that began to look like a German reparation account. Professor Kitter never dreamed of flowers. He would as soon have thought of sending fresh asparagus.

Moreover, Mr. Johnson appeared with unfailing regularity in company with Miss Marty and Miss Taylor at all college functions, at the Greek Letter dances, and at the lectures on Relativity and the Y.M.C.A. receptions and the other dissipations of college life.

“The triangle,” some gifted wit called them one evening.

“Not much of a triangle about that,” said another wiser one.

In the Christmas vacation Mr. Johnson and Maggie Marty went off on a train together to their home town, and for ten days Miss Taylor walked alone in the snow. Professor Kitter accidentally joined her as she walked thus, and had the pleasure of explaining to her the nature of the crystallization of the snowflake, which is, of course, nothing more than a simple illustration of the prismatic separation of light. In fact, there is nothing to it.

“The snowflake. Miss Taylor,” he said, “is nothing more than a polyhedronal piece of transparent material.”

“Oh, is it, indeed!” said Miss Taylor.

As she said it the falling snowflakes were glistening in her yellow hair, and the professor realized again what a wonderful mind the girl had, and how rapidly she grasped scientific phenomena.

Long before, at least two months before the session ended, Professor Kitter knew that he fully intended to ask Miss Taylor to marry him, but he found it impossible to make a beginning. The astronomy had sunk in too deep. Once, when he took her home to the dormitory just at sundown, after hearing an extension lecture on the service of Babylon to the modern world, she stood a moment on the stone steps, her hand in his, to say good-night. And the professor said: “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say, Miss Taylor—” He paused.

She looked into his face, her own illuminated beneath an arc lamp, and said: “Yes?”

He paused again, struggled, and finally added, “About the orbit of Halley’s Comet.”

On another occasion he actually began, “There are men, Miss Taylor, who—” and again she said “Yes?” but he only repeated, “Who, who—” and trailed off into nothingness.

Thus the college year threatened to end with Professor Kitter’s love unspoken. But as the day of graduation – the end of all things – drew near, its very nearness gave him resolution. There appeared in prospect a particular occasion when he knew that at least he would have his opportunity, and he meant, at every cost, to use it.

Now the occasion in prospect was this. It had long been the custom of Professor Kitter to invite his class, hitherto consisting of men, to visit once a year at evening the observatory of Concordia College.

Everybody who knows anything about a college is aware that a class in Astronomy never needs to go out and look at the sky. They can if they want to. The sky is useful in modern astronomy, but it’s not necessary. Similarly a class in Dynamics does not need to go and look at machinery, and a class in Money never sees a cent. But it had been for many years the custom of Professor Kitter to invite his class once a year to visit at night the college observatory, of which he was ex officio the superintendent.

The observatory was a little, round building like a railway water tank and stood beside the Arts Building of Concordia College. In the top room of it there was, among other things, a big, revolving telescope that looked out through a hole in the roof at the sky. Here a man might sit in a moving chair circling slowly round against the rotation of the earth, his eye exploring into the depths of space, his mind lost in infinite. Hence he might see the silver desolation of the moon, and the satellites of Jupiter, and Halley’s Comet once in every seventy-six years, and the transit of Venus once or twice a century. In such surroundings he might attune his mind to the real values of life and to the great things and the little, and to what matters and to what does not.

Hitherto once a year came the class in Mathematical Astronomy, clumping up the wooden stairs, not knowing whether to talk in a hush or to laugh out loud. And it was the professor’s custom to show the astronomical instruments, to let each student look at the sky, and to repeat each year his regret that the next transit of Venus was not until the year 2004, but he could promise them a total lunar eclipse within sixteen years. Afterwards, as a surprise, he produced a tray, duly set and covered by a janitor, on which were sandwiches and ginger-ale and ice-cream – the surprise being no greater than such college “surprises” are when repeated year by year for a generation. On the morning after such occasions the Daily Concordian always announced that Professor Kitter had entertained the fourth-year class in Astronomy in the tower of the observatory, and that a pleasant time had been had by all.

But this year, as the occasion approached, the professor realized that his fate was to be settled there and then. He would see to it that as they went down from the little tower building he would ask Miss Taylor to be his wife. Somehow the whole thing seemed clear to him beforehand. As if by some psychic process he could see himself in the half-lit curve of the clumsy, circular staircase, with Miss Taylor above, bending down, and he could hear as if by a sort of prescience the very words that he would be saying as he held her hand after she had said “yes” to him.

“I can’t tell you what this means to me, Irene. Up till now I never thought of marriage, but now my whole life seems changed.”

The little speech went round and round in his mind as if he were rehearsing it, or as if, strangely enough, he had heard someone else saying it – long ago and somewhere else – in a past existence perhaps. In the department of Psychology they talked about such things, and at least two of the professors said that this was possible.

And then, all in no time, the weeks and the days went by, and the evening was there, and Professor Kitter found himself leading his class up the stairway in the fading twilight of a spring evening and warning Miss Taylor – and even Miss Marty – against the dusk, and apologizing for the stairs, and apologizing for the half mist that might perhaps obscure some of the stars, and apologizing for the transit of Venus being still delayed by nearly a century – apologizing for so many things at once that it seemed odd even to the students.

In the big top room, shaped in a circle. Professor Kitter turned on the light and then showed the students the instruments and explained the rotation of the great telescope that stood in the centre of the floor pointed at a hole in the roof beyond which was the gathering darkness of the evening sky. And one by one the students of the class, according to annual custom, sat in the reclining chair and looked upward through the great glass in the depths of the sky and saw a star such as they had never seen before – a star with a face and a disc to it – as silver as a little moon. This, Professor Kitter explained, was Venus, now beautifully clear in the earlier part of the night, being in “partial opposition” and distant only a mere 60,000,000 miles. He explained further, dropping in spite of himself into lecture style, that had it been daylight, and had it been about a hundred years later, and had the telescope been in Madagascar or in the Fiji Islands instead of at Concordia College, and had the atmosphere been suitable, they would have been witnessing a transit of Venus, the most interesting of all astronomical phenomena, in which the planet moves across the face of the sun.

After which Professor Kitter, with such ease of manner as he could assume, discovered his tray of sandwiches and his ginger-ale, and with a good deal of nervousness, invited the students to partake of them. So they sat around among the astronomical equipment or improvised seats, the little professor being greatly helped in his efforts by Miss Marty, who had that ease of manner in passing round and accepting sandwiches and drinks which belongs to those from a home town and know nothing of the higher sophistication of city hospitality. Meantime the men students exchanged such learned remarks as “That is certainly some telescope” and “Venus is certainly some star” and ate steadily and unceasingly, without haste but with no sign of ending.

Then came the end. The girls rose and moved toward the door, but the men of the class, or most of them, went down the dark stairs first to show the way and turn on the lights below. And Miss Taylor, just as Professor Kitter knew she would, went last of all. The professor lingered behind a moment to see that all was right in the observatory; there was still an instrument or two to readjust, and there were some readings to make – but these he could postpone till later. When he turned off the light and followed Miss Taylor down the stair, a minute or perhaps two had passed, and in two minutes ever so many things may happen. Certain it is that when Professor Kitter had groped his way down to the first circular landing, there stood on it Mr. Johnson and Miss Irene Taylor. And Mr. Johnson was holding the girl’s hand and was saying to her, “I can’t tell you what it means to me, Irene. Till now I never thought of marriage—”

But beyond that the little professor heard no more. He made his way up again to the tower room and waited for a few moments there in the dark, and when he came down again, the students were all down below on the grass outside the building, waiting for the professor to join them.

“I think, if you will permit me, I will say good-night here,” said the little professor. “I find I have some readings of the instruments to make, and I shall go back for a little while to the observatory.”

So they shook hands and thanked him, each in the same words, like a formula, “I certainly enjoyed it very much,” and if there was a certain dreariness in the little professor’s voice as he said good-night, only one of the class was aware of it.

On which Professor Kitter went back to the tower, and he looked far and deep into the night sky where the things are that never alter and in contemplation of which certain eternal precepts of duty and obligation may be learned. He made his readings of his instruments, and he marked down on a chart his meteorological records of temperature and humidity and pressure. And as he did so, his dreams of the past winter seemed to thread out into thin mist, and he wondered that he had not sooner seen himself as he was, and felt that for him at least the transit of Venus had come and gone.

Professor Kitter went about his tasks of the closing session without hysteria and without complaint. There was for him nothing to say and no one to say it to. But there was still, at least, his work, and even if a man is close on forty, and small of size, and no fit companion for the life and gaiety of youth, there are still equations to be worked out left over from the last lunar eclipse, and by these navigation may be aided and human progress set a little further on. Professor Kitter knew nothing of such things as the “theory of duty” and such ideas of the “subordination of self as a factor in social survival.” These things were taught in another department and were optional even to students. But the professor worked at his lunar equations and went about his work, quiet and unnoticed.

Only once his mind was brought to a sudden and painful attention. It was on a certain day in graduation week, when the examinations were over and nothing was left but to wait till Commencement Day, while meantime each day was filled with student celebrations – valedictory meetings of classes, the presentation of an old English play out on the grass by the youngest of the graduates in English, afternoon receptions on the lawn of the President’s house, and dinners, so-called, where vast quantities of celery and ice-cream were consumed. It was in this week that the little professor, entering the committee room of the faculty, heard the head of his faculty, Dean Elderberry Foible, venting his opinions with his usual emphasis. And he was talking of student marriages such as happened now and then immediately after graduation.

“Absolutely preposterous!” said the Dean. “Ridiculous. Ought not to be allowed. Mere children” – all students seemed children to Dean Foible – “getting married before they know the first thing of life. There should be something to forbid it in the curriculum, or it ought to need at least the consent of a vote of the faculty. And a young fellow like Johnson,” the Dean went on, “why, he’s only twenty – three! just because his great uncle or somebody has left him a little money and he is able to get married – pooh! preposterous!”

Of that speech Professor Kitter heard no more. He gathered letters and left. Nor did he hear any more of the subject-matter of which the Dean spoke till the very afternoon of graduation day. But on that day he was walking up the avenue among the elms, and as he walked he encountered, fully and fairly and unavoidable, Miss Irene Taylor. Even a professor’s eye could see that she was dressed for an occasion. He would have raised his hat and passed, but she stopped him. It was plain that she meant to stop him.

“Why, Professor Kitter!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you coming to the wedding?”

The professor stammered something. “Did you mean to say that you didn’t know?” Miss Taylor went on.

The professor muttered something to the effect that he had heard something.

“Oh, I thought everybody knew. Why, Maggie Marty and Mr. Johnson are to be married at three o’lock, and you know it’s just lovely! He’s come into quite a lot of money from some forgotten uncle or somebody, and they’re going to go to Paris and both study over there – I forget what it is that they are going to study, but they say that there are ever so many courses you can study now in Paris. Why, didn’t you know? He asked her on the way over to the observatory that night, and he told me all about it going down the stairs as we went out. Oh, you really must come down to the church anyway, even if you don’t go to the house. Maggie said they wrote and asked you. Do come!”

And with that she put her hand on the little professor’s arm and turned him in her direction.

What Professor Kitter said as they went down the avenue is not a matter of record. It may have concerned the altitude of the sun, which seemed all of a sudden to have leaped to a surprising height and brilliance, or it may not. But it at least was effective, and when, after the wedding and the ceremony that went with it, the two walked away together under the elm trees, it was understood that Miss Taylor, after an interval shorter than anything ever heard of before in astronomy, was to become the professor’s wife. And it transpired further that she had kept all her notes in class from the very start, and that she had copied a whole equation off the board because he wrote it, and that his letter about the proper motion of the sun had seemed to her the sweetest letter she had ever dreamed of.

All of which things rapidly become commonplace. Especially as Miss Taylor is now Mrs. Arthur Lancelot Kitter, and attends college teas, and reads little papers on Chinese Philosophy at the Concordia Sigma Phi Society – and, in fact, acts and behaves and seems much as any other professor’s wife.

TOC     INDEX

Migration in English Literature

A Study of England and America

All lovers of Dickens will recall with delight, as readers of David Copperfield, the final destiny of Mr. Micawber as an emigrant to Australia. That unbeatable gentleman, always waiting for something to “turn up,” found it at last turn up in the Antipodes. There is a triumphant passage in which is described, “the public dinner given our distinguished fellow-colonist and townsman, Wilkins Micawber, Esquire, Port Middlebay, District Magistrate.” We are told that the dinner “came off in the large room of the hotel, which was crowded to suffocation, it being estimated that no fewer than forty-seven persons were accommodated with dinner at one time.” We are told further that when Mr. Micawbcr’s health was proposed, “the cheering with which the toast was received defied description; again and again it rose and fell like the waves of the ocean.” I don’t think that Charles Dickens himself knew whether this description of the ovation to Mr. Micawber was to be taken as burlesque or as poetic justice; whether he is laughing at Mr. Micawber, converted, after all his grandiose ideas, into a large toad in a small puddle, or exulting in the idea of his final vindication as a man of exception. If we could ask Dickens we should be no further on; he’d claim it both ways at once.

But this characteristic passage opens wide the gate of reflection; here is the path that leads into a very garden of discovery. This outgoing of the people of England, spread over three centuries, how did it react upon the life and thought of the Mother Country? Migration in the past was not the mere transit of our day, with its easy and frequent return and its voices across the ocean. Emigration meant farewell. When the anchor had been lifted with the capstan turned by all hands, singing in chorus, when the white cliffs of the English coast sank dim on the horizon, that was good-bye. And in that leave-taking was all the poignancy of final parting, all that goes with the prospect of unknown exile, but for younger hearts all that goes with the dawn of larger hopes. Can we wonder that the joys and sorrow, the hope and the tragedy of the outgoing emigrant sets its stamp deep on the literature of England?

The theme suggested, at least to my relative ignorance, is one but little exploited in our histories. We have, I think, all too little realized the reaction of America on British life and character. We are so accustomed to think of British America, past and present, as the child of England, that we fail to see that England, in a sense, is the child of America. It was the great voyages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that reanimated the seafaring spirit of England. People learned to know and love their homeland by their losing it awhile. The blood of Vikings moved again in the veins of Sussex farmers. Courage fallen asleep or latent in sheltered farmsteads woke again to something fiercer and less civilized in men who lived among dangers and slept among savages. The boys who for three centuries ran away to sea, the dispossessed younger sons who blew like thistledown over the newer lands, the Covenanters martyred to the West Indies, and, in the Victorian age, the outgoing singing poor, crowded and dirty and triumphant – all these in their going and in their casual returns, in the magnet attraction of their new hopes, the glamour of their new fortunes – all of these helped to fashion, to remake, the character of England as we know it. Those of us who preceded or followed Mr. Micawber to new dominions, I speak here collectively for uncounted millions of us, dead or alive, can in a sense say of England, “We too made it.”

But I am discussing here not the whole field of the reaction of migration on life and character, but only of the reflection and evidence of it as seen in our imagination. It appears as a major theme in our poetry – mostly in its aspect of the sorrow of parting, but at times with a note of joy. It breaks into our earlier romantic literature as an element of adventure, and when romance widens into the broad current of nineteenth-century fiction – the thing called the novel – the idea, one might say also, the device or expedient of migration runs like a a thread in the woven cloth. Elsewhere emigration appears as a sort of defeatist solution of social problems just beginning. To go somewhere else is a fine way of avoiding trouble at home.

I do not think that we shall find much of the theme suggested in the literature, the plays or the prose and the poetry – there were no novels – of the heroic age of exploration and discovery itself. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was written before migration began. It professed to be and has turned out to be nowhere. Shakespeare died before the outgoing of the English people had gone farther than John Smith’s Virginia. In the play King Lear, the noble Kent, banished by the foolish old king, declares that he will “seek liberty in new lands” – but by that he hardly means that he is going to settle in the United States; or at best Kent merely anticipates in his words ideas destined to germinate later on – a habit, it appears, with Shakespeare. So too when the admirable enthusiast Richard Hakluyt gathered from mariners and manuscripts his priceless Principal Navigations (1589), the inspiration was rather towards the mastery of the sea than of the land. Those who went over the sea in those earlier days went as adventurers minded to return.

There were no “emigrants” in the sorrowing sense of people going to a new home in the wilderness until the out-going of the Puritans. They carried in their hearts, in spite of persecution, all their love and longing for the country they had left. “We do not say,” such are the memorable words of Mather, one of the Pilgrim ministers, “farewell Babylon, farewell, Rome – but farewell, dear England.” But the mind of the Puritans, in America as at home, was not cast in the mould of imaginative literature. For them truth overwhelmed fiction, and the pretty fancies of poetry and of play-acting were alike of the devil. It was the well-worn Psalm-book of Ainsworth, and not the latest Italian novella that lay on the lap of Priscilla when John Alden came on his vicarious courting. They did not write of their sorrows. The first-fruits of their printing press were The Bay Psalm Book and such volumes as The Bonder-Working Providence of Zion’s Saviour in New England. Similarly, in so far as the outgoing of the Puritans reacted upon English thought, it affected the religious rather than the literary aspect of the mind of England.

It is not, I imagine, till the eighteenth century when emigration to a new home, definite and final, was becoming an accepted feature of English life, that we begin to trace its mark in literature. Yet it is notable that even Gray’s “Elegy” of 1753 shows no trace of it. The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep beneath their elms; but they are all there; the count is complete; there are no vacant places. The destiny of the mute inglorious Miltons and the English Hampdens was still at home. But compare a century later Mrs. Hemans’ “Graves of a Household” – in which all are gone; the “blood-red fields of Spain,” the “blue lone sea,” the “forests of the west” have claimed them. Mrs. Hemans was never in America. But when she wrote;

“One in the forests of the West

By a dark stream is laid,

The Indian knows his place of rest,

Far in the cedar shade,”

the imagery strikes with wonderful truth any who have ever it. The “darkness,” the heavy shadow of the cedars, is as characteristic as the silence that goes with a forest of pine. But even Mrs. Hemans’ thought is rather that of the break-up of an English home by war and overseas adventure than the allied subject of separation by emigration to a new land. The latter, one might say, is in a sense the higher theme. The deepest notes of human tragedy are those that sound from human fate and not from human wrong. Such notes convey the thought of tragedy where no one is to blame, the injustice of tyranny does not enter, but only the crushing weight of human destiny – nobody’s fault.

Compare here the memorable passage in Robert Louis Stevenson’s memorable book Kidnapped. It is an incidental description of an emigrant ship from the west coast of the Highlands in the period just after the rising of 1745:

“As we got a little nearer . . . there began to come to our ears a great sound of mourning, the people on board and those on shore crying and lamenting, one to another, so as to pierce the heart. Then I understood this was an emigrant ship bound for the American colonies . . . The exiles leaned over the bulwarks, weeping and reaching out their hands . . . But at last the captain of the ship, who seemed near beside himself (and no great wonder) in the midst of the crying and confusion, came to the side and begged us to depart . . . The chief singer in our boat struck into a melancholy air, which was presently taken up by both the emigrants and their friends on the beach, so that it sounded from all sides like a lament for the dying. I saw the tears run down the cheeks of the men and women in the boat, even as they bent at the oars; and the circumstances and the music of the song (which is one called ‘Lochaber No More’) were highly affecting.”

This same crushing sorrow of the exile, as opposed to the wistful regret of the voluntary settler, is voiced by Swinburne in his “Jacobite’s Exile,” “bonnier shine the braes of Tyne, than a” the fields of France.” But in a generation or two of children, exile and settler are all one, their common lot blending to a common thought.

With the sorrow of parting, acute and for the moment overwhelming, is to be set the homesickness, the unending longing for “home” that never dies. It was never better expressed than in the stanza:

“From the lone shieling on the misty Islands

Mountains divide us and the waste of seas;

But still the blood is true, the heart is Highland,

And in our dreams we see the Hebrides.”

The verse appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine of 1829, as one of the stanzas of a poem generally understood to be written by John Gait, the moving spirit of the Canada Land Company, founder of our city of Guelph. Those who know the verse never forget it. Nor does it matter if the reader doesn’t know what shieling means. I know it, but I won’t tell; it isn’t necessary. I liked the poem almost better when I didn’t know, The dim, uncertain meanings of terms half understood heighten the colour of imagination as in the reading of a child.

But compare the wistful pathos and the mutual affection of the “misty islands” with the background of Oliver Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village.” Here is contrast indeed. “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain, where health and plenty cheer the labouring swain” has been half depopulated by the rapacity of greedy landlords and the brutality of new wealth. Its people are driven abroad, not as to new and happier homes in a newer England, but as destined to die in a region of horror:

“Ah, no! To distant climes, a dreary scene,

Where half the convex world intrudes between,

Through horrid tracts with fainting steps they go

Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe?”

This “horrid” place (only classical students appreciate that word), the reader will be “horrified” to find, was the (present) State of Georgia, at that time (1769) the scene where General Oglethorpe’s new paradise had gone a little to the bad. One can redeem the reputation of “the Palmette State,” however, by dropping rapidly down the decades to Wordsworth’s “Ruth” (of 1800). Here both migration and Georgia appear in a different light – the temptation of elopement to a savage paradise. Ruth, a “village maiden” (type now killed by education), has met a

“. . . Youth from Georgia’s shore,

A military casque he wore,

He bought them from the Cherokees

The feathers nodded in the breeze.”

He is not himself an Indian, but Wordsworth says in a truly Wordsworthian line, “He was a lovely youth. I guess.” I guess so too. At any rate, he told Ruth about Georgia in words that would adorn an up-to-date Tourist Handbook:

“He told her of magnolia spread

High as a cloud, high overhead!”

The cypress and her spire

Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam

Cover a hundred leagues and seem

To set-the hills on fire!”

Ruth plans to elope, is deserted, goes mad, and another bad mark is set against colonial settlement. But all this stuff is harmless from its very ignorance.

The closing years of the eighteenth century and the opening of the nineteenth found little room for the emigrant. The air was loud with battle, the sky lurid with a conflict that outlasted a generation. Literature responded to the thrills of war. Poetry sang of “Nelson and the North” and of the “Mariners of England” who defied the “battle and the breeze.” The favourite interjection was Ho! and not Alas! Even the appearance of the “professional” convict, with Captain Phillip’s Botany Bay enterprise of 1787-88, passed for the time unnoted as a theme of literature. Yet it was there. Before that day convicts had gone out in an unending series as “indentured labourers” to America. Indeed, America, through the voice of Benjamin Franklin, speaking as “Poor Richard” in his Almanac, had already protested against their presence. But the independence of the United States brought with it a resolute and very successful determination on the part of the Americans to supply their own criminals. Hence, scarcely noted among greater things, the convict ships and the convict settlements became a part of the British environment. Later on it broke into literature. But the poetry of the moment found no place for it. A slight exception here is found in Southey’s four poems, the “Botany Bay Eclogues,” 1794, a sort of rogues’ gallery of loneliness and misery – of souls broken with crime and cruelty, finding at last even in the “barbarous climes where angry England sends her outcast sons” the “saving hand of grace,” the soothing touch of eternal nature.

With the nineteenth century appears in our literature of migration the sorrows of Ireland, a cup of misery, as the Irish have said, that has been overflowing for generations and is not full yet. The most notable, of course, of the Irish singers was Thomas Moore, much of whose work is as alive today as ever. Mutilated by school recitations, massacred at a thousand pianos, the words still haunt, the melodies still sound. The reason is that Moore’s work was wonderfully and typically Irish – the wistful regret for things that have been and are not, regret that things must ever end, or that they don’t begin, a kind of satisfied dissatisfaction with life. Said in English it sounds like grumbling. Said in Irish it is called a “lament” and connects somehow with the pathos of natural scenery and the rippling music of words. Compare Father Prout: “the bells of Shandon that sound so grand on the pleasant waters of the river Lee.”

Moore himself came to America in 1804, and drew, during his visit, out of our woods and rivers the same magic as from Ireland. Everyone knows his “Canadian Boat Song”;

“Faintly as foils the evening chime

Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time;

Soon as the woods on shore look dim

We’ll sing at St. Anns’s our parting hymn.

Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,

The rapids are near and the daylight’s past.”

Naturally Moore, even as an amateur immigrant, strikes the note of sorrow of the real one. Compare such a passage:

“As slow our ship her foamy track

Against the wind was cleaving

Her trembling pennant still look’d back

To that dear Isle ’twas leaving . . .”

To that dear Isle ’twas leaving . . .”

Or Thomas Irwin (1825-92):

“The white sails are filled and the wind from the shore

Blows sad from the hills we shall visit no more, etc . . .”

Naturally the song of Irish emigration was especially connected with the idea not only of leaving Ireland but of finding a new home in the United States. These, we recall, were the days of the “melting-pot” of the “land of liberty” before the words “quota” and “deportation” had come into our language. An Irish poet (Maurice FitzGerald) therefore could weep (r. 1880) over “Moonlight on New York Bay,” the poignancy of the situation being that the moon might very probably be shining on Tipperary:

“Oh, beautiful moon, art thou shining tonight

On the green hills of Ireland, away, far away?”

But the real pathos of Irish migration to America was never more wonderfully expressed than by Lady Dufferin in her song depicting the outgoing emigrant leaving Ireland after the death of his young wife and her child:

I’m sittin’ on the stile, Mary,

Where we sat side by side

One bright May mornin”, long ago,

When first you were my bride;

The corn was springin’ fresh and green,

And the lark sang loud and high,

And the red was on your lip, Mary,

And the love-light in your eye . . .

“They say there’s bread and work for all,

And the sun shines always there—

But I’ll not forget old Ireland

Were it fifty times as fair!”

The pathos of the bereaved immigrant of a hundred years ago is now lost for us today in the wider pathos of the words “bread for all, the sun shines always there” – the pathos of the broken hopes of a continent.

As contrasted with the Irish “lament,” the typical English poem or song of nineteenth-century migration is of a sturdier character, more stress on hope, less grumbling and less scenery. Naturally so. The British were the dominant lot; for half a century the least of them in coming to Canada had a notion that he owned it. And if the iron of disappointment entered their souls (see Mrs. Moody’s Ploughing It in the Bush) they did not turn it into poetry. The typical English song was the one that ran:

“Cheer, boys, cheer; no more of idle sorrow.

Courage, true hearts, will bear us on our way.

Hope points before and shows a bright tomorrow;

Let us forget the darkness of today.”

The song went on to explain that the “star of the Empire glitters in the West.” If this means Saskatchewan and Alberta the proposition is open to doubt. But the song carried inspiration. It was the “up anchor” song of the outgoing ships. I heard it first on the deck of the Sarmatian, A.D. 1876, in helping to haul on a rope which I understood was lifting the anchor. It is much superior to the jazz music of an up-to-date liner’s orchestra playing till the bar opens. We need new poets.

All of this so far has dealt with poetry, the more adaptable vehicle for the purpose. One turns to emigration as in prose, in fiction. Here the theme presents a strange medley of pathos and miracle, final eclipse and sudden fortune, an artifice of total disappearance or a conjurer’s trick of sudden and glorious resurrection. No one used this theme – at times, this artifice – more than did Charles Dickens. He was in a sense preoccupied with it. As a young man in the romantic age of resentment and illusion he cherished a hatred of English “Toryism” – a natural feeling in a “genius,” poor, unrecognized, and unknown to Tories. He dreamed of “giving it all up” – every young man decides to give it all up. He had his eye on Tasmania. But instead of that the sudden illumination of fortune that came with the Pickwick Papers enabled him, in 1842, to visit America. After that, England suited him for ever. But there remained in his mind, if only by way of literary furniture – as in a large house ready for any kind of entertainment – the notion of migration. Indeed, he “migrated” his sons. Charles, the eldest son, was sent, for a while, to Hong Kong to learn colonial trade. Alfred Tennyson Dickens went out to settle in Australia. Francis, the third son, went to North-West Canada, became an officer in the Mounted Police, and was in Battleford during the Rebellion of 1885.

Naturally, then, if Dickens migrated his own family, a fortiori he was willing to migrate his literary creations. Along with the classic case of Mr. Micawber is that of Dr. Mell, the erstwhile schoolmaster present at the same banquet, but dug up from so far back in David Copperfield that the reader has forgotten who he is; but whoever he was or is, he is now endowed with a daughter, evidently destined to marry Mr. Micawber’s gifted son, Wilkins junior. Thus does Dickens use the rapid light and shadow of emigrant fortune to illumine his closing horizon. Still more characteristic of Dickens and of all the Victorians is the use of migration as a means of redemption. Young Charlie Bates, a convicted thief in Oliver Twist, lives to become the “merriest drover in New South Wales.” Martin Chuzzlewit “sees the light” among the mosquitoes of the Mississippi.

As with Dickens so with the general crowd of mid-Victorian writers. Thackeray in his Virginians proposes a wider field, the contrast between the branch of a family that stays at home and the branch that migrates to Virginia, a study “of opposing loyalisms and severing patriotisms.” Thackeray proposed this, but got so busy talking to the reader about anything and everything that he forgot about it. Nodding over his patchwork he stitched in some good pieces of eighteenth-century London, and used Indians and redcoats to colour Virginia.

It is difficult to cite individual examples characters in fiction with any sustained interest for the reader. The lapse of time, the change of taste, the higher gear of modern life have removed the books of three generations ago from the of the present public. Who among them knows or cares how many characters migrated overseas out of the works of Miss Edgeworth or Charles Lever or Whyte-Melville or Wilkie Collins? But the statement may stand that from the pages of Victorian fiction there passed out an unending procession of unfortunates to seek redemption or oblivion in new lands,

But what is difficult of proof, without loss of interest, in dealing with half-forgotten authors becomes so simple as to be redundant when we turn to authors within easy reach of memory and still within easy hearing of their audience. One has but to name Kipling to call up a succession of gentleman-rankers, of forgotten men, of “men who were,” men who “would be kings”; or to name Robert Louis Stevenson to think of Oxford graduates quoting Latin on South Sea Islands, or Masters of Ballantrae in the American wilderness, or Conan Doyle with his Refugees; while in the full glare of modern publicity and with the full rapidity of modern transport, such happy writers as Mr. Phillips Oppenheim fill their pages with mystery-men, disappearing in the forest or jungle to reappear, fabulously rich, in a London restaurant, ordering – think of it – “Martini cocktails” For here is another note, and a happy one, happier than the mere negation of oblivion or the cold light of moral reform – that of exiles returning dripping with diamonds, covered with rubber, or heavy with gold.

There is a perennial human interest in disappearance and return. Even Enoch Arden, broken and penniless, became a village sensation. But a return accompanied by great wealth, to be shared by a grateful family, that is something else. Oddly enough it is the French – see Alphonse Daudet – and not ourselves who have recognised so clearly this type of the returning millionaire as, to give him a name, “L’ncle d’Amerique.” But beside his sunlit figure the shadow falls upon a darkened one, especially known in fiction, that of the returned convict. As the penal settlements grew from the first establishment of Botany Bay to a system that threw its shadow over an empty island continent, the convict began to come into literature; the convict, with all the mixture of pity and terror that went with his lot; the hulks where he waited his departure, the convict ship that carried him, and the unknown fate – beyond human ken, over the edge of the world – that swallowed him up. For the Term of his Natural Life – so runs the grim title of Marcus Clarke’s great story. With it and after it were many others. The theme had all the attraction of unknown terror. The “convict” idea fascinated a generation with its horror.

Strangely enough, slavery and the slave trade never got into our literature in their own day – except in one fierce burst of denunciation as a ground-swell of the coming American Civil War. Longfellow’s poem of the slave, an African king, dying “beside the ungathered rice”; and the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on whose pages fell the tears of a myriad of children; these came not as literature in the pure sense but from the driving urge of anger and political passion. But the deeper disgrace is that the slave went unwept in our literature till the thing was over. The flag of which the Victorians, after 1833, used to sing that it “never shall float o’er a slave,” had perhaps floated over more slaves in its time, at sea till 1807 and on land till 1833, than any flag in the world. But the slavery motive was what the psycho-analyst would call a mixed complex; the tragedy had got mixed with white superiority, with the Bible, and with West Indian fortunes. The dominant race cannot voice its victims; and the negroes could not sing that sort of song.

But the convict was different. He was white and, therefore, a tragedy and fit for literature. As the “ticket of leave” system developed, the convict turned into a kind of immigrant. His restored fortune put him, as literature, alongside of the “American uncle”; indeed there was even a jocular touch available with him: “True patriots all; for be it understood, we left our country for our country’s good,” so sang once an actual and gifted Australian ex-convict. Such a person naturally became an ingredient in the “historical” fiction dealing with a country like Australia, lucky enough to have no history. It is amazing what has been done with so little. In Canada, with romance and history broadcast over our country, how little we have done with it!

There remains one enthusiastic page over which migration and settlement is written in large and half-formed letters – the boy’s books of the bygone century. This section of our literature has stamped the idea of migration on the mind, not of the nation at large, but of the rising generation, or rather of the successive generations that have risen in turn for two hundred years. These are the “boys’ books” that deal with refugees on desert islands, with “settlers” in the wilderness, with the ingenious building of shelters in trees and snug igloos in the snow. Here is all the charm that goes with “contrivance,” with the surmounting of difficulty, with the “creation,” as it were, of economic life.

The parent book is, of course, the immortal Robinson Crusoe, a book which probably Defoe himself did not understand. Such is often the way with authors. Dickens failed to appreciate Mr. Pickwick for many instalments, and Conan Doyle grew bitter against Sherlock Holmes, not realizing that he had created in Sherlock and Watson far more endearing characteristics than mere scientific deduction. So with Defoe. He meant to present Crusoe as an outcast, an unfortunate object of pity. Crusoe “fooled” him, so to say, and became an object of envy to generations of English boys. Cowper tried later on to sing of Crusoe (under his own name of Alexander Selkirk) in terms of compassion:

“Oh, Solitude, where are the charms

That sages have seen in thy face?

Better dwell in the midst of alarms

Than reign in this horrible place.”

Cowper, as a boy sees it, misses the point. Think of Crusoe, with his fertile island full of yams, breadfruit and coconuts, his axe to build a house with and wild goats to make umbrellas of, and presently his devoted Friday to attend and serve him! Can you better that? Note especially the “devoted native” theme which has attracted uncounted thousands of English boys and helped to give the world – the “faithful Sambo” the “Gunga Dins” – these are the stuff that dreams, boys’ dreams, are made on, and out of the dreams of boys may grow the achievements of a nation.

Robinson Crusoe is the type. But it is followed by a long succession of “boys” books (some boys are seventy years old) dealing with the creative effort of isolated settlers, a series that has only died out when the world has become full, and is now being transferred to the moon. One recalls with affection the Victorian stories of R. M. Ballantyne of the Hudson’s Bay Company, chief interpreter to England of the unknown north. Such books are not of adventure. Leave adventure to the “Spanish Main,” crowded with pirates and French privateers and sailing-ships abandoned with no one on board but a beautiful girl and an old man. That’s all right. But it belongs to a different kind of story. Even in Robinson Crusoe, to a boy’s mind, the “adventure” comes in as a disturbance; the “fun” is the settlement, or rather not so much “fun” as a sense of “snugness,” a self-satisfaction. Oddly enough, some of the favourite books of this type for English boys were written by foreigners, just as Hans Andersen and the Brothers Grimm wrote our fairy stories, so the author of the Swiss Family Robinson and Jules Verne, as the author of The Mysterious Island, wrote our best “settlement” stories.

The Family stuff is a little tame, everything too easy; for the nursery rather than the boarding school. It was written by Johann Rudolf Wyss, a Swiss professor of philosophy, who knew as much about desert islands as a Swiss professor of philosophy would. In any case, to a boy’s mind, having the “family” there at all spoils it. When you strike an A1 desert island you don’t want father and mother. But Jules Verne’s story hits it just right; the landing from a balloon on an empty and remote, but very fertile, island; the group of cheerful and ingenious men (how cheerful they are – but boys never notice that) who start bare-handed from nothing and contrive everything – what a wonderful setting! All machines can be operated backwards, put into “reverse gear,” so to speak. So it often is with literary composition. The reverse gear of Robinson Crusoe is Enoch Arden. There he sits, poor, long-haired exile in the Pacific sunset, weeping for home. He won’t even cut his hair, not appreciating the fun of “contriving” a pair of scissors out of oyster-shells. No contrivance for him. But notice, even in his very tears, how his sorrows call up a picture of England as if to make us feel that we have never loved it enough;

“The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes,

The peacock yew-tree and the lonely Hall,

The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill

November dawns and deny-glooming downs,

The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves,

And the low moan of leaden-coloured seas”

So, too, with all the emigrants. I think it has often been the people in this exile of settlement who have loved England best, who still, after twenty years, talk of “home,” and see it as things only can be in retrospect of time and in the magic of distance. The stuff that binds the British Empire is not texts and tariffs, but such back and forward reactions,

“J’en passe et des meilleurs,” as the French say when they run out of examples. Let me under that pretext turn to the use of migration, not in the realm of fancy, but in the equally imaginary world of nineteenth-century economics. I am willing to call it, if not a world of the imagination, at any rate a lost world or a world that never came true. Political economy is not, or should not be, a work of the imagination, and hence lies properly outside the scope of the present discussion. But there is an odd parallel as between the use of emigration in fiction as a sort of defeatist method of getting rid of undesirables, and the classical economic use of the “emigrant man” as a defeatist solution of social problems at home. Into their imagined setting the “emigrating economic man” was placed as a sort of safety-valve. If there were too many at home, he was supposed to get out. The world which seemed very empty then was all his. He was supposed to care nothing about flags, loyalty and allegiance. At the very time – in the opening Victorian years – when the Canada Company was embarking emigrants to Upper Canada, another organization, the Colombian Society, was undertaking to send them to Venezuela.

It remained for one of the interpreters of the classical economics to prove this parallel between the defeatist migration of the economist and the “redemption” migration of the novelist by bridging over the gap between them and turning economics into fiction. Harriet Martineau (1802-76) had an active mind. She was as optimistic as sunshine, as exact as a checker-board, and about as original as a hen. Her sunshine was refracted by the prism of class and caste that turned the world into masters and servants, gentle and simple, doing their duty in the state of life into which the rubric of the catechism called them. But she had an ingenious facility of words and a concrete presentation that could turn simple things into stories. On this basis she undertook to rewrite the immovable truths of the dismal science as a series of Tales – Illustrations of Political Economy in nine volumes. The tales are among the curiosities of literature, and as humour they deserve to rank with Sandford and Merton and Archibald Marshall’s Birdikin Family. In volume IV is found Tale No. 10, which deals with migration under the title of “New Homes.” In this bright little narrative a Kentish family go out to Van Diemen’s Land (see under Tasmania), the father and mother and Frank and Ellen, the older brother and sister, as indentured servants, and two younger boys, their half-brothers Bob and jerry, lucky fellows, as convicts. It seems that Bob and Jerry had “beaten up” (more Americana) two young gentlemen, for which they were to be hanged but were let off with transportation. Today they would have got three months, or in America have “bumped the young gentlemen off” and got nothing. Here is the cheerful landing of the family – home ties are nothing to them – in the Antipodes:

“Ellen was the first of the family that arrived at Hobart Town. Next came the convict ship which was sent round to Launceston. Next the batch of parish immigrants arrived, and Frank found, on application to the proper government officer, that his sister had landed in good health, and had received a high character from the clergyman and his lady who had come over as superintendents of the expedition; and had been forwarded to a district where a service had been procured for her as dairymaid on a settler’s farm; and that care had been taken that her parents and her brother should be indentured to farmers in the same neighbourhood. So far, all was well.”

Quite so; in fact, fine. One can easily see how Frank and Ellen become prosperous settlers regarded with approval by the “gentry” who come out later. The convict brothers also flourish. Bob becomes a sort of convict labour boss and then independent; Jerry, on ticket of leave, takes on a “black wife,” refuses to work and lives apparently by pillaging the “gentry.” We have a last vision of him leaving the island, as too small for his activities. The moral is that the colonies need more gentry, more servants and, as Miss Martineau says herself, that “our convict arrangements tend to the further corruption of the offender by letting him experience a great improvement in his condition as a direct consequence of his crime.” How much better to keep him in jail for life.

Such has been the lot of the emigrant. Cast out in our history by persecution as a refugee, by economics as a superfluity, he might well have disappeared into limbo. In place of which, as the Latin poet would say, “tamen usque recurrit.” Literature brings him back as an uncle from America, an empire builder, or at least as the point and moral of a tale.

TOC     INDEX

Three Score and Ten

The Business
of Growing Old

Old age is the “Front Line” of life, moving into No Man’s Land. No Man’s Land is covered with mist. Beyond it is Eternity. As we have moved forward, the tumult that now lies behind us has died down. The sounds grow less and less. It is almost silence. There is an increasing feeling of isolation, of being alone. We seem so far apart. Here and there one falls, silently, and lies a little bundle on the ground that the rolling mist is burying. Can we not keep nearer? It’s hard to see one another. Can you hear me? Call to me. I am alone. This must be near the end.

I have been asked how old age feels, how it feels to have passed seventy, and I answer in metaphor, as above, “not so good.”

Now let us turn it round and try to laugh it off in prose. It can’t be so bad as that, eh what? Didn’t Cicero write a book” on old age to make it all right? But you say he was only just past sixty when he wrote it, was he? That’s a tough one. Well, what about Rabbi ben Ezra, you remember – “Grow old along with me.” Oh, he was eighty-one, eh? No, thanks. I’ll stay right here around seventy. He can have all his fun for himself at eighty-one.

I was born in Swanmoor, a suburb of Ryde in the Isle of Wight, on 30th December 1869. That was in Victorian England at its most Victorian, far away now, dated by the French Empire, still glittering, and Mr. Dickens writing his latest book on the edge of the grave while I thought out my first on the edge of my cradle and, in America, dated by people driving golden spikes on Pacific railroads.

It was a vast, illimitable world, far superior to this – whole continents unknown, Africa just an outline, oceans never sailed, ships lost over the horizon – as large and open as life itself.

Put beside such a world this present shrunken earth, its every corner known, its old-time mystery gone with the magic of the sea, to make place for this new demoniac confine, loud with voices out of emptiness and tense with the universal threat of death. This is not mystery but horror. The waves of the magic sea called out in the sunlight: “There must be a God.” The demoniac radio answers in the dark; “There can’t be.” Belief was so easy then: it has grown so hard now; and life, the individual life, that for an awakening child was so boundless, has it drawn into this – this alleyway between tall cypresses that must join somewhere in the mist? But stop, we are getting near No Man’s Land again. Turn back.

Moving pictures love to give us nowadays “cavalcades” of events to mark the flight of time. Each of us carries his own. Mine shows, as its opening, the sea beaches of the Isle of Wight . . . Then turn on Portchester village and its Roman castle . . . Queen Victoria going past in a train, in the dark, putting her head out of the window (her eight heads out of eight windows) . . . Now shift to an Atlantic sailing steamer (type of 1876) with people emigrating to Canada . . . Then a Canadian farm in a lost-corner of Ontario up near Lake Simcoe for six years . . . Put in bears, though there weren’t any . . . Boarding school, scene at Upper Canada College – the real old rough stuff . . . University, cap and gown days, old style, put a long beard on the President, show fourteen boarding-houses at $4.50 a week . . . School teaching – ten years – (run it fast, a series of stills, any year is typical, I want to forget it) . . .

Then make the film Chicago University with its saloons of forty years ago, a raw place, nowhere to smoke . . . And then settle the film down to McGill University, and run it round and round as slowly as you like for thirty-six sessions – college calling in the Autumn, students and co-eds and Rah! Rah! all starting afresh, year after year . . . College in the snow, the February classroom; hush! don’t wake them, it’s a lecture in archaeology . . . All of it again and again . . . College years, one after the other . . . Throw in, as interludes, journeys to England, a lecture trip around the Empire . . . Put in Colombo, Ceylon, for atmosphere . . . Then more college years . . .

Then loud music and the Great War with the college campus all at drill, the boys of yesterday turned to men . . . Then the war over, lecture trips to the U.S . . . Pictures of Iowa State University . . . Ladies’ Fortnightly Club – about forty of them . . . Then back to the McGill campus . . . Retirement . . . An honorary degree (“this venerable scholar”) . . . And then unexpectedly the war again and the Black Watch back on the McGill campus.

Such is my picture, the cavalcade all the way down from the clouds of the morning to the mists of the evening.

As the cavalcade passes down the years it is odd how gradually and imperceptibly the change of outlook comes, from the eyes of wonder to those of disillusionment – or is it to those of truth? A child’s world is full of celebrated people, wonderful people like the giants and magicians of the picture books. Later in life the celebrated people are all gone. There aren’t any – or not made of what it once meant.

I recall from over half a century ago a prize-day speaker at Upper Canada College telling us that he saw before him the future statesmen, the poets, the generals and the leaders of the nation. I thought the man a nut to say that. What he saw was just us. Yet he turned out to be correct; only in a sense he wasn’t; it was still only us after all. It is the atmosphere of illusion that cannot last.

Yet some people, I know, are luckier in this than I am. They’re born in a world of glamour and live in it. For them there are great people everywhere, and the illusion seems to feed itself. One such I recall out of the years, with a capacity for admiration all his own.

“I sat next to Professor Buchan at the dinner last night,” he once told me. “He certainly is a great scholar, a marvellous philologian!”

“Is he?” I said.

“Yes,” my friend continued. “I asked him if he thought the Indian word ‘snabe’ was the same as the German word ‘knabe.’”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he didn’t know.”

And with that my friend sat back in quiet appreciation of such accurate scholarship and of the privilege of being near it. There are many people like that, decent fellows to be with. Their illusions keep their life warm.

But for most of us they fade out and life itself as we begin to look back on it appears less and less. Has it all faded to this? There comes to me the story of an old Carolina negro who found himself, after years of expectancy, privileged to cast a vote. After putting the ballot paper in the box he stood, still expectant, waiting for what was to happen, to come next. And then, in disillusionment: “Is that all there is, boss? Is that all there is to it?”

“That’s all,” said the presiding officer.

So it is with life. The child says “when I am a big boy” – but what is that? The boy says “when I grow up” – and then, grown up, “when I get married.” But to be married, once done and over, what is that again? The man says “when I retire” – and then when retirement comes he looks back over the path traversed, a cold wind sweeps over the fading landscape and he feels somehow that he has missed it all. For the reality of life, we learn too late, is in the living tissue of it from day to day, not in the expectation of better, nor in the fear of worse. Those two things, to be always looking ahead, and to worry over things that haven’t yet happened and very likely won’t happen – those take the very essence out of life.

If one could only live each moment to the full, in a present with its own absorption, even if as transitory and evanescent as Einstein’s “here” and “now.” It is strange how we cry out in our collective human mind against this restless thinking and clamour for time to stand still – longing for a land where it is always afternoon, or for a book of verses underneath a bough, where we may let the world pass.

But perhaps it is this worry, this restlessness, that keeps us on our necessary path of effort and endeavour. Most of us who look back from old age have at least a comfortable feeling that we have “got away with it.” At least we kept out of jail, out of the asylum and out of the poorhouse. Yet one still needs to be careful. Even “grand old men” get fooled sometimes. But at any rate we don’t want to start over; no, thank you, it’s too hard. When I look back at long evenings of study in boarding-house bedrooms, night after night, one’s head sinking at times over the dictionary – I wonder how I did it.

And school days – at Upper Canada College Anno Domini 1882 – could I stand that now? If someone asked me to eat “supper” at six and then go and study next day’s lessons, in silence, in the long study from seven to nine-thirty – how would that be? A school waiter brought round glasses of water on a tray at half-past eight, and if I asked for a whisky and soda, could I have had it? I could not. Yet I admit there was the fun of putting a bent pin-you know how, two turns in it – on the seat where the study master sat. And if I were to try that now at convocation they wouldn’t understand it. Youth is youth, and age is age.

So many things, I say, that one went through seem hopelessly difficult now. Yet other things, over which youth boggles and hesitates and palpitates, seem so easy and so simple to old age. Take the case of women, I mean girls. Young men in love go snooping around, hoping, fearing, wondering, lifted up at a word, cast down by an eyebrow. But if he only knew enough, any young man – as old men see it – could have any girl he wanted. All he need do is to step up to her and say, “Miss Smith, I don’t know you, but your overwhelming beauty forces me to speak; can you marry me at, say, three-thirty this afternoon?”

I mean, that kind of thing in that province of life would save years of trepidation. It’s just as well, though, that they don’t know it or away goes all the pretty world of feathers and flounces, of flowers and dances that love throws like a gossamer tissue across the path of life.

On such a world of youth, old age can only gaze with admiration. As people grow old all youth looks beautiful to them. The plainest girls are pretty with nature’s charms. The dullest duds are at least young. But age cannot share it. Age must sit alone.

The very respect that young people feel for the old – or at least for the established, the respectable, by reason of those illusions of which I spoke, makes social unity impossible. An old man may think himself a “hell of a feller” inside, but his outside won’t justify it. He must keep to his corner or go “ga-ga,” despised of youth and age alike . . .

In any case, to put it mildly, old men are tiresome company. They can’t listen. I notice this around my club. We founded it thirty years ago, and the survivors are all there, thirty years older than they were thirty years ago and some even more, much more. Can they listen? No, not even to me. And when they start to tell a story they ramble on and on, and you know the story anyway because it’s the one you told them yesterday. Young people when they talk have to be snappy and must butt in and out of conversation as they get a chance. But once old men are given rope, you have to pay it out to them like a cable. To my mind the only tolerable old men are the ones – you notice lots of them when you look for them – who have had a stroke – not a tragic one; that would sound cruel – but just one good flap of warning. If I want to tell a story, I look round for one of these.

The path through life I have outlined from youth to age you may trace for yourself by the varying way in which strangers address you. You begin as “little man” and then “little boy,” because a little man is littler than a little boy; then “sonny” and then “my boy,” and after that “young man,” and presently the interlocutor is younger than yourself and says, “Say, mister.” I can still recall the thrill of pride I felt when a Pullman porter first called me “doctor” and when another one raised me up to “judge,” and then the terrible shock it was when a taximan swung open his door and said, “Step right in, dad.”

It was hard to bear when a newspaper reporter spoke of me as the “old gentleman,” and said I was very simply dressed. He was a liar, those were my best things. It was a worse shock when a newspaper first called me a septuagenarian, another cowardly lie, as I was only sixty-nine and seven-twelfths. Presently I shall be introduced as “this venerable old gentleman,” and the axe will fall when they raise me to the degree of “grand old man.” That means on our continent anyone with snow-white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty. That’s the last and worst they can do to you.

Yet there is something to be said even here for the mentality of age. Old people grow kinder in their judgment of others. They are able to comprehend, even if not to pardon, the sins and faults of others. If I hear of a man robbing a cash register of the shop where he works, I think I get the idea. He wanted the cash. If I read of a man burning down his store to get the insurance, I see that what he wanted was the insurance. He had nothing against the store. Yet somehow just when I am reflecting on my own kindliness I find myself getting furious with a waiter for forgetting the Worcester sauce.

This is the summary of the matter that as for old age there’s nothing to it, for the individual looked at by himself. It can only be reconciled with our view of life in so far as it has something to pass on, the new life of children and of grandchildren, or if not that, at least some recollection of good deeds, or of something done that may give one the hope to say, non omnis moriar (I shall not altogether die).

Give me my stick. I’m going out to No Man’s Land.

I’ll face it.

TOC     INDEX

The Perfect Index

There Is No Index, and Why

Readers of books, I mean worthwhile readers, like those who read this volume, will understand how many difficulties centre round the making of an Index. Whether to have an Index at all? Whether to make it a great big one or just a cute little Index on one page? Whether to have only proper names or let it take in idea – and so on. In short, the things reaches dimensions that may raise it to the rank of being called the Index Problem, if nothing is done about it.

Of course one has to have an Index. Authors themselves would prefer not to have any. Having none would save trouble, and compel reviewers to read the whole book instead of just the Index. But the reader needs it. Otherwise he finds himself looking all through the book, forwards and then backwards, and then plunging in at random, in order to read out to a friend what it was that was so darned good about Talleyrand. He doesn’t find it because it was in another book.

So let us agree, there must be an Index. Now comes the trouble. What is the real title or name of a thing or person that has three or four? Must you put everything three or four times over in the Index, under three or four names? No, just once, so it is commonly understood; and then for the other joint names, we put what is called a cross-reference, meaning, see this, or see that. It sounds good in theory, but in practice it leads to such results as Talleyrand, see Perigord . . . and when you hunt this up, you find – Perigord, Bishop of, see Talleyrand. The same effect can be done flat out, with just two words, as Lincoln, see Abraham . . . Abraham, see Lincoln. But even that is not so bad because at least it’s a closed circle. It comes to a full stop. But compare the effect, familiar to all research students, when the circle is not closed. Thus, instead of just seeing Lincoln, the unclosed circle runs like this, each item being hunted up alphabetically, one after the other – Abraham, see Lincoln . . . Lincoln, see Civil War . . . Civil War, see United States . . . United States, see America . . . America, see American History . . . American History, see also Christopher Columbus, New England, Pocahontas, George Washington . . . the thing will finally come to rest somehow or other with the dial pointing at: See Abraham Lincoln.

But there is worse even than that. A certain kind of conscientious author enters only proper names, but he indexes them every time they come into his book, no matter how they come in, and how unimportant is the context. Here is the result in the index under the Letter N:

Napoleon – 17, 26, 41, 75, 109, 110, 156, 213, 270, 380, 460.

You begin to look them up. Here are the references:

Page 17 – “wore his hair like Napoleon.”

Page 26 – “in the days of Napoleon.”

Page 41 – “as fat as Napoleon.”

Page 75 – “not so fat as Napoleon.”

Page 109 – “was a regular Napoleon at Ping-pong.”

Page 110 – “was not a Napoleon at Ping-pong.”

Page 156 – “Napoleon’s hat.”

Pages 213, 270, 380, 460, not investigated. Equally well meant but perhaps even harder to bear is the peculiar kind of Index that appears in a biography. The name of the person under treatment naturally runs through almost every page, and the conscientious index-maker tries to keep pace with him. This means that many events of his life got shifted out of their natural order. Here is the general effect:

John Smith: born, p. 1; born again, p. 1; father born, p. 2; grandfather born, p. 3; mother born, p. 4; mother’s family leave Ireland, p. 5; still leaving it, p. 6; school, p. 7; more school, p. 8; dies of pneumonia and enters Harvard, p. 9; eldest son born, p. 10; marries, p. 11, back at school, p. 12; dead, p. 13; takes his degree, p. 14 . . .

Suppose, then, you decide to get away from all these difficulties and make a Perfect Index in which each item shall carry with it an explanation, a sort of little epitome of what is to be found in the book. The reader consulting the volume can open the Index, look at a reference, and decide whether or not he needs to turn the subject up in the full discussion in the book. A really good Index will in most cases itself give the information wanted. There you have, so to speak, the Perfect Index.

Why I know about this is because I am engaged at present in making such an Index in connection with a book on gardening, which I am writing for next summer. To illustrate what is meant I may be permitted to quote the opening of the book and its conversion into Index Material:

As Abraham Lincoln used to say, when you want to do gardening, you’ve go to take your coat off, a sentiment shared by his fellow-enthusiast, the exiled Napoleon, who, after conquering all Europe, retaining only the sovereignty of the spade in his garden plot at St. Helena, longed only for more fertilizer.

As arranged for the Index, the gist, or essential part of this sentence, the nucleus, so to speak, appears thus:

Abraham Lincoln: habit of saying things, p. 1; wants to do gardening, p. 1; takes his coat off, p. 1; his enthusiasm, p. 1; compared with Napoleon, p. 1.

Coat: taken off by Abraham Lincoln, p. 1.

Gardening: Lincoln’s views on, p. 1; need of taking coat off, for, p. 1; Napoleon’s enthusiasm over, p. 1; see also under spade, sovereignty, St. Helena.

Napoleon: his exile, p. 1; conquers Europe, p. 1; enthusiastic over gardening, p. 1; compared with Lincoln, p. 1; retains sovereignty of spade, p.1; longs for fertilizer, p. 1; plots at St. Helena, p. 1, see also Europe, St. Helena, fertilizer, seed catalogue, etc. etc.

That’s as far as I’ve got with the sentence. I still have to write up sovereignty, spade, sentiment, share, St. Helena, and everything after S. There’s no doubt it’s the right method, but it takes time somehow to get the essential nucleus of the gist and express it. I see why it is easier to do the other thing. But then sin is always easier than righteousness. See also under Hell, road to. Intentions (Good) and Pavement.

TOC     INDEX

L’envoi:

A Salutation
Across the Sea

THE BRITISH ARE AN ODD PEOPLE. They have their own ways and they stick to them, and I like every one of them.

They have their own way of talking. When an Englishman has anything surprising to tell he never exaggerates it, never overstates it – in fact, he makes as little of it as possible. And a Scotsman doesn’t even mention it. An Englishman can speak of a play of Shakespeare as “rather good,” and of grand opera as “not half bad.” He can call Haile Selassie a “rather decent little chap,” and the President of the United States a “thoroughly good sort.”

Sometimes this modesty of speech is perhaps carried a little too far. An Englishman when he has to talk about himself doesn’t refer to himself as “I,” but calls himself “one.” In my club the other day a newly arrived Englishman said, “One finds Canada simply wonderful; of course one had seen India and all that, but here one finds everything so different.” What could I answer except to say that one was terribly glad to know that one liked Canada that if one would take a drink with one, one would push the bell. Yet I like that way of talking. It’s better than the everlasting “I – I – I.” Only I think that next time I’ll call myself “two.”

A Scotsman of course doesn’t use “one.” He simply calls himself “a body.” He’s not referring to his soul before strangers.

But this modest British way of talking without making things sound too big has the advantage that it keeps the world in its right focus. On our side of the water we get so filled up with admiration, with such a sense of the bigness of potentates and magnates, that we feel small ourselves. We wouldn’t know how to behave if we met the Negus of Abyssinia or the Magnum of Magnesia. They’re all one to the Britisher – Rajahs, and Rams and Jams, he calls them all “Jimmy.”

THE BRITISH ARE AN ODD PEOPLE; even in their recreation. They have their own games, and they carry them all round the world with them. When other nations go among natives they bring a whole collection of decrees and ordinances. The Englishman just brings a briar-root pipe and a cricket bag. He opens it and he says. “Now this is cricket and I’ll show you Johnnies how to play; Ali Baba, you just roll out that coconut matting and, Ibn Swat, you stick in these wickets.” Two seasons later Ali Baba is taken “home” to play for Hants against Bucks, or Potts against Crooks – anyway, another quarter million square miles is annexed.

THE BRITISH ARE AN ODD PEOPLE. They are people of high character; and yet they don’t have any particular moral code to guide them. They just go by whether anything is “the thing” or not; if it’s “the thing,” you do it; if it’s not, you don’t. Strangers often wonder, for example, why the opposition in Parliament doesn’t make a row about this or that. But the answer is that it would hardly be “the thing.” The whole of the British Government is carried on in that way. A member rises in the House and asks a question on which seems to hang the whole life of the nation. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Horticulture answers that ministers know it but won’t say it. Then it’s not “the thing” to ask any more. In the United States they need a whole constitution of thousands and thousands of words, and they get tangled up in the clauses. In British constitution is just “the thing.” Of course, there are no rules to guide private morals. I mean to say one learnt one’s catechism when one was young, but as a matter of fact it is rather the thing to forget it.

YES, THE BRITISH ARE AN ODD PEOPLE; they have their own ways in eating and drinking. And I like them. Take their afternoon tea. They have it at the South Pole, and they serve it half-way through a naval engagement. And what, after all, is more charming than the tea-tray with its white cloth, the silver teapot, the delicate cups and the thin bread and butter? And what better excuse for slipping in a real drink, just after. Sometimes I think that’s what it’s for. Only you must be careful not to get absent-minded, and when your hostess asks, “How do you take yours?” you mustn’t answer, “Off the shelf,” or “Plenty of soda, please.” Or, no – it wouldn’t matter. She’d understand and give it to you.

OH YES, THE BRITISH ARE AN ODD PEOPLE – and I like their odd ways. Well, after all, why not? I mean to say, one is English oneself; one was born in Hampshire.

Eh, what!

TOC     INDEX

Happy Stories:

Just to Laugh At

(1943)

~

Preface
Mr. McCoy Sails for Fiji
Pawn to King’s Four
Impervious to Women
The Jones’s Enchanted Castle
Mr. Alcorn Improves Himself
Clouds that Rolled By
Angel Pond, Lure of the North
Cooking for Victory
Good News! A New Party!
The Life of Lea and Perrins
A Morning Off
Mr. Plumter, B.A., Revisits the Old Shop
Allegory Island

Damon and Pythias, Barristers, Solicitors, Etc.

Boom Times

Mariposa Moves On

Introduction
The Happy Warrior
National Debt, National Blessing
The Sultan Speaks from the Grave
Have You Got Even One Cent?
The Righteous Indignation of Angus McCordell
The Chairman’s Walking Stick
Going! Going! Gone!
A New Heaven and a New Earth

Preface

All the stories in this book have, or are meant to have, one element in common. They are not true to life. The people in them laugh too much; they cry too easily; they lie too hard. The light is all false, it’s too bright, and the manners and customs are all wrong. The times and places are confused.

There is no need, therefore, to give the usual assurance that none of the characters in the book are real persons. Of course not; this is not real life. It is better.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Mr. McCoy Sails for Fiji

Sometimes you get a lesson in life. Something occurs to show you that your career, after all, no matter how successful, hasn’t amounted to so much – is, in fact, a pretty selfish business. How much did you ever do for anybody beside yourself?

You get this feeling when brought into contact with men you knew early in life, and lost from sight – when you find such men with success twice as big as your own, and a life behind them filled with all sorts of things done for other people . . . and with that, a complete modesty about it all, almost an unconsciousness of what they have done.

—

I felt all that when I met – or rather re-met after years and years – my friend McIvor McCoy. It was out on the big grass lawn of the Empress Hotel – you know it, of course – in Victoria B.C., on such a lovely morning – but it’s always a lovely morning there – all flowers and springtime and the ruffled Pacific Ocean reaching away to eternity.

There stood McCoy, as easy and debonair as ever, with his old-time way of seeming balanced on his toes, swaying faintly in the light breeze, such a cheery, affable, nut-brown elderly man – old? Well, yes, I suppose, but with something of timeless youth still about him. Neatly but loosely dressed he was, in a suit of careless but expensive grey with little touches of an older fashion: a flower in his buttonhole, a signet ring, seals on his watch chain and the grey Homburg hat of years ago . . .

“Well, well,” he said, “well, well!” – and it sounded the pleasantest thing in the world to say – “Come and sit on this bench and let’s talk—”

“What a charming place,” he began, “and the ocean, how wonderful! I’ve just been congratulating the hotel manager” – he spoke with a certain dignity as of one whose congratulation meant something – “been congratulating the manager on the ocean.”

Now look at that. I would never have thought of congratulating the manager on the Pacific Ocean . . . I wouldn’t have realized that he put it there. Yet in a sense he did; he might have put the hotel a hundred miles inland in the bush . . .

It began to bring back McCoy to me. He was like that; always congratulating people on things – with the quiet dignity of a Scottish laird recognizing merit . . .

“And such a charming hotel,” he continued. “These wonderful corridors; I had quite a romp with some of the children in them this morning . . . I gave them all some candy.”

Now, there again. “Did you know them?” I asked. “No, no – just children in the hotel. There are always children in a hotel. That’s why I carry candy.”

Now, could I do that? Well, I guess not. How do you romp with children? What do you say first? It beat me.

—

“Let’s move to that other bench,” said Mr. McCoy, rising, “the one over there.”

“Why do we do that?” I asked; I saw no particular need to move.

“I’m interested in benches just now,” said Mr. McCoy . . . “I’ve invented a folding bench, a legless bench that folds up into a single piece . . . a total weight of five pounds . . . the only question is a matter of strain . . . now, sit at the very end . . .”

Then I remembered, of course, that McCoy, even from our college days, was an inventor. He took honour physics and mechanics and was always tinkering with inventions – queer inventions like this legless bench – a fireless cooker, and an iceless refrigerator, and a soundless telephone – things no one else would think of. I remember, even as a student he got five hundred dollars for an automatic electric street car bell, to ring immediately after they ran over anybody. There was quite a lot of talk about it but afterwards it was criticized – I forget why.

—

“And what a charming old town—” continued McCoy . . . “I went yesterday up that old street on the right behind us” – he waved his hand over his shoulder – “part of the original town, quite abandoned now – but such very interesting old people in the shops, many from Scotland, still wistful for the Hebrides. I gave them,” he said, “each an American dollar – to one poor old fellow, from Huish itself, the most wistful, I gave five.”

There it was again. I’d been up that street – to buy a notebook. I didn’t know they were wistful. I didn’t know they were worrying about the Hebrides. They seemed just old people in old shops. If I’d known about the Hebrides I’d have given them – well, ten cents anyway . . .

Incidentally I realized that Mr. McCoy must be well off . . . Presently, when he began to tell me of all his inventions and of the people he’d met – the governments and ministers – I realized that of course he must be, simply rolling in it. Imagine sitting with the Pope discussing the heating of the Vatican with explosive magnesium! I don’t mean that he paraded these things; that was his least idea. They just came out in conversation. As I say, imagine sitting down with the Hospodar of Transylvania – I’ll swear I never knew who he was – to discuss blowing up the Iron Gates of the Danube to supply electricity to the Balkans.

But that was the way it was with Mr. McCoy. You see I call him Mr. McCoy, in writing, because he seemed so dignified. Of course I called him McIvor when we spoke, though in a way he seemed a new and strange person.

I was certainly impressed, even at the very start, when I asked him where he was bound for and he answered cheerily and casually, “Fiji, very possibly, but I’m not quite decided.”

Then I realized that there was a big steamer lying at the dock down below – it’s only a couple of hundred yards – with rags of smoke coming out of the funnels, dull raucous blowings from time to time, and that moving of cabs, trucks and little figures on the dock that indicates a departing liner.

“Fiji,” he said, “but I’m not certain . . .”

“Don’t you have to have a passport?”

He laughed easily.

“I carry plenty of them,” he said. “They let me have all I want . . .”

Here was another touch of unconscious importance, but no affectation about it.

But it was his mention of the Hebrides that had brought him back most clearly to my mind, as I recalled him from our college days.

Let me explain:

We were classmates for years. My old friend’s name is not really McCoy, but McIvor McCoy, written not with a little c but with an apostrophe and indeed properly spelt McQuohy. The McCoys came originally from Huish – or Huosh – in the Inner Hebrides, that is, after they moved in from the Outer Hebrides. The family escutcheon is two thistles and a dagger with the motto Creagh-na-Skaw. The present head of the clan is Lord Coy who is, of course, the McCoy, though oddly enough he is not the McIvor. His eldest son is. Their present seat is McCoy Castle which hangs on the edge of a skaw in the Inverness country. Tourists pay a shilling to go through the grounds and walk out on the stone platform that overlooks the steep drop of the skaw. Some pay more. One or two, it is said, who didn’t pay, have fallen over. The family motto Creagh-na-Skaw is cut in the stone. It means Watch-Your-Step. But it’s Gaelic. They do say that in the old Highland days – but of course that’s just talk.

It goes without saying that the McCoys were out in the “Forty Five,” every man of them, out and back. My friend is very proud of a dirk of the Young Pretender that they have at McCoy Castle; they have his dirk, and his gold watch and chain, and his gold pencil, and his cuff-links. The Young Pretender, it seems, while in hiding in Scotland, spent a night at McCoy Castle.

—

You will wonder how I could remember all these details. But they all came back to me in a flood of memory when I met McCoy. . . . This used to be his talk at college – so much so, that the other students used to like to take a rise out of him, ask him if he’d heard lately from Lord Coy, and how the Duke of Inverness was keeping, and rag him about McCoy Castle.

McIvor never saw it. He had too much Highland dignity . . .

So, naturally, I found myself beginning to laugh at the recollection of it all, and saying,

“Have you ever seen your kinsman, Lord Coy, in your travels?”

“Oh, yes,” he answered. “I’ve been at McCoy Castle several times. The first time I sent Lord Coy a salmon rod with a reel I’d invented which he was good enough to accept . . . He invited me to Coy Castle – that is, I came with the rod and he invited me in . . . I came back later and brought him an exact replica of the Pretender’s gold watch, which I asked him to accept.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“He did,” said Mr. McCoy, with dignity, “as head of the clan. He was delighted with the workmanship. He said that the only way to distinguish the original from the replica was that one had a chain and the other had not . . . I sent him a chain from London – without, of course, any forewarning, so as to forestall all refusal.”

“Did it forestall it?”

“It did,” said Mr. McCoy . . . “We’ll shift, if you don’t mind, to that further bench . . .”

Then he went on talking of his own prompting, as it seemed.

. . . “Once again I went to Coy Castle, bringing with me a valiseful of high explosive, of very high explosive; and boring tools.”

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “What for?”

“I showed Lord Coy a plan for damming the river below the skaw, blowing a tunnel under his castle and driving fifty thousand hydro-electric volts right through it . . .”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“His Lordship,” said Mr. McCoy, choosing his words with care, “was tremendously impressed. He at once took me out on the stone parapet that overhangs the ravine. I showed him the method of a safety clutch that could be installed to prevent accident. We came in again . . . He immediately, that very night, had a man take me to Edinburgh to look up the records . . . The man, by mistake, took me clear to London . . .”

“And what came of it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Mr. McCoy, “nothing. That often happens.” A momentary shadow passed over his face.

—

I realized that, after all, the life of an inventor must have its trials. Think of that dull Scottish nobleman. Utterly unaware of progress. McCoy offers to blow up his castle. Does he see it? No. I more than suspected – I am inclined to see through things of this sort pretty easily that it was not by mistake that the man took Mr. McCoy all the way to London.

“That was too bad,” I said.

“No, no, oh, no,” said Mr. McCoy, recovering himself in that quick happy way he had . . . “It was of no consequence. In any case I was just due to start for Holland . . .”

“Holland?” I said.

“The Zuyder Zee,” he answered. “You may have read of the recovery of the flooded land of Holland where the Zuyder Zee broke in, hundreds of years ago.”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“It was recovered,” he said, “in polders by the sinking of caissons banded together with a welded network.”

Technical terms flowed easily from Mr. McCoy . . . What a wonderful thing it must be, to be an engineer! What a lot they know.

“That was my work,” Mr. McCoy continued, “all mine. I brought the plans over in a sealed tube . . . It was stolen . . . or rather not stolen . . . taken at the Customs and kept by the Government.”

“What could you do?” I asked.

“I could get no redress . . . reasons of state . . . I saw Mynheer Van Ploop, the Minister President; he said it had to be . . . He was most affable but could do nothing . . . I asked if I might have an audience with the Queen . . . Impossible . . . I thought perhaps a little diplomacy . . . I asked leave to present Her Majesty with a beaten silver soup tureen, a large one . . .”

“Would she take it?”

“Not in person. Mr. Van Ploop presented it . . . She was most gracious; she has, you know, that plain almost rough way of all the family of Orange – ‘Vooksillig,’ they call it in Dutch. We have no English for it. She said, ‘Where’s the spoon?’ So of course I bought Mr. Van Ploop a large spoon . . .”

“Did he give it to her?”

“Oh, yes, he told me so himself. In fact, he was laughing about having paid the express on it out of his own pocket – till I stopped him . . . He was really most considerate . . . Had me taken across the frontier to avoid all danger.”

“Good heavens!” I said. I began to see that life among the courts and chanceries of Europe is not easy.

To think how little they appreciate science! How little they care for progress. A man like McCoy having to sneak across their frontiers.

“You seem to have been treated pretty badly over there,” I said.

“Oh, no,” he answered, “not at all – or perhaps only once.”

“Was that when you were called in to heat the Vatican?”

“Oh, no,” protested Mr. McCoy, “His Holiness was most delightful . . . I was called in – I must be fair – not really called in – I got in, on a laisser entrer from the American Secretary . . . His Holiness was delightful . . . I explained to him my proposal for heating the Vatican by explosions of magnesium – in Latin, of course – I spoke in Latin entirely . . . The dear old man sat and nodded his head so gently, merely saying hic . . . hoc. But Cardinal Rampolla felt it was too much for him . . . He took me by the arm and simply insisted – in English, excellent English – on my going out . . . Oh, no, they were all delightful at the Vatican. In fact I was escorted under a papal guard to the Serbian frontier . . .”

“But that magnesium stuff – that sounds very wonderful. Doesn’t the Pope understand Latin?”

“The word explosio,” said Mr. McCoy, “it may have mislead him. They so often have bombs carried in . . . But of course the thing is wonderful.”

He was off again in his technical terms, more than I could follow, yet I am certain marvellously exact. That, it seems, is the idea about Fiji. Did you know – I didn’t – that Fiji has the greatest natural magnesium springs in the world? And that these, if they can be turned to run over uranium ore, will solve the problem of the liberation of atomic energy for industrial power . . . Mr. McCoy intends to show the British High Commissioner at Fiji that with one teaspoonful of radiumized magnesium he can blow up Government House . . .

To think that Mr. McCoy has carried secrets like that all round Europe without recognition . . . And that reminded me . . .

“Where did you say, McIvor, you were actually mistreated – what was that?”

“Let us move,” he said, “to the seat behind that trellis.” He seemed for some reason to look over his shoulder as he said it . . . “That was in Belgrade.” He paused, with the shadow on his face.

“What happened?”

“I was kidnapped.” He paused again and then went on. “My plan had been to blow in the Iron Gates (the great rocks) of the Danube, thus creating unlimited power . . . I had made certain experiments with high explosive near the Gates themselves in the evenings . . . but the peasants are suspicious . . . I had even tried to interest those in control of the upper waters – the Ban of Dalmatia – I gave him a Smith & Wesson revolver, and the Hospodar of Transylvania – I gave him – let me see, yes – a five-bladed jacknife . . .”

“Well, what happened?”

“Finally I went to see Mr. Veryitch, the Prime Minister . . . I must admit his manner was charming; he gave me a cigarette.”

“Good for him; and I bet you gave him a silver samovar, eh?”

“Indeed, no,” said Mr. McCoy. “You little know the Serbs if you think that. They’re a very proud people, especially men like Mr. Veryitch whose family have been Royal Cuspidors for a thousand years. You can’t give watches and jewels and presents to them. I gave Mr. Veryitch five hundred dollars in American bills. It was all he would take. In fact it was all I had.”

“Well—”

“Next morning I was kidnapped – kidnapped while I was feeding the swans in the public park – a new idea I’d worked out of feeding swans with a dust of compressed oxygen . . .”

Mr. McCoy paused. The recollection seemed painful . . . He got up and walked to the end of the trellis and looked around the corner of the leaves. Then he sat down again. I didn’t like to question him. It seemed amazing that Europe, including people like the Serbs that we think the world of, should have been so blind.

It was some little time before Mr. McCoy spoke again. The shadow had fallen again upon his face – a sort of queer perplexity . . . such as one sees sometimes on the face of a puzzled child . . . indeed it made him look quite young again.

“It was six months before I could get out of Serbia . . . Mr. Veryitch must have heard of it . . . at any rate he sent me under escort, for security’s sake, not only through Serbia but right across to a channel port . . . I thought it wise to travel under assumed names . . . in fact, I assumed several . . . the escort acquiesced in it entirely . . . I’ve since found it very useful . . .”

Mr. McCoy seemed trailing off into memories and lapses of silence. Then he began again with something of his own animation.

“In London, the Home Secretary was most concerned, most helpful. He thought that the only way to avoid a European complication would be to secrete me for some time in the country . . . I gave him a cigar. With him, I remember, that morning was Sir John Seeley – later, you know, Lord Mottistone. I gave him a pocketbook with a map of Hampshire – he comes from there, you know – he was delighted with it. He said he would never have known it was Hampshire. Perhaps it wasn’t. I got it in Serbia.”

Mr. McCoy went and looked round the trellis again. Perhaps it was the steamer. At any rate a long sonorous whistle was blowing . . .

“One moment,” said Mr. McCoy, and with that he slipped sideways along the trellis and into the hotel somehow by the back . . . At any rate he disappeared . . . I waited . . . The steamer whistle was blowing again.

I came round back on to the lawn . . . As I did so, I saw two men hurrying across the grass towards me. I didn’t like the look of either of them. I was quick enough to grasp at once what it might mean; if this was another attempt to kidnap Mr. McCoy, I wanted nothing to do with it.

At any rate the men looked exactly it. One of them was in the dress of an hotel attendant, a disguise, of course, only too easy to assume and seen through at once. The other wore a sort of pretence of a police inspector’s uniform, a very good imitation but transparent enough also as he had no number on his neck and no badge – yet I will admit that when he reached me and spoke, his voice was certainly well schooled for the part.

“You were with a gentleman in grey, sir?” he asked.

I hesitated what to do; but supposed that all I had to do was to answer truthfully but give no extra information, so I said yes.

“Can you tell me where he is now?”

“No,” I said, “I can’t.”

Yet I thought at that moment I could see an open carriage driving from the hotel to the dock, and in it, I was almost certain, was Mr. McCoy . . .

“Did he tell you where he was going?” persisted the man, and he added, “I may tell you that it’s only his friends who are looking for him.”

That was a little too thin.

“No,” I said, “not in definite terms. We were talking of other things.”

“Are you aware,” the man went on, “that you were talking with the Hospodar of Transylvania travelling incognito as the Ban of Dalmatia?”

He spoke with a sort of sneer that made me angry.

“No,” I said, “and if you want to know it, the gentleman is nothing of that sort at all, but an old college friend of mine that I’ve known for thirty years. He has no connection with Europe and is most likely going to Fiji.”

“Fiji!” they both exclaimed, “Fiji! We should have thought of it.” And off they went down the slope of the grass, running for the dock. I could see the gangway of the steamer being hauled in. Mr. McCoy I couldn’t see.

They failed to make it. I saw the steamer pull slowly away from the dock. I expected to see it stopped. If the man were really an inspector surely he could have had it stopped . . . But no . . . Away, away it went . . . till it was a cloud of smoke away out on the horizon.

—

When I went in to lunch I looked over the steamer passenger list as given in the morning paper. Mr. McCoy’s name was not there. But it occurred to me that that didn’t mean anything. If Mr. McCoy only got on board at the last minute his name wouldn’t be on the list. But, oddly enough, the other fellow’s name was – there it was large as life – the Hereditary Ban of Dalmatia, passenger for Fiji.

It set me thinking – almost.

TOC     INDEX

Pawn to King’s Four

(There is no readier escape from the ills of life than in a game of chess.—Francis Bacon, and Eggs.)

“Pawn to King’s Four,” I said as I sat down to the chess table.

“Pawn to King’s Four, eh?” said Letherby, squaring himself comfortably to the old oak table, his elbows on its wide margin, his attitude that of the veteran player. “Pawn to King’s Four,” he repeated. “Aha, let’s see!”

It’s the first and oldest move in chess, but from the way Letherby said it you’d think it was as new as yesterday . . . Chess players are like that . . . “Pawn to King’s Four,” he repeated. “You don’t mind if I take a bit of a think over it?”

“No, no,” I said, “not at all. Play as slowly as you like. I want to get a good look round this wonderful room.”

It was the first time I had ever been in the Long Room of the Chess Club – and I sat entranced with the charm and silence of the long wainscotted room – its soft light, the blue tobacco smoke rising to the ceiling – the open grate fires burning – the spaced-out tables, the players with bent heads, unheeding our entry and our presence . . . all silent except here and there a little murmur of conversation, that rose only to hush again.

“Pawn to King’s Four” – repeated Letherby – “let me see!”

It was, I say, my first visit to the Chess Club; indeed I had never known where it was except that it was somewhere downtown, right in the heart of the city, among the big buildings. Nor did I know Letherby himself very well, though I had always understood he was a chess player. He looked like one. He had the long, still face, the unmoving eyes, the leathery, indoor complexion that marks the habitual chess player anywhere.

So, quite naturally, when Letherby heard that I played chess he invited me to come round some night to the Chess Club . . . “I didn’t know you played,” he said. “You don’t look like a chess player – I beg your pardon, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

—

So there we were at the table. The Chess Club, as I found, was right downtown, right beside the New Commercial Hotel; in fact, we met by agreement in the rotunda of the hotel . . . a strange contrast – the noise, the lights, the racket of the big rotunda, the crowding people, the call of the bellboys – and this unknown haven of peace and silence, somewhere just close above and beside it.

I have little sense of location and direction so I can’t say just how you get to the Club – up a few floors in the elevator and along a corridor (I think you must pass out of the building here) and then up a queer little flight of stairs, up another little stairway and with that all at once you come through a little door, a sort of end-corner door in the room and there you are in the Long Room . . .

“Pawn to King’s Four,” said Letherby, decided at last, moving the piece forward . . . “I thought for a minute of opening on the Queen’s side, but I guess not.”

All chess players think of opening on the Queen’s side but never do. Life ends too soon.

“Knight to Bishop’s Three,” I said.

“Knight to Bishop’s Three, aha!” exclaimed Letherby, “oho!” and went into a profound study . . . It’s the second oldest move in chess; it was old three thousand years ago in Persepolis . . . but to the real chess player it still has all the wings of the morning.

So I could look round again, still fascinated with the room.

“It’s a beautiful room, Letherby,” I said.

“It is,” he answered, his eyes on the board, “yes . . . yes . . . It’s really part of the old Roslyn House that they knocked down to make the New Commercial . . . It was made of a corridor and a string of bedrooms turned into one big room. That’s where it got the old wainscotting and those old-fashioned grate fires.”

I had noticed them, of course, at once – the old-fashioned grates, built flat into the wall, the coal bulging and glowing behind bars, with black marble at the side and black marble for the mantel above . . . There were three of them, one at the side, just near us, one down the room and one across the end . . . But from none of them came noise or crackle – just a steady warm glow. Beside the old-fashioned grate stood the long tongs, and the old-fashioned poker with the heavy square head that went with it.

“Pawn to Queen’s Third,” said Letherby.

Nor in all the room was there a single touch of equipment that was less than of fifty years ago, a memory of a half century . . . Even the swinging doors, panelled with Russian leather, the main entrance on the right hand at the furthest end, swung soundlessly, on their hinges as each noiseless member entered with a murmured greeting.

“Your move,” said Letherby. “Bishop to Bishop’s Four? Right.” . . . Most attractive of all, perhaps, was a little railed-in place at the side near the fire place, all done in old oak . . . something between a bar and a confessional, with coffee over low blue flames, and immaculate glasses on shelves . . . lemons in a bag . . . Round it moved a waiter, in a dinner jacket, the quietest, most unobstrusive waiter one ever saw . . . coffee to this table . . . cigars to that . . . silent work with lemons behind the rails . . . a waiter who seemed to know what the members wanted without their asking . . . This must have been so, for he came over to our table presently and set down long glasses of Madeira – so old, so brown, so aromatic that there seemed to go up from it with the smoke clouds, a vision of the sunny vineyards beside Funchal . . . Such at least were the fancies that my mind began to weave around this enchanted place . . . And the waiter, too, I felt there must be some strange romance about him; no one could have a face so mild, yet with the stamp of tragedy upon it . . .

I must say – in fact, I said to Letherby – I felt I’d like to join the club, if I could. He said, oh, yes, they took in new members. One came in only three years ago.

—

“Queen’s Knight to Bishop’s Third,” said Letherby with a deep sigh. I knew he had been thinking of something that he daren’t risk. All chess is one long regret.

—

We played on like that for – it must have been half an hour – anyway we played four moves each. To me, of course, the peace and quiet of the room was treat enough . . . but to Letherby, as I could see, the thing was not a sensation of peace but a growing excitement, nothing still or quiet about it; a rush, struggle – he knew that I meant to strike in on the King’s side. Fool! he was thinking, that he hadn’t advanced the Queen’s Pawn another square . . . he had blocked his Bishop and couldn’t Castle . . . You know, if you are a chess player, the desperate feeling that comes with a blocked Bishop . . . Look down any chess room for a man who’s hands are clenched and you’ll know that he can’t Castle.

So it was not still life for Letherby, and for me, perhaps after awhile I began to feel that it was perhaps just a little too still . . . The players moved so little . . . they spoke so seldom, and so low . . . their heads so grey under the light . . . especially, I noticed, a little group at tables in the left-hand corner.

“They don’t seem to talk much there,” I said.

“No,” Letherby answered without even turning his head, “they’re blind. Pawn to Queen’s Four.”

—

Blind! Why, of course. Why not? Blind people, I realized, play chess as easily as any other people when they use little pegged boards for it . . . Now that I looked I could see – the aged fingers lingering and rambling on the little pegs.

“You take the Pawn?” said Letherby.

“Yes,” I said and went on thinking about the blind people . . . and how quiet they all were . . . I began to recollect a play that was once in New York – people on a steamer wasn’t it? People standing at a bar . . . and you realized presently they were all dead . . . It was a silly idea, but somehow the Long Room began to seem like that . . . at intervals I could even hear the ticking of the clock on the mantel.

I was glad when the waiter came with a second glass of Madeira. It warmed one up . . .

“That man seems a wonderful waiter,” I said.

“Fred?” said Letherby. “Oh, yes, he certainly is . . . He looks after everything – he’s devoted to the club.”

“Been here long?”

“Bishop to Bishop’s Four,” said Letherby . . . He didn’t speak for a little while. Then he said, “Why practically all his life – except, poor fellow, he had a kind of tragic experience. He put in ten years in jail.”

“For what?” I asked, horrified.

“For murder,” said Letherby.

“For murder?”

“Yes,” repeated Letherby, shaking his head, “poor fellow, murder . . . Some sudden, strange impulse that seized him . . . I shouldn’t say jail. He was in the Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Your move.”

“Criminal Asylum!” I said. “What did he do?”

“Killed a man; in a sudden rage . . . Struck him over the head with a poker.”

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “When was that? In this city?”

“Here in the club,” said Letherby, “in this room.”

“What?” I gasped. “He killed one of the members?”

“Oh, no!” Letherby said reassuringly. “Not a member. The man was a guest. Fred didn’t know him . . . just an insane impulse . . . As soon as they let him out, the faithful fellow came right back here. That was last year. Your move.”

—

We played on. I didn’t feel so easy . . . It must have been several moves after that that I saw Fred take the poker and stick its head into the coals and leave it there. I watched it gradually turning red. I must say I didn’t like it.

“Did you see that?” I said. “Did you see Fred stick the poker in the coals?”

“He does it every night,” said Letherby, “at ten; that means it must be ten o’clock . . . You can’t move that; you’re in check.”

“What’s it for?” I asked.

“I take your Knight,” Letherby said. Then there was a long pause – Letherby kept his head bent over the board. Presently he murmured, “Mulled beer,” and then looked up and explained. “This is an old-fashioned place – some of the members like mulled beer – you dip the hot poker in the tankard. Fred gets it ready at ten – your move.”

—

I must say it was a relief . . . I was able to turn to the game again and enjoy the place . . . or I would have done so except for a sort of commotion that there was presently at the end of the room. Somebody seemed to have fallen down . . . others were trying to pick him up . . . Fred had hurried to them . . .

Letherby turned half round in his seat.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s only poor old Colonel McGann. He gets these fits . . . but Fred will look after him; he has a room in the building. Fred’s devoted to him; he got Fred out of the Criminal Asylum. But for him Fred wouldn’t be here tonight. Queen’s Rook to Bishop’s Square.”

I was not sure just how grateful I felt to Colonel McGann . . .

—

A few moves after that another little incident bothered me, or perhaps it was just that my nerves were getting a little affected . . . one fancied things . . . and the infernal room, at once after the little disturbance, settled down to the same terrible quiet . . . it felt like eternity . . .

Anyway – there came in through the swinging doors a different kind of man, brisk alert, and with steel blue eyes and a firm mouth . . . He stood looking up and down the room, as if looking for some one.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Why that’s Dr. Allard.”

“What?” I said. “The alienist?”

“Yes, he’s the head of the Criminal Lunatic Asylum . . . He’s a member here; comes in every night; in fact, he goes back and forward between this and the Asylum. He says he’s making comparative studies. Check.”

The alienist caught sight of Letherby and came to our table. Letherby introduced me. Dr. Allard looked me hard and straight in the eyes; he paused before he spoke. “Your first visit here?” he said.

“Yes . . .” I murmured, “that is, yes.”

“I hope it won’t be the last,” he said. Now what did he mean by that?

Then he turned to Letherby.

“Fred came over to see me today,” he said. “Came of his own volition . . . I’m not quite sure . . . We may not have been quite wise.” The doctor seemed thinking . . . “However, no doubt he’s all right for awhile apart from sudden shock . . . just keep an eye . . . But what I really came to ask is, has Joel Linton been in tonight?”

“No . . .”

“I hope he doesn’t come. He’d better not . . . If he does, get someone to telephone to me.” And with that the doctor was gone.

“Joel Linton.” I said, “Why, he’s arrested.”

“Not yet . . . they’re looking for him. You’re in check.”

“I beg your pardon,” I said. Of course I’d read – everybody had – about the embezzlement. But I’d no idea that a man like Joel Linton could be a member of the Chess Club – I always thought, I mean people said, that he was the sort of desperado type.

“He’s a member?” I said, my hand on the pieces.

“You can’t move that, you’re still in check. Yes, he’s a member though he likes mostly to stand and watch. Comes every night. Somebody said he was coming here tonight just the same. He says he’s not going to be taken alive. He comes round half past ten. It’s about his time . . . that looks like mate in two moves.”

—

My hands shook on the pieces. I felt that I was done with the Chess Club . . . Anyway I like to get home early . . . so I was just starting to say . . . that I’d abandon the game, when what happened happened so quickly that I’d no more choice about it.

“That’s Joel Linton now,” said Letherby, and in he came through the swing doors, a hard-looking man, but mighty determined . . . He hung his overcoat on a peg, and as he did so, I was sure I saw something bulging in his coat pocket – eh? He nodded casually about the room. And then started moving among the tables, edging his way toward ours.

“I guess, if you don’t mind,” I began . . . But that is as far as I got. That was when the police came in, two constables and an inspector.

I saw Linton dive his hand towards his pocket.

“Stand where you are, Linton,” the inspector called . . . Then right at that moment I saw the waiter, Fred, seize the hand-grip of the poker . . .

“Don’t move, Linton,” called the inspector; he never saw Fred moving toward him . . .

Linton didn’t move. But I did. I made a quick back bolt for the little door behind me . . . down the little stairway . . . and down the other little staircase, and along the corridor and back into the brightly lighted hotel rotunda, just the same as when I left it – noise and light and bellboys, and girls at the newsstand selling tobacco and evening papers . . . just the same, but oh, how different! For peace of mind, for the joy of life – give me a rotunda, and make it as noisy as ever you like.

—

I read all about it next morning in the newspapers. Things always sound so different in the newspaper, beside a coffee pot and a boiled egg. Tumults, murders, floods – all smoothed out. So was this. Arrest Made Quietly at Chess Club, it said. Linton Offers No Resistance . . . Members Continue Game Undisturbed. Yes, they would, the damned old gravestones . . . Of Fred it said nothing . . .

—

A few days later I happened to meet Letherby. “Your application is all right,” he said. “They’re going to hurry it through. You’ll get in next year . . .”

But I’ve sent a resignation in advance; I’m joining the Badminton Club and I want to see if I can’t get into the Boy Scouts or be a Girl Guide.

TOC     INDEX

Impervious
to Women

“I look on myself,” said Baffy Sims, “as a man impervious to women.” He wasn’t really a man; he was a fourth year undergraduate. But it’s often hard to tell them apart.

He said this to me one afternoon on the campus just after lectures, but of course I’d heard Baffy Sims say it ever so many times before. Indeed, it was part of a set of fixed ideas; that he was impervious to women; that women were after him; but that they couldn’t get him. He always felt and said that a fellow had to be pretty careful. He kept away from clergymen’s houses, full of daughters, and never went to teas, lawn parties, nor any fool stuff of that sort. No, sir! Not for him. In fact, that was why we called him “Baffy” Sims, because he used to say that he wished he could go up and live in Baffin Land where there were no women.

All men, as they get old, say things over and over. Sims started young. So we called him “Baffinland” Sims, and then just “Baffy.” You know how names get stuck on a fellow at college and stay there. No, no, never mind telling me about the funny ones you remember from your own college. Keep that for another treat.

At any rate this was the afternoon of the evening when Baffy was to read his paper to the Physico-Mathematical Society on the Natural Inferiority of Women.

“Be sure to come,” he said. “I’ve got the paper nearly finished. It’s a corker. I may give it to the Atlantic.”

“Oh, don’t give it,” I said. “Make them pay for it.”

“Well, anyway,” he said, “it’s a corker.”

Just then there came scurrying to us such a pretty girl, with a great armful of books tied up with a string. You and I would have noticed at once her beautiful violet eyes, but of course a fellow like Baffy wouldn’t see them.

“Baffy!” she said, “I’ve just caught you in time! Look, I’m going out with Walter to play golf, so you take these books and sling them in at my house as you go by. Tell mother I’ll be late . . . If mother’s not there, go round to the back door and knock twice and Dinah’ll come . . . That’s good of you, Baffy.”

She was off, leaving Baffy standing there with the armful of books.

“Who,” I said with enthusiasm, “is that beautiful girl? Did you notice her eyes—”

“Eyes, hell,” he said. “I’m impervious to that sort of thing. That’s Pinkie Mordaunt, and I don’t go past her house and she knows it. It’s half a mile across the park. I told Mrs. Mordaunt last week to tell Pinkie I wouldn’t take her books home any more.”

“And what did she say?”

“I don’t think she quite understood. She said to just give them to Dinah without coming to the front door at all . . . and look now today, with my paper to finish . . . Oh, well, come along . . .”

We had hardly got started when another college girl came fluttering to him. “Baffy,” she said, “didn’t you hear me call? I was hunting you all over the campus.” She handed him a long envelope or rather she stuffed it under the string of Pinkie’s books. “Here they are,” she said. “I can’t work the damn things.”

“Quadratics, Dulcie?” said Baffy. Of course he was a real mathematician and could sense an equation even through an envelope.

“I don’t know what the hell they are,” Dulcie said. “They’re what he gave us today.”

A college girl always calls her professor simply “he.” Some of them are not, but that’s what they call them.

“I’ve got to hand them in at nine tomorrow. You’re certainly a real sport, Baffy.” “I’m not,” Baffy began angrily, but she was gone.

Things never happen singly, or even doubly. So I knew that when I saw a third girl with a bulldog on a leash that there was still more coming for Baffy.

“Lucky meeting you, Baffy,” she said.

“I can’t take him, Anastasia,” he said.

“Yes, you can,” she protested. “I want to play tennis with Billy Hyde and I’ve just no time to take Churchill home . . .”

“Look here, Anastasia, the last time I took Churchill . . .”

“Don’t be silly. Last time he hadn’t been fed properly – no wonder he bit that boy – anyway Churchill’s like that . . . Take him!” she said. And he did.

So that was that.

I’m not awfully keen on bulldogs. Oh, they’re faithful! I admit it – and quiet; a bulldog never bites. Oh, no – but I had to go another way anyway so I left Baffy with the dog.

But Baffy got even with them that night at the Physico-Mathematical Society when he read his paper on the Natural Inferiority of Women. They said it was a scorcher; and, mind you, they’re accustomed in that society to scorch something every week – Monarchy, Christianity, God – things like that. I understand that Baffy showed that women lacked not only brains, but also leadership. In fact he didn’t leave them a leg to – or, well, no, that’s not exactly the metaphor. I won’t say that.

—

Such was Baffy Sims’ path at college, impervious, as he said, to women. Not that there was anything mean-spirited about him. I don’t imply that for a minute . . . And, of course, he couldn’t help it if he knew a lot of girls and if they all called him Baffy. You see, his family had been in the city for ever so long and were well off and knew everybody. So of course the girls paid no attention to Baffy being impervious to women. To them he was just Baffy Sims.

—

Being well off, life was easy for Baffy in the material sense. He slid easily through Arts and through Law, a subject beyond the range of women, and slid easily as a barrister into a law business, since there was enough family and estate business to start it anyway . . .

But his views never changed . . .

“I’ve always felt impervious to women,” he would say, “ever since I was a boy at college.” He’d forgotten about being a man there . . .

But he was a pleasant fellow and life used him easily. Some people, clergymen’s wives, said that it was a pity he hadn’t married and that they must ask him up to tea . . . So you see there was something in his apprehension after all.

Anyway, his law practice opened out in pleasant and comfortable surroundings as I can testify.

“Come down and see my new offices some day,” he said. “I’ve got everything running fine.”

“It’ll have to be early in the morning,” I said.

“Early as you like,” he answered, “or come down with me at nine-thirty.”

So the next morning we arrived at the office – a pretty handsome place, I could see at the first glimpse through the open door – at 9:30 a.m. But Mrs. Murphy was still there. You know who Mrs. Murphy is – she’s that big woman with the scrubbing pail and brush who is always in a law office before it opens – at her biggest because she’s always on all fours and seen from the southwest . . .

“I can’t let yez in yet, Mr. Sims,” she said. “I’ve another half hour before I can let you have the office . . . Such a litter, such a dust. Now yous wait outside, half an hour, mebbe . . .

“No, no, Mrs. Murphy,” said Baffy, “never mind it now. It’ll do fine as it is . . .”

“I might give the offices a touch-up after five,” suggested Mrs. Murphy.

“Yes,” said Baffy, “that’s the idea,” and I heard the rustle of a dollar bill passing to Mrs. Murphy, where all rustle ended . . .

“Yes, five o’clock.”

“A fine woman,” said Baffy as we went into his luxurious offices and sat down. “A fine woman – devoted to her work. Do you know that this is the third morning running that she’s been working away overtime like that . . . of course, a woman in that class accepts leadership. That woman looks to me . . .”

“She does,” I said.

—

Baffy had hardly begun to show me the office fittings, the law books all in a row – the charm which even law has when young – when the new telephone sounded on the new desk . . .

“Yes, Miss Macarty,” said Baffy . . .

“Yes . . . can’t come to the office this morning, yes . . .”

“Why, certainly, Miss Macarty; yes . . .”

“Yes . . .”

“Your father’s foot? Miss Macarty, why, yes, Miss Macarty . . .”

“Much wiser, yes – take him to Muskoka, yes . . .”

“No, Miss Macarty . . .”

“Back Monday, yes, Miss Macarty, yes . . .”

“Your golf kit? . . . Get it at your house, yes, and send it to Muskoka . . . I prepay it? Yes, yes. See you Monday – good.”

—

“Miss Macarty,” he explained, “my secretary. It’s her father’s gout again. He’s a martyr to it. She won’t be down this morning because of it. I’m sorry; I’d like you to have met her. A fine girl, and I will say, devoted to her work, never misses – except of course for a thing like this . . . She’s her father’s sole support outside of what he has of his own.”

“And what about his gout?”

“Wretched business, isn’t it? Ever had it? Terribly painful . . . comes in sudden attacks . . .”

“And he’s got it again?”

“No,” said Baffy, “not yet. She wants to forestall it, but its coming on; she feels it. Often she knows it before he does. Two weeks ago she had to rush him to Preston Springs for the week-end. Last week she rushed him to the Buffalo Races, just in time to ward off an attack. Today she’s going to try to make Muskoka – the new hotel there – just in time. That’s why she wants me to get her golf kit and send it by express . . . I must remember . . .”

Mrs. Murphy appeared at the door.

“Them ladies,” she said, “is downstairs . . .”

“Tell them I’ll come and bring them up,” said Baffy hurriedly. “Now I’m sorry—”

“Clients?” I said. “I’ll get right out.”

“No,” he answered, “not exactly . . . It’s the Women’s Auxiliary Bazaar . . . they’re bringing tickets . . . They want me to take a block of two hundred . . . women always imagine that men have more leadership in getting tickets – in fact they said so yesterday . . . Perhaps you’ll buy one . . .”

“What’s it for?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Some damn thing.”

—

I saw quite a lot of Baffinland Sims that winter. He was prospering, as he deserved to do, good fellow, and life, except for his silly “impervious” fad, was all bright in front of him. He went out quite a lot into society. I’ll never forget the speech he made at Pinkie Mordaunt’s wedding, a speech on behalf of bachelors – I wish I could remember it; it was darned good . . . But mostly he went to bachelor gatherings, stag parties. In fact, that was when he founded the U.B.F., the United Bachelors Front, for resisting to the last man. The girls called it – or, well, you can’t repeat what girls call that sort of thing.

—

So there was Baffinland Sims all headed straight for everlasting bachelordom. To think how easily such things end and break! Who could have imagined it all over by that next June? You could? Well, yes, but I mean who else but yourself?

Anyway, you know what the month of June is – all green and soft, all trees and garden and flowers – and every city suburb as fresh as a leafy forest . . . You know what June is; now take a June garden party, under the trees out on a big lawn . . . in one of those lovely big houses where the city ends and the country begins. Fill in tables scattered over the grass and sandwiches and jellies, and ices and drinks and bottles . . . and bevies of girls in all the colours of the flowers . . . and men in soft flannels – if you want a man to look a real man put him in soft flannel, or loose wool – people moving about in little knots and then untieing the knots to move somewhere else. By that means, you see, you get a drink here and then another drink there . . . and nobody counts them . . . Put in, of course – I was forgetting it – a band, seated around under a big tree and playing while the people move round and have drinks, and then the people stop moving and the band have drinks, and so on. You know what a garden party is on a lawn in June! Does a chicken sandwich ever taste so well? Does a cut of cold ham ever look more enticing? Pop! Bang! God bless me! Champagne! Well! Here’s luck!

—

And mind you it wasn’t in aid of anything either . . . No, sir.

—

Well, Baffinland Sims was at the garden party, because he liked to go to that sort of thing. Just to laugh at it . . . It amused him.

So while he was at the height of his amusement at it, I was walking with him through the grounds, and he stopped all of a sudden and clutched my arm and said,

“Who is that marvellous looking girl?”

I didn’t see any marvellous looking girl so I said, “Where?”

“There, in white, beside the end of that table!”

I looked and there wasn’t any marvellous looking girl. I mean, there was only Molly Sheppardson. I’m not saying anything against Molly but you’ll understand what I mean when I say that that’s what it was, just Molly Sheppardson; only her. Molly’s all right; a little large, you might say and, at a guess, going to be larger – you know the kind, the girls I mean. So I said,

“It’s Molly Sheppardson.” Of course, I didn’t “only” to him. “I’ll introduce you if you like.”

“Do,” he said, and then, “just a minute,” and he began to fumble with his tie, and dust crumbs off himself that weren’t there . . .

So I took Baffy over and I introduced him

“How do you do?” Molly said; she speaks easily, I will say. “How do you do? Isn’t everything beautifully green?”

I could see that Baffinland was impressed. Here was a girl with a real reach of intellect! Her apprehension of greenness was wonderful.

I left them and wandered on to another table, where a girl I knew said, “How beautifully green everything is,” and the man with her murmured “Spring . . .” He was a college man and had just come out first at graduation, so he knew. We had a drink together and then some more people came floating along and saying, “How beautifully green everything is, isn’t it?”

But as I moved about I kept track of Baffy. I could see that he never left Molly Sheppardson. They were drifting round from table to table, and when I joined them for a minute Molly Sheppardson said to me, “How beautiful the flowers are!” And Baffinland Sims said to me, “Miss Sheppardson has just been remarking how green everything is . . .”

I saw them presently drifting away from the tables. Baffinland told me after that he had taken Miss Sheppardson on to look at the old well in the hollow at the bottom of the lawn; he said he didn’t want her to miss seeing that. Yes, that would have been awful, wouldn’t it, if Miss Sheppardson had not seen that well. But she saw it. I know she did because I watched them both standing there and peering down deep. I think I know what they saw.

—

Anyway, everybody saw it. It was just as plain as that . . . From the day after the garden party wherever Molly Sheppardson was, there was Baffinland Sims . . . In fact, it’s so old a story that its scarcely worth the telling.

Run smooth? Oh, smooth as spring and soft as summer and mellow as Autumn! Except for one slight interference that pulled it up short, or threatened to. Baffy Sims was going to propose to Molly Sheppardson; he knew it and I knew it because he said so. Then, I don’t remember whether gradually or suddenly, he was brought up short by doubt whether he was worthy of her! There was the trouble. Think of it; if it turned out that he wasn’t worthy of her – and he admitted that he wasn’t fit to black her boots – but they were tan anyway . . . “Women,” he explained to me while admitting that I wouldn’t understand, “women are so much above men, in practically everything that really matters . . .”

—

However, it was all right. It turned out he was worthy. You see, he did propose to Molly – we won’t mind details – and after she had said yes, old Mr. Sheppardson, Molly’s father – he’s a stock broker – looked into the question of what Baffy was worth. He looked into it downtown – and when he came up to the house he welcomed Baffy for a son-in-law with tears in his eyes . . . Old Mr. Sheppardson has done business with those tears in his eyes for forty years. If they were there, the thing was all right.

—

The wedding was certainly happy . . . The United Bachelors tried to raise a laugh at the wedding breakfast . . . Poor simps! What did Baffy care!

The proof of it was that the marriage went on being happy . . . There was no story, no tragedy about it. After they were married I happened to be away from the city for some years but I heard all about it – about their wonderful house in the suburbs, and the children, and Mrs. Sheppardson coming to live with them, and Molly – that’s Mrs. Sims – being Head of the Women’s Morning Musical (she made Baffy secretary) and President of the Women’s Afternoon Dietetic, and the Women’s Evening Endeavour, with Baffy as Honorary Vice President of each of them.

—

So when I returned to the city very naturally Baffy invited me out to his house to dine, and by good fortune it was again the month of June and the lovely place all at its best.

“You remember my wife,” said Baffy proudly, as we shook hands. There was indeed plenty to be proud of – at least three sizes larger. “How beautifully green everything is,” said Mrs. Sims.

Before dinner Baffy took me up to his “den” for a cigarette – the cutest little den you ever saw – his wife arranged it – away off up on the top of the house under the eaves – it used to be a pigeon house. That’s where he smokes. Isn’t that a good idea? It keeps the tobacco clear out of the house . . .

We went down again after the cigarette.

“The children,” said Baffin, as the five little girls trouped in to shake hands – Delia, Belia, Phelia – no, I can’t remember their names. Anyway, names like that. Perhaps there weren’t five; it may have been four or six – nice little things, all so neat and pretty – and the oldest one said to me, “The flowers are lovely, aren’t they?”

Then Baffy said, “My mother-in-law, Mrs. Sheppardson – and my wife’s aunt, Miss Copperfax” – then he turned to his wife and asked, “Is great-grandmama coming down?”

“Not till after dinner,” said his wife.

“I’m sorry,” said Baffy and he explained. “My wife’s grandmother, old Mrs. Sheppardson, lives with us . . . she’s eighty-eight and just as bright as ever but she seldom comes down to dinner. All she takes in the evening is brandy and water and biscuits, and as my wife never likes any drink served in the dining room, we just send it up to her.”

As he spoke, I saw a maid moving away with a decanter on a tray!

“Hey! Stop!” (I thought).

TOC     INDEX

The Jones’s
Enchanted Castle

(“Behold, a cheerful heart can deny adversity and cast out fear.” —St. Paul, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Field Marshal Goebbels.)

. . . So when the cheque was made out, the other boys at the club said it was up to me to take it round to Jones. “Other boys” sounds funny, doesn’t it? But you can’t exactly write “other old men.” You see, I’d known Jones about the longest, indeed ever since he and I were at school at the old Upper Canada on King St. Some of them had only known him about twenty years. So they said I’d have to take the cheque and give it either to Jones or to Bess.

I went round right away that same evening. It wasn’t yet late.

Jones lives in an enchanted castle, but you wouldn’t know it was enchanted if you didn’t know Jones and the strange light that burns in him. You’d think the house just one of those old left-behind houses that stand in the old, left-behind streets of Toronto, with ragged palings and half-withered trees.

When I reached it in the half-darkness, there were Jones and Bess at the paling’s gate, evidently just coming home. “Come on in,” said Jones, cheerily; who wouldn’t be proud to say come on in to a house like that . . .

Inside, it was the biggest, darkest, gloomiest house you ever saw – with no lights in it, till Jones took us up to the big “study” on the first floor and lit a lamp. He’s burning coal oil this winter; it’s a softer light, it appears, less trying to the eyes. And now that there are no maids in the house you need so few lights that Jones has cut the electricity clean out – he has, or someone has, anyway.

The “study” is just one of the rooms with enchanted names like that; beside it is “father’s library” with more dust and fewer books than any I ever saw. And upstairs there is “mother’s bedroom” and “Aunt Annie’s room,” though they’re both dead these thirty years. Similarly on the ground floor there is still the “butler’s pantry,” with fifty niches for fifty bottles that are not there, nor any butler since the time when “father” gave a dinner to the prime minister, while Jones and I were still at Upper Canada. Jones said the prime minister shook hands with him and said some Latin. So! – a house like that – eh, what? With beautiful palings and lovely trees and a butler and a prime minister, and a library full of law books, who wouldn’t be proud of it? No wonder it was enchanted. So it is for Bess, too – or at least, because of Jones and the others.

As a matter of fact the old room looked pretty cheery and comfortable when Jones got a good fire going in the grate. It seems he’s burning some of the old law books from the cupboard under the library shelves. They’re better than soft coal, it seems, less dust and steadier heat. No coal has come to the house, in fact, since it stopped coming. The books are not the ones father valued. He’s just burning the Appendix to the Journals of the Legislative Assembly of Canada. Father always meant to burn those anyway and Jones only kept them because he was sure they must be darned good reading if a feller ever got down to them. It seems that he never got down to them – or round to them – I forget which way you get at Journals. Anyway they burn well. Jones is still only at the year 1857 and they go clear to Confederation. How’s that, eh? That’ll last clean to April. And anyway “grandfather” got them all for nothing. Did Jones ever tell you (oh, yes, he must have) how his grandfather moved the second reading of the Pickerel Fisheries Bill and what Sir John A. said?

. . . Anyway it was pretty comfortable in front of the fire and when Jones said, “I’m sorry I haven’t a drop of—,” why, there! I had a whole flask of it that one of the boys had shoved into my pocket at the club for Jones. As to soda . . . it transpired at once that in “father’s” time no one drank it; they said it spoiled good liquor . . . Well, here’s luck, eh?

So, to begin talk, I asked Jones where they had been.

“Over at the University at a lecture,” said Jones. “Wonderful stuff! Why weren’t you there?”

“I didn’t know there was one. Many people there?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, “quite a good crowd. It’s queer, you know, people don’t seem to know about all these lectures over at the college . . . wonderful stuff, too . . . and free, mind you, nothing to pay to hear lectures that are mighty well worth it, and more. What was that one about that we were at last week, Bess?”

“Palaeontology,” Bess said, looking up from her knitting in the lamplight – like that, just “palaeontology.” Bess never wastes words. She lets Jones talk.

“Oh, yes, palaeontology; it means the science of fish; he showed one in a rock. And, do you know, there were only eleven people there, counting Bess; she wasn’t exactly there, but she came right to the door and then, while I was in, she went over to Mrs. McGinnis’s – the professor’s wife. It’s like that over there; it’s funny; often quite a good crowd almost up to the door, and then a lot break away.”

“And what about tonight?” I asked. “Oh, tonight was fine, let me see – counting Bess – she was at the Peterson’s – there were twenty-six. Of course it was a subject that would draw, it was on Taxation, the Shifting of Taxation. It was wonderful stuff, a marvellous lecturer.”

“A good delivery?” I asked.

“Fine,” Jones said, “except his voice – but what I mean is, it was clear over my head, great stuff – in fact I couldn’t follow it at all, except some stuff he put on the blackboard. He took a tax and turned it into a line, a curve – and you could watch it get closer and closer to a line and yet never touch it.”

“Is that what shifted the tax?”

“I didn’t quite catch on to the shifting,” Jones said. “It seems, or at least the professor said, that all taxes keep shifting on to the consumer – they heap right up on him till he gets a marginal – now, what did he call it? – oh, yes, a marginal satisfaction, and stops consuming altogether. Wait till I get some more water.”

Jones took the jug and started off down stairs with it, stumbling and half stubbing his toe on the worn carpet as he moved off. Everything is worn and everything is wearing out in the Jones’s enchanted castle. You see, as Jones says, why bother to put things in shape in the house till the two boys come home. While they’re over there, things can stay as they are. Especially as Jones has got the time of their return worked out with great certainty. Eddie, being in the Air, one month after war ends – they’ll come first – and John, who is in the artillery, say, a month later. That will give at least a month to have the whole place done over.

So while Jones was down stairs I asked, “Are the taxes paid, Bessie?”

She shook her head.

“Any coal?”

“Another week, anyway.”

“There!” said Jones, “fill it up, and let me stir that fire and get another appendix. Here we are, 1859, Vol. I.”

I thought that the subject of taxes might give me a start towards the cheque.

“Talking of taxes,” I said with an attempt at jocularity, “I suppose you’re like the rest of us, right up against it?”

“Oh, no,” Jones said, “I’m fine! Right up to date. You see on this house I’ve always paid, if you understand, just once a year, that is last year for the year before and pay it the next year; this year, I’ve slipped back a year, but that’s only three. I had a notice about it, but all very nice, you know, just something formal about selling the house, etc. But all very nice.”

“And the income tax?”

“Ah, that’s different. I was getting short there, quite a bit, in fact, well, several years, but this new Ruml plan will clean all that up. Did I tell you?” Jones continued. “I’ve sent in a plan myself to Ottawa suggesting methods of throwing back taxes forward . . . in fact, that is what I wanted this shifting stuff for . . .”

“What have they done about it?” I inquired.

“Fine,” Jones said. “Answered straight back, no delay . . . Referred to File XXOO46 in case I wanted to write further . . . think of the trouble they take, assigning me a personal number like that. And more than that – it seems that the department are going to give my plan every consideration; they said so; they shouldn’t really do so much as that. However, if it goes through, it shifts my income tax clear away even without the new Ruml plan; so between the two, I’m in easy street.”

“How about your own personal finance?” I said, still feeling for an opening.

“Don’t owe a cent . . .”

“I thought you had a mortgage?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he answered, “there’s the mortgage. You see, a house like this, as they all told me, carries a fine mortgage – they say, nearly as much as the place is worth. But I never count the mortgage as it is a fixed item. I meant that we have no debts.”

“We owe the bills . . .” Bess said, still knitting.

“Ah, the bills,” Jones answered. “I don’t mean bills. I was talking of debts. The bills—”

“The grocer—” said Bess – “two years.”

“You’d hardly count the grocer’s account as a bill,” said Jones. “Of course, I am not counting things like the grocer and the coal and that; and I must say they’ve all been awfully decent about it. Why, the coal man the other day, the head man, came right up himself to ask if there was anything I could suggest, and when I said I couldn’t he said he couldn’t . . . Then of course some of these bills are not new ones at all – they’re old bills.”

“The doctor’s account,” said Bess, “goes back to when the boys were at school.”

“Exactly,” said Jones. “You’d hardly count that, especially with the doctor an old friend. Just now, of course, things are a little muddled, I’m really just waiting till, well, till the boys are back. Everything will all come right then; won’t it, Bess?”

“Everything,” Bess said, and went on knitting.

“As a matter of fact,” Jones continued, “I got, or rather Bess did, a most comfortable little windfall a month ago – money paid out of the remains of her mother’s estate – you’d forgotten all about it, eh, Bess? But perhaps, you heard of it?”

“No,” I answered. Nor had I, or not since I gave the cheque to Bess at the back door a month ago.

On a pretext of Jones’s foot, I let Bess show me out. Down below at the door, I gave her the cheque.

“This,” I said, “is from the estate.”

She may even have believed me; after all, enchantment is enchantment.

TOC     INDEX

Mr. Alcorn
Improves Himself

(Each of us by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature. . . . —The New Testament. Revised Version.)

My friend Alcorn is improving himself. I don’t mean just at this minute; I mean, that is the main thing in his life, improving himself. He begins improving himself first thing in the morning and gets as far as he can with it by night. If you happen to know Alcorn, don’t get facetious about it and say there’s lots of room for it, or something of the sort. That’s too easy. Sandy, scrubby and about half bald, Alcorn isn’t much to look at; and he cracks his knuckles, all his joints look reversible and he wears a shiny old black tail coat of the kind that other people gave up about 1890. Of course, it’s hard going to improve him. That’s the virtue of it; it’s like a ploughman stubbornly breaking rough land. It’s like those bees that that Frenchman used to write about – what was his name? Fabre! Of course – I’d forgotten it. Anyway one of these bees would go out on the empty, burnt, rocky waste near Fabre’s little cottage – well, you know Dordogne; we all do-nothing but scrub and cactus and glaring sun – and Fabre would sit for hours, often all day, watching that bee make – I forget what it made. But it shows what industry can do. Fabre, they say, made quite a lot, too. . . .

But that’s neither here nor there. I am talking of Alcorn and what he looked like. And don’t get the idea that I want to make a pathetic figure out of him. He isn’t pathetic, and anyway, if he had been he would have bought a twenty-five cent book, How to Cast out Pathos, and got rid of it. Oh, no, he’s just ordinary. Don’t ask me what he does, apart from improving himself. I know he does something because there is always a good deal of ink on him late in the day. I frequently see him coming up in the street car in the quieter hours, always reading a little book, a manual of something, but never the same one; and I often see him in the Public Library, changing a book, and I see him in the Art Gallery and at any picture exhibition, studying a catalogue.

You see, if a man’s going to improve himself he needs books and catalogues all the time.

If you are the kind of person who would like to get a few hints on the matter, I must tell you that to improve yourself you’ve got to begin early in the day; in fact, you start by sitting up in bed and taking three deep breaths – one – two – three – it’s better to count them. That clears the trachea. Did you know it? And after that three quick movements of the neck, quick and snappy. That gives a knock to the anthrax.

The idea of the early morning stuff – here I am merely quoting Alcorn – is to clear the head. The great aim of the first part of the day, the bathroom exercise, the quiet walk, is to get the head absolutely clear. Avoid thinking, Alcorn says. It might hold the head back. He tells me that often when he comes in at nine – or rather, anywhere between nine and nine-five – his head is so clear that it just feels empty.

It is either then, or before going out (it doesn’t much matter) that it is well to put the eyes under cold water for about five minutes. Alcorn says “the eyes” – not his eyes – because he always looks on himself as made of adjustable parts. There are “the eyes” and “the ears” and “the joints.” – He himself is just the humble total, not half so important as the ones like diaphragm (be mighty careful with that) and the oesophagus . . .

Still, that’s just the start. The main effort is directed at the mind.

—

Most of the improvement of Alcorn’s mind is done out of little manuals, all short and snappy. They have to be quick – Swedish in Ten Lessons, Spanish in Ten Minutes – things like that. Anything called a Digest hits him where he lives, or it used to till he found that you could get Digest of the Best Digests. “You get it all,” he said.

He seems always absorbed in that sort of stuff – not exactly deeply, but like Fabre’s bees, busily. The World’s Great Poetry in Five Pages . . . The World’s Great Two-Cent Dramas . . . Religion (Five Cents) . . . Outline of the Outlines of Wells’ Outline.

But these rapid studies are intermingled with the real stuff, the solid serious study of the world’s greatest and hardest literature. That is what takes Alcorn to the Public Library, with his last book under his arm, waiting for his new one. You will see him handing in Newton’s Principia to get out Descartes’ Discourse on Method. “Great stuff!” he would say for each of them. He told me that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was about the biggest stuff he’s struck. It took him all Sunday afternoon to read it. He had out Rawlinson’s History of Babylon on Thursday and was back with it on Friday. “The real thing!” he said.

One peculiarity is that Alcorn’s activities keep varying. You can never know what particular line of self-improvement he is at; you have to fit conversation to it as best you could.

Thus I noticed one day that as soon as he sat down in the street car beside me he began asking most solicitously about my health.

“How’ve you been keeping?” he said, looking up sideways into my face, with artificial interest. “All right,” I said.

“No difficulty with sleep? No insomnia? And I suppose you digest things all right?”

Then I remembered that there was a new book out called How to Win Friends, and I remembered that it said, “Always express a solicitous interest in your friends’ health.” That came, I think, in Lesson One.

Another section of Alcorn’s self-improvement is done in picture galleries and art exhibitions. He never misses one.

“You see,” he likes to explain, in accounting for his presence in such places, “I don’t enjoy pictures, that is I do, but I don’t naturally. But I enjoy trying to enjoy them. That’s why I like this exhibition; it seems to me the best we’ve had for years. There’s nothing, or practically nothing, here that I can understand. But I’m working on them. That’s why I like this new kind of Catalogue, with little notes about the pictures.

“You know there are lots here that a man likes to study. They don’t mean anything to me; I can’t get them; now take this one – Man with Bucket – of course I get the bucket but the man looks just a blotch – to me, that is. I imagine that the merit of it is in the composition. Aha!” he continued, turning over the leaves of his catalogue, “No. 171. Man with Bucket; The artist here attempts a daring composition to convey the sensation of a bucket. I’m getting it all right; I knew that was a composition.”

Music he tries also, but sparingly. “Were you at the Symphony Orchestra last night?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” Alcorn answered, “I never miss; I just like to sit there and close my eyes and drink it in.” But on the whole music beats him. But he loves a street piano and that hurts his feelings.

That’s the way I have known Alcorn, like that, ever so long, year in, year out . . . no better, no worse.

Yet here is a strange thing. The kind of odd acquaintance, something between habit and friendship, such as I have had for years from my chance meetings with Alcorn, is a thing one gets unconsciously to value – and you never know it till you lose it. So it was with me when recently I all but lost – all but, not quite – my intercourse with Alcorn.

It was no fault of mine. Somebody gave him as a present my latest book (never mind the title; I’m not advertising), and there he was in the street car tapping the book wrapped up in his pocket.

“I’m looking forward to a great laugh,” he said. “Oh, boy!” And then he dipped back behind his spectacles into his Key to Babylonian Chronology . . .

“Yes, sir,” he said, next day. “I’m looking forward to that book of yours; I couldn’t get at it last night, but the first night I have I’m going to get right down to it.”

—

A week later, he said he was keeping the book to take to the Laurentians and have a real laugh, “Eh what?”

After that he nearly took the book to Three Rivers, you know how dull it is there – just the spot, eh, to get right into a book, deliberately, and just sit and chuckle. Three Rivers didn’t work – it’s a hard place to chuckle in. . . . Then he talked of keeping the book for the holidays. Of course, I didn’t mind; I’m used to it; if people buy a book they read it, rather than feel stung. But if you give it to them, they don’t . . .

Then one afternoon I saw Alcorn slipping into Car No. 65 when I got into Car No. 14. I knew that he was trying to avoid me and that I must do something.

So one day a little later I took care to meet him and I said, “Alcorn, here’s a little book for you. Send me that one of mine that you were reading as I’m out of copies, and you take this instead.”

“What is it?” he asked.

I showed him the cover. He read out the title. “The Witticisms of . . . of . . . I don’t quite see it – these spectacles—”

“The Witticisms of Hierocles,” I said, completing the title for him. “It’s Greek humour, the oldest there is. You see it’s in Greek on the page, but there are little notes that explain each joke. See this page—”

“Oh, boy!” said Alcorn, his spectacles glittering.

Our friendship was all set again.

TOC     INDEX

Clouds that Rolled By

Mr. Alldone’s Awful Day

(“I feel ashamed now to think of the things we used to worry over . . .” —Soliloquy of Any Old Man, followed by “What the devil’s wrong with this coffee?”)

Mr. Alldone always spoke of it afterwards as “Black Friday.” But even in old age he hardly cared to talk about it, except for an hour at a time. Some of us can remember him still; a man of character, Mr. Alldone – you could see it in the sweep of square firm head, suggesting something inside it, or near it, and the firm jaw, always shut unless open.

The scene is in Toronto – not the Toronto that you know but the Toronto of the ’seventies that some of us can still remember; the Toronto of the jingling horse cars, of the young chestnut trees, of Carlton Street as the end of the town with the farms beginning on Bloor St.

Mr. Alldone sat reading his morning paper, his breakfast just done, and one eye out of the bow window to watch for the approach of the horse car. Its appearance was always the sign for getting his hat and cane, kissing his wife good-bye and going out and stopping it.

“It’s six minutes late again,” he murmured. (Pretty hard on a man, morning after morning to wait anything from three to six minutes.) Then as he looked back at his newspaper a sudden spasm appeared on Mr. Alldone’s face.

“What is it, Edward?” asked his wife. “Is it the war news?”

He shook his head. “That’s bad enough,” he said, “but listen to this:

“World to End in Five Thousand Years!”

“In five thousand years!” gasped Mrs. Alldone. Ella Alldone was a courageous woman, but the brutal suddenness of the thing for the moment struck her down . . . What about the children’s education?

Alldone, controlling his voice as best he could, read on:

“Speaking last night in Glasgow, at the Royal Geological Association, Lord Kelvin said that the maximum possible duration of the earth was five thousand years!”

The same unspoken thought overwhelmed them both. If that was the maximum what about the minimum?

“But why should he know?” asked Mrs. Alldone, her woman’s instinct fighting even the inevitable.

“He’s in the peerage,” said her husband.

“The one that makes the soap?”

“No, Scotch Whiskey” – and Mr. Alldone added musingly, “They have to look ahead in that business.”

Then he looked at the paper again and corrected himself. “Wait a minute though. It says about him down below, ‘Lord Kelvin, formerly Sir William Thompson, is senior professor of Physics at the University of Glasgow’.”

“Physic?” said Mrs. Alldone.

“Physics,” said her husband. “It includes surgery.”

Mrs. Alldone did her best to speak calmly. She was glad the children were already off to school. “How does he think it will end?” she asked.

“Frozen – the temperature will fall to absolute cold, 468 degrees below zero.” Mrs. Alldone shivered.

“Or possibly” – Mr. Alldone read on – “burned in a terrific heat of 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit . . .” Mrs. Alldone gasped. . . . “or, on the kinetic theory of gases, blown into fragments in a sudden explosion.”

Mrs. Alldone jumped.

When she could speak more calmly she asked. “Does he say how he knows it?”

“He does. He argues that the present conjunction of Mercury and Saturn . . .”

“Yes, yes?”

. . . “means a continued acceleration of the precession of the equinoxes – in other words an aberration of the whole solar system.”

Mr. Alldone threw down the paper.

“The damn solar system!” he exclaimed.

“Hush! hush!” his wife protested. She knew that he had always complained of the solar system, and never really trusted it. He had always felt there was a catch in it. In fact, it was a standing complaint of his. “One day,” he often said, “we’ll see.” And now they were going to.

“The car!” cried Mrs. Alldone.

Alldone laid aside his paper, put on his coat and gathered up his things. For once he forgot to kiss his wife good-bye, then remembered it at the door and turned back to her. “Forgive me, Ella,” he said, “it’s a little hard to get used to it.”

Then he stepped firmly out on the street in front of the car and waved his hat in the horse’s face. The driver, with a rapid turn of the arm of the new powerful circular handbrake, brought the car to a stop, rivetting it to the track, and bouncing up its six passengers.

“You’re late,” said Mr. Alldone.

“A little, Mr. Alldone; it’s a mean morning. We had to stop and rub down the horse a few times . . . and we’re short-handed; there’s only me and Bill on the car this morning.”

Mr. Alldone went around to the back and got into the car. “Is your wife not coming?” asked Bill the conductor. “No? All right, Aleck,” he called, “you can start.”

The half-dozen passengers moved their feet in the straw and nodded.

“War news looks bad, Alldone,” one of them said. The man evidently had not seen the worst.

“Fare, please, Mr. Alldone,” said the conductor.

Mr. Alldone handed him two cents.

“Three cents, sir, if you don’t mind.”

“Three cents!”

“It’s gone up, sir . . . they gave six months’ notice, you know.”

“Good Lord!” said Mr. Alldone, as he paid the extra cent. “What on earth is the world coming to? Three cents!” How long could a man go on like this, three cents here and three cents there! Keep that up a few years and where would you be? An extra cent every morning and every afternoon for 300 days or years – add that up, eh?

At the King Street corner Mr. Alldone and a fellow passenger got out to cross the street. A tattered man with a broom of twigs was sweeping round the mud, this way and that. He touched his hat.

“They’re getting awful, aren’t they?” said Mr. Alldone. “Something should be done about those fellows, standing there and expecting a cent. Do you know, I heard they investigated one of those fellows at the police court and found that he had made forty cents in a single day!”

“No wonder we pay taxes!” growled the other.

Mr. Alldone went up to his office. He was a broker. In the office was Phillips, his clerk – an ageing man in threadbare black, frail and worn, but able to write a hand like copperplate, for he had once been a clerk in London. There were no machines then.

“The war news is bad, Phillips,” said Mr. Alldone.

“Bad sir, very bad,” said Phillips, and when he spoke it was with the accent of London and the British army. He’d left his clerkship for the Queen’s shilling. Twenty years he’d had. Thin old veterans like Phillips in those days often got fine jobs like what Phillips had, at thirty dollars a month and a holiday every holiday.

“I’m glad they’ve got Lord Chugsford, sir,” continued Phillips. “He knows that hill country.”

“This is terrible news, too,” said Mr. Alldone, pointing at the item about Lord Kelvin.

“Bad indeed, sir,” said Phillips, “I hope I never live to see it.”

Mr. Alldone sat down to read the news in detail. Bad, bad it was. As the cable headings put it: Darkest Day of War. All England Anxious. Courage high. News from the NEPAUL CAMPAIGN. Funds fall a penny-halfpenny. Then followed the details, plainly and courageously written, as for a people measuring the cost (in pounds, shilling and pence):

Lord Chugsford’s entire Force, 300 of all ranks with 20 marines and a rocket gun, have advanced up the Brahmapootra into the Garghai Hills where they have suffered a severe reverse. Sir Dumdum Bullit, who led the advance, reported three men hit, with something or other, and a Highland piper shot through the bagpipes, courageously continuing to play. The forces have fallen back, backwards and forwards.

It was ominous enough. But more ominous still, to the trained intelligence of a broker, was the brief announcement that the Funds had fallen three cents! For the moment all thought of the end of the world was banished from Mr. Alldone’s mind. This thing was nearer. If London had fallen three cents, what was happening in New York? Wall Street must be in a ferment.

“The ticker! The ticker!” he called to Phillips. “How’s New York?”

There were no telephones then. But the circular telegraph tape called the ticker carried the stock news – as long as it stayed in order.

“It broke yesterday afternoon, sir,” Phillips said. “But I’ve sent Billy over to the telegraph office for the bulletins. He won’t be—”

In fact, Billy, the office boy, arrived at that moment.

Bad news, brief but bad. New York Central down two cents, Boston and Albany a cent and a half, the Erie Canal up one point but the Baltimore Canal down two.

But bad news never comes singly. A messenger appeared with an envelope. Alldone recognized the handwriting of the chairman of the Stock Exchange and tore the note open.

It read:

Dear Alldone: Early morning telegrams have brought a flood of offers and orders – at least a dozen, certainly ten – showing a total collapse of values, Grand Trunk two cents, Great Western one cent, Goderich Ditch Canal a cent and a half, with Manitoulin Fish thrown on the market. Under the circumstances I write to you and to the other seven members of the exchange to say that on my own authority I am closing the Exchange. I am leaving the key with Peter, the bartender at Clancy’s.

Alldone got through the morning in the office as best he could; later on he could scarcely remember how. Once or twice he sent Phillips along the street and got back the report that the Exchange rooms were closed but that people were selling shares outside on the sidewalk at, literally, whatever they could get. Phillips had seen Grand Trunk sold five cents down, and Manitoulin Fish refused at any price. There was great gloom, he said, on the street. News of the disaster in Nepaul was by this time all over town. Work had practically stopped. People stood silent in little groups, or walked away and talked to themselves.

At half past twelve Alldone said, “I shall go out now and get a bite of lunch, Phillips – not that I can eat it – I’ll be right back, probably within an hour.”

Lunch, in the Bodega Grill on Leader Lane, had always been one of the pleasant spots in Alldone’s day – the bright cosy grill, open glowing coal fires all down one side, chefs in white, waiters in black, sherry in great casks end-on, chops frizzling, everybody talking, blue smoke rising.

All changed today. The patrons of the Bodega Grill sat silent, staring at the newspaper with little more than a nod and a word to a newcomer. Appetite was evidently gone. A man would order a porterhouse steak, sit and look at it, then eat it and get up and go out; or order a chop, toy with it, then read the paper, toy with it again and then finish it.

Even the genial face of the proprietor had exchanged something of its pleasant aspect for the marks of anxiety.

“Three mutton chops, as usual Mr. Alldone?” he asked.

Alldone shook his head. “Two and a half,” he said.

“This is the noon paper, sir,” said the waiter, as Alldone sat down. “Sherry, sir?”

Alldone nodded. It didn’t seem worth while to speak. He’d get it without.

As he drank his sherry, mechanically, and hardly realizing what he was drinking except that it was sherry, Alldone read the latest London dispatches . . .

“The disaster to British Arms in the Nepaul Campaign,” says the Times, “has had a reverberating effect throughout Europe. It is recognized that England has received a blow in her prestige, the one place where she can’t stand it. But we are assured that England will not turn her back.” Then followed the leading account. “Further cable dispatches from London only deepened the gloom of what someone has fittingly called England’s Darkest Hour. The fall of the Funds by three cents (as before) has led to a general fall of security values averaging anything from one farthing to a penny half-penny. The Bank of England directors have at once raised the discount rate to ten per cent, gone into the bank and nailed up the door. Lord Gloop, the great financial expert, has said that England is within twelve hours of barter. He said this ten hours ago. Greatest anxiety prevails as to what happens next.”

Alldone had barely finished his chops and followed them with apple pie and doughnuts, more to conserve his strength than because they were included in the price of the chops, when a messenger boy entered with a special news cable bulletin for the proprietor.

“Read it, read it,” called several of the men.

The proprietor looked at it, turned a trifle pale and shook his head. “You read it,” he said to Mr. Alldone.

Alldone stood up and read the dispatch:

“London, Friday, 3 p.m., Queen Victoria stricken with attack of gout. Royal Physician, Sir Magnus Alhell in attendance.”

There was a gasp from the listeners.

“Sir Magnus has prescribed a complete rest for Her Majesty, urging that she must not open Parliament today; he insists on her taking a pint of burgundy every half hour. If she won’t, he will.”

There was a chorus of approval. “He will, eh? That’s the stuff,” they said. Men recognize the true British spirit when they see it.

“Wait a minute,” said Alldone, “there’s more on the back . . . He will not be responsible. That’s it.”

Well – there was nothing to do but wait – wait and hope. But meantime, to all of them must occur the thought, what is Canada doing? Will Canada give no help? Where is Ottawa? Some didn’t know.

For Alldone, the afternoon wore away with the same listless waiting. He was glad when the day drew to its end, glad to walk back home without waiting for the horse car, though he could see it not far behind him, glad even to find himself back in his own home.

—

Then came the first break in the clouds.

His wife was standing in the doorway, waving an afternoon paper. “Look – look!” she called. “Isn’t it splendid?”

A moment later, Alldone, his eyes almost dazzled with joy, was sitting reading the latest bulletin from Glasgow:

“LORD KELVIN EXPLAINS.
LONGER PERIOD ASSIGNED TO EARTH’S DURATION.

“Lord Kelvin drove to the office of the Glasgow Times today to explain his statement of yesterday and said that his estimate of the earth’s duration is not five thousand years but five billion. The error was solely due to a shortage of type in the printing office, only three naughts being available for this item. The proprietors of the newspaper at fault have apologized very handsomely to Lord Kelvin and paid his cab fare both ways.”

They both sighed with relief! It was good to be back in the happy old world, with five billion years all their own.

But there were bigger and brighter and happier things still to come.

They had hardly risen from their simple dinner – a joint and a fowl – when they heard the newsboy outside in the gathering dusk calling, “Special, Extra! – War News Extra!”

Alldone rushed out for the paper – money didn’t matter now – and when he brought it in, read out to his wife in a voice half choked with emotion but ringing with pride:

Canada to Britain’s Aid: Dominion will send contingent up the Brahmapootra . . . Then followed all the glad news that was making many a home proud that evening:

“It is announced from Ottawa that a Canadian War Contingent will be at once sent up the Brahmapootra. The force will consist of a hundred men, eighty of them trained voyageurs, and the rest on snow-shoes. The Prime Minister has assured the country that none of the expense will fall on Canada. He is not prepared to say where it will fall, but it won’t be here.”

“Isn’t it simply wonderful?” said Ella, as she bent over her husband and kissed him. Then as she did so, her eye caught a final stop-press news item along the foot of the paper.

“QUEEN VICTORIA OPENS PARLIAMENT ON ONE LEG.”

“Oh, Edward!” – and with that she crossed over to the piano (she was a trained musician), struck the opening chords, and said, “Come, Edward, sing . . . ‘God . . . save . . . our gracious . . . Queen’.”

TOC     INDEX

Angel Pond,
Lure of the North

(“North, I think it is, they call it, where the Sons of Women are Men . . ..” —One of those Poets.)

Who should I meet the other evening in the rotunda of the Big Hotel but Charlie Blunt. I knew he’d been “up north” for a year or more; in fact it was the first thing he said. But I could have told it anyway – so could you. You can always tell the fellows just “down from the north” at a glance; that look of perfect physical condition, brown and tanned – well, not exactly tanned – dirty? No, I wouldn’t just say dirty – but, you know – dark looking – the Indians get it themselves; neatly shaved – I mean, neatly three-quarters shaved – they don’t go further in the north; standing square and stocky as if he were on snow-shoes. When Charlie stepped he lifted his feet well up – not to trip over branches.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m just down from Angel Pond – that’s where our new mine is – down here to buy machinery, and hang it, it’s all held up, everything’s held up these days – I’ll be kicking round six weeks waiting for it.”

I saw at once that Charlie was like all the rest of them; no use for any place but the North. You’d think a fellow would be glad to get away from a place like Angel Pond in winter. But, oh no!

“Where is Angel Pond anyway, Charlie?” I asked.

“Angel Pond?” he answered, “well – do you know where God’s Lake is?”

“No—”

“Well, it’s a long way east of that, anyway. You know Little Jesus River?”

“No—”

“. . . where you portage to All Saints Creek . . .”

“A pretty religious set of names you have up there, Charlie,” I said.

“They are,” he assented with a laugh. “It was the French who first went through that country in the early days. They’re a devout people and they like to give all the rivers and portages their religious names. The idea was that it helped them to get through . . .”

“Is that so?”

“I like it,” Charlie went on. “We’ve tried to imitate it in English on our side of the divide round Angel Pond – we’ve got Lower Devil River and All Hell Elbow and Beelzebub Rapids. It’s a good idea, isn’t it? But say,” he continued, “come on with me upstairs. There’s a bunch of fellers up there in a room that I was just going to join. I guess you know some of them . . .”

There is always a “bunch of fellers upstairs in a room” at the Big Hotel. I think they keep roomfuls of them on purpose. I knew what they would look like before we even started up – a big sitting-room, filled with blue tobacco smoke, a lot of bottles on the tables – a bowl of ice – some lemons (the fellers never use the lemons; they just order them) – anyway, lemons, matches, cigars, all those things that go nicely round a whiskey bottle . . .

We got into the elevator, Charlie stepping well over the loose branches as he got in, and up we went, and there the fellers were, just like that. They’re always the same; you don’t exactly remember their faces, and you don’t quite recall their names, but you don’t need to . . .

Even if you didn’t know them you’d recognize them by their talk. Just as we came in one was saying, “I paid three cents and then like a damn fool I let it go at seven cents.” Some one else murmured, “I let it go at eight . . .” and another said, “It was nineteen cents today.” People not used to high finance get dazzled with figures like these . . .

But the talk broke off into loud greetings of “Hullo, Charlie . . . Have a Scotch, Charlie! Say When! . . . Here try this one—” and so on.

“How did you come out, Charlie?” asked one of the “fellers.” “Is it easy?”

Anyone who knows the speech of the north, understands that doesn’t mean how did you succeed. It means how did you make your way out of the hundreds of miles of tangled wilderness . . .

“Oh, it’s easy,” Charlie said. “There’s no difficulty with Angel Pond. You can either go by rail to Sioux Lookout and then canoe and portage from there . . . or round from God’s Lake to Old Shoes . . . It’s only a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles either way. You can do it in a week.”

“Are the flies bad in summer?” asked someone.

“Oh, the flies are nothing to us . . . you just smear your face thick with any kind of fat, groundhog fat, skunk’s fat – and wrap a heavy veil over your face and slip a leather coat over everything else. They never get you that way . . .”

“Can’t you get in by plane?” someone asked.

“Not exactly. The Pond, Angel Pond, itself is too small to land on and the trees are too thick for landing anywhere near. There’s Paradise Lake, quite big enough, but it’s twenty miles away and some people don’t like it . . . they don’t care to come that way.”

“Don’t like it?”

“No, there’s a good many wolves through there. Of course, people have the craziest idea about the wolves up north. As a matter of fact a timber wolf has to be mighty hungry before he’ll attack anyone – I mean in daytime.”

“He would at night?”

“Yes, he might, especially if there’s a bunch of them running in the woods together . . . but you can always hear the howls in time . . .”

“Hear the howls?”

“Yes, and get up a tree . . . there’s lots of jack pine there, you know, and once you get up in a jack pine, well, there you are.”

“Up in the jack pine!” said a fellow.

“Exactly,” said Charlie; he took everything literally, “and in the morning they’re gone.”

Charlie paused a minute and a shadow passed across his face. Perhaps he was hearing the howl of the wolves on a frozen lake in the bush country.

“Have another Scotch, Charlie.”

“Thanks,” he said, and drank it in that plain straightforward way they have in the north. That is to say he drank it. Then it was gone.

“People have got,” he said, as he put down the glass, “the craziest ideas about the north country.”

“It’s not really cold, is it?” someone asked. There is always a smart Aleck in a group of “fellers.”

“Not as a rule,” Charlie said. (He never distinguished jest from earnest; they don’t up there; either you mean a thing or it’s an insult.) “Not as a rule, certainly not at the Pond. I’ve known it, even in January, that the thermometer will get up to fifteen and stay there day after day, never colder.”

“Fifteen above zero?”

“Fifteen below . . . of course, I don’t say that’s usual. More likely you get that for a day or two and then it turns really cold.”

“What’s the place like anyway, Charlie?” asked a man who this time really wanted to know. “Is there a town? Are there shops? and churches and places?”

“Why, of course,” said Charlie, “just like any other place, or pretty nearly. You see, there’s the mine – of course we’re not producing yet, but we’re getting pretty well developed – there’s the mine – and, of course, there’s the men’s quarters – they’re all right, the men – most of them. They’re Polacks, mostly, but they’re all right. They don’t speak much English, but that’s all right. Well, there’s the mine, and quite a few houses, like Dan Clough’s, the machine superintendent’s, he’s down here with me getting machinery. Well there’s his house, and quite a few like that . . .”

“A church?”

“Yes, certainly, what do you think we are? There’s a church, or at least we’ve put a building up, a dandy, that we can use for a church – jack pine and tamarack – with open fireplaces and lockers for bottles – we’re using it as a sort of club just now because we’ve no one to preach in it yet . . . the boys play poker in it. We’ve got electric light and all kinds of modern comforts like, well – electric light and those sort of things . . .”

“Well, what kind of fellers are up there?” persisted the questioner.

“What kind of fellers?” Charlie answered almost angrily. “Why, first class! What would you expect? Some of the fellers are working for the company, and others come through surveying and prospecting. Now you take Freddie de Vere – he came out from England. Freddie had been at Oxford but he was all right. You’d never notice the difference. Freddie was with us for months and months last year. He brought out money to invest but he lost it.”

“In mines?”

“No – just with the boys. He’s gone back for more. He has an uncle who is a big English financier – I don’t mean a crook, I mean an English financier – Freddie may get him to invest in Angel Pond but this uncle wants to make sure. He wants to be assured first about the question of its being crooked. If he wasn’t sure of that he wouldn’t put in a cent. The boys are looking forward to Freddie coming back. He was popular . . .”

Then someone asked the question we all had in mind.

“Any women?”

“Women! Why, of course, women, and some mighty nice cultivated women too. Take Mrs. Clough – that’s Dan Clough’s wife, the machine superintendent; he’s down with me now – the Senora, we call her . . . she’s from Mexico. Her first husband was hanged down there. But that’s nothing against her. And her present husband, Dan, is A1. So was her second husband, too. Dan knew him in Mexico. He was shot. Then Dan brought her up here. She’s a mighty fine woman, cultivated – experienced.”

“She must be,” remarked a feller. But it went past.

“Then there is Mrs. Macdonough, Sandy Macdonough’s wife. He’s the government surveyor.”

“Scotch?” asked someone.

“He is,” said Charlie, “he’s from New Brunswick. She’s a MicMac. That’s why he brought her up. There’s quite a little group of women . . . they’re all right, too, better than a lot of your darned . . .”

He paused and the shadow fell. It hadn’t occurred to him to doubt the merit of those whom they called the “girls” up at Angel Pond.

“Have another Scotch, Charlie,” someone said. He drank it.

What was the good of trying to explain the North to a bunch of flats in the city, who had no idea what it’s really like . . . it all seems to come out wrong. Charlie Blunt’s good-tempered face took on a saddened look.

Charlie, I say, seemed a little discouraged. The shadow had fallen across his face. He took his drink and there was a moment’s silence. Then one of the “fellers” just to put him in countenance again, said gently:

“And you hope to get a clergyman there at Angel Pond, presently?”

“Oh, yes,” Charlie said, “in fact we have our eye on the very man, if he’s not too big for us to swing. You’ve probably heard of Reverend Irwin?”

No one had.

“We had him, Irwin, down to see us last winter. He’s the Bishop of Belcher Islands, they call him the ‘Apostle of the North.’ Ever heard of him?”

It stuck in my mind that I’d heard of about twenty “Apostles of the North,” more than the original crowd, but I couldn’t remember this one.

“He’s a great feller,” said Charlie. “He’s a huge, husky-looking man, so big he’d throw any two of us all round. He’d do it, too, mind you in a minute. He’s the real thing, that man – no religious stuff, you know what I mean – takes a drink any time, takes a cigar, takes anything. What do you think that man did? He went the year before last right up among the Eskimos along the north of the Bay, lived right among them – just shared everything they had; just took what they’d got and never asked for anything else . . .”

“Yes. It was their special seal season when they catch the young seal and have the blubber feasts. The Bishop just sat right in and ate blubber – more than they could.”

“He did, eh?”

“And the year before that he went right across the plains – You know where the Athabascan Indians have their big annual cariboo hunt east of Lake Athabasca? Well, the Bishop went and lived with them – just like one of themselves, shared everything with them, just what they had, food, tobacco – just one of themselves. That’s the season you know, of the cariboo meat feast. He was in that.”

“And what did the Bishop come to you for, Charlie?” asked the smart Aleck.

“He’d run out of chewing tobacco,” Charlie answered, “but he never complained, just started out for three hundred miles on snowshoes. He’d been with the Mounted Police, near God’s Lake.”

“Preaching to them?” someone asked.

“No, helping them to find whiskey . . . often and often he finds it when no one else can. ‘Let me get it,’ he says, and goes out all alone. Well, anyway he ran out of chewing tobacco and he came all the way down to get some at Angel Pond.”

“Did he preach to you at Angel Pond?” we asked.

“He was going to,” Charlie said, “he was all set to, but the way it was – that very Sunday, not knowing he was coming, they’d arranged to use the church for a big euchre game, so the Bishop joined in that instead. But he carried out a baptism there right after the game—”

“One of the children?”

“No, there weren’t any. It was an old Indian, Musquash Joe – they say he’s a hundred and ten years old. The Bishop found he’d never been baptised and baptised him right there . . .”

“In a font?”

“No, with a teaspoon with a little whiskey. He’s like that – always finds a way to do a thing. He’s a great fellow—” Charlie repeated – “more good than all these high-toned city clergymen put together. He left us to strike right across to Lake Mistassini. The Indians over there – they’re Montagnais, you know, and haven’t changed since Champlain – hold their dog feast once a year. The Bishop was timing himself for that. You know,” said Charlie, “I think a man like that spreads Christianity, gets people to know it, better than all the darned . . .”

But just at that moment another man shoved the door of the room open and appeared in the doorway with a bag in each hand.

“Say, Charlie,” he called, “you’ll have to hurry. The train goes in fifteen minutes and we can only just make it. I’ve got the reservations and everything . . .”

“All right,” said Charlie, as he rose in a chorus of good-byes and good wishes.

I walked out into the corridor to say good-bye.

“You off back north already?” I said. “I thought your machinery wouldn’t be ready for six weeks.”

“It won’t,” he added. “Dan and I (meet our mine superintendent) are taking a trip to Florida.”

TOC     INDEX

Cooking for Victory

“Oh, Mrs. Beeton, is it really you? I am so delighted to meet you. How terribly well you look, and – if you don’t mind my saying so – how nice and plump. Of course it must be the good feeding.”

And with that we sat down to talk in Mrs. Beeton’s double drawing-room. It seemed so wonderful to be actually talking to Mrs. Beeton, that famous Mrs. Beeton of Mrs. Beeton’s Cook Book. I had imagined that she must have been dead and gone – perhaps cooked – long ago. Yet here she was, sitting in the drawing-room in front of me, and absolutely unmistakable – the full, matronly figure, the dark dress fitting close to what was called in her day the bust, the neatly parted hair, the bangles, the pince-nez – oh, Mrs. Beeton certainly, wherever she came from.

“I’m especially glad to meet you now,” I went on, “because there are so many things I want to ask you. In war-time, it seems to me, careful cooking and the economy of food would mean a tremendous lot.”

Mrs. Beeton gravely bowed her head. “In war-time,” she said, “as I frequently tell Mr. Beeton, the services of women are the mainstay of the nation.”

“And what does Mr. Beeton say?”

“He doesn’t say anything,” she said, “I shouldn’t wish him to.”

“Mr. Beeton, I suppose, must be of great help to you in collaboration?”

“None whatever,” she said calmly – “or practically none. Of course he eats everything first, particularly now when there’s such a danger of poisoning.”

Then to my surprise she called: “Alfred!”

I was aware of something in a dressing-gown shuffling around in the other half of the room and a voice said, “Yes, my dear!”

“Go up and bring me down from my writing-table my Cooking for War-time, the 1943 Revision.”

I heard something start shuffling up the stairs. Then Mrs. Beeton called, as if by an afterthought.

“Alfred, one minute!”

“Yes, my dear.”

“Had you finished what you were eating?”

“Yes, quite finished.”

“You ate it all?”

“Virtually, yes, virtually.”

“And are you still all right? You are? Then go on up and get the book.”

“It is a very interesting experiment,” she said. “You see, in war-time it is simply impossible to let people keep their aluminum pots and saucepans merely because they prevent poisoning . . . we need the metal . . . so I have been having Alfred’s breakfast cooked in different kinds of cheap metal, to see which are free from poison. This morning I tried galvanized iron. Ah, here he comes with the book . . .”

Mr. Beeton shuffled in, his long Victorian dressing-gown up to his ears. He had a mild face, quite empty.

“Let me introduce Mr. Beeton, my husband,” said Mrs. Beeton.

Mr. Beeton came forward with an outstretched hand and a sort of feeble cheeriness.

“I rather think” – he began.

“You don’t need to, Alfred,” said Mrs. Beeton, “and now run along like a good boy for I have some important business here. Ask Cook for some beans that you are to eat – she knows which ones—”

“And now—” said Mrs. Beeton – “I know just what you’re thinking of – war-time recipes. You see, I have been working on it. I have a list of Recipes Directed to the War-Time Effort for conserving the natural food supply by (a) using minimum quantities, (b) using the cheapest ingredients, (c) making things go as far as possible, (d) preserving the flavour, taste and appetizing quality of dishes.”

“That’s it,” I said, “exactly,” and I took out a pad and pencil as I spoke – “and I’d like to write some of them down for the newspaper I represent.”

“Very good,” said Mrs. Beeton and began turning over the leaves of the big book. “Let me see – what shall we try? Now here – terrapin – tarragon – turtle soup – do you like turtle soup?”

“I do,” I said.

“So do I, very much, in fact I adore it. It’s too rich for Alfred but I used to serve it all the time. Let’s see what it says. ‘Take a fresh turtle, take one gill of old sherry or madeira.’”

“But stop,” I said, “I’m afraid there are no turtles on the market now”—

“No, I forgot, of course not – but this, pâté de foie sandwiches. ‘Take one gill of fine old brown sherry, one ounce of pâté, and a sandwich. Insert the pâté in the sandwich, and drink the sherry before serving.’

“Now that,” she said, “would be excellent for war workers in offices, just as a snack, every half hour or so, while waiting for meals. Here’s a similar one,” she went on, again turning the leaves, “that would be excellent to stave off fatigue. ‘Lobster jelly in aspic – take a gill or more of old brown sherry, one cold broiled lobster and a pot of melted aspic. Remove the lobster’s claws and dip them in the aspic. Drink the sherry while dipping them.’ And now here’s something that would be terribly good, I think, for men on active service, especially men at sea, who suffer from lack of appetite . . . it’s really delicious. Quail à la King – take a pint of Burgundy, one quail, and a few leaves of mace, thyme, rosemary, with either asparagus tips or French petits pois.”

“Oh, but I’m afraid, Mrs. Beeton,” I interrupted, “you had rather mistaken my meaning. I wasn’t thinking so much of delicacies, and luxuries and things to tempt the appetite. I was thinking more of plain food for the home, how to cook plain wholesome dishes at a minimum cost.”

“Ah, but you should have said so,” said Mrs. Beeton cheerfully – and I realized that whatever she might or might not be, she was at least a comfortable, cheerful sort of person, a result, no doubt, of much catering to the male appetite. “Plain food, of course, but that’s the very thing we are all most interested in. Let me see . . .” She readjusted her glasses and ran the leaves again through her fingers, muttering the headings as the pages went past . . . plain joints and cuts . . . dog meat . . . meat for the nursery . . . servants’ meals . . . feeding cats. “Ah, yes, now this for example – Irish Stew.”

Mrs. Beeton sat back triumphantly, her face all smiles, her book poised for reading.

“Irish Stew!” she repeated enthusiastically. “Do you like it?”

“Very much indeed,” I said, “and surely that must cost very little.”

“Nothing!” said Mrs. Beeton. “Practically nothing, when it’s made according to my recipe – just a few simple things and a few ingredients that are found in every kitchen. Now, suppose we work this out together. You check it off with your pencil. Of course, you can alter the quantities if you like. Are you ready? Take about a gill of old brown sherry . . . wait,” she said, “we’ll judge that by itself; nothing like accuracy. I’ll have Cook bring it.”

Mrs. Beeton reached out and pulled an old-fashioned bell-rope that hung beside her. To my surprise a cook appeared, looking like Mrs. Beeton herself, just out of an old-fashioned book – the full white apron, the queer white cap.

“You rang, ma’am?” she said.

“I did,” said Mrs. Beeton. “I want you to bring about a gill – or no, two gills; we must work it out separately – of sherry.”

“The old brown ma’am?” asked the cook.

“Yes, the old brown, and, oh, Cook – just a minute – has Mr. Beeton eaten his beans?”

“Yes ma’am,” said the cook, “all but a few.”

“Give those to Fido,” said Mrs. Beeton.

“I have,” said the cook; “she won’t touch them.”

“H’m,” said Mrs. Beeton thoughtfully. “Has Mr. Beeton gone upstairs yet?”

“No, ma’am, he’s just sitting there.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Beeton cheerfully, “digestion! I always have him sit very still when I’m experimenting. That’ll do, Cook, and thank you.”

“Now,” Mrs. Beeton went on, resuming her cheerful and efficient manner, “the use of sherry in Irish stew is a thing of which many people are ignorant. But it’s most economical as the Irish stew goes ever so much further if mixed with sherry . . . indeed you hardly need any stew. Now, try that sherry. Excellent, isn’t it?”

The good lady beamed over her sherry glass . . .

“No doubt you agree that a brown sherry is better in any recipe than a dry sherry . . . The only question is whether a gill is enough. However, let’s see what follows. Irish Stew. Take a dozen eggs.”

“A dozen eggs?” I protested. “But surely no one could afford a dozen, and anyway eggs are not in a stew.”

“We always mix the gravy, the liquid part first,” explained Mrs. Beeton. “Take a dozen eggs, or more as required, and beat them in French Burgundy; stir in bay leaves, rosemary, and a liberal quantity of truffles.”

“But surely,” I protested again, “no one could have all those things now. What is the meat part?”

“It’s economy in the long run,” said Mrs. Beeton. “After that come the potatoes and plain vegetables and all that but, if you like, I’ll skip that to go right to the meat . . . let me see. Yes, here . . . take a young boiled lamb and throw away all of it but the ribs; dip these ribs in the stew as already prepared and serve with melted butter and anchovy sauce laced with brandy.”

But at that moment Cook appeared in the doorway.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” she said.

“Well,” said Mrs. Beeton, “what is it?”

“It’s master. He seems took rather bad. He’s fallen off his chair.”

“Tut, tut,” said Mrs. Beeton quietly, “the beans, of course. But some of our experiments are bound to fail; we must simply persevere and persevere. Cook,” she continued, “you must run across the street to the doctor’s and ask him to come over, and to bring his stomach pump, the large one . . .”

“And now,” she said, turning to me, “I’m afraid I must ask you to excuse me. Illness in the house always depresses me. I shall take a walk. Good morning.”

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Good News!
A New Party!

(“The old-time political parties, gentlemen, have had their day. What we need is new life, new energy and, above all, if I may say so, a new Working of the Spirit.” —From any soapbox, Halifax to California.)

It is a great pleasure – indeed it gives me a thrill – to be able to announce to the public through the kindly medium of this volume that at last the New Party has come! The hope, the promise, contained in such words as those above is fulfilled. The thing is here. I saw its inception. I was present at it myself no later than last night. All that is now needed is to keep it incepted . . .

Now, please, don’t ask me for details, for names and places and all that; everything will appear in the full publicity of the newspapers.

It came about this way. I’m not in politics but I have many friends who are – some on one side, some on the other, some on both . . . naturally I hear of the new movements. So when Hoggitt called on the phone to me to come down and join him at the Piccadilly I knew that the big stuff was on.

I found him there at a table and he began to talk, right away and with the greatest enthusiasm, about the new Party. You know Hoggitt. He’s all right. He’s got a sort of fierce way of talking, but he’s all right. He’s a big dark fellow and he always seems to be threatening but he isn’t – that is, he is in a way, but he’s all right. Anyway I’d no sooner sat down than he was talking full speed of the Party – with a sort of inspiration.

“It’s the real thing,” he said, “it’s based on human sympathy and equality – where’s that damn waiter? We’re aiming at what the old parties never had – social cohesion – I’d like to fire that fellow – and the right of every man to a voice . . . gimme that check and don’t talk back to me . . .”

He was still muttering at the waiter when we left . . .

“We’ll drive along to the meeting,” he said.

But, of course, we couldn’t get a taxi; we waited – say, we must have waited four minutes; anyway Hoggitt said, “Oh come along. There’s no use waiting for a taxi; these taxi fellers just go beyond all limits . . . and money! What they’re making now! I don’t know what they get, but, by gosh, a mighty comfortable living, I’ll say! It’s a scandal.”

So we walked. In any case it was only four blocks and I was glad because it gave Hoggitt a chance to explain to me all about the new party. I must say it sounded fine – no more of that miserable intrigue and crookedness of the old parties . . . things done in the dark . . . no more leaning on the “interests” for money; just straight honesty. Hoggitt said that when we got to the hall he’d introduce me to the chairman, but not to pay too much attention to him as they were going to ease him out. Of course he doesn’t know it. They’ll keep him while they still need him. Hoggitt said he’s not sufficiently genial – that was it – or, no, I’ve got it wrong – too genial.

The meeting was in a pretty big hall. There must have been well over a hundred, most of them smoking and standing round. They looked all right, too. I’ve been to a good many political meetings but I couldn’t see anything wrong with them. Some of them looked mighty decent fellers, you know – educated – not like what you’d imagine at all. It seemed a kind of free and easy crowd. The chairman was just going to the platform so I only had time to shake hands with him, a middle aged looking man, quite well dressed – in fact I couldn’t see a thing wrong with him.

Anyway he got up to talk, but they didn’t listen much; they went on talking in groups round the room. Hoggitt said that’s the way they do; they find they can get through more business if they don’t listen. Hoggitt says that’s the curse of Washington and Ottawa – one of them; he named quite a few.

The chairman was talking about the name of the party. He said, “Gentlemen, you’ll be glad to know we’ve succeeded in getting a name for our party. You remember last week our difficulty over the proposal to christen the party the Forward Party . . .”

There was noise and applause which Hoggitt explained to me was because some of the members – people of fine old families who’d never moved since they came to America – thought that the Backward Party would be better, a finer ideal.

“We tried,” the chairman went on, “both the name Forward Party and the name Backward Party, and, as you recall, the name Backwards-and-Forwards Party. We wanted something that would mean progressive and yet mean conservative . . . but we couldn’t get it . . . We left, as you will remember, a committee sitting on it and they sat, at the Piccadilly, all that night but failed to find it. I’m glad to say that there has since come in the brilliant suggestion of a member – I won’t name him – but you all know him, who gives us the title The Non-Party Party . . .”

Great applause . . . and cries . . . “Carried! Carried!”

Hoggitt explained to me on the side that the name came from Prof. Woodstick, Professor of Greek, who’s in the party. In fact some of them call him the “brains of the party.” Hoggitt thinks they’ll probably have to drop him. People don’t like the idea of brains running a party. Look at Washington or at Ottawa – at the successful parties. Still I’ll say in favour of Professor Woodstick, he doesn’t look educated . . .

The chairman came and sat with us, while a man – I didn’t catch his name – was talking on what shall we do to get the farmer’s vote. It seems he’s a member of the platform committee (subsection farming), but Mr. Mills the chairman says they’ll probably have to shift him off. He looks too countrified. Anyway nobody listened much. He was talking mostly about his own little place out near Knowlton – no, I’ve got that wrong – out past Knowlton; he said he wouldn’t call it exactly a farm, but we could call it a farm if we liked, so I called it a farm. It appears he grows a lot of stuff on it, more lettuce, for instance, than his wife can eat, in fact, nearly enough for the horse . . . Well, you know what farm talk is at political meetings; he asked how many had seen the new type of dry silo? They hadn’t . . .

But what he got to at length was the committee platform to catch the farm interest. I saw right away it was certainly good – “to give to all farmers a proper aggregate share of their own produce.” That’s the very thing to attract farmers. Someone wanted to insert the word “just” make it read a “just share.” But it was explained that the Liberals gave them that. They’ve had that since 1896.

There was a lot of unanimity and good feeling over that but on the other hand a lot of difficulty over the question of labour. The man who got up to talk (I didn’t catch his name, something like Fitkin, or Delbosse – a name like that) – anyway, he said he was a lawyer and couldn’t pretend to speak of labour but he said he had the deepest sympathy for labour but all the same it was hard even for a lawyer to get a formula to satisfy labour. A lot of the labour men now, he explained, are mighty well educated and it’s hard to put anything past them; difficult to find words for a platform that they wouldn’t see through. He’d made, he said, a conscientious attempt at some honest direct statement but everything seemed to have the same fault of giving away its meaning. He had had with him on the committee, he said, the Reverend Canon Sip . . .

There was applause at that, because everybody knows the Canon, and he was sitting right there anyway. Hoggitt explained that they had tried to keep him away but they failed; Hoggitt says it’s all right to talk of popularity but the Canon makes a bad impression – too damn simple and friendly, Hoggitt said. “It won’t go over with the plain people . . .”

Well, he’d had with him, the lawyer said, Canon Sip and their friend Mr. Vault who as they all knew was a bank manager, or rather an ex-bank manager, whom we were all glad to see back again with us, but with all that the three of them could do, it was hard to find any adequate words that wouldn’t right away show what was meant. It was no use, he said, to advocate a “just reward” for labour. That might be all right for farmers, probably too much, but labour would see through it right away. But he was glad to say that Canon Sip had suggested a labour platform that he believed would carry the country. “We propose to give to labour everywhere an entire freedom from work.”

There was a lot of applause, and I must say I realized the party had hit it this time – here you had all the old slogans, “freedom to work” and “freedom of work” subsumed – that was the word the speaker used – into one lucid thought.

It was a great hit for the Canon – no wonder he’s popular. You see he’s not a bit like what you’d expect from a religious man – he’s always cheerful, takes a drink any time, in fact he was quite tight at Peggy Sherar’s wedding the other day – smokes a cigar, indeed as someone said at the meeting, he just seems the ideal of an early Christian, you know, the kind they used to burn at Rome. All the same, some of them are a little afraid of it. They say if people get the idea that a party stands for religion, it’s all over with it. So Mills and Hoggitt both talk of easing Canon Sip out of the party. They would, except that having him may help to bring in the liquor interest. It seems you can’t possibly hope to get anything out of the liquor interest unless you have with you some sort of showing of clergymen and professors. Lawyers don’t help much for that.

Mentioning that reminds me of the main thing of the evening, the really crucial stuff, when they all sat and listened – the discussion of ways and means, how to get money to carry on.

The chairman of the interim finance committee read a report which he prefaced with a repetition of last week’s general resolution in favour of fair and open means of raising funds, without secrecy or subservience to moneyed interest. He said the committee had been at work. But he said, gentlemen, before you can get to fair and open means you’ve got to do a good lot of spade work underground in the dark. The committee, he said, had been hard at this. The time, he said, was not ripe to say what they had been doing. But they had not been idle. They had approached already three of our largest banks for financial support, with gratifying results. The first had invited them to come back in a month; the second, to come back in three months; the third had invited them never to come back. This, on the whole, was gratifying. They had got in touch with several manufacturing interests; one of the members of this committee knew personally very well the head of one of these interests – or rather, knew a lot about him – and had already obtained in this way his pledge to give as much as he has to.

They had done their best in the direction of both the liquor interests and the churches. But as members present would realize, it is very hard to attract the interest of these unless you get them together. They go, as we all know, hand in hand. Any large, really large, contribution from a liquor source will bring the clergy round us at once.

Meanwhile any members who would care before they passed out to leave a small party donation would find Mr. Sibley the treasurer at the table here. He added that Mr. Sibley had ink and a blank cheque book. But it was too bad. A lot of them were moving out already and I don’t think they heard about Mr. Sibley having the cheque book.

I was driven home after the meeting by one of the younger members who had a car – a college boy, keen as anything on politics, enthusiastic and, I could see by his talk, straight as a string. He said he thought there were too many older men in the thing; he was trying to engineer an inside group of young men to get them out. That was queer, wasn’t it? Because Hoggitt had told me they’d have to get rid of a lot of the younger men . . .

Anyway, there’s no doubt what the party means.

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The Life of
Lea and Perrins

(“There is no greater stimulus to our National Spirit than the contemplation of the lives of the great men who have made our country what it is . . .”)

The coming together of Lea and Perrins, about a century and a half ago, which was later on to have such momentous consequences, seems to have been entirely fortuitous. They met first as schoolboys at the old Winchester school. Harry Perrins, a vigorous young fellow in the Senior Fourth, came upon young Charles Lea, a new boy, standing alone in a corner of the Quad. He felt drawn to this shy, unknown lad. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Just dreaming,” answered Charles. “I say,” said Harry, “dreaming? That’s a queer idea – dreaming of what?”

“Of a sauce,” answered Charles.

“What sort of sauce?” asked Harry.

“Ah, that I don’t know as yet,” replied the little fellow.

That began the friendship of the two boys henceforth inseparable

—

The boys went early to Oxford, to Worcester College, their parents being anxious to get them through it before the French Revolution broke out.

It was at Oxford that Harry Perrins learned glass blowing. “If you’re still thinking of that sauce,” he said to Charles Lea, “I think I could make a jolly good bottle for it.”

Charles looked dreamily at his friend, “The vinegar,” he said: “I’m studying chemistry.”

It was on a bright morning after the Declaration of Independence that Charles Lea came early across the Quad to wake up Harry. “I can make it,” he said.

A few days later in a cellar of the old Mitre Tavern Charles and Harry stood looking into a broad vat full of dark liquid. Charles threw into it a last spoonful of powder. “That’s got it,” he said.

“What was in that powder, Charlie?” asked Harry.

“Hush, hush,” Charles said, “there are people above.”

“Whisper it,” said Harry.

“No, no,” answered Charles, “not now.”

“What do we do next?” asked Harry presently.

“We have to wait twenty-five years,” said Charlie. “You can’t hurry vinegar. Everybody knows that.”

“What do we do in the twenty-five years?”

“We have to think out a label,” said Charles. “We’ll need all the time.”

—

The twenty-five years, thus busily occupied, seemed to pass like a drop in a vat. One year Charles got the idea of a bird on the label, and within a few years more Harry seized the notion of the picture of a rabbit. A few hurried years were devoted to selecting the colour, and – it seemed in no time – the thing was done.

They were ready to bottle up, still both under sixty, hale and hearty, having never touched sauce in their lives.

Then came an unforeseen delay.

“Charles,” said Harry, “how do we sell it?”

“What do you mean?” asked Charles, still as impractical as ever.

“Sell it, sell it. Put it on the market and push it.”

“It’s a good sauce,” protested Charles.

“Good? Of course it is – but that won’t advertise it. Didn’t you learn anything from the French Revolution?”

Charles was impractical, but he had a rapid mind.

“That’s it,” he said; “you’ve said it.”

“What do you mean?” asked Harry.

“The French Revolution. Aristocracy? Don’t you see, we’ll say the sauce was made from a recipe given us by a nobleman . . .”

“Hold on,” said Harry, puzzled, “a nobleman couldn’t make up a recipe.”

“Of course not,” said Charles. “Don’t you see, we’ll say he did.”

A few days later Harry turned up at Charles’s rooms with a tall aristocratic man, stamped with all the stamps that mark nobility.

“This is Lord Nit of Worcester,” he said. “Show him where to sign.”

“You don’t need to,” said Harry, “just write, ‘from the recipe of a nobleman of that county’.”

Lord Nit took the pen.

“I say,” he said, “rather good that, eh?”

With that the sauce was on.

The busy years spun past, expanding the British Empire as the need for the sauce kept bulging it outwards.

There was still much to do. Eager years passed in the quest of a glass stopper and a cork, involving the expulsion of the Portuguese Royal Family.

Charles and Harry, still hale and hearty, confidently expected to live on into the reign of Queen Victoria.

But it was not to be.

There came a day when a breathless manservant broke into Harry’s study

“Could you come over, sir, at once?” he managed to say. “It’s Mr. Charles. He’s real bad.”

“What’s he been taking?” asked Harry.

“Some of the sauce, I’m afraid, sir.”

“Good Lord!” gasped Harry.

Harry leant over Charles’s bed. It seemed as if they were back again, boys together, in the old Winchester Quad, with Charlie still dreaming.

“Charlie,” murmured Harry, “Charlie, can you still hear me? What was in the spoon?”

But there came no answer.

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A Morning Off

(“It is the duty of each and every one of us to maintain in war-time not only an unflinching courage but even a cheerful optimism that defies misfortune.” —Winston Churchill, Mrs. Roosevelt, and other speakers.)

I read that motto, hanging on my wall just before starting out this morning. But for once I didn’t need it, because I’m in for a cheery morning anyway.

I’m going down to my dentist, and what do you think? He said he could give me the whole morning if need be! Think of that, eh?

So here I sit snug and cosy in the big chair, the great plate glass window in front of me, the sun pouring in and the birds singing outside. My dentist friend walks round in his white coat – now I see him, now I don’t see him. You see I have my head in a V-shaped affair – for Victory. I never thought of it before! – and so I can’t move it sideways. He needs my head that way when we’re using the large augur, the two-inch, going at high speed.

For the moment my dental friend is out of the room, telephoning, I imagine. The merry fellow is so popular with all his friends that they seem to ring him up every few minutes.

Little scraps of his conversation reach my ears as I lie half-buried in my white towel, in a sweet reverie of expectancy . . .

“Pretty bad in the night, was it, eh? Well, perhaps you’d better come along down and we’ll make a boring through that biscuspid and see what’s there!”

Full of ideas, he is, always like that – never discouraged, something new to suggest all the time. And then I hear him say; “Well, let me see. I’m busy now for about a couple of hours” – hurrah! That means me! I was so afraid he was going to say “I’ll be through here in about five minutes.” But no, it’s all right; I’ve got two long, dreamy hours in front of me.

He comes back into the room and his cheery presence, as he searches among his instruments and gives a preliminary buzz to the buzzer, seems to make the sunshine even brighter. How pleasant life seems – the dear old life; that is, the life I quitted ten minutes ago and to which, please Providence, I hope to return in two hours. I never felt, till I sat here, how full and pleasant life is.

So runs my pleasant reverie. But, meanwhile, my dental friend has taken up a little hammer and has tapped me in his playful way, on the back teeth.

“Feel that?” he says.

And he’s right, the merry dog! I do feel it. He guessed it right away. I am hoping so much that he will hit me again.

Come on, let’s have a little more fun like that. But no. He’s laid aside his hammer and as nearly as we can see has rolled up his cuffs to the elbow and has started his good old electric buzzer into a roar.

Ah, ha! Now we are going to get something – this is going to be the big fun, the real thing. That’s the greatest thing about our little dental mornings, there’s always something new. Always as I sit I have a pleasant expectancy that my dental friend is planning a new one.

Now, then, let us sit back tight, while he drives at our jaw with the buzzer. Of all the exhilarating feelings of hand-to-hand conflict of man against man, of mind matched against mind, and intelligence pitted against intelligence, I know of none more stimulating than when we brace ourselves for this conflict of man and machinery.

He has on his side the power of electricity and the force of machinery. But I am not without resource. I brace myself, laughingly, in my chair while he starts to bore. We need, in fact, our full strength; but, on the other hand, if he tries to keep up at this pace his hands will get tired. I realize, with a sense of amusement, that if his machine slips, he may get a nasty thump on the hand against my jawbone.

A female voice speaking into the room has called him to the telephone, and again I am alone. What if he never comes back!

The awful thought leaps to my mind, what if he comes in and says, “I’m sorry to say I have to take a train out of town at once.” How terrible!

Perhaps he’ll come in and say, “Excuse me, I have to leave instantly for Ungava!” or, “I’ll have to let your work go; they’ve sent for me to go to China!”

But no, how lucky! Back he comes again. I’ve not lost him. And now what is he at? Stuffing cotton-wool up into my head, wool saturated with some kind of drugs, and pounding it in with a little hammer.

And then – all of a sudden, so it seems – he steps back and says, “There, that will do nicely till Monday.”

Never mind! After all, he said Monday! It won’t seem so long till then!

SEE ALSO DRY PICKWICK -- The Perfect Optimist

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Mr. Plumter, B.A.,
Revisits the Old Shop

(Remember now thy college in the days of thy graduation. —Ecclesiastes – Improved)

Mr. Archie Plumter, college graduate, lives in one of those towns that lie fast asleep in the garden part of Western Ontario. You know the little places – all trees and grass and hedges and flowers, with the houses well back from the street and all boulevarded together. In Woodsdale you can’t tell where the McLeans’ lawn ends and Dr. Selby’s begins. Somewhere concealed in the middle of the town is the main street with the shops on it, and away off at the side, down hill, is the railway station, which is really more of a lawn and a flower garden than a station. All the big through trains stop at Woodsdale (for water) and the passengers ask the porter what place this is and he looks out of the window and shakes his head.

But it’s just the place for a college graduate. You see, a college graduate, as Plumter himself says, could hardly stand it in the country. His mind is too active. But here – again as Archie himself explains – you have everything, just as in the city. If you want to do any shopping you get anything you want right here on the main street; say you want a pair of boots – they have them; say you want a necktie, they’ll have it, or they’ll send for it. And, anyway, if you have any big shopping, any serious buying to do, you’ve only to hop on the train and even the slow train runs you into the City in three hours, and the flyer does it in two and three quarters. There’s a picture house in town or if you want to go to the theatres you’ve only to step on the train and there you are, in Detroit. How long? About four hours. Or if you want music, well, what’s the matter with taking a steamer across Lake Erie to Cleveland? That’s what Archie Plumter does, or at least that’s not what he does but it’s what he could do if he did it. Or suppose you want a drink? Well, you can’t get a drink in Woodsdale because it’s local option and so they have no choice. But all you have to do is jump in the car, drive twelve miles and get all you want.

Mr. Plumter is in the milling business (flour and feed). That’s his mill – as it was his father’s – that huge stone grist mill, sunk down so deep in Woodsdale Creek that, big as it is, the trees have overgrown and overtopped it. A stone grist mill is one of the few of man’s contrivances which, with a touch of time’s hand, can even improve on nature. There it stands, with the water pounding over the dam beside it, and churning up white foam among the stones below; a roar of water outside, and inside a never ending trembling and vibration of the floors, as the great mill stones hum as drowsily and steadily as the earth upon its axis . . . The floors all a-tremble, and on them the millers, moving bags of flour on little hand trucks and talking with the incoming farmers with one hand to their ear. After work the millers go home, dusted all over with fine white – looking better men – right out of the Bible.

—

Thus roars and thunders Plumter’s mill and it seems now that it is to start to grind grist for Mr. Plumter’s old college. . . .

—

It has been my fortune at intervals to pass through Woodsdale on the through trains, and I often stop over between the flyer and the slow train, or contrariwise, and spend a few hours with Archie Plumter. He and I were at college together twenty years or more ago and so when we meet Archie’s talk is all college – all about the “old shop” as he loves to call it. How is it getting on? Have I been round it at all lately?

Oddly enough, in the twenty years since our graduation Archie has never once been “back;” and this, despite the fact that he’s in and out of the city, as he himself says, practically all the time, certainly every two years or so. He means to go to the college! . . . always means to . . . every time he takes a trip to the city he tells Nell (that’s his wife) that he means to have a look around the old joint. But he never does. You see he always has some business in the morning, and generally he takes “some feller” out to lunch, and is apt to meet “one or two fellers” on the street – when a man as genial and comfortable as Archie Plumter comes to the city, the whole street seems filled with accidental “good fellers” as genial as himself.

So he doesn’t go. That’s nothing. Most graduates are like that, even right in the city. They never go near the old college, unless it’s in a bee line between their house and their office. Often they don’t see it for ten years. That’s nothing to do with their enthusiasm.

Plumter is keen on college. He tells me that they often talk, Dr. Selby and himself, of getting up a college dinner right there in Woodsdale. It seems they’ve quite a group of graduates. As Archie says, counting himself and Dr. Selby – and Dr. Selby and himself – and not counting the Methodist minister because you would hardly expect him to take anything, there’d be ten of the boys altogether, or eleven if you count the druggist. They often talk of a dinner. But there are difficulties. At a college dinner the boys would naturally like to wear dinner jackets. But there are two of the boys who haven’t got dinner jackets. So that has held the thing up – just as it has for many college dinners from Halifax to Pasadena.

—

So I wasn’t surprised when about a couple of weeks ago I got a letter from Archie which said, “If you are coming through here soon I’d be glad if you’d stay over and have dinner some evening. I have some college stuff to ask you about – important stuff – but I’d rather talk about it than explain it in a letter.”

Naturally I took occasion as soon as I could stay from afternoon local to the night flyer.

It was one of those beautiful evenings in late September, everything soft and still and mellow; the water in the dam was lower and the water below the dam was quieter, and the main street drowsier and the trees heavier – and the gladioli and asters and late petunias and golden glow banked round the houses and all of Woodsdale hazy and soft with that touch of Indian summer that would have touched even an Indian.

Archie Plumter’s house – but you know exactly what that would be like – large and low – sandstone and red brick, and half timber, with sweeping porches and verandahs and clipped grass and flowers, yet as if all in a woodland.

“There’s the old college,” Archie said as he led me into the library and pointed to a picture. “Nell will be down in a minute. Pretty good of the old joint, isn’t it? Just take a good look at it while I shake up a cocktail.”

The reader must make no mistake about that cocktail. I said above that you can’t get drinks in Woodsdale. Neither can you. This was just some rye and vermouth that Archie had in the house. In fact that’s the only way they can get it – to have it in the house.

“I’ve got some stuff to talk about,” said Archie, “but I’d sooner let it keep till after dinner . . .”

We drank the cocktail and in came Nell. Archie Plumter has been as comfortable and fortunate in his marriage as in everything else. Nell’s father was a lumberman; in fact, he was a big lumberman, one of the biggest, and there’s something about that business of the forest almost as warm and natural as flour and feed, or big scale farming. Poets may talk as they like about a fisherman’s daughter who lives on the water. But for matrimony, for comfortable companionship and financial strength, give me a lumberman’s daughter every time. “Nell, you remember,” said Archie as we shook hands, “was at college too. But she, of course, didn’t go on to a degree.”

No, of course she didn’t. Anyone as pretty as she must have been twenty years ago didn’t need a degree. She could pick up something easier at college than that.

“Nell,” said Archie, “was a partial.”

Was she really? You’d hardly think so now. She looks pretty complete. Still, the years have used her kindly.

“I was just showing this picture of the old circus,” continued Archie. “That picture was taken the first year I played on the football team. You remember, Nell, the big game when the college moved up to second place but I couldn’t play because of my wrist?”

No doubt Nell remembered it all right: but more likely as the game when he held her hand under the rug on the football benches, and she realized that perhaps she wouldn’t need to go any further with mathematics. College girls have their own calendar. They don’t remember the day the college gave an honorary degree to the British Ambassador. They remember the day they first wore their dark blue dress with the fur collar.

We went into dinner, one of those excellent and solid dinners, heavy with steak and light with claret and fragrant with coffee and cigars – the kind of real dinner only to be arranged by a lumberman’s daughter who remembers feeding her father – just the thing to nourish the trained college brain. The claret, fortunately, was some that Archie had in the cellar; so was the Scotch whiskey that we had afterwards – just stuff out of the cellar.

All through dinner Archie was full of reminiscences and questions and filled with by-gone admiration.

“What became of Professor Crabbe, the Greek Professor?”

“He’s still there, I think,” I said.

“Some of the fellows didn’t like him so much,” said Archie, “and of course I never took Greek. But he was certainly a wizard. That man had the most remarkable and the most ready memory I ever came across. I asked him one day, for instance, what was the date of the foundation of Babylon.”

“And did he answer?”

“Answered right off – not a moment’s hesitation – said he didn’t recall it. He certainly was a wonder.”

Indeed from our dinner talk that evening the college in Plumter’s days had been instructed by a set of “wizards,” “wonders” and “wows,” an illumination that never comes twice to a college.

“What became of old Professor Dim, the historian?” Archie asked.

“He’s still right there,” I said, “as far as I know. I haven’t been actually inside the college for about a year but I’m sure he’s there . . . Pretty old, of course.”

“He must be. Do you remember the day I knocked him down in the corridor and the old fellow was nice about it? You remember the way we used to come rushing out of the First Year Latin lecture at twelve o’clock, all in a stampede, and I knocked the old fellow down and Bill, the janitor, picked him up. Where’s Bill? When did he die?”

“He’s not dead,” I said, “he’s there.” Archie Plumter, like all stay-away graduates, imagined everybody had died since he went away.

—

After dinner Nell went upstairs to help their two little girls with their algebra. That’s where Nell’s education as a partial comes in, eh? – able to help the little girls (they’re twelve and fourteen) with their algebra. That is, help them as far as simultaneous equations. They’ll have to stop there. But they won’t need quadratics – pretty little girls like those.

—

Archie unfolded his ideas over the Scotch and cigars. “What I feel is,” he said, “I’ve been a pretty poor sort of graduate. What have I ever done for the old joint, except a casual subscription and things of that sort? Well – I’ve been doing pretty well lately – I want to give the college some money. I want to give it twenty-five thousand dollars. Now, here’s the point. How do I go about it? What do I do? Where do I get the excuse?”

“Excuse?” I said.

“Yes. How do I start it?”

“Archie,” I said, “you don’t need any excuse when you give a college money. They’ll find the excuse: you just find the money. What do you want to do, endow a set of lectures, or offer a fellowship – or just ask them what to do?”

“Oh, I know just what I want to give,” Plumter said. “I want to give a clock – a clock set in a little tower so that students in the campus can see the time. Do you know, when I went to college I had no watch – at least I had an old silver watch of father’s, but it wouldn’t go.”

“I know,” I said, “all students used to have old silver watches that wouldn’t go. Now they have new gunmetal watches that will.”

“Well, this clock I want to give,” said Archie, “does more than tell the time. I got the idea from one that Nell and I saw on our trip this summer to California, at one of those old missions. It has chimes inside it, and just before it strikes the hour it strikes a chime.

Bing! Bong! Bong!

Bong! Bing! Bing!

“The most melodious thing I ever heard,” Archie said.

It seemed to me that I had heard things more melodious than Plumter’s rendering of a chime. But his own opinion was different. He repeated his chimes.

Bing! Bong! Bong!

Bong! Bing! Bing!

And he added: “I’ve got all the data on the whole thing in a business way. It would cost twenty-five thousand and the contractor could hook the clock tower on at any spot on the roof they like. So, what do I do next?”

“Why,” I said, “go down to the city and go and see the president and tell him about it. That’s all. That will give you a look round the place.”

“That’s so,” he assented, “that’s right. I’ll have a look at the old shop. I’ll come next week. You must meet me at the train.”

—

So a week after that Plumter came up from Woodsdale to the city to make his benefaction.

I met him at the station. It was only half-past eight on a bright autumn morning, but he was nervous already. He began at once. “What I think I’ll say, I’ll say, ‘Mr. President, I’m afraid I’ve been rather a delinquent graduate, but . . .’ Something like that, eh?”

I said that would be fine. At breakfast, and after, he was still rehearsing it; “‘Mr. President, I’m afraid . . .’ I won’t beat about the bush,” he said. “I’ll go right at it, eh?”

He had no notion how easy it is to give twenty-five thousand dollars to a college. You don’t have to find the words; just the money.

—

So in the middle morning we started for the college. I hadn’t realized till we came to the gates of the campus how much it has changed since Plumter had left it twenty years ago – the beautiful big Mines Building, all white stone, on one side of the campus and the new library, of white stone and slots of glass on the other.

Plumter stopped dead as we entered the campus.

“I’ll be damned!” he said as he looked round it. “Is this all the size it was? No bigger than this? I thought it was twice the size.”

Then he said, “What’s that?”

“That’s the new Mines building,” I said.

“Where’s the old one, the little old red brick building?”

“They knocked it down,” I explained.

“Knocked it down!” repeated Plumter. “Good Lord, knocked it down! And what’s the other building?”

“That’s the new library,” I said; “the old one was knocked down ten years ago.”

“You mean they knocked down the library?” said Plumter. He sounded horrified. Then with evident relief, he exclaimed, “Say, there’s the old museum, yes, sir, the same darned old museum! I’m certainly glad to see it again.”

“You used to be in it much?” I asked.

“I never was in it,” said Plumter. “There was ten cents admission, you remember?”

—

All this time little flocks of students, boys and girls, were overtaking and passing us, for this was the crowded time of the morning with the big lectures of the first and second year going on.

“Who are all these?” asked Plumter. “Is there partly a high school here now?”

“No,” I said, “these are the students.”

“Good Lord!” said Plumter and stood still to let a demure little group of seventeen-year-old girls go past. One of the demure little girls was saying as she went by, “I don’t care what you call it, I call it a hell of a poor course . . .”

—

And just at that moment we ran into Professor Crabbe. Plumter hailed him with outstretched hand.

“How do you do, sir . . . you remember me . . . I hope . . . I’m Plumter.”

“Oh, perfectly well, perfectly well,” said the professor, “perfectly well.”

They shook hands.

“And what are you in now, Mr. Platter?” asked Professor Crabbe.

“I’m in the milling industry, sir,” said Plumter.

“In the ministry!” said Professor Crabbe. “Dear me . . . well, you were always heading that way, heading that way! Your Greek must come very well for your sermons.”

“I never took any,” said Plumter.

“Of course,” said the Professor.

“You’re still lecturing, sir?” asked Plumter.

“All except my eyesight,” answered Professor Crabbe. “My hearing is excellent, Mr. Plaster” – and he gave him a challenging look.

“You can still see for bookwriting, sir,” said Plumter pleasantly.

“I never see him,” said the professor. “In your class, wasn’t he? But I never see him now, haven’t for years. Time moves on, you know – well, good-bye, Mr. Blister.”

—

But there was more cheer and consolation in meeting Bill, the janitor, as we went into Arts Building, Bill who was timeless and ageless, and remembered everything.

“Well, Mr. Plumter, where you been all this time? We thought you was never coming back!”

“You remember me, eh?” said Plumter, much gratified.

“Remember you?” laughed Bill, “I should say so! You was a regular holy terror! More breakages to your name, Mr. Plumter, than any other student in college!”

Plumter joined in the laugh. He must tell them in Woodsdale about that “holy terror” stuff.

Just then there burst into the main hall through the opening class room door the full charge and onslaught of “Latin One Men” coming out after the lecture. It was like what we used to read of the stampede of Texas steers . . . Plumter was swept aside, pounded and jostled in the flooding pushing crowd; but all so polite, those boys. “Sorry, sir,” they’d say as they ran into his stomach. “Excuse me, sir,” as they got him in the small of his back.

“What’s all this?” asked Plumter.

“First Year Latin coming out, sir . . . but Lord! That’s nothing to what it was in your day. Remember when you knocked down Professor Dim?”

—

And as the flood subsided who should be standing there but Professor Dim, Professor of History and Archaeology. There he was just as ancient and as diminutive, as rosy and as cheery as ever – just as young at seventy as he had been old at fifty. There he was, gown and all, and his lectures, all in leather, under his arm. Being a professor of history he could remember anything up to three thousand years.

“Why, how do you, Mr. Plumter,” he said, “how do you do. This is really a pleasure . . .”

“I’m very glad to see you, sir; I always wish I’d been fortunate enough to take your lectures.”

“Ah, now, that’s very kind of you! I wonder if you wouldn’t care perhaps to come in and sit and listen now . . . oh no, these are not the old lectures of your time – this is a new course – it’s only the sixth year I’ve given it – a course on the Crusades . . . But do come . . . I’ve just a small class . . . a dozen . . . I often have visitors drop in . . . only last month a young Chinaman came in . . . accidentally . . . but he was delighted . . . Please do.”

So genial, so anxious, old Professor Dim, with that queer conceit a professor never loses – so what could we say?

“That’s right,” said Professor Dim. “William here will show you the room.”

—

The class were already there, seated and decorously waiting – a professor’s “dozen” of them, that is, seven. Anyone acquainted with a college register could have explained just who they were and why they were there: three divinity students who were taking the Crusades as a credit in Christianity, a football student taking it as a football qualification, a history student who was liable to the Crusades because he’d fallen down on the French Revolution, and two women Sociology students who had been compelled by a clash in the time-table to substitute the Crusades in place of a course in Motherhood which came at the wrong hour.

From the side door in came Professor Dim. He took his place behind his reading desk, unfolded and spread the blue fool’s-cap sheets of the Crusades, bowed courteously to the class, and began:

—

“Heliogabalus—” began Professor Dim.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the football man.

“Heliogabalus, Mr. Munro—” repeated Professor Dim.

“Thank you, sir—”

“Heliogabalus,” said Professor Dim, for the third time – and paused while all the class wrote down Heliogabalus . . .

“having now assumed the purple . . .” announced Professor Dim.

“purple” . . . wrote the class.

A college lecture is a queer thing, for people not accustomed to it. The Professor isn’t exactly dictating the lecture, and he isn’t exactly talking, and the class are not exactly taking dictation and they’re not exactly listening. It’s a system they both have grown so used to that it’s second nature.

But for anyone to have to sit and listen to it, without writing down anything, not even “purple,” is, of course, impossible. It’s excruciating. I could watch Archie Plumter suffering; trying to look interested; trying to listen; trying to not listen. I knew just what he was thinking; he was wondering if it was really true that he had had four years of this! That he had gone not to one lecture in a morning but to two, three or even four of them!

So he sat agonizing. Then I found in my pocket a pencil and I took some sheets of paper “off” a divinity student behind us, and gave them to Plumter. Oh, my! what a change! What a transformation!

He happened to get the chance of a real start . . . Professor Dim had just opened up. “In the year A.D. 940, or, if you prefer it, the Arabian year 318 . . .” Oh, my! that was stuff! Mr. Plumter’s pencil flew over the paper . . . In five minutes he was absorbed – in ten minutes lost to the world, in the fascination, the concentration of taking notes. Old habit and forgotten aptitude sprang again to life. He wrote and spelt such names Godroi de Bouillon and Saladin Ben Shirgah as easily as you jump a ditch in a van! Think what it would mean, how wonderful it would be, to spend four years like this, with perhaps two or three lectures every morning!!

—

After the lecture we shook hands with Professor Dim – the Professor a little flushed, a little flurried but as happy over praise as a schoolboy.

“Certainly a wonderful lecture, sir,” said Plumter, his notes all collected into a precious heap.

“I’m so glad you liked it,” said Professor Dim. “It’s one of four – as I say, a special course – when I get it into shape, in a year or two, my hope is to open the course to the public . . . if I had a large hall . . .”

“You’d certainly draw a big crowd,” said Archie Plumter, and he meant it.

—

And then to see the President. Down the corridor and along and through and up, and so to the President’s outer office, where we sent in Plumter’s card and waited.

Archie, I saw, was all nervous again. I could hear him reciting.

—

The President’s lady secretary, filing cards, said it was a fine day, and Plumter didn’t hear her.

She filed some more and then asked him where he lived, and, he remembered and said, “Woodsdale.” Then the buzzer buzzed and she said that the President would see us now, and so in we went.

The President rose and shook hands – with me, casually, as to someone known, but with Plumter, as evidently the main visitor, the person of the occasion.

“How do you do?” he said, “Mr. —” as he looked down at the little card – “Mr. Plumter, is it not?”

“Yes,” Plumter said.

“Ah, yes,” said the President, “Mr. Plumter of the class of . . . class of . . .”

“Yes,” Plumter said.

“And you’re now living in—”

“Woodsdale,” Plumter said.

At that moment the lady secretary slipped into the room, said something into the President’s ear to which he answered in a low voice, “Ask him kindly to wait – about five minutes.”

“Woodsdale!” he said. “Woodsdale, oh, yes, that’s out – out beyond . . .”

“Yes,” said Plumter.

“And what profession are you following, Mr. Plumter?” asks the President.

“I’m not in a profession,” Archie said. “I’m mostly in feed.”

The President hadn’t the least idea what he meant; it certainly sounded pretty hoggish but he answered as pleasantly as he could, “Ah, yes, you’re in feed, eh!”

Just then the desk telephone on the table made a gurgling sound; the President picked it up, listened, and said, “Oh, yes, very pleased, indeed, yes, in about five minutes.”

The brief pause had enabled Plumter to collect his courage for the effort he had to make. He determined to say what he had to and be done with it.

He rose and stood up – it seemed more formal and natural to say it in that attitude.

“Mr. President,” he said, “I’m afraid I—” and he cleared his throat.

The President had risen also and put out his hand with a smile; he thought Plumter was leaving . . . He would have liked to speak of lunch, but with a man mostly in feed it seemed risky.

But just as he began to speak there fell upon our ears, from somewhere outside, the loud and melodious sound of a chime of bells:

Bing! Bong! Bong!

Bong! Bing! Bing!

“Ah” – said the President, his head on one side and an appreciative smile on his face – “Ah! Our new chimes! Beautiful, aren’t they? The gift of one of our graduates, a clock tower with a chime! You may have noticed it on the left as you came up!”

—

As we walked away from the building I said, “I’m sorry, Archie, I didn’t know about those chimes; I haven’t been round here for a year; they are evidently just new.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said, and he added, “To hell with them!”

—

And just then a little incident happened to cheer him up. For there was good old Bill, the janitor, running down the front steps . . . “Just to say good-bye, if you’re off, sir,” he called, and as he joined us, “Hope you’ll come again before long, sir.”

“Thanks very much Bill . . .”

“And here’s a little note, sir, that I was to give you. The Bursar heard you was round, sir, and he said not to let you go without this. It’s a bill for breakages he’s had, sir, for years and years. He’d lost your address.”

As we moved off down the avenue, we saw in the sideways distance Professor Dim starting off for home, his Crusades, all in leather, under his arm – he waved his hand in good-bye. “That old bird,” said Plumter, “is worth the whole dam lot of them.”

—

Depressed? You’d be surprised how fast that sort of thing wears off . . . By the time we’d had a cocktail at the club, Plumter was beginning to feel as if we’d had a pretty notable morning . . . By the time we’d had lunch, he was explaining to men at the club that he’d been having a look round the old shop . . . and that the new Mines Building was certainly all right . . .

For you see, after all, he hadn’t bought the clock, he still had his twenty-five thousand dollars, and already a new idea was dawning on his mind . . . By the time he got to Woodsdale he was full of it all, more of a graduate than ever.

—

The Woodsdale By-path (Archie owned it) . . . printed in the next issue some interesting Notes on the Third Crusade, beginning “Heliogabalus, having assumed the purple . . .”

And a few weeks after that the “college boys” of Woodsdale pulled off their college dinner – put on their dinner jackets and pulled the dinner off. One of the two had bought one and the other one borrowed one – so it was all right. Archie Plumter made the speech of the evening, and he said that a college graduate who didn’t from time to time, say at least once in twenty years, visit the old place was as low as a snake.

—

But just a little after that came the big thing, the announcement in all the city papers, of the foundation of an endowment at the college of a series of Four Lectures on the Crusades, to be given annually by the greatest scholars in the world. You’ll see the lectures listed now right there in the front pages of the calendar among Endowments and Benefactions. They’re called The Dim Lectures on the Crusades, endowed by Archibald and Helen Plumter – four of them endowed at five hundred dollars each. Professor Dim will give them the first ten years and after that they’ll be thrown open to all the scholars of the world. My! Won’t there be a scramble?

TOC     INDEX

Allegory Island

Four business men were stranded, shipwrecked and penniless, upon an island in the South Seas. It was a beautiful island. Breadfruit grew on every tree, coconuts dangled at the tops of palms, while beds of oysters lay near the shore.

But for the business men it was useless. They had no “funds” to develop the island; with an advance of funds they could have gathered breadfruit and made bread. But without funds! Why, they couldn’t. They must stay hungry.

“Don’t you think,” said the weakest among them – a frail man (he had never been able to raise more than a million dollars; he’d no strength) – “Don’t you think,” he said to the biggest man, “you could climb that palm tree and throw down coconuts?” . . . “And who’ll underwrite me?” asked the other.

There it was! They were blocked and helpless; couldn’t even get an advance to wade into the sea for oysters.

So they sat there on the rocks – starving, dejected, their hair growing long. They couldn’t even shave; there was no barbers union.

On the fourth day the frail man, who was obviously sinking, said:

“If I die I want you to bury me over there on that little hill overlooking the sea.”

“We can’t bury you, Eddie,” they said. “We’ve no burial fund.”

They fell asleep on the sands. But the next morning when they woke up an Angel was standing beside them. They knew he was an Angel although he wore a morning coat and a top hat, and had grey striped trousers with spats above his boots.

“Are you an Angel?” they asked.

“Pretty much,” he answered. “That is to say, I am a director of the Bank of England, but for you just now it’s almost the same thing.”

“Funds, funds!” they exclaimed. “Can you advance us funds?”

“Certainly,” said the Angel. “I came for that. I think I see a fountain pen in your waistcoat pocket there. Thank you . . . and that ten cent scribbler . . . much obliged. Now then up you get! Light a fire, go and collect those oysters, pick some breadfruit, chase that wild goat and I’ll arrange an advance of funds while you’re doing it.”

As they sat round their fire at supper the Angel explained it all out of the scribbler.

“I have capitalized your island at two million dollars (that’s half a million each) and I have opened a current drawing account for each of you of a hundred thousand, with loans as required . . .”

What activity next day! Climb the coconut tree? Why, of course, the man was underwritten. Oysters? They wrote out an oyster policy and waded right in up to their necks.

What a change the next week or so brought! There they sat at lunch in their comfortable Banyan Club House overlooking the sea – (annual dues, a thousand dollars a year) – sat at lunch eating grilled oysters with coconut cocktails . . .

“To think,” said the little man Eddie, “that only a week ago I wanted to die!”

“All right now, anytime, Eddie,” said another . . . “We’ve a mutual burial and benefit fund. Ask the Angel if we haven’t.”

But when they looked round the Angel had vanished.

“Too bad,” said the senior man. “But in a way it doesn’t matter so much now. We can hire a clergyman. I propose we pay big money and get a really good one.”

—

It’s almost a pity to mention the sequel. A little later, four labouring men tried to land on the island. The others undertook to fight them off with shotguns. That started civilization. But the pity was that if they had only had the Angel with them, he would have told them to let the labourers land and to multiply all the figures in the book by two, and add a little extra, because in developing a country blessed by ample resources twice four is ten.

—

But the coming of labour was really only part of what happened. Just as the trouble with capital began a boatload of women was blown ashore, and then two separate canoes with rival missionaries. So that started a still more complete civilization, with machinery and increase of population till presently there were enough of them on the island to pick up sides for a war, then for a bigger war, and at last an extermination.

—

So, after they were all exterminated there lay Allegory Island again, empty and beautiful in the sunshine. The wind sang and the waves whitened as they rose, or sank to mere ruffles on the surface of the ocean. Then, as the days and the years went by, the lapse of time and the luxuriance of nature wiped out all trace of the visitation of civilization, and of its angers, its wars and death. There lay Allegory Island again as nature made it.

Then, at last, after many years, there came sailing to the island a ship of Socialists. And these had come across the ocean looking for a place to set up Brotherly Love. But they had been a long time in coming, for it is much slower to sail a ship on brotherly love than in the old Nova Scotia fashion.

So when the leader saw Allegory Island it looked so fresh and green and cool that he knew it was just the place for a habitation of brotherly love. He called down the main hatchway, “Gentlemen, I don’t want to ask you to overexert yourselves and I don’t want to disturb the ladies, but if some of you will come on deck I think you will agree that we have found just the very place we are looking for.”

They came at once, after a while, for they were the best-natured fellows in the world.

—

So presently they got the ship to the shore. They bumped a hole in it on the rocks but that didn’t matter as they wouldn’t be using it any more. They had speeches and sang community songs and went to sleep on the sands with the wind in their ears.

The next day the leader said, “Now, gentlemen, I suggest that we set ourselves to work for the production of food. Labour, ladies and gentlemen, is the sole source of value. I will, therefore, ask you to initiate with me the production of yams, mangoes, banyans, breadfruit and so forth, and the domestication of the wild dingo and the llama for their wool and of the goat for its milk and meat. We will also search the rocks for guano eggs.”

One shook his head. “It sounds like work,” he said.

But the leader answered, “How can it be work if you get no wages?”

And another said, “Can’t we have a little community singing first?” So they sat and sang.

—

After that – not that very day, of course – the work began, or at least it was supposed to begin. But the Island was so beautiful and so drowsy that it hardly seemed right to work. Even the leader said, “Don’t overexert yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, and, above all, keep out of the sun. Mrs. McSpodden, don’t try to catch that goat – you’ll never get it.”

So the yam field was a little scratched and then neglected, and they sat round on the grass in the shade of the trees and listened to the burbling of the little brooks, and the women made daisy chains of flowers and sang to the children, and it always seemed too early to begin work, and then too late, and then it was afternoon and then sunset.

So they ate what they had brought in boxes and crates and barrels, and each day there was less and less of it. “We must work,” said the leader and yawned as he said it, and when they looked at him again he was fast asleep.

—

Then came all of a sudden the monsoon storms and rain, and great flashes of lightning that tore the sky, and wind and waves that smashed what was left of the ship. And there was no shelter and no food and only hissing rain.

And when the monsoon storm was over the Socialist settlement of Brotherly Love was gone. There was nothing of it but here and there little fragments of human wreckage among the rocks and trees, and bits of coloured cloth – and even that the sun and wind tore and wore away every day. Perhaps some of the people made a raft of the broken ship and got away. But if they did it was never known.

—

Years and years went by – centuries. And with the flight of time, nature wiped away – oh, so, easily – the little traces of man’s brief visit. A tangled vine here, a cluster of tall flowers there and it was all gone; a little calcined whiteness that once was bone, crumbling to nothing; a piece of steel oxydizing in the air till it blew away as red dust on the wind.

—

So once again Allegory Island was empty and the wind sang and the waves whitened and the tide marked out on the sand the record of the passing years. So many years went by, we say, that every trace of the capitalists civilization and the Socialists dream was past and gone, blown away with the wind, and rotted into the soil.

—

Then there came over the waves other and distant people. For these were Polynesian savages, inured for uncounted generations to the seas and islands of the Pacific . . . In a huge open boat they came, light and buoyant, all of hide and wicker and leaping the surface of the waves . . . There was a great square sail in the boat, and far out on the lee side reached an outrigger of long poles that held a float . . . Twenty flat paddles flashed in the sun on either side, and there were in all – men, women and children – sixty-two people on board . . .

The boat had come five hundred miles over the waves – but that was nothing to it . . .

As they drew near the island the paddlers, since there might be lurking enemies on the shore, chanted out their war-song . . .

A: Ki – a: Ki – a: Ki – a.

But there was no one there. They drove the boat high on the sand and landed in peace.

—

And here it would take the pen of a professor of archaeology to tell of “primitive culture” and explain how these savages were fitted to their environment, how easy it was to them to meet difficulties that had meant failure and death to civilized Europeans. Their boat, their knowledge of the sea – everything prepared and foreseen, not by foresight, but by instinct.

Even their food. There was no danger of starvation for them.

They had their food with them. We said there were sixty-two on the boat, the long boat that rode so easily. Two of them were tied up in thongs under the fore-peak of the boat. They were the food; plenty for a warm meal tonight, enough cold for tomorrow and another hot roast next week.

So now you can understand better the raptures of the archaeologists over primitive culture and its adaptation.

—

So it was that the savages, after a comfortable meal, sat around their little fire, which was dying low in the dusk of the warm summer evening, the soft moon just rising out of civilization. The fireflies played about them, little dots of phosphorescence in the dark – and the women sat and crooned their soft Polynesian love songs, and patted the little children’s hands as they fell asleep.

Savages love one, don’t they?

So all that would be needed would be for the savages to stay two or three thousand years on Allegory Island, and get civilized and start the round again.

I hope there are no readers of this book who are people who want to know things. If there are they may want to know whether there were ever islands in the Pacific as beautiful and inviting as Allegory Island, and whether savages could really make a voyage of five hundred miles in an open boat. For the island, as good and indeed far better, they may see that fascinating old book Anson’s Voyage Around the World (1740-44) where they may read of the South Seas Paradise Island of Tinian (lat 15' 8" North and longitude close to the date line of longitude 180°), and for voyages of savages in open boats across five hundred miles of the Pacific, and even double that distance, they may see that fascinating new book Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Greenland.

But why do so?

TOC     INDEX

Damon and Pythias;
Barristers, Solicitors, Etc.

You remember Damon and Pythias, of course – or at least you remember them as well as I do – the two famous friends in Roman history, or in Greek history, I forget which. The history of Syracuse, you say? Well! well! to think of that! Syracuse in New York State? Oh, the Greek Syracuse in Greece! Oh, not in Greece – the Greek Syracuse not in Greece! I’m glad to know exactly where it all was.

Anyway, as you remember, wherever Damon went Pythias went and anything Damon had Pythias could have, and the other way round. And you remember how the Tyrant of Syracuse threw Damon into prison and condemned him to death – those Tyrants were – well – simply tyrants – and as soon as Pythias heard of it, he hurried to the tyrant and said, “Don’t execute Damon; execute me in his place.” But Damon broke in and said to the tyrant, “You can’t do that; you sentenced me first; execute me and let Pythias go.” The tyrant was touched – deep down, he was all heart. He executed them both.

—

That was the story, or rather that was the first part of it. But if you have read Greek mythology you know that there was more. I shall never forget those lectures I took from Professor Dim on the mythology of Greece. “Wonderful!” I used often to wake up suddenly and say to myself, “fascinating.” As Professor Dim would explain to us that according to the Greeks, when two twin souls existed together like that, they were supposed to pass on after death, side by side, waiting, waiting to come together, and the Fates, all through the passing years, used to weave the skein of life – Professor Dim used to do actual weaving in the air, right in the classroom – and when the threads come together – their souls came back to human life again, and went through the same fate. There was a Greek name that Professor Dim gave to it, metem – something – it doesn’t matter; I’ll think of it in a minute.

But notice if the skein went wrong – if the black thread held by the dark goddess Morta, the one on the right, was woven in with the white – you could see Professor Dim actually weave it in, a thin black thread – that is you could see that he saw it, could just see it through his spectacles . . . Well – if this thin black thread mixed in – then, aha! – and that is what we are going to tell about.

But wait just a minute first. It occurs to me that I got it wrong about Damon and Pythias and what the Tyrant of Syracuse did. Of course he didn’t execute them. It was the other way on. He was going to and then he was so touched with their devotion that he begged he might join in their friendship and make a third . . . That was it . . . and after that the three were just an inseparable trio . . . You’d see them together, at all the town gatherings, at all the public executions – there they were, arm in arm, laughing together.

—

Now years and years ago I knew Damon and Pythias personally; so did lots of people in the Canadian city where I lived. In fact, they hadn’t been in the law school for a fortnight before everybody was saying, “There go Damon and Pythias.” Their names weren’t really that – yet in a sort of a way their names half suggested it. You know the way something half suggests something! Professor Dim said the Greeks called it – Para – ach! para something – I’ll get it presently. Anyway their names were Dannie Dament and Slugger Pethick. . . . They weren’t in the least alike. Damon was short and fair and bright and lively, with blue eyes that were always changing and happy and restless. Slugger was a great, big hulk of a fellow, lurched over at the top, dark as crime – say, he did look like a criminal! He didn’t belong to the city as Dannie did. He’d just come from a small place, just a village, away out past Wiarton . . . You know what fellows look like when they come from past any place like Wiarton.

So please try to get the two clearly apart. Look at them there in the corridor of the law school, one each side of the professor as they just come out of a lecture . . . Dannie – he’s so quick and easy and glib – is looking up sideways into the professor’s face and saying, “I must congratulate you, sir, on a most brilliant lecture!” The nerve of him, eh? Of course it was a dangerous thing to do, because the professor – naturally stopped in his tracks and said – “As a matter of fact, Mr. Dament, there were several very interesting points under section 92, article eleven, which I really should have explained . . . You see” . . . And with that he began to expand, with Dannie looking brightly in his face like an attentive bird, and not hearing a word . . .

Let him stand there till I explain who the two are. His expansion will contract abruptly when he looks round into Slugger’s face.

—

Dannie Dament enjoyed a peculiar social prestige because his family had for generations been prominent people and, also because his father had skipped off to the United States. I’m afraid some people now wouldn’t quite understand what I mean by “skipping to the States.” It was a way they used to go. Tourists? No, not exactly tourists. They just skipped across . . . It was their way of going.

And when they had skipped across to the United States you never heard of them for years and perhaps never again. Perhaps they committed suicide in a hotel – a little room with gaslight, a bed and a dresser . . . So Dannie’s father, as everybody knew had skipped to the States – and was gone.

—

They all remembered him. Such a pleasant hearty man he was, Charles Edward Dament, that it was a pleasure to look at him; a large man, an imposing man, with a strong face that smiled, clean-shaven, behind his gold spectacles as fresh and bright as the morning . . . Add with it a Panama hat, and a loose summer suit of brown holland, a loose expensive tie, and all so clean and fresh and honest . . . Who wouldn’t trust a man like that? And they all did. Why not, indeed? For the man was the soul of honour. Everybody knew that; and for that reason they put him on to every board, to every public charity, to every committee. He was the Treasurer of the Church of England Cathedral, Treasurer of the Art Museum, Treasurer of the Board of Education – in fact, of everything that had money. All the more so and especially as he never stinted money, never stinted salaries. There was plenty of money, he said, where money came from. Never was such a man for raising salaries! He raised all the clergy of the Cathedral – even the Bishop, his own personal friend (that wouldn’t stop him), he raised him. He raised the teachers; he doubled the Budget of the Art Museum, and brought mummies all the way from Egypt, like so much cord wood.

And, mind you, a far-sighted man! A man who would look into the future! “Money, Dannie,” he used to say, “money brings money. All you need, Dannie, is vision. Make money work and never grudge it; there’s enough for all of them.”

All round the city and just outside it Mr. Dament could see the empty waste places, and the mud flats and the sunken ravines filled with litter . . . He could see what that would mean when the city began to grow! Think of all that when the city would reach half a million, yes, a million . . . A dream! No, sir, a reality.

And in went the money – into the dream. Half the endowment of the Cathedral into a mudflat . . . the funds of the Museum, and the endowment of four college chairs were sunk under the sand beside a creek half a mile from the city limits. “Vision!” he said, and he used to tell the Bishop about it through the cigar smoke – the Bishop and Colonel Strong, the Chief Magistrate, and Judge Mildmay – all his old friends and fellow trustees. They’d been boys together at school. There was just one thing. Mr. Dament kept no accounts – or no separate accounts. He was, as he said, no bookkeeper. Everything went into his own account, in and out of it. That seemed to make it all the more secure, you see, because it made him responsible. In fact, as he said himself, it guaranteed everything.

So that was how it happened. We’ve seen it half a dozen times since, played out from start to finish; the slacking of good times, the slump, the squeeze, the crash! And then ruin . . . And Dament responsible to the law. There was no doubt of it; “misappropriation of funds” – it sounds bad doesn’t it, when it’s really vision.

They looked into it, privately at first – and Judge Mildmay said, “Charlie, I’m afraid you’ll have to go” . . . and presently Colonel Strong said, “Charlie, I think you must go. We shall have to get out a capias but I can hold it till you’re gone.” Colonel Strong was a veteran of all the wars there had been and he wore all the ribbons that there were. He would never flinch from his duty, but he wanted to get Dament out of the way before he unflinched it. A capias meant a document, inviting a person, very warmly, not to leave the province. When a person “skipped to the States” it was the custom first to be sure that he’d got there and then get out a capias.

—

“Is the writ out for him?” asked the Bishop of Colonel Strong a night or so later.

“Not yet,” said the Colonel. “I want to be quite sure first.”

“I know that he got to” – the Bishop put up his hand and whispered – “Buffalo.”

“Not far enough,” said the Colonel . . . “There’s always a danger of error if he’s near the border.”

“Where then?” the Bishop whispered. “Cleveland?”

“Too near the lake,” said the Colonel. “I’d like him clear across Ohio.”

A day or two later the Bishop whispered, “it’s all right he’s at . . .” The name went like a whispered sigh . . . Was it “Cincinnati?”

So they got out the capias forbidding Charles Edward Dament to leave the province.

—

So when he was gone, Mrs. Dament – Dannie’s mother – took in boarders in the great big family house, which was her own – about all she had. At first it was very grand, quite distinguished and Mrs. Dament a sort of chatelaine, a person of prestige . . . “Boarding at Mrs. Dament’s” sounded high class. Then, as the years went by, as the house grew shabby and the furniture rickety, the place became just like any other “boarding house,” and the boarders just boarders. “They say her husband skipped to the States years ago,” an old boarder would say to a new, and the new boarder just answer, “He did, eh?” And as the years went by and the “landlady” (Mrs. Dament) grew old and worn – careworn – the boarder would answer, “He did, eh? Can you blame him?” That was a boarding house joke. Boarding houses were cruel places.

So can you wonder that Dannie Dament, with all those wonderful “advantages of adversity” that the socialists describe, grew up bright and self reliant and helpful? How could he help it with such a father? But, of course, they didn’t know all this time where Dament’s father was – or weren’t told. Some people said that he had committed suicide in a hotel in Cincinnati – or in a hotel somewhere. They often did, those who skipped and mostly in hotels. People disliked it elsewhere . . . But this was just talk. At any rate Judge Mildmay and the Bishop and Colonel Strong, Dannie’s father’s friends, if they knew, took care not to tell. If they had, then, you see, Dannie and his mother would have to know. Do you get it? As long as they didn’t know, that blocked all legal inquiry looking to extradition. They could, if need be, swear – oh, what is it you call it – a nescio quod, meaning I don’t know anything, or sign, both of them an ignoramus. They didn’t know, and after Dannie’s mother had gone – she died the sixth year after – Dannie knew still less . . . As a matter of fact, no one knew. That was Dannie Dament.

Slugger Pethick was very different. He’d had no advantages, brought up rough, away off in the country, somewhere back of Wiarton. You know what that would be like. He had no decent chance to learn what was right and what was wrong, not out there, with his father just a Church of England rural clergyman in a place of about five hundred people. As I say, he had no way of knowing right from wrong. When he came down he was wearing a celluloid collar – didn’t know it was wrong; and when he met anybody he used to say, “Pleased to meet you,” and start to pull off his gloves, even if he didn’t have any on – the way they do back of Wiarton . . . And he wore a “dicky” on Sundays (you know what that is) and thought it pretty slick . . . A lot of that he never lost. They never do, the people away back in the country, no matter how celebrated they get – prime ministers, bankers, statesmen, it doesn’t matter – you notice them still pulling off gloves that aren’t there, and see them unconsciously fumbling at their necks. They’re feeling at their celluloid collar to see if their tie is still there – the little ten-cent tie that hooked on with elastic.

Slugger’s father, I say, was just a little country clergyman, short, wiry, tanned and worn. He was a “horse and buggy” clergyman, for on Sunday, after he’d preached in his own place in the morning – it was called, what was it? Something – Head – he drove out seven miles to take an out-of-town service at another place; seven miles out and seven back. Devoted work, you say? Well, yes, that’s right, but of course he got fifty-two dollars for it. Fifty-two dollars a Sunday? Oh, no, no; fifty-two dollars a year – a dollar a Sunday. It made a big difference. Of course, mind you, he got his supper – they had to give him that – and he got his oats and he got his hay, and of course he got a rub any time. It worked pretty well. So with his hay and oats what more could he ask? At any rate he didn’t.

Arthur Pethick, years and years before, had been at school, boarding school with Dannie’s father, all the way from the third form to the sixth – and they had been great friends. But their studies were different. Arthur Pethick took Greek which led him in due course into the Church of England. Charlie Dament took mathematics which led in due course to the United States.

With the Reverend Arthur Pethick, sharing his labours, was his wife, a little wiry nut-brown woman who “did all her own work,” watched her husband’s thankless and unending toil, and hated religion like hell. To Slugger she was “mother,” and it was the unstilled anger in her soul, no doubt, that had put that heavy shadow across his face.

—

Yet it was amazing how fast Slugger Pethick got on at law school. It was Rugby football that first did it. They played in those days the real old Rugby with the tight scrimmage and with Slugger as centre scrimmage the thing just turned to massacre. That’s where Slugger got his nickname. It was changed over from his real name, which was merely, just the simple old English “Slaughter.” The Law School moved up to first place in the Union, with wild excitement at the games, and even the senior judges running up and down along the touch line under the trees. There was no stadium then; admission was all free; the judges attended constantly.

So Slugger Pethick moved on. He moved out of his celluloid collar, for he caught on that he and the Chief Justice were the only ones who wore them. He met at different houses the sisters of fellow students. (That’s how you get educated fast.) He gave private tuition to a rich man’s son who couldn’t learn anything except for money, bought a dress suit and a big dress shirt with cuffs as large as a book, went to dances, couldn’t dance but didn’t need to – the girls said he looked “saturnine,” and that was enough.

—

It was during their last years at the Law School, in fact during the final examinations, that there came to Damon Dament and Pythias Pethick the first of those strange – how shall we say – strange quiverings of the strings of destiny that came to them all the way down from Ancient Syracuse.

It was in connection with their being accused of cheating – of “copying” – in one of the final examinations.

Such accusations – such deeds themselves – are now long since past. We are speaking of times of a lower standard. All examinations now in colleges and in law school are conducted on the “honour system.” All the students are on their honour not to copy. They go into the exam room on their honour and they come out still on their honour, so they can’t have copied. But in any case the examiners are on their honour not to watch them. It is what is called Student Control.

But in these earlier days it was “catch as catch can” and any student could copy if he wouldn’t get caught; but, mind you, only from his friends or from students he knew. Otherwise you couldn’t tell what you were copying. Well, anyway, Dannie and Peth were summoned from the exam room in the Law School to the Judges’ Chambers and there stood Justice Mildmay with two senior examiners and he had in his hands the papers they had written the day before.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I am deeply grieved to send for you, but your papers of yesterday have been submitted to me and there can be no doubt that they show unmistakable evidence of copying. One of you, I regret to say, stands guilty.”

There was a moment’s pause and then Dannie Dament looked up and said:

“I did it. The fault is entirely mine. Pethick had nothing to do with it.”

The judge looked at him with mingled sorrow and admiration, and regret – for his father’s sake . . .

“This is very honourable of you, very honourable Mr. Dament,” he began, but the Slugger broke in:

“Judge Mildmay, I copied that paper. I want no one to shield me – I’ll look after myself,” and he gave a dark look towards the two examiners that made them jump.

“Please don’t listen,” pleaded Dannie (he had a wonderful face for that sort of thing).

Judge Mildmay paused. He was really touched.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is indeed magnanimous; one of you is telling a most noble truth, the other a most noble lie. If you recall your classics, gentlemen, I will remind you of Damon and Pythias . . . I must ask you to wait outside a few moments, gentlemen, till we reach a decision.”

—

A few moments later Dannie and the Slugger came skipping down the outside steps, absolved, exonerated, elevated.

“It worked all right,” said Dannie.

“Certainly did,” said Slugger.

—

And it was all over town in a day or two. In Ancient Syracuse, in the land of the Shades, they knew it that same evening.

—

It was for that reason and similar ones that Dannie Dament and Slugger Pethick made such an immediate success when they “put up their shingle” that autumn as “Dament and Pethick – Barristers, Solicitors etc.” How could they fail anyway? They were so well matched. Dannie was so bright and winning that the judges couldn’t help giving him a decision . . . and Slugger Pethick was so large and fierce that the judges were afraid of him . . . Dannie naturally leaned to the civil side, so smooth and coy, that every plea seemed convincing. But Slugger took criminal work, particularly with juries. Give him a criminal to defend, as tough looking as himself, and let him say, “I defy any intelligent man in this jury – my client defies them – to dare to impute . . .” And when the foreman said “not guilty” and the clerk asked, “And so say all of you?” they yelled out a chorus of “Yes, yes,” each wanting to be first . . .

Success? Why, of course, no end of it. In the very first year the Slugger was able to send home to “mother” back of Wiarton a sewing machine – and a washing machine and an ironing machine – presents dear to the heart of people like “mother” who did her own work and could thus do twice as much work in double the time. Success! Why Dannie joined the Yacht Club without a yacht, the golf Club without a club – or the Art Association without a brush. It’s the “joining” that does it. They succeeded so fast that within a year or two they moved into a large suite of offices, all leather and books, with a big room like a board room – in fact they called it that. They needed this room for their private practice outside the courts. For they soon found, as all lawyers do, that there is no real money in chasing little suits in and out of law courts. There may be money in huge suits where two huge companies, both crooked, are driven along, both fighting, by a group of lawyers, prodding them to make them fight more. You may have seen pictures of those huge primitive animals (I think Professor Dim used to call them dinosaurs) being prodded along towards a huge pit by primitive huntsmen with steel goads . . . Well, that’s like the companies in lawsuits, prodded slowly towards the Privy Council, or the Supreme Court, or any Final Court of Appeal . . .

But short of that the little stuff is no good. The thing is to get the cases settled out of court – get both the litigants to meet in a friendly way in a big office, all luxury and leather, make them feel formal and uncomfortable; then insist on their having a glass of sherry, out of a wainscot cupboard; that gets them comfortable . . .

The custom of the office was that Dannie, in the discussion, would represent one side, fairly and dispassionately – but still representing one side. He was speaking, let us say, for the claim of Mr. Smith. “I doubt,” he would say, “and Mr. Smith admits that I am speaking ex-parte” – Mr. Smith nodded – he didn’t know what it meant; but that was him. And Slugger said, “I feel that Mr. Jones is absolutely right – indeed I insist that he’s right in claiming” – and so on.

And then came the mystic message all down the skeins of destiny from Ancient Syracuse and Dannie would change sides and say, “That’s right; we’re wrong there . . .” And the Pethick changed sides with “No, no, we’re willing to withdraw” – and so on.

A few minutes later their two litigants went down the stairs into the sunlight, dazed . . . “Couple of crooks!” one muttered as they went out. “I don’t know,” the other reflected. “I thought it very generous minded when they turned round like that, it reminded me” – he paused, but couldn’t think what is was, and the other had stopped listening anyway.

—

Municipal politics came next. I don’t mean immediately. Of course, meantime, the years went flowing past, and the birds sang and the city grew and the Slugger sent his father a top buggy and a set of harness and a pair of horse blankets (things needed for church work) and got his mother a kitchen range and an Indian girl – as help, I mean. She wouldn’t consider a white one. “They’re asking ten dollars,” she said, and it was ridiculous . . .

So naturally they went into city politics. It just came of itself. The firm was so popular. In due time a group of organizers in Ward Six came to Dannie Dament and said that if he would run for the City Council the nomination was his for the asking. He had hardly accepted when another group of voters nominated Slugger Pethick. Next day the papers announced that Mr. Dament had withdrawn his name in favour of that of Mr. Pethick and the day after that Mr. Pethick had withdrawn his in favour of Mr. Dament. The wide comment on this magnanimity in withdrawing in Ward Three led to their being elected separately in Ward Four and Ward Five.

These were busy, busy days for the City Council. Science had taken hold of municipal enterprise. The entire city was to be repaved with the newly invented cedar-block-tar-and-gravel pavement. It made a pavement just as smooth – well, just as smooth as tar and gravel – guaranteed to last five years, and not to last longer. It would take five years to pave the city and at the end of five years they would begin again. There would be no end of the paving.

Applications for paving contracts fell like snowflakes on the counsellors’ desks. The newspapers soon announced that Counsellor Dament has made his policy in the matter of pavement contracts quite clear. “I propose,” he said, “to make no distinction in this matter between friends and enemies. I see no reason why I should refuse a contract to a personal friend.” It was similarly announced that Counsellor Pethick had said, “I shall be glad to assign contracts even to my personal enemies.” So they gave them right and left to both . . . And all the city smelt fresh with new-cut cedar, and warm with tar . . . and you could hear the thump-thump of pile-drivers miles out in the fields where there were no houses at all – only streets and birds.

—

So the years went by and the seasons came and went, and the birds sang, and the city grew and life moved on and on . . . The city grew and grew; how amazingly it began to expand; new streets all leafy with young chestnut trees and fresh with beds of tulips where nothing had been but waste land and ash heaps . . . bridges tracing their way through the tree tops of the sunken ravines and all the dust and sand, the hollows and the mudflats, where lay buried the funds of the Cathedral and the endowment of the Art Museum turning into a very bower of beauty and secluded charm.

It was while walking in these days in the suburbs of the city that there came to Dannie Dament the great idea of “vindicating his father’s memory.” That’s what he called it; proving to the world that his father’s “vision” had been justified. The idea was to buy in all the old claims, the mortgage-ridden equities, the properties seized for taxes – buy it all in and as the value rose pay back the lost endowment of the church, interest and all; re-upholster the four college chairs, redeem the mummies, and – this part of it Dannie didn’t say out loud (or only to Pethick) – pocket the difference. It is one of the great principles of large scale philanthropy.

It was a delicate matter. It could only be done with great caution. Real estate had been “dead” but only in the sense that an Arkansas mule is sometimes dead. Real estate sleeps with one eye open. So they moved carefully; bought in and bought back and bought out what they could as a matter of routine. For the rest they used long range methods, done by careful advertising. As for instance:

Country Clergyman, about to retire would buy small empty lot in north of city; sand preferred.

Country clergyman, chronic invalid, would buy site for cottage and orchard in north outskirts of city; no objection to spring floods; will take mud.

The country clergyman was, of course – though he never saw the advertisements – the Rev. Arthur Pethick, of Something-Head beyond Wiarton. He signed and sent purchases and re-sales by the same mail, thinking them merely instalments of something. Clergymen in the country sign so many instalments that they cease to read them.

—

Those who deal with suckers are themselves suckers. Dannie soon found he could pitch the advertisements to as high a note as he liked, make them as glaring as a glass window. No one saw through.

Country clergyman, about to retire, in possession of funds of own and other clergy – all simple and without experience – would like to buy wide tract of sand, dirt or mud – anywhere near city.

In return for this and with his father’s memory in mind, Dannie helped to advance the Slugger’s father – advance his status in the church. Dannie’s influence with the aging Bishop raised the Reverend Arthur Pethick from a rector to a rural dean. The difference between these lies in a different cord on the hat and a different shade of ecclesiastical functions rather hard to define. But call it fifty dollars a year. Soon after that, Rural Dean Pethick was raised to be a Canon, as of the Cathedral but extra-parochial, or extra-something – at any rate, extra pay. This time it meant a solid five hundred dollars a year so that the Rev. Canon Pethick was able to hire a divinity student to rub down his horse and take it out for country sermons while “mother” prepared a special supper for the Canon. The Canon paid the divinity student six hundred a year. As a matter of fact Canon Pethick himself went out most Sundays; the people expected it; the divinity student ate the supper.

—

It was at that stage of Dannie Dament’s vindication of his father’s memory that Dannie’s father suddenly ceased to be a memory and became a fact.

Judge Mildmay sent for Dannie one morning to his chambers.

The Judge was ageing slowly but surely, as even judges do. When he read he stooped his spectacles down close to the paper or held the paper far from his spectacles with one hand . . . To listen, he put one hand to his ear, or didn’t listen at all. But of course he could still decide law suits – large ones, appeal cases – by instinct.

“Dannie,” he said, and the paper rustled in his hand, “I have heard from your father . . .”

“My father,” Dannie said; only that – he couldn’t say more.

“After all these years,” said the judge, “I have heard from him. He’s in Cincinnati.”

“Cincinnati,” said Dannie; just that.

“He wrote me – but the details might distress you – he has managed to support himself . . .”

“Support himself,” repeated Dannie.

“. . . By keeping books in a factory. You will recall,” the judge continued, “his singular aptitude for keeping books . . .”

Dannie didn’t. Nor was there any to recall. But it didn’t matter . . . A bookkeeper in a factory; Dannie had a vision of some little end room partitioned in with boards, a wood stove standing on end and in a corner a high desk and ledgers, and the boss saying, “This is Mr. Dament, our bookkeeper, gents; Charlie, have you got them files of the year before last . . .”

—

“He wishes to know” – and the papers rustled again – “if the situation of things, if the law, or rather the lapse of time – in short – if he can come home . . .”

“Come home—” Dannie repeated, and as his mind began to work again he added, “Can he?”

“There is nothing to stop him,” said Judge Mildmay, “there never was; only that if he came the debts would still be there . . . and, I speak plainly – not only the debts. Those are nothing, to a man who has nothing to pay with – but the charge of embezzlement . . . that never sleeps.”

“If the debts were paid?”

“The charge would fall of itself – or could be made to. Res ipsa loquitur,” added the judge, to make his meaning quite clear.

“Do you know how much they are?”

“We have them all here, all filed. A great sum they seemed then but in these days everything has moved so fast, no doubt not so formidable . . . I’ll say, at a guess, two hundred thousand dollars.”

The judge’s guess was based on having added up the items about five minutes before.

“Judge,” said Dannie, “give me six months more of this real estate market and I can pay it five times over – then he can come back, eh?”

“In any case,” said the judge, “it would take six months. There are certain legal formalities. We have to petition the Crown.” He fell to musing. “You must see that no proceedings are started in the interim . . . See the chief creditors – there are only a few after all . . .” The judge’s fingers rustled and trembled among the papers; “The Bishop, as representing the Synod of the Church . . . Colonel Strong for the Museum of Art, and the University, one or two others; that’s all. The smaller claims were bought up. I think Mr. Sheppardson holds most of them . . .”

—

So in the ensuing weeks Dannie saw the creditors.

“Why,” said the Bishop, “of course! My oldest friend. He would be welcomed with affection . . . Forgive us our debts, Dannie, as we forgive our debtors.”

It appeared it was a point of Christian doctrine that all debts, when paid in full with compound interest at six per cent, should be forgiven and forgotten. As the Bishop explained, we have St. Paul’s authority for it, and Timothy’s, also – good enough security for Dannie.

—

Dannie saw Colonel Strong, now heartier, ruddier, haler than ever, taking his middle seventies in a stride that had not yet slackened – more medals on him than ever and another war to the good.

“Leave it to me, Dannie . . . I’ll fix it,” he said.

The only other chief representative of the creditors was old Mr. Sheppardson. It was his special business to represent creditors – or, rather, to buy up their credit. Particularly he dealt in widows and orphans – people unable to look after themselves. It was the business of Mr. Sheppardson’s firm to look after them – to see that they didn’t lose everything of the little they had. It was Mr. Sheppardson’s policy to see that widows and orphans were always certain of getting something, by buying their claims from them for less than nothing.

—

And now Dannie turned again to the real estate market with a new purpose to make it move, to get the debts paid, to bring his father home in honour. He could see himself meeting his father at the railway station; he could hear his father’s resonant laugh, his merry greeting! Just let that market move and the thing would be done.

And did it move? And what so merry as a real estate market when it does move? The real estate people have their own names for such a market – recovering – active – lively – buoyant – and at length, like the rest of us, it just goes wild. Great sport! To buy by the acre and sell by the foot! To put in ten dollars today and call it twenty tomorrow and a hundred next week! To buy options on land reaching away out among the farms, to run street lines through the pastures and indicate the routes of electric street cars! Take all that, with spring weather, and April showers and sunshine – what scenery is ever so beautiful as real estate scenery, with theodolites in every open field, and surveyors’ links trailing in the grass.

—

There was in those days, as we have said, a recognized and orthodox way of “skipping to the States.” So, too, there was the recognized procedure of a triumphant return. There was always the dinner given to the creditors with a cheque under each plate, and champagne – speeches – Dannie had it all rehearsed in his mind. The Slugger’s father, the Rev. Arthur Pethick, must be there. He was not a creditor but they could give him a cheque anyway, and take it away again afterwards. He wouldn’t know the difference – and, of course, Mr. Sheppardson, if only to have him tell, as part of his speech on such occasions, his standard narrative of the “poor little woman,” the little widow all in black, who came into his office, scarcely daring to hope – but there, sure enough, was every dollar she had entrusted to them ten years before and it had turned into a dollar fifteen. Oh, yes, a wonderful dinner it would be, especially his father’s speech – his father had been wonderful on speeches.

Would you believe it, Dannie had the dinner all arranged with the caterer months ahead; in fact, the day after he spoke to the judge.

So there! – and just as everything was moving like that, the skeins of fate noiselessly weaving, parted – and something happened. We recall Professor Dim and that little black thread that gets woven into the skein of fate by the Dark Goddess. Well, here is just where she found the opportunity to weave it in. And the dark thread was – it always is – a woman.

—

The Honourable Mrs. Fordeck had just come out from England to the city and was for the moment the whole thing in social circles. She was what women called a fine looking woman and what men by instinct keep away from. She loved to refer to herself as a soldier’s daughter but in reality she looked closer to being a soldier’s mother or aunt – at least that. She had that type of face that good birth gives either to a woman or a horse. And birth she certainly had. There was not doubt about her superior birth. She was the niece of the Earl of Haddock of Haddock Castle where she had spent most of her life – as a “ghell” – and, where all the gillies and the crofters – she loved to explain it herself – were simply devoted to her.

But at the time when Mrs. Fordeck used to stay at Haddock Castle she was just a very young girl, because as she explained, with the greatest candour, she was married before she was really old enough to know anything about anything. Her husband – her first husband – was in the Buffs – poor Jack, that was long ago. He died in the Chitral – Mrs. Fordeck didn’t say of drink. Her second husband she loved to speak of as “poor Harry Fordeck.” He was an American, from Cincinnati, but his people really were very good people – none of them came from America. Happy, happy years! – that’s what Mrs. Fordeck loved to call them. Those were the days when she was simply fascinated – you know how a woman like that says “simply fascinated” – with Africa, with lion hunting. She went there first just after Jack’s death because it helped to divert her thoughts from her loss. When you hunt lions, it seems, your thoughts never wander. And after that she went, as she said, year after year.

So when she married poor Harry Fordeck she took him with her to Africa, although he was much older than she was and really too old for lion hunting. It was foolish not to have guarded him better. She couldn’t blame herself enough. But it all happened so suddenly. There were a number of lions in a nullah just beyond a kloof on the Karoo – the words are those of Mrs. Fordeck, or close to them – and the beaters were leading the party in Indian file through tall millet to keep out of sight and avoid them. When they got through poor Harry was gone. Mrs. Fordeck implied that they could actually hear the lions eating Harry but that it was too painful to dwell upon.

It was just while the surveyors were out in the April sunshine creating real estate values with a theodolite that the Honourable Mrs. Fordeck met Dannie Dament and Slugger Pethick. She met them at an evening reception where they had gone to look for real estate. She met them and hooked them both. I mean that Dannie Dament and Slugger Pethick both “fell for her” just as easily as that. Both of them together.

You see, you can’t have all the kinds of smartness and all the kinds of common sense at once. There was something about “nobility” – I mean about being connected with nobility – that hit Dannie and Pethick where they lived. It naturally does hit anyone who lives beyond Wiarton, or even anyone living above College Street, Toronto. They say it can reach clear to Texas.

Mrs. Fordeck got them both at one shot by thus meeting them both together at an evening reception. They knew she was the niece of an Earl and it made them both shy. Even Dannie’s lights faded dim and Slugger Pethick pulled off gloves he didn’t have on and said, “pleased to meet you,” as clumsily as the day he left Something-Head. The phrase is, of course, not one to be used to a lady with a title. It should be kept for society beyond Wiarton where they take pleasure in one another’s society. People of birth don’t.

Anyway they were hooked. Mrs. Fordeck said they might take her to get an ice. They did. And when she said, “Now tell me what on earth am I to do with fifty thousand pounds?” they nearly dropped their plates! So Mrs. Fordeck laughed and said – “Oh, I don’t mean my own. I’d know jolly well what to do with it if it was my own. I’d be off to Africa with it like a shot. But I mean here’s this wretched old uncle of mine (I mean Lord Haddock, though he really isn’t half bad) – here he is with an idea that this is a country of wonderful opportunity.”

—

Oh, say! Did they pile up the ice cream near her! And did they wheel arm chairs for her! And Dannie laughed that pleasant laugh of his and Pethick rubbed his big hands . . . and Mrs. Fordeck told them about the lions, and poor Harry . . . and the Buffs and the Chitral, and her friendship with the Prince of Wales (meaning of course the Prince of Wales) and how, when she was with him, she sometimes liked the Prince and sometimes didn’t, but really she thought that in her heart – her own nature – she liked plainer people, more direct people, people with simpler ways.

—

Oh, yes, they fell fast enough. They made an appointment for her to come to the office. They would look after the fifty thousand pounds with pleasure.

One may ask why didn’t such shrewd lawyers as Dament and Pethick look up the standing of the Earl of Haddock. The answer is that they did look him up and were deeper out of their depth than ever. There they sat, one each side of the table in their big Board Room, Dannie with Debrett’s Peerage and Slugger with Who’s Who, looking up the Earl of Haddock.

“Here you have it?” says Dannie, “Edgar Gaulter De Prothero Ross Haddock, Fifteenth Earl of Haddock – Fifteenth? Oh, boy! – born so and so, succeeded so and so, seat Haddock Castle, Caithness (do you get that? He has a “seat”) estates also in Ross and Cromarty.”

“And hear this,” said Slugger, “served Cold Guards (Cold Guards? What are they?), 2nd Burmese, Relief of Kumasi, Relief of Poonah, Relief of Khartum, Medal and Four Clasps, Grand Star of Burma, Grand Cross of Egypt.”

“Went up the Irrawaddy,” read out Dannie. “Does your book say that? And up the Blue Nile – no, up the Niger.”

“Some soldier, eh,” they both said, and Dannie read on: “Hereditary Equerry of the Buckhounds, Order of the Thistle, Keeper of the County Purse – You get that do you?”

“Yes and listen. Recreations: fencing, lion hunting (that’s where she gets that) and – get this – capturing big snakes . . . Those are his recreations, eh?”

—

They read it all as innocently as children, clean out of their field. What would they know of wind-swept estates of heather and gorse and moor, with broken rocks falling to the sea, of a flock of “gillies” and “crofters”; gillies who “gill” for nothing and crofters who “croft” for crofting’s sake – till in despair they emigrate to Northwest Canada, singing Lochaber no More. How could they picture a tumbled castle, all wind and draft and faded wainscotting with waving rags called tapestry, where a threadbare butler as ancient as his clothes, serves upon silver a gallant old soldier as threadbare as himself. Lions? Yes, forty years ago. Biography knows no difference.

—

They not only hunted the Earl up in the books but they found a pretext to go and ask old Mr. Sheppardson about him, old Sheppardson being the chairman of the Stock Exchange, the head of the chief financial firm and the last word in intimate finance. The reader may recall him as he’s been mentioned already in this book – when he had tears in his eyes over his son-in-law’s money. He always had tears in his eyes. He did his business on tears.

“The Earl of Haddock,” said Mr. Sheppardson, “has been deeply interested in Canada for years. Indeed he has sent many of his crofters to Manitoba. I managed it for him. Now as to his private investment” – Mr. Sheppardson put the points of his fingers together and there were no tears in his eyes – “that, of course, is a matter on which, as you readily understand – exactly . . . One thing, perhaps, I may say, and I will say – or perhaps on second thought I won’t say . . . He might – you understand, he might . . .”

But Mr. Sheppardson had said quite enough to make them enthusiastic.

“I must say,” continued Mr. Sheppardson, “that when Mrs. Fordeck came to see me, I was deeply moved, deeply touched. Her husband you know, poor Harry Fordeck, was eaten by lions. They were moving, it seems, through tall millet in a nullah, across the Karoo, single file to avoid the lions. Fordeck missed the path and must have got among the lions. The poor lady told me – it brought tears to my eyes – that they could actually hear the crunching.”

“We know, we know,” said the partners, and with that they hurried away.

“Mrs. Fordeck,” said Dannie, “is certainly a most striking woman.”

“I call her handsome,” said the Slugger, in a tone of challenge.

“Yes,” asserted Dannie, “in fact, I’d call her a fine looking woman.”

They were both lying and they knew it. The Dark Goddess was weaving in the black thread as fast as her fingers could travel, and the fair Goddess on the left, Nona, who stands for life and happiness, dropped tears upon the skein.

But the main mischief was done that September at a big dance given at Colonel Strong’s house. In those days when they gave a dance they didn’t have it done by proxy – a hotel management arranging the occasion, a chef arranging the food, a florist the flowers, an orchestra the music and a secretary arranging the guests. That isn’t giving a dance. That’s signing a cheque.

In those days when people gave a dance they gave a dance – and they always gave their dances in private houses, especially in those beautiful old houses that stood, all lawn and leaves, in half an acre of ground. Colonel Strong’s house was like that, and he had enough granddaughters and grand-nieces on, and in reach of, the premises to put any dance off to a good start.

Take such a house on a September evening, one of those mellow, soft September evenings, with leaves still so heavy that for people in the houses they half hid the street lights and turned them into fire-flies – like fairyland; a great house all balconies, and conservatories and odd corners, and secluded spots, turned into veritable man-traps with masses of ferns and chrysanthemums, by the hands of the grand-nieces and granddaughters. Pretty dangerous place, eh? And for less sentimental hearts there were sideboards with refreshments, great rounds of cold beef looking out from parsley – pink hams from some once giant hog, and all of it flanked with bottled ale, claret cup in stone jars, and lighter stuff like Moselle and champagne, standing in tubs of ice.

Dangerous! At least Dannie and Pethick were to find it so, separately and jointly.

One didn’t do much actual dancing in those days, except the quite young. All hands from the host and hostess down joined in the square dances, the lancers and the quadrilles, but a lot of the older people were soon playing whist in quiet card rooms. And the marriageable girls “sitting out” out on balconies, and asking about the stars.

Dannie could never remember, though he tried hard, afterwards, just what it was that he said to Mrs. Fordeck that evening. They were behind a huge hydrangea bush in a tub on a balcony in low chairs with a little table to which Dannie had brought the champagne. Those are hard places from which to remember things accurately. Did Mrs. Fordeck say that the scene was just like Capetown, and did Dannie say that he had always longed to see Capetown (a dirty lie), and did she say, “Some day I hope you will?” It seems likely that she did. And it was then that Mrs. Fordeck had said that she had come to regard him as something far different from just her lawyer. Did she say “as something far nearer?” Yes, I guess she did. Did Dannie say something about something nearer still? He may have. And then she said something about its being too wonderful, and that he must let her wait a few days to give him her answer.

—

Pethick remembered better. He had sat in behind a grapevine with cold chicken and Moselle. Mrs. Fordeck had said:

“Doesn’t this heavenly night remind you of Capetown?”

He had answered, “Wiarton is very much like this in September,” and she said, “I should just love to see Wiarton,” and he said, “I hope you will some day. I could give you a letter to Bill Furze, the postmaster, and he’d show you round,” and he had added, “If I was up there, I’d like to show you round myself . . .” and then it was that Mrs. Fordeck had said that he meant more to her than just a lawyer. And she promised him his answer for a few days later.

Just at the close of the evening they were all three together, seated beside a buffet, and Mrs. Fordeck has said, “You’re both just too wonderful. How I wish I could say ‘yes’ to both of you. But whichever way I decide, I shall always feel—” and so on to that effect.

Now here is where a message from Ancient Syracuse should have come down the shaking skeins to say, “Give her up! Each give her up!” There was a sort of message to that effect but it wasn’t exactly from Syracuse. You see, after all, even if Mrs. Fordeck was a striking woman, even if marrying her meant stepping into a castle – even at all that – for a young man’s fancy – for a young man’s dream of love – well, not quite. Be fair, though. Either one would have taken her. There was no Damon and no Pythias that evening. The black thread was running fast into the skein.

—

There was, we say, no renunciation that evening – no Damon and Pythias stuff. But it came a few days later, all right enough. When they sat down in their office that morning, Dannie said.

“Peth, I’ve had time to think this thing over. I want you to marry Mrs. Fordeck. I’ll stand aside and I hope you may be very happy.”

There come to many men in life moments when they find themselves compelled to do the big thing, the generous thing. It seems as if they had no choice. Renunciation of self is, after all, one of the highest things of which we are capable. That may have been Dannie Dament’s feeling on this morning when he came down to the office with his mind made up. It may have been or it may not.

Peth shook his head.

“It’s fine of you, Dannie. You’ve spoken first, I admit, but I had it here (he touched his pocket) in a letter already to give you. Take her, Dannie – she’s yours, and some day after you’re married I’ll come over to Scotland and visit you at the big castle.”

Minds attuned together as theirs were easily make contacts. The words “the big castle” were enough. Dannie began slowly to smile.

“I wonder if you have been reading what I have?” he asked.

“If you put it that way,” said Pethick with a grin, “I guess I have.”

“You mean,” said Dannie, “Pauper Peers.”

“That’s it.”

In the last mails from England there had just come over one of those Chit-Chat magazines that were just coming into fashion, full of Tom-Tit stuff, all about the underside of the upper side. Well, anyway, here was an article on Our Pauper Peers. It told how one of them played a street organ in London, how another was a pavement artist, and how the estates of some of them, in Scotland especially, were just waste land, with the crofters and such being starved out of them and going to Kansas and Manitoba. It mentioned the Earl of Haddock, and Haddock Castle, which was low, but so were all the Tom-Tit papers. The article said that the Earl wasn’t worth a hundred pounds a year – put him at about eighty.

After that Dannie and Pethick waited for a blow to fall, feeling that there was a blow coming. All day they were out in the happy autumn fields of real estate where they were laying out Haddock Park but changing its name now to Ohio Garden; and all this time they were arranging with Judge Mildmay the legal formalities which were needed to bring Dannie’s father home, and waiting for the blow.

Then it fell.

It fell as quietly as blows often fall. It was just a visit from old Mr. Sheppardson who came quietly down to their offices for what he called a purely friendly discussion. He was acting, he said, on Mrs. Fordeck’s behalf but solely, as he explained, as a friend of all parties concerned. The poor lady, he said, had been deeply distressed. She had come into his office all in black (Mr. Sheppardson put that in by habit; as a matter of fact she was in blue). “You may have learned, I gather you have,” said Mr. Sheppardson, “of the poverty of her family and especially of her uncle Lord Haddock. She took for granted that as men of honour” – (she is a soldier’s daughter, Mr. Sheppardson added) – “as men of honour you knew it already” (That was a nasty tweeze for both of them.) “In short,” said Mr. Sheppardson. . . . Well, in short, when he had done with it, what he meant was that one of them would darned well marry Mrs. Fordeck and the other give her twenty thousand dollars – or else – he didn’t need to complete it. With that he withdrew.

At that time and place nothing struck terror to the human heart of the male like a breach of promise suit. It carried with it a peculiar measure of dishonour, not unconnected with a sort of comic element that made it the most dreaded form of disgrace. The shadow of Bardell vs. Picwick lay heavy across it. Hence Slugger in his dreams went through scenes in which a cross-examining barrister said:

“Answer the question, please, without evasion. Did you, or did you not, on the evening of September twelfth compare Capetown to Wiarton? You did? very good; I thought we should get at it at last; now, did you or did you not say, etc. etc.”

And Dannie Dament also heard in his sleep the voice of the prosecuting counsel:

“Did the petitioner offer you the statement that you were something more to her than a lawyer—”

And himself, attempting to be facetious: “Something less—”

Then the Court: “I must ask you to abstain from any attempt at jocularity. Answer the question.”

Counsel, continuing: “Did you say that you hoped you were nearer to her than that?”

Himself: “I did.”

Counsel: “And how near were you to her at the time?”

Then the courtroom in a roar.

—

No, no, they couldn’t stand the disgrace, the laughter of it. In fact they knew, Dament and Pethick, Barristers etc., both of them, knew, that that kind of thing in that kind of town at that time would knock them both out of business, out of law, out of anything . . . In short, if the thing was pushed to the worst there was only one thing to do and they knew it. Marry Mrs. Fordeck? No, no, you’ve forgotten the beginning of this story – skip to the United States.

—

Here then was the irony of history! Dannie’s father ready to come back, and Dannie ready to skip. “They can’t stop us, can they Peth?” said Dannie, “if we decide to clear out?”

“Not without a capias,” said the Slugger, “and they can’t get a capias without a judgment to get it on, and before they get that we’ll be gone. But you had better move fast, Dannie; there’ll be a lot to do . . .”

Then fate intervened again.

Pethick came to the office next morning to find Dannie with a telegram in his hand. “We’re too late, Peth,” Dannie said. “Father’s arriving at eleven o’clock this morning.”

Then he added, “You go, if you like.” But Peth shook his head. The contact with Syracuse was working again.

—

Dannie somehow missed his father at the station – perhaps his father hadn’t understood, the new station was so confusing. But he found him when he came back to the office, sitting there, with Canon Pethick, who had just arrived from Something-Head. His father! Could it really be his father! So changed, so broken – why, an old man! Can seventeen years do that? Is that from bookkeeping? Is that the kind of place that Cincinnati is?

“Father!” said Dannie, and he couldn’t speak.

“We were just speaking,” said Canon Pethick, “of some of the men we remember years ago.” (Why, certainly; what else do old men talk of?)

So there they sat, as Dannie moved, heart-sick, about his office, exchanging their reminiscences . . . “But surely you must remember so and so? Why, of course; he played football,” – “No, no, that was his brother, the one who drank, and went into the church afterwards – did very well.” And so on endlessly.

Dannie presently took them out to lunch, still talking reminiscences and seeing nothing. Then he left them to go and find Slugger who was away out somewhere in a field selling a site for a church.

And when Dannie came back with Slugger in the middle of the afternoon, the two old men were still talking, still twittering away at their reminiscences: “I wonder what became of so and so?” or, “Did any body ever hear anything of such and such . . .”

Dannie stood beside them, along with Slugger Pethick, deep in trouble and perplexity, scarcely hearing what they said. Then all of a sudden his father said something that made Dannie’s mouth fall wide open with surprise, with sudden fixed attention. It was something amazing, something inconceivable.

“You remember,” Mr. Dament was saying to the Canon – “you remember, though it is not his present name, and I shouldn’t mention it for it might mean trouble for him. You remember Harry Fordeck?”

“Why, of course,” said the Canon, “he was on the cricket team. Let me see, did I hear, didn’t someone say he was dead years ago? Yes, yes, he was killed by lions in Africa. He was out with a big lion hunting party, moving (I remember distinctly hearing all about it) through a growth of tall millet . . .”

Mr. Dament shook his head.

“No, no,” he said, “poor Harry. He’s not dead. He’s alive. He’s in Cincinnati. I got him a job there with me as assistant bookkeeper . . .”

“Not dead!” exclaimed Canon Pethick, while Dannie and Slugger remained speechless.

“Hush! It seems he had a terrible wife. He’s told me all about it often. The opportunity came in this unexpected way; he hadn’t planned it. He escaped, slipped through the millet and made his way to the coast. He has never gone back. He’s under an assumed name but of course I knew him instantly, poor old Harry, when he turned up looking for work.”

Neither Dannie nor the Slugger needed to hear any more. Their minds had seized the same idea. “Excuse us a few minutes, father,” Dannie said. And within a few minutes they were seated in Mr. Sheppardson’s office. This time they held all the cards in the pack.

Mr. Sheppardson never doubted them. He knew a fact when he heard it. “Quite so, exactly so,” he repeated, “oh, absolutely so. No question of any further discussion. Indeed,” he said, “this puts a rather different face on every side of the matter, among other things on the whole question of Mrs. Fordeck’s maintenance . . .”

“Hasn’t she got—” Dannie began.

“Practically nothing. A small, a very small, annuity of her own, very small. She has no interest in the estates; they go to a cousin. And, of course, the property left by her late husband – I should say, by her present husband – is all gone long ago, the greater part of it, in fact, in legal expenses. You see, the property, such as it was, was in Ohio and we had the greatest fight to prove that Fordeck was dead, that is, dead in Ohio. Several times they brought him in alive on appeal while admitting that he might be dead in Africa or dead for the purposes of interstate commerce. The distinction was very interesting – and expensive,” added Mr. Sheppardson, musingly.

“What did you do?” asked Dannie.

“We managed it at last through the kindness of the Governor of Bechuanaland, Sir Harry Hoppit, who happened to have financial connections through our firm; in fact we have advanced him funds. He got for us, by a legal fiction, the conviction of a native in a Magistrates’ Court for the murder of Harry Fordeck. That, of course, settled the matter but it involved—” Mr. Sheppardson paused – “The native’s family,” he said, “were compensated.”

“Then Mrs. Fordeck received the money?”

“And spent it.”

Then they were all silent.

“Of course,” said Mr. Sheppardson, “she will now have Fordeck. He has a certain earning power.”

“That’s right,” they said.

“He’s only sixty-six,” said Mr. Sheppardson.

“That’s all,” they said.

And they all had the same vision of two drudging worn-out lives moving on to their end, hopeless.

—

Then messages began to run up and down the skeins of destiny all the way to ancient Syracuse.

Dannie spoke first.

“Look,” he said, “I’m thinking of something,” and Pethick said, “I know it – so am I.”

“What I mean is this: She’d have got twenty thousand dollars anyway and instead of that she’s going to be right up against it. I’m going to give it to her myself, not directly in my own name but through Mr. Sheppardson.”

Mr. Sheppardson rose and shook Dannie’s hand; there were tears in his eyes.

“That’s very noble,” he said, “very noble. I shall be only too glad to arrange it.”

“Wait a minute,” said the Slugger. “Just hold on. You needn’t do that, Dannie. You’ll need all you’ve got to start your old man up again. I’ll give it.”

“This is touching – touching—” said Mr. Sheppardson; he saw business and his eyes grew moist.

“You need it, too, for yours,” protested Dannie. “Don’t be a chump.”

Something like anger developed, till Dannie said, “What does it matter anyway, Peth? Why, Haddock Park – I mean Ohio Gardens – is worth ten times that all by itself. We’ll both give it.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Mr. Sheppardson with an uplifted hand, “this is indeed magnanimous. Let me write it down.”

“All right,” they said.

“I will see,” said Mr. Sheppardson, “that she never knows where it came from. Indeed, I am only too glad to associate myself in any way as a third in such an enterprise . . .” (And the shade of the Tyrant of Syracuse heard him with approval.)

Dannie and Pethick left.

Mr. Sheppardson used to say afterwards that there were tears in his eyes, that he even thought, before he had had time to reflect, of charging no commission on the transaction.

—

But Dannie and Pethick had stepped out into a changed world – how bright it seemed, this glorious autumn day. And when they got back to their office the very joy of their faces brought a new cheeriness to the countenances of their fathers.

Charles Edward Dament sad? – broken? – Oh, no! – just a first impression. Nothing could break a man like that. Already he was recovering his old-time spirit with every moment.

“Watch me get busy sending out messages for that dinner,” said Dannie, and he added, “Darned if I won’t try the telephone. I believe it’s quicker.”

And in less than ten minutes he was actually talking to the caterer.

It was a memorable dinner – just as Dannie had planned and dreamed it – all except the cheques. There was no need for that as they all took the money for granted. And Dannie’s father, back with the old crowd was his old self again – and so were the Canon and the Bishop and Colonel Strong, all their old selves, with old wine and old jokes, and old reminiscences and not a remark that hadn’t at least twenty years retrospect behind it.

Mr. Sheppardson arrived later. He had been with Mrs. Fordeck. Everything was arranged. Mr. Sheppardson said that she had guessed his uneasy secret at once, her husband still alive and their generous provision. It had brought tears to her eyes.

“A wonderful woman,” said Mr. Sheppardson, “such resilience. She’s making plans already. She proposes to pick up Harry at once and start for Bechuanaland. I shall have to communicate with Sir Harry Hoppit.” He added musingly, however, “We needn’t trouble about that,” and he fell to on the walnuts and the wine.

TOC     INDEX

Boom Times

The Mirage
of a Better World

A Word of Preface

Some readers may be kind enough to recall a sketch which I published in a magazine two or three years ago called, My Remarkable Uncle, which afterward became the title piece of a book of sketches. I now take the same distinguished actual person and remove him from the cramped environment of truth to the larger atmosphere of fiction. After the opening page he parts company with his origin, and the people who surround him are, individually, fiction, although, I hope, living pictures of the time and place.

I have given to the story the sub-title The Mirage of a Better World for reasons made obvious in the text, but still more obvious if I mention them now. I have always been greatly impressed with the alternate sunshine and shadow that fall, or used to fall, in places newly opened, in the world that was, to which people flocked as to a promised land, as they did to the Manitoba of 1880. This promised land for the time being transformed them all into a life better than what we have, and into characters better and more distinctive than the everyday people about us but no better than the everyday people ought to be. The mirage of hope and the illusion of fancy faded out to give way to the sad reality of failure just as the fading mirage in the sky leaves, in the place of the vanished oasis, nothing but the waterless sand of the desert. Yet the real mirage over the desert is true; it is not a mere confusion of light and shadow that the eye of misery converts to a picture of hope. It is the reflection of an actuality of green trees and pleasant waters, miles and miles away – if you will – and even inverted in their outline in the sky – but none the less attainable for those who will walk bravely forward, animated by illusion itself.

It seems to me also that this alternation of sunshine and shadow, so plainly to be seen in the boom times and bad times of a new Eldorado, characterizes also all the economic side of our collective human life. We see it in the alternating prosperity and depression of big business of which the “peaks” and “crashes” of the stock exchange are only the outward signs of the tumult within, like the glow from the crater of a volcano that reveals the subterranean fires. Most of all does this appear in the strange and elusive war prosperity, the good times that by some devil’s contrivance come with the onslaught of war to mock the failure of peace. In these things is to be sought, I believe, the solution of the unsolved problem of wealth and want. To me the boom is not the exception but the reality. It is a vision of what ought to be happening all the time. The boom in Winnipeg in 1880 ought to be booming still.

So, too, with the cheery good times of big business that come only to slip away again; and most of all with the war prosperity that chases away idleness and unemployment like shadows of the night and calls out the higher self of inspired people living among us unseen. In that sense each of us should be at war for ever.

All such things are better seen on a smaller scale than on a large. There is a deep meaning in these contrasts with the problem of poverty or prosperity after the war. To such people I especially try to appeal in this picture of Boom Times.

END OF PREFACE

—

When Edward Philip Philiphaugh arrived from England at his brother’s farm in a lost corner of Ontario in the late summer of 1878, he seemed, to the children of the family, like a wonderful being, dropped from the sky. The elder brother had settled there with his wife and children a few years earlier. He had left England first to settle in South Africa, and had been eaten out by locusts. He had then moved to Kansas but had been eaten out by grasshoppers. A grasshopper is a locust. On the Ontario farm there were no grasshoppers; only just mortgages and broken machinery and thin cattle.

The farm was thirty-five miles from a railway. They lived on it in an isolation unknown, in these days of radio, anywhere in the world. There were no newspapers. Nobody came and went. There was nowhere to come and go. In the solitude of dark winter nights the stillness was that of eternity.

Into this isolation broke Edward Philip. He had just come from a year’s travel round the Mediterranean, a man of twenty-eight or thirty, but seeming a more than adult man, bronzed and self-confident, with a square beard like a Plantagenet king. He arrived in the dusk of a late summer evening in a two-horse wagon, filled with English leather portmanteaus and bundles of double-barreled guns, fishing rods and malacca canes – things that he called his “kit.”

That night at supper the children listened wide-eyed to “Uncle Edward,” with visions of Algiers, of the African slave market, of the Golden Horn, and the Pyramids. Lizzie, the hired girl, stood open-mouthed, and when she heard him say, “So, I said to the Prince of Wales” . . . she dropped the plates with a crash . . . “Uncle Edward,” said the children, “do you know the Prince of Wales?” He answered quite simply, “Oh, very well indeed,” as if that was nothing.

“Uncle Edward,” said the oldest boy, Jim, who was fifteen, “I’d like to be a soldier . . .” and his uncle said, “Then I must write to Lord Hartington at the War Office, and ask him to put you into Sandhurst . . .”

—

Now it happened that in that year, 1878, there was a general election in Canada. E.P. – as everybody began to call him – was in it up to the neck in less than no time. He picked up the history and politics of Upper Canada in a day, and in a week knew everybody in the countryside. He spoke at every meeting, but his strong point was the personal contact of electioneering, of bar-room treats. This gave full scope for his marvellous talent for flattery and make-believe.

“Why, let me see” – he would say to some tattered country specimen beside him glass in hand – “surely, if your name is Framley, you must be a relation of my dear friend General Sir Charles Framley of the Horse Artillery.” “Mebbe,” the flattered specimen would answer. “I guess, mebbe; I ain’t kept track very good of my folks in the old country.” “Dear me! I must tell Sir Charles that I’ve seen you. He’ll be so pleased.” In this way in a fortnight E.P. had conferred honours and distinctions on half the township of Georgina. They lived in a recaptured atmosphere of generals, admirals and earls. Vote? How else could they vote than conservative, men of family like them?

It goes without saying that in politics, then and always, E.P. was on the conservative, the aristocratic side, but along with that was hail-fellow-well-met with the humblest. This was instinct. A democrat can’t condescend. He’s down already. But when a conservative stoops, he conquers.

He was not only a conservative but an imperialist in a large way. He made full use, then and always, of the British Empire as if he had a share in all of it, and might at any time be leaving for any part of it.

“Are you likely to be long in Georgina Township?” an innocent questioner would ask.

“That will depend a good deal,” he answered impressively, “on what I hear from West Africa.” Most of them never heard anything from West Africa.

This made his presence in any one place a favour and a distinction.

—

But for his electioneering E.P. had not only his impressive line of talk but also a quite opposite way of telling Gargantuan stories that would make the country crowd in the bar roar and wheeze and slap their thighs, as for instance, when they heard the story of how the old Earl of Kinraith had called his wife an “auld Highland cow,” and she had answered, “Aweel, it’s better than an auld steer.”

—

It was an old-fashioned election, all carried on in the open air in bright September weather with flags, placards and torchlight processions. The hustings were big wooden platforms, with a rail around. Committee men in plug hats sat on the platform. Farmers stood in a crowd in front – no women.

A liberal speaker spoke from a platform with banners all around it – DESMOND AND LIBERTY – DOWN WITH THE TORY PARTY. “What has the Tory party ever done for this country?” he shouted, shaking his fist in the air. “Tramped it down, tramped down the plain people under foot . . . We never had a thing unless we wrested it from them . . . We’ve got them out of power. I say let’s keep them out . . . They’re against the people . . . my father and my uncle carried their muskets in the rebellion of forty years ago . . . I was fifteen . . . I wanted to go . . . They wouldn’t let me . . . They went with the ‘rebels’ . . . That is what the Tories called them . . . ‘rebels’ . . . They went . . . and my uncle never came back . . . they hanged him there in front of the courthouse in Toronto . . . hanged him with the Tories to jibe and laugh, and a holiday for the school children to go and see a rebel hanged . . . that’s Tories for you . . . let them into power again and that’s what they would do again.”

—

On the other hustings stood Edward Philip Philiphaugh, set and firm, the embodiment of resolution, his gaze direct in front of him. All about him were Union Jacks and banners with STRONG AND LOYALTY – and – GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.

His voice went clear over the heads of the crowd.

“You ask me what has the Tory party done for Canada? There is your answer in those waving flags whose crosses chronicle the union of the British people. There, in that loyalty that stands fast and firm against each and every phase of sedition. I will not talk in paltry figures of trade and taxes. I scorn them. I appeal here to all in whose veins run the blood, in whose hearts beat the life – of the mother country . . . I see here before me men whose names connect with some of the oldest families of Great Britain . . . my friend Framley, a cousin, I believe, of Sir Charles Framley, one of England’s greatest soldiers . . . Major Wyndham, a close relation, a possible successor to, the Earl of Egremont . . . my friend Donald McLeish who stands here as one of the McLeishes of McLeish . . . to shout Scots wha’ hae!

(tumult – applause)

. . . “Here on my heart – ,” he drew out a photograph and held it up – “I carry – I always carry – a photograph of our beloved Queen. That is my politics, it is your politics, electors of North York.”

(applause – tumult)

—

So there came an evening with the village all lit with torchlights, when a committee man stepped out before the Tory crowd in front of the Mansion House, and said:

“Gentlemen of North York, I beg to inform you that the official count of votes elects to Parliament at Ottawa, Dr. John Strong of Aurora by a majority of two thousand votes – gentlemen, God Save the Queen!” They sang it from a thousand throats – “Send . . . her . . . victorious . . . Happy . . . and . . . glorious!”

A few nights after the election E.P. was summoned to a general meeting of the Conservative Committee of the Ridings of York County. The chairman spoke:

“Mr. Philiphaugh, I want to express to you on behalf of the Conservative party of the County of York an appreciation of your co-operation in the election of Dr. Strong . . .

“. . . Mr. Philiphaugh, we want to keep you here. I have heard some of our people saying that you think of moving on to Manitobah. [7]  But I’m glad to say that we are here to give you an appointment that will keep you safe from going to starve among the grasshoppers!

(Laughter – “Ya, Ya! That’s right!”)

“Hitherto we’ve had no salaried organizer in the Ridings of York County and the Association is prepared to offer you such a post and to offer it on terms that show we’re in earnest and pay a man according to his real worth. Mr. Philiphaugh, on behalf of these gentlemen of the Committee, I offer you a salary of $1,000 a year as organizer of the Conservative Party in York County.”

(Applause – “Hurrah for E.P.! – Hurrah!”)

“For he’s a jolly good fellow!”

E.P. spoke:

“Gentlemen: When I tell Sir John A. Macdonald, our leader, of your generous offer, I am sure he will be as deeply touched as I am. And when I send word, as I hope you will allow me to do, to Lord Beaconsfield, of the loyalty and allegiance of the County of York, I am sure that he will see fit to place your names before Her Majesty for such honour as she may see fit to bestow. But, gentlemen, for me, my lot is cast, as you yourselves would say Alea jacta est! . . . nulla vestigia retrorsum . . .”

(Dubious voices – “Hear! Hear!”)

“The Star of the Empire glitters in the West . . . I see in Manitobah . . .

(voices – grasshoppers – grasshoppers)

“I see in Manitobah a great future. I look forward to the time when two million people will be settled on the western prairies—”

(laughter – “They’ll freeze – Ya – Ya”)

“—a great future – a great vision – it is my destiny to go.”

(applause – handshaking – tumultuous talk.)

E.P. left next morning taking his nephew Jim with him as his private secretary. Jim couldn’t even spell but that didn’t matter; it was only to last till Lord Hartington was to give him a commission in the British Army.

To get to Winnipeg they went up the Lakes and across Minnesota. It was the only way then. They hit Winnipeg just on the rise of the boom, and E.P. came at once into his own and rode on the crest of the wave. There is something that appeals in the rush and movement of a “boom” town – a Winnipeg of the 80’s, a Carson City of the 60’s. Life comes to a focus; it is all here and now, all present, no past and no outside – just a clatter of hammers and saws, rounds of drinks and rolls of money. In such an atmosphere every man seems a remarkable fellow, a man of exception; individuality separates out and character blossoms like a rose. And before the eyes of each as he hammers, and works and talks, is the mirage of the wonder that is to come – the mirage of what might be – of what the world is meant to be – always coming, but it never comes.

E.P. came into his own. In less than no time he was in everything and knew everybody, conferring titles and honours up and down Portage Avenue.

His activities were wide. He was president of a bank (that never opened), head of a brewery (for brewing the Red River), and, above all, secretary-treasurer of the Winnipeg Arctic Ocean and Siberian Railway that had a charter authorizing it to build a road to the Arctic Ocean, when it got ready. They had no track, but they printed stationery and passes, and in return E.P. received passes over all North America.

—

He knew everybody, but in particular he gathered to himself, round the saloons, a particular set of adherents, men of that queer class that turns up in a place like the Winnipeg of 1880 – dead broke, but gentlemen, and not worrying. There was Captain Desmond Despard. He had been at a “public” school, at it – and out of it. He had been “sent down” from Oxford, and “sent up” from Sandhurst. He used whiskey like milk. But he was a well-educated man; at any rate everybody in the bars agreed on that. “Nothing like education, Jim,” he would say. “E.P. should send you home to a public school. Look at me; would I be where I’ve got to if I hadn’t been at a public school?” And he would quote a line – the first line – of Virgil. It was the only line he knew but it had taken him half round the world.

Then there was little Count Fosdari – Count Fosco di Fosdari. As soon as E.P. knew he was a real count, one of the family of the Fosdaris of Fosforetto, he annexed him. Fosdari was “good medicine.”

All these friends he put on the boards of his new companies. They were always in and out of his huge wooden office building, half finished – always half finished, because the minute it began to look finished he added more to it. Fosdari was a director of the Winnipeg Arctic Ocean and Siberian Railway with his name on the letter-head right under that of the Marquis of Madeira. Captain Despard was president of the brewery. Jim was private secretary to everything.

But naturally E.P.’s main hold was on politics. They elected him right away into the Manitoba Legislature. He made a speech on the hustings in which he said, “I will not talk in terms of paltry figures of trade and taxes. I scorn them.” And he showed his photograph of the Queen. It made a great impression. He made the same speech in the Manitoba Assembly. His public policy was for spending all the money they could get, on everything they could think of to spend it on. His specialty was vision – mirage. “I can foresee a time, Mr. Speaker, in no distant future, when there will be three million people on these western plains.” He had started it at two, but moved it up. He wanted at once to float a huge loan in London, and sink it right there. There was talk after this of making him Prime Minister.

—

E.P. bought a huge house beside the river and filled it with pictures that he said were portraits of his ancestors. One of them, such a fine old portrait that it was nothing but black soot round a dark face, E.P. said was the Marquis of Madeira, the founder of his family. In this great house he instituted a roaring hospitality that never stopped. In it was installed a heavy English butler, Meadows, with a British army medal. “A Crimean veteran,” E.P. explained. He wasn’t really a veteran, because he hadn’t been in the army, and E.P. had bought the medal in a second-hand shop, and his name wasn’t Meadows. But that didn’t matter; it was not a matter of what was but of what should have been. It was a sort of mirage of an “interior.”

Then there was Harris, the footman, a young man chosen for his gentlemanly voice and extraordinary manners. As Harris went out with a tray, E.P. would whisper behind his hand to his guests, “An illegitimate son of the Prince of Wales.” Harris’s mother hadn’t known this. But any one could see that if the Prince of Wales had had an illegitimate son, Harris would be just the kind of illegitimate son the Prince of Wales would have wished to have.

There was a huge cook “Jennings”; not Mrs. Jennings or Jessie Jennings but just “Jennings.” And housemaids called by their surnames – Parker and Anderson. It made a great hit with plain people not used to it, to hear E.P. say, “Anderson, kindly tell Parker—” and so on. Their names weren’t really that. Parker had been Dulcie McGinnis and Anderson had been Phoebe McLean.

The house was run, as E.P. said, on system. Jennings brought her book to E.P. and E.P. gave it to Jim. And Jim gave it back to Jennings. Anyway it didn’t matter what things cost.

Everything was done on that sort of scale, more and more. Presently even the ancestors weren’t good enough. E.P. invented a Portuguese dukedom and conferred it, by a sort of reversion, on Jim, as of the senior branch of the family, ahead of himself, an affectation of inferiority known only to nobility.

To visitors he would show them round the ancestors.

“Strange to think that two deaths would make that boy a Portuguese duke!”

—

E.P. met Agnes Dacres – the Honourable Mrs. De Carteret Dacres – at one of those huge fashionable receptions that had become the fashion, quite the rage, that is to say, the fashion to be fashionable, in the Winnipeg of the Boom. The mirage that coloured all the world of business and money was extending to the world of social life. Everybody suddenly became of high family, of high official position, or closely related to some one of high family or of high official position. So at such receptions people crushed round drinking cups of tea standing up, and drinking champagne and rye whiskey leaning beside sideboards and introducing first cousins of earls to sisters of bishops. “Mrs. McGruder, do let me introduce the Hon. Charles Dewdrop; Captain Dewdrop, you know, is one of the Dewdrops of Devonshire. Your father, of course, was Major General McGruder of Mississippi, wasn’t he? Your cousin? Oh, yes, your cousin . . . a niece of the Earl of Gallaway; oh . . . how do you do?”

And they didn’t say it in stage whispers – not a bit – they bandied it all round quite openly – Dukes, Generals, Ministers of the Crown – the whole place was a galaxy – and everybody willing to believe it – and everybody so happy in it. Here was a new social world all made of mirage, of the colours of the rainbow – as easy as that. And with it all, was a closer reach towards truth than the ordinary drab of social life. Give and take and you’ve got everything.

In such a social world E.P. came into his own. At the receptions he was always to be seen at a sideboard, the men packed around him, listening to one of his Gargantuan stories, and the ladies all dying to catch what he was saying. E.P. would stand against the bar saying: “Well, there we were at Algiers, all standing round at the big reception, a divan, given by the Dey of Algiers to the Navy. There was the Dey, all in uniform, a tremendously fat fellow, stomach like this – diplomats and officers – that sort of thing. Well, in came old Admiral Mannering – I mean to say, simply spiflicated! – and the Vizier said, ‘Let me present you to the Dey.’ And the Admiral said, ‘Day? day! By gad, he looks like nine months!’”

(roars of laughter)

“Ya! ha! ya! ha!” and the story went all over Winnipeg.

It was at such a reception that somebody (either Colonel the Honourable Osborne Thisthewaite, or Señor Desdichado, the Consul-General for Mexico – anyway, somebody) dragged E.P. through the crowded reception given by Mrs. Pleasington, a niece of the Governor of Bombay, and said, “Do let me introduce you to Mrs. Dacres, a cousin of the Duke of Somerset.” E.P., with a bow of deference fit for Versailles, said, “I’m so glad to meet you. I used to know your cousin, the Duke of Somerset so well.” And she said, “Oh, how delightful. Do you know I haven’t heard a word from any of the Somersets for weeks and weeks.” Neither she had. So they moved together to drink champagne at a sideboard, caught up in the mirage of make-believe as superior to truth, as fireflies are to gas light.

—

Mrs. Dacres had arrived in Winnipeg a little before, and was living in shabby lodgings – the Honourable Mrs. De Carteret Dacres – with her little daughter Evelyn. Evelyn was fourteen and Mrs. Dacres was – well, the very least you can be if you have a daughter of fourteen. Mrs. Dacres was as impecunious as she was pretty and as charming as she was both. And she had the same mirage of family and money as Edward Philiphaugh, and when she talked her talk was based on the peerage. She was “honourable” because she said she was honourable. People let it go at that. Her husband had died in India and when she spoke of India she spoke of “cantonments” and “syces” and Simla and of how India was such a small place that of course everybody knew everybody. She left out the other three hundred million. So people thought her husband had been in the army. But in reality he had been with an export tea firm in Calcutta. Sometimes she shifted him to the Zulu war because that was recent. Her talk was so vague that you could never quite locate him. Some people understood that he had got the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan – Winnipeg was full of Victoria Crosses in 1880. Mrs. Dacres never said these things. But they came out somehow in conversation with her over the teacups. If people believed them then she couldn’t help it. And in reality she faced and fought poverty with the bravery of a heroine.

Now the truth was that Mrs. Dacres’ late husband far from being rich had been poor, and worse. For he had put all his money and his savings into the Gujahar Swindle that is still remembered in odd corners of England. This was when a company was floated by the Majarajah of Gujahar to grow tea. The British Government was to – should have, was certain to – back the enterprise. It didn’t. No tea was grown and the Gujahar loan went the way of Turkish bonds. Dacres of Calcutta had put in all his money. He had done more. He had put in, without her knowledge, all his wife’s money, the little bit of money that every girl in England of that kind and class used to have. That was how he came to die. He died – they found him dead – the evening the news came out. Mrs. Dacres never spoke of it; and in any case the worst of it, the last part, they never told her. She thought it was apoplexy. But perhaps she knew. That was why, in Winnipeg, she never mentioned Gujahar.

Her little girl, Evelyn – she liked to call her “my baby” – was, as said, fourteen years old, but Mrs. Dacres got her down to twelve in general conversation. Evelyn was just as pretty as her mother, and as fickle as a summer breeze. She couldn’t help it, because she just had to be whatever you wanted her to be. If a curate talked to her of the love of God, she looked as sad as a saint, because she felt like a saint. But if you wanted her to be a kitten she’d turn into one.

—

“So Lord Decimer came over,” Mrs. Dacres was saying to Evelyn, “and patted you on the head . . .” She was speaking in their shabby sitting room, knitting with some wool which, as her friends understood, the Duchess of Bedford had sent her. She only knitted things not to disappoint the Duchess. She knitted and as in a mirage, she was saying, “So Lord Decimer . . .”

“Mother,” said Evelyn, “did we really know all those people in India?”

“Who, dear?”

“Lord Decimer and the Prince of Wales and . . .”

“My dear child! What a question! Why you must remember yourself how I took you into the House of Lords – no, let me see; perhaps you don’t. You were only three. But, my dear Evelyn, when you ran into the Prince with your hoop and he was so . . .”

“But, mother, I don’t remember any of it.”

“No, perhaps not. Let me see; you were only two.”

“But, mother, at two? I couldn’t have run a hoop at two.”

—

The bell rang from below and Evelyn went down and back. “It’s the grocery man, mother, he’s brought back the cheque you gave him yesterday. He said the bank wouldn’t take it.” Mrs. Dacres looked at the cheque.

“How silly of me! I’m always doing that . . .”

She went over to a desk and took out about eight blank cheque books, thought a little and selected one and wrote a new cheque.

“There, tell him I’m so sorry – I’d written it on the wrong bank . . .”

“But, mother,” persisted Evelyn when she came back, “I don’t remember living in those big houses in England. I only remember such a little house in a village.”

“But of course, dear . . . I adore little houses – so simple. Look at this. They never could get me to London. I remember the dear old Count Chateau de Chateaubriand saying, ‘Mais, pourquoi, madame’ . . . perfect French . . . just like that ‘pourquoi, madame’ . . .” Another tradesman’s cheque came up. Mrs. Dacres made apologies again. It was so stupid of her. She had written 1890 instead of 1880. People who wait and wait for remittances from home do these things. “But stop,” said Mrs. Dacres, “it must be dinner time—” she looked at her watch and murmured, “That tiresome jeweler . . . Yes, it must be dinner time. You’re having dinner at the Smith’s, aren’t you? No, dear, I shan’t have any. I’m not a bit hungry!”

—

So when the Honourable Mrs. Dacres went out to tea all her friends talked about Philip Philiphaugh and she thought him wonderful.

She bought a newspaper every day just to see what it said about him. A newspaper in Winnipeg cost ten cents.

—

So one day the Honourable Mrs. Dacres found herself in Philip Philiphaugh’s combined offices that carried on their front in gigantic letters the sign boards of the Saskatchewan, Manitoba Real Estate Company – The Peace River Development Company, and the Winnipeg Arctic Ocean and Siberian Railway. All these enterprises were at their height, with outer offices and inner offices going full swing, with every luxury in furniture and fittings that the Winnipeg of 1880 could contrive, and with Count Fosco di Fosdari, speaking Italian in all of them, and with doorkeepers to show people in and out, all English army veterans with one leg each.

Charmingly Mrs. Dacres bent over the counter and extended her card: The Honourable Mrs. Dacres. It worked as magic. The great man appeared in a moment. “Do please come in, Mrs. Dacres – do take a chair. You must excuse a rather ramshackle office; our mahogany furniture is all delayed at sea. Lord Beresford cabled that he can do simply nothing about it.”

“My little girl, Evelyn,” murmured Mrs. Dacres. “I like to call her my baby still, but she is really eleven.” “Oh, charming!” exclaimed Philiphaugh, “but dear me, who is it she reminds me of – why, of course, the little Princess of Saxe-Schlitz-in-Main.” “Why, she is like her, and yet I never noticed it before,” echoed Mrs. Dacres. “Do let me call Count Fosdari,” went on Edward Philip. Then, opening the door, he called, “Fate venire, si piace, il Conte Fosdari” – which was good medicine for the outer office.

E.P. took for granted that the Hon. Mrs. Dacres wanted to invest. He showed her on the wall a huge map of the Peace River country. It seemed that Lord Salisbury had cabled over for half of it. But some was left; also a good deal of the Arctic and all Siberia. A mirage seemed to colour the room as he spoke.

Mrs. Dacres took out a cheque book – one on London – she had another with her on Bombay. Evelyn looked at her, a straight direct look, and she felt guilty. She wondered – nearly broke off – and then the mirage grew rosier still when Philip Philiphaugh said, “Oh, please don’t bother with a cheque. We’ll just call it an open account. Your profits will pay it off in no time. But don’t you think after all, a thousand pounds is too small – just a bagatelle. Suppose we say fifty thousand dollars . . . and if you wish to draw out some money in advance of profit, the Count (here the Count bowed double, twice) will arrange at once . . .” And with that E.P. threw a little more Italian at the Count.

E.P. showed Mrs. Dacres through the offices with great dignity, Count Fosdari lingering behind with Evelyn. He had made a bee-line to her at once, and was showing her a picture of his father’s castle, and chattering Italian.

—

The Honourable Mrs. Dacres walked home, still in her mirage, with a thousand other mirages walking the Winnipeg streets, and greeting one another as they passed.

And Philiphaugh? Why had he done it? Why does any person do it? Why does a boy show off before a girl?

Mrs. Dacres spent that afternoon buying furs on Portage Avenue. Till now she had said she thought them vulgar.

—

But other banking transactions were going on that day in Winnipeg of a very different kind. In the private room in one of the real banks, one with a head office in Montreal, the manager talked with the manager of another real bank with a head office in Toronto. They had papers and books in front of them.

“It isn’t banking!” he said. “Man, man, look at these accounts! Here’s a loan company. What are their assets? Loans to a real estate company. What are their assets? Shares in the loan company. Here’s another real estate company? Where does it get its funds? From the Brewery that bought the real estate. Look at this – Winnipeg Arctic and Siberian Railway.”

“Donald,” said the other, “you lent them fifty thousand . . .”

“Man, can I help it? If I didn’t lend it you would . . . and I admit that darned man has a way with him. In he comes here and he starts talking about the Monteiths of Caithness – you’ll understand – and knowing more about our tartan than I do myself. He’s joined the Curling Club it seems, and wants a family tartan; he says he can buy one on a Royal Warrant . . .”

“That’s it, Donald,” said the other. “He can buy it with your fifty thousand.”

So they both laughed, and agreed that it couldn’t go on, that it must burst, and went away to blow it up all the harder . . .

—

When Evelyn and her mother got home Mrs. Dacres seemed very thoughtful. But Evelyn danced all round the room. “Tra-la-la! . . . Is an Italian count’s wife called – what?” “Mother, where is Lake Como? . . . Tra-la-la!”

—

So the autumn waned and the winter came. The river froze and the prairie was a white sheet of frozen snow but the rush of business never slackened and the pace and throb of life were as warm as ever. So it came about that one winter day E.P. took Mrs. Dacres out driving, in a two-seated cutter, drawn by two horses dancing under tall sleighbells. They skimmed over the prairie like the wind. You drove anywhere over the prairie then, just right over the prairie, as soon as you left the town. E.P. and Mrs. Dacres were in front and Evelyn and Jim behind, the big cutter smothered over with buffalo robes and Arctic furs, and Mrs. Dacres and Evelyn with “clouds” over their faces against the cut of the wind. These “clouds” of 1880 were loose-knitted woolen things of bright pink and lighter blue, guaranteed dangerous at ten yards. On the front seat E.P. was explaining to Mrs. Dacres that two deaths might at any time make Jim a Portuguese Duke. Evelyn nudged Jim and Jim nudged Evelyn and Jim whispered, “Which two do I kill?” because each of them had been brought up alongside mirage and humbug, and each knew that the other knew all about it.

Such drives were a great success. E.P. used to help Mrs. Dacres into the sleigh with a courteous, “Allow me, Agnes,” and help her out again – “Allow me, Agnes—” with a chivalry of voice and manner worthy of the Middle Ages.

—

Then in less than no time it was summer again, for there is no spring in the west, and E.P. took them out in his big sailboat on the Red River . . . (people could still sail on it then). It was quite a large picnic party and E.P. told them about yachting off the Isle of Wight with the Prince of Wales, and how one day in a sudden storm the Prince called, “Ned, for God’s sake take the helm!”

After that Agnes called him “Ned,” a name just for herself to use. Count Fosdari, who was one of the party that day, made a great hit by talking heroically about Christopher Columbus, till he fell over the gunwale into the water. After which he had to go home and was out of the picnic, a marvelous picnic on the river bank with such a clatter of plates and knives, with salads and cold pâtés and champagne popping and everybody talking at once. “I remember saying to the Dey of Algiers . . .” “Now, then, Agnes, allow me . . .” “I remember . . .”

—

The strange thing was that when Agnes Dacres was with E.P. all the “pretense” seemed to drop away from her. She let him tell her about the Portuguese title in his family. She never spoke of one in hers.

In fact, quite the contrary. Evelyn noticed it right away. After they had come home from such an outing, her mother would say:

“Evelyn, you’ve always thought the Duke of Somerset is my cousin. Well, he isn’t.”

And Evelyn answered, “I knew he wasn’t, mother.”

And another day:

“Evelyn you’ve always thought that that photograph is a picture of my house when I was a child. Well, it isn’t. My father was a country curate with six children, and I went out to Calcutta as a governess.”

And once, a little later and with much greater difficulty, she said:

“Evelyn, when we were in India – you’ve always thought your father was in the army. Well – he wasn’t.”

She was speaking hesitantly, with pauses, as she sat “fixing her face” before a glass. It was easier to say things when she was doing something.

“He was in a tea house in Calcutta,” she went on, “and we didn’t know anybody. I never saw Simla, dear.”

“. . . Oh, mother, I’m so sorry.”

“. . . And we were very poor . . . and then all that your father could save in ten years, and the little money I had, he put into the terrible Gujahar Swindle . . . and it was all lost.”

“The what? Mother, what a funny word . . .”

“Gujahar! It’s a native state in India . . . the Gujahar Swindle . . . everybody knows about it. The Maharajah – think of the wickedness of it – organized a great tea company – just on nothing, Evelyn; all on paper.”

“But, mother, surely in Winnipeg they do that every day?”

“But this is Winnipeg; that was Gujahar.”

“But, mother, a company like the Winnipeg Arctic and Siberian Railway – Jim says that his uncle and the rest never put a cent into it; his uncle said that himself.”

“Evelyn, that’s an utterly different thing. Didn’t you hear him say that if he could get a million pounds from England, he would sink it all in the Arctic Ocean? But Gujahar was a swindle. The Maharajah got it all; the rest were ruined; it killed your father.”

—

Then there came an evening, an unforgettable evening, of an old-fashioned party in E.P.’s spacious house with Agnes Dacres acting as hostess to his guests. They had all the old-fashioned items and features of the day, little tables of whist, and people singing drawing-room pieces at the piano as they used to sixty years ago.

Captain Despard sang in a bold defiant voice: “’Tis a rich – rough – gem – Deny – it – who – can – ’Tis the Island – Home – of – an Englishman.”

And E.P. turned the music while Agnes sang, “In – the – gloaming – Oh, my darling!” – and all the people listened, yearning, as people could yearn before moving pictures over-strained their capacity for it.

—

As E.P. showed Mrs. Dacres into the carriage which he had ordered to take her home, he held her hand a moment, under the summer leaves and said, in such a wonderful tone: “Agnes, dear – let this be our gloaming now . . .”

—

No one was surprised when the wedding was announced; nor at the stir it made, nor at the tremendous receptions that followed it, in E.P.’s great house.

His wife stood with a fan, like a princess, on a hearth rug and E.P. presented his political constituents and supporters, finding a title and an office for each.

“Agnes, dear, let me present the Reeve of Kildonan – the ex-warden of Stony Mountain – the Assessor of Provencher . . .”

E.P. could find a title for anybody that sounded like a Walter Scott novel.

—

In the new social life that followed, with pretty clothes to wear, Evelyn blossomed as quickly as a prairie rose, especially as her mother now let her wear grown-up dresses. At the receptions she made a wonderful hit with everybody. She let the young and Reverend Fergus MacTavish, just ordained, just arrived in Winnipeg, and nervous, tell her about damnation – “But is everybody really damned, Mr. MacTavish?” . . . “I wouldna’ just say everybody . . .” And she let a young engineer, who had actually seen it, tell her how electric light worked. “But what is it really?” she asked. While he was telling her, she saw all sorts of things out of the corner of her eye. “Do go on,” she said, when he stopped. There was more she wanted to see.

—

They had just time to enter on this grandeur, for what are a few weeks and months when life moves as swiftly as happily as that? – when down it all came with a crash. The great Manitoba boom broke – so suddenly and so completely that only those who remember it can believe how suddenly and completely it broke.

It was all over, so to speak, in a day.

The headshaking and the whispering in the banks reached its climax; the banks acted; they pulled out the planks of credit, down came the house of faith. They drew the curtain and the beautiful mirage was gone.

The hammers fell dead. The sounds ceased. All the new world that was just going to be, and that might have been, broke into the wreckage of the world that is.

It was not only the loss of money. The change came with a sudden personal wrench to each and everyone. It was like the loss of a sudden glory, all this new wealth of character and personality, that had bloomed like a rose, this easy intercourse, this universal generosity and good fellowship, this marvellous mirage more true than reality. Hold it! – Stop it! – We can’t let it go!

That’s how the people felt, trudging the wooden sidewalks, looking for jobs.

In a moment everybody was bankrupt, everybody owed everybody. They always had, but it didn’t matter then because nobody paid anybody. With the crash everybody called for pay.

Real estate went under. During the big boom people had bought land all night under the glare of torch- and lamp-light. Now they sold it all day in the cold daylight. The banks (the private banks) broke. The breweries burst. The insurance companies went up. The trust companies went under. The plain people could not bear to see it taken from them, this bright new world that was just beginning. Some tried to protest, little angry groups of men on street corners, with the snow blowing round them, for winter was come now. One was speaking from a box: “It isn’t right! They’ve no right to close down on us. You know and I know, there’s room here for thousands and thousands. You know and I know, it’s just a crowd of rich men that are scared about their money.”

Then two burly policemen with the real London manner would say, “Now then, move on, please, move on.”

Who can agitate in a snowstorm?

And E.P.? Did he go under? Not for five minutes. What was a little thing like a crash to him. Of course he was ruined on such a huge scale that it made no difference and that it carried itself, as it were.

He explained it all away.

“It will be a matter of course of refinancing everything.” He had a lot of words like that. “I shall cable to Lombard Street about ‘converting’ everything. The only trouble is that I may at any time now be needed in the Soudan.”

So what with that and an unabated hospitality E.P. floated or seemed to, where others sank.

But not really. There was no reality underneath it. The big stuff was all over; what was left was just wreckage. After a few months ready money was clear gone. E.P. had to carry himself, when the company finances were broken, with personal loans at the banks.

Here he developed a wonderful technique. A banker, especially the manager of a branch, was E.P.’s natural mark and victim. He would tremble as E.P. came in, like a dove that sees a hawk. The method used by E.P. was so simple. It was like showing a farmer peas under a thimble. As he entered the banker’s private office he would exclaim, “I say! Do you fish? Surely that’s a green-heart casting-rod on the wall?” E.P. knew the names of everything. In a few minutes the banker, flushed and pleased, was exhibiting the rod, and showing flies out of a box in a drawer. When E.P. went out he carried a hundred dollars with him. There was no security. The transaction was all over.

But such sums, of course, were quite hopeless to maintain, not only E.P. but his establishment. Of course, there was still credit. E.P. would buy with that, though Agnes wouldn’t. “I can’t bear debt,” she said. But E.P. would walk into shops as grandly as ever, buy with lavish generosity, never asking the price and never mentioning pay, until the parcel was in his hand and then: “By the way, please let me have the account promptly. I may be leaving very shortly for the Soudan . . .”

Sometimes it was the Soudan, sometimes Sir Henry Loch in West Africa, whichever was most in the papers.

Of course, E.P. could still travel. As a matter of fact he always carried with him the Charter of the Winnipeg Arctic Ocean and Siberian Railway, an impressive parchment with a big red seal. He could travel, which he did, in a sort of circuit, so as to be always “called east,” or “called back west.”

The hotels, of course, were easy. E.P. would always wait till he was all ready – coat, bag and all – and then ask for his bill at the desk, and receiving it, would break out with enthusiasm over the reasonableness of it. “But just compare that,” he would say, “with the Hotel Crillon at Paris!” The manager couldn’t; he just felt that he ran a cheap hotel. E.P. would add, “When I see Sir John I really must tell him how admirably I have been treated; he’s coming here next week.” Sir John was the Prime Minister. The hotel keeper hadn’t known that he was coming; and he wasn’t. Then came the final touch, “Let me see – seventy-six dollars – seventy-six – you give me” – and E.P. fixed his eye firmly on the hotel man – “give me twenty-four dollars and then I can remember to send an even hundred.” The man’s hand trembled. But he gave it.

—

Of course, it couldn’t last. Credit faded month by month . . . There was no way to meet things up at the big house.

“You’ve let Meadows go?” asked a guest who missed the familiar butler and saw E.P. pour the whiskey himself.

E.P. shook his head very sadly, as if with great commiseration.

“I had to,” he said. “Poor chap! Drinking . . . but what could I do?”

—

“Where’s Harris?” asked another guest. “Has he left you?”

“Oh, no, only for a time. I’ve lent him to Government House. Sir James and Lady Aikins were in despair. Of course, I pay his wages.”

—

“Is your wife out?” asked an evening visitor, who had been invited to supper. “I’m so sorry she is,” said E.P. “She told me to tell you how terribly sorry she was not to see you . . . She was called out.”

Agnes wasn’t out. She was in the kitchen down below, getting supper ready to send up on the dumb-waiter, because Anderson and Parker and Jennings were all gone. Agnes and Evelyn did the work now.

—

At other times they tried other methods. At makeshift dinner parties, for new people, Evelyn was turned into a parlour maid. One English visitor, when she took his hat and coat, gave her half a crown. E.P. sent her down the street with it to the grocer’s for a bottle of California wine, and then served the wine, or had Evelyn serve it, to the visitor. “Annette,” he said, “bring up from the cellar a bottle of the South African wine,” and he added, “Cecil Rhodes has just sent it. It is not half bad.” Neither it was; or only half.

—

Evelyn made such a hit with herself as Annette that she was in and out of character at two minutes notice.

Evelyn was also learning shorthand, and the new art – type-writing – not proper work, of course, for a lady. The Legislature had taken over Jim to a job of selling law stamps in the courthouse. E.P. had lost his seat in the new elections, but they let Jim keep his job. Lord Hartington had never come across with the commission in the British Army; all the soldiering Jim got was training one night a week, in the long summer twilight, with the Winnipeg Field Battery – militia.

All that went on till months drifted into years. Then came a ray of hope; there might be some money for Agnes in England. Her father’s estate was being wound up. He’d been dead for years but they were still winding. Her sister’s husband, the Vicar of Little Bosing-on-the-Edge, Edgewater, near Exeter, England, had sent Agnes twenty pounds, taken out of the estate, to let her come home and help wind it. It seemed that there were some things that could only be arranged by agreement among the heirs.

Twenty pounds wasn’t really enough; at least it meant going second class, and few people liked to admit doing that in 1884. So when they asked E.P., “What boat is your wife sailing on?” he said, “It’s rather uncertain. She may take a Mediterranean boat out of New York.” He might as well have said a banana boat out of Galveston, Texas, for all truth in it; but at least it stalled the question.

—

So Agnes went away, and E.P. shuffled along as best he could, a little shabbier all the time. Travel had broken down. The railways had cut out the Arctic Ocean since E.P. could print no more passes. Even the bar-rooms were breaking under him. There came a time when bar-room credit, the last refuge of human brotherhood, broke. E.P. had trailed into a bar with three adherents in tow. “Now, then,” he said, in his grand manner, “what will you fellows have?” Then he held up his extended fingers to the bar man, and said, “Four.” The head bartender looked round from mixing a fancy drink at a sideboard and broke into oaths. E.P. hooked Captain Despard by the arm. “Come away,” he said. “I’m afraid the poor fellow’s crazy; but I hate to report him.”

—

Then Agnes wrote that she could not come back yet. The estate didn’t seem to wind. Charles (that was the Vicar; he had taken a double blue and pink at Cambridge but all the business he knew was what he had learned out of Horace) – Charles said that there might in the end be quite a bit of money, but there wasn’t any yet; in fact not even enough to come home with – and Charles himself had none.

—

So that was that, till the year 1884 ran out, and 1885 began with E.P. still talking of being called away – only now it was to Johannesburg. Evelyn was typing in a government office, and wishing that life would bring some romance to her life and none ever came. Jim selling law stamps and wishing he could be a soldier, and never a word from Lord Hartington.

Jim and Evelyn had become in a sense “sweethearts” but not sweet enough for Evelyn. It was understood somehow that some day they were going to marry one another. But there was not enough to it. As Evelyn understood it, Jim was supposed to be waiting for “her answer.” But he kept forgetting that he hadn’t got it. It didn’t seem possible to get up a real lovers’ quarrel with Jim or to have final partings, or any of that sort of thing which makes love worth while.

Even the attentions of Count Fosdari, which Evelyn wished to apply as a torment, took no effect on Jim. He had a hereditary view of foreigners as silly asses. “I am sure that Count Fosdari would have proposed to me last night,” Evelyn said. “I just rushed out of the room in time.” Or, “I wonder what Count Fosdari meant when he asked me if I thought I could live where it was always summer time?” “You can search me,” said Jim, who was mending a fishing rod. “Some silly ass stuff about myrtle trees. He’s nuts on them.”

Then came the terrible blow to Evelyn when it turned out that Count Fosdari couldn’t propose to her because he was married already. He had mentioned it quite innocently. He had a wife in Italy. She was twelve years old and in a convent. “Can you beat it?” Jim said. Fosdari must have meant engaged, Jim thought, but Evelyn said, “No, married.”

It appeared that all of Fosdari’s attentions had just been Italian antics. So Evelyn was left with less romance than ever, and Jim with no soldiering at all, unless you count the Field Battery, one evening a week.

—

Then fate pressed a button and gave him, and everyone else in Winnipeg, all the soldiering they wanted, and to Evelyn all the romance she could sustain.

There was plenty of forewarning, for those who could read the signs in the sky, of the oncoming of the rebellion of the halfbreeds and the Indians of the Northwest in the early spring of 1885. Yet few read or heeded them. When the rebellion broke it came with the sudden fury of a March blizzard. The attack on a column of mounted police by Gabriel Dumont’s two hundred halfbreeds at Duck Lake, the heavy loss of life, the police driven back to their barracks – this news fell on Winnipeg with the sudden shock of impending danger. It even echoed across the ocean and around the Empire – the old days of savage warfare come back again.

All the more so when the news followed that the Crees of the Upper Saskatchewan had risen under Big Bear, had massacred people at Frog Lake, carried off the women captive, and were now moving to close in on Fort Pitt and Battleford, the little outlying posts in what was still almost empty country. There seemed no limit to what it all might mean . . . There were ten thousand halfbreeds on the lower Saskatchewan and twenty thousand Crees and Blackfoot Indians beyond. There were twenty thousand more beyond that. In Winnipeg, there were no permanent “soldiers,” only volunteers, militia who drilled on summer evenings. These were the cavalry with sixty-two men (mostly on livery stable horses), the 90th. and 91st. battalions of the militia with about five hundred men and three hundred uniforms among them, and the Winnipeg Field Battery, sixty-two men with six guns, drilled and trained, the only effective unit west of Lake Superior. If the Indians really rose – all of them – then the country was all theirs till help could come. The rest of Canada was still cut off. The Canadian Pacific Railway was still one hundred miles short of completion; and the missing one hundred miles were in the frozen wilderness north of Lake Superior.

No wonder Winnipeg thrilled with excitement. The news from the plains came in as best it could by telegraph from here, there or anywhere, as riders might reach the railway telegraph station. It was written up on Bulletin Boards outside the newspaper offices, and sent out in “special editions” on broad sheets, like snow flakes . . . There were no telephones. The streets were full of people all day.

FORT PITT ABANDONED

POUNDMAKER TAKES WAR PATH

INSPECTOR DICKENS DEFENDS BATTLEFORD

And from the East:

TROOPS GATHERING AT TORONTO

TWENTY THOUSAND PEOPLE THRONG UNION STATION – ROYAL GRENADIERS AND QUEEN’S OWN RIFLES ENTRAIN FOR WINNIPEG; TROOPS REACH LAKE SUPERIOR GAP – SNOW BLIZZARD HALTS MARCH.

And so on, endlessly. Jim was out of law stamps and into Artillery uniform and forage cap. The Battery was ready to go – and the 90th. and the 91st. – only waiting for the troops from Toronto. Meantime, regiments of “home guards” were being sworn in to defend the city.

E.P., standing beside the notice boards and in the bars said, “I shall take out a commission at once.” Then it turned out they wouldn’t give him one. After all, he’d never been in the army. “I shall simply cable to Lord Hartington at the War Office . . .” he said. He wrote a long cable at the telegraph office, marked it “collect,” London, H.M.S. The clerk counted the words with his pencil – sixty words, he said “at forty-five cents a word, but it can’t go collect.” “That’s all right,” E.P. said, “but wait a minute. I think I must add something, it’s hardly long enough – or, let me see . . . I think perhaps I’d better show it at Headquarters.” So the cable didn’t go. E.P. went round saying, “I’m in touch with Lord Hartington about a commission” but Lord Hartington didn’t know he was touched.

Then E.P. got a great idea.

“Desmond,” he said, to Captain Despard, “I shall raise a Troop of Irregular Horse – I shall give you a commission.” Despard hadn’t taken out a commission, though he was a soldier, because just then he was taking in whiskey. Everybody was standing treat to ex-officers in Winnipeg just then. It was too good to lose. “Yes,” said E.P., “a troop of horse – let me see, Fosdari’s a soldier. I’ll make him a lieutenant.”

Those who recall the Northwest Rebellion will remember the little troops of horse that sprang into being at once, in every settlement in the Northwest, Boulton’s Scouts, Steele’s Scouts, the Alberta Rangers, the Surveyors’ Intelligence Corps, all sorts – some with uniforms, most without, and with their own rifles or shotguns.

The idea no sooner struck E.P. than he saw the beauty of it . . . “Will you be going out against the rebels, Mr. Philiphaugh . . .” “I’m raising a troop of horse!” he said, returning his face to his glass . . . “I’ve just cabled Whitehall for authorization.” The word went round – “He’s raising a troop of horse.”

E.P. christened his troop, at birth, or before it, the Queen’s Royal Intelligence. But in spite of its name there was no rush to join; particularly as it appeared that the troopers would get no pay.

So E.P. said it was just to be formed as a “skeleton corps.” He himself was Major and Despard, Captain, and Fosdari a Lieutenant. E.P. dug up Meadows and called him a “trooper” and Harris and called him a “despatch rider.” They had no uniforms but they had a lot of medals, Meadows’ and two real ones of Despard’s and some more that E.P. bought. They borrowed horses for each “parade” from a livery stable. For all that, the Queen’s Skeleton Intelligence was no less or worse than many other corps, especially after E.P. found a tailor with an unsaleable roll of butternut cloth and ordered what he called “service uniforms.” That was, though they didn’t know it, the beginning of khaki.

At this juncture arrived General Sir Frederick Middleton to command the column – all cocked hat and feathers and grey moustache and a red coat – the real thing. He was so completely muddled among men without uniform that the Queen’s Intelligence got by – got on the books. This was partly because when Captain Despard saluted General Middleton, he did it with such an exact cavalry click to it that General Middleton said, “Where were you, sir?” Despard said, “Moari and Ashanti, sir.” To the men standing round it sounded like a couple of Freemasons talking. “Come and have a peg,” said the general, and that was that. All this time the messages kept coming in, brought to points on the railway from places on the plains that appeared as headlines.

“CREES RISING UNDER POUNDMAKER . . . SIOUX JOIN BIG BEAR . . . HALFBREEDS TAKE PRINCE ALBERT . . . LOUIS RIEL ON THE SOUTH SASKATCHEWAN . . . RUMOUR OF NEW MASSACRE AT FORT PITT.”

“We can’t wait,” said General Middleton. He spoke on parade. “Men, our column must start now, without waiting for the rest. We must strike fast and while we can or we’ll have all the Northwest on our hands.”

—

So the Winnipeg column left – packed into box cars, coaches, cabooses, cattlecars, anything, with the field battery guns hauled up on box cars, with a great crowd of people at the station, so great that as the cars pulled out, Jim could hardly see which hat was Evelyn’s and Evelyn could hardly see which forage cap was Jim’s.

—

There were four hundred men in the column, all packed on cars, standing or sitting, or anyhow. And they sang

A rig’ a de jig, and a-way we go

A-way we go, a-way we go,

A rig’ a de jig and a-way we go

I. O. I. O. I. O.

And as the cars drew away out into the distance they could hear it, and Evelyn kept murmuring, “Oh, Jim, Jim, I didn’t mean it.” . . . and she thought her heart would break.

And she didn’t know what she didn’t mean except that she meant that she hadn’t valued him properly, hadn’t known how much she loved him, didn’t mean to be so indifferent.

The train carried the column to Qu’Appelle and from there it struck across the prairies for the South Saskatchewan, trailing out in a strung-out line over the rolling hills and the soft green grass of early spring. They had the infantry out in front (the method used with the Moaris and in Ashanti), guns in file in the centre and the cavalry and the troops of horse behind them. That was because, with Moaris and Ashantis, if you lose the guns, its all over. The Queen’s Intelligence came last. At night the column camped on its tracks round little fires of what brush and last year’s grass would burn. The little army covered a mile of twinkling lights. The Queen’s Intelligence sat round a brush fire of wood collected by Meadows, drinking whiskey poured out by Harris. Captain Despard explained how in mounted infantry you must keep clear of your horse in action, but if it’s killed you can shoot from behind it.

Day after day the column moved. Night after night the lights twinkled.

All this came to Winnipeg by despatches sent back to the telegraph by despatch riders . . . COLUMN REACHES TOUCHWOOD HILLS . . . COLUMN NEARING SASKATCHEWAN . . . and with these came wires from the East . . . TORONTO FORCES PASS LAKE SUPERIOR . . . MEN CARRIED IN SLEIGHS . . . REGIMENTS DUE WINNIPEG TOMORROW.

—

Then the troop trains reached Winnipeg, long trains made up of anything available. These were all sorts of soldiers in all sorts of uniforms, Tenth Royal Grenadiers from Toronto in a scarlet so bright that an Indian couldn’t miss them at half a mile, and the Queen’s Own Rifles in blue so dark that you could see them, against a light background, five miles away – and the Governor General’s Body Guard, real cavalry, the only ones in Canada, all silver and blue. The town was just a roar of steam whistles and cheers of welcome.

But they had only half an hour in the town . . . went swinging along main Street with the Grenadiers singing

Litoria-Litoria – sweedle-e-wet – chu – hi – re – sa.

which was the great marching song of volunteers in the ’80’s.

And the Queen’s Own Rifles singing the new song, or new at least to the West.

There is a tavern in the town . . .

But in just no time they were off . . . off west over the railway and then trailing over the prairies and foothills, the Grenadiers in a long red line, moving fast to catch up with Middleton’s column . . . the others striking still further west to reach Poundmaker before he could join the halfbreeds under Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont.

—

Then the news came thick and fast . . . with crowds round the bulletin boards . . . and special extras. BATTLE AT FISH CREEK . . . COLUMN CHECKED BY HALFBREEDS – MANY KILLED AND WOUNDED – FIELD BATTERY CHECKS REBELS.

The halfbreeds and Indians under Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont had waited for the column, strung out among the grass and shrubs of a coulee beside the Saskatchewan. They fired, hidden in the grass and the hollows, at men in uniforms of bright scarlet. The Field Battery, on the slope behind, threw shells with nothing to shoot at. Jim worked with a bandaged hand. He had to. There were two men dead under the gun. The Queen’s Intelligence were in the thick of it . . . “Why doesn’t Middleton rush them?” E.P. said. “Why doesn’t the old fool rush them?” A lot of men said that. But Middleton was still sneering at his “raw soldiers.”

Then came the night and enabled them to retire back over the brow of the coulee.

The Queen’s Intelligence sat round their fire that night, jolted but full of fight. “That old fool,” said E.P., “should have gone right on.” In the rebel camp a couple of miles away some of them had the same idea. “Keep at ’em,” said Gabriel Dumont, a veteran of the plains. “Don’t let ’em sleep – treat ’em like buffalo – creep in on ’em – keep shooting at ’em – scare ’em.” But Louis Riel had no stomach for it. He had never seen a big fight before . . . The dead and wounded round the camp turned him pale . . . He stood babbling over a crucifix . . . “No, no,” he said, “enough blood, enough blood, assez de sang.”

—

All that came into Winnipeg. Then the news of the attack by the other column on Poundmaker’s Crees at Cut Knife. They were driven back. Then more soldiers came to Winnipeg, French regiments from Quebec, New Brunswickers, and more columns went across the plains. There followed the big fight of three whole days against the rifle pits at Batoche on the South Saskatchewan, and at last General Middleton did let the men go right at it, and charge the rifle pits and the log shelters; whether he let them or they let themselves, when that was done it was all over in an hour. Riel tried to get away. They caught him and brought him in, a shabby, disconsolate figure, the life all out of him, ready for the gallows. Gabriel Dumont got away and struck for the American border. Poundmaker and his Crees came in to surrender when they heard of Batoche. Middleton took the surrender seated on a camp chair, in the approved fashion used at Ashanti, or at Kabul. All of this moved so fast with such life and colour in it that it filled the Canadian press with headlines, and once or twice even got to New York and over to London. “AFFAIR ON THE SASKATCHEWAN” they called it.

All that was left presently was to round up Big Bear, and his lesser chiefs, the bands of Indians who had taken Battleford and Fort Pitt and made the massacre at Frog Lake. They were now somewhere up in the wooded country beyond the North Saskatchewan, making for the Athabasca wilderness, scattered bands of Indians that in the sequel it took all summer to find.

—

Then E.P. got another idea. The Queen’s Intelligence must now make a coup. He would turn them into “flying columns” of “vedettes.” He marked it all out for Despard on the map of the continent engraved on the back of his Arctic Railway Charter. “We cross here . . . we strike here . . . then we strike there” . . . the map was mostly fancy as he had drawn it for the engraver himself. But that made no difference . . . a Flying column must fly. “Who are we chasing?” asked Captain Despard. “Anyone we find,” answered E.P.

They left that night – with no other authorization beyond E.P. telling a sleepy camp adjutant that they were going out as “vedettes” to bring back intelligence of Big Bear, or of any other random Indians.

The adjutant didn’t care where they went, or what they went as.

—

The Intelligence Corps went out over the plains and across the North Saskatchewan, making for the timber country. On the second day beyond the river, reached and “stalked” a settler’s cabin. The settler being stalked said there were no Indians within a hundred miles, but didn’t mind if he took a glass of whiskey. Two days later they stalked another settler and he took another. The night after that they reached the “timber,” and sat under the trees round a fire, for it was cold though it was now June.

There they drank their drinks, poured by Meadows while Harris, the despatch rider, picketed the horses. The firelight playing on the group made it a wonderful picture; so wonderful that it was seen a quarter of a mile away by the Indians of Hole-in-the-sky and Thunder Man . . . These were two chiefs of Big Bear’s outfit with a hundred braves with them, breaking north after the news of Batoche. The Intelligence sat thus drinking its whiskey and E.P. was saying at the second round, “Vigilance! vigilance! In dealing with Indians, one must never lapse for a moment. Stop! Wo! Plenty, thank you, Meadows.” And they never saw the feathered heads and the painted faces, creeping nearer and nearer among the trees . . .

—

It was all over, with one wild war cry and one bound forward, except that Harris, the despatch rider got away – all over, and they were bound and tied, captives of Hole-in-the-sky and Thunder Man. Harris’s escape made headlines in the Canadian papers. QUEEN’S INTELLIGENCE ‘CORPS’ CAPTURED BY BIG BEAR’S INDIANS. But it reached England as “CAVALRY COLUMN WIPED OUT.”

—

Now that sounds like the beginning of horrors, of torture at the stake, of massacre. Not for a minute; not with such a mind as E.P.’s, dealing with such simple intelligences as those of Hole-in-the-sky and Thunder Man. They had hardly got him bound before they were untying him again. He effected it with his picture of the Queen, drawn out before he had his arms tied. These were Wood Crees who had never seen a photograph. They thought it a spirit, the spirit of the Great White Mother. E.P. said she had sent him to them to pardon them. Big Bear must be hanged (as a matter of fact he was not) but the Great Mother loved Hole-in-the-sky and Thunder Man and wanted them to live. He had the pardon in his pocket. Then he took out the Charter of the Arctic Railway, and all the Indians crowded round and grunted. He said that this pardon forgave all the band and he asked for an interpreter to read it off in Cree, and a Medicine Man took it and read it in Cree – just what E.P. said it was.

So the Indians let them all loose. That evening E.P. taught Hole-in-the-sky and Thunder Man to play poker with Despard’s pack of cards. The next day he taught all the band to shout, “Ho! ho! Victoria!” and lift up their tomahawks high in the air. They learned it so well that when two days later the relief column of one hundred Northwest Mounted Police came tearing over the prairie to the woods and deployed into line and swung off saddle with the precision of trained cavalry and then began to stalk the wood, with rifles ready – all the band came out from the trees with E.P. at the head . . . “Ho! ho! Victoria!”

—

The rest, all the way to Middleton’s column, just leaving, and with it to Winnipeg, was sheer triumph. The headlines said FLYING COLUMN CAPTURES CREES.

—

So they got back to Winnipeg and all the town was tumult of welcome, with military bands playing and everyone a hero, and civic receptions and reviewing of the troops. Then came the leaving of the troop trains for the East, crowded and singing and triumphant – going home.

—

And then it was all over. How quickly glory passes! All over and forgotten it seemed in a week. E.P. was back in his shabby house, talking of cables expected from the new mines of Johannesburg, his last bulwark against the creditors who had all flocked back. Evelyn was typing and Jim selling stamps again, with one hand, at the Parliament Building . . . General Middleton had spoken highly of Jim after Fish Creek, and a lot of people had noticed him and there might be a good job for him presently; in fact, there was right now a fine partnership he could have if he could put up $5,000. But things were so dreary now that E.P. didn’t even offer to cable the British Treasury.

And Evelyn said, “I wish mother were back. Oh! I wish mother were back.”

And she was much nearer to being back than Evelyn had any idea of. For in England everything had failed her. Each night, after the latest lawyer’s letter came to the vicarage, the Vicar, her brother-in-law, would sit in his little study in the vicarage adding up figures, and would say, “Dear me, dear me, how unfortunate.”

Like so many estates, the more they wound it up the smaller it got. “I’m afraid I don’t really understand business, Agnes,” said the Vicar. “We didn’t learn it at Cambridge – but I’m just afraid, that really there’s nothing there – or only just enough to pay your passage back.” So her brother-in-law advanced Agnes enough out of what the lawyers advanced him out of what the estate advanced them. And Agnes left for Canada. The Vicar drove her in a donkey cart over to the railway junction at Muddle-on-the-Edge, and he kissed her good-bye.

And from there she went third class to London, and from there third class to Liverpool and from there second class to Montreal, and from there by no class at all was on her way to Winnipeg – only a few hours away when Evelyn spoke.

—

. . . “Unless,” E.P. had said, “I get a cable,” and after they had gone out he had sunk into a chair, and sat there, the outspread newspaper on his lap, beaten at last – or else playing at being beaten at last.

Yet if he had known it there was a cable coming, but coming from so far away – from half round the world, that it was not there yet though it had started the morning of the day before in Gujahar, North India. If this were a moving picture we could follow the progress of the cable from Gujahar to Winnipeg in a set of variegated scenes. It was written and put on the wires in mixed English and Gujahari by a cinnamon-coloured telegraph clerk in a white suit with a black band on one arm to mean that the Maharajah of Gujahar was dead (the old Maharajah), and a sky-blue band on the other to mean that the new Maharajah was alive. The address was the hard part, for it ran Mrs. Dacres, The Vicarage, Little Bosing-on-the-Edge, Edgewater, via Exeter, England. The yellow clerk worked with the address, consulting a big Gujahari dictionary. After the address the rest was Gujahari and went like lightning.

That took the cable as far as Calcutta where a brown Baboo telegraph clerk in white with a white puggaree ran it all into what he understood was English, correcting Vicarage to Vicquorage, and with that it went on to Aden in one jump. There a telegraph clerk in a white uniform with a pith helmet, because he was also a subaltern of engineers, took the cable and when he wrote it out he said, “I say, I’ll be damned! Do look at this, Charteris.” And Charteris said, “I say . . . I will be damned.” Six officers were damned. They all knew of course that the Maharajah of Gujahar was dead because in Aden there’s nothing else to know except that sort of thing. But they all exclaimed when they saw the message, “All that money! Eh? What? But it’s only fair – the old boy simply stole it.”

Then the cable went on another jump to Suez. And there an Egyptian clerk in a white suit and scarlet tarbosh ran it off into French, English not being allowed on the Mediterranean cable in 1885, and sent it on to Marseilles in one long throw. He made no change except to write Vikkerij. At Marseilles, an envious French telegraph clerk in a suit that had been white last year took the cable off the wire and wrote it out, held it up to the other clerks and put his fingers on the figures in it and said, “Quelle veine, hein? Parlez-moi de ces Anglais!”

The French clerk corrected the Turkish spelling Vikkerij to “Viqueurage.” That took it to London and there it only took two minutes to make it “Vicarage,” and send it from London to Edgewater, and within two minutes more a postman was carrying it from Edgewater to the village shop that was the post office in Little Bosing-on-the-Edge. But as it was sealed he didn’t know what was in it and just whistled away as he walked. But he looked at the cable three or four times a minute. When he took it in, the postmistress looked at it – from above and from below and sideways. They both did . . . and she said, “Why, it’s a cable, dear me! From Googe – from Googe . . . Suppose I’ve got to open it.” “That’s regulations, Mrs. Treloar,” said the postman. “You deliver a telegram, as you might say, intact; a cable, so the regulation is, you open, for you can’t tell . . .”

But by this time Mrs. Treloar had read it with one long snort of astonishment.

Mrs. Dacres, The Vicarage, Little Bosing-on-the-Edge, Edgewater, via Exeter, England. British Government arbitration tea plantation claims against late Maharajah Gujahar awards you fifty thousand pounds sterling.

And with that the postman and postmistress started a race across the common to the Vicarage, knocking over sheep as they ran . . . through the gate they burst and through the door. The Vicar was just reading a morning prayer to his wife in the drawing-room, the day’s lesson out of St. John, “And they said, lo! where may we look for help?” When they broke in both shouting, “Gujahar!” The Vicar read the cable, and his wife fell on the neck of the postman and sobbed.

The Vicar was prompt. He had the donkey cart out within an hour. Within two he was at the cable office in Exeter, and it was still that same morning in Winnipeg when the knock of the telegraph boy come to E.P.’s door.

“I’ve got a cable here,” he said. “It’s for your wife – is that all right?”

“A cable?” said E.P. in surprise, then he remembered and said, “Yes, that’s all right. Another cable, eh?” Then he read it: British Government arbitration tea plantations claims against late Maharajah Gujahar awards you fifty thousand pounds sterling.

“Good Lord!” said E.P. “fifty thousand pounds!” Then, “Here boy!” and he began plunging his hands into his pockets . . . “Here, boy.” But there was nothing. Then he said, “Come,” slapped on his hat, grabbed the boy by the wrist and with the cable in the other hand dashed into the street.

He bumped into a clergyman. “Good-morning,” the clergyman began sweetly. “Give this boy a dollar,” said E.P. In sheer surprise the clergyman gave it. They bumped into a grocer watering window boxes in front of his store. “Give him a dollar,” E.P. gasped. The boy got four dollars before E.P. let him loose at the door of the bank.

“I must see the manager,” he said at the counter, “see him at once.” The manager stepped from his office. “I’m sorry,” he said with a frozen face, “we can’t possibly advance another cent. Our head office . . .”

But E.P. had recovered all his old power. “I want to scratch off a cheque for a thousand dollars. They want me at once in Gujahar. The Maharajah has just cabled.”

The manager collapsed into a wet rag. The money was paid across. Within half an hour all the saloons in Winnipeg had heard of the Maharajah of Gujahar. E.P. was lined up with a row of pals – Count Fosdari, Captain the Honourable Desmond Despard and all comers.

“The Maharajah’s cable, of course, means we are leaving for Gujahar at once.”

In the next saloon he said the Maharajah wanted him to raise a troop of cavalry, and in the next, “I expect I shall be asked to command the entire army of Gujahar.”

In the middle of the afternoon a second cable, this time from the Bank of England and addressed again to his wife, said, Placing fifty thousand sterling to your credit, Winnipeg. After that E.P. said, “It’s very likely, of course, that they’ll want me to take over three or four of the Native States.”

—

At which E.P., now in possession of boundless money, moved with his old energy. The first thing was to set his house in order.

So when Jim and Evelyn got to the house that evening the place was transformed. They could see it half way down the street as a blaze of light. There had been so many cleaning women working in the house that it smelt of gin. Delivery men were dumping in cut flowers and plants . . . Crockery and glasses were coming in crates. Half a liquor store had arrived. New carpets were going down. A “handy-man,” half tight, was pounding them in with tacks.

Jim and Evelyn stood, open-eyed. “Why! Uncle Edward!” Jim began. “Why, father,” said Evelyn. “I shall explain it all presently,” said E.P. “It means that I shall probably leave for India as soon as I can arrange things with the Viscount. He may want to go by way of Japan. In any case, I shall only wait till I get your mother back. I’m sending Harris with a cable. She’ll come at once, I’m sure.”

—

Come? But she was there already – getting out of a cab in the dusk, and wondering at the lights – and so happy to be there; so sad to bring nothing, but so glad to be back.

And in a moment she was in his arms . . .

“Agnes!”

“Edward!”

—

There was dinner, real dinner, in the house that evening, with all the pomp that E.P. could throw into it, at such short notice . . . himself in evening dress, and Agnes in the things they wear in English vicarages. Jim was still in his Field Battery uniform. “You must excuse him not dressing, dear,” E.P. said, “he’s not supposed yet, of course, to be in mufti.”

“Meadows,” he said, “you can retire to your pantry when you have served the port. If I want Harris I shall ring.”

But it turned out instead that in a few minutes Harris wanted him. Harris brought a cable, a real one, all paid for; and at last it was from London, from the office of Her Majesty’s Secretary of War. It said:

Her Majesty desires me to express her appreciation of your gallantry for which you are to receive in due course the D.S.O. about to be instituted and the Honorary Rank of Colonel in the Imperial Forces.

Hartington.

Before dinner was over it had all been explained now about the Gujahar money. “It will make a very good start,” said E.P., as he drank his port. “I shall cable at once to see about developing the Peace River and opening the Arctic Railway . . .”

His wife came round the table and put her arm around his neck . . . “Ned,” she said, “suppose we don’t cable any more, not to anybody. Let this be for us not a start but a finish – peace and happiness . . . Let it be a start for them.”

“For them, of course, for them first, but for everybody, too.” E.P. rose to an attitude. “This shall make a new beginning for the West . . . all my dreams . . . all my visions shall come true . . . I see it coming . . . four million . . . this city half a million . . . the star of the Empire shall glitter in the West and shall never set.”

[7]  So pronounced in 1880.

TOC     INDEX

Mariposa Moves On

Introduction

People who still entertain a kindly remembrance of Mariposa, the scene of my Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town of many years ago, will pardon me if I append these further sketches of Mariposa in the shadow of war. They were written, as is obvious from the text, in connection with the Victory Loan of 1943.

But as Mariposa is not one town, but is at least several hundred in Canada and in the adjacent States, and as more Victory Loans may yet be needed for complete victory, it seems not inappropriate to find a place in this book for these Mariposa Sketches.

The Happy Warrior

He came out to my house beside the lake – the most pleasant, cheery man I ever saw. I knew him just a little bit, but couldn’t recall his name.

“Canvassing for the Loan,” he said as he shook hands. “Pretty strenuous going!”

“Sit down,” I said and showed him an easy chair on the verandah.

“A great spot you have here,” he remarked. “That’s a pretty little bay.”

“Yes,” I said, “they call it The Old Brewery Bay.”

“Well, well, The Old Brewery Bay!” he repeated. “That’s a beautiful name! Poetic, isn’t it?”

That’s what I judge my visitors by.

If they like the name, The Old Brewery Bay, they’re all right. They can have anything on the place. Once a woman – I won’t say a lady – exclaimed, “Can’t you change it?” . . . She got hers.

As a matter of fact I have known that name, The Old Brewery Bay, to make people feel thirsty by correspondence as far away as Nevada.

“Pretty strenuous business,” repeated my friend the canvasser, as he sat comfortably down. But he didn’t look strenuous either.

“Will you have a cigar?” I said.

“I certainly will,” he answered, and then as he lit it.

“Any fish in the bay?”

Well, of course, that started us. We got talking of bass being right in the bay and out on the shoals in July, but always moving on in August. I told him there were lots of young pickerel in June, close in along shore, but you could never make them bite; and he asked me if I’d ever tried a very small gilt and silver spinner for pickerel, and I asked him if he ever took Scotch whiskey.

That led to the question of trout fishing. If you don’t see the connection it doesn’t matter. But I agreed with him that nowadays if you go trout fishing on the streams you’ve got to carry soda. You can’t any longer drink the water in the creeks.

That led to the discussion of the way the fish are disappearing in the older settled parts of Ontario and that you have to go north now. So we went north – taking another cigar and another Scotch with us – all the way up to Central Algoma.

Anyway, we spent a most pleasant hour or so. As my friend rose to go I suddenly remembered the Loan.

“You’re canvassing for the Loan?” I said.

“Yes,” he answered, “from a special list. You’re on it.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I took up my subscription yesterday at the bank.”

“So they told me,” he said.

TOC     INDEX

National Debt,
National Blessing

I was a witness to a queer matter of psychology this morning. Psychology? No, I’m not trying to use a long word for a short. It’s simple enough. It just means the way you use your mind. For instance, at poker, when you want the others to think you hold at least a straight, that’s psychology. At golf, when you say to the caddy, “How many was that last hole?” and want him to say seven instead of eleven, that’s psychology.

The case I mean occurred in the Mariposa barber shop that I’ve spoken of before – Jeff’s place – a sort of centre of town talk and public information. I was sitting there in the barber shop waiting my turn – or – well, I won’t say “waiting my turn” but waiting till I had, in fairness, to accept my turn. You see, here in Mariposa it’s not like in the City. The barber shop – I always go to Jeff’s – is a comfortable place to sit in with as good conversation and as much information as you get in any first class club. So each one likes to sit as long as he can till Jeff nominates him to a chair. When he says, “You’re next,” you have to take your place. You’ve read about the guillotine.

It was in the quiet hour of the morning with only Jeff himself shaving. But I got nominated to the chair almost right away because the morning papers had just come off the bus and most of the fellers preferred to sit and read for a while.

Well, Bill Landy was talking to George Summers and evidently talking Victory Loan.

Bill Landy has a mind as quick and bright as the flight of a humming-bird. He has to. He’s in the mining stock business and in that you mustn’t give the other man time to think. Of course Bill is closed just now, so he’s in war work – a dollar a year man – the most he ever made, net. He’s the chief canvasser for the Loan in Mariposa – not the Chairman of the Committee, though – Mariposa is too religious a place to make a mining broker a Chairman.

Anyway, Bill was talking to George Summers. George is different. He has a cement business, and you know the way it is with cement. It has to settle. George’s mind is like that. You can’t make any marks on it – he won’t let you – till it gets set and firm. George laid the town sidewalks and he doesn’t forget the place where the duck walked across the cement in front of the Public Library. No, sir.

I didn’t hear how the talk, or argument, started because Jeff had put a hot towel over my face and stopped to listen and forgot me. But when he let me out of the chair Bill Landy was saying,

“At any rate, you remember the old phrase, a national debt is a national blessing.”

“Why do you call it a phrase?” says George.

“Because it is.”

“Is what?”

“Is a phrase,” says Bill.

“Never mind the phrase business,” interrupts one of the boys who was listening. “Where does the blessing come in? Isn’t a debt a debt?”

“Why, this way,” says Bill. “You take a national debt like ours, widely distributed—”

“What do you call distributed?” asks George.

“He means everybody holds some,” says one of the fellers.

“Oh!”

“Well,” Bill went on, “now let’s say that individual A holds a hundred dollars—”

“Who’s he?” asks George.

“Well, just A, or if you like, I’ll call him B.”

“No, no, call him A if you like. You mean some feller whose name begins with A, like Alec Anderson or Andy Ames.”

“Yes, exactly, but I don’t mean them.”

“Oh, you don’t!”

“He just means anybody,” interrupts the Chorus.

“Yes,” says Bill, “I just mean a whole string of individuals: A, and B, and C, all the way to Z.”

“I doubt,” says George Summers slowly, “If you’d find any feller here in Mariposa whose name begins with Z.”

“No matter,” says Bill, “the point is this. Each hundred dollars that the government borrows means, to the government, a hundred dollars of debt . . .”

“Yes.”

“But for A, B, and C, it means a hundred dollars as an asset.”

“Right down to Z,” says George, “or is there a catch in it?”

“Why, don’t you see, George,” interrupts me and the fellers in the seats, “what’s a debt to the Government that it owes me, looks to me like an asset, a hundred dollars to the good.”

“Exactly,” says Bill Landy. “Now add up all the total. If the country owes a billion dollars, is it any poorer? No, not if it owes it at home. It means there are a lot of people in the country who are, put together, a billion dollars to the good. Make it two billion, it’s all the same.”

“And where’s the blessing?” asked George.

“Holds the country together,” says one of the listeners. “Who’s going to upset or shipwreck a government if he depends upon it for three or four thousand dollars invested in a loan?”

“Exactly,” says Bill Landy.

“I begin to see,” says George Summers.

“Next!” called Jeff.

“You’re next, George,” said the boys. “Shave Mr. Summers, Jeff, we’ll wait.” They knew it was just the moment.

—

I walked out and down the street with Bill Landy.

“That’s a hard business, Bill,” I said, “canvassing a feller like George Summers.”

“Oh, that was not for George,” Bill said. “He’ll take up the Loan good and plenty when he gets set. That was for the other fellers.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Why, the way to make a feller see anything, is to let him see some other feller not see it; d’you see!”

“I see,” I said.

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The Sultan Speaks
from the Grave

Would you believe it that for the last Victory Loan this little town of Mariposa, raised $640,000. Think of it! For a town of only 12,000 people; in fact, the Federal census makes it only 9,000. But that’s crooked; Ottawa’s jealous of us.

Anyway, that’s what we raised last time. Compare that with the old days when European kings tried to raise money and thought a hundred thousand pounds a huge sum. You could do a whole Crusade on it. Or compare it even with modern days when the Sultan of Turkey used to raise Turkish loans and couldn’t raise a hundred thousand pounds without executing half his cabinet and sending a bow-string to his Grand Vizier to choke himself with if he didn’t put the loan over. I refer, of course, to the Sultan that used to be. There is no Sultan over the Turks now. They got rid of them and got a real leader, Mustapha Kemal, who said, “Let’s be up to date,” and they shouted “Attaturk!” . . . So now the Turks are right in it and get all the money they need by telephoning to Mr. Churchill. But I was thinking of the Sultan that I used to read about in the newspapers when I was a boy, Abdul Aziz, the bad man of Europe, and his “Turkish Bonds” that were just a joke for waste paper. And just as I was thinking of him, all of a sudden I met him – Abdul Aziz – right here on the main street in Mariposa. The other people thought he was just an Armenian selling rugs, a little shrunken, yellow man with a rug over his arm, fresh and bright from Samarkand (Ontario).

But I knew who he was right away. “Buy a rug,” he said . . . And when I looked in his face I saw it was the Sultan – a case of that descent of the soul from body to body that the Greeks used to call Metempsychosis. Once learn that word and learn how to spell it, and you’ll see translated souls walking the street every day.

A little later he came out to my house. “Buy a rug!” he said as he came up on the verandah. I shook my head. “May I sit down?” he said. “I need to rest.” I knew he did; so did Judas Iscariot; Abdul Aziz, I was certain, had to walk forever. “Buy a Victory Rug,” he said and then he added, “Could you lend me an old pair of pants?”

Then I knew he was the Sultan of Turkey, so I spoke up. “Abdul,” I said, “am I right in saying that you never raised in any one single sum from and among your whole fifty million people as much as this town of Mariposa did in the last Victory Loan – $640,000?”

“It is true,” he answered. “Never once. There was one time when we nearly did it. We had a splendid committee. They worked up enthusiasm. They beheaded the local council of every Turkish village. They tortured all the tax gatherers. They put the thing over with – what is it you call it? – a hurrah! We raised half a million dollars. When we reached the total we had a grand banquet with music, executed all the committee, and divided up the loan.”

—

Abdul paused, thinking of the great days before democracy. Then he went on. “I don’t see how you do it,” he said. “Have you sent a bow-string to the Mayor to tell him to choke himself?” “No,” I said, “not yet.”

“How many bank managers have you executed?”

“None,” I said, “so far.”

“What leading pashas (business men, you call them, do you not?) have you buried up to the neck?”

“None,” I said. “They’re in it up to the neck, but we didn’t bury them.”

Abdul sighed and was silent. So I thought I’d tell him something.

“Abdul,” I said, “the secret of the thing is mutual confidence, trust in one another, the thing you never had in Turkey in your time – each man willing to lend because he knows he has behind the loan the good faith of all.”

“I see it,” said Abdul with enthusiasm. “I learn quickly. Lend me a dollar till Tuesday.”

TOC     INDEX

Have You Got
Even One Cent?

Professor Scott Byron gave a lecture yesterday afternoon up here in Jeff’s barber shop in Mariposa. The professor had come up on the noon train from the City, where he is a professor, and always when he comes up, he goes over to the barber shop and gives a lecture.

You see, it’s a real treat for a professor to be able to give a lecture under proper circumstances such as he can get in a barber shop. With the students it’s different. It hasn’t the same life to it. They just sit there and write down their notes and don’t half appreciate a good thing when they hear it. The students say that Professor Byron’s talks always have too many statistics. But in the barber shop, they never can get enough. The students say that Professor Byron thinks he knows it all. In the barber shop they know he does.

The Professor comes up to Mariposa pretty often. He’s getting now just that first touch of old age, like September frost in a garden, that mellows a man and makes him cling to the things he’s grown used to. The Professor, you see, always comes up to Mariposa for his vacations and he generally manages to have a fortnight at Christmas; he can usually snatch a week for the trout fishing in May and likes the break of a fortnight in early June for the herring fishing. Beyond that, he has to content himself with odd week-ends. He’s a busy man. He says so himself. In fact, he’s getting touchy about it.

When the Professor is going to lecture in Jeff’s place he comes in to get his hair trimmed. Trimmed, you understand, not cut. Jeff understands it exactly; he just trims it round so that there’s as much as ever and the Professor can come back next day and have it trimmed again.

I wouldn’t mention all this except that it happened yesterday’s lecture came in just right for Victory Loan week. I don’t know whether the professor meant it that way but at any rate his talk was all about interest on money and how it increases if you let it alone. As soon as he said “interest” all the fellers in the shop were sure that he was hitting at the Loan.

What he told us was certainly curious. Some of the “boys” doubted it but Jeff himself believed it fully. You learn to believe when you run a barber shop.

He told us a story and he said you could prove it by any history book – that when the Dutch came to settle in America in 1621 they took the lower half of Manhattan Island – where New York City is located now – and they had too much conscience to take it from the Indians for nothing, so they gave them fifty dollars for it.

Imagine getting the best part of the City of New York for fifty dollars.

But Professor Byron claimed that the Indians got the best of the bargain. If the Dutch, he said, had put the fifty dollars out at interest and let it stay there, it would have brought in, by this time, more than the city is worth. Of course, the professor admitted that interest rates were higher then than now; people got ten per cent easy enough for business loans (kings paid up to twenty or more), and even a hundred years later eight per cent was easy enough.

Here’s the way the professor worked it: Money at ten per cent doubles in 7 1/4 years. He gave the Dutchmen ten per cent till 1735. Then eight per cent till 1835; money at eight per cent doubles in 9 years; he gave them six per cent till 1895 (he said the United States government itself paid that much in the Civil War time); money at six per cent doubles itself in 12 years; he gave them five per cent till 1923; at that, money doubles in 14 years: and four per cent till 1943, with money doubling in 17 1/2 years.

This meant that every dollar the Dutchmen invested was doubled 35 times. It starts off as $1, $2, $4, $8 . . . and looks pretty harmless. But watch it when it gets going. When you get the total of 35 doublings multiply it by fifty because the investment is fifty dollars. It works out at something more than one and a half trillion dollars – $1,500,000,000,000. That sum is 240 times the assessed value of all the land and all the property in Manhattan. It would buy all the United States.

The professor offered to calculate it all out and he asked Jeff if he had a table of logarithms. Jeff said he’d always wanted one in the shop (they look nice) and that his wife had tried to grow them in pots, but they came to nothing.

He was just going to throw the professor on his back and trim his moustache when he saw that Professor Byron was still talking, so he tilted him up and clipped his neck and let him go on.

This time it was William the Conqueror. “You’ve all heard of William the Conqueror,” he said. All of the fellers said yes, and old Archie Green said he remembered him personally very well and that he always used to walk in six miles from the old Conyers place (it’s on the fourth) every Sunday to the Presbyterian Church in Mariposa. Very erect, Archie said.

The professor got his neck up higher and said he meant the William the Conqueror who conquered England. And some one said, “What would Mr. Churchill say to that?” – and the lecture nearly went off the track, as lectures are apt to, in a barber shop. That’s where students are better.

But the professor managed to get the audience back and what he told them was that if William the Conqueror when he marched into London had invested there one cent – just one single cent, and left it there, it would be worth now – well, I forget what – as much as that.

Jeff said it was certainly a caution, and some one else said that he supposed that if a feller took a good slice of this Victory Loan and just left it to increase, he might presently buy up the whole of Mariposa.

But the professor didn’t stay for the discussion. He knew of another place where he could talk and he went out.

When he was gone someone said, “I’ll bet the prof. buys in on the Loan, eh?”

There was a bank teller sitting there, a kind of smart feller and he said, “He has already. He put a cent in today.”

TOC     INDEX

The Righteous Indignation
of Angus McCordell

There is, of course, a radio in Jeff’s barber shop in Mariposa. But Jeff never feels very sure about turning it on. People are peculiar. It’s all right if it’s baseball or anything like that, but Jeff says customers are touchy. Why he’s known some people object even to the Farm and Produce Prices – get right up out of the chair – think of that!

Of course the war is all right, that is, when it’s really war news, but Jeff says customers are apt to get a little restless if it’s just war talk. He says a lot of it sounds too much like religion. He admits that no doubt it’s not meant that way, but customers resent it all the same.

So Jeff finds that the best plan is just to keep the radio going quietly so that in a way you hear it and yet it doesn’t interrupt anybody. Jeff himself is fully satisfied with the result because no doubt being right there beside the chair he can keep one ear each way. You have to, anyway, in running a barber shop.

But for people sitting round the shop it’s different. It sounds like alternate talk, first this, then that, especially as the customers pay no attention to what is very often earnest pleading and butt right in on it. Perhaps the radio speakers have got into a set, stereotyped way that fails to carry conviction. That may be it. If so, the customers are not so wrong.

The talks run something like this: “Surely we realize that in this great world struggle for freedom we ought to feel that no effort is too great.”

. . . “With a good push Toronto could move up into second place. That must be a dandy pitcher, that new feller they have . . .”

“That’s so.”

. . . “Is it not then our duty towards all that we cherish . . .”

“How are the roads out past Medora?” . . . “I didn’t come that way. I went round by the third, but they are not apt to be any too good at this time of year. Of course, with plenty of gravel . . .”

. . . “The Hun can be crushed, will be crushed. We must be strong and spare not till the whole foul brood of Naziism has been extirpated and then . . .”

. . . “Potatoes will be up to three dollars for dead sure . . .”

That’s the way it generally went and we got used to it. But last Monday afternoon it was different. There were quite a few people in the barber shop and naturally they were talking about the Loan and one fellow – I won’t name him, but it was Pete McGaw – said he didn’t see much profit in taking three per cent when a fellow could easy get six on a town mortgage. And he said he wasn’t taking any of the Loan. And quite a few fellers – it wouldn’t be fair to give their names; Joe Ekers was one – spoke up and said they’d no idea of taking any.

You see it just happened that way. Fellers are like that. Now another day it might be just the other way.

Well, just then there was a man who began to talk over the radio who could talk. Yes, sir. And he was talking of righteous indignation and when he spoke of it he sent a tingle through your blood and heroism to your heart. I don’t know who he was. If you heard him you’ll remember it was a voice with a strong Scottish accent and there was truth and power in every word.

“Don’t be afraid to be angry, to be crazy angry, to be filled with righteous indignation. Nothing else has ever won a war. Nothing ever will, nothing but the flaming righteousness of the spirit that counts death as nothing.”

The shop grew still and even Jeff stopped the clippers from clipping.

The voice went on:

“All history shows it, the history of your country here and of mine at home. What but the power of the spirit ever animated the men of Scotland to stand firm to death at Culloden and wring victory from Waterloo. I tell you, strike these people down! Kill and spare not! Death is their portion!”

Sitting against the wall of the barber shop was a big crooked Highland man, too tall, as they all are, to sit properly anywhere, and as he listened to the radio I could see his fingers buckle and clench and the fire flash in his blue eyes. This was Angus McCordell, the “crazy Highlander.” We all knew him. Below the tam-o’-shanter that he wore there was a deep mark furrowed along the side of his head. That was from the battle of the Somme; and the two bent fingers of his left hand were from after he went back again; and the half limp in his leg from the third time. He had blue eyes and a clear face and a stubble beard, half red, half grey. He was twenty years old at the Somme. So that will give you his age.

That was Angus McCordell and he lived by himself out on the fifth concession and some people said he was crazy and some said half crazy.

He was a wild man anyway. When he got angry nothing stopped him. He reached for his double-barrelled gun and started after somebody. There were car thieves around Mariposa one summer, terrorizing the farms outside the town. Angus went after a gang of five. One he shot full of buckshot, and one dead. The rest got away in their car. There’ve been no car thieves round since.

Show Angus any wrong or cruelty and he’d flame up at once, and go for his gun and get after it. That was all right and no doubt made for righteousness. But at other times Angus would take fire at some purely imaginary idea in his crazy Highland head and come raging into town with his gun, looking for trouble. Then the Chief of Police, who was Scottish himself, would chase after Angus and drive him out home in his car. So that was why people said that Angus McCordell was crazy.

The radio appeal ended with a call to give . . . give . . . give – that those who held back were unworthy to be citizens . . .

As it ended, Angus jumped up from his seat, shaking his clenched hand.

“Yon’s right,” he said. “The man who won’t give to this Loan is unfit to walk the street. He’s a damned German. He should be shot in his tracks.”

And he stormed out of the shop.

“Who’s that?” said an alarmed city customer, crawling out from under a Russian shampoo.

They all told him in a babble. “He’s gone for his gun,” they said. “He’ll be back in an hour, raging up and down Main Street, looking for a man who hasn’t subscribed to the Loan.”

Peter McGaw was out first. They said he was over in the bank in two minutes, signing up for five hundred dollars. Joe Ekers was right after him. He was saying to the tellers that it would be a good thing if every feller who subscribed to the Loan could wear a white band, or something, on his arm so that people would know him on the street.

As the news about Angus went round town you could see men streaking from all directions to the banks. There were so many they had to wait in line.

Angus came sure enough – with his double-barrelled shotgun – raging up and down the Main Street. The Chief of Police refused to stop him. “He’s done nothing,” he said. “He’s made no threat against any assignable person. He’s said he’ll kill any Hitlerite in Mariposa. He’s entitled to. He says he’ll put a charge of buckshot in any Nazi who refuses to subscribe to the Victory Loan. He’s within his rights.”

The chief, as I said, was from the Highlands himself.

—

There was great relief that evening when Angus went off home. But it ended abruptly the next morning when he came back. In fact, things were worse. On the first day, to most people, it was no matter of personal alarm; indeed it was more or less a good joke on the slackers. But this next morning Angus was parading up and down the street in a sort of military fashion. He’d got a new idea. He was after the whole town now. He said that Mariposa had to raise its Quota – that sum that it was pledged to raise. Raise that, he said, or he’d shoot up the whole street.

But the trouble is, the Quota was put too high; everybody knew that. You know Mariposa. It was just vain glory and civic pride. They never expected to raise it.

Angus is on the street right now. The Chief of Police won’t interfere. He says let them raise the Quota.

Most of them think they will. In fact, they’re all at one another to do it. Angus will see that they do.

Nothing like righteous indignation, is there?

TOC     INDEX

The Chairman’s
Walking Stick

It was pretty well understood by the middle of the Victory Loan Campaign in Mariposa that on the final evening they would present the Chairman of the Committee with a stick. This was partly on the Chairman’s own account. Jim Heavyside – that’s the older one; don’t confuse him with young Jim – is one of the biggest business men in Mariposa, head of the largest of the companies, and just retired from active work a month ago after a long life of service to the town. And now he’s thrown himself into this campaign with all his old time energy. In any case he’s a good feller; I mean he’s all right.

It has always been the thing in Mariposa to give a man a walking stick in recognition of any public service. They gave a stick to the designer of the historic monument in the Park, and a stick for the Municipal Abattoir, and a stick for the new wing of the Asylum that increased its capacity three to one and definitely put Mariposa on the map as a home for the feeble-minded.

Generally when they’re going to give a stick the idea gets started and goes round town, confidentially, of course, so that the man himself won’t know it. In this case, as a matter of fact, the idea originated in Jeff’s barber shop and it was Jeff himself who first started it. He stopped his scissors one afternoon and rested his elbow on the customer’s neck and said, “What about a stick for Jim Heavyside?”

The idea caught right on. And Jeff – you know how a modest man gets encouraged and goes on – said that to his mind, one of these Malacca canes with a band on it would be just right. It appears that they sell canes like that clear up to a hundred dollars, and past it, though you wouldn’t think it.

Well, that was all settled and the next thing was to raise the money. Bill Landy – he’s the mining broker I spoke of – generally does that because he understands finance. He just gets from each feller what he feels like giving, and keeps it confidential. He gives out nothing except the total. A lot of mining business is done that way. They just tell you what you get.

So that was all settled, and Bill got busy and a couple of days later he was telling a group of us in the shop that he had all the money for the cane in sight, when who should walk in but Jim Heavyside himself. He was leaning on a Malacca cane. You could have knocked any of us down with a club.

One of the fellers, in a chair, who could only half see, called out, “What’s the matter, Jim, gone lame?”

“No,” said Jim Heavyside with a laugh, “the boys at the factory gave me a farewell supper last night and this stick as a presentation. That’s the third stick,” he added, “that I’ve got in less than a month. Take a look at it; isn’t it a dandy?”

They passed it round but of course the heart was out of the idea now. They had to think of something else.

Well, the next day, Jeff said to some of the customers in the shop, “Professor Byron was up here from the City yesterday and he says why not give Mr. Heavyside one of these sets of books – what is it – an encyclopaedia?”

“An encyclopaedia,” said one of the fellers. “Why, Jim Heavyside could never read that. He’s no scholar.”

“You don’t have to read an encyclopaedia,” says another. “It is for the front room. And when you buy them now they sell you a glass case right with them so that you don’t have to open it even for dusting. Bert Trawley has one – has had it for ten years – and it’s in dandy shape – good as new – they never open it.”

“Grandfather had one,” said another customer, “given to him like this when he retired, but he read his; yes, sir, sat down to read it clear through and get the good out of it. But he was too old when he started. He died in the letter A. But Jim Heavyside is only sixty-five. He can tackle it.”

So it was settled that the presentation gift would be an encyclopaedia. But just to avoid all error this time they got Bill Landy to go up to the Heavysides’ house to spy round and see if they had one.

Lucky they did. They had one sure enough, and a real beauty, an antique, in fine old leather, at least seventy years old. Goodness knows what it would fetch today. So that was a lucky escape from another bad break.

Then came a suggestion that carried every one with it. It’s a wonder that so often the right thing never occurs to any one at first. This idea like so many others, came from Peter Cogland, the new lawyer in Mariposa. He’s always full of ideas and popular. Of course, he’s new to Mariposa – only been here six years – but the feeling is that after he’s been in the town a while and gets settled, he’ll play quite a part.

Anyway, it was Peter who said, “Why not give Jim Heavyside a case of Scotch Whiskey?” Well, the idea just caught like wild fire.

Someone said, “But Jim doesn’t drink,” and Peter said, “That doesn’t matter. You see, he has to entertain a lot, and now all the more because of this campaign and being retired. He’ll have fellers in his house all the time. This whiskey will come in just right. But listen – a case is only two dozen isn’t it – we might make it two cases – one for Jim and one for Mrs. Heavyside.” “That’s right,” said one of the boys, “the only question would be whether Scotch whiskey is as acceptable as gin – a case of real old dry gin—”

“Or if you come to that,” interrupted George Summers, “what about a case of rye?”

But he was ruled out. Everybody knew that George only drank rye.

The only question was whether such a presentation was legal. Would the law of the province allow it or not! So Jeff said, “I tell you boys, why don’t you telegraph down to the city and ask if it’s legal to give the Chairman of a Loan Committee a case of whiskey? I can’t express it right,” said Jeff, “but no doubt Mr. Cogland could.”

So Peter Cogland got a pencil and a pad and they started framing a telegram to the Attorney General’s Office. It was certainly hard to phrase.

“A group of citizens of Mariposa desire to know . . .”

That didn’t sound right.

“On behalf of the undersigned group . . .”

And that sounded wrong.

“Would you consider a case of Scotch whiskey . . .”

No, that sounded backwards.

Then someone suggested, why shouldn’t they write it just the way Jeff said it:

“Is it legal to give the Chairman of our Loan Committee a case of whiskey?”

So that was what they sent.

Telegrams are like that.

The answer came right back while most of them were still sitting round discussing it.

“Presentation entirely legal. Writing you to that effect.”

—

So that was great. They started right away picking brands off a Liquor List, each one what he liked best.

Naturally there were quite a number of fellers in the shop next day when the noon mail came in. The letter was addressed to Jeff and it read:

“Your proposed presentation of one or more cases to the Chairman of your Victory Loan Committee is entirely within the law. The only limitation upon it is that the cases must not be bought for this purpose but must be filled with bottles taken from the private stock of individual subscribers.”

Well, say! . . . Talk about a Victory Campaign – talk about sacrifice and winning the war – but when it comes to . . . well, I mean when you ask a man to – well, who would want to . . . oh, no, reason is reason.

So that was the end of that. I will admit that for the moment all the fellers looked pretty downhearted, almost felt mean. They knew that they were right in not asking one another to give up private whiskey but somehow they didn’t feel so good.

Luckily there came to Peter Cogland on the spur of the moment one of those bright ideas that will some day send him to Ottawa – or half way to it. Anyway – as far, say, as Kingston.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “We’ll give Jim Heavyside a hundred-dollar Victory Bond.”

Wasn’t it simple? And timely? And obvious? And yet no one had thought of it. It’s always like that. Give the Chairman one of his own Bonds! Why, of course!

So the meeting – it was a sort of meeting – broke up with enthusiasm and went to dinner.

I lingered behind a moment.

“That’s fine, isn’t it?” I said. “That was the real solution.”

Jeff shook his head.

“I don’t know that I hold with it,” he said. “You give a man one of his own Bonds and it seems like giving milk to a milkman – or it’s like giving me a free shave and a shampoo.” And he added gloomily, “Jim will be disappointed about the stick.”

“About the stick?” I said.

“Yes, he is expecting it. He’d heard something about it. He’s got the notion of sticks. You see, Jim Heavyside is not vain but he’s pretty proud of having three sticks given to him, and he was hoping to make it four. That’s why he came down here with the Malacca cane . . . In fact, it was my idea. I said to him, ‘Mr. Heavyside, if you’ll come down to the shop and bring one of your sticks that’ll put the boys on their mettle to give another.’”

Luckily it hasn’t been too late. Everything is arranged and the Chairman will get his stick. We have it all ready, and a real dandy. Some of the fellers think it must be worth a hundred and fifty dollars, some more. No one knows how much Bill Landy collected or what he paid for it. “Better taste,” Bill said, “to keep it confidential.”

TOC     INDEX

Going! Going! Gone!

Next to me in Jeff’s barber shop in Mariposa there sat this morning a country feller, at a guess, from thirty-five to sixty-five years old.

“Were you out at the sale at Crittenden’s yesterday?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “where’s Crittenden’s?”

“Crittenden’s!” he answered in amazement. “Why, right next the Ames place.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“The Ames place? Just beyond Lem Crowder’s.”

I let it go at that.

“No,” I said, “I wasn’t there.”

“Well, sir,” said the country feller, “you’d oughter been. It was a caution. I seen a sulky go for thirty dollars.”

I didn’t know whether that meant a lot or a little. But the audience in the barber shop did. “Gosh!” they said.

“Yes, sir, a sulky ten years old and with a broken trip, for ten dollars more than it cost ten years ago.”

“There was an old lumber wagon there,” said a man from across the room, “fetched a hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Gosh!” said the room.

“I suppose,” said the country feller to me, “you wouldn’t be much interested in farm sales?”

No, not altogether. Yet, as he said it, I was carried back sixty-five years in recollection and was standing in the April sunshine in the slush and snow of a barnyard – a farm auction sale – while the purchasers – who didn’t purchase (they had no money) – walked up and down among the lean cattle and the broken machinery for sale. The farmer of the farm was treating them to whiskey and laughing it off as best he could. He was “sold up” and was going to move, they said, to “this Manitobah.”

Inside the farmhouse the woman – the lady of the farm – was cutting sandwiches for the purchasers who couldn’t buy but could still eat. The children were helping her. I was one. I could hear the voice of the auctioneer – hear it still across sixty-five years of memory – calling:

“Now, gentlemen, this fine double-seated cutter, as good as new – what do I hear? – make me a bid, gentlemen! Come, give me a start! Four dollars? Thank you, four dollars! Going at four dollars. Going! Going! Gone, at four dollars!”

Those were the hard times of the seventies, with no war to brighten the economic outlook, when the government had to borrow a million dollars, but couldn’t find it in Canada.

But one need not look back across sixty-five years of retrospect for the remembrance of auction farm sales, the tragedy of the Canadian countryside. Five years is enough. Just five years! To those stricken, hungry days when our ten million people had no one to kill and no one to feed but themselves. Right here in Mariposa, every month of May brought with the Spring birds the little leaflets, the “dodgers” that fluttered, pinned up to the telephone and light poles and pasted up in the window of the Mariposa Newspacket:

Auction Farm Sale

Lot this: Concession that

To be sold regardless of reserve price

And then follows the list. Stand here a moment and look upon it, and reflect upon the tragedy of our economic life that knows no stimulus but death.

Item 1.—Two-year-old grey mare—

Do you get that? That’s Fancy, the family driving horse. They’ve had her for years and years on the farm. They must have had her for eight years. There’s a boy now in Tunis remembers driving her. They loved her. That’s why they put her down at two years. It’s not a lie. She was still two years to them.

These two “excellent milch cows,” part Jersey (never mind the other part) and these “mixed poultry” – all that in the life of a family – Going! Going! Gone!

Or look at the last item:

Household furniture, books—

Do you realize that those are the books that grandfather’s father brought out from the old country, a hundred years ago? Look – Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake; half of part of Macaulay’s England – nothing you read now of course . . .

And with that I came back to myself still in Jeff’s barber shop and they were talking of the sale at old Tom Crittenden’s place. They were saying that he “cleaned up” (their very phrase, taken from a fanning mill) fifteen hundred dollars. What else could he do but sell up, with both the boys, it appeared, overseas, and Sally. Tom himself is spry enough and not a day over seventy-five, but he and the old lady can’t run the place alone.

And just as they were saying that in burst old Tom himself.

When I say “burst” – that is, he appeared outside the glass door, leant his stick outside the door frame, pulled the door open a little, then got his shoulder to it, took up his stick again and burst in.

So there he was, hearty and hale, and evidently so tickled with himself that he could hardly hold it in. He didn’t look the least bit like the people who used to be sold up in the seventies.

There was a chorus of “How are you, Mr. Crittenden?” . . . “How are you, Tom?”

The old man nodded around. “Just come over, Jeff,” he said, “to get cleaned up.” Then, unable to hold it any longer, he added, “I’ve just put fifteen hundred dollars across the street in this Victory Loan; yes, sir, fifteen hundred dollars.”

That explained, you see, the need of a shave. Farmers, of course, are people who shave regularly; never miss a Saturday except in harvest. But when a farmer “hits town” one of the things to do is to get a shave – a real one – with a Roman massage, and a shampoo under machine brushes – facial massage, lilac powder and flapping towels – the whole thing.

“You’re next,” said Jeff, giving him “priority” over all candidates; “sit right down.” And with that, Crittenden was draped and wrapped and pinned and whirling brushes played round his bent head. When anyone spoke to Tom, the barber stopped, Tom answered, and then Jeff went at him with the brushes again.

“You’ve sold your place, Mr. Crittenden?” said a customer.

“No, indeed, I didn’t sell the old place; just sold off the implements and the stock.”

“Couldn’t work it, eh?”

“Not now, with just the missus and me, and the boys gone, and Sally.”

“Where are the boys now, Mr. Crittenden?”

“Both overseas. Jim’s in Iceland with General Montgomery and Dick’s right there in London with General MacArthur. Oh, I follow it,” added old Tom.

“Too bad, to lose all your implements,” said a sympathizer.

“Oh, I ain’t lost ’em. They don’t take ’em away. They’re right there to work the place with.”

“But you lose the use of them?”

“No, sirree, I don’t lose the use of them. I can use them as much as I like any time.”

“So you’ve just lost the livestock?” put in another customer.

“No, not entirely. The folks don’t want to take them away and so the missus and I still have them on condition we milk the cows and use the milk and eggs.”

There was a man in the shop waiting for a shave, a traveller (you know what that is) up from the City.

“Say, mister,” he said, “I don’t quite understand this. You’ve sold out and you’ve got fifteen hundred dollars and yet you still have your place and everything else you ever had. How do you explain that?”

“I don’t try to,” chuckled the old man. “I leave that for Mr. Ilsley – all I know is that I got fifteen hundred in this Victory Loan – that’s five hundred each for the boys and five hundred for Sally.”

As the dialogue had progressed Jeff had gradually transformed old Mr. Crittenden – shampoo’d, massaged, shaved, creamed, powdered and, at the end, splashed with lilac till he smelt like the 24th of May itself – he was disengaged out of the chair, fit for the bees to settle on him.

“I don’t have to explain it,” repeated old Tom. “I leave that to these here economists.”

I felt that was for me.

“You’re right,” I said, “as to the mystery of the economics of it – this mystery of the poverty of peace and the prosperity of war. It’s an economic paradox . . .”

I saw Jeff look at me apprehensively at the word “economics.” He knew by instinct that economics won’t go in a barber shop. What’s more, there’d been some talk there one day about cutting out unnecessary industries and some one had claimed that shaving was non-essential. Jeff himself claimed it a war service – look at all the great generals – you’ve seen these pictures of MacNaughton?

So, as I say, he looked apprehensive when I began to speak.

“What Mr. Ilsley intends to do,” I continued, “is to make the most of every productive industry – like this farm of Mr. Crittenden’s – and to keep the consumer away from everything not absolutely essential.”

Jeff looked across again.

“You’re next,” he said.

TOC     INDEX

A New Heaven
and a New Earth

Well, the thing is done. The big Loan’s been raised. Mariposa passed its quota of a million dollars at 9:30 a.m. this very morning. All the bells rang and the factory whistles blew, and all the people have been out on the street laughing and talking and congratulating one another. I haven’t seen anybody work all day, except Jeff, the Mariposa barber and his four assistants. It’s been a real day for shaving. There’s war service for you. You see, there were quite a lot of fellers who took a pledge that they wouldn’t shave till the million dollars was raised. Jeff’s clearing them up first. Then there are all the fellers going to the big lunch at noon, and the big later evening dinner at six o’clock. Talk of essential industries, eh.

But, do you know, perhaps it’s just as well that the Victory Loan Campaign is closing. It was beginning to have a queer effect on the town, disrupting its social life. You know, in a place like Mariposa you can’t get along without certain fixed animosities, fixed oppositions – people who differ from other people, and even people who don’t speak to other people because they differ from them.

Well, between ourselves, all that was beginning to break down. Quite frankly, people are not accustomed to such good will all round, and this Loan Campaign has been threatening to undermine our fixed way of living. I admit it’s the price we pay for Victory in War. But all the same it’s different. When I see a man like old Major Henge shaking hands, right on the street, with a man like old Edward Flint, and asking him what’s the news of his son at the front – and telling about his own boy, a prisoner of war in Germany – and forgetting that he is still holding old Flint’s hand while he’s talking – well, I ask myself what things are coming to.

I wouldn’t believe it except that I saw it. I was there. I was walking down Main Street with Major Henge and I saw old Flint coming and wondered how we could dodge him. Look at it this way: Major Henge is a life-long conservative, a member of the Church of England – Edward Flint is a Liberal or worse, and never goes inside a church. It seems queer, doesn’t it, that they would stand and talk right where everybody could see them?

But even that wasn’t the half of it. You’d see Continuing Presbyterians, the strict ones who never used to drink anything but whiskey, sitting at a soda-water fountain beside a Baptist; or Roman Catholics attending meetings in the Protestant High School. You felt somehow as if society was breaking away from its moorings, as if we never would get back again to where we used to be. And if you said that to any of the people they said, “Why should we?”

They told me – I wasn’t there – that the Church of England clergyman in his sermon last Sunday made a reference to “our Russian brothers.” That’s going pretty far, isn’t it?

Along with that there has been a lot of pretty wild talk as to what they want to do in Mariposa after the war. It seems that the Loan – the realization that they could raise a million dollars in a little town like ours – has gone to their heads. They say that if we could spend it for war, why not raise another Loan for peace? Why not spend money on better houses, better schools, do something for the children on a big scale – knock down the old Central School, not fit to teach a decent child in. If you said it was only the poorer children who went there, they answered, why shouldn’t the poor children have as good a chance as the rich ones?

As old Oliver Croke, the grouchy lawyer (the town grouch) says, we might just about as well be in Russia.

And with that there went all sorts of what they called town planning. For instance, everybody has suddenly decided that Main Street is too cramped and narrow; they want to knock down one side of it and throw it into the lake. A meeting of all the business men on the north side voted for demolishing their side of the street – their side, mind you – isn’t that magnanimous? the south side business men will probably vote to sacrifice their side – just taking what they get from the Government to rebuild. It’s the new spirit, or rather the old, that St. Paul speaks of, each man seeking the other’s wealth.

Everybody is so full of hope, too, about it all – hope and social betterment. They all agree that we must make a great effort to uplift the poor, only just now we can’t find any poor.

The thing came to a head this afternoon at a meeting that we tried to have after the Loan Quota was declared. It was meant to be the annual meeting of the Conservative Party. The idea was to seize the moment of enthusiasm over the Loan and use it to enthuse the Conservative Party. And Angus Gorse says – he’s an old friend of mine who is the local organizer of the party – you’ve got to catch the Conservatives while they are awake.

Well, the meeting was the flattest failure from the beginning. Major Henge who spoke at the start, began saying, “We must admit that the Liberal Party has done great service to this Dominion—” and what did the audience do but start to clap and stamp their feet. Well, you can’t run a Conservative Party that way. As Angus said to me, the moment you get that sort of dry rot in the Party it’s all over. There’s no room for that good will stuff if you’re out to win.

Things reached a climax when a speaker referred to Mr. Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister, as a “Great Canadian Patriot.” That was pretty strong. Angus Gorse felt it necessary to appeal to the Chair; he said that he was sorry to criticize but he must ask whether such an expression was in order. The Chairman ruled that it was quite in order “provided the speaker meant it by way of a joke. As no doubt he did.” The speaker said he meant it in real earnest. The Chairman said he must ask him to withdraw the expression; he would put it to them this way, he said: What would Mr. Mackenzie King himself think if he heard that his name had been used in this way in a Conservative meeting? After Mr. King’s long years of devoted service – or rather, let us say, his long years of trying to delude the people of this country – it would be painful to him, as a man, even a low one, to hear that a Conservative Meeting had called him a Patriot. So the speaker said that he would withdraw the words but he gave fair warning that he was going to say them, to shout them, outside after the meeting. The Chairman said that that was all right and he was heartily in accord with him. Then someone called out, “Three cheers for—” and others called, “Order, Order,” and there was quite a little confusion.

Then came the final surprise, the climax.

Our proposed candidate, Colonel Trelawney, stood up to speak. And when he spoke they were all still.

He spoke very quietly, never raised his voice. But they all listened. You see, he lost his son, his only child, in the first year of the War, and so it was thought that the people might show their appreciation of his son’s sacrifice, by sending Colonel Trelawney to Parliament. The strange thing was that no one would have thought of that before the war, because Colonel Trelawney was always so cold and distant and hardly seemed to know people on the street. Now, since he lost his son, he seems so quiet. They feel as if they knew him but they still can’t speak to him.

Colonel Trelawney said that he would ask them to withdraw his name. He felt that the sitting (Liberal) member, elected for two Parliaments already, should be kept in. What we should do he said, was to elect the best man, whether he was a Conservative or a Liberal. There was no room now, he said, for such divisions.

After that there was nothing more to be said. The meeting adjourned.

I walked across from the meeting to Jeff’s barber shop with Angus Gorse. Angus was greatly disturbed. He said that the weak spot in that argument was that if you tried to pick the best man, as likely as not you’d get a Liberal. Look, he said, at some of the skunks we’ve succeeded in electing in Mariposa in past years. Well, could you do that without party organization and party feeling? No, a skunk would be nowhere, never get in anywhere. Well, there you were.

Inside Jeff’s place there was quite a crowd and excitement because, as I said, they were crowding in to get shaved for the big dinner – dinner at six o’clock, mind you. After that there was to be a general meeting in the Town Hall, and a big speaker up from the City. “That man,” said Jeff, “when he gets well started is good for two hours, any time. You don’t want to miss that.”

I did. But I didn’t say so.

The streets were full of people, all afternoon and till sundown, everybody talking and friendly, and all so easy with one another. It seems so different from what it used to be. But for the price paid for it, it would seem a wonderful world.

I was in Jeff’s shop again just after sundown before starting to walk home. Through the window you could see, sideways, a little down the street, a knot of people gathering, and hear the beating of a drum, and voices singing, and then a speaker talking to the crowd.

As the man spoke, an echo, or an eddy, somehow caught up his voice and it came for a moment clear and distinct through the partly open window – “a new heaven and a new earth.”

“What’s that, Jeff?” asked a customer in the chair, “a Victory meeting?” “No,” said Jeff, “it’s nothing. It’s just a religious revival.”

“Oh,” said the customer, “nothing real.”

—

A new heaven and a new earth – the words seemed to echo still as I walked away from the town and beside the lake towards my home. The evening was closing in around me – as it is every evening at my age – and from the lighted town behind me, and in the evening breeze gathering off the lake, the sound still came – “a new heaven and a new earth.”

TOC     INDEX

Serendipity

Found Treasures
DISCOVERED IN VARIOUS ARCHIVES

(1915~1946)

~

Two Little Boys: An Allegory
Frenzied Fiction for the Dog Days
Inside the Tank
May Time in Mariposa
The Art of Taking a Vacation
I’ll Stay in Canada
My Fishing Pond
Why I Am Leaving My Farm
The Hidden Secret of the City
Are Witty Women Attractive to Men?
Living with Murder
What Can Izaak Walton Teach Us?
A Lecture on Walking
Good-bye, Motor Car!
This Business of Prophecy

Two Little Boys

An Allegory

Once upon a time there were two boys.

One was the child of rich parents: the other an offspring of the slums. The one was richly dressed and attended by servants; the other clothed in rags.

The rich little boy had tutors to instruct him in learning; he attended gymnasium classes to make him strong and read great and noble hooks to teach him to be brave. On Sundays he was sent to Sunday school where he was taught the duty of self-sacrifice and devotion to his fellow men. The poor little boy had none of these things.

Now it so happened that both these little boys one afternoon were playing in the park beside the river. And while they were there a child fell from one of the piers into the deep water.

Now which of the boys was it that leaped fearlessly into the water, at the peril of his life, to rescue the struggling child?

The poor boy, you say at once. Not at all, you are quite wrong. It was the rich little boy. Didn’t I say that his mind had been specially trained and that he had been taught to be courageous? In he jumped at once.

The boy from the slums simply stood on the bank and said: “Gee, see the young dood jump into the drink!”

By the way, the rich little boy was drowned. They’d forgotten to teach him to swim. Too bad.

—Collier’s magazine, 27 Nov 1915

TOC     INDEX

Frenzied Fiction
for the Dog Days

(Done by the Dipperful)

These are the Dog Days. It is too hot to read. It is too hot even to write. It is almost tot hot for the magazine staff to draw their pay. But not quite.

Yet at the same time there is a persistent, if artificial, demand for reading matter. The reading public is now betaking itself to the country, to the lakes and to the woods. It is out camping in Algonquin Park, it is summering in the Thousand Islands or simmering at Scarboro, wearing old clothes at Gohome Bay or new ones at the Royal Muskoka. And wherever it goes it insists on taking its magazines with it. It cannot do without them. How else could it light a fire at a picnic, paper the bedroom of a bungalow or stop the leaks in a canoe?

This demand then has got to be met. There is great need for summer fiction and yet nobody wants to be bothered with actually reading the magazines in this awful heat. I have, therefore, suggested to the Editor of MacLean’s that he should let me find a way out of this dilemma. With his consent I present herewith a Magazine in Miniature suitable for the Dog Days. It contains all the usual parts and items of the best magazines, or at least as much of them as any reasonable person would want to read in AWFUL AUGUST.

I don’t mind admitting that most, if not all, of the stuff is stolen. In fact, I may as well indicate straight out in each case where it comes from.

Let us begin then with the first item, the Great Summer Serial. The scene of this has to be laid in Italy. So we will call it The Vendetta of the Vendiglia. This title gives the summer reader the chance to call out from his hammock, to his sister, “Say, Agnes, what the ——— does vendetta mean?”

—

However, here it is, or the few lines of it that are enough for the hot weather. The full original text can be found, any month, in the Petropolitan, or in Somebody’s, or Anybody’s or any other of the popular magazines.

THE VENDETTA
OF THE VENDIGLIA.

Chapter LLLXXXXVVIII. Ring Two.

Synopsis of Preceding Chapters. Pasqualo Pasqualo, a condottiere, is in reality a noble scion of the house of Vermicelli, but is unaware of his own birth. He has fallen madly in love with Teresa della ———.

[There, that’s all the synopsis of any story that anybody needs. His name is Pasqualo, and hers is Teresa. Now we begin.]

“Zitto!” exclaimed Teresa between her closed teeth. “Zitto! Hush!”

She took Pasqualo by the hand and led him down the dark passagio till their further progress was stopped by a barred door. “Harko!” she said. “Listen!”

The condottiere leaned forward in an attentive attitude, his head against the door, his ear intent, his eye bright, his body alert, his mind active, his whole being tense – and the rest of him on the qui vive.

—

There! He’s on the qui vive; let us leave him there! That’s enough, more than enough. Nobody could want to read more of a Summer Serial than that. Nobody ever does. What they do is to take the serial out to a hammock for a long afternoon’s read and fall asleep over the first page. Or take it in a canoe to be read aloud in some sheltered place under the deep foliage that lines a river’s bank. Such at least is the proposal by an idle man in flannels to a distracting girl. But not a line of it do they read; or at best the little scrap above will amply suffice. It will set them talking about the characters of Pasqualo and Teresa and from that they can drift off into talking of their own characters, hers and his; and the magazine has done its work and is needed no more.

But after all some people do read, more or less, seriously in the summer. On a wet day especially – let us say in a wooden house in Muskoka, or on the side verandah of a hotel, in a corner well out of the wind – there are always women reading. And they prefer best to read something about men and women, their one topic of interest. And they like it best if it has a dash of spite in it against the men. Even they don’t need very much as they are constantly interrupted and only too willing to quit if some one says “Bridge.” Here is our sample of what they need, taken almost verbally from the pages of the Ladies Own Journal, and Woman’s Some Companion and such.

HOW I NEARLY LOST MY HUSBAND.

(Continued, apparently, from somewhere in the middle.)

Well, from that time on the miserable conviction began to dawn upon my mind that John was drinking. I don’t mean to say that he was drunk, or that he was cruel to me. It was not that. It showed itself in small things. He would come up to breakfast looking fagged and heavy as if he had not slept well. I say “up” because by this time John, like any other well trained husband such as those, no doubt, of countless of my readers, slept in the cellar. But I would notice often as he brought up the coal to light the fire in my bedroom in the morning that his hand shook and the scuttle rattled. He endeavoured to pass it off by saying that it was the cold in the cellar that made his hand shake; but I knew better. Especially as Fido had always slept in the cellar, at any rate in the milder weather, till I had given him a little rug at the foot of my bed.

But I began to notice in John, as I say, especially in the morning while he was moving about the house getting my breakfast before going out to his work, signs of sullenness that I could only connect with drinking. At times he broke out into bursts of temper. Once when he accidentally burnt his finger at the electric stove in making my toast, he let the toast fall, in a fit of demoniacal rage – I can only call it so – and said: “Gee! I’ve burnt myself!” “John!” I said. “How can you! How dare you! How wicked of you to give way like that!” I think he saw by my sobs how deeply I was bruised and for a day or so things were better.

Then the old troubles began again. Often in the evenings instead of staying quietly in his own den he would wander into the house in a queer, restless way. I should say that I had fitted John up a den, out in the coal shed, so that he could have a place where he could smoke in the evenings. Once we heard him – by we, I mean my mother and I and two lady friends who were with us that evening – apparently moving about in the pantry. I should explain that we were in the upstairs sitting room playing cards.

“John!” I called down. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Emily,” he answered – quietly enough, I admit.

“What are you doing there?” I asked.

“Looking for something to eat,” he answered.

“John,” I said, “you are forgetting what is due to me as your wife. You were fed at six. Go back to your den.”

We heard him groan, but he went.

These little signs kept multiplying. What could be the cause?

Sometimes I felt as if John’s love for me was dwindling. I asked myself, what is the matter? Is it that I am doing too much for him? Do I make myself too cheap? Perhaps I am letting my heart run away with my head!

I thought it all over, wearily enough, and went over to myself all the things that I had done, vainly as it seemed now, to hold John’s love. I had kept him in at nights. I had stopped his playing cards. I had cut his smoking down to four cigarettes a week.

What more could there be? What else could I cut off? And if the only result was to be that John has started drinking——

—

Enough! The reader has fallen asleep, but would admit before doing so that one page of this sort of thing is as good as fifty. Better.

That is quite as much pure fiction as the reader ever attempts to read. For the other stories nothing is needed except the title and one or two opening sentences. The reader looks at them, shudders, and passes on.

Thus, the inevitable French-Canadian story. Let us call it:

L’ANGE GARDIEN
DU PETITE MARIE.

[Quite so, it ought to be “de la.” But it isn’t.]

It begins like this:

On the threshold of the fermerie, Mère Floquet – for every one in Le Petit Anse called her mère Floquet – kneeled idly scrubbing the steps like the bonne ménagère that she was. On the opposite side of the long rue that ran through the village, the horloge of the presbytère had just struck three o’clock.

“Trois heures!” murmured Mère Floquet to herself, as she counted the chiming strokes.

[Well done, Mère Floquet. Lucky it wasn’t eleven.]

—

But, as I say, no one needs more than that on a summer afternoon.

Next!

Let me see. After that we have to supply our readers with something a little more solid. Something with facts sticking out in it like plums in a cake. Facts and what has come to be called “punch.” Every reader likes an article with a “punch” in it. Tell a thing to a modern reader in a quiet gentlemanly fashion and he is bored to death. What he likes is to have it “punched” into him. So we have to insert an article, at least one, dealing with some kind of facts, big ones, noisy ones – some subject such as, shall we say, the grain crop of Canada. Only it musn’t be called that. It has to be labelled

JOHNNY CANUCK’S
BREAD BASKET.

The article should, properly speaking, be written by Miss Ag——— but, no, let us not mention names. We’ll have to write it ourselves. And in the summer time a very little of it will do. It has to run like this:

A million cars a month! Think of it. With thirty billion bushels of grain in them! Set them end to end and they reach from Toronto to Talahassee! Multiply them by a million and they will reach over the same distance a million times! Imagine it? You can’t! Ha! Then imagine, if you dare, the whole of this boundless crop loaded in a single oil steamer, on a single afternoon!

[Ha! That beat you! Then quit reading.]

—

There is practically nothing needed now to complete the miniature magazine, except a few loose columns of “Hearth and Home” stuff, useful hints, that would be of inestimable benefit if one could remember them overnight. We will head up this column

HOME HINTS
FOR THE SUMMER BUNGALOW
and will put in just one sample of what is needed.

How to Light a Fire in Five Minutes.

Take an old newspaper. Select one that is thoroughly dry, such as – but it would be unfair to mention. Crumple the sheets well and sprinkle freely with kerosene. Lay the paper in the fireplace, or stove, with the kerosene spots turned towards the sun, or moon. Get a basketful of dry pine shavings – they may be had at any carpenter’s – and heap them up on the paper. Wet the shavings with kerosene. Then get an armful of old dry pine shingles and, with a knife, split each one into four. Lay the shingles carefully on the shavings in layers, across and across. Sprinkle freely with gunpowder and lay two large sticks of dynamite across the top.

Then touch a match to the kerosened paper at the bottom.

That fire – so you would at least think – will light.

But if you think so it only shows that you have never been out camping, or summering, among the northern lakes of this, our beautiful country, after three days’ rain. That fire will not light. Try it. The match will flare up feebly, the kerosene will flicker into a little flame and go out, the gunpowder will give a feeble sizzle and send out a little wet smoke, then a large drop of rain will fall through the roof of your tent or bungalow and the whole thing will go out with a biff.

Except perhaps the dynamite. That might explode all right. But try it, try it. The only way is to try it.

—

Even in a summer magazine, it is just as well to end up with a few answers to correspondents. These are easily provided for. The Editor merely looks up something in an encyclopedia and then writes a letter to himself to find out about it. We might arrange it thus:

QUERIES AND ANSWERS.

To the Editor. – I am most anxious to find out the relation of the earth’s diameter to its circumference. Can you, or any of your readers, assist me in it?

Yours, etc.,

Careworn Mother.

Answer. – The earth’s circumference is estimated to be three decimal one four one five nine of its diameter, a fixed relation indicated by the Greek letter pi. If you like we will tell you what pi is. Shall we?

Yours, etc.,

Editor.

On the other hand real questions sometimes come in to be answered, which prove embarrassing to the uninitiated. To a trained editor they give no trouble. Here is one that happened to be sent in while this very article was being prepared.

Editor, Queries and Answers,

Dear Sir. – Can you, will you, tell me what is the Sanjak of Novi Bazar?

Yours,

Brink of Suicide.

Answer. – The Sanjak of Novi Bazar is bounded on the north by its northern frontier, cold and cheerless, and covered during the winter with deep snow. The east of the Sanjak occupies a more easterly position. Here the sun rises – at first slowly, but gathering speed as it goes. After having traversed the entire width of the whole Sanjak, the magnificent orb, slowly and regretfully sinks into the west. On the south, where the soil is more fertile and where the land begins to be worth occupying, the Sanjak is, or will be, bounded by the British Empire.

—MacLean’s magazine, Aug 1917

TOC     INDEX

Inside the Tank

An Allegory
for the New Year

Don’t ask me how I recognized it as a tank when I was myself inside it. I really do not know. I admit that I was never inside a tank before, and yet somehow I was certain, the moment I looked about me, that a tank it was.

To begin with, it was dark and gloomy, only lighted with a dim electric bulb here and there. It seemed, moreover, filled with complicated machinery, like the mental picture that we all have of the inside of a submarine.

I confess that I was amazed at the size of it. It seemed five times as large, ten times as large, as any tank that I had ever imagined. And apparently it held more people and of more diverse kinds than I had ever supposed to congregate in such a war machine. But all this may have been merely the effect of the gloom, and the little moving lights, and of the perpetual clatter of machinery.

Nor could I give an intelligent answer if I were asked how I came to get inside the tank. Perhaps it was that the Familiar Spirit who attends upon our dreams had beckoned to me in the watches of the night. Or it may have been that the Oriental rug which adorns the study where I sit working of an evening had converted itself, as it is apt to do, into the flying carpet of Bagdad, and had borne me with it to Flanders. Or it may have been by sheer force of ink and imagination that I had made my way there. But never mind how I got into the tank. There I was.

—

At first sight the entire aspect of the gloomy machine puzzled and perplexed me. To begin with, it was possessed with such a trembling vibration, and consumed with such a puffing of its machinery, and with such an apparent activity of its inhabitants, that it seemed at first impression to be moving with extraordinary rapidity, but, whether backwards or forwards, it would have been impossible to say.

The people in the tank, too, seemed, as I said, of the most diverse character and occupation. Some in a soldierly uniform of khaki were quietly busied with the machinery and the armament and paid no heed to those about them. Others in civilian dress, some even in frock coats and tall silk hats, appeared to move restlessly up and down in the gloom, with a perpetual babel of talk, the greater part of which, however, was lost in the surrounding din.

I was staring about in the darkness, endeavouring to interpret the scene around me when I was accosted by a quiet-looking man in uniform who emerged, as it were, out of the darkness.

“You seem puzzled,” he said.

“I am,” I answered. “Surely this place is a tank, is it not? Though it seems perfectly enormous. What tank is it?”

“It is The Canada, or if you prefer it, Le Canada,” said the officer.

“Has it two names?” I asked.

“Yes, it has to have. It’s a bilingual tank. Everything has to be in the two languages. That’s the rule. C’est un tank bi-lingual. Tout est dans les deux langues. . . .”

“Ah!” I answered. “That must be why it’s so hard to understand what all these people are shouting out to one another.”

“Exactly. It is hard. In fact it is particularly hard when we go into action as we have to fire first in English from one side, and then in French from the other. But, of course, without it there’d be an end of all brotherhood in the tank.”

The clatter of the machinery and the babel of voices grew so loud at this moment that I could scarcely hear what my companion said.

“Brotherhood?” I shouted.

“Yes,” he yelled back. “Brotherhood! Internal harmony! Using two languages unites the whole tank in a single confederation of brothers.”

I waited till the noise seemed to subside a little.

“I suppose you mean brotherhood and harmony among the soldiers there . . .” I pointed as I spoke to the little group of uniformed men that were seen in the dim distances of the great tank, working quietly at their tasks.

“Oh, no,” said the officer, “not them. They don’t seem to need it. I mean among the crowd here.” He indicated the motley groups of civilians running to and fro.

“Aren’t they frightfully in the way?” I asked.

My companion laughed. “You must hardly ask me that,” he said. “You see I’m a soldier myself and not allowed to express opinions. But I understand that according to the regulations, these civilians supply the driving power, or the inspiration or something or other, that keeps us all going.”

—

At this moment the whole tank was shaken with a fearful concussion. A blinding flash of light seemed to come through an opening in the top. Then all was darkness again and hubbub.

“Great Heavens!” I exclaimed. “Was that a German shell that struck us?”

“No fear!” laughed my companion. “We are still three miles behind the lines. No, they merely opened the top of the tank and threw in a barrelful of election pamphlets. The civilians are scrambling for them. They’ll begin making speeches in a moment.”

“Is that all?” I said. “And you say we are still three miles behind the lines?”

“Come,” said my companion. “I can give you a look out.”

We made our way as best we could towards the side of the great machine. The civilians, jostling for the pamphlets, shouldered rudely against us. One or two, seeing me in civilian dress, even plucked me by the arm. “Have you eaten anything to-day?” asked one in a nervous, hysterical manner. “Are you controlling your food? Let me beg, sir, let me exhort you, let me adjure you, to control your food!” Another took me by the sleeve on the other side. “Are you subscribing any money towards the cost of this tank?” he pleaded, fawning upon me in a sort of ingratiating, subservient way. “Let me beg you, sir, let me exhort you! It will be so noble of you if you do.”

“Never mind them,” whispered my companion in my ear, “they’re only the Exhorters. They’re paid to run round and do that. Come along through here.”

We passed down a dark passageway, between gun carriages and piles of munitions, towards the side of the tank. I noticed that the soldiers as we passed merely fell back with a salute to my companion, but without a word.

“Don’t they exhort, too?” I asked.

“They can’t; they’re too busy,” he answered. “But, here we are. Now look through this hole.”

—

As he spoke he opened a sort of trap or slot in the side of the huge structure. The sunlight streamed brightly through. We put our faces to the little aperture and looked out. There beside us lay the wide and deeply trodden fields of Flanders, mile upon mile of trampled mud flecked with snow, of scattered bushes and thick grass beaten down by the tramp of countless regiments. Over it all lay the still illumination of early dawn. But what held my eye most was the long line of tanks, of which our huge machine must evidently form a part, drawn up, side by side, at spaces of about fifty yards, and reaching miles away till lost on the horizon.

“Great sight, isn’t it!” said the officer at my side. “They’re waiting the word to go into action. Notice the little bannerets astern of each tank that mark them. That is New Zealand’s next to us. The one beyond is full of Irish – listen and you’ll hear them arguing inside. But you notice they’re moving off first all the same. That next is from Aberdeen. See the crew walking alongside! They do that for the first two miles (the enemy is about three miles away) to save coal. There further yet, is a whole row of London tanks – hear the racket inside? They’re holding a music hall show as they go. And there away down the line, Cornishmen, Welshmen, Australians, South Africans – the whole British Empire . . . miles and miles of them.”

“They’re all starting to move!” I exclaimed.

“So they are,” said my companion. “The word of command must have come. That means that we must close up this trap. It’s forbidden to open it in action.”

“Then are we starting, too?” I asked, with a thrill of excitement.

“Not yet,” said the officer with a grim smile. “They’re going to take a vote first. Listen!”

As he spoke a great shouting arose from the civilians gathered in the central aisles and passages of the tank.

“Are they cheering for the battle?” I shouted into the officer’s ear.

“No,” he called back, “they’re cheering for Sir Gil ———, the great leader; he’s passing down the tank.”

“Sir who?” I called.

He shouted the name again. But the din was too great to permit of my hearing. At any rate, as my guide spoke, I caught sight of a statesmanlike figure, moving down the centre of the tank, amid the shouts of the Exhorters, and the civilians. His noble features seemed, even in the half darkness, strangely familiar.

“Wonderful, isn’t he?” said my companion, raising his hand in a salute to the passing figure of the leader. “He goes up and down the tank like that ten times every day.”

“What good does it do?” I asked.

“None. But think of the marvellous energy and vitality that he must have to do it.”

“Has he any work to do here?” I inquired.

“Oh, rather. Notice that wheel and crank right at the back of the machine (see he’s walking towards it)? It’s his business to turn that round, or at least to try to. It makes the tank go backward. There’s other machinery away up in front that makes it go forward. The idea is (I’m only quoting the civilians – it’s not my business to know anything about it) that if we can move the tank backwards and forwards at the same time we shall get a perfect equilibrium – an absolute harmony. But stop, listen, listen!”

I seemed to hear, as it were, in the far distance, a reverberatory sound, distant and dull, but reaching us in spite of the noisy babel around Sir Gilbert.

“It’s the tanks,” said my companion, and I could see his features brighten with excitement. “Listen! They’re going in. They’re at the first line trenches. Hear that? That sort of sputtering . . . it’s the machine guns. Those must be the New Zealanders. And that . . . listen . . . it’s the whole battery of the London men.” As he spoke a sudden passion of anger seemed to sweep over his face, and to change his voice. “My God!” he exclaimed. “They’re in it. Why can’t we hurry? This cursed talking – talking. They’re fighting now for life or death out there, and we stand here, stuck like this.”

He gripped a little iron railing beside him, forcing himself to self-control. But as he still spoke I could hear from the dark corners and sides of the tank where the soldiers were, low angry mutterings and growls of protest.

“Steady, men, steady,” the officer called into the dark. “Remember it’s our first duty to obey.”

“But if he’s the leader,” I said, making myself heard as best I could, “why doesn’t he order the tank forward with the rest?”

“Leader of nothing!” exclaimed my companion, in disgust. “That’s only a nickname. The real leaders are up in front, working like the soldiers, too busy for this silly babel of talking and voting. But they’ve got some kind of fool compact with him . . . It’s more than I understand.”

Here a renewed shouting interrupted us. I turned and looked toward the leader, and saw that he had now mounted upon a little iron platform, beside which a few dim electric lights illuminated his handsome, statesmanlike face. About him there seemed to be formed a special group of civilians, dressed in frock coats and evidently, themselves, persons of importance.

“Who are they?” I asked.

The officer shrugged his shoulders. “Search me!” he said. “They’re only politicians. I’ve been away from Canada three years now and have forgotten the names of them. We ran this show ourselves, you know, we soldiers, till last autumn. Then this bunch came butting in, and the orders were to take them all into the tank. But listen to this!”

—

A burly-looking man with a megaphone in his hand had mounted on to the platform beside Sir Gilbert. He began calling out into the crowd. But such was the general hubbub and so loud and audible had become the detonation of great guns out on the plain beyond us, that it was almost impossible to hear what he said. But the discourse, as far as I could catch it, ran something like this:

“Gentlemen and citizens of Canada” (loud cheering from the civilians) “we are now about to go into action . . . But before doing so, it is necessary and proper that we should take a vote. Ballot papers will be handed round among you, and you will kindly mark them with a cross in order to indicate whether you wish to go into action forwards or backwards . . .” (prolonged shouting).

The tumult became greater at every moment. I could see groups of angry-looking men in khaki turning towards the platform and shaking their clenched fists as they called out: “What in ——— are we waiting for? Turn her loose! Let’s get at them.” Meantime the Exhorters and Persuaders ran to and fro distributing little papers, and saying, “Gentlemen, may we beg you, may we exhort you, let us adjure you; will you please kindly mark your ballots.”

The din and hubbub grew at every moment, the angry voices of the soldiers, the cries of the Exhorters, and the bellowing of the megaphones.

How long it lasted or how it would have ended, I cannot say. But all of a sudden a wide trap door in the ceiling of the tank opened and admitted a great flood of sunshine that penetrated to the darkest recesses of the huge machine. Round the rim of the opening appeared a circle of merry-looking Cockney faces, under steel caps, all grimy with powder, but joyous as the faces of boys on a big holiday.

“I say, you chaps down there,” called an unmistakably London voice, “where the blooming Hydes have you been? The whole bally show’s over. Come out and look.”

There was a rush towards the sides and openings of the tank. I could see the soldiers everywhere opening up the little apertures and peering out. My companion and I raised again the slot through which we had looked before.

The whole plain lay before us, a mass of moving and cheering men, among which the great tanks, now decked with flags and surrounded by their shouting crews, crunched their way homeward. Here and there one could see long lines of German prisoners tramping through the mud, dull and dispirited. From the moving file of the London tanks went up the gay songs of the music hall and the merry music of the accordion. Even the Aberdonians were singing solemnly and rhythmically “Auld Lang Syne” and wiping the mud off their tank as they went along.

“Great Heavens!” gasped my companion. “It’s all over. The trenches are taken and the thing is done while we were held up here with our silly voting. By the Lord,” he continued, as our ears caught an angry shouting that arose all around us, “watch out for trouble now!”

We turned from the window. The soldiers of our tank had left their places. With angry cries and with upraised fists and some with iron bars or bayoneted rifles, they were moving on to the civilians.

“Clean them out!” they shouted. “Out with them! We’ve had enough of them!”

All was confusion.

I could see the Exhorters in frock coats making impossible leaps through the narrow windows. One was calling out: “In the interests of harmony, gentlemen, in the general interest of harmony,” as they heaved him out through the top.

My companion turned to me. “I don’t know how you got in here,” he said, quietly, “but I have just one piece of advice to give you. Beat it! And when you get to Canada tell them to let us run this tank ourselves.”

I shook his hand, seated myself upon my flying carpet, and was back again in Canada in less than nothing . . . in fact in lots of time to read the morning papers of the same day, explaining precisely how the war could be won, but omitting to state how it could be lost.

—MacLean’s magazine, Jan 1918

TOC     INDEX

May Time in Mariposa

If you do not know Mariposa, my dear reader, the loss is yours, and the fault lies at your own door. For it means that you have failed to see it by not having the eyes to see. There is no doubt that if you live in Ontario at all you have driven, numberless times, in your motor through the wide streets of that beautiful town; that you have drawn up outside of the Continental Hotel, and have drunk two per cent. beer, foaming over the bar; you have admired, or at least have had the opportunity to admire, the striking architecture of the Carnegie Library (Opened 1902: the Gift of A. Carnegie. J. Melville, Mayor); you have seen the imposing front of the new Y.M.C.A. building (Anno Domini, MCMXIX), even if your urban indolence has prevented you from inspecting the inside of it and viewing the swimming tank, which is said to be the largest of its size in North America, and is deep enough to drown any man under eight feet high.

If you have not seen these things the fault, I repeat, is all your own. It means that you have crawled wearily away in your motor after eating dinner at the Continental and have started back on your journey to the sordid city with the reflection, “How absolutely alike all these little towns are.” You have perhaps applied to it the brutal and degrading epithet “one-horse”; and you may have said to your companions, “How awful it would be to live in a town like that all winter!” Such a man as you could hardly realize that in the winter time – when the Mariposa Shakespeare Society is in full swing (meeting once every five weeks), when the Chess Club (over Hillis’s store in the Oddfellows’ Block) is a blaze of light every third Saturday evening, and when the Mariposa Opera House presents, every month or so, such features as Muggs Landing, the Marks Brothers in East Lynne, and things admitted even on the handbills to be big New York attractions – that, in short, in point of intellectual life the winter time is the season in Mariposa, just as June is the season in London, or March on the Riviera.

But let it pass. If you do not appreciate your own country it is not for me to tell you how.

In any case I had not meant to talk of things in general in Mariposa or in any of the two hundred towns that are just like it, but to write of Mariposa as it is in May. The spring time when it comes in Mariposa comes as the fitting and appropriate reward of the peculiar optimism that has carried its inhabitants through the rigors of winter. There never were such people as the Mariposans for persisting in the belief that the winter is not really cold, and that it is at any given moment about to “break.” At New Year’s time the Mariposan hugs his fur coat about his ears as he stands on the creaking sidewalk in the flying blizzard – outside of Elliott’s drug store – trying to read the thermometer, which has shrunk discouraged into its bulge, and talks of the “January thaw,” which he feels to be imminent. This “January thaw” is an obstinate tradition which fifty years of meteorological records have been unable to break. In February, though the mercury stands at twenty-five below zero and the farmers’ horses on market day move in a cloud of frosted vapor, there is a rumour in the town that crows have been seen in Smith’s hardwood bush – Trespassers Prosecuted: Picnic Parties Kindly Apply at the House – and the winter is felt to be breaking up. In March, though the ice on the lake beside the town is two feet thick, the winter is declared to be “on its last legs,” and there is an organizing meeting of the Mariposa Tennis Club which gives a touch of summer itself to the season. April blows wild with great gusts of flying snow that come whirling down from the Hudson Bay. But the Mariposans sneer at it. Already they are planting beans under the snow and patching up hen houses with an eagerness which means that the brief winter is over all too quickly and spring may be upon them, unprepared, at any moment.

Then all of a sudden comes the First of May and the winter is understood to be over. On which there is an immediate and peculiar change of opinion, a sort of right-about-face. All the people declare that it was the longest and hardest winter that they ever remember: that such a winter was never seen before: that their health is shattered by the severity of it: that the fall crops are destroyed: that the lambs are dead and that the fruit trees will never bear again. The farmers, it is freely claimed, are ruined – a fact admitted by all the farmers themselves.

—

Still at any rate it is spring time. This is a known fact, provable by the calendar. It is the first of May, and May is spring. Everybody tells everybody else as they walk down for the early morning mail (eleven o’clock) at the post office that they are glad that the spring has come: that they “feel it in the air”; that the days are ever so much longer than they were a week ago. The livery man at Johnson’s Livery (Motor Cars a Specialty) who meets the four-thirty from the north every morning, says that it is broad daylight now at five o’clock. Hence it is known to be, absolutely and beyond a doubt, spring. To a person ignorant of Mariposa there might be some doubt or hesitation about admitting it. The wind blows raw and cold: the nights are sharp and bitter as zero: the ice still lies thick upon the surface of the lake: there is ragged snow along the sides of Main Street: the Mariposa Newspacket states that it was fifteen below up at White Fish River yesterday, and that the trains out of the Soo have been stalled in a blizzard: and the proof of it comes to Mariposa two days later in the wild whirling of a storm that sends the powdered snow dancing in eddies along Main Street.

All this, I say, an outsider might falsely call winter. But it seems that it is not. The Mariposans explain it all away as a pure exception, an absolutely unaccountable thing, a straight violation of the usual and normal course of nature. The fact that the same thing happens every year makes no manner of difference to them. It is declared to be a “caution,” the way the ice hangs on in the lake below the town. But it is stated that in any case the ice must be so “honey-combed,” so “sun-cheeked,” and so “eaten into” that it is absolutely rotten. The bartender at the Continental says he’d hate to drive a team of horses over it. So, too, the snow storm at the Soo merely moves the Mariposans to compassion: the Soo they say must be an awful place to live in in winter time: their own snow storm is explained away by the Newspacket as a “snow flurry.”

Besides, the visible signs are all around. George Popley, manager of the bank, is wearing his bronze straw hat: the spring opening at Northrup’s store is announced in the window: and at McTab’s hardware they are already advertising fishing lines, hooks, sinkers and a full line of fishermen’s supplies (Come In and See Us) for the opening of the bass season. Oh, yes, it’s spring!

—

But most of all as the sign of the month, par excellence, the gardening season has begun. Every other man in Mariposa is at it. Look over, or through, the fence of any backyard in Mariposa and you’ll see the Mariposan crawling round on his hands and knees on the cold earth with a packet of lettuce seed in one hand, trying to keep the wind away from it while he picks the seeds out with his finger and thumb. Look more closely still and you will see the lettuce seed flying in little clouds: in fact, all through the first two weeks in May, lettuce seed blows round in Mariposa like thin mist. But if you want to watch a Mariposan gardening, it must be done surreptitiously and by stealth. If you call out to a man and he hears you, he will rise up from his hands and knees and lie about it: he will say that he is just having a look at the ground to see how it is and when it will be ready: he will report that it is in no shape yet to be worked: there is “no growth in it”: there is still frost in it, a great deal of frost: he advises you, very strongly, if you are planting a garden this summer to wait at least two weeks longer: in fact, his own opinion is that a late garden does better, and that June is quite early enough: all this he says with brazen hardihood, for he has by this time hidden his lettuce seed in his pocket.

A stranger would find this conduct peculiar. Everybody in Mariposa understands it perfectly and passes on the same kind of lie to everybody else. The reason is that each man in Mariposa wants to be first with his garden. He wants, later on, in the first week in June when you are planting your potatoes, to tell you very quietly that his are already in flower: he wants, further on in the season, to meet you with a box of sickly little tomato plants under your arm and to tell you that his are already climbing up a stick five feet high, and that he and his wife had the first ripe ones last Sunday. Thus everybody in Mariposa wants to be first with his garden, and everybody lies about it to keep the rest out. Men go out after dusk and plant beans under the snow, and then remove the traces of the mud from their clothes as carefully as if it were the evidence of a crime. Nobody says a word about his vegetables till the moment comes when he announces that he and his wife had a “mess” of them last Sunday. After that let envy rage as it will and the more the better.

—

But did I say the ice has not gone out of the lake? That must be an error. There is a mistake somewhere. Certainly the ice was there, when May began, all covered with dirty snow and rutted here and there with sleigh tracks. Yet lo and behold! All of a sudden it is gone! One looks down the main street of Mariposa, which slopes right down to the water, and there all of a sudden is the open lake, glittering and sparkling in the sunshine, with little waves lapping upon its surface. Where is the ice? No one knows. Where has it gone? How did it get out? No one can tell.

It is, and it remains, a standing mystery what happens to the ice in our little lakes such as the one beside Mariposa. One day it is there, still solid enough, though said to be honey-combed and unfit to bear a team of horses, and reaching away for miles. The next it is gone. It can’t get out of the lake for there is only one little river, sixty feet wide, leading out of it, and a dozen angry creeks pouring broken ice into it. Where does the ice go? There are many theories. One is that it evaporates; another that it sinks; another, that it is waterlogged: and another view, held on both sides of the lake, that it blows away over to the other side of the lake and is lost from sight.

But certain it is that once the ice is gone there is a real and notable change in the season. The heart of faith reaps its reward. Boats are seen on the dimpled water of the lake. Motor launches, with their passengers in overcoats, go splashing along in the chill water. In the main street there is cold bright sunshine with the thin promise of summer in it. The gardeners throw off something of their secrecy and are seen openly carrying hoes and shovels, unabashed.

—

Readers of the ignorant sort might easily be mistaken by my reference to the bar. They are under the impression that there is prohibition in Mariposa. In one sense there is: but in another and larger sense there is not. The little town, like all its fellows, has passed through the successive phases of restrictive legislation – it has been in turn wet, half dry, dry, and now bone-dry. Virtue has gripped it like a coiling snake and holds it tighter and tighter. But all of this makes no difference to the habits or to the heart of the place. There is still a bar at the Continental Hotel, and at the Mariposa House, and, in fact, at all the hotels in the town: and in each a bartender, still in his wicker sleeves, with his bar pump, and his row of bottles and a group of Mariposan disciples drinking at the bar. The change is one merely of percentages. Here you may still have, if you will, spring beer (two and a half per cent. alcohol), or fine old Sherry (one per cent. of it straight from Spain), or old Tawny Port (guaranteed one and a quarter per cent. genuine spirit). In the old time the beer was ten per cent. alcohol: now it is two and a half. A man must drink now four glasses to do the business that was done by one. But the Mariposans are a kindly, law-abiding people. And, in any case, the thing is a war measure; a man who won’t drink four glasses of beer to help to win the war is a poor lot.

So the Mariposans line up still in front of the bar, and call for Old Sherry (young enough to be ashamed of itself) and pale ale (pale enough to blush for itself), and they treat one another to rounds of drinks and five-cent cigars as if nothing had happened. Law, it is often said, is powerless against a determined public opinion.

—

And then, lo and behold, while they are still standing drinking and talking of the advancing season, somehow, by a sort of transformation as it seems, spring time – the real spring time – and the month of May – the real month beginning about May the twentieth – comes all with a rush.

The grass that had been but a few poor shoots under the mud has changed over night to a luxuriant carpet of verdant green. The eager dandelions burst out into a waving mass of yellow, swinging on their stems. The hard maples along the main street that shivered thin and bare in the wind last week burst into such heavy and luxuriant foliage that there is nothing to equal it this side of Sumatra. The lilacs are heavy with blossom and the ten million bees that have lain hidden somewhere in Mariposa during the winter fill the air with drowsy murmurings. The green peas of the Mariposan gardens hear the sound and peep up above the earth to have a look. The birds sing in every bush. The oriole is back. The raucous crow calls resonant from the hardwood bush. The Queen’s birthday comes with flags down the main street and a firemen’s excursion that arrives in Mariposa in seventeen cars with banners on the side of them. There are ten bands playing all together.

So ends the month and passes in such a blaze of the glory of opening summer that every Mariposan swears that May is, after all, the only month of the year.

—MacLean’s magazine, May 1918

TOC     INDEX

The Art
of Taking a Vacation

It is not given to every man to be able to take a vacation even if he tries. As with all other things, there are those who can do it and those who can’t. One man spends in vain a thousand dollars and travels in vain a thousand miles in the attempt to encompass a vacation. Another man can put on an old pair of trousers and a battered felt hat and retire to his back yard with a hoe, and, lo! in five minutes the outer world is blotted out, the sounds of the street are hushed, and his mind is as far away as if he were among the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Enchanted Islands of the South Seas.

There is an art in it. Either one can do it or one cannot; and in this work-broken world most of us have long since lost the key. When we try to take a holiday, we go so busily about it that we merely substitute one kind of work for another.

Every one recalls the story of the sexton in one of Dickens’s books who took a day’s holiday after continuous grave digging for twenty years. He walked over a hill to the next cemetery and spent his day watching the sexton there dig graves. We are all a little bit like that. We carry our grave-digging around with us. Do but observe any where the tourist starting on his vacation and you will see at once that he still carries his burden on his back.

A stock-broker has no sooner started on his European holiday than he gets up an auction pool on board a steamship which he makes quite as complicated and as interesting as the Stock Exchange itself.

The liberated housewife, when you set her down in the Pitti Palace at Florence, finds a quiet corner, gets out her knitting and two pairs of children’s socks, and straightway feels at home. Near by is her husband, a college professor. They gave him a year of Sabbatical leave of absence to ease his mind from the strain of his lectures. Watch him. He is lecturing to the doorkeeper and a nursemaid on mediaeval Florence. Or behold in the galleries of the Louvre a stout gentleman with a pencil in his hand, ticking off names on a printed list. He is an auctioneer from Kansas City, and he is saying to himself (in his mind at any rate), “Lot No. 1, very fine painting by Van Dook, the great Dutch artist. Come, gentlemen! the frame alone is worth the price, what do I hear?”

I remember one day in Paris observing a man in rusty black habiliments who was saying to a French policeman, “Can you tell me, sir, where Napoleon is buried?” I knew at once that the man was an undertaker.

When I see a member of a State Legislature making speeches in a pension, or a contractor figuring out with a pencil the cubic feet of stone in the pyramid of Cheops, or a banker explaining on a Dover-Calais ferryboat the relation of the French franc to the British sovereign, then I know that the nemesis of our working civilization is upon them. They have worked so much that they cannot stop.

Most pathetic of all is the case of those whom a deceitful good fortune has allured into retiring and for whom the close of life is one long and melancholy vacation – a discount, as it were, upon eternity. These haunt like ghosts the scenes of their former activities, if not in body at least in mind. I knew once upon a time a retired banker, a shadowy, mournful-looking man of fifty on whom false fortune had smiled. He lived for the most part on the Riviera and spent his time looking out over the Mediterranean and talking about how he founded the Bankers’ Association of South Dakota. When he got well into his topic and described the operations Of the Association, its members, and the extraordinary interest of its annual con vention, his mind was so absorbed that the blue Mediterranean and the palm trees and the white cliffs above the beach were all blotted out and he was back again in a sunless room in a side street in some mean town of South Dakota – happy. When his talk ceased, he came to himself again and looked about him at his sunlit prison of blue and green with a sigh.

At times, more cruel still, the retirement and the vacation is forced. All over this continent one sees the melancholy spectacle of college professors being brutally forced by well-meaning trustees into pensioned retirement. Forced they literally are. In vain they cling to their classroom benches. They are lifted out and set down outside in the campus, blinking in the sun and looking aimlessly at their pension checks. Before Mr. Carnegie’s well-intentioned philanthropy, professors worked till they died. Now they stop working and cannot die.

In all these cases, I repeat, one sees the impossibility of the trained, industrious mind abandoning its evoluted activity. In vain it announces itself vacant. It cannot be vacant if it tries. It puts up a sign, “Top Story to Let for Two Months,” and hopes that there may enter in a new set of tenants in the form of Scenery or Foreign Culture or, shyest and strangest of all, the quiet tenant called Rest. The thing is not to be. The old tenants have not moved out. The imps of industry who have lived upon the premises these forty years are there still. Forty years ago they entered in; it was at the time when, under the rigorous discipline of the thing called School, the dreaming spirit of the idle boy was chased out of its proper habitation; and now they will not leave; the dreams can never come back.

But contrast with all these those rare beings for whom the dreaming spirit that is the soul of the true vacation has not been cast out. Of such a sort is the man of whom I spoke who has but to step out to his back garden and kneel down beside a ten-foot tulip bed to be transported out of his daily existence. Such people have by temperament the vacational mind. Give them but an afternoon in the sunshine or a rainy day indoors and they will slip out of the prison in which we live so noiselessly that you will not hear the key turn in the lock. That matchless artist O. Henry, whose own mind was of just this temperament, tells us some where of such a one: a humble clerk inhabiting a hall bedroom in New York, but able, by seating himself with stockinged feet on the radiator and opening a paper-bound novel of Clark Russell, to transport himself bodily to the storms of the South Pacific.

I suppose that the supreme example of the vacation man – I mean the real thing at its acme – is found in that misunderstood person called the tramp. In him the idea is so highly developed as to exclude almost all others. He will sit on the shady side of a blossoming hedge and watch the clouds go by; and he will not turn his leisure into work, as you or I would, by naming and classifying the blossoms in the hedge, or by distinguishing the cumulus clouds from the cirro-stratus. Indeed, so perfect is his adjustment that the mere idea would make him tired.

Society has misjudged the tramp. It has confused him with the criminal. Never was a greater difference. The tramp may be compelled by the force majeure of hunger most reluctantly to steal a chicken – a thing requiring effort and contrivance and something suspiciously akin to work. But the true criminal is a busy, planful, contriving person, not absolutely different from what is called a captain of industry. Robbing a bank by night and running a bank by day are both operations that require thought. The tramp could encompass neither of them.

The tramp is in reality a survival. Evolution has passed him by. He is a reversion to the type of that far-away, forgotten period when man did not have to work; when, countless centuries ago, somewhere in the paradise of Mesopotamia perhaps, man, half-humanized animal, existed on the bounty of nature or died for want of it, but never worked. Of such days of a “lost paradise” our literature still bears the dim remembrance. And the Adam of that Garden of Eden was the tramp; once the type figure, now the despised survival sitting under his hedge.

The rest of us centuries and centuries ago learned to work. It was “evoluted” into us as an aptitude. We work – that is to say, we perform all sorts of routime, uninteresting tasks devoid of sense or meaning so far as our own particular faculties go. One man lifts dirt on a shovel, another spreads ink on paper, a third carries food to a pig. And we have become so fashioned and habituated to it that we work as the ducks swim and as the birds fly. But, alas! when we wish to cease the work and announce ourselves to be on vacation, then the secret of it is gone forever. Our paradise is indeed lost.

If I had time to start a great National movement (I am a little too busy for it just now), it should be in favour of the resumption of primitive idleness. I should found a Garden of Eden Society in which – but, no, what would be the use? We are all so badly damaged with work and industry that it would fail at once. A biologist would break in and classify the animals, Some one would introduce wire-fencing, some one else would begin improving the trees, and in less than no time there would be motor roads all through the garden and “rest houses,” save the mark! With music after midnight. And for myself, the founder of it, no recourse but to go and talk with the serpent in his tree about the futility of it all.

But if that movement is impossible, I will start a humbler and more feasible one – a movement for the renovation of vacations. It would be after this fashion. You, sir or madam, who are about to start upon your European vacation, do not turn it into work. Do not exert your brain with railway folders and steamship guides. That is work. Avoid it. Do not buy and study the map of London; you cannot understand it, anyway, and it is work. Never mind about the Tower of London or which is the Tomb of Edward the Confessor in the Abbey. These things are dangerous. They will do you harm. Go and eat a bun on the Thames Embankment, and if you do not know in which direction the river is running, forbear to ask. When you go to Paris, do not brush up your French; you learned it in the Central High School, and it is really not worth brushing; it will only show the seams in it. If you must talk, hire a Frenchman to talk English, or, better still, why not keep silent for a week or two? You have talked so much these forty years, and silence is twin-sister to rest.

You will not take this advice. But if you did, you would come back from your vacation with that beautiful emptiness of mind, that charming Old World ignorance, so rarely seen today. In short. you would be voted by all your friends to be almost a vacuum. Can you do it?

—The Outlook magazine, 25 May, 1921.

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I’ll Stay in Canada

You are kind enough to suggest that I might, being now free from work, come home to England. But no, no, I, don’t tempt me. It wouldn’t work. I know it wouldn’t. It sounds fine. But there are all kinds of difficulties, things you wouldn’t think of at first – questions of language and manners; a lot of them. Honestly, I don’t think Id letter try it. You see, it’s been sixty years, this early spring, since I came out from England as a little boy of six, so wise that I knew all about the Trojan War and which Gods fought for which side, and so ignorant that I had never seen a bark canoe or a bob-sleigh and didn’t know what a woodchuck was. We crossed the Atlantic, which I recall as continuous ice; were in river steamers for four days; then in a train with a queer little engine that threw hemlock sparks over the bush; and then thirty miles in a lumber-wagon – and we were there.

After that my brothers and I never saw a railway train again for three years, till someone built a railway to Lake Simcoe and the “cars” came. There followed another three years, and then we went away to school and to the world. But the “stamp” I carry is that of the farm in Georgina Township and my predilection is for the soil and the Canadian bush. Forever, I like the sunrise. I worked at teaching. I taught for three months, in training, eighteen years old, at the old Strathroy High School with General Sir Arthur Currie, our greatest Canadian, as my pupil. Then I taught for a year at Uxbridge High School. Then I taught ten years at Upper Canada College. Then I got quite a good job at McGill University and held it for thirty-five years. My life has been as simple as one of Xenophon’s Marches. But at least my jobs grew longer. The next, I think, will be what you’d call permanent.

But now, as you say, I am free to do as I please; and, if I like, after sixty years I could come “home.” Certainly it sounds tempting. Yet, as I say, there are difficulties. The first is the question of language. When I left Hampshire I spoke English. But I’ve lost it, and it might be too late to pick it up again. You see, we speak differently here. I don’t mean uneducated people, I mean educated men, like my friends at my club (The University Club, Montreal – you can’t miss it; it’s just opposite McGill University).

We used to be ashamed of our Canadian language, before the war, and try to correct it and take on English phrases and say, “What a ripping day,” instead of “What a peach of a morning,” and “Ah you thah?” instead of “Hullo Central,” and “Oh, rather!” instead of “O-Hell-yes.” But now, since the Great War put Canada right on a level with the Portuguese and the Siamese and those fellows who came from – ah! one forgets the names, but it doesn’t matter – I mean, made Canada a real nation – we just accept our own language and are not ashamed of it. We say “yep!” when we mean “yep!” and don’t try to make out it’s “yes,” which is a word we don’t use; and if we mean “four” we say so and don’t call it “faw.”

So you see, there’s the question of language. Then there’s the difference of education. I don’t mean that we are not educated – us fellers in the University Club – because we are: only in a different way. At first sight you English people would not think we were educated because we learned different things. Any member of the club knows what a kilowatt is, and you don’t; but on the other hand, our members would think that a “perfect aorist” is either a vacuum cleaner or an Italian trombone player.

It is just that difference. I remember a few years ago a distinguished English bishop, speaking at our club, said that he felt that Greek had practically made him what he was; we felt exactly the same about him and thought it very manly and British of him to admit it straight out.

Then, there’s the question of manners. There it would be pretty hard for me or for any of my friends here to “get by.” You see, we are not just quite what you call gentlemen. Not quite. In the dark and if we don’t talk, you could hardly tell us. But when we begin to feel easy and at home the thing comes out. I don’t just know what it consists of: I think we are a little too unrestrained and we have a way of referring to money, a thing of which you never definitely speak in England.

I remember, in making conversation with that bishop, I asked him if his salary went right on while he was out here, and when he said, “I beg your pardon,” all I could say was, “Forget it.” Of course, the bishop didn’t know that in Canada we never feel at ease with a man till we know what his salary is, and which of the gold mines he bought shares in last. All this means we lack “class.” There isn’t a sufficient distinction between us and those lower down in money. Personally I can go bass fishing with a taxi driver and a Toronto surgeon and an American tourist and the “feller that rents the boat” and can’t see any difference. Neither can they. There isn’t any. That brings me to the Americans! There’s another reason for not wanting to leave Canada for England. I’d hate to be so far away from the United States. You see, with us it’s second nature, part of our lives, to be near them. Every Sunday morning we read the New York funny papers, and all week we read about politics in Alabama and Louisiana, and whether they caught the bandits that stole the vault of the national bank, and – well, you know American news – there’s no other like it. And the Americans come-and-go up here, and we go-and-come down there, and they’re educated just as we are and know all about kilowatts but quit Latin at the fourth declension. Their colleges are like ours and their clubs are like ours and their hotels are like ours and Rotaries and Lions and Kiwanis like ours. Honestly, you can’t tell where you are unless you happen to get into a British Empire Society; and anyway, they have those in Boston and in Providence, and the Daughters of the American Revolution is practically a British organization – so all that is fifty-fifty. Our students go and play hockey with their stoodents and our tourists going out meet their towrists coming in. The Americans come up here and admire us for the way we hang criminals. They sit in our club and say, “You certainly do hang them, don’t you!” My! they’d like to hang a few! The day may be coming when they will. Meantime, we like to hang people to make the Americans sit up. And in the same way we admire the Americans for the way they shovel up mountains and shift river-courses and throw the map all round the place. We sit in the club, fascinated, and listen to an American saying, “The proposal is to dam up the Arkansas River and make it run backward over the Rockies.” That’s the stuff! That’s conversation. There you are again – conversation. It would be hard for me or any Canadian to learn to “converse” in England. You see, English conversation turns upon foreign politics and international affairs. It runs to such things as – “But don’t you think that the Singapore Base would have been better if it had been at Rangoon or at least on the Irrawaddy?” “Ah, but would that really control Hoopow, or, for that matter, Chefoo?” Now, we don’t talk about that. Listen to us in my club and you hear, “He told me that in Central Patricia, they were down to the second level and that there was enough stuff right in sight to make it a cinch. I bought 100 at 2.30 and yesterday it had got to three dollars.....

That’s real talk. And that’s our country, anyway – our unfailing interest, for all of us, in its vast development, its huge physical future. In this last sixty years – since I’ve known it – we have filled it in and filled it in like a huge picture lying in a frame from the frozen seas to the American line, from Nova Scotia to the Pacific. What the English feel about the Armada and the Scottish about Bannockburn, the Canadian, consciously or not, feels about the vast geography of Canada.

There is something inspiring in this building of a new country in which even the least of us has had some part. I can remember how my father went – from our Lake Simcoe farm – to the first Manitoba boom of over fifty years ago – before the railway. He had an idea that what the West needed was British energy and pluck. He came back broke in six months. Then Uncle Edward went; he had a gifted mind and used to quote to us that “the Star of the Empire glitters in the West.” He did better. He came back broke only after four years.

Then my brothers Dick and Jim went. Dick was in the Mounted Police and then worked in a saloon and came home broke. Jim got on fine but he played poker too well and had to leave terribly fast. Charlie and George and Teddy went – they all went but me. I was never free to go till now, but I may start at any time. Going West, to a Canadian, is like going after the Holy Grail to a knight of King Arthur. All Canadian families have had, like mine, their Western Odyssey.

It’s the great spaces that appeal. To all of us here, the vast unknown country of the North, reaching away to the polar seas, supplies a peculiar mental background. I like to think that in a few short hours in a train or car I can be in the primeval wilderness of the North; that if I like, from my summer home, an hour or two of flight will take me over the divide and down to the mournful shores of the James Bay, untenanted till yesterday, now haunted with its flock of airplanes hunting gold in the wilderness. I never have gone to the James Bay; I never go to it; I never shall. But somehow Id feel lonely without it.

No, I don’t think I can leave this country. There is something in its distances and its isolation and its climate that appeals forever. Outside my window as I write in the dark of early morning – for I rise like a farm hand – the rotary snow ploughs on the Cote des Neiges Road are whirling in the air the great blanket of snow that buried Montreal last night. To the north, behind the mountain, the Northern Lights blink on a thousand miles of snow-covered forest and frozen rivers.

We are “sitting pretty” here in Canada. East and west are the two oceans far away; we are backed up against the ice cap of the pole; our feet rest on the fender of the American border, warm with a hundred years of friendship. The noise and tumult of Europe we scarcely hear – not for us the angers of the Balkans, the weeping of Vienna and the tumults of Berlin. Our lot lies elsewhere shoveling up mountains, floating in the sky to look for gold, and finding still the Star of Empire in the West.

Thank you, Mother England, I don’t think I’ll “come home.” I’m “home” now. Fetch me my carpet slippers from the farm. I’ll rock it out to sleep right here.

— This Week magazine, 8 Mar 1936

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My Fishing Pond

It lies embowered in a little cup of the hills, my fishing pond. I made a last trip to it, just as the season ended, when the autumn leaves of its great trees were turning colour and rustling down to rest upon the still black water. So steep are the banks, so old and high the trees, that scarcely a puff of wind ever rufHes the surface of the pond. All around it, it is as if the world was stilled into silence, and time blended into eternity.

I realized again as I looked at the pond what a beautiful, secluded spot it was, how natural its appeal to the heart of the angler. You turn off a country road, go sideways across a meadow and over a hill and there it lies – a sheet of still water, with high, high banks, grown with great trees. Long years ago some one built a sawmill, all gone now, at the foot of the valley and threw back the water to make a pond, perhaps a quarter of a mile long. At the widest it must be nearly two hundred feet – the most skilful fisherman may make a full cast both ways. At the top end, where it runs narrow among stumps and rushes, there is no room to cast except with direction and great skill.

Let me say at once, so as to keep no mystery about it, that there are no fish in my pond. So far as I know there never have been. But I have never found that to make any difference. Certainly none to the men I bring here – my chance visitors from the outside world – for an afternoon of casting. If there are no fish in the pond, at least they never know it. They never doubt it; they never ask; and I let it go at that.

It is well known hereabouts that I do not take anybody and everybody out to my fish pond. I only care to invite people who can really fish, who can cast a line – experts, and especially people from a distance to whom the whole neighbourhood is new and attractive, the pond seen for the first time. If I took out ordinary men, especially men near home, they would very likely notice that they got no fish. The expert doesn’t. He knows trout fishing too well. He knows that, even in a really fine pond, such as he sees mine is, there are days when not a trout will rise. He’ll explain it to you himself, and, having explained it, he is all the better pleased if he turns out to be right and they don’t rise. Trout, as everyone knows who is an angler, never rise after a rain, nor before one; it is impossible to get them to rise in the heat, and any chill in the air keeps them down. The absolutely right day is a still, cloudy day, but even then there are certain kinds of clouds that prevent a rising of the trout. Indeed I have only to say to one of my expert friends, “Queer, they didn’t bite!” and he’s off to a good start with an explanation. There is such a tremendous lot to know about trout fishing that men who are keen on it can discuss theories of fishing by the hour.

Such theories we generally talk over – my guest of the occasion and I – as we make our preparations at the pond. You see I keep there all the apparatus that goes with fishing – a punt, with lockers in the sides of it – a neat little dock built out of cedar (Cedar attracts the trout.) and best of all a little shelter house, a quaint little place like a pagoda, close beside the water and yet under the trees. Inside is tackle, all sorts of tackle, hanging round the walls in a mixture of carelessness and order.

“Look, old man,” I say, “if you like to try a running pater noster, take this one.” Or, “Have you ever seen these Japanese leads? No, they’re not a gut, they’re a sort of floss.”

“I doubt if I can land one with that,” he says.

“Perhaps not,” I answer. In fact I’m sure he couldn’t; there isn’t any to land.

On pegs in the pagoda hangs a waterproof mackintosh or two – for you never know – you may be caught in a shower just when the trout are starting to rise. With that of course a sort of cellarette cupboard with decanters and bottles and ginger snaps and perhaps an odd pot of anchovy paste – no one wants to quit fishing for mere hunger. Nor does any real angler care to begin fishing without taking just a drop (“Just a touch; be careful; whoa! whoa!”) of something to keep out the cold, or to wish good luck for the chances of the day.

I always find, when I bring out one of my friends, that these mere preparatives or preparations, these preliminaries of angling, are the best part of it. Often they take half an hour. There is so much to discuss – the question of weights of tackle, the colour of the fly to use and broad general questions of theory such as whether it matters what kind of a hat a man wears. It seems that trout will rise for some hats and for others not. One of my best guests, who has written a whole book on fly fishing, is particularly strong on hats and colour.

“I don’t think I’d wear that hat, old man,” he says; “much too dark for a day like this.”

“I wore it all last month,” I said.

“So you might, old man, but that was August. I wouldn’t wear a dark one in September, and that tie is too dark a blue, old man.”

So I knew that that made it all right. I kept the hat on. We had a grand afternoon; we got no fish.

I admit that the lack of fish in my pond requires sometimes a little tact in management. The guest gets a little restless. So I say to him, “You certainly have the knack of casting!” and he gets so absorbed in casting further and further that he forgets the fish. Or I take him towards the upper end and he gets his line caught on bulrushes – that might be a bite. Or if he still keeps restless, I say suddenly: “Hush! Was that a fish jumped?” That will silence any true angler instantly. “You stand in the bow,” I whisper, “and I’ll gently paddle in that direction.” It’s the whispering that does it. We are still a hundred yards away from any trout that could hear us, even if a trout was there. But that makes no difference. Some of the men I take out begin to whisper a mile away from the pond and come home whispering.

You see, after all, what with frogs jumping, and catching the line in bulrushes, or pulling up a water-logged chip nearly to the top, they don’t really know – my guests don’t – whether they have hooked something or not. Indeed after a little lapse of time they think they did; they talk of the “big one I lost” – a thing over which any angler gets sentimental in retrospect. “Do you remember,” they say to me months later at our club in the city, “that big trout I lost up on your fish pond last summer!”

“Indeed I do,” I say.

“Did you ever get him later on?”

“No, never,” I answer. In fact I’m darned sure I didn’t; neither him nor any other.

Yet the illusion holds good. And besides you never can tell. There might be trout in the pond. Why not? After all, why shouldn’t there be a trout in the pond? Ydu take a pond like that and there ought to be trout in it!

Whenever the sight of the pond bursts on the eyes of a new guest he stands entranced. “What a wonderful place for trout!” he exclaims.

“Isn’t it?” I answer.

“No wonder you’d get trout in a pond like that.”

“No wonder at all.”

“You don’t need to stock it at all, I suppose?”

“Stock it!” I laugh at the idea! Stock a pond like that! Well, I guess not.

Perhaps one of the best and most alluring touches is fishing out of season – just a day or two after the season has closed. Any fisherman knows how keen is the regret at each expiring term – swallowed up and lost in the glory of the fading autumn. So if a guest turns up just then I say, “I know it’s out of season, but I thought you might care to take a run out to the pond anyway and have a look at it.” He can’t resist. By the time he’s in the pagoda and has a couple of small drinks (“Careful, not too much; whoa! whoa!”) he decides there can be no harm in making a cast or two.

“I suppose,” he says, “you never have any trouble with the inspectors?”

“Oh, no,” I answer, “they never think of troubling me!” And with that we settle down to an afternoon of it.

“I’m glad,” says the guest at the end, “that they weren’t rising. After all we had just the same fun as if they were.”

—

That’s it – illusion! How much of life is like that. It’s the idea of the thing that counts, not the reality. You don’t need fish for fishing, any more than you need partridge for partridge shooting, or gold for gold mining . . . just the illusion or expectation.

So I am going back now to the city and to my club, where we shall fish all winter, hooking up the big ones, but losing the ones bigger still, hooking two trout at one throw – three at a throw! – and for me behind it all the memory of my fishing pond darkening under the falling leaves. . . . At least it has made my friends happy.

MY LADDERS

A Sequel to “My Fishing Pond”

Indulgent readers of the Atlantic Monthly will recall the fact that in that esteemed periodical a year ago, I wrote an account of My Fishing Pond. I described the beautiful little secluded spot in a woodland hollow in which it lay. I caught, I think, in words something of the autumn glory that fell on it with the falling leaves. I admitted, quite frankly, that as far as I knew there were no fish in it. But that, I explained, I kept to myself; it made no difference to the expert fishermen, my friends who came on a casual visit to cast a fly at my trout. They were all impressed with the wonderful surroundings, had never seen a trout pond of greater promise, and easily explained, over a friendly drink in my pagoda, the failure of a single day.

I realize now that I never should have published this in the Atlantic. The Editor and I must have offended some tributary god of fishing. Nemesis fell upon me. When the winter broke and the ice went, a great flood of water carried away the dam, and flung it, cement, logs and all, in a wild confusion of debris down the stream. There it lies now, and above it the pond, drained out flat to a bottom of wet weeds and old logs and stranded puddles – a feeble stream trickling through.

And the trout? Gone! washed clean away down the stream! I take my friends out now to the place and they explain it all to me until I can see it like a vision – the beautiful trout hurled away in spring flood and foam! My friends estimate them as anything from two miles of trout to five miles. But do you think those fishermen have lost interest? Not a bit! They are more keen on coming out to look at my pond and give advice about it than they were even in the days when we used, as they recall it, to haul out trout by the puntful.

They explain to me what to do. The miller who ran a little feed mill off the pond is going to rebuild the dam, and my friends tell me to put in “ladders” and the trout will all come back! A trout, it seems, will climb a ladder! I can hardly believe it, but they all tell me that; in fact I have learned to say nothing, just to look utterly disconsolate till the visiting expert says, “Have you thought of ladders?” And then I act the part of a man rescued from despair. They say it will take about three ladders of five feet each. How trout climb a ladder I don’t know; it must be difficult for them to get hold of the rungs. But a man said in Scotland he has seen a trout climb 20 feet. It appears that if you go out in the autumn you can lie on the bank of the dam and watch the trout, splashing and climbing in the foam. Quite a lot of my friends are coming up here next autumn just to see them climb. And even if it is out of season, they may throw a hook at them!

Fishermen, in other words, are just unbeatable. Cut them off from fish, and they are just as happy over “ladders.” So we sit now in my little pagoda, and someone says: “Talking about ladders, I must tell you – whoa! whoa! not too big a one.” . . . And away we go, floating off on the Ladders of Imagination.

—The Atlantic Monthly, Dec 1936;
—The Atlantic Monthly, Mar 1938.

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Why I Am Leaving My Farm

I Can’t Live Up to It

(A Lunch Club Talk that was designed to stop the Back to the Land Movement. It killed it dead.)

My! But these farmers are wonderful fellows – I mean the words they use and the education they must have! I never realized it till just recently when I retired from being a professor and came to settle down on my little place that I call a farm.

I hadn’t had anything to do with a farm since I lived on one as a little boy, more than fifty years ago. I am amazed at the change! I’m not sufficiently educated for it. I’ll have to go back to the city. I mean like this – a few days ago I bought a bottle of poison to use against garden bugs, and it had on the label, “The antidote to this poison is any alkali emetic followed by an emollient febrifuge”! Just think of it! Imagine a farmer’s wife calling downstairs: “William! Baby has been eating shoeblacking! Throw me up an alkali emetic and follow it with an emollient febrifuge.” And the farmer would probably call back: “All right. And you’d better handle baby very carefully. Lift him up with callipers.”

That’s another word on farmers’ labels, “callipers”; directions for all seeds and things say, “Handle very carefully and pick up with a pair of callipers.” Up till now I always thought that callipers were French things that women wear. But it seems not. . . .

Anyway you have to have them on a farm. I’m going to get measured for a pair right away.

This high standard of education – I mean this need of knowledge of special terms – makes it hard for any outsider to start in and do anything around the house and garden. You see, on a farm, everything is done from printed directions, either out of little manuals or from papers that come with the packet or round the bottle or under the wrapper.

When I took over my place, as it was meant to be my home for good, I thought I would begin by planting trees round it for shelter. From what I remember of farming when I was young, I naturally thought of spruce trees, and balsam and pine – any kind of fir trees. But it seems they don’t have them. The book said, “The snuggest effect about the dwelling house is to be got by having a warm belt of conifers about it.” I don’t want them. All I remember about conifers, if I have the word right, is that if they once get into the frame of a bed or bedroom chest of drawers all you can do is to burn it. You can of course try poison, any good unguent or emollient, but it seldom works. The conifers could be lifted out one by one by callipers, but it would take a lot of time. The book says, “If set out when quite young they will increase rapidly.” I don’t doubt it, but, thank you, not for me.

The same manual suggested that if a belt of conifers was not available an equally snug effect can be made by covering the loggia with eucalyptus. “Loggia” is a new word for me, though I suppose I can guess what it refers to. Personally I would just give it a coat of whitewash.

I have found already that gardening has to go the same way as planting trees. I don’t understand the words. Try this: “Nitrates may be freely used with leguminous plants” . . . “at the time of calyx closing watch closely for curculio” . . . “remember that the ranunculus is the gardener’s friend” . . . “among the birds all the caprimulgidae are well worth having, while the flickers wage war on larvae” . . . etc. It seems that farmers eat up this kind of language by the paragraph.

There was an old man working in the next lot to my place on the first day of gardening, and I asked him what he thought of the weather. In the days when I was young such an old man would have said:

“Well, sir, if them clouds would clear away off the sun for a bit I think it might set in for a pretty fair spell.”

But this old man didn’t.

He said:

“I had a look at my aneroid barometer first thing this morning and there is certainly an area of pretty low barometric pressure. I had been thinking of setting some antirrhinum this morning, but I guess I won’t.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s too aquaceous. You’ve got to keep a pretty good eye on your humidity gauge before you do much with antirrhinum. I’ll put in something a little more gelatinous.”

Think of it. That old man getting out of bed and having a look at his aneroid before he even put on his pants.

I was going to ask him what he would do instead of setting out antirrhinum, but then I didn’t. I didn’t need to, I knew what he would do.

He would go out and start to do all those things that are in the Farm and Home Manuals and on the seed packets and that I can’t understand. For instance, he might go and make himself “a compost bed.” Don’t ask me what it is; I’ve no idea, except that it is said to be a grand thing to make with an eye to the future. “Soap suds, dirty water and all kinds of kitchen slops thrown on the compost bed will help to keep it in good heart.” It sounds like a dirty enough mess.

Or if the old man didn’t make a compost bed, then he might spend his time “treating his soil” with nitrate, phosphorus or basic slag. “What are they?” I don’t know. “Where do you get basic slag?” I have no idea.

Then, if the old man had done that, he could go and plant his garden – with what, do you think – lettuce, radishes and that sort of stuff that I had expected to grow? – not at all. They don’t have them any more. He could plant it with antirrhinum, as I have just said, and scabies, and cuspis and a border of asbestos and scrofula. Those are the words on the packets, as nearly as I recall them.

So, as for gardening, I’m out of it. I don’t understand the terms. “When the garden is complete,” suggests the manual, “a final touch may be given by laying down a flagstone path, with saxifrage in the interstices, and then having a pergola all down the pathway.” Thank you, not for me.

—

Another thing I had looked forward to in coming back to farm life, after fifty years away from it, was the reading of the good old farm newspapers. They’ve been parodied, I know, a thousand times by smart city people; but the charm was there all the same. There was personal news that said, “Ed Callaghar was in town last night from the Fourth Concession and reports his fall wheat nicely in hand. Well done! Ed”; and the social news, “Miss Posie Cowslip of Price’s Corners is home after a three days’ visit in the city.”

In the place of that you now read:

“Among the daintiest of the season’s weddings was that of Miss Poinsettia Primrose, celebrated at the family Farmstead, The Bagnolias, the happy bridegroom being Mr, Earl DeBenture of Wall Street. The ceremony, at which the Rev. Mr. Bray ofEciated, was held out of doors under a pergola, the assembled guests being gathered in the loggia, beautified with floral decorations of bubiscus, rabies and flowering avunculus. Miss Primrose wore a beautiful écrin of soft tulle shot with dainty écrus. Her father, who gave her away, wore a plain vignolette of haricot while Mrs. Primrose (mère) looked riante in a dark purple chassis de nacre. The happy couple left immediately after the ceremony for a wedding tour through the Panama Canal.”

—

I find I don’t talk much to the neighbours. I can’t. One of them, a young farmer from nearby, dropped in the other day to ask if I could lend him a pair of callipers to reset his seismograph, and we had a little talk. He talked a little while on surrealism which he said had been interesting him lately; he spoke also of metampsychosis and then drifted onto foreign politics and the “open door” in Manchuria. I think it was in Manchuria; it may have been Missouri.

—

No, no. I’ll have to go back and study a whole lot more and learn all about alkalis and barometers and callipers: or else perhaps not come to the country but retire into a beer garden. It’s easier.

—John O'London's Weekly, Nbr. 38 (1937)

TOC     INDEX

The Hidden Secret
of the City

Every year when the good old summertime begins I feel that longing to turn my back – all of it – on the city, which is probably felt by nine city dwellers out of ten. Not for me the roar of the metropolis. Let me feel the new-mown hay blow in my face and let me hear the trout stream gurgle under the fallen logs in the bush. I know all that can be said in favour of the city. I admit that it palpitates with intellectual life, that it throbs with the conscious power of collective thought. But not for me – not a palpitation, not a throb!

The truth is, and I don’t mind admitting it at this time of year, I am afraid, and always have been, of a great city and of the kind of people who live in it. Like everybody else who has come off a farm – our homestead was in Georgina Township, up in Ontario; perhaps you know it? – I have never felt at ease with high class city people, with financial magnates, great criminal lawyers, bank presidents and scintillating literary wits. I always felt that the wits might start something or the magnates sit on something or the great criminal lawyer might say something. Anybody from the country knows the feeling. As to the bankers, everybody knows that these men hold the world in the hollow of their hand; if they lift their thumb over we go. So I am uneasy with them. I don’t want them to lift it while I’m round.

But that feeling is all gone since an experience I had just a little while ago. It was my fate to have to give an address at one of the biggest luncheon clubs on the Diplomatic Situation in Europe, in one of the biggest hotels of one of our cities before some of the biggest men in the country. If anything sounds bigger than that, I don’t hear it. It was certainly a distinguished crowd. As I looked round at the vast glittering hotel dining-room, filled with hundreds and hundreds of what I knew were typical city men, leaders in business and finance and the professions, I felt appalled. It seemed impossible that I could dare to speak to them.

So there I sat, at the head of the table, in the very centre of that marvellous gathering, making conversation as best I could. Beside me was the president of one of the biggest banks in the world, a fine, dignified man who looked the part. I wouldn’t have dared to borrow $5 from him, if I was dying.

I talked as best I could; and presently, by chance, I mentioned Ohio. “I come from there,” he said, and then added, as if owning up to something, like an honest man, “we had a farm there; as a matter of fact, I have it still.” The moment he said that I felt easier. “Did you?” I said. “I was brought up on a farm in Ontario – Georgina Township – we had a hundred acres, counting the bush.” “We had more than that,” said the bank president; “we had over five hundred” – then he realized, like the kindly man he is, that he had said a rather brutal thing, as between farmers, and he added at once: “Of course, the old homestead wasn’t as much as that at first; we only had a quarter section less sixty acres. But later when Uncle Bill went out West we had his half section, less the road allowance of four rods that went right across the place just behind the homestead.”

The words were like music! “Quarter sections” and “homesteads,” and relations called “Uncle Bill,” and things measured in “rods”! That’s the language I like to hear! I felt at home at once.

With that we were started. Five minutes later, if the conversation of that great financier had been reported, it would have run like this: “You can do better with soy beans for hogs than you can in trying to raise grain for them. Put in your soy beans, with a cover crop first—”

But I had to interrupt him there. “Soy beans are all right,” I said, “if the land is clean enough.” And with that we were absorbed; gone was all the glitter and the form and pomp of the occasion. The bank president was back in Ohio and I was back in Georgina Township (next to North Gwillimbury, you can’t miss it; take the town line past the old Prosser place) and he was feeding hogs on soy beans, and I was objecting that if he didn’t raise any wheat he’d have no straw for bedding, and he admitted it. Think of a man in his position sleeping on straw!

All of a sudden I remembered, we both seemed to remember, where we were. Imagine talking farm stuff in a gathering like that! And in the silence that fell for the moment between us, I listened and caught a little of the talk of the group of men – presidents of this, and vice-presidents of that – who sat at the table just beneath the head table that was ours. One man I noticed in particular, a dignified figure, the face of a diplomat. He was saying to the man beside him: “Don’t talk to me of leghorn hens! I won’t have them on my place. You waste your money in trying to put a twelve-foot wire fence round a leghorn, and even then they’ll fly over it. No, sir, I admit they lay, but give me a heavy fowl, a Barred Rock or a Black Jersey Giant, and you’ve got something! They’ll lay pretty good, and they’re a table bird and you don’t have to chase them all over the place!”

“But wait a minute,” objected the man next to him. “You can’t make them pay!”

I listened, fascinated! They were talking of that wonderful, vital question, “Can hens be made to pay?”

“They do pay!” said the first man. “Out at my place in Indiana last week we showed a clear profit on them!”

He didn’t say how much: no one was cruel enough to ask. But I knew, because my hens back in Ontario have been showing a clear profit right along, a total of sixty cents in November (and mind, I’ve only two hundred hens) and eight cents in December and this last month over a dollar! So I understood just what was meant. That banker, I suppose, wouldn’t take any special joy in a corporation that would pay a dividend on $5,000,000; but to make a profit, an actual profit, on hens (not counting, of course, your own time, nor the hired man’s time, nor the odd months when they don’t lay) – Ah! that is high finance!

So after that I felt easier. And when I realized that my neighbour on the left was talking about trout fishing in an Indiana creek, and the man next him was spearing suckers with a jack light, then it was all too easy.

So when I got up to speak I knew that I was among friends, men whose thoughts I could share, whose sympathies I could call forth.

“In rising, gentlemen,” I said, “to speak on this matter of the Diplomatic Situation in Europe, I find myself in no little difficulty. I have just come down here from my farm – a little place that I call my farm – in Simcoe County, Ontario, where I have, gentlemen, nearly ten acres, without counting two acres of bush.”

I could feel a distinct wave of interest pass over the audience. They seemed to draw their chairs sympathetically nearer to me.

“Yes, gentlemen,” I continued, “ten acres and a little bush. The bush, I admit, is mostly soft maple and ash with a little black birch, and I know that you will at once tell me that you don’t call that first-class hard wood. No, neither do I. But it is easy to cut, gentlemen, and you can get in there with your portable saw most any time. But, as I say, in regard to this Diplomatic Situation in Europe, I went up to my place then – it’s just off the Muskoka Highway; if any of you come up ask at Hatley’s store – to work up this question, and I found it hard to do so. You see, gentlemen, we had, in our section, as no doubt you had, a rather mean spring this year – an early thaw that took off the snow and that sharp frost that winter-killed a lot of the fall wheat,”

All over the audience I could see men nodding in confirmation. “It hit the apple trees hard, gentlemen; I lost about half a dozen Macintosh red, just coming nicely into bearing. I know you’ll at once all ask me why I hadn’t banked them up with manure in the fall. Well, I’ll tell you, gentlemen, I don’t believe in it. No, sir!” I could sense sensation, denial and corroboration rippling all round among the audience.

“I hold that if you bank up your young trees that way, you soften them. They lose body and the fruit is never really firm; and, what’s more, gentlemen, you have all kinds of bugs, as you know, getting round your roots. Well, I wouldn’t enlarge on it!”

I could hear a sigh of disappointment.

“All I’m saying,” I went on, “is that what with one thing and another there was too much to do round the place to let me get at this question of the Diplomatic Situation in Europe, on which I was invited here to address you. You know how crowded a man gets on a little place like that, especially just at seeding time with everything coming on at once. You haven’t the leisure, the spare time, of city folks. And then I was specially anxious, gentlemen, as soon as the spell of really fine weather should set in, I was specially anxious to have another try at early cucumbers. I don’tknow whether any of you gentlemen have ever tried early cucumbers-”

Had they? I could see by the thrill of excitement, the tenseness of this luncheon audience, that they all had!

“But if you have, then you know that early cucumbers are a mighty speculative thing! It takes nerve! One nasty frost and you may lose a dozen plants at a crack. You don’t feel safe, at least not up with us, not clear through till the first of June. You can start them all right, that’s not the trouble, I admit, but it’s when you come to set them out!”

They were listening, breathless.

“The gentleman sitting next to me but one – who is, I understand, a member of your State Senate – says he does fairly well with his cucumbers by starting them in a greenhouse. He says that last year he had eight, or was it nine, really fine plants, started that way, though he admits he took a lot of trouble with them. But I don’t think, gentlemen, that you’ll ever enjoy the flavour in a cucumber started in a greenhouse. Now, I’ll tell you my plan – and I give it you for what it’s worth.”

There was tense excitement now all over the audience.

“You take an old sod and cut it with your jack-knife into about a four-inch square, turn it upside down and put your seed into that!”

Sensation!

“Then take your sods and set them in rows in a hot bed with lots of first-class manure, gentlemen – and I know I need not tell men like you that when I say manure, I mean real manure with lots of body, not just a lot of dry straw. You want heat. But I need not tell men like you what manure is. Use lots of it and tramp it well down, till you’re satisfied. Give it a four-inch layer of the best dirt you can lay your hands on, put your sods on, and you’ll get real results.

“But what I mean about this Diplomatic Situation in Europe is that I didn’t get time to work it up; in fact, to be quite frank, I’ll go so far as to say that I don’t give a damn about it anyway! I’d rather be up on my ten-acre farm setting out cucumbers than loafing round all the Chancelleries of Europe, or whatever they call them – and unless I am much mistaken, so would you, every one of you!”

There was deafening applause. They said it was one of the finest talks they’d heard for years. And later the reporters of the papers – you know how clever those boys are – had it all fixed up under the heading “Home Agricultural Interest First Claim on Nation,” and so I saw what I had really meant.

But meantime I had drifted out of the place and over to one of the big city clubs, feeling pretty well elated. Till now, though my friends have often been kind enough to put me up, I’ve been afraid to go into those metropolitan Clubs. But this time I walked into the lounge-room of one of the swellest of them with absolute confidence. I was beginning to understand the city.

It was the quiet hour of the club day, the early afternoon. There was hardly anyone in the lounge except a couple of ministers – clergymen. I knew what they were by their quiet black dress and their kind serious faces. One of them, I could see by his gaiters, must be an Episcopal bishop. I didn’t want to overhear their talk, as I felt sure it would deal with some of their spiritual ministrations, and be, in a way, private. But I couldn’t help it. The Bishop was saying:

“Then just as she seemed to be getting along so well, something went wrong.” He paused and shook his head and repeated “something went wrong!”

“Till then,” the other asked anxiously, “she had seemed quite all right?”

“Quite,” said the Bishop. “Quite! A little restless, perhaps, at times. But then I thought that meant merely that the flies were troubling her. She’d been giving eight to ten quarts every morning and at least six at night. . . .”

“Perhaps,” said the other in gentle admonishment, “perhaps you put her on the grass too early?”

“She hadn’t been on the grass,” said the Bishop slowly, and added with a groan, “We were still feeding her chop!”

There was a pause, I could see that they were old friends, and that argument was painful to them, yet the lesser clergyman said firmly, “I know we mustn’t dispute it again; but don’t you think, perhaps, that Holsteins – I say it with all gentleness . . .”

I rose and moved quietly away. I knew that they were going to talk of the unsolved problem of the Holstein versus the Jersey cow, beside which squaring the circle is child’s play: but I couldn’t bear to hear it; our last little Jersey – but no, no, never mind. The country, too, like the city, has its sharp tragedies.

—

So now, I know the city and I’m not afraid of it. I understand city men. As they sit in their palatial hotels tney are dreaming of morning mists rising off the pasture in the river valley. As they study at their meals their bills of fare, they are not looking at such items as Pate Bourguignon à la Marengo, which the Chef sticks on the list to remind himself of France. What they are trying to find is Flop-Over Pancakes, Honey, and Liver and Bacon à la Wabash. And when the orchestra starts its softest music, they’ll close their eyes and hear the drone of the cow-bells in the bush.

The Great City! There’s no such place. It’s just where people go, bravely enough, to earn the money to get back home.

I know now that I can go down to Wall Street, New York, with a bag of soy beans under one arm and a hen under the other, and borrow all the money I want.

—The Leacock Roundabout (1959).

TOC     INDEX

Are Witty Women
Attractive to Men?

Slaves murmur to one another in their chains. They whisper what they think of their masters. In the same way the generality of men, being enslaved by women, whisper, when in safety, what they think. Slave No. 1 in his Club murmurs to Slave No. 2 that women have no sense of humour. Slave No. 2 agrees, and Slave No. 3, overhearing from his armchair, says quite boldly, “They certainly have not.” After which quite a colloquy ensues among the slaves. But when the wife of Slave No. 1 asks at dinner what was the talk at the Club, he answers, “Oh, nothing much.” Yet his inmost feeling is that women have no sense of humour, and if a woman is witty, she has somehow come by it wrongly. He daren’t speak right out, but I will speak for him.

Having been asked to answer the question, “Are witty women attractive to men,” I answer decidedly, “No.” Having said this I dodge behind the Editor and explain it.

There are, of course, a lot of immediate qualifications to be made to it. In the first place, are witty people in general attractive to anybody? Not as a rule. They get tiresome. It is terribly hard to be witty without getting conceited about it. I used to be very witty myself, till I learned to be careful about it. People don’t like it. There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike – information and wit. Most people – most men at any rate – like to gather up information out of the Digests, which are the passion of the hour. But they won’t take it from you. You’re not a Digest. So, too, with wit. They’ve learned by experience that if they laugh at one thing, they’ll have to go on. . . . So if this applies to men with men, it applies all the more to men with women. Luckily women don’t go in for information; or if they give it, it is so incorrect as to be harmless.

In the next place, it goes without saying that some witty women are attractive to some men. This, by a happy disposition of providence, happens to all kinds of women, like attracting unlike. Hence witty women always have silent husbands. That’s why they got married. There is a particularly decent type of man who finds it restful not to have to talk. When, in his youth, he meets a girl who talks all the time, that exactly suits him. He doesn’t have to say anything. Ten years later you’ll see them enter a drawing room together. The host says to the man, “Looks like an early winter,” and he answers, “Certainly does!” The host says, “Have a cocktail,” and he answers, “Certainly will.” By that time his wife has started in on the conversation; he doesn’t have to talk any more. People commonly call this type an adoring husband. He isn’t. His wife is just a sort of fire screen. The real adoring husband overtalks his wife, overdominates her, pays with unexpected presents for easy forgiveness of his ill temper, and never knows that he adored her till it is too late, because now she cannot hear it. . . .

We will add another qualification, that one reason why some men don’t care for the society of witty women is because of their own egotism. They want to be it. A wise woman sitting down to talk beside such a man will not try to be witty. She will say, “I suppose you’re just as busy as ever!”

All men, you see, have the idea that they are always busy, and if they are not, a woman can soon persuade them that they are. Just say, “I don’t see how you do it all,” without saying what all is.

Another very good opening for women sufficiently self-possessed is to say, “Well, I hear you are to be congratulated again!” You see there is always something; either the office staff gave him a stick last month, or the Rotary Club elected him an Elder Brother. He’ll find something. If he doesn’t, then say to him that if he hasn’t heard of it yet, you are certainly not going to tell. Then don’t see him for a month, till the Fireman’s Benevolent Union has elected him an Honorary Ash Can. He’ll get something if you wait.

So you see there are ever so many ways for women to make a hit without trying to be witty.

Nor have women, themselves, any particular use for witty men. Instinctively they admire courage, though unhappily courage often goes with brutality and savagery. In the next degree they admire the courage of character of strong people on whom one can rely. But intellect comes last. Unhappily, women also have their superficial admirations, things they fall for – it’s too bad, but they do. Women are apt to fall for a poet, for anything with long hair and a reputation. Round him they cluster, searching his thoughts. He probably hasn’t got any. But wit, in all the procession, comes last, with only a cap and bells behind it.

Another thing is this. By this very restriction of their province of humour, women are saved from some of the silly stuff that affects the conversation of men. Take puns. They have pretty well died out now. The last of the punsters is probably dead, or in hiding. But many of us can still remember the social nuisance of the inveterate punster. This man followed conversation as a shark follows a ship, or, to shift the simile, he was like Jack Horner and stuck in his thumb to pull out a pun. Women never make puns; never did; they think them silly. Perhaps they can’t make them – I hope not.

Nor have women that unhappy passion for repeating funny stories in order to make a hit, which becomes a sort of mental obsession with many men. The “funny story” is a queer thing in our American life. I think it must have begun on the porch of the Kentucky store where they whittled sticks all day. At any rate, it has become a kind of institution. It is now a convention that all speakers at banquets must begin with a funny story. I am quite sure that if the Archbishop of Canterbury were invited to address the Episcopal Church of America, the senior bishop would introduce him with a story about an old darky, and the Archbishop would rise to reply with a story about a commercial traveller. These stories run riot in our social life and often turn what might be a pleasant dinner into an agonized competition, punctuated with ruminating silence. Women keep away from this. They like talk about people, preferably about themselves, or else about their children, with their husband as a poor third, and Winston Churchill competing with Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek for fourth place. It may not be funny but it’s better than darkies and commercial travellers. . . .

There is also the most obvious qualification to be made in regard to women’s sense of humour in general and women’s wit in particular, that of course individual exceptions, however conspicuous, do not set aside the general rule. There is no doubt that at least one of the most brilliant humorists of the hour in America is a woman. Many would say, the most brilliant. Such a faculty for reproducing by simple transcription the humour of social dialogue has, it seems to me, never been surpassed. But one swallow doesn’t make a summer, though one drop of ink may make all humour kin.

The truth is that the ideal of ordinary men is not a witty woman, but a sweet woman. I know how dangerous the term is, how easily derided. Sweetness may easily cloy into sugariness, or evaporate into saintliness. A saint with hair parted in the middle, with eyes uplifted, may be all right for looking out from the golden bars of heaven, but not so good for the cocktail bars below.

And yet, I don’t know. A saint can kick in sideways anywhere.

It might easily be objected that all such opinions about sweetness in women are just left-over Victorianism, half a century out of date. Witty women, it will be said, may have seemed out of date in the stodgy days of women’s servitude, but not now. The men and women of today – or call them the boys and girls – mix on an entirely different plane. All the old hoodoos and taboos are gone. All the girls smoke. They use language just as bad as any the men care to use. They drink cocktails and give the weaker men the cherry. In other words, they can curse and swear and drink – they’re real comrades. In point of physique, they may not be equal to the men but after all they can drive a car and fly a plane and telemark all over hell on skis – what more do you want?

So why shouldn’t a girl of that type, the new girl who has conquered the world, be witty if she wants to? What more charming than a witty girl, half-stewed, as compared with a girl half-stewed and silent as a toad full of gravel?

To all of which I answer, “No, no, it’s just an illusion!” There are no new girls, no new women. Your grandmother was a devil of a clip half a century before you were born. You telemark on skis; she cut ice in a cutter. You only knew her when she was wrinkled and hobbling, reading the Epistle to the Thessalonians in a lace cap and saying she didn’t know what the world was coming to. The young have always been young, and the old always old . . . men and women don’t change. It took thousands, uncounted thousands, of years to make them what they are. The changes that you think you see lie just on the surface. You could wash them away with soap and hot water.

But now I’ll tell you another thing. All this new era of ours of emancipated women, and women in offices and women the same as men, is just a passing phase, and the end of it is already in sight. A great social disaster fell on the world. The industrial age built up great cities where people lived, crowded into little boxes, where there was no room for children, where women’s work vanished because they were dispossessed, where national population was kept going by additions from God knows where, and national safety was jeopardized by the increasing scarcity of our own people. . . . We had a close shave of it.

Then came the war in the air. . . . It has bombed the industrial city out of future existence. They know that already in England. The bomb is decentralizing industry, spreading the population out. They will never go back. This will mean different kinds of homes, homes half-town, half-country, with every man his acre. . . . Every one’s dream for a little place in the country, a place to call one’s own, will come true. Socialized up to the neck, the individual will have its own again under his feet.

And the children? There must be four or five for every marriage. It is the only path of national safety, safety by the strength and power of our kin and kind, bred in our common thought and speech and ideal. Without our own children, the wave of outside brutes from an unredeemed world will kill us all. Later, we can redeem the world but we must save ourselves first. . . . Everybody will know that. In re-organized society the nation’s children will be the first need, the main expense of government. Women who see to that need see to nothing else. . . . That will be done in the home, for there will be no paid domestic service except contract labour by the hour from the outside, labour as good as ladyship, wearing a gold wrist watch and a domestic college degree. . . . But the main thing will be the home and behind it the long garden and trim grass and flower and vegetable beds, and father trying to plant a cherry tree from a book.

When England has been bombed into the country, America will follow. Our cities will go, too. . . . No one will live in New York any more than miners live in a coal mine.

So the world will be all different. One little century will do it. Even half a century will show the full outline of it. Surviving on . . . surviving on into this altered world will be the queerest old set of left-over creatures, as queer as our left-over Victorians, only queerer. These old women will be happy and alert and self-assertive, but they will still not know how to fry an egg or repeat a nursery rhyme, for they only had three-quarters of a child each. . . . The boys and girls of twenty will think them very funny. . . . But my! Won’t they be witty when they get together and cackle.

So that, you see, is why I don’t think witty women are attractive to men. You don’t see the connection? Well, perhaps you remember Molière’s play called The Doctor by Accident (Le Médecin Malgré Lui) where the supposed doctor, called in to diagnose a case, gets off a vast rigmarole about nothing in particular and adds at the end, “. . . and that is why your daughter has lost her speech.” You see, he didn’t know anything about it.

Possibly it was like that.

—Last Leaves (1946).

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Living with Murder

I am a great reader of detective fiction. That is, I have been up to now, but I see I shall have to give it up. It begins to affect one’s daily life too much. I am always expecting something sudden, something sensational, to happen, such as that a criminal will “burst around the corner” on the run and I shall immediately have to “time” his burst.

They always time everything in the stories, so as to have it ready for the evidence.

That is why I now find myself perpetually “timing” myself all day, so that I can swear to everything.

For instance, I went down to dine three or four days ago with my old friend Jimmy Douglas at his house. He lives alone. This, by itself, would make any reader of crime fiction time him. I paused a moment at the lighted doorway before ringing the bell and noted that my watch said 7:00 p.m. A street clock just visible down the street, however, marked 7:02 1/2 p.m. Allowing for the fact that my watch was one minute slow, I was thus able to place the time fairly accurately as at 7:01 1/4.

What did I do that for? Well, don’t you see – what if I rang the bell, received no answer, and at length pushed the door open (it would yield quite easily) to find Jimmy Douglas lying prone in the doorway? That would settle the time, wouldn’t it? And what if he were still warm (he would be, good fellow)? That would settle just how warm he was.

So I rang the bell. The Chinese servant who answered the door showed me noiselessly into the lighted sitting room and motioned me to sit down. The room was apparently empty. I say apparently, because in the stories you never know. If Douglas’s body was lying hunched up in a corner (you know the way they hunch them up), my business was to take care to look up in the air, around the room, everywhere except in the right place to see him.

I did this and I noticed that there was an Ormolu clock on the mantel (there always is) and that it stood at 7:04 p.m., practically corroborating my previous estimate.

I was just checking it over when Douglas came in.

I noticed his manner at once and could only describe it as extremely normal, even quiet, certainly, I would say, free from any exhilaration. Whether this was a first effect of arsenic poisoning, or just from seeing me, I am not prepared to state.

We had a cocktail. Douglas left two distinct fingerprints on the glass. I held mine by the rim.

We sat down to dinner at 7:30 p.m. Of this, I am practically certain because I remember that Douglas said, “Well, it’s half-past,” and as he said it the Ormolu clock chimed the half-hour. A further corroboration is that the Chinese servant entered at that moment and said, “Half-past seven!” I gather, therefore, that the hour was either seven-thirty or possibly a little before or a little after.

At any rate – not to make too much of details – we sat down to dinner. I noticed that at dinner Douglas took no soup. I attached no importance to this at the time, so as to keep it for afterwards. But I also took care on my part to take no fish. This, of course, in the event of arsenic poison would at least, by elimination, give a certain indication of how the poison had been administered. Up to this point the Chinese servant’s manner was quite normal, in fact, Chinese.

I am not able to say whether Douglas took coffee after dinner; I slipped up there. I had got talking, I remember, of my views on Allied Strategy and for the moment forgot not only to time him but to notice what he ate. This makes an unfortunate gap in the record.

However, Douglas, I noticed, seemed but little inclined to talk after dinner. I was still unfolding to him my views on Allied Strategy in the war, but he seemed unable to listen without signs of drowsiness. This obviously might be due to arsenic poisoning.

I left at nine, having noticed that Douglas roused up with a slight start as the Ormolu clock struck, and said, “Nine! I thought . . . I thought it was ten.”

I drove home in a taxi; and can easily identify the taxi, even if abandoned in a stone quarry, by a mark I made in the leather. I can identify the taxi man by a peculiar scar.

That, as I say, was three days ago. I open the newspaper every morning with a nervous hand, looking for the finding of Douglas’s body. They don’t seem to have found it yet. Of course I don’t know that he lost it. But then it is never known that a body is lost until some one finds it.

One thing is certain, however. I am all ready if they do. . . . If any news comes out I can act at once. I have the taxi man, and the fingerprints and the Ormolu clock – that’s all you need usually.

—Last Leaves (1946).

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What Can
Izaak Walton Teach Us?

Everybody – or at least everybody who goes fishing, and the rest don’t count – knows the name of Izaak Walton. Many of them would also remember that he was called the Father of Angling and that he wrote a book called The Compleat Angler. This is acknowledged to be one of the world’s books. Only the trouble is that the world doesn’t read its books, it borrows a detective story instead.

So it may not be without interest to outdoor people – anglers, men of the bush and streams and such – to turn over again the pages of the old volume and see what Izaak Walton can teach us. This, especially, if we can catch something of the leisurely procedure, the old-time courtesy and, so to speak, the charming tediousness of people with lots of time, now lost in our distracted world.

Izaak Walton, let us pretend to remember, was born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1593) but lived so long and so peacefully – old fishermen never die; they merely fade away – that he only passed away at the age of ninety at the end of the Stuart period. People reading The Compleat Angler would take him for a country gentleman. But he wasn’t. Indeed, in the phrase of the times he wasn’t a gentleman at all. He came to London from the little town of Stafford and in London he kept an ironmonger’s shop in the very heart of the city. It was so small a place that there was hardly room to turn around in, certainly not with a fishing rod, for it was only six feet by seven feet six inches.

But it must have been a grand little place from which to dream of the woods and meadows around Stafford and to let the noise of the city die on his ear till he could catch the murmur of the babbling streams. . . . Thus you may see today, if you have the eye for it, many an imprisoned, incomplete angler working at a desk with the sound of a waterfall in his ears, or selling across a sporting goods counter the tackle that he never has the good fortune to use.

Walton says that fishermen are the Lord’s own people, and no doubt he’s right. “The primitive Christians,” he remarks, “were, as most anglers are, quiet men and followers of peace.” He undertakes to prove it from the fact that four of the Apostles actually were fishermen, and these four taught all the others to fish. Thus worked Izaak Walton till he was over fifty years old.

But, oddly enough, he made money, and soon was able to move to larger quarters on Fleet Street. Ironmongery was evidently all the thing in the days of the English Civil War. So when the great battles were over and there was peace, iron peace, under Oliver Cromwell, Izaak Walton gave up his London life, and bought himself the thing of which all anglers dream – a little place in the country, his own country – and all his dreams came true.

From then on, for some forty years, Izaak Walton spent a life of leisure, or of leisure broken with leisurely activity. At times he was on his own little place; at times he wandered about the country a welcome and indefinite guest, an old man who never grew older, who had said good-bye to the world and its troubles, and to whom Roundhead and Royalist were all one. Especially he sought, and was welcome in, the homes of the clergy. He had been greatly assisted in his London days by the famous Dr. John Donne, Vicar of St. Dunstan’s. Both his wives, for he married twice, were of clerical families; he seems to have borne married life easily, a basis, as with some among us now, from which to go fishing. For his last twenty years he wandered and fished alone. When he died he left his little place to the poor of the parish.

He wrote his Compleat Angler, so to speak, while angling. The first edition of it was mainly thought out in his Fleet Street days, the fruit of odd holidays and chance journeys. But later, with copious leisure and larger experience, he kept finding new things to put into the book, new verses, new jests and even new people.

As even casual readers remember, The Compleat Angler is built up on talks between various characters. They meet and go fishing together and they talk; or they can’t go fishing, so they talk; or they come in from fishing and they talk. Some of us do it still. And in among the talk they have so many pleasant cups of ale and draughts of the “best barley wine,” that it’s a pleasure to be with them; plenty to smoke, also, from the long pipes of the period, for tobacco, in spite of King James I, had now come into its own. Indeed, the comfortable entertainment begins in Chapter 1, page 1, paragraph 1, of The Compleat Angler. An angler, Piscator, accosts two travellers on the road with the words:

“You are well overtaken, Gentlemen! A good morning to you both! I have stretched my legs up Tottenham Hill to overtake you, hoping your business may occasion you toward Ware, whither I am going this fine fresh May morning.”

“Sir,” replies one of them, “I, for my part, shall almost answer your hopes; for my purpose is to drink my morning’s draught at the Thatch’d House in Hoddesden.”

So away they wander together, talking of fishing, so that the three miles to Hoddesden seem nothing, and there they are at the Thatch’d House, and must needs all enter together “for a cup of drink and a little rest.”

What fisherman, then or now, could pass a Thatch’d House?

Thus it was with the freshness of the morning; but equally so with the pleasant weariness of the evening after a long day.

“Come, Hostess, where are you? Is supper ready? Come, first give us drink and be as quick as you can for we are all very hungry. . . . Come, Hostess, more ale . . . and when we have supped, let’s have your song!”

The early people in these wayside talks were a fisherman, Piscator, and a traveller, Viator. But later on Izaak thought it a good idea to let the second man be a huntsman, Venator, and then he put in a third who was called Auceps, which we understand to mean a falconer, a man who hunts birds with birds. Time has dropped him clean out. Today we would have to make him an Airman. That is probably exactly what Izaak Walton would have done, for he kept on putting in new things and new people till death made a final edition.

You ask perhaps, I hope not with impatience, what we can learn from Izaak Walton. Why, don’t you see we’ve learned a lot already; that fishing is the Apostles’ own calling; that fishing must be carried on in an atmosphere of good will and forbearance; that the longest story must never seem prosy; that a cup of ale beneath a tree is better than a civic banquet, and an old familiar song from a familiar singer outclasses grand opera.

And you can also learn, or learn over again, the peculiar and manifold charm of our English language. For what Izaak Walton writes is sufficiently like our own speech to be familiar, and sufficiently unlike to have a quaintness of its own. He has a chapter, for example, which he entitles How to fish for, and to dress, the Chavender, or Chub. A witty English writer of today was so impressed by the conversion of the everyday chub into the romantic chavender that he followed it up with a gallop of analogous synonyms:

There is a fine stuffed Chavender,

A Chavender, or Chub,

That decks the rural pavender,

The pavender, or pub,

Wherein I eat my gravender,

My gravender, or grub.

And so on, amazingly. But I must not further trespass on the good nature or the copyright of Mr. St. Leger whose complete poem may be found in the fascinating little anthology, The Comic Muse.

All these things you can learn from Izaak Walton. But if you ask what you can learn of the technique of fishing, the answer is that you can’t learn anything at all. The apparatus of the modern expert, the knowledge of trout and flies, the mechanisms of reels – all these have left good old Izaak two centuries and a half in the rear. All that he can teach is the spirit; yet the performance in the long run rests on that.

To take an example, nowadays we always connect trout fishing with the art of casting flies – an exquisite art, indeed, when at its highest. What more beautiful than a cast far across a wide stream to where the broken water ’round the end of a sunken log marks where a trout must lie? What more beautiful indeed, except the ensuing leap of the foolish trout itself, a victim of its own delusion. It is an art that, personally, I can envy but not share; I can never catch anything that way except willow trees.

But at least I have the consolation that Izaak Walton is in my company. He knew very little about casting flies and that was not his ordinary method of catching fish anyway. He caught them, as I do, and perhaps you, with anything they would eat, taken off anything they would eat it on.

This seems odd in view of the long discussion in The Compleat Angler on fly fishing and how to do it and how to make flies. The discussion, moreover, has its setting in one of these charming sylvan scenes – under a sycamore tree with wine and a snack of food – which are the very inspiration of the book.

“It is now past five of the clock,” says Piscator, meaning five in the morning; “we will fish till nine; and then go to breakfast. Go you to yon sycamore tree and hide your bottle of drink under the hollow root of it; for about that time, and in that place, we will make a brave breakfast with a piece of powdered beef and a radish or two that I have in my fish bag. We shall, I warrant you, make a good, honest, wholesome, hungry breakfast.”

But, as a matter of fact, Izaak Walton did not himself write the discussion of the “making and using of flies” which follows. He knew that he ought to have something of the sort in his book so he got a fellow angler to write it in, thereby lifting his friend Mr. Thomas Barker to an immortal seat beside himself. Mr. Barker was by trade a cook and may have aided also in the hints on cooking fish (“dressing the chavender, etc.”) that are freely inserted in the Angler. Mr. Barker is also said to have been a “humorist”; he may have helped with the jokes.

But all agree that when it comes to fishing with worms, grasshoppers and frogs, Izaak Walton was a past master. There is comfort here for those who suffer, as I do, from the insolent superiority of men who refuse to use bait. Izaak used nothing else. Indeed, many who knew very little about his book have heard the quotation from it about the use of a frog as bait: “Use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer.” The implication of a slow death behind the apparently kindly words is one that might make the coldest-blooded frog boil with indignation.

But the point is that Izaak Walton was out to get the fish. In the same way, he and his friends were fond of using little floats tied to sticks or anchored in the stream. This with us is viewed among good sports as the last resort of ignoble minds. Indeed, the game laws forbid that kind of fishing to all except Indians on a reservation. But to Izaak and his friends it represented the very best of sport and the rarest of opportunity. They had only to choose a grassy sward beneath a spreading sycamore, among whose roots babbled the passing stream, to fix their floats, pour out a cup of ale, light a long pipe and open a discussion on the Gospel of St. John or listen to Mr. Barker tell in his own humorous way how to cook a carp – and there you were. Leave the rest to the frog.

Indeed, Izaak Walton is willing to go a little further with “bait” than the stomachs of more degenerate anglers could tolerate. He specializes on worms, distinguishing earth worms from drug-worms, worms found in excrement and in dead flesh such as the maggot or gentle worm; to which are added lob worms, brandling worms for which we search in cow dung, “horse dung being somewhat too hot and dry for that worm.” Beside which an artificial fly on a bit of cardboard seems singularly clean and attractive.

Such dainty considerations are nothing to Izaak. He is out for fish. He’ll go even further if we let him. “If you desire,” he says, “to keep gentles, that is maggots, to fish with all the year, then get a dead cat and let it be fly-blown; and when the gentles begin to be alive and to stir, then bury it and them in soft, moist earth but as free from frost as you can; and these you may dig up at any time you intend to use them.”

And there you are. But if you don’t care to prepare the bait in this fashion, then Izaak explains to us a method of preparing the water of any likely pond, so as to make it attractive. “You are to throw into it,” he directs, “either grains, or blood mixed with cow dung or with bran; or any garbage as chicken guts or the like.”

If you are going to be an angler, the thing is to be a complete one. . . .

One might think that at least the discussions on cooking would be helpful, especially to us now in wartime days when we want to make the most of all kinds of food, and turn even coarse fish into something edible. The carp itself, the very fish which The Compleat Angler helps us to turn into a dainty dish, is very commonly thrown away with us in Canada as worthless – or else, if I may say it without offence, exported to the United States. Izaak Walton, I say, shows how to turn it into a dainty dish, and no doubt succeeded in doing it. But his process is quite beyond us. Here is the recipe:

“Put the Carp in a kettle; take sweet marjoram, thyme and parsley, each a handful; a sprig of rosemary and another of savoury; put them into two or three small bundles, and put them to your Carp with four or five whole onions, twenty pickled oysters and three anchovies—”

So far that’s only about three dollars’ worth of stuff, and you could gather it up in about a week, but wait:

“—Pour on your Carp enough claret as will cover him (lucky Carp!) and season your Carp well with salt, cloves and mace, and the rinds of oranges and lemons—”

We’re up now to about ten dollars:

“—That done, cover your pot and set it on a quick fire till it be sufficiently boiled. Then take out the Carp; and lay it, with the broth into the dish, and pour upon it a quarter of a pound of the best fresh butter, melted and beaten with half a dozen spoonfuls of the broth, the yokes of two or three eggs and some of the herbs shred; garnish your dish with lemons and so serve it up. And much good do you!”

I think so, too.

Thus lived and wandered Izaak Walton from middle age to old age and then on to immortality. Especially was he welcome, we are told, “in the families of the eminent clergy of England of whom he was much beloved.” Their kindness was returned. It was Izaak Walton’s secondary interest, in the pauses of his leisure, to write biographies, or perhaps eulogies, of his departed friends and benefactors, lay or cleric. Here belong Sir Henry Wotton, Dr. John Donne, Bishop Sanderson and others. Their names, once known, now half-forgotten, still float down the stream of time with The Compleat Angler.

—Last Leaves (1946).

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A Lecture on Walking

Walking – it has come to that. They’ve taken away our motor cars, crowded us off the trains, cut out week-end excursions and drained the gasoline out of the motor boats. There is nothing for it, in the way of outdoor sport, but walking.

So let us make a virtue of necessity and all go in for walking.

On this understanding I would like to deliver a lecture, in set form like a college lecture, on the subject of Walking. It will be a great pleasure to me to do so, for it is now six years since an ungrateful college foiled me, on the mere ground of senile decline, to give any more lectures, and took away all my students. So now for a brief hour I want them all back, lined up on the benches to listen to a lecture on Walking. I want especially, not the younger ones, but those well into middle life, or even wheezing their way into old age; pleasant, puffy, comfortable-looking fellows as seen sitting in a leather armchair in a club but in poor shape if you start them walking.

There! Line them up. You, sir, the large student on the left, you are, am I not right, the president of a bank? Well, you needn’t put on any plutocratic airs in this class. I doubt if you could walk half a mile. You say you played left wing on the football team? I don’t doubt it. But I want you all to understand, gentlemen, that it’s no use your talking about exercise you took thirty years ago. That won’t help you now. You, sir, just sitting down on my left, are, I believe, an Anglican Bishop. Now, don’t tell me about your championship high jump in 1910. Everybody knows, on the side, that you jumped your way into your bishopric. How high could you jump now?

Now, gentlemen, please open your notebooks and write the heading WALKING, and then when I come to each important point, I’ll tell you what to write. Don’t write till I tell you. Remember how we used to do it.

You might begin, please, with a little note, “Professor’s own experience: a devotee of walking for many years: has walked the Montreal mountain every morning nearly as far as the cemetery.” On second thought, gentlemen, please delete the phrase, “nearly as far as the cemetery.” It might be misunderstood.

And what is more, gentlemen, I am led by such walks to observe how little of walking for walking’s sake survives today. It is my experience again and again to walk Mount Royal at nine o’clock in the morning and see not a soul in sight. The motor car, gentlemen, has grave sins to answer for in cutting us out from the air and exercise that once were ours. Look at yourselves, gentlemen: I need hardly say more.

Now will you please write in your notes, “Definition of Walking,” and for that I will ask you to turn to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 23, page 301, division 1, or, if you prefer it, don’t turn to it but take my word for it, and write it at my dictation. “Walking is the art of progression by setting one foot methodically before the other and is the most venerable and universal way of locomotion among mankind, and has been for a million years.” The same authority explains further, in regard to the technique of walking, that in plain straightforward walking one must not lift one foot into the air before the other has come down to the ground; in other words, the walker must not have both his feet in the air. This caution, in your case, gentlemen, makes me smile: I don’t think there is much fear of any of you leaving the ground with both feet at once. All you need to understand from this is to distinguish walking in the proper sense from shuffling, which is what you do from your club lounge to your club dining room, and shambling, which is what you do when compelled to go along the street a hundred yards to look for a taxi.

Nor are we concerned here with the technique of walking when it becomes part of competitive athletics, for it’s far too strenuous, I fear, for any of you. Walking in that form is, happily, dying out. Walking matches used to be held on a terrific scale two generations ago, both in England and in this country. Seven-mile walking races for an American championship were introduced in 1876, and in the present century the revival of the Olympic Games led to walking marathons on a scale of one to twenty-five miles. Walking, in this strenuous and distressing sense, seems to me, gentlemen, as no doubt to you, a ghastly business. I am thinking of walking only as the gentle and kindly exercise of the man who cannot spend his whole day indoors and must perforce be out in the open – as the relaxation of the office worker, tired of ink and paper and four walls, as the inspiration of the poet, and as the quiet saunter of the daydreamer.

I will ask you, gentlemen, to make a note here on that word saunter, as well illustrating our subject. Kindly mark it, “Interesting note by professor on word SAUNTER.” This term, you will be surprised and delighted to hear, is one of the most curious in our language. It is derived from Sainte Terre (Holy Land). In early, pious days a knight with sins that needed absolution and a soul that needed redemption made a Sainte Terre, a Holy Land pilgrimage. This was originally a journey beset with danger, nobly braved.

Presently, with beautiful travel up the Mediterranean among olive groves and enchanted islands, the pilgrimage turned into a saunter, a delightful dream journey. So will you, too, find it, gentlemen, if you will take the practice of a daily walk. At first, you will find it a hard matter to gird up your loins (as near as you can find them) and step out three, four, five miles or more at a stretch. But with habit and continuance, and above all with the regularity that never misses, walking will become of such unconscious ease that you will, as it were, step out of yourself and find yourself sauntering – timeless, effortless, with no other thought beyond the quiet pleasure of not thinking. I cannot forbear to quote again from this high authority cited ahead, which thus expounds this aspect of a customary walk. “Walking in the nobler sense is a measured progress inspired of the woods and hills, by rivers and the flowers of the field, a serene partaking of the enduring sources of joy.”

Well, gentlemen, with such an admirable ideal before us, I think we may now come down to particulars such as the question of companionship in walking, of hours and times and places, and the particular routine and regularity, if any, with which we see fit to surround it.

I begin, then, with the question of companionship. Should one walk alone, or is it better to walk with a companion? I think I hear a member of the class saying behind his hand, “What about women?” – and I may say I don’t like the expression of his eye as he said it, nor the nudge he gave the student next to him, in whom I think I recognize one of our leading stockbrokers. Well, gentlemen, since the question of women has come up, I’ll answer it. You are all, I am sure, elderly or, at any rate, discreet men, who would not, I am sure, repeat outside of the class anything said here in confidence. And in that sense I say, “Have nothing to do with going for walks with a woman.” You will find her, gentlemen, a bore and a nuisance, or else you will find her too interesting, and in that case, gentlemen, there is no telling where your walks will lead you. Understand, gentlemen, that in this matter there can be no middle path. I am aware that some of you perhaps will say that you are able to associate with women as “comrades” – yes, that is the word – that you look on them as comrades. All I can say is that if you do, you are a nut. I had not intended to bring up this topic of walking with women, and will let it go at that. I will admit, of course, that you may, if you wish, go for a walk with your little granddaughter or grandniece of thirteen, provided that you make her keep her mouth shut. It will make a very pretty picture, your walking with her among the falling autumn leaves, especially if you keep well in the front of the picture yourself, and keep the child in the background.

But, far better, walk with a man of your own kind and size, and congenial in the sense that you have nothing in particular to say to one another. Silence, if deliberate, is artificial and irritating; but silence that is unconscious gives human companionship without human boredom. But if, by habit, you and your companion must talk, then take care to agree about everything all the time. Whatever he says, you say, “That’s very true,” and then you don’t need to listen to what he’s saying. If you miss a piece of it, you say, “That’s very true when you come to think of it,” and by that means you don’t need to come to think of it at all. . . . There is, indeed, no better companionship than this trudging along, almost without conversation, but not quite, or at best with a repetition of the same remarks that have done duty between you already for years past.

Above all, gentlemen, avoid walking with a nature lover. Nothing spoils a walk so much as the observance of “nature”; I mean the details of the coming and going of birds, of the arrival of the first woodpecker and the departure of the last crow, and the first touch of green on the willow and the last seared yellow of the birch leaf. Leave all that stuff out. When you’re walking, you’re just out-of-doors – that’s all. You’re not an almanac.

A gentleman in the class asked me, “How long should one walk every day, to call it walking?” The question is an excellent one, so excellent that I was coming to it anyway. I will answer thus, “The ideal walk should last up to the point where one is comfortably tired.” That happy phrase covers it all. Some of you, I fear, would be uncomfortably tired in about a quarter of an hour. But a man in any sort of condition has not begun to walk till he has walked for half an hour. Observe that a man’s duties in the daytime generally prevent him from taking a real walk in the earlier hours of the day. Hence, to practise walking, probably the walker must walk twice a day. The morning walk of a mere half-hour before office or lecture time is rounded out by the real walk when the day’s work is done and dinner still two hours away. You must come in, gentlemen, from your walk to your food; that is the real sequence: half an hour before breakfast or half an hour before lunch, and then the real thing, a six-mile walk (two hours), and come in comfortably tired to dinner with such an appetite as you have never had since you left the old farm, which all successful men in this country left at the age of twelve.

You will perhaps object that after such a walk you would be good for nothing in the evening. Quite so. That’s what you ought to be good for. But, my dear sir, if you will let me say it to you quite frankly, what good do you think you are in the evening anyway? What you mean is that if you don’t walk and don’t take any exercise in the open air in the afternoon, then after dinner you can get half “lit up,” and “go strong” – I think that was your phrase – till one in the morning. That’s right, and go all flabby when you get up the next morning.

But how much better to get that comfortably tired feeling, to eat that marvellous dinner, and after it to sit down in front of a good fire, with a pipe of tobacco and a book of Ancient History, and a decanter in sight out of the corner of your eye – and then, in less than no time, off you drowse to sleep – the book, the decanter, the pipe, all forgotten – and stay asleep till bedtime. . . .

That’s what walking will do: and that is why it has lasted a million years.

But, gentlemen, I hear your motor cars outside. Your chauffeurs are getting impatient. The class is dismissed.

—Last Leaves (1946).

TOC     INDEX

Good-bye, Motor Car!

For the time being, the pleasure use of the motor car has disappeared from our world. It is likely that it will be a long time in coming back. Even the earliest victory that we can reasonably expect must be followed by a strenuous period of reproduction and restoration during which the world’s depleted rubber supply will be absorbed in more essential operations than those of motoring for pleasure.

It is only now that we realize to what extent the motor car had come to shape and fashion all our leisure. Older and slower things were pushed aside, compressed into small compass or speeded up into newer and bigger forms. Golf changed from a quiet pursuit in a local pasture beside the town to a vast, mechanized organization carried on twenty miles from everywhere and transforming farms and fields to a clipped landscape of little flags, and a palace club house that grew and grew till it’s become too expensive for its own members. People used to play golf in the ex-cow-pasture at five dollars a year. Lately they were just able to keep up their annual fee by never going out to play. It was the motor car that did this.

During the same period the motor car killed fishing. Sitting in a punt at one end of a rod was too slow; fishing around home at the old rate of two bites an hour, two bass a day, and two drinks a man, was just hopeless as beside a motor trip one hundred miles to Lake Katchehoochee, where you can get a motor boat for only ten dollars, and a man to run it for five dollars, and where there’s the fine big Katchehoochee Inn, all built of spruce logs set on end, with piazzas and chromium cocktail bars and everything à la carte so as to cost more.

It was the motor car that did all that.

With fishing went boat sailing – the real old boat sailing in the real old sailboats. As far as I know, it has vanished from our inland waters. It survives only beside the open sea where people must use real sailboats and do real sailing in them or get drowned.

But on the inland waters there is no time for that. Sailing has given place to a sort of aquatic circus in a thing called a sailing dinghy, all bottom and no sides, all gunwale and no seats, all sail and no place to pour a drink. It has to be that way, because sailing has to be done in a form to fit in with driving a motor car ten to twenty miles to a sort of sailing meet, where a whole flight of dinghies skim over the water, as beautiful to look at as all such wicked things are.

Boys and girls in bathing suits line the gunwales of the boats – in bathing suits because, of course, they expect to be upset. They feel disgraced if they don’t get upset; in the old days we felt disgraced if we did. There they sit, like birds on a swaying bough, wonderfully dexterous, tanned and bronzed and coloured and trimmed till they look as good as an advertisement. What they do is wonderful, but it isn’t worth doing, or only for people who live so fast that they have no time for better.

But, above all, please do not let them think that that sort of thing is boat sailing, and that the contraption they are sailing in is a boat. A boat, a sailboat, used to mean, and still does mean beside the sea, a boat that is not meant to capsize, that is not meant to roll over sixty degrees in every squall. You don’t “hang on” to a real sailboat because you are inside it – smoking. You don’t have a row of girls sitting out on the gunwale because in a real sailboat you don’t use girls. You may “take them out” on a fine afternoon with a wind that is guaranteed neither to rise nor to fall, but real sailing, as it used to be, was too long and too slow to be enjoyed by a mixed community of souls. . . .

Nowadays, you see, the whole of the dinghy sailing is planned on the idea that, of course, you will all be back in time to dance at the Club House, or the Chop House, or the Old Windmill, or wherever the crowd will fly to after the sailboats are all capsized. . . .

But the old boat sailing was planned as a thing in itself, to take all afternoon if one only had an afternoon, all day if one had a whole day, all the end of the week from Friday till Monday (oddly enough we never called it the “week end” – that was a fashionable English term that sounded affected) . . . but, as I say, from Friday to Monday if you had all that, and then, for a vacation, sailing joined hands with camping, and there you were.

The scenes where the sailing and camping were done were the inland lakes like Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching which lie beside me, one to the right and one to the left, as I write this article . . . beautiful lakes, two among hundreds. Before the motor car came, their waters were flecked with the sails of real sailboats – large sloops half-decked, heavily ballasted, with a main boom that would kill an ox if you let it jibe; Mackinaw two-masted boats patterned from the Upper Lakes’ fishing trade, bow and stern both sharp, the sternpost six to seven feet high, a cuddy forward and the rest open; and, with these, the boats we then called “yachts” – deep-draft boats with leaded keels, decked over, with a cabin with a folding table and four bunks . . . and with these again a great number of smaller sailboats, every one seaworthy.

A dinghy of today in a fair breeze would pass all this old fleet as if it weren’t there. But then the old fleet would just sail on anyway, still smoking and with the sheets tied, against the rule that everybody made and everybody broke.

You see, they wouldn’t care about the empty dinghy swishing by them because they are “going camping,” and are down to the hatches with cargo. This, you see, is not a sail at all, but a voyage.

You notice the mattresses all rolled up tight and stowed under the foredeck, so that they will only get half-wet instead of completely soaked . . . there are the dunnage bags in which each man has his other duck trousers; there’s the box full of canned food and the other one with the jar of whiskey and the keg of lager . . . lying on top of this stuff – for after all you need something to read – is a copy of a paper called Tit-bits. It will last three men four days because it is all made up of little bits about the height of the Pyramids, and you can begin anywhere and stop any time. That is how Lord Northcliffe made a fortune.

So away blows the old sailboat farther and farther out on the lake till all you see over the waves is just the bobbing patch of white that is the mainsail.

Perhaps, some day, it may turn around and come back again.

But meantime the motor car killed out the sailboat and with it the camping that was its associate. Camping was too slow. Why go and cut down spruce saplings for tent poles, and make a fire with smoke in your eyes, and sleep beside snakes when you can take your car and hire a cabin for a dollar a night for one, and only three dollars a night for two, and have supper at the Spruce Bough Inn with dancing. . . .

The motor car did that. It did it all. The only amusement for a youth came to be going out in a car with a girl, or going out in a car to look for a girl, or going out with a girl to look for a car. Since you can’t drive all the time, they had to invent the pop and hot dog stand, and since you can’t stand and eat all evening, they had to build a dance hall beside the pop stand.

You can’t dance forever, so that had to expand into a sort of Inn, called the Old Saw Mill, or the Old Forge, or the old anything at all that a new thing isn’t.

With that, money, money, money every minute . . . money for gasoline, money for pop, money for ice cream, more money for more gas, money for the right to dance, money for the right not to dance . . .

Thus staggered the world along, bankrupt with its own pleasure . . . the rich bankrupted by the richness of their golf club . . . the young bankrupted on soft drinks; the old bankrupted on hard ones. There was a time – it’s not so long ago but what some of us can remember it still – when a young man could have a wonderful summer holiday on twenty-five dollars a month . . . along with one or two other young men with the same ideas and the same funds. You needed a sailboat and a canoe in tow, an extra shirt each and that extra pair of duck pants I spoke of. . . .

Things like bread and milk and butter and eggs cost nothing . . . you just went to the nearest farmhouse with an empty basket and ten cents – the farmer wouldn’t take the ten cents; one ten-cent piece lasted all summer. As to drink, it cost hardly anything . . . no young people drank much before prohibition . . . out camping, if we came to a town, there was a bar with drinks at five cents. Two of those lasted three days. . . . There were no girls in it, but when you came home, all tanned up from a trip like that, you could get engaged to just about any girl you wanted.

So that’s that. The pleasure car is gone. We won’t pretend that we don’t want it back. But there is no such thing as an unalloyed blessing or an unmitigated cure . . . let us look around for that old canoe; is it still somewhere in the back of the shed? Or is it lying somewhere on a bend of the river under the trees? And the heavy old sailboat with the bluff bow . . . is that it I see thumping, thumping toward us? . . . “Ahoy-y-y!” Let’s get our things ready; hurry up; it’s beating toward us. It will be right in at the dock in two hours.

So, good-bye, motor car. . . .

—Last Leaves (1946).

TOC     INDEX

This Business
of Prophecy

I used to go in a great deal for prophecy. I found it safer and easier than fact, and more impressive. During my long years of lecturing at McGill I used to say to my classes, “Mark my words, gentlemen, in another fifty years you will see” so and so; or, “Mark me, gentlemen, in another half century you will see the end of” of pretty well everything. The students were tremendously impressed. They didn’t see how I could see it all coming. They just lived on the hope of it.

The only mistake was that I made the prophecies too short. They’ll soon fall due. I began in 1901, and the first of the prophecies will come around in 1951. It is true that a great many of the older students have dropped out. Even those left begin to look pretty shaky. So I guess it will be all right. Yet it was timed too close. I wouldn’t do it again.

But in any case, I have gone out of the prophecy business. Too many people are crowding into it, people without experience. And it is a thing that demands long preparation. Look at those prophets of the Old Testament. They were mature men, 500 to 600 years old, with a bombing range of 3,000 years.

But now everybody’s in it. Why, only yesterday at my club a man told me to mark him that the world would be an absolutely different place after the war. I marked him right away (with a piece of billiard chalk) but I doubt if I can find him again – after the war.

That’s it, all the time – after the war. They’re prophesying and planning all the big things that are going to be done after the war. It seems that the whole framework of society has got to be reconstructed – from top to bottom, or from bottom to top. Some will begin at one end, some the other. Fascinating, isn’t it? In fact, some of us can hardly wait till the war is over, and would end it right now so as to get at this post-war stuff. It seems that we’ve been living in the wrong ideology – I think that’s it. Anyway it’s all got to change.

Naturally the biggest thing of all is the question of the future of Europe. We have simply got to consider what that is to be. In fact, it is a thing that should have been attended to long ago. Only last week I heard two men discussing quite eagerly, indeed, almost angrily, whether Europe after the war is to be a federation or just a loose conglomerate under a guarantee of conglomeration.

It is a thing you have to face. These two men were going to a meeting (I was so sorry I couldn’t go) where they were to thresh this out. They said that after the discussion the future of Europe would probably be thrown open to the audience. That was nice, wasn’t it? I forgot to look in the paper to see what happened; often so much war stuff gets into the papers that you miss the news.

But, anyway, what is needed here is one of those big general polls of public opinion that show exactly what is going to be, or, rather, the percentage of everything that is going to be. A lot of us would like to see the future of Europe put to a poll that way, along the lines: (1) Future; (2) no Future; (3) any damn Future. I’ll bet you it would show Europe 62 per cent, or say 63, conglomerated. That’s what I’d do with it.

Of course there would be the usual 17 per cent “indifferent.” Those fellows should keep out of the poll. If they don’t care, why do they vote? In fact, the real trouble with these polls is that the very people whose opinions we don’t want in the poll are the kind of people who give their opinions, and those we do, don’t. Do you see what I mean? If we could get the solid thought of the country to think, it would be better.

But there are big things to plan for at home, too. Take education, one of the biggest. They are saying that after the war education will have to be reconstructed from top to bottom. They say it won’t be recognizable. You won’t be able to tell whether a man is educated or not. It seems there are a lot of committees, some of the biggest educationalists in the country, sitting on it already. One committee is sitting on arithmetic and working on the multiplication table. They’re up to nine times nine already. They may scrap the rest. Another is working on long division; it’s too long for them.

But, of course, the biggest post-war thing of all is the reconstruction of the cities. I imagine that that question has come up everywhere. I know that with us in my city it is the most acute problem of all and there’s no use ending the war till we solve it. There’s no doubt our city has got to go; it’s no darned use; the streets all run the wrong way and cross one another. Indeed, the only thing to do with it is to knock it all down and shovel it away.

When I look at my own house, I just want to take a spade and knock it down flat. The thing is worthless; the upstairs ought to be downstairs. Anybody can see that now. And it’s the same way with all the apartment buildings. That’s the fascination of city planning. You see it all so clearly when you see it. You see, in practically all the apartments the bottom floor should be the top one – to get proper light.

Anyway, in our city we all see eye to eye about it, though in different directions. I see my own house best. However, we’ve got a committee of experts working on it and they are beginning right at the beginning, at the very foundation of reconstruction – drainage. Are we draining properly? And after that leakage, and then seepage, and then garbage. We had a big man here a week or two back talking garbage. He was certainly right up in it. He’s been invited to talk elsewhere. That’s the way with these experts; they know their stuff.

But of course it all takes time and spade work. One of our speakers put it pretty neatly the other day by saying you can’t rebuild without spade work. That seems to put it in a nutshell, or at any rate in a steam shovel. The only trouble is the time. It would never do to have the war end on us and the city still right here.

Then there’s post-war finance – I suppose the nation’s greatest problem of the lot. But here the biggest experts, on the biggest salaries, seem to be pretty well agreed: after the war we must keep right on with big expenditure and high salaries for fear of a collapse. It seems that, quite apart from the other Allies, the United States and Great Britain and Canada are spending 365 billion dollars a year. That means a billion dollars a day, and, spread out among the 200 million of us, it means five dollars a day each! I just can’t think now how I’ll spend mine.

So you see, with all these fascinating post-war problems to think about, you can’t blame people if the war news sometimes seems a little dull. There is so much to plan and so little time. I hope those who are fighting won’t stop till we get our ideology ready.

—New York Times Magazine, 21 Mar 1943
—Last Leaves (1946).

TOC     INDEX

Bibliography

HUMOR

Literary Lapses (1910)

Nonsense Novels (1911)

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)

Behind the Beyond, and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge (1913)

Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914)

Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915)

Further Foolishness: Sketches and Satires on the Follies of the Day (1916)

Frenzied Fiction (1918)

The Hohenzollerns in America; with the Bolsheviks in Berlin, and Other Impossibilities (1919)

Winsome Winnie, and Other New Nonsense Novels (1920)

My Discovery of England (1922)

College Days (1923)

Over the Footlights (1923)

The Garden of Folly (1924)

Winnowed Wisdom (1926)

Short Circuits (1928)

The Iron Man and the Tin Woman, with Other Such Futurities (1929)

Wet Wit and Dry Humour: Distilled from the Pages of Stephen Leacock (1931)
[collection of previously published material]

The Dry Pickwick and Other Incongruities (1932)

Afternoons in Utopia: Tales of the New Time (1932)

Hellements of Hickonomics in Hiccoughs of Verse Done in Our Social Planning Mill (1936)

Funny Pieces: A Book of Random Sketches (1936)

Here Are My Lectures (1937)

Model Memoirs, and Other Sketches from Simple to Serious (1938)

My Remarkable Uncle and Other Sketches (1942)

Happy Stories Just to Laugh At (1943)

Last Leaves (1945)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946)

BIOGRAPHY

Mark Twain (1932)

Charles Dickens: His Life and Work (1933)

DRAMA

“Q”: A Farce in One Act [with Basil Macdonald] (1915)

ECONOMICS

Economic Prosperity in the British Empire (1930)

Back to Prosperity: The Great Opportunity of the Empire Conference (1932)

The Gathering Financial Crisis in Canada: A Survey of the Present Critical Situation (1936)

EDUCATION

The Pursuit of Knowledge: A Discussion of Freedom and Compulsion in Education (1934)

Too Much College, or Education Eating Up Life (1939)

HISTORY

Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Government (1907)

Adventures of the Far North: A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas (1914)

The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada and the Coming of the White Man (1914)

The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier (1914)

Mackenzie, Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks (1926)

Lincoln Frees the Slaves (1934)

The British Empire: Its Structure, Its History, Its Strength (1940)

Canada: The Foundations of Its Future (1941)

Our Heritage of Liberty: Its Origin, Its Achievement, Its Crisis: A Book for War Time (1942)

Montreal: Seaport and City (1942)

Canada and the Sea (1944)

LITERARY CRITICISM

Essays and Literary Studies (1916)

Humour: Its Theory and Technique (1935)

The Greatest Pages of American Humor (1936)

Humour and Humanity: An Introduction to the Study of Humour (1937)

How to Write (1943)

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Elements of Political Science (1906)

The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice (1920)

My Discovery of the West: A Discussion of East and West in Canada (1937)

While There Is Time: The Case against Social Catastrophe (1945)

Index of Story Titles

Items in italics marked with asterisk
are book titles.

A • B • C • D • E • F • G • H • I • J • K • L • M • N • O • P • Q • R • S • T • U • W • Y

A

A, B, and C [LITERARY LAPSES]

A, B, and C After Twenty Years [THE DRY PICKWICK]

Abolishing the Heroine [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]
Abdul Aziz Has His [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]
Advance Cable Service, An [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Advantages of a Polite Education, The [BEHIND THE BEYOND]

Afternoon Tea with the Sultan [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]

**Afternoons in Utopia — Tales of the New Time

Alfred of the Advertisements [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

All Aboard for Europe [WINNOWED WISDOM]
All Is Not Lost! [MODEL MEMOIRS]
All Nice People [MODEL MEMOIRS]
All Up! [THE IRON MAN]
Allegory Island [HAPPY STORIES]

Amazing Travels of Mr. Yarner, The [MOONBEAMS]

Among the Antiques [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Anatomy of Gloom, The [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Anecdotes of Dr. So and So, The [MOONBEAMS]
Angel Pond, Lure of the North [HAPPY STORIES]

Appeal (An) to the Average Man [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Approach of the Comet, The [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

**Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich

Are Professors Absent-Minded? [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Are the Rich Happy? [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]

Are We Fascinated with Crime? [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Are Witty Women Attractive to Men? [SERENDIPITY]

Aristocratic Anecdotes [MOONBEAMS]

Aristocratic Education [LITERARY LAPSES]

Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson, The [ARCADIAN ADVENTURES]

Art of Conversation, The [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]
Art of Taking a Vacation, The [SERENDIPITY]
As History Grows Dim [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Astronomical Alarms [THE IRON MAN]
At the Ladies Culture Club [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Athletics for 1950 [THE IRON MAN]
Atmosphere [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones, The [LITERARY LAPSES]

TOP
B
Back to the Bush [LITERARY LAPSES]
Back from Europe [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Back from the Land [FRENZIED FICTION]

Balance of Trade in Impressions, The [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]

Band of Brothers, The [AFTERNOONS IN UTOPIA]

Bass Fishing on Lake Simcoe [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Beacon on the Hill, The [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

Bed-time Stories for Grown-Up People [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Behind the Beyond [BEHIND THE BEYOND]

**Behind the Beyond and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge

**Serendipity — Found Treasures
Blue (The) and the Grey [WINSOME WINNIE]
Boarding-House Geometry [LITERARY LAPSES]
Boom Times [HAPPY STORIES]
Borrowing a Match [LITERARY LAPSES]
Boy (The) Who Came Back [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]
Breakfast at the Smiths’ [THE DRY PICKWICK]

British (The) and the American Press [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]

British Soldier, The [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Broken Barriers [WINSOME WINNIE]
Buggam Grange [WINSOME WINNIE]
Business in England [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]

Business Outline of Astronomy, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Butler of the Old School, A [THE DRY PICKWICK]

TOP

C

Call of the Carbureter, The [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]

Candidacy of Mr. Smith, The [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

Caroline’s Christmas [NONSENSE NOVELS]
Cave-Man (The) as He Is [FRENZIED FICTION]
Cast Up by the Sea [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

Chairman’s Walking Stick, The [HAPPY STORIES—Mariposa Moves On]

Children’s Column, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Children’s Corner, The [COLLEGE DAYS]
Children’s Poetry Revised [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Christmas Examination, A [COLLEGE DAYS]
Christmas Ghost, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Christmas Letter, A [LITERARY LAPSES]
Christmas Rapture [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Christmas Shopping [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

Clear View (A) of the Government and Politics of England [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]

Clouds that Rolled By [HAPPY STORIES]
College as Comic Stuff [MODEL MEMOIRS]
**College Days
Come and See Our Town [THE DRY PICKWICK]
Come Back to School [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Come Back to School [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Come Out into the Garden [MODEL MEMOIRS]

Complete Guide and History of the South [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Concerning Humour and Humorists [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

Confessions of a Soda Fiend [THE DRY PICKWICK]

Confessions of a Super-Extra-Criminal [THE IRON MAN]

Conjurer’s Revenge, The [LITERARY LAPSES]
Conversations I Can Do Without [THE IRON MAN]
Cooking for Victory [HAPPY STORIES]
Couldn’t Sleep a Wink [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Correspondence Manual Number One [THE IRON MAN]

Cricket for Americans [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Criminal by Proxy, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Criminal Face, The [THE IRON MAN]

Criminal Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, The [MODEL MEMOIRS]

Crossword Puzzle Craze, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
TOP
D

Damon and Pythias; Barristers, Solicitors, Etc. [HAPPY STORIES]

Dead Certainty [HICKONOMICS]—POEM
Dead Men’s Gold [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]
Dentist (The) and the Gas [BEHIND THE BEYOND]
Dip into Psychology, A [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Discovery of America, The [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]

Dissolution of Our Dinner Club, The [MODEL MEMOIRS]

Diversions of a Professor of History, The [COLLEGE DAYS]—POEMS

Doctor (The) and the Contraption [AFTERNOONS IN UTOPIA]

Done into Movies [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Dry Banquet, The [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]
Dry Pickwick, The [THE DRY PICKWICK]
**Dry Pickwick, The
TOP
E
Easy Ways to Success [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Eating Air [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Eddie the Bartender [THE IRON MAN]
Education Eating Up Life [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Education Made Agreeable [MOONBEAMS]
Educational Appendix, An [HICKONOMICS]
Electric Service [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Elegy (An) Near a City Freight Yard [SHORT CIRCUITS]—POEM

English as She Is Taught at College [COLLEGE DAYS]

Errors of Santa Claus, The [FRENZIED FICTION]

Everlasting Angler, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Every Man and His Friends [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]

Every-Day Experience, An [MOONBEAMS]

Experiment (An) with Policeman Hogan [LITERARY LAPSES]

Extinct Monsters [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Extraordinary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin, The [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

TOP
F
Faculty of Arts, The [COLLEGE DAYS]—POEM
Faded Actor, The [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

Fall Fair (The) and the Autumn Exposition [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Familiar Magic of Fishing, The [MODEL MEMOIRS]

Family at Football, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Father Knickerbocker: A Fantasy [FRENZIED FICTION]

Feeding Time [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Fetching the Doctor [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]
Fifty Cents Worth [THE IRON MAN]
Finale (Adam Smith) [HICKONOMICS]—POEM
First Call for Spring [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]
First Newspaper, The [MOONBEAMS]
Five Dollars, Right Now [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Flying Carpet, The [THE DRY PICKWICK]
Force of Statistics, The [LITERARY LAPSES]

Fore-Ordained Attachment (The) of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

Foreign Fiction in Imported Instalments [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]

Forty Years of Billiards [THE IRON MAN]

Fragment from Utopia, A: The Fifty-Fifty Sexes [AFTERNOONS IN UTOPIA]

Freedom of Thought [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

French Politics for Beginners [WINNOWED WISDOM]

**Frenzied Fiction

Frenzied Fiction for the Dog Days [SERENDIPITY]

[Save Me] From My Friend the Deadbeat [SHORT CIRCUITS]

[Save Me] From My Friend the Guide [SHORT CIRCUITS]

[Save Me] From My Friend the Reporter [SHORT CIRCUITS]

[Save Me] From My Friend with a Speech to Make [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Fun as an Aid to Business [SHORT CIRCUITS]

**Further Foolishness: Sketches and Satires on the Follies of the Day

Further Progress in Specialization [THE IRON MAN]

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G
**Garden of Folly, The
Gasoline Goodbye, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Germany from Within Out [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]
Gertrude the Governess [NONSENSE NOVELS]
Get Off the Earth [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Getting the Thread of It [LITERARY LAPSES]

Give and Take of Travel, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Go to Mother [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Going! Going! Gone! [HAPPY STORIES—Mariposa Moves On]

Golf Season in Retrospect, The [THE IRON MAN]
Golfer’s Pocket Guide, The [THE IRON MAN]
Golfomaniac, The [THE IRON MAN]
Good-bye, Motor Car! [SERENDIPITY]
Good News! A New Party! [HAPPY STORIES]

Graduation Day at the Barbers College [THE IRON MAN]

Grandfather Goes to War [AFTERNOONS IN UTOPIA]

Grass Bachelor’s Guide, The [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]

Great Detective, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Great Election (The) in Missinaba County [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

Great Fight for Clean Government, The [ARCADIAN ADVENTURES]

Great Life in Our Midst, A [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Great War (The) as Recorded by Mr. William Shakespeare [THE DRY PICKWICK]

Ground Floor, The [MOONBEAMS]

Guide (A) to the Province of Quebec [THE DRY PICKWICK]

Guide to the Underworld, A [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Guido the Gimlet of Ghent [NONSENSE NOVELS]
TOP
H
Half-Hours with the Poets [LITERARY LAPSES]
Hallucination of Mr. Butt, The [MOONBEAMS]
Hand Me Down that Book [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Hands Across the Sea [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Hannah of the Highlands [NONSENSE NOVELS]
Happy Jim, the Consumer [HICKONOMICS]—POEM
**Happy Stories: Just to Laugh At

Happy Warrior, The [HAPPY STORIES—Mariposa Moves On]

Has Economics Gone to Seed? [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Have the English any Sense of Humour? [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]

Have We Got the Year Backwards? [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Have You Got Even One Cent? [HAPPY STORIES—Mariposa Moves On]

He Guessed Right [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
**Hellements of Hickonomics
Help Wanted [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Helping the Armenians [LITERARY LAPSES]
Hero in Homespun, A [NONSENSE NOVELS]
Hero of Home Week, The [THE IRON MAN]
Heroes and Heroines [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]
Hidden Secret of the City, The [SERENDIPITY]
Hints to Travellers [LITERARY LAPSES]
His Better Self [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Historical Drama [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]
Ho for Happiness [THE DRY PICKWICK]

Hohenzollerns in America, The [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]

**Hohenzollerns (The) in America and Other Impossibilities

Homer and Humbug [BEHIND THE BEYOND]

Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas [LITERARY LAPSES]

Hostelry of Mr. Smith, The [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

How Far Can We Plan? [MODEL MEMOIRS]

How I Succeeded in My Business [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

How Much Does Language Change? [MODEL MEMOIRS]

How My Wife and I Built Our Home for $4.90 [WINNOWED WISDOM]

How Teachers Swim [MODEL MEMOIRS]

How Tennyson Killed the May Queen [LITERARY LAPSES]

How to Avoid Getting Married [LITERARY LAPSES]

How to Be a Doctor [LITERARY LAPSES]
How to Borrow Money [SHORT CIRCUITS]
How to Live to Be 200 [LITERARY LAPSES]
How to Lose Money [MODEL MEMOIRS]

How to Make a Million Dollars [LITERARY LAPSES]

How We Kept Mother’s Birthday [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Human Body (The) – Its Care and Prevention [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

Human Mind (The) Up to Date [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

Humble Lover, A [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Humour As I See It [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]
Hunt for a Heroine, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]
TOP
I

I Am Interviewed by the Press [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]

I’ll Stay in Canada [SERENDIPITY]
Ideal Interviews [FRENZIED FICTION]
Idleness [COLLEGE DAYS]—POEM
If Germany Had Won [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]
If Mussolini Comes [SHORT CIRCUITS]

If Only We Had the Radio Sooner [SHORT CIRCUITS]

If the Gandhi Habit Spreads [THE DRY PICKWICK]

If They Go On Swimming [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Illustrations I Can Do Without [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Impervious to Women [HAPPY STORIES]

Impressions of London [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]

In Dry Toronto [FRENZIED FICTION]
In Merry Mexico [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]
In Praise of the Americans [THE DRY PICKWICK]
In the Good Time After the War [MOONBEAMS]
Inference as an Art [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Inflation and Deflation [THE DRY PICKWICK]

Information While You Drink [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Information While You Eat [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Inside the Tank [SERENDIPITY]
Insurance Up to Date [LITERARY LAPSES]
International Amenities [WINNOWED WISDOM]

[Interview] With a European Prince [FRENZIED FICTION]

[Interview] With Our Greatest Actor [FRENZIED FICTION]

[Interview] With Our Greatest Scientist [FRENZIED FICTION]

[Interview] With Our Typical Novelists [FRENZIED FICTION]

Intimate Disclosures of a Wronged Woman, The [THE IRON MAN]

Introduction of Mr. Stephen Leacock [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]

Iron Man (The) and the Tin Woman [THE IRON MAN]

**Iron Man (The) and the Tin Woman, and Other Such Futurities

Is Prohibition Coming to England? [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]

Isn’t It Just Wonderful? [THE IRON MAN]
TOP
J
Janus and the Janitor [THE IRON MAN]
Jazzled Journalism [THE IRON MAN]
John and I [WINSOME WINNIE]
Jones’s Enchanted Castle, The [HAPPY STORIES]
Joys of Philanthropy, The [BEHIND THE BEYOND]
TOP
K
Kidnapped Plumber, The [WINSOME WINNIE]
TOP
L
Last Man Out of Europe, The [MOONBEAMS]
Last of the Rubber Necks, The [THE IRON MAN]

Laughing Off Our History [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

Laundry Problem, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Laus Varsitatis [COLLEGE DAYS]—POEM
Lecture on Walking, A [SERENDIPITY]
Lesson in Fiction, A [LITERARY LAPSES]
Lesson on the Links, A [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Letters to the New Rulers of the World [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

Life in the Open [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Life of J. Correspondence Smith, The [THE IRON MAN]

Life of John Smith, The [LITERARY LAPSES]

Life of John Mutation Smith, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Life of Lea and Perrins, The [HAPPY STORIES]
Life’s Little Inconsistencies [THE IRON MAN]
Life’s Minor Contradictions [SHORT CIRCUITS]
**Literary Lapses — A Book of Sketches

Literary Sensations of 1929, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Literature and the Eighteenth Amendment [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Little Conversations of the Hour [THE IRON MAN]

Little Dinner (A) with Mr. Lucullus Fyshe [ARCADIAN ADVENTURES]

Little Glimpses of the College Future [COLLEGE DAYS]

Little Glimpses of the Future in America [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

Little Lessons in Journalism [THE IRON MAN]

Little Study in Culture (A) from Below Up [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Living with Murder [SERENDIPITY]
Long After Bedtime [THE IRON MAN]
Lord Oxhead’s Secret [LITERARY LAPSES]

Lost Illusions of Mr. Sims, The [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]

Lost in New York [FRENZIED FICTION]
Lost World of Yesterday, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Love Me, Love My Letters [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins, The [ARCADIAN ADVENTURES]

TOP
M
Machine at Work, The [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Maddened by Mystery [NONSENSE NOVELS]
Madeline of the Movies [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]
Magic of Finance, The [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Making a Magazine [BEHIND THE BEYOND]
Man in Asbestos, The [NONSENSE NOVELS]
Man in the Pullman Car, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Man with the Adventure Story, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Manual of Education, A [LITERARY LAPSES]

Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias, The [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

Mariposa Bank Mystery, The [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

Mariposa Moves On [HAPPY STORIES]

Mathematical Problem of the Lost Chord, The [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

Mathematics Versus Puzzles [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
May Time in Mariposa [SERENDIPITY]
Mediaeval Hole in One, A [THE DRY PICKWICK]
Meet Mr. Wegg, Banker [HICKONOMICS]—POEM
Memoirs of an Iceman [THE IRON MAN]

Memoirs of a Night Watchman, The [THE IRON MAN]

Men Who Have Shaved Me [LITERARY LAPSES]
Merry Christmas [FRENZIED FICTION]
Merry Month of May, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Midsummer Detective Mystery, A [THE IRON MAN]

Migration in English Literature [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone, The [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing, The [ARCADIAN ADVENTURES]

Model Dialogue, A [LITERARY LAPSES]

**Model Memoirs and Other Sketches from Simple to Serious

**Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy
More Literary Scandals [THE IRON MAN]
More Messages from Mars [THE IRON MAN]

More than Twice Told Tales [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]

Morning Off, A [HAPPY STORIES]
Mother of Parliaments, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Mr. Alcorn Improves Himself [HAPPY STORIES]
Mr. Chairman, I Beg to Move— [THE IRON MAN]
Mr. McCoy Sails for Fiji [HAPPY STORIES]

Mr. Plumter, B.A., Revisits the Old Shop [HAPPY STORIES]

Mr. Wordsworth and the Little Cottage Girl [LITERARY LAPSES]

Mrs. Easy Has Her Fortune Told [MODEL MEMOIRS]

Mrs. Eiderdown Roughs It in the Bush [MODEL MEMOIRS]

Mrs. Newrich Buys Antiques [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Mrs. Uplift Betters Society [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Mushrooms [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

My Affair with My Landlord [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

My College Days: A Retrospect [COLLEGE DAYS]
**My Discovery of England
My Financial Career [LITERARY LAPSES]
My Fishing Pond [SERENDIPITY]
My Lost Dollar [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]
My Lost Opportunities [BEHIND THE BEYOND]

My Memories and Miseries as a Schoolmaster [COLLEGE DAYS]

My Pink Suit [WINNOWED WISDOM]
My Remarkable Uncle [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
**My Remarkable Uncle and Other Sketches
My Revelations as a Spy [FRENZIED FICTION]
My Unknown Friend [BEHIND THE BEYOND]

My Unposted Correspondence [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

My Victorian Girlhood [MODEL MEMOIRS]
TOP
N

National Debt, National Blessing [HAPPY STORIES—Mariposa Moves On]

New Education, The [FRENZIED FICTION]

New Food, The [LITERARY LAPSES]

New Heaven (A) and a New Earth [HAPPY STORIES—Mariposa Moves On]

New Light from New Minds [WINNOWED WISDOM]
New Pathology, A [LITERARY LAPSES]
New Words – New Things [THE IRON MAN]
Newer Truthfulness, The [THE IRON MAN]
Next War, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
No Place for Gentlemen [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
**Nonsense Novels
Nothing Missing [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Number Fifty-Six [LITERARY LAPSES]
TOP
O
Oh! Mr. Malthus! [HICKONOMICS]—POEM

Oh, Sleep! Oh, Gentle Sleep! [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Old College (The) and the New University [COLLEGE DAYS]

Old Farm (The) and the New Frame [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

Old Junk and New Money [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Old Men’s Page, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Old Mr. Longfellow on Board the Hesperus [LITERARY LAPSES]

Old, Old Story (The) of How Five Men Went Fishing [FRENZIED FICTION]

Old Proverbs Made New [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Oldest Living Graduate, The [COLLEGE DAYS]
On Collecting Things [LITERARY LAPSES]

On the Need for a Quiet College [MODEL MEMOIRS]

One Crowded Quarter Second [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Once to Everyman [THE DRY PICKWICK]

Oroastus – A Greek Tragedy [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

Our American Visitors [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

Our Business Benefactors [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

Our Get-Together Movement [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Our Literary Bureau [MOONBEAMS]
Our Own Business Barometer [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Our Summer Convention [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Our Summer Pets [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Our Vanished Industries [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Outline of Evolution, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Outline of Recent Advances in Science [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Outline of Shakespeare, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
Outlines of Everything, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
**Over the Footlights
Over the Grape Juice [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]
Overhauling the Encyclopedia [THE IRON MAN]
Overworking the Alphabet [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Oxford as I See It [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]
TOP
P
Paris at Night [BEHIND THE BEYOND]
Parlez-vous Français? [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Passing of the Back Yard, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Passing of the Kitchen, The [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

Passing of the Poet, The [LITERARY LAPSES]
Passionate Paragraphs [MOONBEAMS]
Pawn to King’s Four [HAPPY STORIES]

People Just Back from Europe, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]

People We Meet in the Movies [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

Perfect Gift, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Perfect Lover’s Guide, The [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

Perfect Index, The [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Perfect Optimist, The [THE DRY PICKWICK]
Perfect Salesman, The [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]
Perplexity Column, The [FRENZIED FICTION]

Personal Adventures in the Spirit World [FRENZIED FICTION]

Personal Experiments with the Black Bass [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

Platter of Life, The [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]
Poet Answered, The [LITERARY LAPSES]
Politics from Within [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]
Portents of the Future [THE IRON MAN]

Preface to the Outlines of Everything [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Prophet in Our Midst, The [FRENZIED FICTION]

Psychology: The Black Art of the College [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

TOP

Q

“Q.” A Psychic Pstory of the Psupernatural [NONSENSE NOVELS]

Quality Does It [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Questionnaire Nuisance, The [WINNOWED WISDOM]
TOP
R

Radio: A New Form of Trouble [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

Raft (The): An Interlude [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

Rah! Rah! College! [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Rah! Rah! College, or Tom Buncom at Shucksford [AFTERNOONS IN UTOPIA]

Ram Spudd the New World Singer [MOONBEAMS]

Ranchman’s Reverie, The [HICKONOMICS]—POEM

Ratification of the New Naval Disagreement [THE DRY PICKWICK]

Reader’s Junk [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Reading Public, The [MOONBEAMS]
Reflections on Riding [LITERARY LAPSES]
Reminiscences of Mr. Apricot, The [MOONBEAMS]
Removal Problem Solved [MODEL MEMOIRS]

Restoration of Whiskers, The [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

Resurrection of Adam Smith, A [HICKONOMICS]—POEM

Retroactive Existence of Mr. Juggins, The [BEHIND THE BEYOND]

Righteous Indignation of Angus McCordell, The [HAPPY STORIES—Mariposa Moves On]

Rival Churches (The) of St. Asaph and St. Osoph, The [ARCADIAN ADVENTURES]

Roughing It in the Bush [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]
Rural Urbanity [THE IRON MAN]
Russian Drama, The [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]
TOP
S
Saloonio [LITERARY LAPSES]

Salutation Across the Sea, A [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

[Save Me] From My Friend the Deadbeat [SHORT CIRCUITS]

[Save Me] From My Friend the Guide [SHORT CIRCUITS]

[Save Me] From My Friend the Reporter [SHORT CIRCUITS]

[Save Me] From My Friend with a Speech to Make [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Saving Grace of Humour, The [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

Scenery and Signboards [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Secrets of Success, The [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]
Self-Made Men [LITERARY LAPSES]
Sermon on College Humour, A [COLLEGE DAYS]
**Short Circuits
Sidelights on the Supermen [MOONBEAMS]
Simple Life in Paris, The [BEHIND THE BEYOND]
Simple Stories of Success [FRENZIED FICTION]
Snoopopaths, The [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]
So This Is the United States [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Soaked in Seaweed [NONSENSE NOVELS]
Social Plan, The [HICKONOMICS]—POEM
Society Chit-Chat [LITERARY LAPSES]

Softening the Stories for the Children [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Some Just Complaints About the War [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]

Some Startling Side Effects of the War [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]

Sorrows of a Summer Guest, The [FRENZIED FICTION]

Sorrows of a Super Soul [NONSENSE NOVELS]
Soul Call, The [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]
“Speaking of India—” [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe, The [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

Speeding Up Business [MOONBEAMS]

Spiritual Outlook of Mr. Doomer, The [MOONBEAMS]

Split in the Cabinet, The [WINSOME WINNIE]
Stamp-Album World, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Stories Shorter Still [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]

Struggle to Make Us Gentlemen, The [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

Study in Still Life (A): The Country Hotel [LITERARY LAPSES]

Study in Still Life (A): My Tailor [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]

Sub-Contractor, The [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

Subscription with Reflections, A [COLLEGE DAYS]

Sultan (The) Speaks from the Grave [HAPPY STORIES—Mariposa Moves On]

Summer Sorrows of the Super-Rich [WINNOWED WISDOM]

**Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Survival of the Fittest, The [MOONBEAMS]
TOP
T
Teaching the Unteachable [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Telling His Faults [LITERARY LAPSES]
Tennis at the Smiths’ [THE DRY PICKWICK]

Then and Now [College News] [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]

Then and Now [Were We Happier?] [MODEL MEMOIRS]

Things I Hardly Dare Whisper [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Thinking of Tomorrow [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
This Business of Prophecy [SERENDIPITY]
This Expiring World [WINNOWED WISDOM]
This Heart-to-Heart Stuff [THE IRON MAN]
This Strenuous Age [FRENZIED FICTION]

This World Championship Stuff [SHORT CIRCUITS]

Three on Each [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
Three Score and Ten [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Through Arabia on a Mule [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Thrown Out [MODEL MEMOIRS]
To Nature and Back Again [FRENZIED FICTION]
Tom Lachford, Promoter [THE GARDEN OF FOLLY]
Tommy and Milly at the Farm [THE IRON MAN]

**Too Much College, or, Education Eating Up Life

Toronto and McGill [COLLEGE DAYS]—POEM
Train to Mariposa, The [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]
Transit of Venus, The [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Travel Is so Broadening [THE IRON MAN]
Truthful Oratory [MOONBEAMS]
“Tum and Play Dolf” [THE DRY PICKWICK]
Turn Back the Clock [MODEL MEMOIRS]

Twenty Cents’ Worth of Murder [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Two Little Boys: An Allegory [SERENDIPITY]

Two Sexes (The), in Fives or Sixes [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]

TOP
U
Uncle Sam: An Allegory [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Under the Barber’s Knife [BEHIND THE BEYOND]
Unintelligence Test, The [SHORT CIRCUITS]
Up and Down Downing Street [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Utopia Old and New [AFTERNOONS IN UTOPIA]
TOP
V
Visit to Versailles, A [BEHIND THE BEYOND]
TOP
W
Wanted: A Gold-fish [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]
War and Humour [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

War And Peace at the Galaxy Club [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]

War Mania of Mr. Jinks and Mr. Blinks, The [MOONBEAMS]

War News (The) as I Remember It [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]

War Sacrifices of Mr. Spugg, The [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]

War-time Christmas: 1941 [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

War-time Christmas: Santa Claus [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

“We Have with Us Tonight” [MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND]

“We Have with Us Tonight” [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

Weejee the Pet Dog [MOONBEAMS]

Welcome (A) to a Visiting American [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

What Can Izaak Walton Teach Us? [SERENDIPITY]

What Good Is Latin? [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

What I Read Then; What You Read Now [MODEL MEMOIRS]

What Is a Sport? [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
What Next? [THE DRY PICKWICK]
What the Radio Overheard [SHORT CIRCUITS]
What’s in a Name? [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
When Fellers Go Fishing [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
When Men Retire [TOO MUCH COLLEGE]

When Social Regulation Is Complete [THE IRON MAN]

Whirlwind Campaign (The) in Mariposa [SUNSHINE SKETCHES]

White House (The) from Without In [FURTHER FOOLISHNESS]

Who Canonizes the Classics? [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]

Who Do You Think Did It? [WINSOME WINNIE]
Who Is Also Who [MOONBEAMS]
Who Knows It? [MODEL MEMOIRS]
Who Reads What [THE IRON MAN]
Why Do We Fish? [MY REMARKABLE UNCLE]
Why I Am Leaving My Farm [SERENDIPITY]

Why I Left Our Social Workers’ Guild [WINNOWED WISDOM]

Why I Refuse to Play Golf [OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS]

Why the Next War Didn’t Happen [THE DRY PICKWICK]

Willie Nut Tries to Enter College [THE IRON MAN]

**Winnowed Wisdom

Winsome Winnie [WINSOME WINNIE]

**Winsome Winnie and Other New Nonsense Novels

Winter Pastimes [LITERARY LAPSES]

[Interview] With a European Prince [FRENZIED FICTION]

[Interview] With Our Greatest Actor [FRENZIED FICTION]

[Interview] With Our Greatest Scientist [FRENZIED FICTION]

[Interview] With Our Typical Novelists [FRENZIED FICTION]

With the Authorities [SHORT CIRCUITS]

With the Bolsheviks in Berlin [THE HOHENZOLLERNS]

With the Photographer [BEHIND THE BEYOND]
Wizard of Finance, The [ARCADIAN ADVENTURES]
TOP
Y

Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown, The [ARCADIAN ADVENTURES]

Year at College, A [SHORT CIRCUITS]

TOP

About

Northern Light

A COLLECTION
OF THE HUMOROUS WRITINGS
OF

Stephen Butler Leacock
(1869-1944)

WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY
AND INDEX OF STORY TITLES

Stephen Leacock was a Canadian educator, political scientist, writer, and humorist. Between 1911 and 1925 he was so well-known as the world’s greatest humorist that it was said more people had heard of Stephen Leacock than had heard of Canada.

Perhaps his most famous books were Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, two of his many books of humor. He also wrote non-fiction, including books on political science, economics, history, literary criticism, and biographies of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.

This omnibus, comprised of 25 books, brings you more than 550 stories, essays, and poems from the talented pen of “...Leacock the essentially Canadian humorist, dry and droll, half-clown, half-satirist, whose irony reflects no anger, whose wit is sharp but leaves no sting.” (—J. B. Priestley, Introduction to The Bodley Head Leacock.)

The contents of this book were first published 1895–1946.

This ebook was created April 2017 for MobileRead.com, by E.C.M. in collaboration with Mousewaffle and Grumbles, MobileRead forum members. The book may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

The text of this book is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

Text was obtained from FadedPage.com (Distributed Proofreaders Canada), Project Gutenberg Australia, the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and scans created by Grumbles.

Book title, cover and titlepage art, and editing assistance provided by Mousewaffle.

Transcription and OCR errors were corrected; punctuation, italics, and diacritics formatted; some spelling and punctuation revised for consistency. The main Table of Contents provides links to book titlepages: individual story titles and links can be found there, as well as in the Index of Story Titles.

Validation by Pagina Epub Checker.

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